Open Office runs like a dog on my Win 2K computer at work. It takes forever to load and some functions that should appear virtually instantaneous take seconds to carry out or fail altogether.
I love the functionality of the package, especially the promise it holds out of a ready path to single-source publicaton. But if it takes replacing existing hardware and OS on all the desktops--and retraining or replacing the entire PC support operation--the cost advantage becomes a huge deficit and my ill-tempered government client won't consider switching.
NASA is self-castrating. If their intent is to do great science in space, there are many lower-cost ways of doing it better than on the Space Station. But NASA can't wean itself from the archaic narrative of manned space exploration, preferring to gild the idols of the tribe with endless moral example and dramatic spectacle (astronauts showing the right stuff) rather than devote itself in these leaner times to the direct pursuit of scientific goals.
For NASA, science has always been secondary and expendable: a pretext. Is this the fault of anyone in particular? Perhaps not--Americans don't trust or want science, but can never be sufficiently entertained or preached at. Nevertheless, it's hardly the case that the Space Station was once a great scientific enterprise but was later betrayed.
From a purely scientific point of view, Space Station was always a bridge to nowhere.
You have to come up with as objective and purely functional a set of requirements as possible, if only for the reason that (most of the time) you have a customer and a contract, and the requirements are what the customer signs off on after testing instead of suing you or witholding payment(and believe me, they'll try it).
Clear requirements are your protection against politics in the client's office, using your project as a stalking horse, and many other unfair surprises of the business world.
If you have responded to an RFP, the requirements process allows you to restate over-specific, vague, or non-optimal customar requirements into a form that is testable and clearly specifies the functionality that is to be encoded. You restate what the client gives you, and negotiate until agreement is reached.
You have to have enough requirements to specify the functionality that you are committed to providing so it can be verified, and not so many that you wind up with a government ashtray that does work but costs five times (or five thousand times) what it should because it is over-specified.
This presumes a process of iteration and clarification that may well continue throughout the development cycle, and may be formalized in a number of different methodologies. But the principle of agreeing on requirements and proceeding on the basis of the agreement is essential to any productive business process, no matter how iterative.
Leaving aside the probably decisive issue of the radiation hazard posed by Mars's lack of a magnetosphere, the biggest joykiller in the terraformers' box of goodies is the length of time (as much as 100s of Ks of years) that it would take for the planet to "cook" as it were.
At what point is it proposed to insert "mankind" into the environment?
Unless the human (or posthuman) colonizers are allowed somehow to co-evolve with the new planetary atmosphere, flora, and fauna, isn't it possible (if not probable) that what emerges at the far end of the pipe will be some sort of planet that while it is in some sense "living" is nevertheless profoundly toxic to us, or to which we ourselves are profoundly toxic (just as we are to the Terran envioronment)?
And what are the odds in any case that we won't just go extinct as a "native" martian biosphere establishes itself?
That is, supposing h. sapiens sapiens still exists on Earth in 100K years (a daring assumption)....
Hmm. On the other hand, what a perfect place Mars would be in which to dispose of the families who will otherwise starve among us in the wake of welfare reform and so forth. Let them evolve or die!
By Jove, I think we've got it! And just think of the lucrative contracts for shipping all that human mulch to our big NASA garden in the sky!
By definition if you lie, you yourself do not believe what you are saying. Or are you suggesting that deliberate falsification of facts by commentators is acceptable--i.e., if they think it necessary for some reason (e.g., the greater good) to lie, they should be permitted to do so because they are commentators?
If so, a fascinating glimpse into the heart of Republican "morality." See the recent rash of Republican pundits who have said in essence that yes, they cheated in the election, but it's all right because they would have won anyway.
Oberving the macrocosm (Einstein, Newton) doesn't change it. This only applies to the sub-atomic microcosm (Bohr, Heisenberg).
This creates a lack of symmetry and mirroring that drives some people crazy. Micro doesn't mirror macro; future doesn't mirror past.
Where's a body to get his/her/its eternal verities?
Adobe FrameMaker, originally a UNIX application, has been clinging to life for years as the preferred tool of technical authors/publishers and would make a SUPER Linux app--capable of authoring SGML, HTML, XML, the latest PDF--and fully supporting SVG. The GUI is now showing its age, but once you learn to use this tool, you will never want to go back to Word. (Cheap it ain't, however).
Consultants used to add a surcharge (as much as 25%) for using Word instead of Frame, because Word was that much more trouble to use, even for medium-sized projects.
feckless
Not a point. Apparently you have the same contempt for the English language that you have for people in general.
Not everything has to be accomplished by force...
Gee, that's big of you. Which part of your program do you intend to accomplish by force?
Not a leg to stand on
Not a point. But if you now recant your original sentiments and no longer feel you are beset by sinister clones from Greenpeace, I welcome your recovery. (No, I don't belong to Greenpeace).
It is not easy to make a nuclear reactor melt down.
Irrelevant. It happens. Some say it doesn't happen to pebble-bed reactors, but they have other problems, among them the fact that graphite burns.
What is "hard" vs "easy" as a criterion for nuclear safety? Can you show me the standard? Your vague explanations of safety precautions are too general to be convincing.
dirty bomb
Yes it's possible, but since you don't give a damn, it doesn't matter. Some argument.
measures taken against meltdown etc.
Maybe, maybe not. Your account is far too general to be of any value.
"we"... don't allow designs that have failed in the past
What you mean "we"? From what I've seen of your reasoning powers (and your character), I'd be very afraid if "we" were you.
But maybe I misinterpreted "sucky." I thought by "non-sucky" you meant "advanced." Now you assert that only those designs are "sucky" that have catastrophically failed in the past. A doubtful--and typically disingenuous--shift of focus.
I understand that something like 60-70% of reactors in commercial production are second-generation designs, which have to be at least somewhat "sucky" compared with the latest designs. And we're only considering the U.S. here. My point--that the latest designs, even if flawless, will not soon displace the relatively "sucky" ones--stands.
you have no inclination to violence
Nonsense. You've been using fighting words from the start, and your weak arguments make it clear that you can't fight by intellectual means alone.
Well, there's another load cleared. You didn't respond to a lot of the points I made, but hey: why bother when you can call names? And on and on we go...
I doubt your assertion that Greenpeace (ALL of Greenpeace? matter of policy?) can't tell fusion from fission, but it just sounds like one of those things reactionaries always say on their way to the swear words. Personal attacks; guilt by association. I'm NOT connected with Greenpeace. NOT any form of Luddite. I AM a fan of technology and a believer in progress. Go relieve yourself in someone else's hat. Talk about a troll.
I've already replied somewhere else to your few legitimate points.
More feckless arrogance, combined with more of your trademark vile abuse Your core assertion (from your first post) is that the problem with nuclear energy is all these evildoers who have the gall to comment on nuclear matters DESPITE THE FACT THAT SOME OF THEM ARE NOT NUCLEAR ENGINEERS!
Your remedy: to place exclusive authority over nuclear matters in the hands of nuclear engineers.
And to take who knows what adverse action against the evildoers who presume to question them. FUD, implied threats.
This is what I have been trying to debate with you while you have been deluging me with adolescent abuse and off-point"rebuttals."
Nuclear reactor design is a long subject, far off the original topic (your choice, not mine--as long as you kept attacking, I was determined to fight back.) But just for the hell of it, here is a sample of what people have to fear from nuclear power:
Meltdown, accidents in transporting waste, use of fission byproducts by terrorists, the unforeseen problems caused storing large quantities of poisonous waste for lengths of time beyond any effective planning horizon. To pick a few.
New reactor designs, for example pebble-bed reactors, may ameliorate some of these concerns but there is no conclusive evidence that they cure them. And what about problems arising from the distinctive qualities of the technology, for example the fact that graphite used in pebble-bed pebble-bed reactors as a moderator (shades of Chernobyl), burns?
It is your responsibility, if you really are an expert on this subject (my guess is that you're probably just a computer geek), to make a case for a responsible policy that takes account of these problems as well as other issues, such as the fact that the majority of more or less "sucky" old-generation reactors in the world are going to remain in production for a very long time no matter how perfect the newer generation reactors are. The invention of non-"sucky" and less-"sucky" designs thus by no means eliminates the threat of "sucky" designs.
Instead, you merely propose to eliminate people who dare to mention these obvious and valid concerns. Then, while continuing to spew obscenities, you adopt the pose of the wronged rationalist, in the apparent, deluded belief that you can steal your opponent's fire merely by parroting his words.
I can see that I am going to have to let you have the last word. The fool is wise in his own conceit, and you are far too self-intoxicated to realize when you have lost an argument--or indeed, on the strength of the evidence, to understand what you have been arguing about. This therefore is my last post on the subject.
Enjoy being a fool: you will never know whether the world is laughing at you or with you.
The nuclear power industry are big Bush financial backers. They are behind the administration's support for fuel cell technology--Ballard, the largest developer of PEM fuel cells, has published a paper stating that the only way to obtain the electricity necessary for generating the requisite quantity of hydrogen is to build more fission-based power plants.
You and your knee-jerk friends are a gang of narcissitic half-asses whose philosphies of convenience betry your inability to engage in any form of usefully critical thinking about the larger issues. This is particularly dangerous when, as in the present case, you obviously do not have the slightest idea what you are talking about.
This is the mind-set that has traditionally rendered techies incapable of any useful contribution to the social dialog. Perhaps you and your pals need a stern, purgative dose of the humanities.
It is reasonable to fear nuclear power. People have the right to be concerned. Those are rational and moderate assertions. It is pure arrogance to argue otherwise--particularly when one is an interested party.
There are matters of public policy here that should not be left to some Republican star chamber recruited from the nuclear power industry--still less a community of engineers whose jobs are at stake, or of PhDs whose egos are at stake.
The only one spreading FUD is you. Fortunately, the rest of us are not intimidated by your implicit threats.
Who is going to guarantee the continuing good design of nuclear reactors in the U.S.? The Republican Party? The nuclear industry? The U.S. military? Some secret committee of PhDs? Please. This is precisely the sort of thing that can change at any time for economic or political reasons, especially when the public are not permitted to form opinions on the subject.
Nor is it necessary (obviously) to post a body count to justify my contention that nuclear power is something to fear. The fact that other forms of power also contain a fear factor is beside the point.
I don't believe that the anti-nuclear evildoers (wreckers? terrorists?) whom you so menacingly denounce in your original post, exist. I think you simply cannot acknowledge that the public interest has any business interfering with projects in which you are, in all senses of the word (including, no doubt, the financial sense), interested. You alone are important; you alone are entitled: people be damned.
This attitude is self-refuting.
None of which has much to do with fission-based rockets.
The public fears nuclear technology a) because it's something to fear (ever hear of Chernobyl? ever hear of Three Mile Island?); b) it is the ultimate product of military/industrial elitism, with its bland assumption that hoi polloi exist to be lied to, and that the world is best ruled in secret by a happy few.
These are reasonable concerns. Your ill-tempered ridicule only calls your own character into question.
Not installable? Ever tried Knoppix (or any other live CD distro)?
Yer info's outta date, pard!
Re:Old school hackers vs. new school hackers.
on
Good Bad Attitude
·
· Score: 1
To the extent that intellectual property protects the livlihoods of those who produce the property, it is indispensable and should remain involate. Furthermore, the protection should extend to those whose labor is necessary to edit, produce, market, and maintain the works of authorship in production.
The rights of media conglomerates and big software companies, as such, in this scenario are problematic, since the value added by, say, Disney or Microsoft to the actual work of authorship and publication is unclear. It's a fact that their products are not always of the highest possible quality.
Despite these realities, one suspects that very few downloaders of pirated stuff are principled libertarian anarchists. This goes back to "Steal This Book" and other shallow stunts of the late 1960s. Many people violating copyright are just weak, greedy, or lazy. In fact, they tend to be addicted consumers, which is why corporations marginally encourage a "freebie" mindset.
So while freetrading cracked and pirated goodies has a certain value as a protest, a lot of people just get hooked on ripping stuff off, which is not a good thing at all--bad both for them and for society in the long run. This is so, among other reasons, because it reinforces the culture of obsessive consumption with all the psychological degradation, vulnerability to exploitation, and environmental damage that go along with it.
Slashdot Mirror
Open Office runs like a dog on my Win 2K computer at work. It takes forever to load and some functions that should appear virtually instantaneous take seconds to carry out or fail altogether.
I love the functionality of the package, especially the promise it holds out of a ready path to single-source publicaton. But if it takes replacing existing hardware and OS on all the desktops--and retraining or replacing the entire PC support operation--the cost advantage becomes a huge deficit and my ill-tempered government client won't consider switching.
NASA is self-castrating. If their intent is to do great science in space, there are many lower-cost ways of doing it better than on the Space Station. But NASA can't wean itself from the archaic narrative of manned space exploration, preferring to gild the idols of the tribe with endless moral example and dramatic spectacle (astronauts showing the right stuff) rather than devote itself in these leaner times to the direct pursuit of scientific goals.
For NASA, science has always been secondary and expendable: a pretext. Is this the fault of anyone in particular? Perhaps not--Americans don't trust or want science, but can never be sufficiently entertained or preached at. Nevertheless, it's hardly the case that the Space Station was once a great scientific enterprise but was later betrayed.
From a purely scientific point of view, Space Station was always a bridge to nowhere.
You have to come up with as objective and purely functional a set of requirements as possible, if only for the reason that (most of the time) you have a customer and a contract, and the requirements are what the customer signs off on after testing instead of suing you or witholding payment(and believe me, they'll try it).
Clear requirements are your protection against politics in the client's office, using your project as a stalking horse, and many other unfair surprises of the business world.
If you have responded to an RFP, the requirements process allows you to restate over-specific, vague, or non-optimal customar requirements into a form that is testable and clearly specifies the functionality that is to be encoded. You restate what the client gives you, and negotiate until agreement is reached.
You have to have enough requirements to specify the functionality that you are committed to providing so it can be verified, and not so many that you wind up with a government ashtray that does work but costs five times (or five thousand times) what it should because it is over-specified.
This presumes a process of iteration and clarification that may well continue throughout the development cycle, and may be formalized in a number of different methodologies. But the principle of agreeing on requirements and proceeding on the basis of the agreement is essential to any productive business process, no matter how iterative.
If a new thing comes along, perforce a word must be found to name it.
Their list isn't long. People are just going to have to pull their socks up and pay attention.
BTW: The word "bamboozle" means to con, to deceive. Our British friends seem to think it means to confuse or to mystify.
Can't these bastards get their American right after two hundred years?
Leaving aside the probably decisive issue of the radiation hazard posed by Mars's lack of a magnetosphere, the biggest joykiller in the terraformers' box of goodies is the length of time (as much as 100s of Ks of years) that it would take for the planet to "cook" as it were.
At what point is it proposed to insert "mankind" into the environment?
Unless the human (or posthuman) colonizers are allowed somehow to co-evolve with the new planetary atmosphere, flora, and fauna, isn't it possible (if not probable) that what emerges at the far end of the pipe will be some sort of planet that while it is in some sense "living" is nevertheless profoundly toxic to us, or to which we ourselves are profoundly toxic (just as we are to the Terran envioronment)?
And what are the odds in any case that we won't just go extinct as a "native" martian biosphere establishes itself?
That is, supposing h. sapiens sapiens still exists on Earth in 100K years (a daring assumption)....
Hmm. On the other hand, what a perfect place Mars would be in which to dispose of the families who will otherwise starve among us in the wake of welfare reform and so forth. Let them evolve or die!
By Jove, I think we've got it! And just think of the lucrative contracts for shipping all that human mulch to our big NASA garden in the sky!
Who says compassionate conservatism is dead?
The real question is, was it having a tantrum or did it just need a little privacy?
I hope this kid takes a warning from Chairman Bill and passes up the opportunity to pose for kittenish pix in teen mags.
Nevertheless it is not, as the Bush thugs have said, a crisis requiring immediate hysterical action.
"If they lie, that is part of their beliefs."
By definition if you lie, you yourself do not believe what you are saying. Or are you suggesting that deliberate falsification of facts by commentators is acceptable--i.e., if they think it necessary for some reason (e.g., the greater good) to lie, they should be permitted to do so because they are commentators?
If so, a fascinating glimpse into the heart of Republican "morality." See the recent rash of Republican pundits who have said in essence that yes, they cheated in the election, but it's all right because they would have won anyway.
Since when does idiot-proofing do any harm?
Oberving the macrocosm (Einstein, Newton) doesn't change it. This only applies to the sub-atomic microcosm (Bohr, Heisenberg). This creates a lack of symmetry and mirroring that drives some people crazy. Micro doesn't mirror macro; future doesn't mirror past. Where's a body to get his/her/its eternal verities?
Just wear a bandanna loose around your neck and pull it up, Jesse James style, when you use the kiosk.
So what if this is illegal? After Nuremberg, we should all realize it is our (legal) duty to disobey bad laws.
PS--has anyone invented antiphotographic face coating (analagous to the stuff that's suppost to obscure license plates when subjected to a flash)?
Consultants used to add a surcharge (as much as 25%) for using Word instead of Frame, because Word was that much more trouble to use, even for medium-sized projects.
Hey--retinal lasers are good for you, just like plutonium!
Not in my shop!!
You had nothing to say in the first place--don't hurry back.
feckless
Not a point. Apparently you have the same contempt for the English language that you have for people in general.
Not everything has to be accomplished by force. ..
Gee, that's big of you. Which part of your program do you intend to accomplish by force?
Not a leg to stand on
Not a point. But if you now recant your original sentiments and no longer feel you are beset by sinister clones from Greenpeace, I welcome your recovery. (No, I don't belong to Greenpeace).
It is not easy to make a nuclear reactor melt down. Irrelevant. It happens. Some say it doesn't happen to pebble-bed reactors, but they have other problems, among them the fact that graphite burns.
What is "hard" vs "easy" as a criterion for nuclear safety? Can you show me the standard? Your vague explanations of safety precautions are too general to be convincing.
dirty bomb
Yes it's possible, but since you don't give a damn, it doesn't matter. Some argument.
measures taken against meltdown etc.
Maybe, maybe not. Your account is far too general to be of any value.
"we" ... don't allow designs that have failed in the past
What you mean "we"? From what I've seen of your reasoning powers (and your character), I'd be very afraid if "we" were you.
But maybe I misinterpreted "sucky." I thought by "non-sucky" you meant "advanced." Now you assert that only those designs are "sucky" that have catastrophically failed in the past. A doubtful--and typically disingenuous--shift of focus.
I understand that something like 60-70% of reactors in commercial production are second-generation designs, which have to be at least somewhat "sucky" compared with the latest designs. And we're only considering the U.S. here. My point--that the latest designs, even if flawless, will not soon displace the relatively "sucky" ones--stands.
you have no inclination to violence Nonsense. You've been using fighting words from the start, and your weak arguments make it clear that you can't fight by intellectual means alone.
Well, there's another load cleared. You didn't respond to a lot of the points I made, but hey: why bother when you can call names? And on and on we go ...
I've already replied somewhere else to your few legitimate points.
Your remedy: to place exclusive authority over nuclear matters in the hands of nuclear engineers. And to take who knows what adverse action against the evildoers who presume to question them. FUD, implied threats.
This is what I have been trying to debate with you while you have been deluging me with adolescent abuse and off-point"rebuttals."
Nuclear reactor design is a long subject, far off the original topic (your choice, not mine--as long as you kept attacking, I was determined to fight back.) But just for the hell of it, here is a sample of what people have to fear from nuclear power:
Meltdown, accidents in transporting waste, use of fission byproducts by terrorists, the unforeseen problems caused storing large quantities of poisonous waste for lengths of time beyond any effective planning horizon. To pick a few.
New reactor designs, for example pebble-bed reactors, may ameliorate some of these concerns but there is no conclusive evidence that they cure them. And what about problems arising from the distinctive qualities of the technology, for example the fact that graphite used in pebble-bed pebble-bed reactors as a moderator (shades of Chernobyl), burns?
It is your responsibility, if you really are an expert on this subject (my guess is that you're probably just a computer geek), to make a case for a responsible policy that takes account of these problems as well as other issues, such as the fact that the majority of more or less "sucky" old-generation reactors in the world are going to remain in production for a very long time no matter how perfect the newer generation reactors are. The invention of non-"sucky" and less-"sucky" designs thus by no means eliminates the threat of "sucky" designs.
Instead, you merely propose to eliminate people who dare to mention these obvious and valid concerns. Then, while continuing to spew obscenities, you adopt the pose of the wronged rationalist, in the apparent, deluded belief that you can steal your opponent's fire merely by parroting his words.
I can see that I am going to have to let you have the last word. The fool is wise in his own conceit, and you are far too self-intoxicated to realize when you have lost an argument--or indeed, on the strength of the evidence, to understand what you have been arguing about. This therefore is my last post on the subject.
Enjoy being a fool: you will never know whether the world is laughing at you or with you.
You and your knee-jerk friends are a gang of narcissitic half-asses whose philosphies of convenience betry your inability to engage in any form of usefully critical thinking about the larger issues. This is particularly dangerous when, as in the present case, you obviously do not have the slightest idea what you are talking about.
This is the mind-set that has traditionally rendered techies incapable of any useful contribution to the social dialog. Perhaps you and your pals need a stern, purgative dose of the humanities.
There are matters of public policy here that should not be left to some Republican star chamber recruited from the nuclear power industry--still less a community of engineers whose jobs are at stake, or of PhDs whose egos are at stake.
The only one spreading FUD is you. Fortunately, the rest of us are not intimidated by your implicit threats.
Nor is it necessary (obviously) to post a body count to justify my contention that nuclear power is something to fear. The fact that other forms of power also contain a fear factor is beside the point.
I don't believe that the anti-nuclear evildoers (wreckers? terrorists?) whom you so menacingly denounce in your original post, exist. I think you simply cannot acknowledge that the public interest has any business interfering with projects in which you are, in all senses of the word (including, no doubt, the financial sense), interested. You alone are important; you alone are entitled: people be damned.
This attitude is self-refuting.
None of which has much to do with fission-based rockets.
The public fears nuclear technology a) because it's something to fear (ever hear of Chernobyl? ever hear of Three Mile Island?); b) it is the ultimate product of military/industrial elitism, with its bland assumption that hoi polloi exist to be lied to, and that the world is best ruled in secret by a happy few.
These are reasonable concerns. Your ill-tempered ridicule only calls your own character into question.
Not installable? Ever tried Knoppix (or any other live CD distro)?
Yer info's outta date, pard!
To the extent that intellectual property protects the livlihoods of those who produce the property, it is indispensable and should remain involate. Furthermore, the protection should extend to those whose labor is necessary to edit, produce, market, and maintain the works of authorship in production.
The rights of media conglomerates and big software companies, as such, in this scenario are problematic, since the value added by, say, Disney or Microsoft to the actual work of authorship and publication is unclear. It's a fact that their products are not always of the highest possible quality.
Despite these realities, one suspects that very few downloaders of pirated stuff are principled libertarian anarchists. This goes back to "Steal This Book" and other shallow stunts of the late 1960s. Many people violating copyright are just weak, greedy, or lazy. In fact, they tend to be addicted consumers, which is why corporations marginally encourage a "freebie" mindset.
So while freetrading cracked and pirated goodies has a certain value as a protest, a lot of people just get hooked on ripping stuff off, which is not a good thing at all--bad both for them and for society in the long run. This is so, among other reasons, because it reinforces the culture of obsessive consumption with all the psychological degradation, vulnerability to exploitation, and environmental damage that go along with it.
Humph.