To expect a child to choose a career at that age is ridiculous
[advocate class="devil"]
My senior high school courses were Chemistry, Physics, as much Mathematics as I could fit, Engineering Science, and English (because it was compulsory).
You'd never guess that I would go on to become an engineer...
Lucky I wasn't "forced to declare a major". Choosing a major would have severely restricted my career options, and I was far too young to lock myself in to a career path.
if a Company is going to use an other office suite it will need to be 100% compatible. Not this 99% compatability where 3 times a year you get a document which blowes up in your face and you need to put tail between your legs and beg your supplier or worse your customer to save it in a different format. For the 3 times a year that could cost the company far more then the cost of Office Professional
I think this is less of a problem than you make out. It's not uncommon to be forced into work-arounds for bone-headed IT policies causing incompatibilities between companies.
A classic case of this is one of my customers - an international automotive manufacturer that will remain nameless. Their mail system is set to reject files bigger than 5(?)MB and ".zip" files (for security reasons...?!). Their engineers advise that the best way to send them big spreadsheets is in a zip file, with the extension re-named to ".piz". Piz files get through the email filters, zip files don't. They've associated the.piz extension with their unzipping application, so it's seamless at their end.
Of course, at first they're apologetic about their idiot IT department, but once the system is known it works fine. Everybody working on that project has set up a.piz association. No need for an international incident. There's no loss of face, it's just a bone-head corporate policy thing.
If I was using $_generic Office and somebody sent me a document that I couldn't open, I'd call them, blame our IT department, and ask for the file to be saved as something different and re-sent. No different.
A more important aspect of 100% compatibility is for the "advance guard" to be able to use the software in breach of company policy.
I work in a 100% Microsoft site. The IT guys trust me enough to have given me admin rights over my own computers, and they turn a blind eye when I install Firefox, OO.o and whatever other non-policy software I choose. I'm sure this is a pretty common scenario for geeks who work outside of IT.
At the moment I don't use OO.o because it doesn't run the macro-laden Excel spreadsheets I need - it's not 100% compatible. If it did everything I needed and I used it exclusively, the IT guys might consider me as an alpha-trial, demonstrating that the alternate software could be viable, and might be worth consideration for site-wide implementation. Because it doesn't work for me, I can give that feedback, and it's killed off as an option before it's even considered.
If Adobe office was ever considered for my workplace, there's a fair chance I'd be used as a test pilot. If it works for me (and others in different functional areas), they might build a case for making the change. If it doesn't work because it's not compatible with what we already have, it would be killed off and we'd stay with MS.
drives home the importance of keeping good anti-spyware and anti-virus software updated on both corporate systems as well as systems being used from home.
If I don't keep good updated security software on my home computer, somebody will steal six figure amounts from me?
I'd like to see them try. Blood, stone and all that.
And the thing is, they're right. 8-4 is just the time they are required to be AT SCHOOL, in the room.
To compare teaching with a "normal" office-based profession:
Teachers run and chair meetings, continuously, from 8-4 each day. The preparation for the meetings is additional to that.
If any business person was required to chair 8 hours of business meetings every day, they'd have a couple of full-time support staff doing their preparation for them.
The TV is a single use, passive, entertainment medium whereas the PC is a multi use, active, tool. In other terms the TV is 'lean back' technology whereas the PC is 'lean forward' technology. Whichever way you put it they are not the same.
So, compare the PC with the automobile instead.
Driving a car is an "active" activity, as is using a computer.
Early automobiles needed one, sometimes two skilled mechanics to drive. Nowdays you can drive a car without any knowledge of, or sensitivity to, the mechanical workings of the car. The user interface is dumbed down so that a normal person can use it, and the reliability is adequate that it rarely needs specialist attention to maintain or repair it.
Computers haven't reached that level of development yet. Normal people still struggle to "drive" without causing damage. Service intervals are too short. Repairs are required too frequently.
It's the progression of the technology from a complex system that requires specialist expertise, to being an appliance. Cars have had a century to get there, computers haven't.
Most people here would be terrified of the day when the user experience of a computer is as brain-dead as the user experience of a Toyota Camry. For that matter, most car enthusiasts are already terrified that cars are as brain-dead as a Camry.
When a computer is truly an appliance, I contend that it should no longer be called a "computer". In fact, "computing" is no longer the primary function of the devices that we currently call a "computer", outside of a scientific workplace. It's a communication and entertainment device, which occasionally doubles as a media editor (all media from text documents to digital video). Computation happens behind the scenes, and the user need not know anything about it.
"Hybrid cars are no better than intelligent cars".
Excellent work with the automation system. Now let's put this intelligent autopilot in a hybrid car and see what we can get.
"Hybrids are no better than a modern turbodiesel"
Excellent work with the diesel engine development. Now let's build a turbodiesel hybrid. With intelligent autopilot.
The technologies aren't mutually exclusive. They don't have to be compared against each other. They can be combined for even better results.
Of course, the law of diminishing returns applies. An intelligent turbodiesel hybrid may only be a couple of percent more efficient than an intelligent spark ignition hybrid. But as a research tool and technology demonstration, why don't we hear of anybody building such a thing?
Unfortunately, the best way to get Howard out is to vote Labor.
...ahead of Liberal.
Not necessarily first, not necessarily second.
As long as your Labor candidate is preferenced before your Lib/Nat candidate, it is effectively a Labor vote. In almost all cases, preferences will distill out until there are only two candidates left standing. Labor and Lib/Nat. Your vote will end up on the pile of whoever you preferenced first, even if they were 7 and 8 out of an 8 candidate ticket.
We effectively get two votes.
As above, the main race is the two-horse race for government. Small parties are an irrelevance to this. Whether you vote them 1 and 2, 1 and 8 or 7 and 8, you'll end up "represented" by one major party or the other. That's your "lesser of two evils" vote.
The other vote we get is for statistics. First preference is noted and used in statistics, which go toward shaping policy. If the "Green vote" - that is, people giving Greens their #1 vote - jumps from 8% to 15%, that will be noted and talked about. There's next to no chance that your Green candidate will get up and take the seat (unless you're in inner Melbourne or Sydney), but you get to contribute to the statistics.
Likewise with other minor parties. If your local anti-immigration-pro-gun-smokers-rights-evangelica l-christian-family-values party candidate gets a good slice of primary votes, that will be pondered over by the policy makers. You can endorse their position by voting them #1, even though they have no chance of taking the seat. It's the small colourful bars on the TV graphics on election night.
Unfortunately, nobody takes much notice of which minor party you put in at #2. They'll all be eliminated, and it will come down to the big 2.
Unless you agree with every one of their policies (or you're in one of the very few seats that are a genuine three-horse race), giving your primary vote to either of the major parties is a waste of your statistical vote.
What does software have to do with a hardware waranty?
It was a keyboard failure.
If the owner was using a real operating system, she wouldn't have had to use the command line. All that command line typing is obviously what caused her keyboard to wear out prematurely.
Hmm no. Because music is a personal thing and people will tend to enjoy what they are exposed to at a young age and leaves a lasting impression.
Hmmm no.
My Dad believes that music has been in decline since Bach. Mozart is still worth listening to, but anything after Beethoven is too far down the slippery slope. I was blissfully unaware of contemporary music until I was about 10 and able to discover it for myself.
Mid to late teens (early 1990s) saw me as a socially disfunctional geek who liked metal, punk, and whatever spin-offs one cares to give names to. I listened to - and still listen to - quite a bit of back catalogue, despite having had absolutely no exposure to it at a young age. I'm sure my parents still have no idea who Led Zep are, let alone Siouxsie and the Banshees. I'm sure a psychoanalyst would tell you that my taste in music was a response to my feeling isolated from society.
As presumptuous as it is to label one's self as "gifted", I probably fit the mould pretty well. This story may as well have been written about me 10 years ago.
If this is a successful campaign then I don't think it take long until they offer the same kind of discounts high school students, then just home users, until all your spreadsheets are belong to Microsoft.
I work for a multinational corporation. We were invited (about 2 years ago) to purchase MSOffice 2k3 for $35 on a home-use license deal. Your choice of shrink-wrapped CDs or DVD, delivered.
The licence states that I must uninstall and stop using the software if I cease employment at $_big_corporation.
Your future is already here, and has been here for some time now.
It takes a lot of nearly as much oil to produce the ethanol from corn as the ethanol saves. The best figured I've seen is it takes 1 barrel of oil to produce the ethanol equivalent of 1.2 barrels of oil.
How about this for an option:
It takes a lot of nearly as much ethanol to produce the ethanol from corn as the ethanol saves. The best figured I've seen is it takes 1 barrel of ethanol to produce the ethanol equivalent of 1.2 barrels of ethanol.
All of these energy balances that show alternative fuels to be ineffective assume that the energy used to refine the fuel comes from oil.
If the corn (or sugar or tree) farmer is running his equipment on biofuel, where is the problem? Even if he burns 80% of what he produces, he still has 20% left to sell into the energy market.
No decomposing dinosaurs were harmed in the making of this ethanol...
Sure, it will "correct" itself. The problem in this case is that the cure might not be very fun for us living on it at the moment, or in the future as well.
More likely, the "correction" will be the removal of the problem - us.
There's a finite range of climatic conditions that humans can survive and flourish in. If the climate gets too far out of our comfort zone and the planet is no longer capable of sustaining human life, then man-made climate change will no longer be a problem.
The planet can then take a few thousand gazillion years to damp the effects of the short but sharp "blip" we caused.
Sure, that's worst case alarmist BS. But the point remains - natural cycles occur on geological timescales. The changes occuring now appear to be happening at an unprecedented rate.
Lets hear it for nukes, nukes, and some more nukes.
Throughout history we have moved to older and older stores of energy.
We burnt wood until we started running out of forests. It doesn't take long to turn solar radiation into a tree, but we couldn't wait that long.
We burnt peat until we started running out of swamps. It takes a long while to turn solar radiation into plants and then to peat, and we couldn't wait that long.
We burnt coal, oil and gas until they started to run dry. Fossil fuels are stored solar radiation from millions of years ago, and we don't have millions of years available to renew them.
Now we're moving on high-energy isotopes that were most likely created at the dawn of time.
Regardless of how much we think there is, and putting aside the issue of waste disposal, nukular power relies on a non-renewable resource, and we'll sure as heck invent new an imaginative ways to use it all up if we put our minds to it.
Energy that has been stored since the dawn of time is about as old as it gets. There's no "next oldest" to move to.
All applications that our kids use will only work on Windows. Office is the "standard" that they all get taught (yes, I've put OpenOffice on - without teachers wanting to use it, Office is the only thing used). The educational applications that they use every day will only run on Windows
My wife is a high school teacher (in Australia), and with a better-than-average knowledge of MS Office, found herself head of a subject which teaches, among other things, IT. Her training is in chemistry and physics; her IT experience is 100% learnt on-the-job (largely in her career before teaching).
Since she knows more about computers (ie Windows and Office, in layperson eyes) than most teachers, she teaches other teachers how to use Office so that they can teach the kids. The IT support department (2-3 people with various skill levels) spend all their time and resources keeping the whole system afloat - as you would need to with 500+ laptop-equipped teenagers trying their hardest to break it - that they don't get much involved in teaching, aside from the occasional and very rudimentary PD session for staff.
I challenged her when I found out that the subject has assesment criteria detailing the specific MS Excel skills the kids should be competent in at each year level. But, as she pointed out, that's what the kids need to know in order to be competent computer users in the real world, and really, Excel wasn't much different to Lotus-123 back in the day when they were duking it out, so spreadsheeting skills are probably generic and transferrable if something else ever becomes the global standard.
So not only are the schools locked in to 100% MS environments, the kids are being tutored in specific MS software, by teachers with no experience of anything else.
I can't even consider going MS-free at home, because she knows MS Office, and needs to be well practiced in MS Office so she can teach teachers to teach kids how to use MS Office.
I don't think this is an unusual scenario. Teachers are no different to any other profession who uses a desktop PC as a tool; they learn to use what is put in front of them (some better than others). Many of them have been in the workforce since "before computers existed", and have enough trouble using email and writing letters without taking interest in the ethics and philosophy of software development and knowlege ownership.
There is no risk of Microsoft lock-in in schools, any more than there is a risk of the sky turning blue.
While soybeans are a good renewable source of fuel, it is unlikely we could power enough automobiles for the population of the US or the world for that matter. There just isn't enough farmland to produce the crop needed for this kind of fuel source
One alternative is to grow about 1000 times as much biomass, dig a really big hole, and bury it for a few million years to create a renewable supply of natural gas.
A second alternative is to grow about a million times as much biomass, feed it to animals (either really effing big ones, or a whole lot of little tiny ones), then bury the animals in a really big hole for a few million years to create a renewable supply of oil.
Facetious sarcasm aside, the "problem" with renewable bio-fuels is that we can clearly see that our planet doesn't have the capacity to grow enough fuel to match our current consumption levels.
Fossil fuels have a convenient "out of mind, out of sight" aspect, that we can't see how much is left, so we don't have to think about it. Or the fact that once it's gone, it will take a few million years to replace.
...they fault Linux OpenOffice desktops for not having all the features in Microsoft Windows Office, even though few actually use all of the Microsoft stuff
What a ridiculous argument. Of course very few actually use all the Microsoft stuff.
There only needs to be one feature that a user is acustomed to using in MS Office not supported in OO.o. That is enough to break the deal.
I'm sure every one of those "useless" bloated features of MS Office has at least one user. And almost every long-term user of MS Office has at least one useless feature that they think they need, whether or not there is a different or better way of doing things.
I'm still using MS Office at work. I installed OO.o (at several releast points) and had a look. There was one thing I needed that it didn't have. I can't remember what, and I'd never be able to tell you why I needed it, but I did. MS Office, the industry standard, was able to meet my perceived needs. Where's my motive to change?
Flashing stuff on boxes all over the supermarket? That's got to be a nightmare for those suffering from epilepsy.
I doubt it would have a very fast refresh time - certainly not fast enough to flash. If the display was fast enough to flash, surely we'd be seeing this technology in normal display applications (TVs, monitors, phones etc.) before on cereal boxes.
I'm imagining these cereal boxes slowly morphing from one display mode to another, over a period of a few seconds as the reversible reaction progresses.
I don't know much about epilepsy, but I'm assuming they aren't affected by hypercolour T-shirts changing colour...
I work at a long-standing (50 years) JV between a verybig-multinational.com and rather-big.com.
IT integration being suckful at best, we had the ridiculous situation with our email system - provided by verybig-multinational. Email passwords would expire monthly, but only our IT department had the necessary access on the verybig-multinational's network to set a password. So it was a monthly routine to phone a network support guy and tell him, with the entire open-plan office listening in, what the new password should be.
Given the level of available security, I resorted to using something as blatantly lame as companyname2005. Every month. It didn't need to be changed, just re-set.
I generally find that it takes me a couple of weeks to start automatically entering the correct passwords after an expiry. So if somebody installed a keyboard sniffer on my machine, they'd most likely get both of my regular passwords.
And then they'd have access to my bank, slashdot, ebay, paypal and MSN accounts. Not to mention my luggage. Damn, I think I just gave one of them away. Note to self - change luggage from 123456...
Were that to happen in the United States we'd get 500 million votes for Senator Linus Torvalds..
That depends on who brib^H^H^H^Hwins the government contract to supply the voting system...and what undocumented features they included in the software.
Electionworks for Windows may have an inadvertent bug that changes the vote count to a signed int and toggles the MSB for random candidates after polling has closed...so Torvalds may end up with a staggering -500 million votes!
If it's that easy to paint on and is that efficient, why are we talking about geek clothes and not about every home having their southerly facing side painted with this stuff?
Because some of us live in the Southern Hemisphere (you insensitive clod!), and our southern walls don't see a whole lot of sun!
The gas mileage you can get with a hybrid is far less than what you can get with a good diesel engine
...which begs the question:
Why is nobody building diesel-electric hybrid cars?
Why not gain the benefits of both worlds? A modest sized turbodiesel engine, assisted by an electric motor when required, charging batteries when able by running the engine at an efficient loadpoint, regenerative braking...
Modern European turbodiesels are very efficient, and very clean. Very few Americans have the experience to claim otherwise, given that there are very few, if any, modern European turbodiesels in America (NB - I'm not European, so don't play the "euro elitist wanker" card on me).
If diesel engine could be designed and tuned for absolute optimum efficiency, even if only over a limited speed range...the potential is quite exciting.
For that matter, why not try turbine-electric cars?
A major limitation of both gas and steam turbines (as mentioned in TFA) is that they only run efficiently at a very narrow band of speeds, and cars need to run at a wide range of engine speeds (due to the finite number of gears available, or the limitations of CVTs).
So why not use an efficient fixed-speed turbine to run a fixed-speed generator to charge batteries or capacitor banks, which then power electric wheel-motors to drive at whatever speed is required? No need for an inflexible mechanical drivetrain.
Incidentally, that's how diesel-electric railway locomotives have worked for years. Diesel engines run at whatever speed is required to generate the power needed; driving generators; which power electric motors to drive the tractive wheels at whatever speed is required. Many ships operate the same way, particularly large cruise liners; a roomfull of medium-speed diesel engines driving generators, started and stopped individually as required to meet the needs of the propeller motors (and other power needs onboard). It's not new technolgy. There aren't a whole lot of spark-ignition railway locomotives or cruise ships out there...
Geez, get over it. People post at the top, since that is the part that is visible when using a mail reader.
Each style is appropriate in its own place.
For normal "one-to-one" email, top-posting is quite appropriate. The most recent information is the most relevant, and should be at the top where it's immediately available without having to scroll down. It's sometimes useful to keep the discussion history in the email (especially if it is ever CC'ed to an extra person who hasn't seen the rest of the thread), but generally, there is no confusion as to which "branch" of the discussion you are replying.
For "many-to-many" forums, such as news groups, mail list discussions and web forums, trimming and bottom-posting (or middle-posting) is the way to go. There are usually several threads active at a time, and threads can be forked and broken and carried on for weeks and months. It is very rare that a reply will be in response to every point that the parent made. In these cases, it's essential to give some reference so the reader knows what part of the discussion your comments apply to. Thus, a terse, trimmed "reference" quote is suitable.
The two styles are the difference between:
"These are my comments. (And by the way, this is the preceeding conversation, in case you forgot what we were discussing)"
...and...
"Somebody said this; to which I would like to add the following comments".
Most people will never post to a newsgroup or discussion board. They will live safe and secure in their top-posting world. It is only when they take a step into our world that there is an issue, and they need a quick and painless heads-up that different rules apply when posting to a multi-user discussion, and that they'd better learn to trim and bottom post if they want to stay:P
Slashdot Mirror
[advocate class="devil"]
My senior high school courses were Chemistry, Physics, as much Mathematics as I could fit, Engineering Science, and English (because it was compulsory).
You'd never guess that I would go on to become an engineer...
Lucky I wasn't "forced to declare a major". Choosing a major would have severely restricted my career options, and I was far too young to lock myself in to a career path.
[/advocate]
I think this is less of a problem than you make out. It's not uncommon to be forced into work-arounds for bone-headed IT policies causing incompatibilities between companies.
A classic case of this is one of my customers - an international automotive manufacturer that will remain nameless. Their mail system is set to reject files bigger than 5(?)MB and ".zip" files (for security reasons...?!). Their engineers advise that the best way to send them big spreadsheets is in a zip file, with the extension re-named to ".piz". Piz files get through the email filters, zip files don't. They've associated the .piz extension with their unzipping application, so it's seamless at their end.
Of course, at first they're apologetic about their idiot IT department, but once the system is known it works fine. Everybody working on that project has set up a .piz association. No need for an international incident. There's no loss of face, it's just a bone-head corporate policy thing.
If I was using $_generic Office and somebody sent me a document that I couldn't open, I'd call them, blame our IT department, and ask for the file to be saved as something different and re-sent. No different.
A more important aspect of 100% compatibility is for the "advance guard" to be able to use the software in breach of company policy.
I work in a 100% Microsoft site. The IT guys trust me enough to have given me admin rights over my own computers, and they turn a blind eye when I install Firefox, OO.o and whatever other non-policy software I choose. I'm sure this is a pretty common scenario for geeks who work outside of IT.
At the moment I don't use OO.o because it doesn't run the macro-laden Excel spreadsheets I need - it's not 100% compatible. If it did everything I needed and I used it exclusively, the IT guys might consider me as an alpha-trial, demonstrating that the alternate software could be viable, and might be worth consideration for site-wide implementation. Because it doesn't work for me, I can give that feedback, and it's killed off as an option before it's even considered.
If Adobe office was ever considered for my workplace, there's a fair chance I'd be used as a test pilot. If it works for me (and others in different functional areas), they might build a case for making the change. If it doesn't work because it's not compatible with what we already have, it would be killed off and we'd stay with MS.
If I don't keep good updated security software on my home computer, somebody will steal six figure amounts from me?
I'd like to see them try. Blood, stone and all that.
And the thing is, they're right. 8-4 is just the time they are required to be AT SCHOOL, in the room. To compare teaching with a "normal" office-based profession: Teachers run and chair meetings, continuously, from 8-4 each day. The preparation for the meetings is additional to that. If any business person was required to chair 8 hours of business meetings every day, they'd have a couple of full-time support staff doing their preparation for them.
The TV is a single use, passive, entertainment medium whereas the PC is a multi use, active, tool. In other terms the TV is 'lean back' technology whereas the PC is 'lean forward' technology. Whichever way you put it they are not the same.
So, compare the PC with the automobile instead.
Driving a car is an "active" activity, as is using a computer.
Early automobiles needed one, sometimes two skilled mechanics to drive. Nowdays you can drive a car without any knowledge of, or sensitivity to, the mechanical workings of the car. The user interface is dumbed down so that a normal person can use it, and the reliability is adequate that it rarely needs specialist attention to maintain or repair it.
Computers haven't reached that level of development yet. Normal people still struggle to "drive" without causing damage. Service intervals are too short. Repairs are required too frequently.
It's the progression of the technology from a complex system that requires specialist expertise, to being an appliance. Cars have had a century to get there, computers haven't.
Most people here would be terrified of the day when the user experience of a computer is as brain-dead as the user experience of a Toyota Camry. For that matter, most car enthusiasts are already terrified that cars are as brain-dead as a Camry.
When a computer is truly an appliance, I contend that it should no longer be called a "computer". In fact, "computing" is no longer the primary function of the devices that we currently call a "computer", outside of a scientific workplace. It's a communication and entertainment device, which occasionally doubles as a media editor (all media from text documents to digital video). Computation happens behind the scenes, and the user need not know anything about it.
We see these stories all the time.
"Hybrid cars are no better than intelligent cars".
Excellent work with the automation system. Now let's put this intelligent autopilot in a hybrid car and see what we can get.
"Hybrids are no better than a modern turbodiesel"
Excellent work with the diesel engine development. Now let's build a turbodiesel hybrid. With intelligent autopilot.
The technologies aren't mutually exclusive. They don't have to be compared against each other. They can be combined for even better results.
Of course, the law of diminishing returns applies. An intelligent turbodiesel hybrid may only be a couple of percent more efficient than an intelligent spark ignition hybrid. But as a research tool and technology demonstration, why don't we hear of anybody building such a thing?
Unfortunately, the best way to get Howard out is to vote Labor.
...ahead of Liberal.
Not necessarily first, not necessarily second.
As long as your Labor candidate is preferenced before your Lib/Nat candidate, it is effectively a Labor vote. In almost all cases, preferences will distill out until there are only two candidates left standing. Labor and Lib/Nat. Your vote will end up on the pile of whoever you preferenced first, even if they were 7 and 8 out of an 8 candidate ticket.
We effectively get two votes.
As above, the main race is the two-horse race for government. Small parties are an irrelevance to this. Whether you vote them 1 and 2, 1 and 8 or 7 and 8, you'll end up "represented" by one major party or the other. That's your "lesser of two evils" vote.
The other vote we get is for statistics. First preference is noted and used in statistics, which go toward shaping policy. If the "Green vote" - that is, people giving Greens their #1 vote - jumps from 8% to 15%, that will be noted and talked about. There's next to no chance that your Green candidate will get up and take the seat (unless you're in inner Melbourne or Sydney), but you get to contribute to the statistics.
Likewise with other minor parties. If your local anti-immigration-pro-gun-smokers-rights-evangelica l-christian-family-values party candidate gets a good slice of primary votes, that will be pondered over by the policy makers. You can endorse their position by voting them #1, even though they have no chance of taking the seat. It's the small colourful bars on the TV graphics on election night.
Unfortunately, nobody takes much notice of which minor party you put in at #2. They'll all be eliminated, and it will come down to the big 2.
Unless you agree with every one of their policies (or you're in one of the very few seats that are a genuine three-horse race), giving your primary vote to either of the major parties is a waste of your statistical vote.
It was a keyboard failure.
If the owner was using a real operating system, she wouldn't have had to use the command line. All that command line typing is obviously what caused her keyboard to wear out prematurely.
Hmmm no.
My Dad believes that music has been in decline since Bach. Mozart is still worth listening to, but anything after Beethoven is too far down the slippery slope. I was blissfully unaware of contemporary music until I was about 10 and able to discover it for myself.
Mid to late teens (early 1990s) saw me as a socially disfunctional geek who liked metal, punk, and whatever spin-offs one cares to give names to. I listened to - and still listen to - quite a bit of back catalogue, despite having had absolutely no exposure to it at a young age. I'm sure my parents still have no idea who Led Zep are, let alone Siouxsie and the Banshees. I'm sure a psychoanalyst would tell you that my taste in music was a response to my feeling isolated from society.
As presumptuous as it is to label one's self as "gifted", I probably fit the mould pretty well. This story may as well have been written about me 10 years ago.
I work for a multinational corporation. We were invited (about 2 years ago) to purchase MSOffice 2k3 for $35 on a home-use license deal. Your choice of shrink-wrapped CDs or DVD, delivered.
The licence states that I must uninstall and stop using the software if I cease employment at $_big_corporation.
Your future is already here, and has been here for some time now.
If we could eliminate sex from real life, there'd be no more children needing to be thought of.
Then could go back to taking responsibility for our own actions.
I don't see a problem with that.
How about this for an option:
It takes a lot of nearly as much ethanol to produce the ethanol from corn as the ethanol saves. The best figured I've seen is it takes 1 barrel of ethanol to produce the ethanol equivalent of 1.2 barrels of ethanol.
All of these energy balances that show alternative fuels to be ineffective assume that the energy used to refine the fuel comes from oil.
If the corn (or sugar or tree) farmer is running his equipment on biofuel, where is the problem? Even if he burns 80% of what he produces, he still has 20% left to sell into the energy market.
No decomposing dinosaurs were harmed in the making of this ethanol...
He may be faced with two financial options:
I don't think "retire at 50 and live a life of leisure for the rest of my days" was ever raised as an option.
More likely, the "correction" will be the removal of the problem - us.
There's a finite range of climatic conditions that humans can survive and flourish in. If the climate gets too far out of our comfort zone and the planet is no longer capable of sustaining human life, then man-made climate change will no longer be a problem.
The planet can then take a few thousand gazillion years to damp the effects of the short but sharp "blip" we caused.
Sure, that's worst case alarmist BS. But the point remains - natural cycles occur on geological timescales. The changes occuring now appear to be happening at an unprecedented rate.
Throughout history we have moved to older and older stores of energy.
We burnt wood until we started running out of forests. It doesn't take long to turn solar radiation into a tree, but we couldn't wait that long.
We burnt peat until we started running out of swamps. It takes a long while to turn solar radiation into plants and then to peat, and we couldn't wait that long.
We burnt coal, oil and gas until they started to run dry. Fossil fuels are stored solar radiation from millions of years ago, and we don't have millions of years available to renew them.
Now we're moving on high-energy isotopes that were most likely created at the dawn of time.
Regardless of how much we think there is, and putting aside the issue of waste disposal, nukular power relies on a non-renewable resource, and we'll sure as heck invent new an imaginative ways to use it all up if we put our minds to it.
Energy that has been stored since the dawn of time is about as old as it gets. There's no "next oldest" to move to.
My wife is a high school teacher (in Australia), and with a better-than-average knowledge of MS Office, found herself head of a subject which teaches, among other things, IT. Her training is in chemistry and physics; her IT experience is 100% learnt on-the-job (largely in her career before teaching).
Since she knows more about computers (ie Windows and Office, in layperson eyes) than most teachers, she teaches other teachers how to use Office so that they can teach the kids. The IT support department (2-3 people with various skill levels) spend all their time and resources keeping the whole system afloat - as you would need to with 500+ laptop-equipped teenagers trying their hardest to break it - that they don't get much involved in teaching, aside from the occasional and very rudimentary PD session for staff.
I challenged her when I found out that the subject has assesment criteria detailing the specific MS Excel skills the kids should be competent in at each year level. But, as she pointed out, that's what the kids need to know in order to be competent computer users in the real world, and really, Excel wasn't much different to Lotus-123 back in the day when they were duking it out, so spreadsheeting skills are probably generic and transferrable if something else ever becomes the global standard.
So not only are the schools locked in to 100% MS environments, the kids are being tutored in specific MS software, by teachers with no experience of anything else.
I can't even consider going MS-free at home, because she knows MS Office, and needs to be well practiced in MS Office so she can teach teachers to teach kids how to use MS Office.
I don't think this is an unusual scenario. Teachers are no different to any other profession who uses a desktop PC as a tool; they learn to use what is put in front of them (some better than others). Many of them have been in the workforce since "before computers existed", and have enough trouble using email and writing letters without taking interest in the ethics and philosophy of software development and knowlege ownership.
There is no risk of Microsoft lock-in in schools, any more than there is a risk of the sky turning blue.
tim
One alternative is to grow about 1000 times as much biomass, dig a really big hole, and bury it for a few million years to create a renewable supply of natural gas.
A second alternative is to grow about a million times as much biomass, feed it to animals (either really effing big ones, or a whole lot of little tiny ones), then bury the animals in a really big hole for a few million years to create a renewable supply of oil.
Facetious sarcasm aside, the "problem" with renewable bio-fuels is that we can clearly see that our planet doesn't have the capacity to grow enough fuel to match our current consumption levels.
Fossil fuels have a convenient "out of mind, out of sight" aspect, that we can't see how much is left, so we don't have to think about it. Or the fact that once it's gone, it will take a few million years to replace.
/tp
What a ridiculous argument. Of course very few actually use all the Microsoft stuff.
There only needs to be one feature that a user is acustomed to using in MS Office not supported in OO.o. That is enough to break the deal.
I'm sure every one of those "useless" bloated features of MS Office has at least one user. And almost every long-term user of MS Office has at least one useless feature that they think they need, whether or not there is a different or better way of doing things.
I'm still using MS Office at work. I installed OO.o (at several releast points) and had a look. There was one thing I needed that it didn't have. I can't remember what, and I'd never be able to tell you why I needed it, but I did. MS Office, the industry standard, was able to meet my perceived needs. Where's my motive to change?
/tim
I doubt it would have a very fast refresh time - certainly not fast enough to flash. If the display was fast enough to flash, surely we'd be seeing this technology in normal display applications (TVs, monitors, phones etc.) before on cereal boxes.
I'm imagining these cereal boxes slowly morphing from one display mode to another, over a period of a few seconds as the reversible reaction progresses.
I don't know much about epilepsy, but I'm assuming they aren't affected by hypercolour T-shirts changing colour...
Both definitions are correct.
One of them is the standard.
The other is the Microsoft implementation.
I work at a long-standing (50 years) JV between a verybig-multinational.com and rather-big.com.
IT integration being suckful at best, we had the ridiculous situation with our email system - provided by verybig-multinational. Email passwords would expire monthly, but only our IT department had the necessary access on the verybig-multinational's network to set a password. So it was a monthly routine to phone a network support guy and tell him, with the entire open-plan office listening in, what the new password should be.
Given the level of available security, I resorted to using something as blatantly lame as companyname2005. Every month. It didn't need to be changed, just re-set.
I generally find that it takes me a couple of weeks to start automatically entering the correct passwords after an expiry. So if somebody installed a keyboard sniffer on my machine, they'd most likely get both of my regular passwords.
And then they'd have access to my bank, slashdot, ebay, paypal and MSN accounts. Not to mention my luggage. Damn, I think I just gave one of them away. Note to self - change luggage from 123456...
That depends on who brib^H^H^H^Hwins the government contract to supply the voting system...and what undocumented features they included in the software.
Electionworks for Windows may have an inadvertent bug that changes the vote count to a signed int and toggles the MSB for random candidates after polling has closed...so Torvalds may end up with a staggering -500 million votes!
Because some of us live in the Southern Hemisphere (you insensitive clod!), and our southern walls don't see a whole lot of sun!
...which begs the question:
Why is nobody building diesel-electric hybrid cars?
Why not gain the benefits of both worlds? A modest sized turbodiesel engine, assisted by an electric motor when required, charging batteries when able by running the engine at an efficient loadpoint, regenerative braking...
Modern European turbodiesels are very efficient, and very clean. Very few Americans have the experience to claim otherwise, given that there are very few, if any, modern European turbodiesels in America (NB - I'm not European, so don't play the "euro elitist wanker" card on me).
If diesel engine could be designed and tuned for absolute optimum efficiency, even if only over a limited speed range...the potential is quite exciting.
For that matter, why not try turbine-electric cars?
A major limitation of both gas and steam turbines (as mentioned in TFA) is that they only run efficiently at a very narrow band of speeds, and cars need to run at a wide range of engine speeds (due to the finite number of gears available, or the limitations of CVTs).
So why not use an efficient fixed-speed turbine to run a fixed-speed generator to charge batteries or capacitor banks, which then power electric wheel-motors to drive at whatever speed is required? No need for an inflexible mechanical drivetrain.
Incidentally, that's how diesel-electric railway locomotives have worked for years. Diesel engines run at whatever speed is required to generate the power needed; driving generators; which power electric motors to drive the tractive wheels at whatever speed is required. Many ships operate the same way, particularly large cruise liners; a roomfull of medium-speed diesel engines driving generators, started and stopped individually as required to meet the needs of the propeller motors (and other power needs onboard). It's not new technolgy. There aren't a whole lot of spark-ignition railway locomotives or cruise ships out there...
Each style is appropriate in its own place.
For normal "one-to-one" email, top-posting is quite appropriate. The most recent information is the most relevant, and should be at the top where it's immediately available without having to scroll down. It's sometimes useful to keep the discussion history in the email (especially if it is ever CC'ed to an extra person who hasn't seen the rest of the thread), but generally, there is no confusion as to which "branch" of the discussion you are replying.
For "many-to-many" forums, such as news groups, mail list discussions and web forums, trimming and bottom-posting (or middle-posting) is the way to go. There are usually several threads active at a time, and threads can be forked and broken and carried on for weeks and months. It is very rare that a reply will be in response to every point that the parent made. In these cases, it's essential to give some reference so the reader knows what part of the discussion your comments apply to. Thus, a terse, trimmed "reference" quote is suitable.
The two styles are the difference between:
"These are my comments. (And by the way, this is the preceeding conversation, in case you forgot what we were discussing)"
...and...
"Somebody said this; to which I would like to add the following comments".
Most people will never post to a newsgroup or discussion board. They will live safe and secure in their top-posting world. It is only when they take a step into our world that there is an issue, and they need a quick and painless heads-up that different rules apply when posting to a multi-user discussion, and that they'd better learn to trim and bottom post if they want to stay :P