I also used to have trouble with these things but my latest Debian install did a wonderful job. With USB in particular, hehehe. It used to be that only Unices needed to do the mount/unmount thing, but now Windows also requires it for all these removable USB thingies. Except the unmounting in Windows is unmount/click/click (I mean the two layers of dialogs that pop up are totally useless) while in Linux is a simple unmount.
I'm with you on that. I can see the companies having their employees fraudulently entertain customers in an online fashion, but never getting to the date. If there was an actual date, it probably wasn't some organinzed plot. I mean you waste a lot of man (or woman) hours on one customer. It can't be economically productive. The same employee can, however, keep several potential customers interested by sending occasional messages. These don't take much of their precious **paid** time. The return on the investment is much better. On the other hand, I'm guessing actually paying an employee to get to the date stage is probably a money losing proposition.
As far as I know, this is quite a stunning discovery. Until recently, it was believed that grass only appeared a few million years ago. Not several tens of millions.
Actually communism worked pretty well... in small hunter gatherer tribes where every member of the community realised that his/her existence depended on the welfare of the other members. Therefore sharing resources, in that context, is the most obvious way to do things.
In larger societies, it's more difficult to relate the welfare of Joe I Don't Dnow and Don't Wanna Know Who, to one's own best interest is much more difficult. And swindling is easy in any big structure, whatever type of government or private interest it resprents.
Similarly capitalism works when the population is small enough that the accumulation of resources by a few does not significantly deplete the globally available resources. But since resources are finite, when the increase of welfare of a few signifies a significant drop of survival odds of a significant fraction of the population... things change and usually in bloodshed, since the established elite is not likely to be willing to forfeit its priviledges for the benefit of mere "commoners".
Capitalism is the economic system of choice when rsources (and thereofore opportunity) seem plentiful, while communism is the system ofchoice of desperate people who think of survival, when resources appear very limited. The failure of the first is the the system itself whic acts as a positive feedback pump which causes resources to become ever scarcer for the greater number. The failure of the second is that as soon as survival seems assured, people start wishing to improve their personal lot with respect to their fellow humans. Their respective success is their downfall in the end.
Apparently, the speed of light when the zero point energy is lower (as between the two plates generating the Casimir effect) the speed of light is higher than the speed of light in vacuum at normal zero point energy levels.
Sony is one of the scariest companies of all. They are worse, much worse than even MS. Since I have seen some of their buisness practices I make a point of not buying any Sony product. You know from the start that they weill hyperDRM anything you buy from them, and I always make the assumption that I very lilkely will lose ownership or access (or both ) of anything I could produce using their products, or any copyrighted material that I may legally obtain. It 's the safest approach, although I'm sure they are not alone. Only the very worst offenders.
Yeah, Microsoft is definitely not the poster boy of consumer friendliness. On the other hand, Sony beats them hands down in terms of hostility to consumers. They had made this bookreader with E-Ink display, and not only was their selection bad, but they were only public domain works, which they nonetheless felt compelled to prohibit you from copying by locking them tight into DRM. It was a sad read.
I don't know if I remember correctly, but I think the files you bought had limited life too. I mean how can you expect to sell even one of those things?
I personally find grammar checkers totally useless. But I know SEVERAL people for whom English is not their native language. A grammar checker is VERY useful for them. It allows them to make more intelligible sentences on their own. When they use it, it makes the life of people they rely on to make the final revisions A LOT easier.
So on the whole, I would say yes, a grammar checker is useful to have. It is the main thing that has prevented me "selling" OOo to a lot of the grad students at my university. Most of them come from abroad. It is a must have feature for them.
Although as far as I know, it is not compatible with DOS. At least starting with XP, a huge amount of DOS programs do not work even using the "compatibility modes" when executing programs. Thank god there is DOSBOX or my cousin couldn't have had his kid playing with the games he enjoyed so much at an earlier age. Of course, I couldn't help pointing out to him, when I told him about the existence of DOSBox that it also ran on Linux.:)
But indeed, backward compatibility is an issue.
I tend to agree that object linking/embedding isn't really the holy grail of desktop application convergence. I really don't get why this is so hard to do... every word processor has a table editor... why not drop in a full spreadsheet there? And presentations are mostly word processor docs with some large fonts and pretty animations. Not much going on there but some macros.
I didn't mean so much dropping things into another document, as much as having a kind of MasterDocument, for which the linked documents could be of different formats. The master document would be of a "Print Preview" form, and we could specify Sections, or print ranges in spreadsheets, or Slides in drawings. These would be like the linked sections in OOo where you can specify the document and section, but in a more general way. The spreadsheet print range would look as it would in its Print Preview, as filtered through the MasterDocuments page header/footer pagination format. etc.
Being a print preview you would get the WYSIWYG of the compound pages, with a header footer and pagination set by the master document. The page numbering could flow naturally between one document and the next etc.
The documents would still be modified individually. The compound document would be a presentation container, not an editing container.
The only way I could justify a monolithic suite, is if somehow you could have a master-document setup in which you could seamlessly integrate different documents into a single document. For instance I have this thesis work, and a few pages of the appendix are composed from a OOdraw slides, a few others from spreadsheet directly, and some more word processor files. It would take work to make this all show up into a seamless compound document, but if someone came up with a neat way to do it, then yes a monolithic beast might be justified... although even then it could be broken up into components and add an independent compound document component.
But I've been hoping for something like that since the early 90s. I guess I'm alone in that since I've never seen anything remotely similar.
Another neet thing that I'd like see appear in the spreadsheet is what Excel 4 had... bound and unbound sheets. You could carry around the files that you need, and yet keep the master document a consistent whole. The master document already exists for the word processor. It needs to come back for the spreadsheet. (and no, copy paste link just does not work the same way)
I don't think the public and private sectors have the same scope to begin with. It seems to me that most of the problems we have is confusing what should belong in one sector and the other.
NASA and all national space programs are there to develope the cutting edge technology, where risk would be too high for the private sector. Then that knowledge is spread around because we all polled our resources to get that knowlege, we should all be able to benefit from it... government agencies are not there to turn a profilt...They already used the public money, to produce a public service: producing the knowledge that benefits all. That was the problem of the space shuttle program and most government satellite launch programs: they were design to run a public agency as a private for profit business. It just does not work.
The private sector's role is to take that leading edge technology and developping it into a day to day business.
This is not only true for aerospace, but all field. Whenever government agencies try to commercialize something it is wrong. They inevitable run into a conflict of interest: protecting the public interest or protecing this really lucrative business.
On the otehr hand, private sector does very badly in research. Most of their interest is protecting their IP, so it puts real hurdles to development. Take the best examples, drugs. Research is quickly abandonned for drugs that seem too promising. If it promises a quick cure rather than a long term (or lifelong) treatment, research is plainly abandonned. Then, on the treatment drugs, they get these long-term monopolies which are government enforced, and through which they bleed the public coffers dry (if there is some medicare coverage for it) or effectively restrict treatment to rich people.
In the case of pharmaceuticals, it is obvious that patents should not be recognized. It is the best interst of the public for governments to pull together resources into research of cures (not liflelong treatments) and have the private industry compete for the production of these drugs. Need to find cures would be the drive to research. The economical incentive is that a heatly population contributes taxes, so the state benefits of lower cost of healthcare and increased productivity. The private sector, not saddled with research and development can make is free to compete at the production level. That's how it should be, and we would find disgraceful profiteering on the backs of dying people as we've seen with AIDS in South Africa.
Government is not and should NOT be run as a private business. They have different roles. Private buisness cannot generate knowledge in high risk conditions or for the purpose of the public good. Trying to confuse those roles leads to aberrations that ultimately are costly to all of us.
I don't see how loss of fertility is a drawback of increased lifespan... it seems to be a desireable side effect. Imagine the overpopulation nightmare otherwise.
I know nothing about lasers, but I was wondering how effective they can be at any decent range in atmosphere? What kind of effective ranges can we get high energy lasers to be effective at, condidering all the diffraction and absorbtion that can be expected in the atmosphere?
And besides reflective surfaces, if the projectiles are coated with defocusing ablative materials, how much can the lasers do? Just looking to find some answers from people who have some solid knowledge about those things. Also, what kind of wavelength would be the most effective as a weapon in an atomospheric context.
The fact that money is being spent by the military is not much of an indication of anyting in my opinion. As long as it keeps the big guy in the military supply industry well loaded with taxpayer's money, the military will happily spend away money in fairytales. That's why I'd like to hear from people with solid knowledge in laser technology about how useful lasers can be in the real world as opposed to sci-fi flicks.
Then they should charge for the cost of the empty boxes. This guy showed publicly something that possibly thounsands of people do in one form or another. "Free" (as in beer) stuff tends to be abused this way. However, the guy might still have payed the few cents the boxes if it saved him the furniture.
Not really. Some of the kind of people not runnign XP can very simply people happy with their hardware capability, who don't see a reason to buy a new computer just so they can install XP on it. Rather than having XP run like a dog, they'd rather have windows 98, with ZoneAlarm firewall. Of course, those would have likely started using Firefox a long time ago too, rather than IE.
This attitude of Telemarketers. They should be lobbying in FAVOUR of Do not Call Lists. What does a do not call list represent? People who DO NOT WANT to be called. People who are not likely to be influenced by your sales pitch because they find this kind of call intrusive. Do not call lists allows telemarketers to weed out the most unlikely clients from the bunch who are more amenable to that marketing strategy. By having to call less people, they need to hire less employees for the same number of sales at the end of the road. It's actually BETTER for them.
Really? I think that was the main reason for those folk poem to be poems, the rythm and the necessity to rhym would limit the options and make memorization more natural. It's the same reason why it's sooooo much easier to memorize an entire song (even a song with lyrics... there was even one song which was so naturally flowing that I memorized it after listening to it once... and it wasn't one sentence repeated over and over either), than some random paragraph.
As far as I'm concerned, when it's government funded research, the whole population of the country paid for it. They should have access to what was already paid for... their own money should not be used for the sole profit of one publisher. That is wrong, wrong, wrong wrong wrong.
We should actually probably start a whole lot of distributed databases. I don't know anything about such things, but I'm pretty sure gomething has to exist where a database might be distributed. I guess Freenet works in a similar way where the "database" is the website.
I'm going to let more knowledgeable people comment on that, as I'm really not up to speed. I guess I was really annoyed at how some private interests think they should be the only ones making money out of the pockets of those who already paid for the research (and are likely to have governments cave in, after a bit of lubrication of the right people in the right places). I call them thieves. No other term will do.
That's a good question. Do any international slashdotters know of a local bank or government office that uses the local character set in their URL to be more familiar to their potential customers or users? My experience is limited in this respect, but I would think that it would be something highly desirable for such institutions.
Still, it might be nice to be able to work out a solution that doesn't involve punycode even before the top level domains' policies are sorted out. Once users get trained that legitimate addresses (be it banks or more trivial places) CAN look like gibberish, the temptation to click on links that don't necessarily look like anything also increases. It's a matter of conditionning. As more and more addresses show up like that, the tolerance for gibberish will only increase. And unfortunately,.com etc are the most common domain names.
Slashdot Mirror
I also used to have trouble with these things but my latest Debian install did a wonderful job. With USB in particular, hehehe. It used to be that only Unices needed to do the mount/unmount thing, but now Windows also requires it for all these removable USB thingies. Except the unmounting in Windows is unmount/click/click (I mean the two layers of dialogs that pop up are totally useless) while in Linux is a simple unmount.
Hence megablocks.
I'm with you on that. I can see the companies having their employees fraudulently entertain customers in an online fashion, but never getting to the date. If there was an actual date, it probably wasn't some organinzed plot. I mean you waste a lot of man (or woman) hours on one customer. It can't be economically productive. The same employee can, however, keep several potential customers interested by sending occasional messages. These don't take much of their precious **paid** time. The return on the investment is much better. On the other hand, I'm guessing actually paying an employee to get to the date stage is probably a money losing proposition.
As far as I know, this is quite a stunning discovery. Until recently, it was believed that grass only appeared a few million years ago. Not several tens of millions.
Actually communism worked pretty well... in small hunter gatherer tribes where every member of the community realised that his/her existence depended on the welfare of the other members. Therefore sharing resources, in that context, is the most obvious way to do things. In larger societies, it's more difficult to relate the welfare of Joe I Don't Dnow and Don't Wanna Know Who, to one's own best interest is much more difficult. And swindling is easy in any big structure, whatever type of government or private interest it resprents. Similarly capitalism works when the population is small enough that the accumulation of resources by a few does not significantly deplete the globally available resources. But since resources are finite, when the increase of welfare of a few signifies a significant drop of survival odds of a significant fraction of the population... things change and usually in bloodshed, since the established elite is not likely to be willing to forfeit its priviledges for the benefit of mere "commoners". Capitalism is the economic system of choice when rsources (and thereofore opportunity) seem plentiful, while communism is the system ofchoice of desperate people who think of survival, when resources appear very limited. The failure of the first is the the system itself whic acts as a positive feedback pump which causes resources to become ever scarcer for the greater number. The failure of the second is that as soon as survival seems assured, people start wishing to improve their personal lot with respect to their fellow humans. Their respective success is their downfall in the end.
Apparently, the speed of light when the zero point energy is lower (as between the two plates generating the Casimir effect) the speed of light is higher than the speed of light in vacuum at normal zero point energy levels.
a rpstat.html
http://www.nasa.gov/centers/glenn/research/warp/w
Just a question
Sony is one of the scariest companies of all. They are worse, much worse than even MS. Since I have seen some of their buisness practices I make a point of not buying any Sony product. You know from the start that they weill hyperDRM anything you buy from them, and I always make the assumption that I very lilkely will lose ownership or access (or both ) of anything I could produce using their products, or any copyrighted material that I may legally obtain. It 's the safest approach, although I'm sure they are not alone. Only the very worst offenders.
Yeah, Microsoft is definitely not the poster boy of consumer friendliness. On the other hand, Sony beats them hands down in terms of hostility to consumers. They had made this bookreader with E-Ink display, and not only was their selection bad, but they were only public domain works, which they nonetheless felt compelled to prohibit you from copying by locking them tight into DRM. It was a sad read.
I don't know if I remember correctly, but I think the files you bought had limited life too. I mean how can you expect to sell even one of those things?
I personally find grammar checkers totally useless. But I know SEVERAL people for whom English is not their native language. A grammar checker is VERY useful for them. It allows them to make more intelligible sentences on their own. When they use it, it makes the life of people they rely on to make the final revisions A LOT easier.
So on the whole, I would say yes, a grammar checker is useful to have. It is the main thing that has prevented me "selling" OOo to a lot of the grad students at my university. Most of them come from abroad. It is a must have feature for them.
Although as far as I know, it is not compatible with DOS. At least starting with XP, a huge amount of DOS programs do not work even using the "compatibility modes" when executing programs. Thank god there is DOSBOX or my cousin couldn't have had his kid playing with the games he enjoyed so much at an earlier age. Of course, I couldn't help pointing out to him, when I told him about the existence of DOSBox that it also ran on Linux. :)
But indeed, backward compatibility is an issue.
Being a print preview you would get the WYSIWYG of the compound pages, with a header footer and pagination set by the master document. The page numbering could flow naturally between one document and the next etc.
The documents would still be modified individually. The compound document would be a presentation container, not an editing container.
The only way I could justify a monolithic suite, is if somehow you could have a master-document setup in which you could seamlessly integrate different documents into a single document. For instance I have this thesis work, and a few pages of the appendix are composed from a OOdraw slides, a few others from spreadsheet directly, and some more word processor files. It would take work to make this all show up into a seamless compound document, but if someone came up with a neat way to do it, then yes a monolithic beast might be justified... although even then it could be broken up into components and add an independent compound document component. But I've been hoping for something like that since the early 90s. I guess I'm alone in that since I've never seen anything remotely similar. Another neet thing that I'd like see appear in the spreadsheet is what Excel 4 had... bound and unbound sheets. You could carry around the files that you need, and yet keep the master document a consistent whole. The master document already exists for the word processor. It needs to come back for the spreadsheet. (and no, copy paste link just does not work the same way)
I don't think the public and private sectors have the same scope to begin with. It seems to me that most of the problems we have is confusing what should belong in one sector and the other. NASA and all national space programs are there to develope the cutting edge technology, where risk would be too high for the private sector. Then that knowledge is spread around because we all polled our resources to get that knowlege, we should all be able to benefit from it... government agencies are not there to turn a profilt...They already used the public money, to produce a public service: producing the knowledge that benefits all. That was the problem of the space shuttle program and most government satellite launch programs: they were design to run a public agency as a private for profit business. It just does not work. The private sector's role is to take that leading edge technology and developping it into a day to day business. This is not only true for aerospace, but all field. Whenever government agencies try to commercialize something it is wrong. They inevitable run into a conflict of interest: protecting the public interest or protecing this really lucrative business. On the otehr hand, private sector does very badly in research. Most of their interest is protecting their IP, so it puts real hurdles to development. Take the best examples, drugs. Research is quickly abandonned for drugs that seem too promising. If it promises a quick cure rather than a long term (or lifelong) treatment, research is plainly abandonned. Then, on the treatment drugs, they get these long-term monopolies which are government enforced, and through which they bleed the public coffers dry (if there is some medicare coverage for it) or effectively restrict treatment to rich people. In the case of pharmaceuticals, it is obvious that patents should not be recognized. It is the best interst of the public for governments to pull together resources into research of cures (not liflelong treatments) and have the private industry compete for the production of these drugs. Need to find cures would be the drive to research. The economical incentive is that a heatly population contributes taxes, so the state benefits of lower cost of healthcare and increased productivity. The private sector, not saddled with research and development can make is free to compete at the production level. That's how it should be, and we would find disgraceful profiteering on the backs of dying people as we've seen with AIDS in South Africa. Government is not and should NOT be run as a private business. They have different roles. Private buisness cannot generate knowledge in high risk conditions or for the purpose of the public good. Trying to confuse those roles leads to aberrations that ultimately are costly to all of us.
Apparently, all the all the longstanding overused jokes from slashdot are going to condense into coherent statements in this single thread.
This must the long awaited golden thread. The one thread to bind them all. The one thread to rule the world.
I don't see how loss of fertility is a drawback of increased lifespan... it seems to be a desireable side effect. Imagine the overpopulation nightmare otherwise.
I know nothing about lasers, but I was wondering how effective they can be at any decent range in atmosphere? What kind of effective ranges can we get high energy lasers to be effective at, condidering all the diffraction and absorbtion that can be expected in the atmosphere? And besides reflective surfaces, if the projectiles are coated with defocusing ablative materials, how much can the lasers do? Just looking to find some answers from people who have some solid knowledge about those things. Also, what kind of wavelength would be the most effective as a weapon in an atomospheric context. The fact that money is being spent by the military is not much of an indication of anyting in my opinion. As long as it keeps the big guy in the military supply industry well loaded with taxpayer's money, the military will happily spend away money in fairytales. That's why I'd like to hear from people with solid knowledge in laser technology about how useful lasers can be in the real world as opposed to sci-fi flicks.
Is this the natural evolution of the airplane, or is it a case of intelligent design?
Then they should charge for the cost of the empty boxes. This guy showed publicly something that possibly thounsands of people do in one form or another. "Free" (as in beer) stuff tends to be abused this way. However, the guy might still have payed the few cents the boxes if it saved him the furniture.
Not really. Some of the kind of people not runnign XP can very simply people happy with their hardware capability, who don't see a reason to buy a new computer just so they can install XP on it. Rather than having XP run like a dog, they'd rather have windows 98, with ZoneAlarm firewall. Of course, those would have likely started using Firefox a long time ago too, rather than IE.
This attitude of Telemarketers. They should be lobbying in FAVOUR of Do not Call Lists. What does a do not call list represent? People who DO NOT WANT to be called. People who are not likely to be influenced by your sales pitch because they find this kind of call intrusive. Do not call lists allows telemarketers to weed out the most unlikely clients from the bunch who are more amenable to that marketing strategy. By having to call less people, they need to hire less employees for the same number of sales at the end of the road. It's actually BETTER for them.
Neanderthal could and did do this. Didn't save them.
Really? I think that was the main reason for those folk poem to be poems, the rythm and the necessity to rhym would limit the options and make memorization more natural. It's the same reason why it's sooooo much easier to memorize an entire song (even a song with lyrics... there was even one song which was so naturally flowing that I memorized it after listening to it once... and it wasn't one sentence repeated over and over either), than some random paragraph.
As far as I'm concerned, when it's government funded research, the whole population of the country paid for it. They should have access to what was already paid for... their own money should not be used for the sole profit of one publisher. That is wrong, wrong, wrong wrong wrong. We should actually probably start a whole lot of distributed databases. I don't know anything about such things, but I'm pretty sure gomething has to exist where a database might be distributed. I guess Freenet works in a similar way where the "database" is the website. I'm going to let more knowledgeable people comment on that, as I'm really not up to speed. I guess I was really annoyed at how some private interests think they should be the only ones making money out of the pockets of those who already paid for the research (and are likely to have governments cave in, after a bit of lubrication of the right people in the right places). I call them thieves. No other term will do.
That's a good question. Do any international slashdotters know of a local bank or government office that uses the local character set in their URL to be more familiar to their potential customers or users? My experience is limited in this respect, but I would think that it would be something highly desirable for such institutions.
Still, it might be nice to be able to work out a solution that doesn't involve punycode even before the top level domains' policies are sorted out. Once users get trained that legitimate addresses (be it banks or more trivial places) CAN look like gibberish, the temptation to click on links that don't necessarily look like anything also increases. It's a matter of conditionning. As more and more addresses show up like that, the tolerance for gibberish will only increase. And unfortunately, .com etc are the most common domain names.