One reason that I have stopped contributing to its growth, is that I don't know anyone who is not running Firefox anymore (except my supervisor and the lab tech who are running NetScape... never converted to IE, they sure as hell are not going to convert for me... plus it still is in the family). I wish I had more friends, or that they were more into getting their own friends converted.
At least if I could get a girlfriend it might get me a new pool of people to tap into. Now that seems to be a good motivator to try to get one. It might just give me that edge that I was always lacking and that girls probably noticed.
There is no mention either of the "multiple desktops". I don't know who invented them, I only know that Windows does not have them. And it's such a wonderful concept. I tend to keep two file manager windows always open in one of them, and switch to that desktop to do all my dragging and dropping thingies. I'm sure other people find it useful when heavily multitasing, and it should have deserved mention.
Why all this concern with "survival of the race"? You have to face the inevitable fact that all things come to an end, even entire species, even if they are dispersed across the galaxy. We will invariably go extinct sooner or later, one way or another.
True, but it is also our "duty" as living beings to delay the inevitable as much as possible. That is what life is all about, and why reproduction came to be in the first place. If we are to extend your logic to its natural conclusion: all humans must die. We all do whatever we do. What then is the point in eating healthy, or even more so in having hospitals or anykind of healthcare? Isn't spending all that money on healtcare a waste of money given that it only serves in delaying the inevitable? Imagine how much governments would save each year if people could just accept that simple fact. No need for medical insurance or anything.
Seems a bit weird to look at the top 25 developpers. It's normal that the ones who have more time to contribute to FOSS projects would be those who are paid to do it. The hobbyists, have a full time job to attend to. Sure, if you limit yourself to a few of the biggest projects, with the widest deployment, you are going to find a lot of "professional contributers" (by professional contributer I mean people whose job is to contribute, I don't mean to say that the others are novices to the field).
But if you look at the thousands upon thousands of projects out there, It is unlikely that most the project maintainers are hired to do so, and much less the hordes of part-time contributers. It's a narrow-scope myth buster.
I finally got around to RTFA, it seems clear that it is plastic bending.
The ductile, or bendable, concrete is made mainly of the same ingredients in regular concrete minus the coarse aggregate, Li said. It looks exactly like regular concrete, but under excessive strain, the ECC concrete gives because the specially coated network of fibers veining the cement is allowed to slide within the cement, thus avoiding the inflexibility that causes brittleness and breakage, Li said.
The term ductility refers to plastic deformations. It is a slow, gradual form of failure in opposition to brittle failure.
What I meant to say was that cracking of the surface would be less of a concern than with asphalt, only if the material was MORE FLEXIBLE than asphalt. You are correct in stating that it is very unlikely that concrete would be more flexible than asphalt though.
That being said, as your asphalt ages, it does lose flexibility, and becomes rather brittle. Some of the volatile hydrocarbons that contributed to its flexibility are long gone. However it is still remains more flexible than any concrete I've seen indeed.
But usually, the advantage of concrete surfaces over asphalt, is its reistance to wear and tear. You need to have frequent joints to avoid cracking due both to settlement of the soil and heat expansion cycles in any concrete surface because it is stiff.
Therefore the flexibility of this concrete, may not be so much of an advantage for road construction. It is certainly interesting in construction, though, where ductility of members is important to give timely warnings of imminent failures.
A brittle beam would only let you know it was failing as it fell on top of your head with the floors above it with it. Hardly useful for evacuation purposes. It is generally preferred in those cases to have a more ductile structural member, even if weaker (in which case you have to increase the number of members or their cross-sectional area).
As for permeability, the surfacing material is the least permeable part of any road, because you want to avoid water migrating through it to the underlying layers. You also give it a slope so you can get rid of the water which will slide nicely on top of it.
As a rule the bottom part is very coarse and easy to drain. You don't want water to pond in your earth structures, and water moves downward because of gravity (there is also some upward migration in fine grained soils which is why you can have ice lensing right below the pavement, and why on many roads heavy traffic is forbidden during spring thaw). Like in a bathtub, you drain at the bottom, so there is where you put your coarsest material. Your topmost material is your umbrella, and is the leat permeable of all.
I would assume that once you've passed the strain at which the unreinforced concrete reaches tensile capacity, you are stuck with plastic behaviour unless the fibres are very very strong and very very elastic thus providing not only reinforcement, but also prestressing of the concrete. Usually, tensile reinforcement is there to increase the stress at which that strain will be reached, and when it has been matched, it allows for a graceful failure, giving people more time to evacuate (a beam that starts sagging is a sure giveaway of problems:) ). Perceptible bending of concrete is likely to be plastic.
Actually, the main reason for roads cracking is the deformation of the underlying soil. As soil settles unevently, lots of stresses are induced in the surface material. The more brittle the material, the more likely it is that there will be cracks forming. The greater the difference of stiffness between the surfacing material and the underlying soil and the greater the stress concentrations on the stiff material.
Once a tiny crack is there, water fills is, and during freezing conditions, expands it, then , more water is able to fill the hole and the cycle continues. The question is, is this flexible concrete MORE flexible than asphalt? Because even asphalt is suceptible to this, although at a much lesser degree. And yes, if a crack did form in the first place, water will be able to expand it as it adds stress to an initial stress that was already able to cause the crack.
It might just mean they want to beat Microsoft to the (stated) threat of integrating MSN search into Word and other MSOffice applications.
If they make an extension that allows search from OpenOffice documents, something customizable with a default on Google of course (like in Firefox), then it got there first. It's also the kind of thing that might help spread OpenOffice.
It would have to be more than the Firefox Mycroft search bar. It should make life easier when writing a document, and when you need some supporting information... it should be able to use context etc.
There are many other features that I can't think about, but that I'm sure they might be considering (google maps with satellite view, was one of those things I hadden't really gotten to think about, but somehow I was subconsciously waiting for, at least that's how it felt when they produced it).
Just to clarify for those who haven't read the uplift universe, here is a quote taken from a chapter (avaiable at http://www.davidbrin.com/sundiversample2.html) of Sundiver, the first book written in that universe.
"... They went to great efforts to convince the populace," Jeremey said in a low rumbling voice, "that the laws would cut down on crime. And they did have that effect. Individuals with radio transmitters in their rumps often think twice about causing trouble to their neighbors.
"Then, as now, the Citizens loved the Probation Laws. They had no trouble forgetting the fact that they cut through every traditional Constitutional guarantee of due process. Most of them lived in countries that had never had such niceties anyway.
This starts to sound like the probies in the Uplift universe from David Brin. I hope we get to start uplifting the chimps and dolphins soon. I wonder what the Tymbrimi will look like.
The plant did not change itself to become immune to the effects of round-up. The strong plants survived and the week plants died.
Isn't that the basis of Darwinian evolution? At any one time there is a number of mutations that exist in different individuals of a species. Some of those mutations may provide advantages (or disadvantages) under given conditions. Under given conditions, a small percentage of the population having a specific mutation now become better suited to survive, and their proportion increases since they are better adapted at surviving those new conditions. Mutations occur ALL THE TIME.
Darwinian Evolution does not cause changes in the individuals or species. Evolution weeds out the specimens that don't have the proper set of mutations for a given set of condition. Only with time and a cumulation of mutations throughout the generations do species differenciate.
That sample is probably not representative of the Christians in the world. 100% of the Christrians that **I** know take the text of the Bible as an allegory (For the record most of the people I know are Christians.). That being said, my sample is no more representative of ALL the Christians than yours.
It's pretty fair to say, however, that outside of the U.S. you will have a very hard time finding a Christian who takes the Bible literally, or a clergy that pushes that notion.
Exactly. By the way, most religions (Christian and none Christian alike) do seem to accept evolution. A number of Christian denominatios take the text of the Genesis as an allegory that should not be taken literally. They usually recognise that biblical texts must be interpreted.
For a more detailed description of the official position of different religions on the topic of Evolution, I recommend reading the following page:
http://academic.regis.edu/mghedott/evolut.htm
Interesting. It's always rendered correctly on different computers at home rendering linux. Of course, at home I'm on dialup, maybe the time to load the HTML has something to do with it. I'm just wildly speculating here. The only thing I can think of. In any event, if it's fixed, it's fixed.
that Guy Steele has no beard. According to a previous article (can't seem to be able to find it) on Slashdot, this means that this programming language will never become mainstream. When will new language designers realize that they need a beard to break through?
Exactly. Actually, capitalism, tends to be self-destructive unless the masses remain aware of their freedom. The premise of capitalism is that there is choice, and that the preferred product or service gets ahead of the competion. The problem is that however ideal this seems, in the real world, when a preferred product or service becomes substantially more prevalent, then the economics of monopolies prevail. Unless you have builtin methods to break those before they form, or the people is sufficiently aware that they will strive to favour choice over the "cool" product or service, then we get more and more into a feudal economy. The big guy has the tools to prevent future competition, either through contractual agreements (who would want to be left aside by the big player?) or by buying out governmental legislation. Capitalism must be protected to survive. The forces of the market alone are not enough since they are more of a positive feedback system, rather than a negative feedback which is required for a homeostatic system.
This is where the importance of FOSS come to light. Licenses, such as the GPL enforce a kind of negative feedback, a homeostatic control, which gives the consumer the tools to change providers when the original supplier feels that he "owns", his clients because of the lack of competition. Because the source is still out there, it is always possible to break such a lock-in. Those lock-ins are most anti-capitalistic.
When the client satisfaction is no longer necessary; when you impose the rule on your client, because you can and he has no other choice; when the client is no longer "right", then you cannot claim that you live in a capitalistic system. It has become a feudal system, where an elite makes the rules, and the masses suck it up.
I disagree. When enough people decide not to care about it, you quickly find out that the restrictive policies are the only ones applied. You have lost your own freedom of choice because people at large did not care. I may decide not to shop at Wallmart because I have an issue with their ethics, and maybe I prefer my local store. However, when enough people have decided that they didn't care, then I also lose the option of choosing. I can't sustain the local store all by myself, so it goes under taking my choice with it. Only by mobilizing the collectivity can we protect our freedom. If enough people don't care, we ALL lose.
I'm sure that before the establishment of Hitler, and Stalin, a number of people in Germany and Russia could see where they were going. But on their own, without the collective support, the most they could achieve is a place in the goulag.
Exactly. There is no violation of "social contract" The ads are displayed, for those who will respond to them, with the knowledge that not everyone will respond to them. As such, Adblock ads value to the ads, because those who see them, while using firefox, are the people more likely to respond to advertisement.
I know people who use Adblock very sparingly because they are actually interted in advertisment offers, and only block the most annoying ads. I on the other hand, subconsciously block all ads (with or without Adblock). I am not the target of those ads, because I NEVER respond to advertising at any level. There is therefore no violation of social contract.
Hopefully, the advertisers will start realising this. Views of ads with browsers that allow the blocking of such should eventually become more valuable (and be worth more money per view) than those from "blanket advertisement", for the simple reason that the audience is more likely to be influenced by them. My browser loading an ad does nothing for the guy trying to sell his product, and Adblock is a perfect way to communicate this reality.
You may be using Adblock. Once you've adblocked a URL with a wildcard (example http://ads.doubleclick.com/* ) then they can have all the popups in the world in all kinds of ad-in formats you're not likely to be loading them.
Most people don't know that they have the "path" tool for this kind of thing. I have to admit that it is not obvious, but once you know it, you do have a line, poliline etc. tool. If you get trained on something else, it's trouble, but if you get trained on it, it's the other way around. I personally like the fact that the menus detach (I know that this is a GNOME feature, shared by KDE incidentally, but they have kept it in even the Windows port). It puts the common commands at the tip of the finger even when you don't want to bother learning the shortcut (you may need it frequently for this particular job, but usually not).
Slashdot Mirror
Geeks have only so many friends.
One reason that I have stopped contributing to its growth, is that I don't know anyone who is not running Firefox anymore (except my supervisor and the lab tech who are running NetScape... never converted to IE, they sure as hell are not going to convert for me... plus it still is in the family). I wish I had more friends, or that they were more into getting their own friends converted.
At least if I could get a girlfriend it might get me a new pool of people to tap into. Now that seems to be a good motivator to try to get one. It might just give me that edge that I was always lacking and that girls probably noticed.
There is no mention either of the "multiple desktops". I don't know who invented them, I only know that Windows does not have them. And it's such a wonderful concept. I tend to keep two file manager windows always open in one of them, and switch to that desktop to do all my dragging and dropping thingies. I'm sure other people find it useful when heavily multitasing, and it should have deserved mention.
True, but it is also our "duty" as living beings to delay the inevitable as much as possible. That is what life is all about, and why reproduction came to be in the first place. If we are to extend your logic to its natural conclusion: all humans must die. We all do whatever we do. What then is the point in eating healthy, or even more so in having hospitals or anykind of healthcare? Isn't spending all that money on healtcare a waste of money given that it only serves in delaying the inevitable? Imagine how much governments would save each year if people could just accept that simple fact. No need for medical insurance or anything.
Seems a bit weird to look at the top 25 developpers. It's normal that the ones who have more time to contribute to FOSS projects would be those who are paid to do it. The hobbyists, have a full time job to attend to. Sure, if you limit yourself to a few of the biggest projects, with the widest deployment, you are going to find a lot of "professional contributers" (by professional contributer I mean people whose job is to contribute, I don't mean to say that the others are novices to the field).
But if you look at the thousands upon thousands of projects out there, It is unlikely that most the project maintainers are hired to do so, and much less the hordes of part-time contributers. It's a narrow-scope myth buster.
What I meant to say was that cracking of the surface would be less of a concern than with asphalt, only if the material was MORE FLEXIBLE than asphalt. You are correct in stating that it is very unlikely that concrete would be more flexible than asphalt though.
That being said, as your asphalt ages, it does lose flexibility, and becomes rather brittle. Some of the volatile hydrocarbons that contributed to its flexibility are long gone. However it is still remains more flexible than any concrete I've seen indeed.
But usually, the advantage of concrete surfaces over asphalt, is its reistance to wear and tear. You need to have frequent joints to avoid cracking due both to settlement of the soil and heat expansion cycles in any concrete surface because it is stiff.
Therefore the flexibility of this concrete, may not be so much of an advantage for road construction. It is certainly interesting in construction, though, where ductility of members is important to give timely warnings of imminent failures.
A brittle beam would only let you know it was failing as it fell on top of your head with the floors above it with it. Hardly useful for evacuation purposes. It is generally preferred in those cases to have a more ductile structural member, even if weaker (in which case you have to increase the number of members or their cross-sectional area).
As for permeability, the surfacing material is the least permeable part of any road, because you want to avoid water migrating through it to the underlying layers. You also give it a slope so you can get rid of the water which will slide nicely on top of it.
As a rule the bottom part is very coarse and easy to drain. You don't want water to pond in your earth structures, and water moves downward because of gravity (there is also some upward migration in fine grained soils which is why you can have ice lensing right below the pavement, and why on many roads heavy traffic is forbidden during spring thaw). Like in a bathtub, you drain at the bottom, so there is where you put your coarsest material. Your topmost material is your umbrella, and is the leat permeable of all.
I would assume that once you've passed the strain at which the unreinforced concrete reaches tensile capacity, you are stuck with plastic behaviour unless the fibres are very very strong and very very elastic thus providing not only reinforcement, but also prestressing of the concrete. Usually, tensile reinforcement is there to increase the stress at which that strain will be reached, and when it has been matched, it allows for a graceful failure, giving people more time to evacuate (a beam that starts sagging is a sure giveaway of problems :) ). Perceptible bending of concrete is likely to be plastic.
Actually, the main reason for roads cracking is the deformation of the underlying soil. As soil settles unevently, lots of stresses are induced in the surface material. The more brittle the material, the more likely it is that there will be cracks forming. The greater the difference of stiffness between the surfacing material and the underlying soil and the greater the stress concentrations on the stiff material.
Once a tiny crack is there, water fills is, and during freezing conditions, expands it, then , more water is able to fill the hole and the cycle continues. The question is, is this flexible concrete MORE flexible than asphalt? Because even asphalt is suceptible to this, although at a much lesser degree. And yes, if a crack did form in the first place, water will be able to expand it as it adds stress to an initial stress that was already able to cause the crack.
It might just mean they want to beat Microsoft to the (stated) threat of integrating MSN search into Word and other MSOffice applications.
If they make an extension that allows search from OpenOffice documents, something customizable with a default on Google of course (like in Firefox), then it got there first. It's also the kind of thing that might help spread OpenOffice.
It would have to be more than the Firefox Mycroft search bar. It should make life easier when writing a document, and when you need some supporting information... it should be able to use context etc.
There are many other features that I can't think about, but that I'm sure they might be considering (google maps with satellite view, was one of those things I hadden't really gotten to think about, but somehow I was subconsciously waiting for, at least that's how it felt when they produced it).
If you are only interested in searching for images on your own computer, have a look at imgSeek. http://imgseek.python-hosting.com/
It's been around for some time now. You can not only use an existing image to search, but also do a rough sketch. Check the screenshots:
Nice complement to what has been presented in this article.
Let's get this feature into Google Maps
And for another 10 000$ per month the girls also have good "other body parts" on top of the hair. (well not on top, but in addition)
Just to clarify for those who haven't read the uplift universe, here is a quote taken from a chapter (avaiable at http://www.davidbrin.com/sundiversample2.html) of Sundiver, the first book written in that universe.
This starts to sound like the probies in the Uplift universe from David Brin. I hope we get to start uplifting the chimps and dolphins soon. I wonder what the Tymbrimi will look like.
Isn't that the basis of Darwinian evolution? At any one time there is a number of mutations that exist in different individuals of a species. Some of those mutations may provide advantages (or disadvantages) under given conditions. Under given conditions, a small percentage of the population having a specific mutation now become better suited to survive, and their proportion increases since they are better adapted at surviving those new conditions. Mutations occur ALL THE TIME.
Darwinian Evolution does not cause changes in the individuals or species. Evolution weeds out the specimens that don't have the proper set of mutations for a given set of condition. Only with time and a cumulation of mutations throughout the generations do species differenciate.
That sample is probably not representative of the Christians in the world. 100% of the Christrians that **I** know take the text of the Bible as an allegory (For the record most of the people I know are Christians.). That being said, my sample is no more representative of ALL the Christians than yours.
It's pretty fair to say, however, that outside of the U.S. you will have a very hard time finding a Christian who takes the Bible literally, or a clergy that pushes that notion.
Exactly. By the way, most religions (Christian and none Christian alike) do seem to accept evolution. A number of Christian denominatios take the text of the Genesis as an allegory that should not be taken literally. They usually recognise that biblical texts must be interpreted.
For a more detailed description of the official position of different religions on the topic of Evolution, I recommend reading the following page: http://academic.regis.edu/mghedott/evolut.htm
Interesting. It's always rendered correctly on different computers at home rendering linux. Of course, at home I'm on dialup, maybe the time to load the HTML has something to do with it. I'm just wildly speculating here. The only thing I can think of. In any event, if it's fixed, it's fixed.
Only in Windows. In Linux, that never happened. Weird as it's supposed to have the same code base.
that Guy Steele has no beard. According to a previous article (can't seem to be able to find it) on Slashdot, this means that this programming language will never become mainstream. When will new language designers realize that they need a beard to break through?
Exactly. Actually, capitalism, tends to be self-destructive unless the masses remain aware of their freedom. The premise of capitalism is that there is choice, and that the preferred product or service gets ahead of the competion. The problem is that however ideal this seems, in the real world, when a preferred product or service becomes substantially more prevalent, then the economics of monopolies prevail. Unless you have builtin methods to break those before they form, or the people is sufficiently aware that they will strive to favour choice over the "cool" product or service, then we get more and more into a feudal economy. The big guy has the tools to prevent future competition, either through contractual agreements (who would want to be left aside by the big player?) or by buying out governmental legislation. Capitalism must be protected to survive. The forces of the market alone are not enough since they are more of a positive feedback system, rather than a negative feedback which is required for a homeostatic system.
This is where the importance of FOSS come to light. Licenses, such as the GPL enforce a kind of negative feedback, a homeostatic control, which gives the consumer the tools to change providers when the original supplier feels that he "owns", his clients because of the lack of competition. Because the source is still out there, it is always possible to break such a lock-in. Those lock-ins are most anti-capitalistic.
When the client satisfaction is no longer necessary; when you impose the rule on your client, because you can and he has no other choice; when the client is no longer "right", then you cannot claim that you live in a capitalistic system. It has become a feudal system, where an elite makes the rules, and the masses suck it up.
I disagree. When enough people decide not to care about it, you quickly find out that the restrictive policies are the only ones applied. You have lost your own freedom of choice because people at large did not care. I may decide not to shop at Wallmart because I have an issue with their ethics, and maybe I prefer my local store. However, when enough people have decided that they didn't care, then I also lose the option of choosing. I can't sustain the local store all by myself, so it goes under taking my choice with it. Only by mobilizing the collectivity can we protect our freedom. If enough people don't care, we ALL lose.
I'm sure that before the establishment of Hitler, and Stalin, a number of people in Germany and Russia could see where they were going. But on their own, without the collective support, the most they could achieve is a place in the goulag.
Exactly. There is no violation of "social contract" The ads are displayed, for those who will respond to them, with the knowledge that not everyone will respond to them. As such, Adblock ads value to the ads, because those who see them, while using firefox, are the people more likely to respond to advertisement. I know people who use Adblock very sparingly because they are actually interted in advertisment offers, and only block the most annoying ads. I on the other hand, subconsciously block all ads (with or without Adblock). I am not the target of those ads, because I NEVER respond to advertising at any level. There is therefore no violation of social contract. Hopefully, the advertisers will start realising this. Views of ads with browsers that allow the blocking of such should eventually become more valuable (and be worth more money per view) than those from "blanket advertisement", for the simple reason that the audience is more likely to be influenced by them. My browser loading an ad does nothing for the guy trying to sell his product, and Adblock is a perfect way to communicate this reality.
You may be using Adblock. Once you've adblocked a URL with a wildcard (example http://ads.doubleclick.com/* ) then they can have all the popups in the world in all kinds of ad-in formats you're not likely to be loading them.
Most people don't know that they have the "path" tool for this kind of thing. I have to admit that it is not obvious, but once you know it, you do have a line, poliline etc. tool. If you get trained on something else, it's trouble, but if you get trained on it, it's the other way around. I personally like the fact that the menus detach (I know that this is a GNOME feature, shared by KDE incidentally, but they have kept it in even the Windows port). It puts the common commands at the tip of the finger even when you don't want to bother learning the shortcut (you may need it frequently for this particular job, but usually not).