I agree. That's why I ended up loving Gnome 3. I screamed and bitched as much as the next guy when it was introduced. But I decided to give it a trial time of 2 weeks befroe moving on. It turns out, productivity was significantly increased with the new workflow. It's hard to break old habits. But it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done once in a while. Unity is terrible, taking the worst aspects of GNOME 3 without its really revolutionary aspects. I love the dynamic allocation of desktops. I cannot go back to a desktop that doesn't have it anymore. Managine multiple tasks is much easier.
I do miss the custom shortcuts, but again, probably with the size of computer and available applications, the search instead of categorize approach might be faster. And it's still easy to add shortcuts to favourites. And the fact that you just move the mouse to the corner to get the menu makes it fast and easy to reach even on a desktop. No need to think hard. The reflex comes quickly. The main pet peeve Ihave left is "why do I need to press ALT to be able to poweroff". That does seem like a gratuitous limitation, and not intuitively figured out, and therefore it's bad. Everything else in the new layout is intuitive, once you accept that your old habits are useless.
While it was easier to customize everything before, there is blessedly little left to customize now. Anyways, I did find my productivity increasing pretty fast after the initial decline. Now I wouldn't go back to earlier types of desktops. They feel like more work to get most things done.
How can he practice law elsewhere? Law is not engineering. It is specific to each country. Some countries, others like france have a "civil code". Basically all that you've learned to practice in your country is meaningless to practice in another. While he might provide advice, I don't see how he could be a lawyer anywhere else but Spain. I haven't read TFA, so I'm not sure what he's going to actually do, but it cannot be actual representation in court.
Actually, pharmaceutical patents would do well to disappear. Promising drugs get ditched because they can't recoup the investment. All they produce are "treatments". There is no monetary interest in finding cures even if cures were possible through medication. A patient who never heals but can survive many long years is more profitable than one who cures. Governments would save money to finance research in those areas instead of financing the purchasing of patented drugs.
So I would think that the 5 year period would be justified on this basis only.
Actually, the original work seems to be stemming from what is now the Bundler project. A fork (so to speak) became phototourism and photosynth. But Slashdotters probably prefer Bundler
What's wrong with the name? Does it have some significance in the English language? (not a native speaker, so the only think that Gimp evokes for me is a graphics software)
Same thing here. I used to follow the Olympics minute by minute. But I didn't even bother watching a single minute of the last winter Olympics (being canadian and all). The magic is gone (it really hasn't helped that they started showing off the "professional" teams. You don't get the same involvement from those guys. It certainly doesn't feel like it's the most important competition to them, and just got me bored.
I wasn't planning to watch the Olympics anyways, but I'm certainly not moved to changed my mind by these rulings.
I think the problem with vaccination is its own success. Very few thought ill of vaccination when smallpox, polio, etc. were a very real possibility for most people. Here was something that could save you and your kids from those deadly swords of Damocles.
Now, though, those threats seem remote to most people. The devastation of so many infections diseases has been so successfully achieved through vaccination campaigns that lots of people have forgotten why they are necessary. People who are not vaccinated get away with it because most of the population is, and suddently they think it's nothing but a "government conspiracy" to get money into the pockets of pharmaceutical companies. Unfortunately, many of these people would only learn the error of their ways if enough people believe them for such deadly diseases to become common place again. I hope they don't get their way.
What's scary is people sharing chicken pox infected candy and cloth over mail with total strangers. Let's not trust "government" vaccination, let's just trust a total stranger to send me something "knowingly" infected with something. Nothing can go wrong with that scenario can it? Surely someone I don't know a thing about who is willing to send a disease to me via mail could never think of doing something bad could they?
The logic of people sometimes baffles me. It's like a portion of the population is addicted to being afraid. So if no imminent threat is detected, one must be manufactured.
I totally agree. It has been my own experience, that since people only publish successful experiments, all the what ifs that came before and failed never see the light of day, condemning innumerable researchers to repeat the same dead end experiments. In those failures might also be the seed of someone else's idea. I think there shoudl be a journal dedicated to these failures. "The journal of failed experiments" or something. It would be an awesome source of info. As long as the failures are well documented.
It's a global commodity. There is no way that domestic production can change the global price if global production is declining. Globalisation ensures that your suppliers can sell to the highest bidder, and as capitalists, they'd be crazy not to.
Second, it IS expensive to drill in deep water. Not only in immediate costs, but in potential costs of litigation. You have to prepare you nest egg with that in mind. BP certainly convinced everyone in the industry of that fact. You cannot calculate only the immediate profit, but must consider that in the long term the risk of an evironmental catastrophe will hit you, and you can't reduced your profit margin, even if you were so inclined.
The bottom line is, consumers have to get off the drug. The days of free fossil fuel are over anyways (whatever those idealistic economists who obviously still believe in the tooth fairy will tell you). Suck it up, plan in consequence. Give up the macmansion in the suburb and think of a more reasonable lifelstyle. Don't blame others for what YOU can change? Fuel is expensive? Don't buy it.
(I know, we are all affected by indirect cots of other products we can't do without, but we can certainly reduce that impact by changing our behaviour anyways).
Of course knowledge for knowledge sake is enough. Who knows when "useless" knowledge becomes useful. When computers first appeared lot of theory on discrete compuations and methods had been developped, decades, and in some cases centuries, before it became practical. This then was only "knowledge for knowledge's sake". Then the electronic computers made it so much more useful. But without that background work, it might not even have been practical to develop computers without anything to use them with. While it's good to look for practical applications for knowledge, the lack of immediate application does not render said knowledge irrelevant. One day it may turn out that that bacground info becomes the seed of something revolutionnary.
Because an economy is a lot like an ecosystem. You eliminate the regulators (like, say the predators), in an ecosystem and you get populations booms followed by population collapse when the resources are depleted. Sometimes to extinction. Regulation is good in that it prevents this boom and bust scenario. Guess what the economic system advocated by conventional economists looks like? Boom and bust the whole length. The periods of stability in between have usually come as governments start enforcing regulations after a pariticularly boom and bust event has left a good part of the population in hardship. Then over time people forget. Little by little regulations are dropped, and of course so arrives a period of apparent prosperity (the boom phase) during which we are lured into dropping more and more regulations because obviously regulations are hampering this prosperity. Of course, it can't last. Without the moderation provided by regulation we enter this boom phase, that once all the suckers at the bottom of this pyramidal scheme have contributed can only end in a bust. Then we start talking of regulation again (which is needed).
Until we get rid of the models that advocate the "deregulate" point of view, we have no chance of getting out of this history of boom and bust. Current economic models encourage waste (we've dilapidated in a couple of generations all the energy wealth stored up over millions of years). That's hardly "economic" if it's wasteful. Boom and bust cycles, and chronic waste are a sure proof that accepted economic models are broken.
I actually like Gnome 3 better than Gnome 2. I bitched about it at first. But it improved my productivity. Sometimes we only resist change because we are used to something. True, change for change's sake is not necessarily good. But sometimes you have to experiment with new things. Otherwise, you can't find a better way of doing what you always did before. The old way of doing things is often based on the limitations of the time. It's good that we keep distros and desktop environments that apply the old ways. But it doesn't mean that the new way may not be better.
And sometimes the new way is not all that new. It seems to me that the new heads up display is very much like what I usually do anyways... Alt-F2 and call my fav. command. That was true to call an application why can it not be true about a menu command? Sometimes the menu command is easy to figure out, but where it is being kept is hard. And lots of time is wasted in finding it.
It's actually an old interface if you think about it. The first version of AutoCAD I knew (for DOS) had this command line that you could use in conjunction with the mouse. It increased productivity back then enormously for not forcing you to constantly wave the mouse back and forth between the menu and where it needs to be. Once you memorize the commands it just works. And guess what? AutoCAD still has that function. Since the 1980s. It's probably what has kept it as the top CAD solution (at least in civil engineering it is) despite its price tag. The command line is awesome. Now, Ubuntu proposes in essence to carry on that power (no quite, I'm sure you can't just cut and paste a string of commands from the clipboard thus making a spreadsheet a preferred interface of mine to AutoCAD) to pretty much every application. I think it is awesome. I think it is not new, and about time that it was done. Watch out AutoDesk. AutoCAD may end up having some competition through no fault of their own (the competitors, I mean).
It has taken a long time coming. That autonomous region had their own distro (LinEx [http://www.linex.org/joomlaex/]) since 2002 (shut down december 29 2011... moved on to a national initiative, CENATIC [http://www.cenatic.es/]). Apparently they still had lots of computers to migrate.
I never get crashes with LibreOffice. Whenever I try Word on some documents (docx) I get a crash. I was completely unable to edit some documents in Word (sent to me by colleagues) until I opened them in LibreOffice, saved them in doc format, then reopened them in Word. It happens with distressing regularity. I find LibreOffice much more stable than Word personally. The worst part is when once I edited a doc in Word, saved it, and when later tried to open it again had a similar problem. I am not sure what document elements cause this but it's a sad state of affairs when LibreOffice is not only more stable (for me), but handles better MS own file format (even though there are still big deficiencies in the docx file handling in LibreOffice). So, stability issues? I guess it depends on your computer.
I see it as all good to sell the "hardware" which is costly to produce and requires a large infrastructure investment, and give away the software, which once development is done, is essentially free to reproduce (very low cost anyways). It is certainly a refreshing departure from Microsoft's traditional view that hardware should be free and software what people pay for... from a production point of view it is completely ridiculous. The ease of software reproduction makes it a concept difficult to enforce. It makes more sense to pay more for hardware, which anyways is expensive to produce so that "pirates" will not bother with the investment.
I think this is a good direction for Microsoft to take. I for one want to encourage it. I'd rather pay more for hardware, than pay for the software.
I actually like Gnome 3. I hated it at first, then I made myself use it for a while. I think my workflow is improved. It actually makes more sense than the legacy interfaces. Do I miss the add-ons and tweaks, yes. But with the scripting interface, I'm sure those are going to start coming by the shovel Bottom line, even without those, I still prefer Gnome 3 to the old interfaces. Unity, not so much. They kind of sat on the fence, trying one without leaving too much of the previous metaphor behind. It's not as useful. I love how the Gnome 3 interface makes is easier to use the multiple desktops. I love how you get new desktops on the fly.
The one think that is screwed up is not so much Gnome 3 but Nautilus specific. There is no option to associate an arbitrary application to a file type. There is also no way in nautilus to create a Launcher.desktop file as there used to be. Those two features are not optional and should have been a must have in the first release.
I also find that Chromium (don't know about Chrome) has more trouble with flash media than Firefox. In Chromium, some videos take forever to download, but if I try it in Firefox (8) it does so instantly and start playing right away. I've repeated the operation on those sites where I observed this and it was quite constant. I don't know why that should be. But it certainly doesn't incite me to switch over.
Which raises the issue of how unsafe were the hydrogen airships? This is an actual question. I have not researched the topic at all, but the only catastrophic fire that I know of is the Hindenburg disaster. It seems more like the wrong event at the wrong time (blooming airplane technology which provided faster craft, when energy efficiency wasn't a concern). The aircraft industry has survived many more catastrophic accidents. It seems that one was enough to sink the airships. In practice, how would the safety record of an airship built with modern design considerations aiming at lowering the risks of fire compare to the overall safety of the existing aircraft industry?
From reading the headline I was almost expecting a shield a la Star Trek. All we would have left would be to find a way to make the Alcubierre warp drive something more than a theoretical possibility and I'd be donning Vulcan ears. Oh, well, I guess the waiting is not almost over yet.
I don't think engineers "tend to believe Creationism". That statement gives the impression that most engineers believe in creationism, which certainly not true. What the Salem Hypothesis says, as I understand it, is that of those with formal training in scientific disciplines those who believe in creationism are more likely to have training in physical sciences or math (the foundations of most engineering disciplines) than those who have training in the life sciences. If 1% of engineers believe in creationism, and 0.001% (note, statistics out of thin air, made up on the spot, no relation to reality, don't quote me on those, they were only for illustration purposes) of biologists do, while that will show up a a greater number of creationists being engineers than biologists it certainly would not indicate that engineers "tend" to believe in creationism.
Slashdot Mirror
EEEPC reincarnation
I agree. That's why I ended up loving Gnome 3. I screamed and bitched as much as the next guy when it was introduced. But I decided to give it a trial time of 2 weeks befroe moving on. It turns out, productivity was significantly increased with the new workflow. It's hard to break old habits. But it doesn't mean it shouldn't be done once in a while. Unity is terrible, taking the worst aspects of GNOME 3 without its really revolutionary aspects. I love the dynamic allocation of desktops. I cannot go back to a desktop that doesn't have it anymore. Managine multiple tasks is much easier.
I do miss the custom shortcuts, but again, probably with the size of computer and available applications, the search instead of categorize approach might be faster. And it's still easy to add shortcuts to favourites. And the fact that you just move the mouse to the corner to get the menu makes it fast and easy to reach even on a desktop. No need to think hard. The reflex comes quickly. The main pet peeve Ihave left is "why do I need to press ALT to be able to poweroff". That does seem like a gratuitous limitation, and not intuitively figured out, and therefore it's bad. Everything else in the new layout is intuitive, once you accept that your old habits are useless.
While it was easier to customize everything before, there is blessedly little left to customize now. Anyways, I did find my productivity increasing pretty fast after the initial decline. Now I wouldn't go back to earlier types of desktops. They feel like more work to get most things done.
How can he practice law elsewhere? Law is not engineering. It is specific to each country. Some countries, others like france have a "civil code". Basically all that you've learned to practice in your country is meaningless to practice in another. While he might provide advice, I don't see how he could be a lawyer anywhere else but Spain. I haven't read TFA, so I'm not sure what he's going to actually do, but it cannot be actual representation in court.
actually 1 tonne = 1000 kg
1 ton = 2000 lb
Logos are not protected by copyright but trademarks, right? As long as you use it as a trademark, you can have a clain on it. Of course IANAL
Actually, pharmaceutical patents would do well to disappear. Promising drugs get ditched because they can't recoup the investment. All they produce are "treatments". There is no monetary interest in finding cures even if cures were possible through medication. A patient who never heals but can survive many long years is more profitable than one who cures. Governments would save money to finance research in those areas instead of financing the purchasing of patented drugs.
So I would think that the 5 year period would be justified on this basis only.
Actually, the original work seems to be stemming from what is now the Bundler project. A fork (so to speak) became phototourism and photosynth. But Slashdotters probably prefer Bundler
http://phototour.cs.washington.edu/bundler/
What's wrong with the name? Does it have some significance in the English language? (not a native speaker, so the only think that Gimp evokes for me is a graphics software)
Same thing here. I used to follow the Olympics minute by minute. But I didn't even bother watching a single minute of the last winter Olympics (being canadian and all). The magic is gone (it really hasn't helped that they started showing off the "professional" teams. You don't get the same involvement from those guys. It certainly doesn't feel like it's the most important competition to them, and just got me bored.
I wasn't planning to watch the Olympics anyways, but I'm certainly not moved to changed my mind by these rulings.
I think the problem with vaccination is its own success. Very few thought ill of vaccination when smallpox, polio, etc. were a very real possibility for most people. Here was something that could save you and your kids from those deadly swords of Damocles.
Now, though, those threats seem remote to most people. The devastation of so many infections diseases has been so successfully achieved through vaccination campaigns that lots of people have forgotten why they are necessary. People who are not vaccinated get away with it because most of the population is, and suddently they think it's nothing but a "government conspiracy" to get money into the pockets of pharmaceutical companies. Unfortunately, many of these people would only learn the error of their ways if enough people believe them for such deadly diseases to become common place again. I hope they don't get their way.
What's scary is people sharing chicken pox infected candy and cloth over mail with total strangers. Let's not trust "government" vaccination, let's just trust a total stranger to send me something "knowingly" infected with something. Nothing can go wrong with that scenario can it? Surely someone I don't know a thing about who is willing to send a disease to me via mail could never think of doing something bad could they?
The logic of people sometimes baffles me. It's like a portion of the population is addicted to being afraid. So if no imminent threat is detected, one must be manufactured.
I totally agree. It has been my own experience, that since people only publish successful experiments, all the what ifs that came before and failed never see the light of day, condemning innumerable researchers to repeat the same dead end experiments. In those failures might also be the seed of someone else's idea. I think there shoudl be a journal dedicated to these failures. "The journal of failed experiments" or something. It would be an awesome source of info. As long as the failures are well documented.
It's a global commodity. There is no way that domestic production can change the global price if global production is declining. Globalisation ensures that your suppliers can sell to the highest bidder, and as capitalists, they'd be crazy not to.
Second, it IS expensive to drill in deep water. Not only in immediate costs, but in potential costs of litigation. You have to prepare you nest egg with that in mind. BP certainly convinced everyone in the industry of that fact. You cannot calculate only the immediate profit, but must consider that in the long term the risk of an evironmental catastrophe will hit you, and you can't reduced your profit margin, even if you were so inclined.
The bottom line is, consumers have to get off the drug. The days of free fossil fuel are over anyways (whatever those idealistic economists who obviously still believe in the tooth fairy will tell you). Suck it up, plan in consequence. Give up the macmansion in the suburb and think of a more reasonable lifelstyle. Don't blame others for what YOU can change? Fuel is expensive? Don't buy it.
(I know, we are all affected by indirect cots of other products we can't do without, but we can certainly reduce that impact by changing our behaviour anyways).
Of course knowledge for knowledge sake is enough. Who knows when "useless" knowledge becomes useful. When computers first appeared lot of theory on discrete compuations and methods had been developped, decades, and in some cases centuries, before it became practical. This then was only "knowledge for knowledge's sake". Then the electronic computers made it so much more useful. But without that background work, it might not even have been practical to develop computers without anything to use them with. While it's good to look for practical applications for knowledge, the lack of immediate application does not render said knowledge irrelevant. One day it may turn out that that bacground info becomes the seed of something revolutionnary.
Because an economy is a lot like an ecosystem. You eliminate the regulators (like, say the predators), in an ecosystem and you get populations booms followed by population collapse when the resources are depleted. Sometimes to extinction. Regulation is good in that it prevents this boom and bust scenario. Guess what the economic system advocated by conventional economists looks like? Boom and bust the whole length. The periods of stability in between have usually come as governments start enforcing regulations after a pariticularly boom and bust event has left a good part of the population in hardship. Then over time people forget. Little by little regulations are dropped, and of course so arrives a period of apparent prosperity (the boom phase) during which we are lured into dropping more and more regulations because obviously regulations are hampering this prosperity. Of course, it can't last. Without the moderation provided by regulation we enter this boom phase, that once all the suckers at the bottom of this pyramidal scheme have contributed can only end in a bust. Then we start talking of regulation again (which is needed).
Until we get rid of the models that advocate the "deregulate" point of view, we have no chance of getting out of this history of boom and bust. Current economic models encourage waste (we've dilapidated in a couple of generations all the energy wealth stored up over millions of years). That's hardly "economic" if it's wasteful. Boom and bust cycles, and chronic waste are a sure proof that accepted economic models are broken.
I actually like Gnome 3 better than Gnome 2. I bitched about it at first. But it improved my productivity. Sometimes we only resist change because we are used to something. True, change for change's sake is not necessarily good. But sometimes you have to experiment with new things. Otherwise, you can't find a better way of doing what you always did before. The old way of doing things is often based on the limitations of the time. It's good that we keep distros and desktop environments that apply the old ways. But it doesn't mean that the new way may not be better.
And sometimes the new way is not all that new. It seems to me that the new heads up display is very much like what I usually do anyways... Alt-F2 and call my fav. command. That was true to call an application why can it not be true about a menu command? Sometimes the menu command is easy to figure out, but where it is being kept is hard. And lots of time is wasted in finding it.
It's actually an old interface if you think about it. The first version of AutoCAD I knew (for DOS) had this command line that you could use in conjunction with the mouse. It increased productivity back then enormously for not forcing you to constantly wave the mouse back and forth between the menu and where it needs to be. Once you memorize the commands it just works. And guess what? AutoCAD still has that function. Since the 1980s. It's probably what has kept it as the top CAD solution (at least in civil engineering it is) despite its price tag. The command line is awesome. Now, Ubuntu proposes in essence to carry on that power (no quite, I'm sure you can't just cut and paste a string of commands from the clipboard thus making a spreadsheet a preferred interface of mine to AutoCAD) to pretty much every application. I think it is awesome. I think it is not new, and about time that it was done. Watch out AutoDesk. AutoCAD may end up having some competition through no fault of their own (the competitors, I mean).
It has taken a long time coming. That autonomous region had their own distro (LinEx [http://www.linex.org/joomlaex/]) since 2002 (shut down december 29 2011... moved on to a national initiative, CENATIC [http://www.cenatic.es/]). Apparently they still had lots of computers to migrate.
I never get crashes with LibreOffice. Whenever I try Word on some documents (docx) I get a crash. I was completely unable to edit some documents in Word (sent to me by colleagues) until I opened them in LibreOffice, saved them in doc format, then reopened them in Word. It happens with distressing regularity. I find LibreOffice much more stable than Word personally. The worst part is when once I edited a doc in Word, saved it, and when later tried to open it again had a similar problem. I am not sure what document elements cause this but it's a sad state of affairs when LibreOffice is not only more stable (for me), but handles better MS own file format (even though there are still big deficiencies in the docx file handling in LibreOffice). So, stability issues? I guess it depends on your computer.
I see it as all good to sell the "hardware" which is costly to produce and requires a large infrastructure investment, and give away the software, which once development is done, is essentially free to reproduce (very low cost anyways). It is certainly a refreshing departure from Microsoft's traditional view that hardware should be free and software what people pay for... from a production point of view it is completely ridiculous. The ease of software reproduction makes it a concept difficult to enforce. It makes more sense to pay more for hardware, which anyways is expensive to produce so that "pirates" will not bother with the investment.
I think this is a good direction for Microsoft to take. I for one want to encourage it. I'd rather pay more for hardware, than pay for the software.
I actually like Gnome 3. I hated it at first, then I made myself use it for a while. I think my workflow is improved. It actually makes more sense than the legacy interfaces. Do I miss the add-ons and tweaks, yes. But with the scripting interface, I'm sure those are going to start coming by the shovel Bottom line, even without those, I still prefer Gnome 3 to the old interfaces. Unity, not so much. They kind of sat on the fence, trying one without leaving too much of the previous metaphor behind. It's not as useful. I love how the Gnome 3 interface makes is easier to use the multiple desktops. I love how you get new desktops on the fly.
The one think that is screwed up is not so much Gnome 3 but Nautilus specific. There is no option to associate an arbitrary application to a file type. There is also no way in nautilus to create a Launcher .desktop file as there used to be. Those two features are not optional and should have been a must have in the first release.
I also find that Chromium (don't know about Chrome) has more trouble with flash media than Firefox. In Chromium, some videos take forever to download, but if I try it in Firefox (8) it does so instantly and start playing right away. I've repeated the operation on those sites where I observed this and it was quite constant. I don't know why that should be. But it certainly doesn't incite me to switch over.
Which raises the issue of how unsafe were the hydrogen airships? This is an actual question. I have not researched the topic at all, but the only catastrophic fire that I know of is the Hindenburg disaster. It seems more like the wrong event at the wrong time (blooming airplane technology which provided faster craft, when energy efficiency wasn't a concern). The aircraft industry has survived many more catastrophic accidents. It seems that one was enough to sink the airships. In practice, how would the safety record of an airship built with modern design considerations aiming at lowering the risks of fire compare to the overall safety of the existing aircraft industry?
From reading the headline I was almost expecting a shield a la Star Trek. All we would have left would be to find a way to make the Alcubierre warp drive something more than a theoretical possibility and I'd be donning Vulcan ears. Oh, well, I guess the waiting is not almost over yet.
Why is this on Slashdot? So people can complain of course.
They should use Esperanto as the middle language. Since it is a synthetic language there should be less cases of ambiguities.
I don't think engineers "tend to believe Creationism". That statement gives the impression that most engineers believe in creationism, which certainly not true. What the Salem Hypothesis says, as I understand it, is that of those with formal training in scientific disciplines those who believe in creationism are more likely to have training in physical sciences or math (the foundations of most engineering disciplines) than those who have training in the life sciences. If 1% of engineers believe in creationism, and 0.001% (note, statistics out of thin air, made up on the spot, no relation to reality, don't quote me on those, they were only for illustration purposes) of biologists do, while that will show up a a greater number of creationists being engineers than biologists it certainly would not indicate that engineers "tend" to believe in creationism.