The other reason (flames coming) is christianity. Christianty's worldview is one of a flat earth, where Man was created separate from all other creatures. Evolution, heliocentrism, science in general is eschewed by the Western Church with such a passion it's amazing.
When a British school casually mentioned that its science curriculum included Creationism, there was a huge furor. When it died down, Richard Dawkins commented that the clerics were doing a better job of promoting evolution and destroying creation than the Atheists were, and that they (the Atheists) were better off standing back and watching the masters at work.
Christian belief has never held that the Earth is flat. Neither has the Medievel Church, AKA Roman Catholicism, counted that assertion among the very many things that they got wrong over the years. IRL, the furor was over whether the Earth was the center of the universe or not. The RCC said yes, science said no.
Depending on your perspective, they were both right. Earth seems to be within 100 million lightyears of the centre of the universe, a cosmic stone's throw, whereas the science (IRL, the religion of Naturalism) which espouses a Big Bang doesn't admit to a universe with a centre (or edges) at all.
Science as we know it doesn't propose helicentrism. The situation described in the previous paragraph is galactocentrism, and science doesn't like that too much either.
Science in general, at least science as we know it, was started by Christians. The founder of Scientific American, for example, was a Christian and a Creationist. Pasteur, Paley, Newton were all Christian Creationists, along with many, many others. The idea of classifying animals doesn't make much sense from an Orthdox Darwinistic point of view, because you'd be expecting great randomness (many intermediates), little systematism; and a pagan point of view, all warring gods or mischevious spirits, wouldn't be oriented toward constancy or systematism either.
Christians, including Creationists, are still very strong in science despite centuries of propaganda war against the idea and the extreme difficulty of gaining or holding tenure while admitting Creationist ideals. For an example of such a scientist, the author of the world's most effective geodynamics modelling program, Terra, is a Creationist; another Creationist accurately predicted, from Creationist principles, what the magnetic fields of Neptune and Uranus would be like (quite different to everyone else's ideas) long before we put a suitably equipped probe past them to do measurements.
If you can be bothered looking, you will discover that many ancient civilisations weren't as primitive as they seemed. But because it speaks against orthodox Naturalistic science, the evidence which clearly shows this is treated as Winston Churchill describes: `Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.'
Do be sure that you have some idea of what you're on about next time. (-:
The Catholic Church knew the earth was round. (Read Dante's "Divine Comedy" if you don't believe me). Their mistake was to insist that the earth be considered the center of the universe.
They're really good at getting important things wrong, but this time - at least in general - they may turn out to have been right, or at least righter than their opponents.
most probably spend some of it to go into space or to the Moon
You'd almost certainly have to form a consortium to get that far up. In which case funding this is probably a better idea.
After the philanthropy had worn down, I myself would tile a wall with these these and hook them to a few of these. And I would go absolutely nuts with other technotoys.
possibly help engineer some sort of food/weed that will grown nearly anywhere
How do I say this?
Cane toads, foxes, rabbits, dieback, doublegees and other species introduced and/or spread by human activity are destroying the Australian Outback and in some cases farms. Gengineered crops are destroying the livelihood of farmers even in the `good ole' USA. ENOUGH WITH THE BIO-ENGINEERING ALREADY! It's not a silver bullet, it's a lead balloon!
What would be truly useful is to provide these people with a system of morality that gave them a future, a reason for doing anything, the guts and insight to no longer fight each other or be suckered into stupid political deals, a humble but incredibly resolute attitude and a will to work. And then stand clear.
Dubyah's arrogant version of Christianity won't do it, similarly arrogant Roman Catholicism has had centuries to do it and failed miserably, Islam and other fatalistic systems have no chance and Atheism even less.
Oh, yes, and we'd also need make the IMF and a few other choice `helpful' organisations thoroughly extinct to stop them stuffing things up.
Guess what? You need Flash to even see the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program site. And when you do, it's strictly elitist. Bill's essentially trying to buy the allegience of the best and brightest students in America. Only. The kind of people who would probably succeed without his intervention.
$750 million over five years to [...] the World Health Organization, the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicef, pharmaceutical companies and the World Bank.
Looks more like an investment than a donation.
$350 million over three years to teachers, administrators, school districts and schools to improve America's K-12 education, starting in Washington State.
$200 million to the Gates Library Program, which is wiring public libraries in America's poorest communities in an effort to close the "digital divide."
Specifically, to equip them with Windows?
All those hundreds of millions pouring into the vaccination industry is getting a bit frightening, even if some of those are dupes. You don't eradicate most diseases by swamping them in vaccine, you eradicate them by improving people's living conditions. By and large, Bill isn't doing that.
If he really wanted to make a durable name for himself, Bill could do a lot more for those poor countries by giving them cheap access to space industry with either a $5G seed donation or $10G to get the first one working.
It can probably feed pages with a single pixel on them at 6ppm. But I wouldn't bet my life on it, the love of high margins is the root of all kinds of evil. (-:
The point is, customers don't install their own stuff, and for a systems integrator to install once and clone many times is not hard. Mandrake Linux is generally easier to install than Windows, but 99% of people simply don't install their own software - wouldn't try, even with a zero questions wipe-and-restart rescue CD - so it wouldn't make any practical difference whether you had to interpret and punch in big strings of hex without benefit of a backspace key, or the installer AI read your mind and turned your wishes into something bootable while you slept.
The quick and the dead, in this world, and we're the quick. Even the overdone unions, the mighty US dollar, and braindead pollies can't keep us down... sorry, but you're talking about "God's own country" here. Even I've contributed to a project or two and I'm only Lord Muck. (-:
Bigger than Texas. Many, many times bigger... with better radar, smarter rockets and our own space program of sorts.
Surprise! Not everything in the world happens in the USA. And did I mention that we have the most dangerous collection of wildlife in the world? (-: Not even including the crocodiles?:-)
I hope the work will start to implement more export formats and/or interfacing with other renderers (Renderman support would be pretty neat).
A few weeks back they were discussing import and export. XML is basically going to happen, so it shouldn't be to hard to either translate that or just pitch into the development to make sure it speaks the same (or close enough) XML dialect as the renderer of your choice.
The existing binary format is very small and fast, but also very much a hack. If you could invent something that was still small and fast, yet consistent and flexible enough to implement all of the new stuff they're planning after the stable/free release, you'd make a hero of yourself.
Using the format of other editors or renderers may involve IP deadfalls, but if you can safely adapt a good file format, that would be fine.
KDE seems to be striking a reasonable balance between not terrifying incoming Windows users, and curing some of Windows' ills. Have you tried the newer KDEs? KDE 3.0.x with translucency only looks like Windows until you click on something, KDE 3.1 even more so. I don't see XP ripping audio CDs for you when you drag them onto a filesystem, I don't see it giving you a choice of cut/paste methods, I don't see protocol drivers for odd devices (think palmtops) accessible within the existing file management paradigm, and so on.
Windows 3 had fixed-sized elevators because Macintosh had them. So IRL, who is it chasing tail-lights?
"...It's `let me tell you' this and `listen to me' that..." (-:
I live in Western Australia. We have a town shire bigger than Texas, used to have a cattle station bigger than Texas, you can fit seven Texases into the state without overlap, yadda yadda, and tourists - notably Japanese tourists - still hop into taxis in Perth (that's the dot on the left edge) every so often and ask to be taken to Sydney (that's one of the two big dots on the right edge), two full days (ie 24x7) driving at the speed limit away.
By way of righteous indignation, I should add that Jindalee could do local air-traffic control for you (China's OTH radar is the only other that comes even close) from here, including for your stealth aircraft, and we're all-round tougher than you (for example, we don't let little things like the absence of water deter us from having yacht races). (-:
A relative of mine installed a reverse osmosis filter in his house. This filters out everything including chlorine: the water is so clean that it squeaks. The next time he refiilled his aquarium, the fish started dying. He had to add a little chlorine and flourine to their water to revive them. You have substantial amounts of chlorine incorporated into your own body.
then the bad PR from MS's incompatibilities will basically force them to play ball.
The world inside your head seems like a nice, logical place. Unfortunately it isn't well connected to the world around us. Microsoft will simply continue to pressure/bribe media sources into proclaiming that the problem lies with their competitor's software. Having a competitor who is a country, standards committee or random bunch of worldwide collaborators won't change that process much at all.
Compare this with Windows XP, where you plug a network cable in, and the OS pops up a dialog saying "hey! a network!", without you even having to touch anything.
Sometimes the dialog is blue and occupies the entire screen.
Also, as an administrator, I don't necessarily want my users bugg^H^H^H^Hsetting up their own network parameters. If it's broken, I want them to be bringing it to my attention.
Microsoft had a chance to do something truly new and good with XP. They blew it.
They will blow it again with LongHorn.
They also blew a chance to move towards real security. XP is still design insecure.
But when I tried to get my (short-lived) Mandrake 8 box to talk to my Windows box, Mandrake gave me a pagefull of textboxes labelled with jargon.
<deadpan>Ah, well, at least you didn't have to edit the registry (note their typoe near the end) to get it all working.</deadpan> It's all point-and-click on my Mandrake 8.2. In fact, with a sniffer I can make it pretty much automatic. What did you do wrong?
I have an uncle who wanted to export farm equipment to Mexico. He finally teed up a meeting with the appropriate minister, flew across from Oz, sat around a big table with the minister and a handful of other bigwigs.
The meeting started with señor minister asking `So what's my share?' and then going on to say that he saw said uncle's expression of amazement, but that was how things worked here, and had been working here `for over 400 years', and after Australia had been doing business for 400 years it might be in a position to comment on Mexico's methods (of course, by then Mexico would have been at it for 600 years).
Red Escolar consisted of a mailout of CDs. No support. Knowing that about Mexico, it was basically an invitation for Microsoft to give the appropriate minister(s) a wad of cash, make a nice-sounding offer, and charge in qith all guns blazing.
Surprise, they did. The technology was totally irrelevant.
The same thing is possible in Venezuela. Mind you, they've done exceptionally well at a lot of other political things, maybe they'll buck the trend again.
Slashdot Mirror
When a British school casually mentioned that its science curriculum included Creationism, there was a huge furor. When it died down, Richard Dawkins commented that the clerics were doing a better job of promoting evolution and destroying creation than the Atheists were, and that they (the Atheists) were better off standing back and watching the masters at work.
Christian belief has never held that the Earth is flat. Neither has the Medievel Church, AKA Roman Catholicism, counted that assertion among the very many things that they got wrong over the years. IRL, the furor was over whether the Earth was the center of the universe or not. The RCC said yes, science said no.
Depending on your perspective, they were both right. Earth seems to be within 100 million lightyears of the centre of the universe, a cosmic stone's throw, whereas the science (IRL, the religion of Naturalism) which espouses a Big Bang doesn't admit to a universe with a centre (or edges) at all.
Science as we know it doesn't propose helicentrism. The situation described in the previous paragraph is galactocentrism, and science doesn't like that too much either.
Science in general, at least science as we know it, was started by Christians. The founder of Scientific American, for example, was a Christian and a Creationist. Pasteur, Paley, Newton were all Christian Creationists, along with many, many others. The idea of classifying animals doesn't make much sense from an Orthdox Darwinistic point of view, because you'd be expecting great randomness (many intermediates), little systematism; and a pagan point of view, all warring gods or mischevious spirits, wouldn't be oriented toward constancy or systematism either.
Christians, including Creationists, are still very strong in science despite centuries of propaganda war against the idea and the extreme difficulty of gaining or holding tenure while admitting Creationist ideals. For an example of such a scientist, the author of the world's most effective geodynamics modelling program, Terra, is a Creationist; another Creationist accurately predicted, from Creationist principles, what the magnetic fields of Neptune and Uranus would be like (quite different to everyone else's ideas) long before we put a suitably equipped probe past them to do measurements.
If you can be bothered looking, you will discover that many ancient civilisations weren't as primitive as they seemed. But because it speaks against orthodox Naturalistic science, the evidence which clearly shows this is treated as Winston Churchill describes: `Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing happened.'
Do be sure that you have some idea of what you're on about next time. (-:
Visit http://plug.linux.org.au/~leonb/2000_seminar2a.htm l for some Wordless viewing pleasure. :-( Thank you, SlashDot, for that gratuitous space in the text. )-:
Wave yer lookin' gear at this. (-:
They're really good at getting important things wrong, but this time - at least in general - they may turn out to have been right, or at least righter than their opponents.
See that and a whole bunch of other eye-poppin' stuff in this gallery. However, strange doesn't need to be small, in fact it can stand out a fair bit (bear in mind (which the page's author doesn't seem to have done) that things move over time).
You'd almost certainly have to form a consortium to get that far up. In which case funding this is probably a better idea.
After the philanthropy had worn down, I myself would tile a wall with these these and hook them to a few of these. And I would go absolutely nuts with other technotoys.
One _being_ a heatsink? (-:
How do I say this?
What would be truly useful is to provide these people with a system of morality that gave them a future, a reason for doing anything, the guts and insight to no longer fight each other or be suckered into stupid political deals, a humble but incredibly resolute attitude and a will to work. And then stand clear.
Dubyah's arrogant version of Christianity won't do it, similarly arrogant Roman Catholicism has had centuries to do it and failed miserably, Islam and other fatalistic systems have no chance and Atheism even less.
Oh, yes, and we'd also need make the IMF and a few other choice `helpful' organisations thoroughly extinct to stop them stuffing things up.
[Dons his skeptic's hat]
Guess what? You need Flash to even see the Gates Millennium Scholarship Program site. And when you do, it's strictly elitist. Bill's essentially trying to buy the allegience of the best and brightest students in America. Only. The kind of people who would probably succeed without his intervention.
Looks more like an investment than a donation.
Specifically, to equip them with Windows?
All those hundreds of millions pouring into the vaccination industry is getting a bit frightening, even if some of those are dupes. You don't eradicate most diseases by swamping them in vaccine, you eradicate them by improving people's living conditions. By and large, Bill isn't doing that.
If he really wanted to make a durable name for himself, Bill could do a lot more for those poor countries by giving them cheap access to space industry with either a $5G seed donation or $10G to get the first one working.
It can probably feed pages with a single pixel on them at 6ppm. But I wouldn't bet my life on it, the love of high margins is the root of all kinds of evil. (-:
Bear in mind that I use 100% Linux, then I tell you that you missed the ball once, twice, thrice; now take your bat back to the bench with you.
Their opening screen is very pretty, too.
The point is, customers don't install their own stuff, and for a systems integrator to install once and clone many times is not hard. Mandrake Linux is generally easier to install than Windows, but 99% of people simply don't install their own software - wouldn't try, even with a zero questions wipe-and-restart rescue CD - so it wouldn't make any practical difference whether you had to interpret and punch in big strings of hex without benefit of a backspace key, or the installer AI read your mind and turned your wishes into something bootable while you slept.
...the list goes on.
:-)
The quick and the dead, in this world, and we're the quick. Even the overdone unions, the mighty US dollar, and braindead pollies can't keep us down... sorry, but you're talking about "God's own country" here. Even I've contributed to a project or two and I'm only Lord Muck. (-:
Bigger than Texas. Many, many times bigger... with better radar, smarter rockets and our own space program of sorts.
Surprise! Not everything in the world happens in the USA. And did I mention that we have the most dangerous collection of wildlife in the world? (-: Not even including the crocodiles?
A genuine apology on SlashDot! Not the slightest tongue-in-cheek, no barbs, no shred of kickback or resentment. +1 Astonishing! (-: Woo-hoo! :-)
A few weeks back they were discussing import and export. XML is basically going to happen, so it shouldn't be to hard to either translate that or just pitch into the development to make sure it speaks the same (or close enough) XML dialect as the renderer of your choice.
The existing binary format is very small and fast, but also very much a hack. If you could invent something that was still small and fast, yet consistent and flexible enough to implement all of the new stuff they're planning after the stable/free release, you'd make a hero of yourself.
Using the format of other editors or renderers may involve IP deadfalls, but if you can safely adapt a good file format, that would be fine.
KDE seems to be striking a reasonable balance between not terrifying incoming Windows users, and curing some of Windows' ills. Have you tried the newer KDEs? KDE 3.0.x with translucency only looks like Windows until you click on something, KDE 3.1 even more so. I don't see XP ripping audio CDs for you when you drag them onto a filesystem, I don't see it giving you a choice of cut/paste methods, I don't see protocol drivers for odd devices (think palmtops) accessible within the existing file management paradigm, and so on.
Windows 3 had fixed-sized elevators because Macintosh had them. So IRL, who is it chasing tail-lights?
"...It's `let me tell you' this and `listen to me' that..." (-:
I live in Western Australia. We have a town shire bigger than Texas, used to have a cattle station bigger than Texas, you can fit seven Texases into the state without overlap, yadda yadda, and tourists - notably Japanese tourists - still hop into taxis in Perth (that's the dot on the left edge) every so often and ask to be taken to Sydney (that's one of the two big dots on the right edge), two full days (ie 24x7) driving at the speed limit away.
By way of righteous indignation, I should add that Jindalee could do local air-traffic control for you (China's OTH radar is the only other that comes even close) from here, including for your stealth aircraft, and we're all-round tougher than you (for example, we don't let little things like the absence of water deter us from having yacht races). (-:
A relative of mine installed a reverse osmosis filter in his house. This filters out everything including chlorine: the water is so clean that it squeaks. The next time he refiilled his aquarium, the fish started dying. He had to add a little chlorine and flourine to their water to revive them. You have substantial amounts of chlorine incorporated into your own body.
It may also interest you to know that even oxygen can be poisonous. (-:
Perhaps you should have qualified yourself with `large concentrations of chlorine...' - even if only to reduce `period pain'.
Nothing like a bleached nose to let you know you're alive...
The world inside your head seems like a nice, logical place. Unfortunately it isn't well connected to the world around us. Microsoft will simply continue to pressure/bribe media sources into proclaiming that the problem lies with their competitor's software. Having a competitor who is a country, standards committee or random bunch of worldwide collaborators won't change that process much at all.
...and then order them to reverse their policy. Of course, the Brazilians might object to calling their city `Jenifa'.
Sometimes the dialog is blue and occupies the entire screen.
Also, as an administrator, I don't necessarily want my users bugg^H^H^H^Hsetting up their own network parameters. If it's broken, I want them to be bringing it to my attention.
Microsoft had a chance to do something truly new and good with XP. They blew it.
They will blow it again with LongHorn.
They also blew a chance to move towards real security. XP is still design insecure.
<deadpan>Ah, well, at least you didn't have to edit the registry (note their typoe near the end) to get it all working.</deadpan> It's all point-and-click on my Mandrake 8.2. In fact, with a sniffer I can make it pretty much automatic. What did you do wrong?
One of my clients has a dedicated NT4 box which does just that. It's the acme of reliability. Not.
They'd be much better off with a headless variant of OpenOffice.org, and I'm sure there are even more streamlined solutions available.
China has made its position reasonably clear. Since the head honcho's son is running Red Flag Linux, I don't think Microsoft has a prayer there.
China already had a `one-disk country' reputation.
The meeting started with señor minister asking `So what's my share?' and then going on to say that he saw said uncle's expression of amazement, but that was how things worked here, and had been working here `for over 400 years', and after Australia had been doing business for 400 years it might be in a position to comment on Mexico's methods (of course, by then Mexico would have been at it for 600 years).
Red Escolar consisted of a mailout of CDs. No support. Knowing that about Mexico, it was basically an invitation for Microsoft to give the appropriate minister(s) a wad of cash, make a nice-sounding offer, and charge in qith all guns blazing.
Surprise, they did. The technology was totally irrelevant.
The same thing is possible in Venezuela. Mind you, they've done exceptionally well at a lot of other political things, maybe they'll buck the trend again.
...acceptable. <Crunch>