Sure, I can see it now. Sowhere in Darfur, someone gets a computer for free, with a free ad-driven version of Windows/Office. They make $2 a month and are forced to stare at the ads for Lexus and Grand Cherokees.. Uhhuhh... Yup, that's why I use Linux. Hopefully in the event that the world gets it's finger out and does something about what's happening in Dafur, they will too.
I would imagine this would be either implemented in embedded devices for public terminals or that sort of thing, or perhaps for cheap/free versions of Windows/Office for the developing areas of the world, like the 'Starter Edition'. You know, here have a free ad supported OS and software, then when you don't want the ads you have to pay $699 for ad free version.
I seriously doubt even MS would put this in the mainstream paid for consumer OS.
Ann Summers is a retail chain (they have highstreet shops), and if a real Ann Summers started it she no loner runs it. I think they make enough money that whilst this publicity may improve sales of this product it won't make much difference to their bottom line.
Think of southern Australia and Tasmania......where sunshine is at low levels for as much as nine to ten months out of the year. You are joking, southern Australia gets huge amounts of sunlight thus it has the one of the worlds highest rates of skin cancer. Don't forget that the latitude of the south coast of Australia is only about 36 degrees and that the southern hemisphere receives more sunlight than the northern hemisphere due to the eccentricity in the earth's orbit (and angle of axis). Most people in southern Australia have difficulty getting enough sunscreen on year round rather than getting enough sun exposure.
Firstly because this is open source and free (as in speech) software*, so people can do whatever they like with it. If I want to release my own Linux distribution it's up to me, I don't need anyone else's permission.
Secondly, I personally rate Mandriva way above Ubuntu, I've used Mandriva for about three times as long as Ubuntu has even existed. After all the hype I did ditch Mandriva for Ubuntu for a while, but it was so frustrating that I switched back. The installer for Mandriva is second to none (whereas Ubuntu wouldn't even let me install grub to anywhere other than the MBR - yeah, I found out later there is another version of Ubuntu that would - yet another download). Also, the admin tools for Mandriva were better and there were more of them and finally, when I tried it Kubuntu was a very poor second cousin to the base Ubuntu (I wanted KDE) and there were all sorts of problems with it. Dunno whether that has changed since they said they would improve KDE support.
*Yeah, I know Mandriva push their commercial versions, but you don't have to buy 'em and all the software is available elsewhere, e.g. PLF.
And surely Slackware should be there rather than Red Hat(not that I've used it in 8 or 9 years) as they invented the idea of a Linux distribution. I'm not sure there would ever have been Red Hat if it wasn't for Slackware.
I'm also a scientist. Graphing is really inadequate in Calc, but there again it is in Excel too. Worse in Calc though. I mostly use Openoffice and Linux, but still have to switch to Windows for SPSS, SigmaPlot and Reference Manager. The open source equivalents are no where near in those areas. Too specialised I guess. The one feature I really miss in Calc is non-contiguous copy and paste, something that has been in Excel for many many years. I put a feature request in for it years ago and had some support but nothing was ever done (the ignore spaces option in paste special is not the equivalent of this feature).
I work for an organisation with several thousand employees and which has an exclusive deal with Dell (for desktops at least). Few of those employees use Linux, but I have installed it on my desktop and laptop with not too many problems. Before working here I would never have considered buying Dell, but I have actually been pleasantly surprised with the build quality. Next time I am in the market for a laptop at home (have toshiba at the mo which came with winxp home), I may well be persuaded by a Dell machine if they offered a machine that was the same build but guaranteed to work with Linux.
My point is that whilst the market may not be huge, Dell doing this could gain themselves a much larger part of that market by making these offerings, so it may well be successful for them.
No, it's been proven in Slashdot discussions many times that no Slashdot reader can hear a difference between CDs and 128k encoded mp3s. We're just wasting our money on the expensive stuff 'cos we're mugs.
There's no need to be. I buy plenty of music on vinyl, on CD and as mp3s. I've never had a problem playing anything on anything (yeah alright, I can't play mp3s on my turntable). But then I only buy mp3s not encumbered by drm (ie emusic.com), so they play on just about any media software on any computer platform, and I play my CDs on a CD player not my PC (though I do sometimes rip them, but I do it with Linux and have never had a problem there either). Simple!
I'm not sure that is true. If you look at the Aborigines here in Australia, as probably one of the best studied examples of hunter-gatherer man, I'd say that music was/is often used in religious/sacred ceremonies, that isn't the same thing as being FOR God/gods, in fact Aborigines don't really have gods as such.
Furthermore, I find it very hard to believe that throughout the history of man singing has been restricted to religious events only. What about hunting/war songs for instance?
Finally, I also don't believe this 15,000 year figure, why would singing/music have suddenly been invented then, it's an aspect of all hunter-gatherer societies and there wasn't any magic change throughout the human world 15,000 years ago (Aborigines have been here in Oz for 40-60,000 years). Its a much more sensible null-hypothesis that Homo sapiens sapiens has sung throughout its existence.
Judging by the frequency of these recalls, this seems to be a bit of a risk with Li based batteries. Is it just bad manufacturing with laptop batteries or is the manufacture of Li batteries generally troublesome? I was watching an piece on the Tesla electric car (0-100 km/h in 4 s!) last night and the manufacturer explained that they use Li batteries, having seen videos of exploding laptops I really wouldn't want to be in a Telsa (or equivalent) when the batteries blew up!
It would be different from the current situation in that devs would actually get the specs and access to an engineer, rather than having to reverse engineer stuff.
Here in Australia, we have a very different constitution, but one of it's clear intentions is to protect the powers of the states (similar to your 10th amendment I guess). The constitution gave a limited number of powers (but fairly general) to the federal government, but over the last 100 years successive governments have used all sorts of loopholes to take powers away from the states and effectively do what they like. Most recently, they have over-ridden state employment law in order to remove most of the employment protection that the states have provided. If I remember correctly they used their powers to govern commerce to do this.
My point, if I have one, is that it looks to me like federations of states will probably always go down this path, until eventually the concept of the state within the federation is pretty much in name only. I agree that it is a sad state of affairs (if you'll excuse the pun), because it removes one of the ways of mitigating governments intent on doing the worst.
am I only only one that gets sick of the PR language that is used in the IT industry, it's constant drivel. I mean look at:
What we [at XBox] are focused on doing is providing great tools at a free or low price point that are going to enable consumers to be absolutely successful at creating games for both the Windows and the Xbox 360 platforms. They're not tools they're "great tools", they don't provide a product they "enable consumers", their product doesn't just do a job it is "absolutely successful" argghhhhhhh............. One of my aims in life is never to buy anything from a company that uses this sort of PR speak.
I made no comment about heritability of height. Of course it's heritable and of course there is variation in height in different races. Everyone is born with a genetic trait for height, but whether that height is reached or not is dependent on their environment. There's plenty of studies linking malnutrition in childhood with problems in development, including height.
It's not actually that simple. For example, the increase in height in Westerners isn't micro-evolution it's simply diet. When man went from hunter-gather (the state to which we evolved), to an agrarian lifestyle, the quality of diet went down, it hit rock bottom in Europe in the middle ages where teh majority of the population were quite severly malnourished and therefore short. The heights we are currently reaching (pun intended) are basically those of our hunter-gatherer forefathers, because as a population the quality of our diet over the last 50 years has improved so much. Of course we're probably heading down the path of too much now...
So my point is, that it's not easy to define or prove 'micro-evolution'. Just to clarify, I am a biologist by trade and am quite comfortable with the punctuated-equilibrium model of evolution, I'm certainly not arguing that evolution doesn't happen, just that we have to be careful with our conclusions.
Who is controlling NASA PR these days, and who decides to put these stories out? A few years ago there was the 'bacteria in meteorites' tale and they've been desperate to imply running water on Mars, with a pile of puff pieces over the last couple of years.
Now I have the highest respect for the NASA scientists and I don't doubt their work, but both in the 'bacteria' case and in this one there are far more likely scenarios, which are supported by plenty of good scientists. They publish in the media anyway and in the long run it makes them look foolish, when the guys doing the work certainly are not. I've read a few of the published articles from the Mars research in scientific journals, well 'Science' anyway;-) and sometimes they don't even have the same conclusions that the PR pieces have...
That always seems to happen to me as well. I think there is probably a simpler explanation, that the new phone numbers are given out in batches, so when you get a new pre-paid mobile, there's lots of other new mobiles with similar numbers being bought around the country and when you get a new number and hand it out to people, some of those are going to get it wrong. Multiply that up by simialr new numbers and you get quite a few wrong numbers....
Or better still one which actually has some facts. This is one small town, it's voluntary for both patrons and for drinking establishments (five clubs are using it so far). Many clubs already require you to have a membership card, what's the difference? The worry is that it may end up with you having to sign up just to go for a drink, but then you can vote with your feet and drink somewhere else....
Re:Its because of Women psychology
on
IT and Divorce?
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· Score: 1
I'm late on this discussion, but I have to say. That is one of the worst posts I have read on Slashdot. I am staggered that a presumably educated person could come up with such sexist rubbish. "Women are faulty" says it all. I feel sorry for any female partner you may have.
Hmmm, nice that the article doesn't mention the actual author of the paper (published in Science). Also not surprisingly, the actual paper doesn't talk about 'smell'. Oh and for the person going on about sample size, of course the paper gives sample sizes.
Here's the abstract:
Volatile Chemical Cues Guide Host Location and Host Selection by Parasitic Plants Justin B. Runyon, Mark C. Mescher, Consuelo M. De Moraes*
The importance of plant volatiles in mediating interactions between plant species is much debated. Here, we demonstrate that the parasitic plant Cuscuta pentagona (dodder) uses volatile cues for host location. Cuscuta pentagona seedlings exhibit directed growth toward nearby tomato plants (Lycopersicon esculentum) and toward extracted tomato-plant volatiles presented in the absence of other cues. Impatiens (Impatiens wallerana) and wheat plants (Triticum aestivum) also elicit directed growth. Moreover, seedlings can distinguish tomato and wheat volatiles and preferentially grow toward the former. Several individual compounds from tomato and wheat elicit directed growth by C. pentagona, whereas one compound from wheat is repellent. These findings provide compelling evidence that volatiles mediate important ecological interactions among plant species.
I don't think so. Look at Iraq, more than 30,000 civilians killed, under 10,000 military. Look at Lebanon, 1000+ civilians killed, under 300 military Now go look at similar figures for the first world war say. What has happened is that the TYPE of warfare has changed and the inequality in armaments between the west (particularly the US) and the rest of the world has become larger than ever, so when the west wages war the civilian deaths are on the other side...
The summary makes no sense for a change - no one has suggested the sun has the same composition as the earth - or it wouldn't be giving out much light, it'd be a big ball of iron and rock. TFA states that the relative abundancies of three oxygen isoptopes (16 - the common one on earth - 17 & 18) reflect neither the relative abundancies found on earth nor of meteorites (unchanged since they formed and thus thought to be similar to the nebula from which the solar system formed).
Slashdot Mirror
I would imagine this would be either implemented in embedded devices for public terminals or that sort of thing, or perhaps for cheap/free versions of Windows/Office for the developing areas of the world, like the 'Starter Edition'. You know, here have a free ad supported OS and software, then when you don't want the ads you have to pay $699 for ad free version.
I seriously doubt even MS would put this in the mainstream paid for consumer OS.
Ann Summers is a retail chain (they have highstreet shops), and if a real Ann Summers started it she no loner runs it. I think they make enough money that whilst this publicity may improve sales of this product it won't make much difference to their bottom line.
Firstly because this is open source and free (as in speech) software*, so people can do whatever they like with it. If I want to release my own Linux distribution it's up to me, I don't need anyone else's permission.
Secondly, I personally rate Mandriva way above Ubuntu, I've used Mandriva for about three times as long as Ubuntu has even existed. After all the hype I did ditch Mandriva for Ubuntu for a while, but it was so frustrating that I switched back. The installer for Mandriva is second to none (whereas Ubuntu wouldn't even let me install grub to anywhere other than the MBR - yeah, I found out later there is another version of Ubuntu that would - yet another download). Also, the admin tools for Mandriva were better and there were more of them and finally, when I tried it Kubuntu was a very poor second cousin to the base Ubuntu (I wanted KDE) and there were all sorts of problems with it. Dunno whether that has changed since they said they would improve KDE support.
*Yeah, I know Mandriva push their commercial versions, but you don't have to buy 'em and all the software is available elsewhere, e.g. PLF.
And surely Slackware should be there rather than Red Hat(not that I've used it in 8 or 9 years) as they invented the idea of a Linux distribution. I'm not sure there would ever have been Red Hat if it wasn't for Slackware.
I'm also a scientist. Graphing is really inadequate in Calc, but there again it is in Excel too. Worse in Calc though. I mostly use Openoffice and Linux, but still have to switch to Windows for SPSS, SigmaPlot and Reference Manager. The open source equivalents are no where near in those areas. Too specialised I guess. The one feature I really miss in Calc is non-contiguous copy and paste, something that has been in Excel for many many years. I put a feature request in for it years ago and had some support but nothing was ever done (the ignore spaces option in paste special is not the equivalent of this feature).
I work for an organisation with several thousand employees and which has an exclusive deal with Dell (for desktops at least). Few of those employees use Linux, but I have installed it on my desktop and laptop with not too many problems. Before working here I would never have considered buying Dell, but I have actually been pleasantly surprised with the build quality. Next time I am in the market for a laptop at home (have toshiba at the mo which came with winxp home), I may well be persuaded by a Dell machine if they offered a machine that was the same build but guaranteed to work with Linux.
My point is that whilst the market may not be huge, Dell doing this could gain themselves a much larger part of that market by making these offerings, so it may well be successful for them.
No, it's been proven in Slashdot discussions many times that no Slashdot reader can hear a difference between CDs and 128k encoded mp3s. We're just wasting our money on the expensive stuff 'cos we're mugs.
There's no need to be. I buy plenty of music on vinyl, on CD and as mp3s. I've never had a problem playing anything on anything (yeah alright, I can't play mp3s on my turntable). But then I only buy mp3s not encumbered by drm (ie emusic.com), so they play on just about any media software on any computer platform, and I play my CDs on a CD player not my PC (though I do sometimes rip them, but I do it with Linux and have never had a problem there either). Simple!
I'm not sure that is true. If you look at the Aborigines here in Australia, as probably one of the best studied examples of hunter-gatherer man, I'd say that music was/is often used in religious/sacred ceremonies, that isn't the same thing as being FOR God/gods, in fact Aborigines don't really have gods as such.
Furthermore, I find it very hard to believe that throughout the history of man singing has been restricted to religious events only. What about hunting/war songs for instance?
Finally, I also don't believe this 15,000 year figure, why would singing/music have suddenly been invented then, it's an aspect of all hunter-gatherer societies and there wasn't any magic change throughout the human world 15,000 years ago (Aborigines have been here in Oz for 40-60,000 years). Its a much more sensible null-hypothesis that Homo sapiens sapiens has sung throughout its existence.
Judging by the frequency of these recalls, this seems to be a bit of a risk with Li based batteries. Is it just bad manufacturing with laptop batteries or is the manufacture of Li batteries generally troublesome? I was watching an piece on the Tesla electric car (0-100 km/h in 4 s!) last night and the manufacturer explained that they use Li batteries, having seen videos of exploding laptops I really wouldn't want to be in a Telsa (or equivalent) when the batteries blew up!
It would be different from the current situation in that devs would actually get the specs and access to an engineer, rather than having to reverse engineer stuff.
Here in Australia, we have a very different constitution, but one of it's clear intentions is to protect the powers of the states (similar to your 10th amendment I guess). The constitution gave a limited number of powers (but fairly general) to the federal government, but over the last 100 years successive governments have used all sorts of loopholes to take powers away from the states and effectively do what they like. Most recently, they have over-ridden state employment law in order to remove most of the employment protection that the states have provided. If I remember correctly they used their powers to govern commerce to do this.
My point, if I have one, is that it looks to me like federations of states will probably always go down this path, until eventually the concept of the state within the federation is pretty much in name only. I agree that it is a sad state of affairs (if you'll excuse the pun), because it removes one of the ways of mitigating governments intent on doing the worst.
I made no comment about heritability of height. Of course it's heritable and of course there is variation in height in different races. Everyone is born with a genetic trait for height, but whether that height is reached or not is dependent on their environment. There's plenty of studies linking malnutrition in childhood with problems in development, including height.
It's not actually that simple. For example, the increase in height in Westerners isn't micro-evolution it's simply diet. When man went from hunter-gather (the state to which we evolved), to an agrarian lifestyle, the quality of diet went down, it hit rock bottom in Europe in the middle ages where teh majority of the population were quite severly malnourished and therefore short. The heights we are currently reaching (pun intended) are basically those of our hunter-gatherer forefathers, because as a population the quality of our diet over the last 50 years has improved so much. Of course we're probably heading down the path of too much now...
So my point is, that it's not easy to define or prove 'micro-evolution'. Just to clarify, I am a biologist by trade and am quite comfortable with the punctuated-equilibrium model of evolution, I'm certainly not arguing that evolution doesn't happen, just that we have to be careful with our conclusions.
Who is controlling NASA PR these days, and who decides to put these stories out? A few years ago there was the 'bacteria in meteorites' tale and they've been desperate to imply running water on Mars, with a pile of puff pieces over the last couple of years.
;-) and sometimes they don't even have the same conclusions that the PR pieces have...
Now I have the highest respect for the NASA scientists and I don't doubt their work, but both in the 'bacteria' case and in this one there are far more likely scenarios, which are supported by plenty of good scientists. They publish in the media anyway and in the long run it makes them look foolish, when the guys doing the work certainly are not. I've read a few of the published articles from the Mars research in scientific journals, well 'Science' anyway
That always seems to happen to me as well. I think there is probably a simpler explanation, that the new phone numbers are given out in batches, so when you get a new pre-paid mobile, there's lots of other new mobiles with similar numbers being bought around the country and when you get a new number and hand it out to people, some of those are going to get it wrong. Multiply that up by simialr new numbers and you get quite a few wrong numbers....
Or better still one which actually has some facts. This is one small town, it's voluntary for both patrons and for drinking establishments (five clubs are using it so far). Many clubs already require you to have a membership card, what's the difference? The worry is that it may end up with you having to sign up just to go for a drink, but then you can vote with your feet and drink somewhere else....
I'm late on this discussion, but I have to say. That is one of the worst posts I have read on Slashdot. I am staggered that a presumably educated person could come up with such sexist rubbish. "Women are faulty" says it all. I feel sorry for any female partner you may have.
Hmmm, nice that the article doesn't mention the actual author of the paper (published in Science). Also not surprisingly, the actual paper doesn't talk about 'smell'. Oh and for the person going on about sample size, of course the paper gives sample sizes.
6 4.pdf
Here's the abstract:
Volatile Chemical Cues Guide Host Location and Host Selection by Parasitic Plants
Justin B. Runyon, Mark C. Mescher, Consuelo M. De Moraes*
The importance of plant volatiles in mediating interactions between plant species is much debated. Here, we demonstrate that the parasitic plant Cuscuta pentagona (dodder) uses volatile cues for host location. Cuscuta pentagona seedlings exhibit directed growth toward nearby tomato plants (Lycopersicon esculentum) and toward extracted tomato-plant volatiles presented in the absence of other cues. Impatiens (Impatiens wallerana) and wheat plants (Triticum aestivum) also elicit directed growth. Moreover, seedlings can distinguish tomato and wheat volatiles and preferentially grow toward the former. Several individual compounds from tomato and wheat elicit directed growth by C. pentagona, whereas one compound from wheat is repellent. These findings provide compelling evidence that volatiles mediate important ecological interactions among plant species.
And here's the actual paper for those with access to Science articles:
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/313/5795/19
Amazing the difference an 'a' makes.
I don't think so. Look at Iraq, more than 30,000 civilians killed, under 10,000 military. Look at Lebanon, 1000+ civilians killed, under 300 military Now go look at similar figures for the first world war say. What has happened is that the TYPE of warfare has changed and the inequality in armaments between the west (particularly the US) and the rest of the world has become larger than ever, so when the west wages war the civilian deaths are on the other side...
The summary makes no sense for a change - no one has suggested the sun has the same composition as the earth - or it wouldn't be giving out much light, it'd be a big ball of iron and rock. TFA states that the relative abundancies of three oxygen isoptopes (16 - the common one on earth - 17 & 18) reflect neither the relative abundancies found on earth nor of meteorites (unchanged since they formed and thus thought to be similar to the nebula from which the solar system formed).