I have invented a starship drive that follows real Physics -- but, for practical purposes, requires impossible Engineering, at least for the foreseeable future (I recall Einstein was convinced that Gravitational waves that he predicted would never be detected!).
I don't really follow your point. The EM drive didn't follow real physics. With far future advanced engineering it'd still be a perpetual motion machine.
Please read the first paragraph of my post more carefully (the paragraph that you didn't quote). In essence, I said that that the EM drive did not work as advertised -- and although a force was measured, it was due to more pedestrian physics and the Earth's Magnetic field, hence not suitable as a Space Drive.
I suppose, I should spell things out in more detail for Americans (scary so many voted for Trump).
unless some other new technology like the EM drive were to be discovered
Speaking of fantasy physics....
The EM drive isnt a new piece of technology thats been discovered. It's a perpetual motion machine in disguise, i.e. complete and utter bunk.
They found the EM force was real, in once sense at least. It was actually the force on the wires leading to the apparatus -- hint, what happens to a wire carrying a current when it is in a magnetic field?
I have invented a starship drive that follows real Physics -- but, for practical purposes, requires impossible Engineering, at least for the foreseeable future (I recall Einstein was convinced that Gravitational waves that he predicted would never be detected!).
Even in Newton's theory of gravity, photons are deflected from the Sun. Interesting, even some Physicists forget this! However there is a difference of a factor of 2 between the predictions of Newton's theory of gravity and Einstein's general relativity, in the amount of the affect.
https://briankoberlein.com/201... [...] The catch is that the amount of bending predicted by Newton’s model is half what Einstein’s model predicted. Eddington actually demonstrated not only that light was gravitationally deflected, but that the amount matched Einstein, and not Newton. [...]
https://www.researchgate.net/p... [...] Jerry Decker Private Research Newton Gravity can be manipulated to give an approximation of bending light, but was not done in advance of Einstein GR. So it is just an exercise with approximate results. Local gravity acceleration does not depend on the small mass of a falling object, only the mass of the sun or other large body. Then curvature is implied. g = MG/r2 Radial velocity changes according to curvature dvr/dt = g
Taken into the usual hyperbolic geometry, it leads to an answer for bending of light that is only half as large as GR and the accepted observations [...]
We're alone and they are too. And it will stay that way until we fade.
My 2 cents.
I think that the probability of intelligent Life on other planets is near certainty, but that the probability interacting with intelligent Life on other planets is near zero.
Of course I'm excluding the possibility of any intelligent Life on Earth going to other planets. I'll refrain from discussing the existence, or non existence, of intelligent Life on Earth!
This is what the Martians did. They became a full hydrogen economy. They converted a lot of their planet's water into hydrogen and it escaped into space! They didn't have enough fresh water left to sustain their economies. The resulting wars left lots of craters.
And their atmosphere got so thin without moisture that it was blown away by the solar winds. Over thousands of years, the solar radiation and planetary dust storms degraded everything and turned it all to dust.
Careful, you might start a new Woo-Woo trend like Flat Earthers, Global Warming Denialists, Moon Hoaxers, and Creationists -- all people who prefer beliefs over reality.
The Warming Denialists and Creationists, are probably the most well organised and dangerous.
I think var should be banned in any sane development environment, and should never have been put into Java.
I have found lambdas very useful in a couple of use cases, such as when you need to pass a function for special functionality -- far better than defining a class to hold the function.
If you want a program to execute under a second, then write it in C, or another compiled language.
However, if the program is likely to be running a minute or more, than a well written Java program will most likely out perform a well written C program. Because in Java, the code parts that are executed intensely, will be compiled into native machine code optimized for that run time profile by the Just-in-Time Java compiler that is part of the JVM. The JIT can even in-line code that is at the end of a long pointer chain.
Big enterprise applications running on on big multi-core count computers with a terabyte of RAM can make effective use of Java for long running programs. As the JVM makes good use of the multicores and gobs of RAM.
I once ran a silly benchmark, and found that the JVM/JIT had created 2 threads to run code in the same method, because it had found that my 2 large for loops could be run in parallel.
I have programmed in over 25 languages, including COBOL, C (I actually was paid to teach C to experienced programmers one year), ARM3 assembler, and Python. Found Python had some good points, indenting eliminated brackets and no need for lots of semicolons, but I found it too gimmicky and didn’t handle multi-threading very well compared to Java.
I’ve found Java quite effective for writing short programs of less than 100 lines to explore mathematical ideas, like how many polygons can meet at a snugly at a point(see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/...). So Java does not need massive projects to be really useful.
Cross platform support is also good. I wrote a Java Application to find duplicated files on my Linux box, and a friend had no problems running it on his Microsoft box.
I find Java is my favourite language, though I also have things I don’t like about it. No language is perfect, and there are many considerations to be taken into account for selecting a language for development.
The US is $22 trillion in debt. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Vets are sleeping outside in the freezing cold and not given the health care they entitled to. The US cannot healthcare for it's poorest citizens. And I could go on.
How much would it cost to put a colony on the moon, and what is the payoff? What do we have on the moon that we don't have on earth?
Don't worry, the Chinese will develop the Martian colonies -- so no need for American tax dollars!
Within a relatively short time, under 10 years from first landing humans, Mars would be self sufficient in terms of air, water, methane, and bulk building materials -- though band aids etc. may take tens of years. note that they will probably develop other materials and not need 'rubber', so no need for rubber trees.
Some minerals and goods will be obtained elsewhere in the Solar System, other than from Earth.
Most people, who haver given self sufficiency any real thought, are thinking of centuries for sufficient self sufficiency. Some luxury items we take for granted on Earth may never be practical to create off Earth, but you don't need luxury items to be self sufficient!
No need to refer to SF or Heinlein. All I need to do is point out that as far as the Earth/Moon system is concerned, having a base on the Moon gives you control of the ultimate High Ground.
Controlling the L5 And L6 points is probably far more significant!
I used to think that a Moon base was essential for the sustained exploration and colonisation of the rest of the Solar System, or at least for Mars.
But Elon has convinced me that a Martian colony could be started from Earth directly. Although, a Lunar colony may help, providing it doesn't divert necessary funds for the Martian colonies.
An actual self-sufficient colony yes. We're not remotely close to that though, it'll be an outpost. Earth dies, it dies.
Hmm...
Long term, we need a viable self sustaining population of humans off Earth.
This may well take a few centuries to achieve -- but if we don't start, then it will never happen.
I doubt that a Lunar colony by itself would be sufficient -- nor for that matter, a Martian colony. The latter, because currently we have no confidence that human females can reproduce effectively on Mars (does gestation require Earth normal gravity?), nor that sufficient babies would be able to develop properly to fully functioning adults. On the other hand, I'm not aware of evidence that it can't happen either!
Pregnancy, and early, childhood may need to done in large rotating space stations to maintain sufficient g forces to enable reliably producing and raising generations of humans off Earth. I'd love to be proved overly pessimistic!
Am making the reasonably assumption that radiation shielding is a mere engineering detail, along with the necessary ability to make the space stations self sufficient in terms of air and food.
There is abundant free energy in space from solar radiation, and raw materials can be mined from planetary surfaces.
Would not surprise me that that Mercury ended up with mining camps for metals and heavy industry. There is water ice in the Mercurian polar craters, and bountiful solar energy, plus no locals will be complaining about industrial pollution!
Mars can supply more than sufficient, water, oxygen, and methane for the colony, plus probably many of the minerals it needs. Suspect that the Martian colonies collectively, will be self sufficient in terms of basic food, water, air, and fuel within 20 years. Luxury food categories may take a few more years.
I see that asteroid mining will become economically viable within 50 years, and most probably a lot sooner.
In about 200 years will have colonies on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus (cloud cities), and probably other places. Also manned expeditions to Pluto and beyond.
So long as the forces of ignorance are kept sufficiently in check, but unfortunately Creationists and their ilk, are hell bent on promoting belief over understanding.
Most of the new users since perhaps around 2012 came for the data analytics side.
IPython, NumPy, SciPy had been around for a while, but with maturing Jupyter, Pandas and TensorFlow/Keras, it really caught on. Other NLP and Machine Learning libraries probably helped too.
My use of Python today is completely different from how I used it earlier, nearly two decades ago, when it was mainly seen as a better Perl, back when Perl was THE scripting language. Now it is seen as a better MATLAB or a better R, even though the base language isn't itself vectorized as the others. The language and the standard library didn't improve much towards this. It was mainly the third party libraries that emerged and matured.
Speaking purely from a language standpoint, Julia has all right features for the analytics side, but the scientific community is right now with Python.
SageMath is free and is easily accessible from Python. It runs on Linux, and other O/S's including those from Microsoft.
SageMath is very powerful and is a good alternative to MatLab and Mathematica.
http://www.sagemath.org/ [...] SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers.
Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab. [...]
Probable best to encourage people to move to Open Standards, which is something the British Government is doing right: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov...
Microsoft has been pushing Office 365 HARD for some time now. At microsoft.com, you have to do some digging to find anything about Office 2019, and even what you do find is scant. I only keep Microsoft Office around just in case I need 100% compatibility with a MS doc I've received or need to edit and send out. I'll probably buy Office 2019 some time this year, but it will probably be the final time I pay for an office suite. I prefer to use LibreOffice. Not only is the price right and the features meet and exceed all my needs, the UI is more intuitive and obvious.
Yeah, my mother who was then in her late seventies, found LibreOffice easier to use than Microsoft Office!
I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
I hate that it doesn't actually work.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
What was the last version of LibreOffice you tried? LibreOffice 6.2.0 is at RC3 level, and LibreOffice 6.1.4 is the latest stable version. If you are adventuresome, you can even download LibreOffice 6.3.0.0 Alpha and compile it yourself (trying asking Microsoft if you could download and compile their source code -- good luck, even if you are prepared to sign a contract!)! Though, not something I'd recommend for most people!
If you have a problem with LibreOffice you can raise a bug report, and/or pay for commercial support. You can search the LibreOffice bug tracker to see if other people have hit the same problem -- can you do that for Microsoft Office???
You don't mention the multiple problems people have with Microsoft Office, including file corruption. Is that deliberate?
One place I worked, they had standardized on Microsoft Office, but I found LibreOffice easier to use, and no one complained about the files I sent them (I used the.doc type files).
LibreOffice is more 'Microsoft compatible' than Microsoft Office, it will read all Microsoft word formats, even old ones that Microsoft Office can't without downloading extra stuff. Note that files produced by one version of Microsoft Office may not be fully compatible with another version.
Also, LibreOffice supports over a 100 languages without having to pay extra.
For most people, both LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, have far more features than they'd ever need.
Oh, and you don't need a Microsoft Box to run it on, it will happily work on Linux as well, or on a Mac if you walk that way.
LibreOffice is free, but you can have paid support contracts from multiple sources if you need such, and you can freely distribute copies. LibreOffice is available on all major O/S's, which include Linux, Microsoft's & Apple's.
But Yes, I often send people PDF files. Note that LibreOffice allows you to edit PDF files!
Nobody is going to Mars this century. Deal with it.
I am confident that Man will get to Mars within 10 years, and that people will be living on Mars for several Martian years within 20 years.
Rocket technology is both far more sophisticated and cheaper in real terms, than it was when Man landed on the Moon. Almost totally reusable rockets of the BFR class and above, will make it happen. Provided Trump, and his ignorant ilk, don't get in the way.
Show us on the doll where the mean orange man hurt you...
My brain.
Seriously, I don't understand this big group of his supporters who can't perceive how comically incompetent he is.
Sorry for clipping your salient points, but it was to cut down on over-quoting for readability's sake.
In any 2 party democracy (US, UK, Australia and Canada for example),
The UK, Australia, and Canada, are not 2 party democracies -- they are multi-party, they usually have 4 or more political parties.
For example, the UK Parliament has 9 parties:
Conservative Party
Co-operative Party
Democratic Unionist Party
Green Party
Labour Party
Liberal Democrats
Plaid Cymru
Scottish National Party
Sinn Féin see: https://www.parliament.uk/abou...
The American political system is inherently unstable, with only two parties, it tends to be very polarised. In a multi-party democracy, when the major parties stop being representative, then new parties emerge -- in practice, this can't happen in the USA, though attempts have been made.
America is not really a democracy, it is essentially a 2 party dictatorship!
Probably New Zealand is the most democratic country in the world, as the relative proportions of the political parties in Parliament match those of the votes cast for each party. see: https://www.elections.org.nz/v...
I even been wiped of the chess board by an old woman who was probably at least 30 years older than myself
Anecdote... Had to laugh at your comment there. I played my first chess tournament in DC back in '82 with around 300 other people. While I was in the registration line, talking to the man behind me, we both noticed a woman about ten yards away from us, who was talking to herself with her head down and holding a coffee cup. When she looked up, she saw us and said, "don't mind me, I'm just writing letters", and proceeded to talk with us for the next couple minutes. During that time, I noticed she was sipping from an empty coffee cup. Of those people, who do you suppose I played in my very first ever tournament game?...Joan Slilch (sp?), who was at the time one of the top USCF rated women. And yes, she crushed me.
Well the old woman was toothless and looked a bit gaga. If you had seen her in a cafe, most people would never have thought she could play chess, let alone be able to beat most Club Players!
I could imagine her in a film, where she was the leader of a band of guerillas pretending to be harmless illiterate old woman providing tea&cakes to the enemy general, while taking careful note of their strategic intentions...
Slashdot Mirror
Seriously, we need to drop all of these idiotic private companies doing clearance duty. We are getting far too many ppl that do not belong.
Absolutely! The next thing you know, they'll be letting in idiots that won't even type out entire words! -_-
Far worse, they may even elect a president, who has extreme difficulty typing a coherent sentence, and are proud of their ignorance!
Hmm...
On third thoughts, perhaps we could make use of the weak magnetic field between the stars???
I have invented a starship drive that follows real Physics -- but, for practical purposes, requires impossible Engineering, at least for the foreseeable future (I recall Einstein was convinced that Gravitational waves that he predicted would never be detected!).
I don't really follow your point. The EM drive didn't follow real physics. With far future advanced engineering it'd still be a perpetual motion machine.
Please read the first paragraph of my post more carefully (the paragraph that you didn't quote). In essence, I said that that the EM drive did not work as advertised -- and although a force was measured, it was due to more pedestrian physics and the Earth's Magnetic field, hence not suitable as a Space Drive.
I suppose, I should spell things out in more detail for Americans (scary so many voted for Trump).
unless some other new technology like the EM drive were to be discovered
Speaking of fantasy physics....
The EM drive isnt a new piece of technology thats been discovered. It's a perpetual motion machine in disguise, i.e. complete and utter bunk.
They found the EM force was real, in once sense at least. It was actually the force on the wires leading to the apparatus -- hint, what happens to a wire carrying a current when it is in a magnetic field?
I have invented a starship drive that follows real Physics -- but, for practical purposes, requires impossible Engineering, at least for the foreseeable future (I recall Einstein was convinced that Gravitational waves that he predicted would never be detected!).
Even in Newton's theory of gravity, photons are deflected from the Sun. Interesting, even some Physicists forget this! However there is a difference of a factor of 2 between the predictions of Newton's theory of gravity and Einstein's general relativity, in the amount of the affect.
https://briankoberlein.com/201...
[...]
The catch is that the amount of bending predicted by Newton’s model is half what Einstein’s model predicted. Eddington actually demonstrated not only that light was gravitationally deflected, but that the amount matched Einstein, and not Newton.
[...]
https://www.researchgate.net/p...
[...]
Jerry Decker
Private Research
Newton Gravity can be manipulated to give an approximation of bending light, but was not done in advance of Einstein GR. So it is just an exercise with approximate results.
Local gravity acceleration does not depend on the small mass of a falling object, only the mass of the sun or other large body. Then curvature is implied.
g = MG/r2
Radial velocity changes according to curvature
dvr/dt = g
Taken into the usual hyperbolic geometry, it leads to an answer for bending of light that is only half as large as GR and the accepted observations
[...]
[...]
We're alone and they are too. And it will stay that way until we fade.
My 2 cents.
I think that the probability of intelligent Life on other planets is near certainty, but that the probability interacting with intelligent Life on other planets is near zero.
Of course I'm excluding the possibility of any intelligent Life on Earth going to other planets. I'll refrain from discussing the existence, or non existence, of intelligent Life on Earth!
This is what the Martians did. They became a full hydrogen economy. They converted a lot of their planet's water into hydrogen and it escaped into space! They didn't have enough fresh water left to sustain their economies. The resulting wars left lots of craters.
And their atmosphere got so thin without moisture that it was blown away by the solar winds. Over thousands of years, the solar radiation and planetary dust storms degraded everything and turned it all to dust.
Careful, you might start a new Woo-Woo trend like Flat Earthers, Global Warming Denialists, Moon Hoaxers, and Creationists -- all people who prefer beliefs over reality.
The Warming Denialists and Creationists, are probably the most well organised and dangerous.
I was making no comment wrt 'functional programming', merely that I had found lamdas useful in Java.
I think var should be banned in any sane development environment, and should never have been put into Java.
I have found lambdas very useful in a couple of use cases, such as when you need to pass a function for special functionality -- far better than defining a class to hold the function.
Java is now version 11, with 12 out Real Soon Now.
Java 9 did have a major, but necessary breakage. But Versions 10, 11, and 12 should not create too many problems for code that run on Java 9.
None of my Java programs, a few at least 15 years old, had any problems on on Java 9 or later!
Probably only developers that broke the rules, and used non public APIs had significant problems with Java 9.
Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence.
If you want a program to execute under a second, then write it in C, or another compiled language.
However, if the program is likely to be running a minute or more, than a well written Java program will most likely out perform a well written C program. Because in Java, the code parts that are executed intensely, will be compiled into native machine code optimized for that run time profile by the Just-in-Time Java compiler that is part of the JVM. The JIT can even in-line code that is at the end of a long pointer chain.
Big enterprise applications running on on big multi-core count computers with a terabyte of RAM can make effective use of Java for long running programs. As the JVM makes good use of the multicores and gobs of RAM.
I once ran a silly benchmark, and found that the JVM/JIT had created 2 threads to run code in the same method, because it had found that my 2 large for loops could be run in parallel.
I have programmed in over 25 languages, including COBOL, C (I actually was paid to teach C to experienced programmers one year), ARM3 assembler, and Python. Found Python had some good points, indenting eliminated brackets and no need for lots of semicolons, but I found it too gimmicky and didn’t handle multi-threading very well compared to Java.
I’ve found Java quite effective for writing short programs of less than 100 lines to explore mathematical ideas, like how many polygons can meet at a snugly at a point(see http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/...). So Java does not need massive projects to be really useful.
Cross platform support is also good. I wrote a Java Application to find duplicated files on my Linux box, and a friend had no problems running it on his Microsoft box.
I find Java is my favourite language, though I also have things I don’t like about it. No language is perfect, and there are many considerations to be taken into account for selecting a language for development.
The US is $22 trillion in debt. Our infrastructure is crumbling. Vets are sleeping outside in the freezing cold and not given the health care they entitled to. The US cannot healthcare for it's poorest citizens. And I could go on.
How much would it cost to put a colony on the moon, and what is the payoff? What do we have on the moon that we don't have on earth?
Don't worry, the Chinese will develop the Martian colonies -- so no need for American tax dollars!
Within a relatively short time, under 10 years from first landing humans, Mars would be self sufficient in terms of air, water, methane, and bulk building materials -- though band aids etc. may take tens of years. note that they will probably develop other materials and not need 'rubber', so no need for rubber trees.
Some minerals and goods will be obtained elsewhere in the Solar System, other than from Earth.
Most people, who haver given self sufficiency any real thought, are thinking of centuries for sufficient self sufficiency. Some luxury items we take for granted on Earth may never be practical to create off Earth, but you don't need luxury items to be self sufficient!
No need to refer to SF or Heinlein. All I need to do is point out that as far as the Earth/Moon system is concerned, having a base on the Moon gives you control of the ultimate High Ground.
Controlling the L5 And L6 points is probably far more significant!
https://www.space.com/30302-la...
I used to think that a Moon base was essential for the sustained exploration and colonisation of the rest of the Solar System, or at least for Mars.
But Elon has convinced me that a Martian colony could be started from Earth directly. Although, a Lunar colony may help, providing it doesn't divert necessary funds for the Martian colonies.
An actual self-sufficient colony yes. We're not remotely close to that though, it'll be an outpost. Earth dies, it dies.
Hmm...
Long term, we need a viable self sustaining population of humans off Earth.
This may well take a few centuries to achieve -- but if we don't start, then it will never happen.
I doubt that a Lunar colony by itself would be sufficient -- nor for that matter, a Martian colony. The latter, because currently we have no confidence that human females can reproduce effectively on Mars (does gestation require Earth normal gravity?), nor that sufficient babies would be able to develop properly to fully functioning adults. On the other hand, I'm not aware of evidence that it can't happen either!
Pregnancy, and early, childhood may need to done in large rotating space stations to maintain sufficient g forces to enable reliably producing and raising generations of humans off Earth. I'd love to be proved overly pessimistic!
Am making the reasonably assumption that radiation shielding is a mere engineering detail, along with the necessary ability to make the space stations self sufficient in terms of air and food.
There is abundant free energy in space from solar radiation, and raw materials can be mined from planetary surfaces.
Would not surprise me that that Mercury ended up with mining camps for metals and heavy industry. There is water ice in the Mercurian polar craters, and bountiful solar energy, plus no locals will be complaining about industrial pollution!
Mars can supply more than sufficient, water, oxygen, and methane for the colony, plus probably many of the minerals it needs. Suspect that the Martian colonies collectively, will be self sufficient in terms of basic food, water, air, and fuel within 20 years. Luxury food categories may take a few more years.
I see that asteroid mining will become economically viable within 50 years, and most probably a lot sooner.
In about 200 years will have colonies on the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Venus (cloud cities), and probably other places. Also manned expeditions to Pluto and beyond.
So long as the forces of ignorance are kept sufficiently in check, but unfortunately Creationists and their ilk, are hell bent on promoting belief over understanding.
Most of the new users since perhaps around 2012 came for the data analytics side.
IPython, NumPy, SciPy had been around for a while, but with maturing Jupyter, Pandas and TensorFlow/Keras, it really caught on. Other NLP and Machine Learning libraries probably helped too.
My use of Python today is completely different from how I used it earlier, nearly two decades ago, when it was mainly seen as a better Perl, back when Perl was THE scripting language. Now it is seen as a better MATLAB or a better R, even though the base language isn't itself vectorized as the others. The language and the standard library didn't improve much towards this. It was mainly the third party libraries that emerged and matured.
Speaking purely from a language standpoint, Julia has all right features for the analytics side, but the scientific community is right now with Python.
SageMath is free and is easily accessible from Python. It runs on Linux, and other O/S's including those from Microsoft.
SageMath is very powerful and is a good alternative to MatLab and Mathematica.
http://www.sagemath.org/
[...]
SageMath is a free open-source mathematics software system licensed under the GPL. It builds on top of many existing open-source packages: NumPy, SciPy, matplotlib, Sympy, Maxima, GAP, FLINT, R and many more. Access their combined power through a common, Python-based language or directly via interfaces or wrappers.
Mission: Creating a viable free open source alternative to Magma, Maple, Mathematica and Matlab.
[...]
Above comment is from me.
Having strange problems with Slashdot at the moment! :-(
Probable best to encourage people to move to Open Standards, which is something the British Government is doing right: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov...
Microsoft objected, when the British Government first mentioned they might: https://www.theregister.co.uk/...
Microsoft has been pushing Office 365 HARD for some time now. At microsoft.com, you have to do some digging to find anything about Office 2019, and even what you do find is scant. I only keep Microsoft Office around just in case I need 100% compatibility with a MS doc I've received or need to edit and send out. I'll probably buy Office 2019 some time this year, but it will probably be the final time I pay for an office suite. I prefer to use LibreOffice. Not only is the price right and the features meet and exceed all my needs, the UI is more intuitive and obvious.
Yeah, my mother who was then in her late seventies, found LibreOffice easier to use than Microsoft Office!
I have a love / hate relationship with LbreOffice. I love that it's free.
I hate that it doesn't actually work.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. Somewhere near the end of the process, I dragged a slide to reorder it in the list. The list got completely out of whack (i.e. managing a simple linked list FAIL). Then, after a couple more minutes, Impress crashed. Launching it again, it found a recovery file and offered to open it. Opening it, it showed me half of my first slide. Closed that and attempting to open my saved file and it was corrupted. I started over and got about 3 slides in when the exact same thing happened.
I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
That's just one example among many, many attempts over the years to use the product.
When a piece of software that supposedly competes with Office can't keep track of basic 101 programming skills like a linked list without corrupting RAM, I'm out. The devs of LibreOffice have had a decade to produce a stable, functional piece of software and have yet to succeed. That's why it's never taken off except in limited circles. People can keep pushing it, but it's broken-by-design software that will never run properly.
What was the last version of LibreOffice you tried? LibreOffice 6.2.0 is at RC3 level, and LibreOffice 6.1.4 is the latest stable version. If you are adventuresome, you can even download LibreOffice 6.3.0.0 Alpha and compile it yourself (trying asking Microsoft if you could download and compile their source code -- good luck, even if you are prepared to sign a contract!)! Though, not something I'd recommend for most people!
If you have a problem with LibreOffice you can raise a bug report, and/or pay for commercial support. You can search the LibreOffice bug tracker to see if other people have hit the same problem -- can you do that for Microsoft Office???
You don't mention the multiple problems people have with Microsoft Office, including file corruption. Is that deliberate?
One place I worked, they had standardized on Microsoft Office, but I found LibreOffice easier to use, and no one complained about the files I sent them (I used the .doc type files).
LibreOffice is more 'Microsoft compatible' than Microsoft Office, it will read all Microsoft word formats, even old ones that Microsoft Office can't without downloading extra stuff. Note that files produced by one version of Microsoft Office may not be fully compatible with another version.
Also, LibreOffice supports over a 100 languages without having to pay extra.
For most people, both LibreOffice and Microsoft Office, have far more features than they'd ever need.
Oh, and you don't need a Microsoft Box to run it on, it will happily work on Linux as well, or on a Mac if you walk that way.
Simply download LibreOffice, see: https://www.libreoffice.org/
or any other software that supports the OpenDocument format ISO26300, see: https://www.iso.org/standard/4...
The British Govenment saw the light, see: https://gdstechnology.blog.gov...
LibreOffice is free, but you can have paid support contracts from multiple sources if you need such, and you can freely distribute copies. LibreOffice is available on all major O/S's, which include Linux, Microsoft's & Apple's.
But Yes, I often send people PDF files. Note that LibreOffice allows you to edit PDF files!
Nobody is going to Mars this century. Deal with it.
I am confident that Man will get to Mars within 10 years, and that people will be living on Mars for several Martian years within 20 years.
Rocket technology is both far more sophisticated and cheaper in real terms, than it was when Man landed on the Moon. Almost totally reusable rockets of the BFR class and above, will make it happen. Provided Trump, and his ignorant ilk, don't get in the way.
Show us on the doll where the mean orange man hurt you...
My brain.
Seriously, I don't understand this big group of his supporters who can't perceive how comically incompetent he is.
Sorry for clipping your salient points, but it was to cut down on over-quoting for readability's sake.
In any 2 party democracy (US, UK, Australia and Canada for example),
The UK, Australia, and Canada, are not 2 party democracies -- they are multi-party, they usually have 4 or more political parties.
For example, the UK Parliament has 9 parties:
Conservative Party
Co-operative Party
Democratic Unionist Party
Green Party
Labour Party
Liberal Democrats
Plaid Cymru
Scottish National Party
Sinn Féin
see: https://www.parliament.uk/abou...
The American political system is inherently unstable, with only two parties, it tends to be very polarised. In a multi-party democracy, when the major parties stop being representative, then new parties emerge -- in practice, this can't happen in the USA, though attempts have been made.
America is not really a democracy, it is essentially a 2 party dictatorship!
Probably New Zealand is the most democratic country in the world, as the relative proportions of the political parties in Parliament match those of the votes cast for each party.
see: https://www.elections.org.nz/v...
I even been wiped of the chess board by an old woman who was probably at least 30 years older than myself
Anecdote...
Had to laugh at your comment there. I played my first chess tournament in DC back in '82 with around 300 other people. While I was in the registration line, talking to the man behind me, we both noticed a woman about ten yards away from us, who was talking to herself with her head down and holding a coffee cup. When she looked up, she saw us and said, "don't mind me, I'm just writing letters", and proceeded to talk with us for the next couple minutes. During that time, I noticed she was sipping from an empty coffee cup. Of those people, who do you suppose I played in my very first ever tournament game?...Joan Slilch (sp?), who was at the time one of the top USCF rated women. And yes, she crushed me.
Well the old woman was toothless and looked a bit gaga. If you had seen her in a cafe, most people would never have thought she could play chess, let alone be able to beat most Club Players!
I could imagine her in a film, where she was the leader of a band of guerillas pretending to be harmless illiterate old woman providing tea&cakes to the enemy general, while taking careful note of their strategic intentions ...