Douglas Coupland said it best
"Doors sure are important to nerds." When companies start to forget this, they might still have staff, but most really techie techies verge on adult ADHD or into the autism spectrum. Not having a door to close can keep one out of flow state semi-permanently.
This is a pain in the arse, but instead of running Skype with the firewall switched off, you can run Skype in the disk image (uninstalled), and be able to quit and restart indefinitely.
It's just annoying b/c you have to agree to run a downloaded program once, and then agree to allow incoming connections to Skype twice, so you feel like you're using Vista. But with a better GUI. And faster.
FTA, the patent was filed on Dec 2, 1997. From Google's Corporate History page, they describe setting up their first data centre in 1998.
Still absolutely ridiculous that this idea was patentable, and that the patent infringement case could happen this late.
Re:Different things for different reasons
on
Vista Vs. Gutsy Gibbon
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Hey - It's Ubuntu 7.10, not 7.1 for a reason. "7" indicates the year of release, and 10 indicates the month. Ubuntu 7.1 would be whichever Feisty Alpha they released in January.
The trend affects almost every group of critically ill patients -- from trauma sufferers in the ER to heart attack victims, patients with anemia and those undergoing chemotherapy.... "After you control for sickness and all sorts of things, patients who receive transfusions still have more heart attacks. It makes no sense," says Dr. Jonathan Stamler, a professor of medicine at Duke University Medical Center.
It'll be interesting to see whether the research proves that oral nitrates will be effective. The Time article mentioned that mouse studies have shown that adding NO to blood given to mice reduces their likelihood of cardiac complications. I haven't been able to get at the original journal article yet, though.
It's actually remarkably difficult to notice trends that happen "in the first 30 days after a transfusion," because there's so many health issues to control for. So, whether this is true or not (I RTFA but not the journal article it's based on), I can understand why it would take a long time to realize that there was a correlation between blood older than 1 day and heart attacks/stroke.
The problem listed in the article is an increase in heart attacks and strokes post-transfusion. Time's more complete article says that 25% of blood donor recipients have heart attacks within the 30 days post-transfusion, as opposed to 8% of patients who came in to the emergency with similar conditions, but did not get a blood transfusion.
When the problem shows itself over the 30 days post-transfusion, it can be hard for medical researchers to notice and research the issue. I'd suggest (assuming this research has been done properly), having my probability of MI increase from less than 1 in 10 to 1 in 4, would make me want them to consider altering the requirements, whether it be by providing more new blood, or by artificially adding Nitric Oxide (not Nitrous Oxide, as the summary claims).
1) Potentially die due to running out of blood (although many blood recipients aren't at death's door when they receive transfusions) 2) Potentially die post-transfusion from a heart attack or stroke 3) Potentially receive added nitric oxide, once study of this matter has moved forwards.
Shouldn't the goal of medical research be that we don't have medical beggars, but instead that anyone can have the best possible options?
They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a numberof closedissuesin the OOoissue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."
The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.
The download site says it'll take forever. Anyone know where to find a torrent? Using Google I can find the 1.1 torrent on the site, and a few 2.0 and 2.1 torrents on other sites.
I doubt that they have as much corporate "encouragement" to stay using copyrighted dead-tree textbooks. The movement towards English-language, open, software-based textbooks has been slow and decentralized.
Hopefully, these countries have budgeted textbook creation as part of their operating costs for the OLPC project. If not, you're right, it will fail just like it has in the U.S.
I agree, but that's because I had to study from copyrighted, dead-tree textbooks. If my textbooks were updated for free like OSS software, I would have been thrilled to always have cutting-edge information.
The safer and more economically viable a country is, the less the brain drain will occur. When most citizens in a country are educated and have an understanding of and belief in freedom, won't that country be able to negotiate well on the international market? Won't that lead to the country eventually being able to pay their professionals decent wages?
The problem now is that only the richest educate their children well, and those children seek economic stability elsewhere. When the majority of the population has access to good education, there will be less of a brain drain, not more.
You're right that giving someone a laptop might have little effect on helping them learn. But, that's because we're thinking of a laptop just as a laptop, as a way to surf the net and type an essay.
All of these things will actually help kids learn:
Universal access to good quality, appropriate language, frequently updated textbooks
Access to experts in kids fields of interest (I remember one of my elementary school friends becoming pen pals with a zoo keeper from our local zoo)
Access to training tools for teachers
Unfiltered access to a variety of sources discussing history, geography, politics and economics (that's to help towards the path to freedom -- people must know that freedom can exist in order to fight for it)
All of those things can be fulfilled by a series of networked laptops for kids, at a much lower cost than doing things the dead-tree way. People will have to make some serious investment on the software side of this project for it to work. But, it could work. And if it does, it will seriously turn the world upside-down. Not because they have a laptop, but instead because they have access to textbooks, communication, and unfiltered information.
Asteroid is apparently firewire audio interface for Garageband. Basically, so you could plug in a keyboard, guitar or microphone and record. I'm not exactly sure why this is such a big deal, seeing as M-Audio sells the same thing in both USB and firewire.
Toronto, ON, Canada has been called the most multicultural city in the world by the UN. In general, large cities in Canada are pretty diverse, while more rural communities are still pretty homogenous.
Also, in Canada, we've favoured more of an approach that's "mixed salad" rather than "melting pot," so areas that are heterogenous are very heterogenous.
But my experience has been that the disparity between the rich and the poor in Canada is generally less sharp. The public schools in our poorest areas aren't significantly worse than the public schools in our richest neigbourhoods. That can provide real hope, particularly in impoverished areas with high numbers of immigrants. Generational poverty is harder to tackle, because then you get into learned hopelessness and helplessness.
I'm very confused about why it's generally considered OK for Firefox to be moving out into the microformats arena. Is it because it's not a monopoly? Or because microformats have been created by others? Would it be evil for MS to start embracing microformats?
How do you prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission - oh yeah, antiretrovirals. There's your prevention.
Also, if you run an African community development agency, rather than just an AIDS charity, you realise that when 50% people (not just adults) of some communities are HIV seropositive, then even if you could miraculously get everyone to start using condoms 100% tomorrow, there's no way the community could survive without treating people who already have HIV. They're losing their parents, their teachers, their health care providers, the people who keep communities together. Without treating those infected, significant swathes of Africa will simply cease to exist.
Condoms, civil rights work, and education could have worked on their own about 10 years ago. Now it's too late to consider prevention without treatment in Africa. That said, India and mainland China both are where Africa was 7-8 years ago. We need those three initiatives in those two countries now, before it's too late.
Actually, medicine prevents mother-to-child transmissions, which is one of the most concerning ways AIDS is being spread at present. Education and condoms are important, but they rely on large-scale societal change. Many ground-level workers say that providing AIDS drugs to pregnant women and committing to working on women's rights will have more long-lasting preventative repercussions than providing more condoms could ever do.
These ideas are ones that have been influenced by the book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
Most health professionals working in HIV/AIDS in third world countries regularly state that the only way to really tackle the AIDS epidemic is for drug companies to allow generic drugs to be made and given to people in third world countries, while allowing the expensive, patented, proprietary medications to continue to be sold in first world countries.
Of course, Merck et al haven't been too eager to open that intellectual property floodgate, and they've either said "No" outright, or volunteered to donate a small percentage of drugs (much less than addressing the epidemic would require).
Any other multinational corporation with substantial patents and IP concerns must wonder be aware that reducing the patent protection from big pharma could eventually affect them as well.
So, when Bill Gates donates large amounts of money to buy patented medications, he's equally protecting the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of international IP laws. Convenient way to look great, do good things, all while protect his own interests.
Sometimes "good" is the enemy of "best" and rich & powerful people using their money to buy drugs at ridiculous prices allows them to avoid pressuring our world governments to level the playing field a little for the poorest of the poorest.
Perhaps that is true with the blue sun shirts. The Serenity shirts were definitely not identical to the image/font used by Fox/Universal. I find it particularly reprehensible that 11th hour was told to take down all shirts with Serenity written on it in English or Chinese, no matter the font, layout, or colouring.
It shouldn't be legal to trademark a common word. You can only complain of trademark infringement when it might contribute to trademark dilution.
I can make a t-shirt with the word "Bounce" on it in my handwriting, and it doesn't violate the trademark of Proctor&Gamble. That said, I can't sell a laundry product called "Bounce" and not expect to have angry lawyers chase me down.
Slashdot Mirror
"Doors sure are important to nerds." When companies start to forget this, they might still have staff, but most really techie techies verge on adult ADHD or into the autism spectrum. Not having a door to close can keep one out of flow state semi-permanently.
This is a pain in the arse, but instead of running Skype with the firewall switched off, you can run Skype in the disk image (uninstalled), and be able to quit and restart indefinitely.
It's just annoying b/c you have to agree to run a downloaded program once, and then agree to allow incoming connections to Skype twice, so you feel like you're using Vista. But with a better GUI. And faster.
FTA, the patent was filed on Dec 2, 1997. From Google's Corporate History page, they describe setting up their first data centre in 1998.
Still absolutely ridiculous that this idea was patentable, and that the patent infringement case could happen this late.
Hey - It's Ubuntu 7.10, not 7.1 for a reason. "7" indicates the year of release, and 10 indicates the month. Ubuntu 7.1 would be whichever Feisty Alpha they released in January.
It's actually remarkably difficult to notice trends that happen "in the first 30 days after a transfusion," because there's so many health issues to control for. So, whether this is true or not (I RTFA but not the journal article it's based on), I can understand why it would take a long time to realize that there was a correlation between blood older than 1 day and heart attacks/stroke.
The problem listed in the article is an increase in heart attacks and strokes post-transfusion. Time's more complete article says that 25% of blood donor recipients have heart attacks within the 30 days post-transfusion, as opposed to 8% of patients who came in to the emergency with similar conditions, but did not get a blood transfusion.
When the problem shows itself over the 30 days post-transfusion, it can be hard for medical researchers to notice and research the issue. I'd suggest (assuming this research has been done properly), having my probability of MI increase from less than 1 in 10 to 1 in 4, would make me want them to consider altering the requirements, whether it be by providing more new blood, or by artificially adding Nitric Oxide (not Nitrous Oxide, as the summary claims).
Actually, the situation is closer to:
1) Potentially die due to running out of blood (although many blood recipients aren't at death's door when they receive transfusions)
2) Potentially die post-transfusion from a heart attack or stroke
3) Potentially receive added nitric oxide, once study of this matter has moved forwards.
Shouldn't the goal of medical research be that we don't have medical beggars, but instead that anyone can have the best possible options?
They seem to have done some work on Mailmerge. Here's to hoping that it's usable, now. I wonder if they've also improved printing labels from a database. There are a number of closed issues in the OOo issue tracker where people have said "this doesn't work right" and the OOo team says, "Just do it this other, less-intuitive way."
The last it seems to be mentioned in the issue tracker, the target fix was changed from OOo 2.0 to OOo Later. That was in 2004, so I'm not hopeful.
The download site says it'll take forever. Anyone know where to find a torrent? Using Google I can find the 1.1 torrent on the site, and a few 2.0 and 2.1 torrents on other sites.
I doubt that they have as much corporate "encouragement" to stay using copyrighted dead-tree textbooks. The movement towards English-language, open, software-based textbooks has been slow and decentralized.
Hopefully, these countries have budgeted textbook creation as part of their operating costs for the OLPC project. If not, you're right, it will fail just like it has in the U.S.
I agree, but that's because I had to study from copyrighted, dead-tree textbooks. If my textbooks were updated for free like OSS software, I would have been thrilled to always have cutting-edge information.
The safer and more economically viable a country is, the less the brain drain will occur. When most citizens in a country are educated and have an understanding of and belief in freedom, won't that country be able to negotiate well on the international market? Won't that lead to the country eventually being able to pay their professionals decent wages?
The problem now is that only the richest educate their children well, and those children seek economic stability elsewhere. When the majority of the population has access to good education, there will be less of a brain drain, not more.
You're right that giving someone a laptop might have little effect on helping them learn. But, that's because we're thinking of a laptop just as a laptop, as a way to surf the net and type an essay.
All of these things will actually help kids learn:
All of those things can be fulfilled by a series of networked laptops for kids, at a much lower cost than doing things the dead-tree way. People will have to make some serious investment on the software side of this project for it to work. But, it could work. And if it does, it will seriously turn the world upside-down. Not because they have a laptop, but instead because they have access to textbooks, communication, and unfiltered information.
The guy who made Kiwi made one called "Pony" in his undergrad:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lNu8u_Kpa00
It's not as good technically, but even then he had a talent for affecting the emotions.
That's the most brilliant thing I've read all week. Thanks for making my day!
Asteroid is apparently firewire audio interface for Garageband. Basically, so you could plug in a keyboard, guitar or microphone and record. I'm not exactly sure why this is such a big deal, seeing as M-Audio sells the same thing in both USB and firewire.
Thanks! Makes more sense now.
Toronto, ON, Canada has been called the most multicultural city in the world by the UN. In general, large cities in Canada are pretty diverse, while more rural communities are still pretty homogenous.
Also, in Canada, we've favoured more of an approach that's "mixed salad" rather than "melting pot," so areas that are heterogenous are very heterogenous.
But my experience has been that the disparity between the rich and the poor in Canada is generally less sharp. The public schools in our poorest areas aren't significantly worse than the public schools in our richest neigbourhoods. That can provide real hope, particularly in impoverished areas with high numbers of immigrants. Generational poverty is harder to tackle, because then you get into learned hopelessness and helplessness.
I'm very confused about why it's generally considered OK for Firefox to be moving out into the microformats arena. Is it because it's not a monopoly? Or because microformats have been created by others? Would it be evil for MS to start embracing microformats?
How do you prevent mother-to-child HIV transmission - oh yeah, antiretrovirals. There's your prevention.
Also, if you run an African community development agency, rather than just an AIDS charity, you realise that when 50% people (not just adults) of some communities are HIV seropositive, then even if you could miraculously get everyone to start using condoms 100% tomorrow, there's no way the community could survive without treating people who already have HIV. They're losing their parents, their teachers, their health care providers, the people who keep communities together. Without treating those infected, significant swathes of Africa will simply cease to exist.
Condoms, civil rights work, and education could have worked on their own about 10 years ago. Now it's too late to consider prevention without treatment in Africa. That said, India and mainland China both are where Africa was 7-8 years ago. We need those three initiatives in those two countries now, before it's too late.
Actually, medicine prevents mother-to-child transmissions, which is one of the most concerning ways AIDS is being spread at present. Education and condoms are important, but they rely on large-scale societal change. Many ground-level workers say that providing AIDS drugs to pregnant women and committing to working on women's rights will have more long-lasting preventative repercussions than providing more condoms could ever do.
These ideas are ones that have been influenced by the book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy".
Most health professionals working in HIV/AIDS in third world countries regularly state that the only way to really tackle the AIDS epidemic is for drug companies to allow generic drugs to be made and given to people in third world countries, while allowing the expensive, patented, proprietary medications to continue to be sold in first world countries.
Of course, Merck et al haven't been too eager to open that intellectual property floodgate, and they've either said "No" outright, or volunteered to donate a small percentage of drugs (much less than addressing the epidemic would require).
Any other multinational corporation with substantial patents and IP concerns must wonder be aware that reducing the patent protection from big pharma could eventually affect them as well.
So, when Bill Gates donates large amounts of money to buy patented medications, he's equally protecting the sanctity of human life and the sanctity of international IP laws. Convenient way to look great, do good things, all while protect his own interests.
Sometimes "good" is the enemy of "best" and rich & powerful people using their money to buy drugs at ridiculous prices allows them to avoid pressuring our world governments to level the playing field a little for the poorest of the poorest.
One of the people who owns one has posted a video of it booting and some general use. It looks slick.
Perhaps that is true with the blue sun shirts. The Serenity shirts were definitely not identical to the image/font used by Fox/Universal. I find it particularly reprehensible that 11th hour was told to take down all shirts with Serenity written on it in English or Chinese, no matter the font, layout, or colouring. It shouldn't be legal to trademark a common word. You can only complain of trademark infringement when it might contribute to trademark dilution. I can make a t-shirt with the word "Bounce" on it in my handwriting, and it doesn't violate the trademark of Proctor&Gamble. That said, I can't sell a laundry product called "Bounce" and not expect to have angry lawyers chase me down.