There was a BBC news page last year about another British project, simplicITy, which used the Italian ELDY Linux project to get elderly people acquainted with computers.
Here's the link: http://www.eldy.org/ (in italian), http://www.eldy.eu/ (in english).
Some more links: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldy, http://www.webnews.it/news/leggi/4217/eldy-linformatica-per-la-terza-eta/ (in italian) (I wonder if this isn't refered to more often because the primary sources are in italian?)
Apparently the idea is that the project contains both a technological and a social component: young people are encouraged to teach the elderly.
I absolutely *love* this quote on their english page:
Teach the people who taught you how to walk, how to surf the Internet!
Personally, I don't care if they earn a lot of money (ripping people off / providing a value-added service) by selling them gratis (FOSS) software, as long as it means that more old people can take their first baby steps on the informational superdirttrack. My parents acknowledge that nowadays, you seem to need that internet for more and more stuff, but they find it a bit too difficult to use.
Down with the Digital Divide!
I once programmed a bit for a company that still had a database system called SPEED-II, which ran on a Wang minicomputer. You *REALLY* don't want to know....
So, when can we expect the India-based PayPal-equivalent service with lower transaction costs and friendlier service?:-)
Seriously, seems like there is a business opportunity there.. Only you'd have to somehow get enough momentum for the network effect to help you instead of hinder you.
Seconded, looking at the Mesa repository it seems as if people are working very hard to get those new drivers working.
By the way, is there any plan for a radeon r600 gallium driver or is that after r300g is done?
I wonder what's going to happen in 2011, when the Novell-Microsoft "agreement not to sue on the valuable Microsoft intellectual property" patent agreement runs out.
To be honest, I haven't the faintest idea what will happen to Novell's customers. If I screw my tin-foil hat on tighter, I'd guess that Microsoft would start to rumble about customers with Mono to have to pay royalties. After all, the agreement's duration was long enough for Mono to have caught on in mission-critical software, surely there's profit to be made there by next year.
give me a break! and that is without Chaos theory applied to the entire differentiable manifold.
This is not about calculating some kind of Lyapunov exponent, predicting the *weather* 90 years from now is indead "FUD and hand waving", but the rise in sea level is predicted as a result of predicting the *climate* change instead.
If you're fat now, that's not because you stuffed yourself at a party 20 years ago and the Chaos butterfly fell in love with you, but it's more or less extrapolatable from your past diet, past weight, and eating habit trends.
But then, you probably already knew all that. It's debunked here (realclimate.org "Chaos and Climate")
There's a very simple solution for this: forbid housing in the floodplain and reserve it for grazing cattle on that extremely fertile clay ground, converting it into grassland. This is called an "uiterwaard" (in Dutch) (sorry, no English translation found--as someone said before here, hire Dutch engineers then, because they have the required vocabulary;-) ). In winter there's not much to eat outside for the cattle anyway so it doesn't matter that it's under water.
It completely astonishes me to read every year that in Great Britain and Ireland, people aren't allowed to use their garden hoses in summer because there's too little water, and then in winter some village or other floods to great loss of property (and sometimes life). It's not exactly rocket science if you look at the working solutions... and GB and NL have very similar climates (it rains a bit more in Britain though).
FUD.
That Ogg Theora isn't supported in hardware is presumably not due to any kind of property of the algorithm itself, but instead because there's no commercial incentive *at present* to build a hardware encoder/decoder for it.
The more it gets used, the more such a commercial incentive will become viable, so I wouldn't say it's "the gotcha that will most likely screw Theora", it will just mean that it will take a while before mobile phones can play it easily.
From the wikipedia page:
Theora is a variable-bitrate, DCT-based video compression scheme. Like most common video codecs, Theora also uses chroma subsampling, block based motion compensation and an 8 by 8 DCT block. It supports intra-coded frames and forward predictive frames, but not bi-predictive frames which are found in H.264 and VC-1. Theora also does not currently support interlacing, variable frame rates, or bit-depths larger than 8 bits per component.
If that Discrete Cosine Transform is the most computation-intensive part of the algorithm, it's solved because that is also used in JPEG and MPEG so hardware support is probably already in existence. Also the phrase "Like most common video codecs" sounds like hardware support doesn't need to be coded from scratch, as opposed to e.g. Dirac which uses wavelet transforms instead of DCT.
My rambling point is this: Finding life on Mars doesn't mean that ET is out there, it means that there must be another reason that we haven't found ET yet. It means that the origin of life isn't the hurdle, but the hurdle must still exist, otherwise we'd be seeing or hearing our neighbors by now.
This seeems like a nice point to hang the link to the E8 symmetry page of wikipedia: E8.
I found it awe-inspiring because it's completely beyond me:-).
Yes, possibly ending in some kind of apotheosis of the AI.
<weird_rant_mode>
What I'm amazed about is, should we be able to create such an intelligence, why would anyone believe that it will then desire to sort out all our current problems. It all seems very childish to me: a bit like "after we've destroyed this our only, beautiful blue world through our lazyness and wastefullness, don't worry, we'll create a God who will then give us a new one to play with because we took such good care of the old one".
Who's to say that such a God wouldn't do the equivalent of locking us up in our room until we've sorted out our mess -- and no cake for dessert!
Even if such a God would be benevolent doesn't mean it would give in to its puny-brained creators' every whim; after all if you see someone who is not very smart eating themselves sick on cake, the wisest thing might be to take it out of their hands and tell 'em off: "don't eat so much, you'll get sick, and you won't have any cake left tomorrow".
Replace "room" by "planet" and "cake" by "petroleum" if you like.
</weird_rant_mode>
Naah... kakos daimoon = evil "daemon".
The original word daemoon has many connotations, not all of them evil, as I recall.
To Slashdot admins: C'mon admins! do full UTF-8 support!
According to Wikipedia, the latter two types are often prefered because they lack the permanence of Constitutional treaties:
Excuse me? So the other countries have to sign and ratify the treaty and are bound by it, but for the proposer, the U.S.A, it can be dropped when it "becomes too inconvenient"?
There's no difference between that and an imperial decree. Did Dick Cheney make this one up or something.
For a good laugh, check out this statue by Michelangelo: Statue of Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli
Result of a slight mistranslation that Moses had horns. Makes him easier to distinguish from the other prophets, I guess...
Read "Reinventing Collapse" by Dmitry Orlov. You need to survive in order to have an economy; you don't need to have a functioning market economy to survive. In the Soviet Union, collapse is survivable!
"he Haber process is important because ammonia is difficult to produce on an industrial scale, and the fertilizer generated from the ammonia is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population."
, or the phosphate mines running out. Funnily enough, you never read about those things in the newspapers, instead you read about "economy" which doesn't, ultimately, exist. I say bring the discussion back to the real issues.
I don't think that anthropogenic global warming is really disputed anymore (will you please read chapter 2 of the AR4 synthesis report?). And I believe it has serious repercussions for food production (chapter 3), especially in Africa. (heat stress). Have you any idea how many Africans would emigrate if it becomes too hot for agriculture?
But really global warming is just an additional stress factor; if it didn't exist, some other stress factor would become more urgent for humanity's survival. Ultimately, an exponential process is.. well.. exponential, and people (voters) aren't schooled sufficiently to understand what that entails, otherwise we would already live in a very different society right now.
Looking at the PGDP project for it, it seems they've just started the letter L (vol. 16c Laing to Laplace) and finished vol. 8c (Destructor to Diameter) so it will take quite a few years before the whole monster is available on-line.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, that seems to be the most legal and cheap option. Maybe, if you dare, even telling your friends and family about this Blue Ray and AACP problem.
Do normal DVD's also have this problem? Or are they still ok to buy?
I don't understand. Why? Please enlighten us.
Here's the link: http://www.eldy.org/ (in italian), http://www.eldy.eu/ (in english).
Some more links: http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eldy, http://www.webnews.it/news/leggi/4217/eldy-linformatica-per-la-terza-eta/ (in italian) (I wonder if this isn't refered to more often because the primary sources are in italian?)
Apparently the idea is that the project contains both a technological and a social component: young people are encouraged to teach the elderly.
I absolutely *love* this quote on their english page:
Personally, I don't care if they earn a lot of money (ripping people off / providing a value-added service) by selling them gratis (FOSS) software, as long as it means that more old people can take their first baby steps on the informational superdirttrack. My parents acknowledge that nowadays, you seem to need that internet for more and more stuff, but they find it a bit too difficult to use.
Down with the Digital Divide!
I once programmed a bit for a company that still had a database system called SPEED-II, which ran on a Wang minicomputer. You *REALLY* don't want to know....
So, when can we expect the India-based PayPal-equivalent service with lower transaction costs and friendlier service? :-)
Seriously, seems like there is a business opportunity there.. Only you'd have to somehow get enough momentum for the network effect to help you instead of hinder you.
Seconded, looking at the Mesa repository it seems as if people are working very hard to get those new drivers working.
By the way, is there any plan for a radeon r600 gallium driver or is that after r300g is done?
I wonder what's going to happen in 2011, when the Novell-Microsoft "agreement not to sue on the valuable Microsoft intellectual property" patent agreement runs out.
To be honest, I haven't the faintest idea what will happen to Novell's customers. If I screw my tin-foil hat on tighter, I'd guess that Microsoft would start to rumble about customers with Mono to have to pay royalties. After all, the agreement's duration was long enough for Mono to have caught on in mission-critical software, surely there's profit to be made there by next year.
Norway isn't in the EU, IIRC.
FTFY.
This is not about calculating some kind of Lyapunov exponent, predicting the *weather* 90 years from now is indead "FUD and hand waving", but the rise in sea level is predicted as a result of predicting the *climate* change instead.
If you're fat now, that's not because you stuffed yourself at a party 20 years ago and the Chaos butterfly fell in love with you, but it's more or less extrapolatable from your past diet, past weight, and eating habit trends.
But then, you probably already knew all that. It's debunked here (realclimate.org "Chaos and Climate")
There's a very simple solution for this: forbid housing in the floodplain and reserve it for grazing cattle on that extremely fertile clay ground, converting it into grassland. This is called an "uiterwaard" (in Dutch) (sorry, no English translation found--as someone said before here, hire Dutch engineers then, because they have the required vocabulary ;-) ). In winter there's not much to eat outside for the cattle anyway so it doesn't matter that it's under water.
It completely astonishes me to read every year that in Great Britain and Ireland, people aren't allowed to use their garden hoses in summer because there's too little water, and then in winter some village or other floods to great loss of property (and sometimes life). It's not exactly rocket science if you look at the working solutions... and GB and NL have very similar climates (it rains a bit more in Britain though).
That Ogg Theora isn't supported in hardware is presumably not due to any kind of property of the algorithm itself, but instead because there's no commercial incentive *at present* to build a hardware encoder/decoder for it.
The more it gets used, the more such a commercial incentive will become viable, so I wouldn't say it's "the gotcha that will most likely screw Theora", it will just mean that it will take a while before mobile phones can play it easily.
From the wikipedia page:
If that Discrete Cosine Transform is the most computation-intensive part of the algorithm, it's solved because that is also used in JPEG and MPEG so hardware support is probably already in existence. Also the phrase "Like most common video codecs" sounds like hardware support doesn't need to be coded from scratch, as opposed to e.g. Dirac which uses wavelet transforms instead of DCT.
My rambling point is this: Finding life on Mars doesn't mean that ET is out there, it means that there must be another reason that we haven't found ET yet. It means that the origin of life isn't the hurdle, but the hurdle must still exist, otherwise we'd be seeing or hearing our neighbors by now.
That (quite depressing) theory has been dubbed "The Great Filter" by Robin Hanson.
What about mammoths? They died out around the time Jericho was founded and agriculture invented.
And because such retroviral infections are so common, we can see our farm animals better in the dark..
oh wait.. never mind...
This seeems like a nice point to hang the link to the E8 symmetry page of wikipedia: E8. :-).
I found it awe-inspiring because it's completely beyond me
Yes, possibly ending in some kind of apotheosis of the AI.
<weird_rant_mode>
What I'm amazed about is, should we be able to create such an intelligence, why would anyone believe that it will then desire to sort out all our current problems. It all seems very childish to me: a bit like "after we've destroyed this our only, beautiful blue world through our lazyness and wastefullness, don't worry, we'll create a God who will then give us a new one to play with because we took such good care of the old one".
Who's to say that such a God wouldn't do the equivalent of locking us up in our room until we've sorted out our mess -- and no cake for dessert!
Even if such a God would be benevolent doesn't mean it would give in to its puny-brained creators' every whim; after all if you see someone who is not very smart eating themselves sick on cake, the wisest thing might be to take it out of their hands and tell 'em off: "don't eat so much, you'll get sick, and you won't have any cake left tomorrow".
Replace "room" by "planet" and "cake" by "petroleum" if you like.
</weird_rant_mode>
Naah... kakos daimoon = evil "daemon".
The original word daemoon has many connotations, not all of them evil, as I recall.
To Slashdot admins: C'mon admins! do full UTF-8 support!
According to Wikipedia, the latter two types are often prefered because they lack the permanence of Constitutional treaties:
Excuse me? So the other countries have to sign and ratify the treaty and are bound by it, but for the proposer, the U.S.A, it can be dropped when it "becomes too inconvenient"?
There's no difference between that and an imperial decree. Did Dick Cheney make this one up or something.
For a good laugh, check out this statue by Michelangelo: Statue of Moses in San Pietro in Vincoli
Result of a slight mistranslation that Moses had horns. Makes him easier to distinguish from the other prophets, I guess...
it's very nice but rough around the edges, i.e. not fully OpenGL 2 yet. Openarena plays well but Nexuiz is ah.. extra challenging at the moment :-)
Read "Reinventing Collapse" by Dmitry Orlov. You need to survive in order to have an economy; you don't need to have a functioning market economy to survive. In the Soviet Union, collapse is survivable!
Not really..
if population growth is exponential, and we live in a closed system (spaceship earth) with only energy input (sunlight), then we are *GUARANTEED* to run into some kind of resource limit at one point because our bodies need food:
Whether it's the end of cheap energy from hydrocarbons, the end of cheap energy for cheap Nitrogen fertilizer via the energy-intensive Haber-Bosch process for NH4 (I quote
"he Haber process is important because ammonia is difficult to produce on an industrial scale, and the fertilizer generated from the ammonia is responsible for sustaining one-third of the Earth's population."
, or the phosphate mines running out. Funnily enough, you never read about those things in the newspapers, instead you read about "economy" which doesn't, ultimately, exist. I say bring the discussion back to the real issues. .. well.. exponential, and people (voters) aren't schooled sufficiently to understand what that entails, otherwise we would already live in a very different society right now.
I don't think that anthropogenic global warming is really disputed anymore (will you please read chapter 2 of the AR4 synthesis report?). And I believe it has serious repercussions for food production (chapter 3), especially in Africa. (heat stress). Have you any idea how many Africans would emigrate if it becomes too hot for agriculture?
But really global warming is just an additional stress factor; if it didn't exist, some other stress factor would become more urgent for humanity's survival. Ultimately, an exponential process is
Looking at the PGDP project for it, it seems they've just started the letter L (vol. 16c Laing to Laplace) and finished vol. 8c (Destructor to Diameter) so it will take quite a few years before the whole monster is available on-line.