So the text you quote, "the Commission is considering ordering Microsoft and OEMs to obligate users to choose a particular browser when setting up a new PC" is IMHO NOT evident from the Commission's press release. Maybe it's in the actual Statement of Objections, otherwise.. sounds like Microsoft lying to the SEC and putting words in the Commissioner's mouth.
If you'd change "a particular browser" to "any browser of their choice" the sentence would probably be correct (IANAL btw).
If that "Statement of Objections" is public I'll try to find a link to that, too. The level of ignorance and FUD here today is a bit worrying, otherwise:-)
Official Experienced Mechanic: "Now that you've chosen that GM car without a gas tank preinstalled, would you like us to fit it with a small gas tank or a large one (which takes up more space and is more expensive but you need to refuel less often)?"
Grandmother: "A small one, I only need it for shopping"
Maybe my bias shows:-) I did mean a bit that my anecdotal experience in 3 dutch universities was that people used VM/CMS, VAX/VMS, BSD Unix, Sys V Unix, AIX, Irix, SunOS, MS-DOS, Atari ST, for their work; I'm not saying THAT's good but it gives one a bit of a general idea what computers can all be used for. This was mostly in chemistry and informatics I might add.
What I kind of read between the lines from your post, is that nowadays it is considered normal that everyone tries to use MS Windows for all tasks, and that the idea that certain programs run on other OSes/computer systems is just not a concept people encounter when they start to study.
I can't imagine that in the Netherlands scientists get no exposure whatsoever with various and sundry ancient or modern OSes besides MS Windows. But as I said, maybe my bias shows because I'm a bit of a Linux fanatic:-)
I remember when there was talk of MS Windows computers being used to run Gaussian (a program used for large computations on molecules), and IIRC the program had to be painstakingly "dumbed down" to 32-bit file I/O because MS Windows couldn't deal with files larger than 4Gb. This was decades ago, I'm sure it must have improved in the mean time, but still.
What I really mean is: you should use the computer systems for your work that get your work done; and the idea that all possible kinds of scientific work can be shoehorned to be done on off-the-shelf MS Windows systems, is ridiculous to me; it doesn't even run on more than one CPU architecture AFAIK, and I'm not convinced it can run a calculation for a month without crashing (I'm told MS Windows XP is much much better nowadays so I could be wrong on this). Look at the top-500 supercomputers sorted by OS family and you'll see what I mean.
Hmm. all that said, I AM impressed that #10 on that list is a supercomputer that runs MS Windows. Would be nice to see a performance comparison between some protein folding work on top of GNU/Linux and on top of MS Windows super-server-version, on that Dawning 5000a cluster
Your argument only applies to the U.S. of A. For the rest of the world, your logic can be turned the other way around: it is unpatriotic to pay a foreign corporation, if you can get good enough functionality for much less, and support your nation's IT companies in the process.
5. Swirl in a basic selection in the language of the region from http://gutenberg.org/ [gutenberg.org] and http://www.wikipedia.org/ [wikipedia.org] you have a decent pedagogic resource
I googled a little and apparently there is a project dslinux.org, but I suspect that
The DS only has 4MB of RAM which severely limits how much you can do with DSLinux. Thanks to the work of Amadeus and many others, the DLDI Build will now detect and enable the GBA RAM automatically on most Slot-2 cards that have built-in RAM. If you do not have a RAM extension you may experience crashes and "out of memory" errors when running most of the applications.
means you can't easily run sugar or abiword on it..
For textbooks that are public domain already and haven't changed much in the past 70+ years, I recommend to inform people of the existence of Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders.
These kind people OCR and proofread and format texts of all sorts. Only texts that are out of copyright (i.e. very old). If you're good in correcting text, you can join in the fun:-)
If you know anyone in Uruguay who is good in LaTeX and has F2-level access to PGDP, please point 'em to the following math book which will hopefully enter the F2 phase on PGDP soon:
here (subscription probably required)
H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight, Elementary Algebra for Schools, 1885 (in English)
Hm.. sorry.. it seems it's not ready for F2 yet.
Table of contents:
I. DEFINITIONS. SUBSTITUTIONS.... 1
II. NEGATIVE QUANTITIES. ADDITION OF LIKE TERMS . 9
III. SIMPLE BRACKETS. ADDITION.... 13
IV. SUBTRACTION....... 19
V. MULTIPLICATION....... 23
VI. DIVISION........ 34
VII. REMOVAL AND INSERTION OF BRACKETS... 42
VIII. SIMPLE EQUATIONS....... 48
IX. SYMBOLICAL EXPRESSION...... 57
X. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMPLE EQUATIONS . . 65
XI. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE.
SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS.... 70
XII. ELEMENTARY FRACTIONS. SIMPLE EXPRESSIONS . 72
XIII. SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . . . . . 77
XIV. PROBLEMS LEADING TO SIMULTANEOUS EQUATIONS . 87
XV. INVOLUTION........ 92
XVI. EVOLUTION........ 96
XVII. RESOLUTION INTO FACTORS..... 106
XVIII. HIGHEST COMMON FACTOR..... 120
XIX. FRACTIONS ........ 128
XX. LOWEST COMMON MULTIPLE..... 136
XXI. ADDITION AND SUBTRACTION OF FRACTIONS . . 140
XXII. MISCELLANEOUS FRACTIONS..... 152
XXIII. HARDER EQUATIONS...... 164
XXIV. HARDER PROBLEMS...... 172
XXV. QUADRATIC EQUATIONS...... 178
XXVI. SIMULTANEOUS QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . . 188
XXVII. PROBLEMS LEADING TO QUADRATIC EQUATIONS . . 195
XXVIII. HARDER FACTORS....... 201
XXIX. MISCELLANEOUS THEOREMS AND EXAMPLES . . 208
XXX. THE THEORY OF INDICES..... 226
XXXI. ELEMENTARY SURDS...... 239
XXXII. RATIO, PROPORTION, AND VARIATION... 256
XXXIII. ARITHMETICAL PROGRESSION..... 273
XXXIV. GEOMETRICAL PROGRESSION...... 280
XXXV. HARMONICAL PROGRESSION..... 287
MISCELLANEOUS EXAMPLES..... 293
At P1 level (for beginners) there's a Appleton's Spanish-English dictionary being done that might be interesting for Uruguayan educators (admittedly doing dictionaries can be boring to tears even if you like PGDP;-))
For those who haven't: please, just this once, RTFA.
If there was a "news for nerds, stuff that matters" yearly award I'd nominate this story!
About Open Source Government: IIRC, Douglas Hofstadter wrote in one of his books, years ago, about a game where the purpose of the game was to each turn, change the rules. I don't remember the name, lexus or something. If anyone remembers please reply.
Maybe having laws with version control and unit testing would be a good idea:-)
I interpreted the bit he said about the U.S.A government as follows:
The sub-prime mortgage crisis was a disaster in the making years ago, it was a known, public problem of a kind Jared Diamond describes in his book "Collapse": the problem and its solution are known on time to the government, but nevertheless, it is politically inexpedient ("taboo"?) to take action.
Laws were proposed to correct this disaster in time.
These laws were not enacted because of lobbying, i.e. the best interest of the people of the U.S.A was not served.
This exposes a systemic failure of the U.S.A lawmaking process, as in: it can fail in a crisis situation because of people gaming the system and taking advantage of the lobbying possibilities for their own gain.
I think systemic failures cannot be repaired from within the system, a new system must be devised which is immune to this kind of treacherous attack.
A lot of smart people are necessary to help rewrite the lawmaking process to route around this current "bug", for their own benefit.
Did I kind of get the gist? IANAL, IANAPolitician, IANASociologist, etc. etc.
Last time I looked, it was here, but as that page says this is an unofficial list.
Methinks some of the bugs look bad, but at least you can *see* what's happening "in the kitchen" with Debian.
(a bit personal but hey this is Slashdot) Are you family of the (should have been slightly more legendary) Jean Monnet?
I always thought the "secret plan" behind the EU was the following priority list: 1. No more war 2. No more famine 3. there is no point 3, we'll all have to make it up as we go along
I learned it in a 2-day course a long time ago, so it can't be THAT hard to learn to use:-) but I don't have experience in many other 4GL's e.g. this newfangled Visual Basic so I can't compare.
Loved the Data Dictionary concept and the automagic database table restructuring though. It also saved companies that had invested in Wang VS a lot of grief because they could with some difficulty rewrite their business logic from SPEED-II to APPX.
Slashdot Mirror
Antitrust: Commission confirms sending a Statement of Objections to Microsoft on the tying of Internet Explorer to Windows
So the text you quote, "the Commission is considering ordering Microsoft and OEMs to obligate users to choose a particular browser when setting up a new PC" is IMHO NOT evident from the Commission's press release. Maybe it's in the actual Statement of Objections, otherwise.. sounds like Microsoft lying to the SEC and putting words in the Commissioner's mouth.
If you'd change "a particular browser" to "any browser of their choice" the sentence would probably be correct (IANAL btw).
If that "Statement of Objections" is public I'll try to find a link to that, too. The level of ignorance and FUD here today is a bit worrying, otherwise :-)
Grandmother: "A small one, I only need it for shopping"
Hey look! I made a car analogy :-)
Strange this isn't picked up in the Linux Standard Base.
What I kind of read between the lines from your post, is that nowadays it is considered normal that everyone tries to use MS Windows for all tasks, and that the idea that certain programs run on other OSes/computer systems is just not a concept people encounter when they start to study.
I can't imagine that in the Netherlands scientists get no exposure whatsoever with various and sundry ancient or modern OSes besides MS Windows. But as I said, maybe my bias shows because I'm a bit of a Linux fanatic :-)
I remember when there was talk of MS Windows computers being used to run Gaussian (a program used for large computations on molecules), and IIRC the program had to be painstakingly "dumbed down" to 32-bit file I/O because MS Windows couldn't deal with files larger than 4Gb. This was decades ago, I'm sure it must have improved in the mean time, but still.
What I really mean is: you should use the computer systems for your work that get your work done; and the idea that all possible kinds of scientific work can be shoehorned to be done on off-the-shelf MS Windows systems, is ridiculous to me; it doesn't even run on more than one CPU architecture AFAIK, and I'm not convinced it can run a calculation for a month without crashing (I'm told MS Windows XP is much much better nowadays so I could be wrong on this). Look at the top-500 supercomputers sorted by OS family and you'll see what I mean.
Hmm. all that said, I AM impressed that #10 on that list is a supercomputer that runs MS Windows. Would be nice to see a performance comparison between some protein folding work on top of GNU/Linux and on top of MS Windows super-server-version, on that Dawning 5000a cluster
I'm curious, in which country was this?
Your argument only applies to the U.S. of A. For the rest of the world, your logic can be turned the other way around: it is unpatriotic to pay a foreign corporation, if you can get good enough functionality for much less, and support your nation's IT companies in the process.
To your point 5 I'd like to add that a lot of the content from the Gutenberg project is produced by the Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders volunteers.
*YOU* can be one.
It's all very old books though, so for sciences that are still young, such as computer science, this wouldn't help much.
Maybe like this
means you can't easily run sugar or abiword on it..
These kind people OCR and proofread and format texts of all sorts. Only texts that are out of copyright (i.e. very old). If you're good in correcting text, you can join in the fun :-)
If you know anyone in Uruguay who is good in LaTeX and has F2-level access to PGDP, please point 'em to the following math book which will hopefully enter the F2 phase on PGDP soon: here (subscription probably required)
H.S. Hall and S.R. Knight, Elementary Algebra for Schools, 1885 (in English)
Hm.. sorry.. it seems it's not ready for F2 yet.
Table of contents:
At P1 level (for beginners) there's a Appleton's Spanish-English dictionary being done that might be interesting for Uruguayan educators (admittedly doing dictionaries can be boring to tears even if you like PGDP ;-))
Book tip for ultimate future happiness: Galapagos, by Kurt Vonnegut.
Mmmmmm... zeekraal...
But you have to be careful what trousers it's wearing.
Let's start with saying that it's now apparently being improved and the issues fixed:
message by representative of Foxconn China
Discussed on Slashdot
But before that.. well who knows.
<tinfoil_hat_time> Unfortunately, I can't find Comes v. Microsoft antitrust case exhibit 32 anywhere on the 'Net.
Just pretend as if you're running a Microsoft OS and suddenly some of the crashes etc. disappear, apparently.
</tinfoil_hat_time>
Official Ubuntu bug 251338 page
They can use COW POWER!
Vladimir Zhirinovsky, is that you?
If there was a "news for nerds, stuff that matters" yearly award I'd nominate this story!
About Open Source Government: IIRC, Douglas Hofstadter wrote in one of his books, years ago, about a game where the purpose of the game was to each turn, change the rules. I don't remember the name, lexus or something. If anyone remembers please reply.
Maybe having laws with version control and unit testing would be a good idea :-)
I interpreted the bit he said about the U.S.A government as follows:
Did I kind of get the gist? IANAL, IANAPolitician, IANASociologist, etc. etc.
and that after only 16 years!!!
So, I wish you all the best with your project to make a new release, convince other people to make a new release, or pay people to make a new release.
Last time I looked, it was here, but as that page says this is an unofficial list.
Methinks some of the bugs look bad, but at least you can *see* what's happening "in the kitchen" with Debian.
I "lakh" your comment but I think you meant "fifty tenthousand"
(a bit personal but hey this is Slashdot)
Are you family of the (should have been slightly more legendary) Jean Monnet?
I always thought the "secret plan" behind the EU was the following priority list:
1. No more war
2. No more famine
3. there is no point 3, we'll all have to make it up as we go along
but then, i'm an idealist.
Uh, do you mean occidentalist?
</nitpick>
Well.. APPX has these and a few more as extra modules, and runs on quite a few systems including Linux, but I wouldn't hazard a guess at the cost.
Is anyone still programming in that 4GL?
I learned it in a 2-day course a long time ago, so it can't be THAT hard to learn to use :-) but I don't have experience in many other 4GL's e.g. this newfangled Visual Basic so I can't compare.
Loved the Data Dictionary concept and the automagic database table restructuring though. It also saved companies that had invested in Wang VS a lot of grief because they could with some difficulty rewrite their business logic from SPEED-II to APPX.