Hey Green Wi-Fi people, if you're listening, I agree with the parent poster. How about you put the schematics for your designs online so we can all build these? Open Source philosophy and all that, the more of us building them the more eyes and hands to find improvements and bug fixing... I'm helping two community networks in the UK where they are really concerned about ecological issues and they've actually already asked me if they could power their roof top access points by solar energy. I think you could be the solution. Please could you put the designs online, creative commons them, so we can build some?
Everybody loves the Ronja guy for putting his optical networking designs online....
So how the heck do you pronounce "gnuLinEx" in Spanish?:-) that looks like a string of characters that's going to be hard for some people to remember surely.. probably I am being trite but I think one of the smartest things those nice browser people did was call their browser "Firefox", not some uberclever mashup of acronyms, just a friendly name. Surely there's some friendly localised name that could be used, will the school teachers and govt officials in this part of Spain really give a damn if their OS is based on GNU and Linux. I'd say the Spanish geeks should think of a friendlier name. Good on you though for what you've done getting the OS established though, good luck one and all!
You must be American, because you are so ignorant.
Just joking to make you sit up, one terrible stereotype deserves another....
I'd suggest you visit some of these countries to open your eyes and learn a little more about them, or if this is not possible, at least go to Wikipedia and read a little about them. It's a shame you make this comment because it devaluates the quite reasonable statement you make about querying the value of computers in education.
I think you're probably right, and as other posters have pointed out soldiers in the front line often also use black humour to keep themselves sane... but a thought came to my mind - how would you feel if a DVD/ video clip came to light made by Iraqi insurgents which had some sort of funky triumphal music played to shots of US soldiers getting blown up and gunned down, and images of US bodies?
Would you be happy with that and accept it as a fair outlet for the insurgents need to help explain to people what they saw?
I think posting videos on the public internet, particularly when the author has spent some time editing on a sound track, is a different kind of phenomenon than taking a few snaps and keeping them in your pocket (mind you, what would the media response be if the army captured insurgents with images of charred US soldiers' bodies in their pockets?)
Maybe Europe is a "big city" but there's a lot of public transport right across the continent. Yes there's population density in places like Netherlands, but there's a lot of public transport intercity use in rural France, Germany, etc. On the population density argument: again, back to my post: offer urban and suburban transport and 'park and ride' - get people to drive their cars from the low density place to the edge of cities and then share transport from there. For practice rather than theory discussing if public transport works I point you to: Europe, China, India: big places, lots of rural population, lots of train and bus use. Whether it 'works' or not I think is largely socially constructed, people's personal preferences play a large part.
Re: your point about public transport about not being able to pay for itself - think outside the box and say "so what?" maybe if it's a social good then it doesn't matter if it doesn't pay for itself? Nobody suggests reducing the army because it doesn't make a financial profit, it's considered to be a necessary part of the country's infrastructure. Nobody closes schools because they don't make a net cash profit from their users. Could air travel pay for itself if air fuel was taxed? it's currently exempt from fuel taxes so skews the actual cost - what would tickets cost if air fuel was taxed at the same rate as automobile fuel? Cost out public transport with its fuel tax set at zero and see what you get. At some point somebody's decided that for social reasons air fuel is tax free. How about making public transport fuel tax free?
Re: grand plans on reducing traffic - well sometimes I get the train from a small town to London, and cycle round London. So stationary autos are actually preferable to fast moving autos for me:-) I don't benefit either way, but I like the cleaner air. My main commute is by bike into work each day, 8 miles each way, longer than some people admittedly. I travel on pedestrian and cycle only redways so cars are irrelevant to my commute. Sometimes I drive a car (me and my girlfriend bought one between us) but as somebody who tends to walk or cycle to the shops, I'm really concerned at how much people will use their cars - maybe driving half a mile to pick up a paper and a pint of milk on a sunny day.
"Want to cut gas consumption in half?....Start by clearing up the traffic people sit in every day"
Invest in some decent public transport, think long term. It won't work for everywhere but will cut a lot of those urban/suburban traffic jams. Check out how busy the car parks are in European 'park and ride' edge of town parking locations are, that offer out of town drivers the opportunity to park and then get cheap shared transport (buses, metros, trams) into the city centre 5 miles away. They are all doing the same journey (out of town to the centre) at the same time 5 days a week.
Run some decent long distance trains on main transport corridors, European trains travel at 100mph plus, faster than cars. Think about the big economic picture (how much do we save if you factor in wider aspects) than just costing the train travel at how ever much they need to break even independently.
from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/800040.stm - in the UK the 1995 price of gas was 53.3 pence a litre, now in 2006 its just topped 100. So we moan a little too, but realise it will keep on going up because it's a finite resource and it's running out. Small cars are popular here, they are cheaper to run when gas is 6 dollars a gallon. Not that many people actually drive cars long distances, 6 days a week it is school runs with the kids or a few miles to the shops, 30 miles each way to work, something like that. The price of gas is only going to go up and I think in the USA it will go up more rapidly as its been more highly subsidised (or lower taxed depending on your perspective) for many years than in many other countries.
Help me ! - with my work situation and IE
on
Firefox Usage Climbing
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"At work, there is one system that requires IE _on windows_, and we had to get a new computer, with windows just to view one website, and I had a word or two with them. And guess what? They told me that they are now targeting Firefox as the target browser, and for that to be cross platform."
Some advice please? my university work place has an expenses system which required me to use IE if I want to claim for travel expenses etc. Doesn't work on Firefox or other browsers. I have to keep IE on my computer solely for this purpose. Can you (or any other slashdotters) advise on some well chosen arguments that I could use in an email to try and persuade the management (and I guess the central organisation techies) to modify the system so I can use firefox instead? cheers in advance...
Not that quick! only if it's of popular interest..
on
When Wikipedia Fails
·
· Score: 1
"problems are quickly solved"
Well that all depends on the article in the question, and how popular the subject is. I noticed that articles to do with the FIFA World Cup 2006 were being updated pretty well live - look at the history for articles on Wayne Rooney and Zinédine Zidane. However find a topic that isn't so popular and I think you're in for a long wait to get changes made. Look at the history of the OLSR article. I made a change on 27 June, and asked a question on the Talk pages. No responses yet. I was really suprised, a computer based article, I would have though geeks would have jumped to provide more information.
Now I know this is nothing like the publishing time compared to something like Brittanica, but the variance (almost instant to several weeks) does show that "problems are quickly solved" is a wiki myth. I'd say it depends more on the participants' areas of interest.
"The funny part was, I couldn't always tell if it was German or Klingon that they were speaking"
Yeah, pretty disturbing... Sounds like Ms. Elkes could be a liability to her company if that was an official trip she was on. I'd say sad rather than funny. Tell Ms. Elkes the little books with the pretty pictures in the airport shops for ten dollars are called "phrasebooks" and she ought to buy the "German" one next time she's in Germany. Learning a few words on the plane ride over might win her more friends. Maybe she got stressed because she couldn't find the Klingon one...
"I wouldn't want to be caught in the "not others" column without any option to escalate things."
Perhaps one aspect of this is how you wish to be perceived after the event if you succeed. I'm guessing Gandhi and similar non violent protestors felt that they would be morally no better than their oppressors if they resorted to violence, and would in term legitimise *their* overthrow at a later date by violent means.
I understand that in some circumstances you might consider an overthrowing of a regime is impossible without violent revolution but I'd suggest that these days there are so many complex global interdependencies that if the cause is perceived as just by enough people then external pressures can bring down a system without needing armed struggle? Is this what happened with the breakup of the Soviet Union? There were huge protests in some of the states and the military decided to go against orders from the Kremlin and not send the tanks in. Similarly armed conflict may happen when the outside world doesn't care...
I agree, but let's get even more basic, why does public transport need to make a profit? Step back and look at the bigger picture... maybe decent public transport should be part of a civilised society *and* the spin off effects may win you lots of economic benefits as well in the long term. there are lots of core national services we accept that cost money and don't run at a profit (= we all pay a little bit to keep them going = taxes) because philosophically a majority of us have agreed that well, they are nice to have and people should get decent services. Whether that means doctors or schools or road lighting or free eye tests for pensioners...
Some countries think less stuff should run at a loss (e.g. USA) and some countries think more stuff should be supported by us all (e.g. Scandinavian social democracies). My shout is decent cheap (even free in some cases) public transport benefits us all. If you're from the UK you know that while the train system might be relatively good compared to the USA, it's an absolute overpriced mess compared to much of the rest of Western Europe for starters...
Oh, and Thatcher was evil, full stop.;-) Could you really trust a prime minister to care about public services when she came out with statements like "there is no such thing as society" (talking to Women's Own magazine, October 31 1987).
hmm, many western countries have power groups that maintain influence over many years too, they don't seem to move that much. Condoleeza Rice (for a high profile exmple) has been advising presidential decisions for 20 years or so, plus a lot of links with the oil industry over that time (damn, they got to love you to name an oil tanker after you, right?). I'd say this equals if not exceeds the duration of power held by leaders in non-western countries. Also "theocratic" would be maybe stretching it but the US for example has seen a strong resurgence in fundamentalist Christian philosophy influencing everything from presidential opinion to education. Not as extreme in some ways as fundamentalist muslim countries but nevertheless influential.
cheers! I worked on this project - it was about 1995 -1997 so really fun to see it's still alive and useful. All praise to the Arts and Humanties Data Service for keeping it up there.
So for folks wondering why it's so basic - a little more info.. short answer: it was a small project and it was about ten years ago.
I think we started about 1995 or 1996 - description here. Pat Batley is a visionary librarian who could see the value of digitisation and pushed to get archive resources digitised. She got in contact with my boss in our small research group in the London College of Printing (about 4 people), and got him on board. So the project's original goal (as far I know) was to put ten years of Design magazine on CD-ROMs (this was 1994, 95? so CD-ROMs were still the way to go...). We got funded for a project manager and a couple of assistants and these guys scanned page by page all ten years, about 12,000 pages. Then ran the scans through an OCR program and then manually proof read them. We poured this into the database and produced the CD-ROMs. Towards the end of the programme (about 1996, 97) we decided it would be cool to put it online, it was a hack. So hence the very minimal web pages. Very limited time and money towards the end of the project and in 1997 it didn't look so bad! Plus the main thing we wanted was high res images of each of the pages, as the design of the journal itself as well as the content was important to archive (hence full pages rather than just the images). So the ascii text underneath we felt was fine, people could refer to the images of the whole pages for information about the layout. Would be great to update the site, anybody fancy sending some funding to AHDS?:-)
But I'm really glad we did it because the web feels a lot better place right now than CD-ROMs for it to be on, and those Design editions cover an amazing period of the journal itself and what was going on in the world at the time. Take a look at the difference between the 1965 issues and the 1974 issues for how the magazine itself changes.
Cheers for your positive feedback! ten years later and it's still alive and useful, I'm really pleased. Enjoy:-)
"There are many more then 38 Million SUV drivers." - How many? Reference? Actually I'd be interested to know the figure of SUV *owners* because I sat in a friend's Land Rover once and drove it up the drive for 5 minutes so technically I could be described as an "SUV driver (once)" but I don't think we want to include people like me in the stats we're interested in...
hmmm... ""medieval-minded theocratic crazies""....careful how you bandy round a phrase like that... some might argue that somes up the current management of the USA quite nicely:-)
Let's get beyond the simple binary 'all closed source is bad for customers/users, all open source is good". In an ideal world yes, but open source developers as people have many of the same motivations as closed source developers and the reason they leave a project may be similar - they might be bored with what they are doing, get a better job offer somewhere else, and *not support the software any more*.
The open source code might *potentially* be resurrected by other developers, but it might not. Leaving customers/ users just as stranded as if it was a closed source project, particularly smaller users who do not have the money/resources to do anything themselves. Just look at sourceforge and see the number of dead projects.
yeah I think you could be right... cheers for the research! - certainly there's a perception that we're going the same way... though I think it could be argued that we take our lead from US culture in many ways and we're taking on as many USian traits as European. Probably some theory about influence from dominant ideologies etc.
Dear USian friends- how did your legal system get the way it is? in my country (UK) the US legal system and more precisely its half shark half mule lawyers, are laughed at because of their obstinancy and desire to turn the most trivial situations into a legal hoo-haa. I guess the losing lawyer in this case will sue the other one... We're always hearing about some US citizen sueing somebody or something for the most trivial piece of stupidity. How did it get this way? Genuine question! - how did the legal culture become so significant in the US?
"I've often thought about the new commonplace practices in society that someone from 1920 might find odd"
Umm, get more basic, complacent geek! How about:
- women having equal rights, being paid the same as men. - ethnic groups treated equally in many countries (people were still being burnt alive in the USA in the 20s for being the wrong colour, right?) - people living for much longer
oh... too many to mention, even before you talk about the minutae of technological habits...
... an alternative interpretation for the Act of Union is that the Scots nobility and merchant classes sold their country down the river for personal gain. 400,000 English pounds were paid to cover Scotland taking on part of the English national debt. Given the nature of society at the time I think it's safe to say not much of this found its way into the pockets of more than a few.
You mean US based paper? English language, or other? That amazing invention "Teh Intrerweb" means you can access a lot of journalism from across the planet if your own country's papers aren't doing a good job. The Guardian did an online "World News Guide". Always fun comparing how your country's papers see the world compared to somebody else.
Interested: what financial aid is USA currently giving the EU?.. or does the parent mean trade deals?
Probably a compromise will happen, USA will promise not to sell on the data and keep it really secure, honest guv. I thought we were about to have a trade war anyway about Boeing / Airbus, what happened to that one?
These guys have been 'aving it tiny in a smaller venue for rather longer: The Miniscule of Sound at 1.99 m2! (gallery here)Come back when you've got it in a broom cupboard....
Slashdot Mirror
Hey Green Wi-Fi people, if you're listening, I agree with the parent poster. How about you put the schematics for your designs online so we can all build these? Open Source philosophy and all that, the more of us building them the more eyes and hands to find improvements and bug fixing... I'm helping two community networks in the UK where they are really concerned about ecological issues and they've actually already asked me if they could power their roof top access points by solar energy. I think you could be the solution. Please could you put the designs online, creative commons them, so we can build some?
Everybody loves the Ronja guy for putting his optical networking designs online....
So how the heck do you pronounce "gnuLinEx" in Spanish? :-) that looks like a string of characters that's going to be hard for some people to remember surely.. probably I am being trite but I think one of the smartest things those nice browser people did was call their browser "Firefox", not some uberclever mashup of acronyms, just a friendly name. Surely there's some friendly localised name that could be used, will the school teachers and govt officials in this part of Spain really give a damn if their OS is based on GNU and Linux. I'd say the Spanish geeks should think of a friendlier name. Good on you though for what you've done getting the OS established though, good luck one and all!
"MUST be good for impoverished kids in mud huts"
You must be American, because you are so ignorant.
Just joking to make you sit up, one terrible stereotype deserves another....
I'd suggest you visit some of these countries to open your eyes and learn a little more about them, or if this is not possible, at least go to Wikipedia and read a little about them. It's a shame you make this comment because it devaluates the quite reasonable statement you make about querying the value of computers in education.
I think you're probably right, and as other posters have pointed out soldiers in the front line often also use black humour to keep themselves sane... but a thought came to my mind - how would you feel if a DVD/ video clip came to light made by Iraqi insurgents which had some sort of funky triumphal music played to shots of US soldiers getting blown up and gunned down, and images of US bodies?
Would you be happy with that and accept it as a fair outlet for the insurgents need to help explain to people what they saw?
I think posting videos on the public internet, particularly when the author has spent some time editing on a sound track, is a different kind of phenomenon than taking a few snaps and keeping them in your pocket (mind you, what would the media response be if the army captured insurgents with images of charred US soldiers' bodies in their pockets?)
Maybe Europe is a "big city" but there's a lot of public transport right across the continent. Yes there's population density in places like Netherlands, but there's a lot of public transport intercity use in rural France, Germany, etc. On the population density argument: again, back to my post: offer urban and suburban transport and 'park and ride' - get people to drive their cars from the low density place to the edge of cities and then share transport from there. For practice rather than theory discussing if public transport works I point you to: Europe, China, India: big places, lots of rural population, lots of train and bus use. Whether it 'works' or not I think is largely socially constructed, people's personal preferences play a large part.
:-) I don't benefit either way, but I like the cleaner air. My main commute is by bike into work each day, 8 miles each way, longer than some people admittedly. I travel on pedestrian and cycle only redways so cars are irrelevant to my commute. Sometimes I drive a car (me and my girlfriend bought one between us) but as somebody who tends to walk or cycle to the shops, I'm really concerned at how much people will use their cars - maybe driving half a mile to pick up a paper and a pint of milk on a sunny day.
Re: your point about public transport about not being able to pay for itself - think outside the box and say "so what?" maybe if it's a social good then it doesn't matter if it doesn't pay for itself? Nobody suggests reducing the army because it doesn't make a financial profit, it's considered to be a necessary part of the country's infrastructure. Nobody closes schools because they don't make a net cash profit from their users. Could air travel pay for itself if air fuel was taxed? it's currently exempt from fuel taxes so skews the actual cost - what would tickets cost if air fuel was taxed at the same rate as automobile fuel? Cost out public transport with its fuel tax set at zero and see what you get. At some point somebody's decided that for social reasons air fuel is tax free. How about making public transport fuel tax free?
Re: grand plans on reducing traffic - well sometimes I get the train from a small town to London, and cycle round London. So stationary autos are actually preferable to fast moving autos for me
Invest in some decent public transport, think long term. It won't work for everywhere but will cut a lot of those urban/suburban traffic jams. Check out how busy the car parks are in European 'park and ride' edge of town parking locations are, that offer out of town drivers the opportunity to park and then get cheap shared transport (buses, metros, trams) into the city centre 5 miles away. They are all doing the same journey (out of town to the centre) at the same time 5 days a week.
Run some decent long distance trains on main transport corridors, European trains travel at 100mph plus, faster than cars. Think about the big economic picture (how much do we save if you factor in wider aspects) than just costing the train travel at how ever much they need to break even independently.
from the BBC: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/800040.stm - in the UK the 1995 price of gas was 53.3 pence a litre, now in 2006 its just topped 100. So we moan a little too, but realise it will keep on going up because it's a finite resource and it's running out. Small cars are popular here, they are cheaper to run when gas is 6 dollars a gallon. Not that many people actually drive cars long distances, 6 days a week it is school runs with the kids or a few miles to the shops, 30 miles each way to work, something like that. The price of gas is only going to go up and I think in the USA it will go up more rapidly as its been more highly subsidised (or lower taxed depending on your perspective) for many years than in many other countries.
"At work, there is one system that requires IE _on windows_, and we had to get a new computer, with windows just to view one website, and I had a word or two with them. And guess what? They told me that they are now targeting Firefox as the target browser, and for that to be cross platform."
Some advice please? my university work place has an expenses system which required me to use IE if I want to claim for travel expenses etc. Doesn't work on Firefox or other browsers. I have to keep IE on my computer solely for this purpose. Can you (or any other slashdotters) advise on some well chosen arguments that I could use in an email to try and persuade the management (and I guess the central organisation techies) to modify the system so I can use firefox instead? cheers in advance...
Well that all depends on the article in the question, and how popular the subject is. I noticed that articles to do with the FIFA World Cup 2006 were being updated pretty well live - look at the history for articles on Wayne Rooney and Zinédine Zidane. However find a topic that isn't so popular and I think you're in for a long wait to get changes made. Look at the history of the OLSR article. I made a change on 27 June, and asked a question on the Talk pages. No responses yet. I was really suprised, a computer based article, I would have though geeks would have jumped to provide more information.
Now I know this is nothing like the publishing time compared to something like Brittanica, but the variance (almost instant to several weeks) does show that "problems are quickly solved" is a wiki myth. I'd say it depends more on the participants' areas of interest.
Yeah, pretty disturbing... Sounds like Ms. Elkes could be a liability to her company if that was an official trip she was on. I'd say sad rather than funny. Tell Ms. Elkes the little books with the pretty pictures in the airport shops for ten dollars are called "phrasebooks" and she ought to buy the "German" one next time she's in Germany. Learning a few words on the plane ride over might win her more friends. Maybe she got stressed because she couldn't find the Klingon one...
"I wouldn't want to be caught in the "not others" column without any option to escalate things."
Perhaps one aspect of this is how you wish to be perceived after the event if you succeed. I'm guessing Gandhi and similar non violent protestors felt that they would be morally no better than their oppressors if they resorted to violence, and would in term legitimise *their* overthrow at a later date by violent means.
I understand that in some circumstances you might consider an overthrowing of a regime is impossible without violent revolution but I'd suggest that these days there are so many complex global interdependencies that if the cause is perceived as just by enough people then external pressures can bring down a system without needing armed struggle? Is this what happened with the breakup of the Soviet Union? There were huge protests in some of the states and the military decided to go against orders from the Kremlin and not send the tanks in. Similarly armed conflict may happen when the outside world doesn't care...
I agree, but let's get even more basic, why does public transport need to make a profit? Step back and look at the bigger picture... maybe decent public transport should be part of a civilised society *and* the spin off effects may win you lots of economic benefits as well in the long term. there are lots of core national services we accept that cost money and don't run at a profit (= we all pay a little bit to keep them going = taxes) because philosophically a majority of us have agreed that well, they are nice to have and people should get decent services. Whether that means doctors or schools or road lighting or free eye tests for pensioners...
;-) Could you really trust a prime minister to care about public services when she came out with statements like "there is no such thing as society" (talking to Women's Own magazine, October 31 1987).
Some countries think less stuff should run at a loss (e.g. USA) and some countries think more stuff should be supported by us all (e.g. Scandinavian social democracies). My shout is decent cheap (even free in some cases) public transport benefits us all. If you're from the UK you know that while the train system might be relatively good compared to the USA, it's an absolute overpriced mess compared to much of the rest of Western Europe for starters...
Oh, and Thatcher was evil, full stop.
hmm, many western countries have power groups that maintain influence over many years too, they don't seem to move that much. Condoleeza Rice (for a high profile exmple) has been advising presidential decisions for 20 years or so, plus a lot of links with the oil industry over that time (damn, they got to love you to name an oil tanker after you, right?). I'd say this equals if not exceeds the duration of power held by leaders in non-western countries. Also "theocratic" would be maybe stretching it but the US for example has seen a strong resurgence in fundamentalist Christian philosophy influencing everything from presidential opinion to education. Not as extreme in some ways as fundamentalist muslim countries but nevertheless influential.
cheers! I worked on this project - it was about 1995 -1997 so really fun to see it's still alive and useful. All praise to the Arts and Humanties Data Service for keeping it up there.
:-)
:-)
So for folks wondering why it's so basic - a little more info.. short answer: it was a small project and it was about ten years ago.
I think we started about 1995 or 1996 - description here. Pat Batley is a visionary librarian who could see the value of digitisation and pushed to get archive resources digitised. She got in contact with my boss in our small research group in the London College of Printing (about 4 people), and got him on board. So the project's original goal (as far I know) was to put ten years of Design magazine on CD-ROMs (this was 1994, 95? so CD-ROMs were still the way to go...). We got funded for a project manager and a couple of assistants and these guys scanned page by page all ten years, about 12,000 pages. Then ran the scans through an OCR program and then manually proof read them. We poured this into the database and produced the CD-ROMs. Towards the end of the programme (about 1996, 97) we decided it would be cool to put it online, it was a hack. So hence the very minimal web pages. Very limited time and money towards the end of the project and in 1997 it didn't look so bad! Plus the main thing we wanted was high res images of each of the pages, as the design of the journal itself as well as the content was important to archive (hence full pages rather than just the images). So the ascii text underneath we felt was fine, people could refer to the images of the whole pages for information about the layout. Would be great to update the site, anybody fancy sending some funding to AHDS?
But I'm really glad we did it because the web feels a lot better place right now than CD-ROMs for it to be on, and those Design editions cover an amazing period of the journal itself and what was going on in the world at the time. Take a look at the difference between the 1965 issues and the 1974 issues for how the magazine itself changes.
Cheers for your positive feedback! ten years later and it's still alive and useful, I'm really pleased. Enjoy
"There are many more then 38 Million SUV drivers." - How many? Reference? Actually I'd be interested to know the figure of SUV *owners* because I sat in a friend's Land Rover once and drove it up the drive for 5 minutes so technically I could be described as an "SUV driver (once)" but I don't think we want to include people like me in the stats we're interested in...
hmmm... ""medieval-minded theocratic crazies"" ....careful how you bandy round a phrase like that... some might argue that somes up the current management of the USA quite nicely :-)
Let's get beyond the simple binary 'all closed source is bad for customers/users, all open source is good". In an ideal world yes, but open source developers as people have many of the same motivations as closed source developers and the reason they leave a project may be similar - they might be bored with what they are doing, get a better job offer somewhere else, and *not support the software any more*.
/resources to do anything themselves. Just look at sourceforge and see the number of dead projects.
The open source code might *potentially* be resurrected by other developers, but it might not. Leaving customers/ users just as stranded as if it was a closed source project, particularly smaller users who do not have the money
yeah I think you could be right... cheers for the research! - certainly there's a perception that we're going the same way... though I think it could be argued that we take our lead from US culture in many ways and we're taking on as many USian traits as European. Probably some theory about influence from dominant ideologies etc.
Dear USian friends- how did your legal system get the way it is? in my country (UK) the US legal system and more precisely its half shark half mule lawyers, are laughed at because of their obstinancy and desire to turn the most trivial situations into a legal hoo-haa. I guess the losing lawyer in this case will sue the other one... We're always hearing about some US citizen sueing somebody or something for the most trivial piece of stupidity. How did it get this way? Genuine question! - how did the legal culture become so significant in the US?
"I've often thought about the new commonplace practices in society that someone from 1920 might find odd"
Umm, get more basic, complacent geek! How about:
- women having equal rights, being paid the same as men.
- ethnic groups treated equally in many countries (people were still being burnt alive in the USA in the 20s for being the wrong colour, right?)
- people living for much longer
oh... too many to mention, even before you talk about the minutae of technological habits...
quiet day at the office Mr Dvorak?
... an alternative interpretation for the Act of Union is that the Scots nobility and merchant classes sold their country down the river for personal gain. 400,000 English pounds were paid to cover Scotland taking on part of the English national debt. Given the nature of society at the time I think it's safe to say not much of this found its way into the pockets of more than a few.
You mean US based paper? English language, or other? That amazing invention "Teh Intrerweb" means you can access a lot of journalism from across the planet if your own country's papers aren't doing a good job. The Guardian did an online "World News Guide". Always fun comparing how your country's papers see the world compared to somebody else.
Interested: what financial aid is USA currently giving the EU? .. or does the parent mean trade deals?
Probably a compromise will happen, USA will promise not to sell on the data and keep it really secure, honest guv. I thought we were about to have a trade war anyway about Boeing / Airbus, what happened to that one?
These guys have been 'aving it tiny in a smaller venue for rather longer: The Miniscule of Sound at 1.99 m2! (gallery here)Come back when you've got it in a broom cupboard....
A good study of the development of the M-16 and the problems that arose is in the following book:
'The American Army and the M-16 rifle' In The social shaping of technology.
MacKenzie, D and Wajcman, J (eds.) Milton Keynes: Open University Press