And we've developed a culture where close reason and analysis are treated with suspicion, while glib assertion and oversimplification is celebrated.
IMHO, Powerpointitis is a symptom rather than cause - it just makes it easier to pass off the latter. The acid test: if the information I was just presented was handwritten on a piece of paper, would it be of interest to me?
My 11 year old son came home from school with an assignment to put together a short presentation on the subject of refugees. I sat down with him and started discussing the points he wanted to make... about how to tell genuine refugees from economic migrants, the flow of refugees over the years, about how groups of refugees over the years have helped shape our society, and we started taking notes into an emacs buffer to marshall ideas
He ran off to his mother saying "I'm meant to be making a powerpoint presentation, and Dad won't help me", whereupon his mother came and took over - as I stormed out of the room I heard the words "now what font would you like it to be in"...
Me, I can't present to an audience without interacting, and I can't interact with Powerpoint/Magicpoint, so while there may be some prepared content on acetate/PP, a board with pens is a must.
Powerpoint/Magicpoint may well be OK for persuasive presentations - e.g. sales pitches - but is a hopeless means of presenting analysis and explanation. If people need to read an article by information theorist Edward Tufte to work this out, we're in trouble.
Good point. And it's not a small amount of air - some big instruments need several sizeable blowers.
Not only is there actually a lot of air moving through and out of the pipes, the sound comes out pretty much uniformly through 360 degrees, where a loudspeaker puts it out of the front (or in their case the front and back, but not the sides).
"What's new with NCSA Mosaic" closes Mosaic ported to Windows (3.1) Email addresses in GB start putting the "uk" at the end rather than the front (DNS rather than Coloured book style) Getting proper internet connectivity no longer requiring justifying why your traffic should run across NFSnet Sun start using all ones as the broadcast address rather than all zeroes Sun put disk partitionng utilities into the OS rather than having to boot "stand/diag" DEC bolt a TCP/IP stack onto VMS - yuk
It works the other way round as well. The church where I play is a small rural Catholic parish, and even the smallest pipe organ, voiced down, would overpower the space.
So we have a sampled electronic instrument - not a toaster, it's a classical electronic instrument (with a full RCO [GB equivalent of AGO]) pedalboard, and a reasonable selection of classical stops. I don't need it to go particularly loud, because my average turnout is about 50. As I stated in an earlier reply, the loudspeakers move the air in a different way to a set of pipes, and in our case that is to our benefit.
The fundamental issue is how the air is moved - any loudspeaker will fundamentally move the air differently to an organ pipe. And the more pipes you have blowing, the more the difference matters: you can have a lot of big speakers, but a large organ with a lot of stops drawn can be blowing 200-300 pipes at once. And that is an awful lot of air moving.
And at the same time, you have to remember that if you have a lot of loudspeakers close together, they will all cause each other to resonate, effectively a form of cross talk. On the other hand, organ pipes are made of metal, and cause very little cross resonance.
These guys have created a magnificent instrument, probably at a tiny fraction of the cost of a pipe organ (and with a fraction of the lead time), but I bet that playing it is like kissing your auntie - missing the frisson of the real thing.
The most anoying one is going into Watford Junction from Euston. Most of the trains stop there, yet the track has been cambered for high speed for the odd train which doesn't stop. Result: everything sliding off the table.
Particularly the consequences of persecuting a minority within your population.
Some years ago I was given a book about the Gunpowder plot, which sets the context. After the death of Elizabeth I, there was hope among the English Catholics that life would get better. Instead, James I set up what was effectively an inquisition, and appoined Popplewell to turn the screws down even tighter. My family were tucked away in North Yorkshire, and got away with a series of fines, but many English Catholic families had members executed - the English Martyrs. That's why even in today's more ecumenical time I'm not ashamed to sing "Our fathers chained in prisons dark were still in heart and conscience free".
Yes, a splinter group decided to resort to violence, and yes that was totally unforgiveable, but there is a lesson which should not be ingored.
Local councils in Great Britain are not IT innovators. They are deeply conservative (small C, sadly) bodies whose IT directors are terrified of appearing on television or in the press with projects which have failed. Hell, some of them only recently stopped doing their word processing on green screens attached to their mainframes.
They have now arrived at the "nobody got sacked for buying Microsoft" mindset, and the elected members who they serve are as nervy about IT projects as their IT staff. They are happy to tip loads of local taxpayers' money into Microsoft because that's what everybody else is doing, and there's no safe alternative. This, well, fear, uncertainty and doubt guides IT procurement in Microsoft's favour. But for cash strapped councils, the attraction of leaving Microsoft behind is great - the money saved could go directly into local services (most likely some pet project which would be a waste of money, but I digress).
So the emerging possibility of basing council desktop IT around free software causes mixed feelings in these people - if they save lots of money they will be heroes, but if the project crashes and burns they will be zeroes. They have done a good job so far of scaring IT directors into thinking that they are taking a big risk going with non MS software: now they are addressing the other part of the equation, and demonstrating that there won't be a big saving.
It doesn't matter that the study is rigged and being paid for by MS: "The Newham Study" will be often quoted as a "professional" study by CGEY, who are a tier 1 player in local council outsourcing in GB.
The question is, can the study be neutered? Sadly this is unlikely as it will be printed on glossy paper and widely circulated. The best outcome is that there will be another study showing a different outcome, so the viewpoint on cost savings will be "mixed".
This is precisely why MadHatter is so significant: Sun are trying to still show major cost savings (though not as much as using a generic free software stack), while reducing or eliminating the possibility of the project crashing and burning.
OK, let's treat this jig not as a tool, but as a pattern. What would seem reasonable with a pattern?
Would it be reasonable to make copies of the pattern and give them to one's friends to use in their own workshops? I would suggest not.
If I lent the pattern to my friend for him to make end products, that would seem reasonable.
If I lent the pattern to my friend, he made a copy, and then he used that copy to make end product while I used the original pattern to make end product, that would seem unreasonable.
But clearly these guys are taking the view that, while the jig itself can be considered goods which have been purchased, its use constitutes making copies - in the same way that when you buy a software CD, actually using it in your computer is considered copying (from the CD into memory). By using this logic, the maker has chosen to treat the use of the jig as copying, and *in* *law* he may well have a case.
This takes me back to the 1980s when the old Sun 3 machines came with an operating system "right to use" licence, and if used hardware was sold, then the puchaser had to purchase another "right to use" OS licence because he wasn't covered by the original licence. They stopped that years ago. More recently we've seem Microsoft suggesting to schools and charities that PC hardware donated to them by businesses probably has an OS licence which is non-transferable.
Anyways, rather than complaining about this EULA on a jig/pattern, if they really can be used to make replicas then there is clearly a need for a Free Jigs Foundation so that these silly people go out of business.
[Sigh] Whether you use DC or AC for long distance transmission depends on all sorts of things. Here in GB, *all* the transmission is AC, and the entire country's AC supply and all the generating plant are in synchronisation.
However, the 2GW link under the English Channel is DC, because we're not in syncronisation with the French (in more ways that one...) so there are loads of expensive power electronics each end to deal with rectification and inversion.
Getting power to remote areas is sometime done using DC - for example, to some of the more remote areas of Brazil. However, the general rule is AC over large areas - for example, the East Coast blackouts a couple of months ago were the results of instabilities in an AC grid extending through New York, Ohio and up into Ontario. The length of time getting power back on was due to the need to resynchronise many power stations back onto the grid in an orderly fashion.
But returning to the subject in question, yes, Edison saw Tesla as a threat to his local DC loop business, and yes, he did use anti-competitive practices to prolong his DC business practice, even though he knew it was doomed.
Getting completely back on topic, then, the smarter brains in the RIAA will realise that they're not acting to keep their business model in place indefinitely, rather they're just squeezing out all the cash while they can. They know that in ten years' time their business will be dead, so if you're already going into terminal decline then suing your customers makes perfect sense - it is a way of maximising revenue before you go out of business. Which bring us back to SCO (nice link).
As they left M$ apparently Blair was overheard saying to Alistair Campbell, without the slightest hint of irony, "I think he was just using us for publicity".
Actually, the very long instruction pipelines on Itanium make it inefficient for systems with large numbers of processors. Instead of seeing SPARC as simply a processor architecture, see it as integral with the whole working of the system. Now, in these very big multiprocessor systems cache coherency is a fundamental design problem, and the architecture of the 15K puts a lot of different stuff together to get the cache coherency to work.
Fortunately Sun don't listen to these halfwitted commentators, and we will have both UltraSPARC and PowerPC around for many years yet.
Why-oh-why-oh-why to people keep talking about numbers of gigahertz when talking about SPARC?
Sun hardware isn't designed around having big processor frequency numbers, it's designed about getting data through systems fast. Contrary to all the naysaying, this *does* extend down to the volume hardware - 280/480/880/1280 machines, at rates which make Wintel or Lintel systems look rather lame. Now, if you want a stack of edge webservers this doesn't really matter, but for the business logic part of the technology stack this really, really does matters.
What the loon is doing is betting both ways: if Sun fail (which they won't) then he can say he told you so. And by making such a large shopping list of things they could do, he can point to one or two and say "See, they took my advice and survived".
What I would like to understand is how Sun's accounting works: I have read commentators who say Sun's accounting process is ultra conservative, and this is precisely why they have made this billion write-down. OTOH, corporate accounting is way over my head, and I have no idea, for example, how much goodwill they have on their balance sheet from their various acquisitions.
Showing my age here - did anybody else rlogin to their coworker's workstations running sunview and run "decay", which caused the screen to start averageing pixels with adjacent ones, ultimately causing the image to melt?
Yes, OO does do something that MSOffice doesn't: it saves your documents in a published format. If you're concerned about the future useability of your documents, this ought to matter to you.
For organisations which have to be accountable this ought to be the overriding concern - it doesn't have to be OpenOffice, it doesn't even have to be free software, but it absolutely must be an open file format.
Is anybody else concerned that the word "sharing" is being changed so that it has a negative meaning rather than the purely positive one it had when I was growing up?
Most cases of document sharing there doesn't need to be a read/write copy. In these cases PDF is widely readable, and preferable to a read/write format.
Everything shouldn't be kept in Word or Excel formats - inability to import these formats into OO exactly demonstrates the problem: they are secret formats. In contrast, open an OO document with Winzip and it is in absolutely clear XML, to a published schema.
While OO is currently the only app which imports these files into a word processing application, the format is clearly open. I look forward to seeing Lotus Smartsuite and Corel Office with OO import and export filters.
Slashdot Mirror
... is the typo which immediately springs to mind
Dunstan
And we've developed a culture where close reason and analysis are treated with suspicion, while glib assertion and oversimplification is celebrated.
IMHO, Powerpointitis is a symptom rather than cause - it just makes it easier to pass off the latter. The acid test: if the information I was just presented was handwritten on a piece of paper, would it be of interest to me?
My 11 year old son came home from school with an assignment to put together a short presentation on the subject of refugees. I sat down with him and started discussing the points he wanted to make ... about how to tell genuine refugees from economic migrants, the flow of refugees over the years, about how groups of refugees over the years have helped shape our society, and we started taking notes into an emacs buffer to marshall ideas
...
He ran off to his mother saying "I'm meant to be making a powerpoint presentation, and Dad won't help me", whereupon his mother came and took over - as I stormed out of the room I heard the words "now what font would you like it to be in"
Me, I can't present to an audience without interacting, and I can't interact with Powerpoint/Magicpoint, so while there may be some prepared content on acetate/PP, a board with pens is a must.
Powerpoint/Magicpoint may well be OK for persuasive presentations - e.g. sales pitches - but is a hopeless means of presenting analysis and explanation. If people need to read an article by information theorist Edward Tufte to work this out, we're in trouble.
Duntan
I meant NSFnet - typo. Show how long ago that my fingers automatically put those three letters in that order.
Good point. And it's not a small amount of air - some big instruments need several sizeable blowers.
Not only is there actually a lot of air moving through and out of the pipes, the sound comes out pretty much uniformly through 360 degrees, where a loudspeaker puts it out of the front (or in their case the front and back, but not the sides).
Dunstan
How can it be unconstitutional in my country - we don't have a constitution. Parliament pretty much can do what it wants.
Dunstan
Add to this:
...
"What's new with NCSA Mosaic" closes
Mosaic ported to Windows (3.1)
Email addresses in GB start putting the "uk" at the end rather than the front (DNS rather than Coloured book style)
Getting proper internet connectivity no longer requiring justifying why your traffic should run across NFSnet
Sun start using all ones as the broadcast address rather than all zeroes
Sun put disk partitionng utilities into the OS rather than having to boot "stand/diag"
DEC bolt a TCP/IP stack onto VMS - yuk
and
PC's start having more than 640K of memory
Dunstan
I think what you mean is:
"She's turned into a real woman with curves."
Dunstan - I can't get over a girl like you, so you'll have to turn the light off yourself.
It works the other way round as well. The church where I play is a small rural Catholic parish, and even the smallest pipe organ, voiced down, would overpower the space.
So we have a sampled electronic instrument - not a toaster, it's a classical electronic instrument (with a full RCO [GB equivalent of AGO]) pedalboard, and a reasonable selection of classical stops. I don't need it to go particularly loud, because my average turnout is about 50. As I stated in an earlier reply, the loudspeakers move the air in a different way to a set of pipes, and in our case that is to our benefit.
It's horses for courses.
Dunstan
The fundamental issue is how the air is moved - any loudspeaker will fundamentally move the air differently to an organ pipe. And the more pipes you have blowing, the more the difference matters: you can have a lot of big speakers, but a large organ with a lot of stops drawn can be blowing 200-300 pipes at once. And that is an awful lot of air moving.
And at the same time, you have to remember that if you have a lot of loudspeakers close together, they will all cause each other to resonate, effectively a form of cross talk. On the other hand, organ pipes are made of metal, and cause very little cross resonance.
These guys have created a magnificent instrument, probably at a tiny fraction of the cost of a pipe organ (and with a fraction of the lead time), but I bet that playing it is like kissing your auntie - missing the frisson of the real thing.
Dunstan
The most anoying one is going into Watford Junction from Euston. Most of the trains stop there, yet the track has been cambered for high speed for the odd train which doesn't stop. Result: everything sliding off the table.
Dunstan
Next you'll be claiming that emacs is only an editor ...
Like the famous weather forecast in the Western Mail one morning:
"Warm and dry, but cooler with some rain".
Particularly the consequences of persecuting a minority within your population.
Some years ago I was given a book about the Gunpowder plot, which sets the context. After the death of Elizabeth I, there was hope among the English Catholics that life would get better. Instead, James I set up what was effectively an inquisition, and appoined Popplewell to turn the screws down even tighter. My family were tucked away in North Yorkshire, and got away with a series of fines, but many English Catholic families had members executed - the English Martyrs. That's why even in today's more ecumenical time I'm not ashamed to sing "Our fathers chained in prisons dark were still in heart and conscience free".
Yes, a splinter group decided to resort to violence, and yes that was totally unforgiveable, but there is a lesson which should not be ingored.
Dunstan Vavasour
... as drive by spamming??
Dunstan
What's going on here does matter.
Local councils in Great Britain are not IT innovators. They are deeply conservative (small C, sadly) bodies whose IT directors are terrified of appearing on television or in the press with projects which have failed. Hell, some of them only recently stopped doing their word processing on green screens attached to their mainframes.
They have now arrived at the "nobody got sacked for buying Microsoft" mindset, and the elected members who they serve are as nervy about IT projects as their IT staff. They are happy to tip loads of local taxpayers' money into Microsoft because that's what everybody else is doing, and there's no safe alternative. This, well, fear, uncertainty and doubt guides IT procurement in Microsoft's favour. But for cash strapped councils, the attraction of leaving Microsoft behind is great - the money saved could go directly into local services (most likely some pet project which would be a waste of money, but I digress).
So the emerging possibility of basing council desktop IT around free software causes mixed feelings in these people - if they save lots of money they will be heroes, but if the project crashes and burns they will be zeroes. They have done a good job so far of scaring IT directors into thinking that they are taking a big risk going with non MS software: now they are addressing the other part of the equation, and demonstrating that there won't be a big saving.
It doesn't matter that the study is rigged and being paid for by MS: "The Newham Study" will be often quoted as a "professional" study by CGEY, who are a tier 1 player in local council outsourcing in GB.
The question is, can the study be neutered? Sadly this is unlikely as it will be printed on glossy paper and widely circulated. The best outcome is that there will be another study showing a different outcome, so the viewpoint on cost savings will be "mixed".
This is precisely why MadHatter is so significant: Sun are trying to still show major cost savings (though not as much as using a generic free software stack), while reducing or eliminating the possibility of the project crashing and burning.
Dunstan
OK, let's treat this jig not as a tool, but as a pattern. What would seem reasonable with a pattern?
Would it be reasonable to make copies of the pattern and give them to one's friends to use in their own workshops? I would suggest not.
If I lent the pattern to my friend for him to make end products, that would seem reasonable.
If I lent the pattern to my friend, he made a copy, and then he used that copy to make end product while I used the original pattern to make end product, that would seem unreasonable.
But clearly these guys are taking the view that, while the jig itself can be considered goods which have been purchased, its use constitutes making copies - in the same way that when you buy a software CD, actually using it in your computer is considered copying (from the CD into memory). By using this logic, the maker has chosen to treat the use of the jig as copying, and *in* *law* he may well have a case.
This takes me back to the 1980s when the old Sun 3 machines came with an operating system "right to use" licence, and if used hardware was sold, then the puchaser had to purchase another "right to use" OS licence because he wasn't covered by the original licence. They stopped that years ago. More recently we've seem Microsoft suggesting to schools and charities that PC hardware donated to them by businesses probably has an OS licence which is non-transferable.
Anyways, rather than complaining about this EULA on a jig/pattern, if they really can be used to make replicas then there is clearly a need for a Free Jigs Foundation so that these silly people go out of business.
Dunstan
[Sigh]
...) so there are loads of expensive power electronics each end to deal with rectification and inversion.
Whether you use DC or AC for long distance transmission depends on all sorts of things. Here in GB, *all* the transmission is AC, and the entire country's AC supply and all the generating plant are in synchronisation.
However, the 2GW link under the English Channel is DC, because we're not in syncronisation with the French (in more ways that one
Getting power to remote areas is sometime done using DC - for example, to some of the more remote areas of Brazil. However, the general rule is AC over large areas - for example, the East Coast blackouts a couple of months ago were the results of instabilities in an AC grid extending through New York, Ohio and up into Ontario. The length of time getting power back on was due to the need to resynchronise many power stations back onto the grid in an orderly fashion.
But returning to the subject in question, yes, Edison saw Tesla as a threat to his local DC loop business, and yes, he did use anti-competitive practices to prolong his DC business practice, even though he knew it was doomed.
Getting completely back on topic, then, the smarter brains in the RIAA will realise that they're not acting to keep their business model in place indefinitely, rather they're just squeezing out all the cash while they can. They know that in ten years' time their business will be dead, so if you're already going into terminal decline then suing your customers makes perfect sense - it is a way of maximising revenue before you go out of business. Which bring us back to SCO (nice link).
Dunstan
As they left M$ apparently Blair was overheard saying to Alistair Campbell, without the slightest hint of irony, "I think he was just using us for publicity".
Dunstan
Actually, the very long instruction pipelines on Itanium make it inefficient for systems with large numbers of processors. Instead of seeing SPARC as simply a processor architecture, see it as integral with the whole working of the system. Now, in these very big multiprocessor systems cache coherency is a fundamental design problem, and the architecture of the 15K puts a lot of different stuff together to get the cache coherency to work.
Fortunately Sun don't listen to these halfwitted commentators, and we will have both UltraSPARC and PowerPC around for many years yet.
Dunstan
Why-oh-why-oh-why to people keep talking about numbers of gigahertz when talking about SPARC?
Sun hardware isn't designed around having big processor frequency numbers, it's designed about getting data through systems fast. Contrary to all the naysaying, this *does* extend down to the volume hardware - 280/480/880/1280 machines, at rates which make Wintel or Lintel systems look rather lame. Now, if you want a stack of edge webservers this doesn't really matter, but for the business logic part of the technology stack this really, really does matters.
What the loon is doing is betting both ways: if Sun fail (which they won't) then he can say he told you so. And by making such a large shopping list of things they could do, he can point to one or two and say "See, they took my advice and survived".
What I would like to understand is how Sun's accounting works: I have read commentators who say Sun's accounting process is ultra conservative, and this is precisely why they have made this billion write-down. OTOH, corporate accounting is way over my head, and I have no idea, for example, how much goodwill they have on their balance sheet from their various acquisitions.
Dunstan
Showing my age here - did anybody else rlogin to their coworker's workstations running sunview and run "decay", which caused the screen to start averageing pixels with adjacent ones, ultimately causing the image to melt?
Dunstan
Yes, OO does do something that MSOffice doesn't: it saves your documents in a published format. If you're concerned about the future useability of your documents, this ought to matter to you.
For organisations which have to be accountable this ought to be the overriding concern - it doesn't have to be OpenOffice, it doesn't even have to be free software, but it absolutely must be an open file format.
Dunstan
Is anybody else concerned that the word "sharing" is being changed so that it has a negative meaning rather than the purely positive one it had when I was growing up?
Dunstan
Most cases of document sharing there doesn't need to be a read/write copy. In these cases PDF is widely readable, and preferable to a read/write format.
Everything shouldn't be kept in Word or Excel formats - inability to import these formats into OO exactly demonstrates the problem: they are secret formats. In contrast, open an OO document with Winzip and it is in absolutely clear XML, to a published schema.
While OO is currently the only app which imports these files into a word processing application, the format is clearly open. I look forward to seeing Lotus Smartsuite and Corel Office with OO import and export filters.
Dunstan