Don't be a troll AC. With the exception of closing open ports the rest of the stuff is easy to do and can be almost completely automated. You don't have to maintain the firewall (thats turned on by default anyway), you can set most popular anti-spyware, anti-virus and windows update to run automatically in the background - again you do this once. Not running as admin is good practice - its something you setup once. I'm guessing your parents and your grandmother and her friends won't be needing to install software that needs you to be admin anyways. The last point about not downloading whatever from wherever or randomly clicking links is called not be an idiot. That IMHO is the hardest thing to fight against.
Its hardly a full time job - it won't take a single bloody hour to get most of this setup. Sure I agree this ought to be stuff that is done by default but it isn't. And like it or not the vast majority of computers that sell today (including I'm guessing your parent's and grandmother's and her friends') run windows and your mad if you think everyone can up and switch to OSX or linux. You can whine about Windows and its insecurities till the cows come home but reality is that its what most of us have to deal with at some point so shut up and secure it for the people you love instead of being a snarky little bitch on slashdot.
Try QuickJava so you can turn javascript on and off a little easier - the annoying thing is that flashblock wants javascript on so even that isn't quite ideal.
Closing unnecessary open ports, turning off javascript, using a firewall, running windows update and keeping your virus definitions current, running some anti-spyware software once in a while, not downloading anything from anywhere of the net and running it on your computer willy nilly, not clicking links in emails from sexylaura123@ebay.securelogin.com or the like that remind you of the great time you had last Saturday and most of all not running in a fucking administrator account will do wonders at securing windows. Frankly I think telling users to do that, rather than tell them to switch to Non-MS software which they often can't and probably won't do anyway is a little more useful.
My dad immigrated from India to the U.K., and then moved to Ireland. He's a plastic surgeon and helped fix a lot of terrible injuries. Hes now an Irish citizen. He bought his own house and his own car and happily pays taxes that go towards keeping other people of the dole. His story isn't my any means unique and he is the sort of person this article is talking about. Sure, there are economic migrants and many of them don't do well. That is the point of this article - a point you appear to have completely missed. There is a good number of skilled immigrants that are very good for the economy. You are just trolling by stereotyping all of them as parasitic.
With respect to your can't be bothered to learn the language" comment which I'm sure will have a number of US citizens nodding their heads vigorously in agreement. http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/national_language.jpg
How often did the British colonials learn local languages?
When I was young and foolish I used notepad. When I was forced to learn unix, I chose pico. When I learned more about the GPL and linux I chose nano (a whole three orders of magnitude better). When I figured out that most of the physics and astronomy I do involves coding, I tried Emacs. When I found machines that didn't have Emacs or a network connection, I was shocked and horrified (these are remarkably common in the astronomy world though you wish they weren't) With no other recourse, I forced myself to learn vi(m). The vimtutor and docs were my friend. Now I do not need them. I learned the keys. Then I forgot them. My fingers remember though... J'y suis, j'y reste.
Refusing to start the car is one thing, and perfectly acceptable, but taking control away from the driver is a big no no under any circumstance.
I'd agree that refusal to start the car is probably a good idea - possible false positives by the drunk idiot in shotgun throwing up notwithstanding. There are however several drivers I know (and unfortunately been driven by) who need control taken away from them when sober to begin with. Theres a lot of people out there who ought not be be given driving licenses. Pretty much every time I'm on the interstate I see some car crash - read about it the next day and chances are are its DUI. I'm fine with control being taken away because it seems we are getting much better at cars that can drive themselves.
One that actually believes you have to be shown to sharing copyrighted material before being found guilty of it. Merry fucking Christmas.
Tiny steps. Maybe next year we can get a judge who recognizes that the RIAA "settlements" are pure extortion and the entire calculation for how much financial damage was caused by sharing a file is pure bollocks. Eventually one who realizes that an IP address!=identity and they shouldn't be allowed to just ask ISPs for IP address and get any kind of information at all. And that it shouldn't be a crime to punch the RIAA layers and moguls in the face... one can dream.
I'm not a biologist so does anyone know if the second head is fully functional? I'd have thought there'd be serious blood flow issues and it'd be unlikely for these animals to live very long but the snake at the bottom of the article doesn't look young. Does it act as a redundant system used only if the primary one fails or do they actually process stimuli from both heads? What happens if the stimuli are conflicting? Can someone point me towards anything on decesion making in these creatures or are they just not enough to study this. The beeb article says something vague about the condition being due to damage to the embryo possibly. What sort of damage? and how accepted is this?
I think you are getting things that live in a spatially 3D universe with the universe itself. Things that live in the universe, like your desk and computer and monitor indeed have physical measurements. The universe on the other hand is just the stage these objects live in. Its meaningless to talk about physical measurements for space because we started by defining it as infinite.
What you can talk abut is somethings coordinates in space - we label them (x,y,z) and when we say space is infinite it just means you can take of in any direction you like and those coordinates can keep changing and you won't run into a wall that will stop you in any direction and you won't loop back or anything crazy.
----
WHY can you define space as infinite - well you define a function - its called a line element that tells you how how much distance you've moved for a tiny (infinitesimal) move along x,y,z
so we can write ds^2 = dx^2+dy^2+dz^2
This thing can tell you all you need to about the geometry of this particular three dimensional space - it should be familiar - its standard flat boring 3d Euclidean space. In the process of grinding through math one of the things you do is see what restrictions there are on the values of x,y,z - in this case there aren't any and it can be -inf,inf for any of them.
The same holds true if you feel like going to higher dimensions we can add time in for instance ds^2 = dt^2 - a(t)^2(dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2)
This one might be less familiar but try googling FLRW metric or FLRW line element (some people drop the L) - this is the starting point in GR with a cosmological constant for our current description of the universe on the largest scales. That little a(t) that we slipped in there is the interesting quantity - thats the thing that we try to solve for in a universe where we know the curvature. We happen to live in a very special kind of universe - a flat one - on the largest scales you can draw a triangle and the angles add up to 180 degrees - theres a whole bunch of universes (an infinite number) that are not flat so its kinda special that ours is flat and this particular bit of magic is because of a fun period call inflation in the early history of the universe that addresses a lot of sticky issues so we believe it to be true. Thats another thing to google for.
Google/Wikipedia never really provides satisfactory answers - thats the point of The question I think you are dealing with is how to define something as taking GR and field theory courses - but theres a lot of good stuff out there. Try Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial o Elegant Universe. Sean Carroll has a blog somewhere as well thats very worth reading.
I love Slashdot - only here can the argument that an mp3 player has style turn into a movie with you "sliding out of bed, lookin' awesome, smoothly puttin on your stylin' clothes, hoppin into your sports car and zooming off."
You forgot to brush your teeth there bud. Style ain't gonna help you with no cavities fo' sure. Twit.
I don't care that M$ blatantly ripped of OSX (and they did) - I don't have a mac so I can't run OSX (legally). Also, there is one feature that I value in Windows that OSX doesn't have. I can't play any of my games, or run any of my programs on OSX.
End of story.
Thanks for all the feature R&D apple - I'll enjoy most of it on my PC now (actually truth be told I will turn most of the shiny off straight away - I like my solid grey windows with blue titlebars).
That website is pretty low on content and for the heck of it I read the links on the right as well. The 25 shortcomings one is pretty ludicrous. You should read it.
Most home users don't give a shit about SMB2. Most users are going to get Vista with new hardware, so their needing new hardware point is moot and really is it a shortcoming of Vista that it won't run on old hardware or is it a shortcoming of the hardware. The 2 gigs of ram to run Vista is bollocks - these guys havent even booted upto the RCs have they. He complains about a lack of driver support from the hardware manufacturer - how can you spin a hardware manufacturers problem into a shortcoming of vista?
They talk about lack of compatibility with AV products but do fail to mention a lot of things M$ is doing better with security. He actually complains that there is a learning curve with Vista - that its different enough than XP that users and technicians will need retraining - I've tried it - I don't need retraining. And whats the alternative - switch to linux - I run Debian in lab and Zenwalk at home and have run a whole bunch of other distros and I can assure you that any users that switch will need retraining there too.
By the time he gets to 20 he isn't he making grammatical sentences and he actually claims that theres bound to be bugs in 50 million lines of code and a five year beta test period - I'd agree but it isn't because theres 50 million lines of code because dear lod Linux also has a lot of lines of code. THis also sounds little better than SCO claiming well theres millions of lines of code in linux - some of it is bound to be ours.
I'm not going to go on bashing the article - its pretty obvious its biased and badly written in about 15 mins and he isn't even trying. The most valid point for me is going to be the inability of wordpad to open.doc files but I don't use them so much anymore.
Heres my list of things that are Bad with Vista 1) DRM - especially the Hollywood mandated HDCP and its Protected Video Path crap. The minute they roll this out you will see studios using HDCP because they can and if you don't have a brand spanking new monitor then there is a nice little ICT to drop your content straight back down to 480p and good riddance - now if I just bought HD content and have hardware perfectly capable of running it without needing an upgrade except to satisfy the Hollywood moguls then I damned well expect it to run and don't like being shafted. Even if movie studios do decide not to enforce ICT until 2012 (bollocks they will do it in a couple of years because they can)
2) UAC - this is a great idea in principle but the last I checked in implementation it was too goddamn annoying and I'm sure most people will just turn it off.
I used to have an issue with the limited license transfers but they've taken care of that one (not if you get your Vista from an OEM in which case you get what you paid for imho) I had no driver issues. If I did I don't think I'd be blaming MS and rather my shitty hardware manufacturer.
Thats it. Thats my list of woes with Vista. Now I'm not going to add my list of things that are bad with MS....
Have you already tried to buy a laptop without Windows, or with Linux? Well, you can't. Unless you're ready to pay *more* than with Windows pre-installed.
Yes I can. You are wrong. I have bought laptops without Windows installed, and have been able to get them cheaper than without Windows pre-installed. I posted this in another of my posts but just for you AC.
But you do already have the CHOICE of purchasing a PC without an operating system. Heck, even Dell can sell no OS PCs (well I think it comes with FreeDOS these days) or you can build the damn thing yourself. But if I want to sell a PC tied to a particular operating system then I should be allowed to do so (Apple certainly thinks so). If you don't like it give someone else your money.
Or go after MSFT and prevent them from doing shady deals where they can offer mass discounts to OEMs if OEMs sell you a keyboard with a windows key and a sticker and don't advertise other OSes. If MSFT wants to sell a product at x at retail then they either sell it at x to the OEM or some fraction of x WITHOUT forcing the OEM to become party to MSFT's anti-competitive behaviour.
HP isn't the right target here and whatever their numerous faults I think they are in the right in this case. Now granted I think they OUGHT to offer a no OS option and indeed I think they are bastards for not doing so already. I do not think they should be forced by law to do so however.
And the law isn't mad - I would hardly be a fan if a drug company decided not to sell me a cancer cure unless I bought their cold medicine as well. The trouble with laws is the second you draw a clean line to seperate things into black and white you find that you couldn't really make everyone happy, which is thankfully why we have courts. I think HP is on the right side of the line here though because you really aren't forced to buy anything from them at all.
Everything below isn't part of the point I'm making and is entirely me ranting so if you are easily offended or love MS/HP don't bother reading it or mark me troll if you want.
The sad thing is even if MSFT allowed OEMs to sell you PCs with an another operating system they'd still keep their OS monopoly because a) people are used to windows and all their programs, games and documents are already on windows and its a PITA to get things to work under wine or in OO. b) tech support for most linux distros is still hunt forums for obscure thread that fixes problem for a few hours - mind you atleast this does fix the problem - if something goes wrongs with my windows box its typically much more serious and calls for a full reinstallation - but people like the reassurance of a 1-800 number where you can get someone who doesnt know shit reading from a script - something I can't see debian doing anytime soon for instance.
An insightful poster on this forum pointed out that the average joe equated PC with an OS and another insightful poster replied out that this was only because they didn't know otherwise - but the trouble is people don't want to know otherwise at all. The Microsoft lockin isn't really with the OEMs, or the DRM or the proprietary formats anymore - the lockin is in the head of the customer that is so used to and comfortable with the windows monoculture that they do not want to change. Sheeple.
As for my personal opinion of HP - since Agilent was spun off they've never gotten my buisness. I think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard would turn in their graves if they saw HP today.
They offer a variety of case designs to choose from. nVidia or ATI graphics cards to choose from. AMD or Intel processors to choose from. So why no choice on operating system?
Because it costs them more money to support multiple OSes or indeed no OS at all? Think of all those fun tech help calls for people who chose the no OS option and then can't get drivers for some piece of hardware.
For other items mentioned (such as iPods) that depend on firmware to operate there is no other options for the functioning of the device, with a computer there are MANY other operating systems, and many manufacturers do offer options.
Actually iPods can run iPod Linux or rockbox but we don't expect Apple to offer the option of it. Or for that matter the option of buying a Mac without OSX. Yes I hate the windows tax but my point is still this - if you don't like the options you are getting from a particular company then you do not have to give them your buisness - like you yourself claim many other manufacturers do offer options.
dear god I sound like a capitalist and I'm typically socialist. I need a drink damn it.
The base PC models should come with a cheaper/free OS like linux, and (as much as I hate and disagree with the phrasing) users could choose to "upgrade" to windows.
Ahh but you are also forcing HP to provide technical support for linux - why should they have to deal with that "burden"
Or would you like the base PC models come with no technical support whatsoever and you have to upgrade to get help with windows.
I maintain that if you really don't want a computer without the windows tax you can probably find some company that sells them. Heres a starting point for notebooks that I bookmarked a while ago http://mcelrath.org/laptops.html
I hate the windows tax as much as the next/.er but this doesn't seem like an intelligent law - does anyone have more info on the law itself?
The group, the Union Fédérale des Consommateurs-Que Choisir, (UFC) alleges consumers frequently lack the option of buying "bare" computers without software. UFC said it wants consumers to be able to choose the software for their machine and get reimbursed for purchasing an OS they did not want. UFC contends the packaging of both hardware and software together violates a French law that prohibits linking the functionality of a product to another product.
Computers do depend on a whole range of products to function - they are a collection of products to begin with. You can certainly buy a functioning motherboard without a computer, hence they are other products, and computers, as we typically define them do depend on them to function.
What if it wasn't motherboard - what if I only want to sell custom high end computers with powerful GPUs - they aren't essential for the computer to function so do I have to provide the option of not installing a high end GPU? What if I don't want my companies logo on a computer without said high end GPU? I'd hardly like to see a PC with only a GMA3000 and have people judge its performance and associate that performance with the name of a company that claimed to sell great gaming hardware. A computer doesn't NEED a HDD, or optical drivers or a keyboard or a mouse, heck evena case fan to function. So should HP be forced to give people the option of not buying any of those things. I think no - most people really wouldn't consider it a computer without them.
And theres a perfectly reasonable way to get a computer without paying the windows tax. Its called assembling it yourself. HP should be allowed to sell whatever they want and if you want a computer without Windows find a seller who makes them - they exist - or make it yourself.
Players can choose to join the Antichrist's team, but of course they can never win on Carpathia's side. The enemy team includes fictional rock stars and folks with Muslim-sounding names, while the righteous include gospel singers, missionaries, healers and medics. Every character comes with a life story.
Wow. I thought the entire rock stars are evil thing was stereotyping and satirizing some of the more fundamnetalist Christians. Little did I know... But these guys aren't even trying - theres no BLOOD!!! I mean come on!!!! And no mention of evil homosexuals, people who play D&D, the ACLU, unbaptized babies, Catholic priests.../sarcasm
When asked about the Arab and Muslim-sounding names, Frichner said the game does not endorse prejudice. But "Muslims are not believers in Jesus Christ" -- and thus can't be on Christ's side in the game. "That is so obvious," he said.
Also obvious, people with Muslim-sounding names are Muslim. No, no clearly it doesn't endorse prejudice. I'm just giving up on this one though. Theres just no point in trying anymore. Theres so much prejudice against Islam around the world that people don't even recognize it as prejudice anymore.
"And it's kind of crazy," Gerstmann said. "One of the evil characters is a rock musician.... If you get too close to him your spirit is lowered."
I mean wow. Just wow. Someone actually coded this. Someone with brains enough to code. Wow. On the flip side this game seems so over the top it'd probably be entertaining to play. Though I'll wait for the expansion which features Pat Robertson and gang taking out Hugo Chavez and assaulting non-believers with the power of his speech.
I typed a whole lot more here and then just deleted it. Theres just no point really. Fucking Slashdot posting this in the morning - now I get to be depressed the whole day. I don't believe in a god. If there was one there'd be no stupid people.
OOo is not the solution - nor is Excel. People stick with Excel because the interface is familar and they have it at home but Excel or Calc is still a spreadsheet app and graphing tasks aren't really their forte especially in a physics lab.
I TAed several undergrad physics labs and we had this problem especially in the classes for non-majors. A lot of the analysis they had to do was reasonably complex and couldn't have been done with Excel or any spreadsheet app in any reasonable amount of time. We had Kaliedagraph on all the Windows and Mac boxes and recommended that the non-majors use it. Their lab writeup had instructions for the first few labs even to baby them through it.
The machines also had Origin and Mathematica on the windows and mac boxes for the upper classmen. Assuming moderate competence with a search engine, you can easily find enough information on the net to use any of these. I was happy to give people a short tutorial on gnuplot or an intro to R, even access to my student IDL license or supermongo on my lab machine. Anything but excel - chemistry uses that.
Yet, time after time people would try to use Excel and then get stuck when they couldn't define their own fitting function or that they didn't know how to weight a fit with the error bars(or even add error bars in some cases). The main reason for using Excel was that we had evening labs and people wanted to get out of lab and back to their dorms and only had Excel on their computers.
Eventually, tired of dealing with people who were trying to use Excel for things it wasn't meant to do, and trying to understand graphs that frequently resembled a cross between modern art and a pile of elephant turd, the TAs simply asked permission to dock people points for printing an Excel graph (and you can identify the damn thing easily - grey background with random useless horizontal lines - and the problem went away very quickly.
Unfortunately, I still don't know of a good free (as in beer - a lot of colleges aren't going to be able to afford site licenses) *user friendly* (see GUI) scientific data analysis and plotting software for Windows. There is ploticus and you can use R, but a full statistics and physics programming lanugage is a bit excessive for this task... The closest thing is qtiplot which is donation ware and quite affordable and is avaialble in binary format for a lot of OSes and is completely free if you choose to compile from source but frequently crashes on my laptop running Zenwalk.
So two messages - 1) OOo and excel are still spreadsheet apps. They aren't meant for scientific data analysis and really have no buisness in a lab to begin with. 2) The best way to force a student to learn a new interface is to give them incentive to (or in our case incentive not to use the old one and do a crap job). Yes it takes longer and you have to learn something new but isn't that the point of getting an education anyways.
I can't argue with your wife and importing complex Word documents - OOo is limited - my "trick" was not to make complex word documents to begin with and saving as Word 98 has always worked for me, but I can believe some people need the full feature set of office (shudders). I just hope MS is forced to add ODF support somehow.
Cowon doesn't use SRS WoW, they do have an equalizer, two systems called BBE (tries to regenerate higher frequency harmonics that are lost) and Mach3Bass (tries to expand the bass) and theres an MP Enhance thing that I'd not use - they do help with low bitrate files but you don't have to take my word for it - you could take a fourier transform and see for yourself - as long as you've a set of cans thats decent you can hear the difference. Oh heres a link to the RMAA tests and the results are pretty damn good - note the tests here went even run with BBE or Mach3Bass.
I leave you to compare these results to other DAPs. Or you could just try listening to it and a few other players and decide which one sounds the best to you. I did before I bought my X5L. You are full of shit. Also I think the ergonomics are a personal issue - I've no problem with it. I like the feature set a whole lot more than the iPods.
I'm not claiming it doesn't have problems - the firmware isn't for everyone - if you really want iD3 Tag search try rockbox - theres a patch to the Rockbox bootloader that does allow you to dual boot firmwares. You lose video and get a shorter battery life (the x5l with rockbox still lasts longer than my labmates G5 iPod video) but gain doom. Whatever its problems though the audio quality is not one of them.
The British Phonographic Industry (BPI), which represents the mainstream recording industry, broadly welcomed the report but said it would continue to press for the copyright extension. Peter Jamieson, chairman of the BPI, said: "Stealing music is effectively stealing the future of British musicians and the people who invest in them. "The decision on extension is ultimately for the European Commission and we will be putting our case vigorously when it reviews the relevant directive next year."
I love this bit - they don't even try to justify the reason for copyright extension which is they want to continue making money of something old - and they probably can because *some* people will still buy 51 year old stuff if they find it valuable. The point is that the material has passed into collective conciousness if its still wanted after 50 years and it ought to be free (I mean in the public domain not free as in beer). Putting things in the public domain doesn't translate to free as in beer - you still have to get it from someplace and unless its widely available someone can certainly charge you for the convenience of making it available. Ofcourse you can turn around and host it yourself and they can't do anything about that.
What putting things in the public domain does do is allow anyone anywhere to study it freely, edit it, really do whatever they damn well please with it and not have consequences. Yes I'm being a heretic and saying that something that is old but still profitable should be given away to anyone for anything for essentially free because that will encourage creativity. It will also help ensure those works actually get preserved. If something is available freely and openly and anyone can make copies of it (books, music, movies software, whatever) then it stands a much better chance of survival then if its still controlled by one company.
Theres a massive disconnect here - Jamieson is talking about stealing music and copyright extension at the same time but not extending copyright terms is not stealing from the artist or the people who invested in them - its allowing them to make money of older stuff which they wouldn't have otherwise - in a sense its really stealing from the general public who IMHO have a right to work that is part of our common "heritage" (for want of a better term).
The Association of Independent Music (AIM) said it was particularly unhappy over the issue of allowing more private copying. A spokesman said: "This is taking pragmatism to the point of capitulation, and falls drastically short of creating the progressive copyright framework needed in the digital age. "By tidying up a small part of the copyright law, we believe Gowers may well be opening the floodgates to uncontrolled and unstoppable private copying and sharing from person to person, as well as format to format."
This one is od coming from AIM precisely because they are supposed to be independent and I thought the issue of pivate copying was more of an issue for the major labels - I've not had time to follow the money yet. I think they misunderstood something though - Gowers advocated private copying and format shifting yes but they did not say without DRM. This ofcourse begs the $64,000 question - how the heck do you get something under a DRM scheme into the public domain after the copyright term is up. Frankly I'd hope that with 50 years in the interim we could break any DRM there was quite easily by brute force if need be but the question is if the format will remain readable over that period at all. I'd say obligate companies to release material into the public domain after their copyright term is up in a current format without any restriction. Yes this costs money but they did profit of the damn thing for 50 years - its minimum payback and the cost is already pretty damned low.
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Don't be a troll AC. With the exception of closing open ports the rest of the stuff is easy to do and can be almost completely automated. You don't have to maintain the firewall (thats turned on by default anyway), you can set most popular anti-spyware, anti-virus and windows update to run automatically in the background - again you do this once. Not running as admin is good practice - its something you setup once. I'm guessing your parents and your grandmother and her friends won't be needing to install software that needs you to be admin anyways. The last point about not downloading whatever from wherever or randomly clicking links is called not be an idiot. That IMHO is the hardest thing to fight against.
Its hardly a full time job - it won't take a single bloody hour to get most of this setup. Sure I agree this ought to be stuff that is done by default but it isn't. And like it or not the vast majority of computers that sell today (including I'm guessing your parent's and grandmother's and her friends') run windows and your mad if you think everyone can up and switch to OSX or linux. You can whine about Windows and its insecurities till the cows come home but reality is that its what most of us have to deal with at some point so shut up and secure it for the people you love instead of being a snarky little bitch on slashdot.
Try QuickJava so you can turn javascript on and off a little easier - the annoying thing is that flashblock wants javascript on so even that isn't quite ideal.
Closing unnecessary open ports, turning off javascript, using a firewall, running windows update and keeping your virus definitions current, running some anti-spyware software once in a while, not downloading anything from anywhere of the net and running it on your computer willy nilly, not clicking links in emails from sexylaura123@ebay.securelogin.com or the like that remind you of the great time you had last Saturday and most of all not running in a fucking administrator account will do wonders at securing windows. Frankly I think telling users to do that, rather than tell them to switch to Non-MS software which they often can't and probably won't do anyway is a little more useful.
My dad immigrated from India to the U.K., and then moved to Ireland. He's a plastic surgeon and helped fix a lot of terrible injuries. Hes now an Irish citizen. He bought his own house and his own car and happily pays taxes that go towards keeping other people of the dole. His story isn't my any means unique and he is the sort of person this article is talking about. Sure, there are economic migrants and many of them don't do well. That is the point of this article - a point you appear to have completely missed. There is a good number of skilled immigrants that are very good for the economy. You are just trolling by stereotyping all of them as parasitic.
With respect to your can't be bothered to learn the language" comment which I'm sure will have a number of US citizens nodding their heads vigorously in agreement.
http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/national_language.jpg
How often did the British colonials learn local languages?
When I was young and foolish I used notepad.
When I was forced to learn unix, I chose pico.
When I learned more about the GPL and linux I chose nano (a whole three orders of magnitude better).
When I figured out that most of the physics and astronomy I do involves coding, I tried Emacs.
When I found machines that didn't have Emacs or a network connection, I was shocked and horrified
(these are remarkably common in the astronomy world though you wish they weren't)
With no other recourse, I forced myself to learn vi(m). The vimtutor and docs were my friend.
Now I do not need them. I learned the keys. Then I forgot them. My fingers remember though...
J'y suis, j'y reste.
I'd agree that refusal to start the car is probably a good idea - possible false positives by the drunk idiot in shotgun throwing up notwithstanding. There are however several drivers I know (and unfortunately been driven by) who need control taken away from them when sober to begin with. Theres a lot of people out there who ought not be be given driving licenses. Pretty much every time I'm on the interstate I see some car crash - read about it the next day and chances are are its DUI. I'm fine with control being taken away because it seems we are getting much better at cars that can drive themselves.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/articles/ne
Also there are tons of things you could do if you weren't actually driving the car and it would be brilliant for long road trips.
Find a hippie chick ;-)
In Soviet Russia spacecraft launch you! Oh wait...
One that actually believes you have to be shown to sharing copyrighted material before being found guilty of it. Merry fucking Christmas.
Tiny steps. Maybe next year we can get a judge who recognizes that the RIAA "settlements" are pure extortion and the entire calculation for how much financial damage was caused by sharing a file is pure bollocks. Eventually one who realizes that an IP address!=identity and they shouldn't be allowed to just ask ISPs for IP address and get any kind of information at all. And that it shouldn't be a crime to punch the RIAA layers and moguls in the face... one can dream.
The beebs article has slightly more details and a picture of the actual fossil and a two headed snake.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6195345.stm
I'm not a biologist so does anyone know if the second head is fully functional? I'd have thought there'd be serious blood flow issues and it'd be unlikely for these animals to live very long but the snake at the bottom of the article doesn't look young. Does it act as a redundant system used only if the primary one fails or do they actually process stimuli from both heads? What happens if the stimuli are conflicting? Can someone point me towards anything on decesion making in these creatures or are they just not enough to study this. The beeb article says something vague about the condition being due to damage to the embryo possibly. What sort of damage? and how accepted is this?
I think you are getting things that live in a spatially 3D universe with the universe itself. Things that live in the universe, like your desk and computer and monitor indeed have physical measurements. The universe on the other hand is just the stage these objects live in. Its meaningless to talk about physical measurements for space because we started by defining it as infinite.
What you can talk abut is somethings coordinates in space - we label them (x,y,z) and when we say space is infinite it just means you can take of in any direction you like and those coordinates can keep changing and you won't run into a wall that will stop you in any direction and you won't loop back or anything crazy.
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WHY can you define space as infinite - well you define a function - its called a line element that tells you how how much distance you've moved for a tiny (infinitesimal) move along x,y,z
so we can write ds^2 = dx^2+dy^2+dz^2
This thing can tell you all you need to about the geometry of this particular three dimensional space - it should be familiar - its standard flat boring 3d Euclidean space. In the process of grinding through math one of the things you do is see what restrictions there are on the values of x,y,z - in this case there aren't any and it can be -inf,inf for any of them.
The same holds true if you feel like going to higher dimensions we can add time in for instance
ds^2 = dt^2 - a(t)^2(dx^2 + dy^2 + dz^2)
This one might be less familiar but try googling FLRW metric or FLRW line element (some people drop the L) - this is the starting point in GR with a cosmological constant for our current description of the universe on the largest scales. That little a(t) that we slipped in there is the interesting quantity - thats the thing that we try to solve for in a universe where we know the curvature. We happen to live in a very special kind of universe - a flat one - on the largest scales you can draw a triangle and the angles add up to 180 degrees - theres a whole bunch of universes (an infinite number) that are not flat so its kinda special that ours is flat and this particular bit of magic is because of a fun period call inflation in the early history of the universe that addresses a lot of sticky issues so we believe it to be true. Thats another thing to google for.
Google/Wikipedia never really provides satisfactory answers - thats the point of The question I think you are dealing with is how to define something as taking GR and field theory courses - but theres a lot of good stuff out there. Try Ned Wright's cosmology tutorial o Elegant Universe. Sean Carroll has a blog somewhere as well thats very worth reading.
I love Slashdot - only here can the argument that an mp3 player has style turn into a movie with you "sliding out of bed, lookin' awesome, smoothly puttin on your stylin' clothes, hoppin into your sports car and zooming off."
You forgot to brush your teeth there bud. Style ain't gonna help you with no cavities fo' sure. Twit.
I don't care that M$ blatantly ripped of OSX (and they did) - I don't have a mac so I can't run OSX (legally). Also, there is one feature that I value in Windows that OSX doesn't have. I can't play any of my games, or run any of my programs on OSX.
End of story.
Thanks for all the feature R&D apple - I'll enjoy most of it on my PC now (actually truth be told I will turn most of the shiny off straight away - I like my solid grey windows with blue titlebars).
Feel free to make this a PC vs Mac ad.
That website is pretty low on content and for the heck of it I read the links on the right as well. The 25 shortcomings one is pretty ludicrous. You should read it.
.doc files but I don't use them so much anymore.
Most home users don't give a shit about SMB2. Most users are going to get Vista with new hardware, so their needing new hardware point is moot and really is it a shortcoming of Vista that it won't run on old hardware or is it a shortcoming of the hardware. The 2 gigs of ram to run Vista is bollocks - these guys havent even booted upto the RCs have they. He complains about a lack of driver support from the hardware manufacturer - how can you spin a hardware manufacturers problem into a shortcoming of vista?
They talk about lack of compatibility with AV products but do fail to mention a lot of things M$ is doing better with security. He actually complains that there is a learning curve with Vista - that its different enough than XP that users and technicians will need retraining - I've tried it - I don't need retraining. And whats the alternative - switch to linux - I run Debian in lab and Zenwalk at home and have run a whole bunch of other distros and I can assure you that any users that switch will need retraining there too.
By the time he gets to 20 he isn't he making grammatical sentences and he actually claims that theres bound to be bugs in 50 million lines of code and a five year beta test period - I'd agree but it isn't because theres 50 million lines of code because dear lod Linux also has a lot of lines of code. THis also sounds little better than SCO claiming well theres millions of lines of code in linux - some of it is bound to be ours.
I'm not going to go on bashing the article - its pretty obvious its biased and badly written in about 15 mins and he isn't even trying. The most valid point for me is going to be the inability of wordpad to open
Heres my list of things that are Bad with Vista
1) DRM - especially the Hollywood mandated HDCP and its Protected Video Path crap. The minute they roll this out you will see studios using HDCP because they can and if you don't have a brand spanking new monitor then there is a nice little ICT to drop your content straight back down to 480p and good riddance - now if I just bought HD content and have hardware perfectly capable of running it without needing an upgrade except to satisfy the Hollywood moguls then I damned well expect it to run and don't like being shafted. Even if movie studios do decide not to enforce ICT until 2012 (bollocks they will do it in a couple of years because they can)
2) UAC - this is a great idea in principle but the last I checked in implementation it was too goddamn annoying and I'm sure most people will just turn it off.
I used to have an issue with the limited license transfers but they've taken care of that one (not if you get your Vista from an OEM in which case you get what you paid for imho) I had no driver issues. If I did I don't think I'd be blaming MS and rather my shitty hardware manufacturer.
Thats it. Thats my list of woes with Vista. Now I'm not going to add my list of things that are bad with MS....
Have you already tried to buy a laptop without Windows, or with Linux? Well, you can't. Unless you're ready to pay *more* than with Windows pre-installed.
Yes I can. You are wrong. I have bought laptops without Windows installed, and have been able to get them cheaper than without Windows pre-installed. I posted this in another of my posts but just for you AC.
http://mcelrath.org/laptops.html
If you claimed I couldn't get it from a big name brand liek Dell I might agree with you but then again no one is forcing you to buy from Dell at all.
But you do already have the CHOICE of purchasing a PC without an operating system. Heck, even Dell can sell no OS PCs (well I think it comes with FreeDOS these days) or you can build the damn thing yourself. But if I want to sell a PC tied to a particular operating system then I should be allowed to do so (Apple certainly thinks so). If you don't like it give someone else your money.
Or go after MSFT and prevent them from doing shady deals where they can offer mass discounts to OEMs if OEMs sell you a keyboard with a windows key and a sticker and don't advertise other OSes. If MSFT wants to sell a product at x at retail then they either sell it at x to the OEM or some fraction of x WITHOUT forcing the OEM to become party to MSFT's anti-competitive behaviour.
HP isn't the right target here and whatever their numerous faults I think they are in the right in this case. Now granted I think they OUGHT to offer a no OS option and indeed I think they are bastards for not doing so already. I do not think they should be forced by law to do so however.
And the law isn't mad - I would hardly be a fan if a drug company decided not to sell me a cancer cure unless I bought their cold medicine as well. The trouble with laws is the second you draw a clean line to seperate things into black and white you find that you couldn't really make everyone happy, which is thankfully why we have courts. I think HP is on the right side of the line here though because you really aren't forced to buy anything from them at all.
Everything below isn't part of the point I'm making and is entirely me ranting so if you are easily offended or love MS/HP don't bother reading it or mark me troll if you want.
The sad thing is even if MSFT allowed OEMs to sell you PCs with an another operating system they'd still keep their OS monopoly because
a) people are used to windows and all their programs, games and documents are already on windows and its a PITA to get things to work under wine or in OO.
b) tech support for most linux distros is still hunt forums for obscure thread that fixes problem for a few hours - mind you atleast this does fix the problem - if something goes wrongs with my windows box its typically much more serious and calls for a full reinstallation - but people like the reassurance of a 1-800 number where you can get someone who doesnt know shit reading from a script - something I can't see debian doing anytime soon for instance.
An insightful poster on this forum pointed out that the average joe equated PC with an OS and another insightful poster replied out that this was only because they didn't know otherwise - but the trouble is people don't want to know otherwise at all. The Microsoft lockin isn't really with the OEMs, or the DRM or the proprietary formats anymore - the lockin is in the head of the customer that is so used to and comfortable with the windows monoculture that they do not want to change. Sheeple.
As for my personal opinion of HP - since Agilent was spun off they've never gotten my buisness. I think Bill Hewlett and Dave Packard would turn in their graves if they saw HP today.
Because it costs them more money to support multiple OSes or indeed no OS at all? Think of all those fun tech help calls for people who chose the no OS option and then can't get drivers for some piece of hardware.
Actually iPods can run iPod Linux or rockbox but we don't expect Apple to offer the option of it. Or for that matter the option of buying a Mac without OSX. Yes I hate the windows tax but my point is still this - if you don't like the options you are getting from a particular company then you do not have to give them your buisness - like you yourself claim many other manufacturers do offer options.
dear god I sound like a capitalist and I'm typically socialist. I need a drink damn it.
Ahh but you are also forcing HP to provide technical support for linux - why should they have to deal with that "burden"
Or would you like the base PC models come with no technical support whatsoever and you have to upgrade to get help with windows.
I maintain that if you really don't want a computer without the windows tax you can probably find some company that sells them.
Heres a starting point for notebooks that I bookmarked a while ago
http://mcelrath.org/laptops.html
Or assemble it yourself.
Computers do depend on a whole range of products to function - they are a collection of products to begin with. You can certainly buy a functioning motherboard without a computer, hence they are other products, and computers, as we typically define them do depend on them to function.
What if it wasn't motherboard - what if I only want to sell custom high end computers with powerful GPUs - they aren't essential for the computer to function so do I have to provide the option of not installing a high end GPU? What if I don't want my companies logo on a computer without said high end GPU? I'd hardly like to see a PC with only a GMA3000 and have people judge its performance and associate that performance with the name of a company that claimed to sell great gaming hardware. A computer doesn't NEED a HDD, or optical drivers or a keyboard or a mouse, heck evena case fan to function. So should HP be forced to give people the option of not buying any of those things. I think no - most people really wouldn't consider it a computer without them.
And theres a perfectly reasonable way to get a computer without paying the windows tax. Its called assembling it yourself. HP should be allowed to sell whatever they want and if you want a computer without Windows find a seller who makes them - they exist - or make it yourself.
You must be new here. this is Slashdot. Hes never gotten a PEEK at anything before let alone got to POKE it.
Even the nerd chicks don't think memorizing memory address ranges is cool.
Wow. I thought the entire rock stars are evil thing was stereotyping and satirizing some of the more fundamnetalist Christians. Little did I know... But these guys aren't even trying - theres no BLOOD!!! I mean come on!!!! And no mention of evil homosexuals, people who play D&D, the ACLU, unbaptized babies, Catholic priests...
Also obvious, people with Muslim-sounding names are Muslim. No, no clearly it doesn't endorse prejudice. I'm just giving up on this one though. Theres just no point in trying anymore. Theres so much prejudice against Islam around the world that people don't even recognize it as prejudice anymore.
I mean wow. Just wow. Someone actually coded this. Someone with brains enough to code. Wow.
On the flip side this game seems so over the top it'd probably be entertaining to play. Though I'll wait for the expansion which features Pat Robertson and gang taking out Hugo Chavez and assaulting non-believers with the power of his speech.
I typed a whole lot more here and then just deleted it. Theres just no point really. Fucking Slashdot posting this in the morning - now I get to be depressed the whole day. I don't believe in a god. If there was one there'd be no stupid people.
OOo is not the solution - nor is Excel. People stick with Excel because the interface is familar and they have it at home but Excel or Calc is still a spreadsheet app and graphing tasks aren't really their forte especially in a physics lab.
I TAed several undergrad physics labs and we had this problem especially in the classes for non-majors. A lot of the analysis they had to do was reasonably complex and couldn't have been done with Excel or any spreadsheet app in any reasonable amount of time. We had Kaliedagraph on all the Windows and Mac boxes and recommended that the non-majors use it. Their lab writeup had instructions for the first few labs even to baby them through it.
The machines also had Origin and Mathematica on the windows and mac boxes for the upper classmen. Assuming moderate competence with a search engine, you can easily find enough information on the net to use any of these. I was happy to give people a short tutorial on gnuplot or an intro to R, even access to my student IDL license or supermongo on my lab machine. Anything but excel - chemistry uses that.
Yet, time after time people would try to use Excel and then get stuck when they couldn't define their own fitting function or that they didn't know how to weight a fit with the error bars(or even add error bars in some cases). The main reason for using Excel was that we had evening labs and people wanted to get out of lab and back to their dorms and only had Excel on their computers.
Eventually, tired of dealing with people who were trying to use Excel for things it wasn't meant to do, and trying to understand graphs that frequently resembled a cross between modern art and a pile of elephant turd, the TAs simply asked permission to dock people points for printing an Excel graph (and you can identify the damn thing easily - grey background with random useless horizontal lines - and the problem went away very quickly.
Unfortunately, I still don't know of a good free (as in beer - a lot of colleges aren't going to be able to afford site licenses) *user friendly* (see GUI) scientific data analysis and plotting software for Windows. There is ploticus and you can use R, but a full statistics and physics programming lanugage is a bit excessive for this task... The closest thing is qtiplot which is donation ware and quite affordable and is avaialble in binary format for a lot of OSes and is completely free if you choose to compile from source but frequently crashes on my laptop running Zenwalk.
So two messages -
1) OOo and excel are still spreadsheet apps. They aren't meant for scientific data analysis and really have no buisness in a lab to begin with.
2) The best way to force a student to learn a new interface is to give them incentive to (or in our case incentive not to use the old one and do a crap job). Yes it takes longer and you have to learn something new but isn't that the point of getting an education anyways.
I can't argue with your wife and importing complex Word documents - OOo is limited - my "trick" was not to make complex word documents to begin with and saving as Word 98 has always worked for me, but I can believe some people need the full feature set of office (shudders). I just hope MS is forced to add ODF support somehow.
Cowon doesn't use SRS WoW, they do have an equalizer, two systems called BBE (tries to regenerate higher frequency harmonics that are lost) and Mach3Bass (tries to expand the bass) and theres an MP Enhance thing that I'd not use - they do help with low bitrate files but you don't have to take my word for it - you could take a fourier transform and see for yourself - as long as you've a set of cans thats decent you can hear the difference. Oh heres a link to the RMAA tests and the results are pretty damn good - note the tests here went even run with BBE or Mach3Bass.
I leave you to compare these results to other DAPs. Or you could just try listening to it and a few other players and decide which one sounds the best to you. I did before I bought my X5L. You are full of shit. Also I think the ergonomics are a personal issue - I've no problem with it. I like the feature set a whole lot more than the iPods.
I'm not claiming it doesn't have problems - the firmware isn't for everyone - if you really want iD3 Tag search try rockbox - theres a patch to the Rockbox bootloader that does allow you to dual boot firmwares. You lose video and get a shorter battery life (the x5l with rockbox still lasts longer than my labmates G5 iPod video) but gain doom. Whatever its problems though the audio quality is not one of them.
Then again maybe you are deaf.
I love this bit - they don't even try to justify the reason for copyright extension which is they want to continue making money of something old - and they probably can because *some* people will still buy 51 year old stuff if they find it valuable. The point is that the material has passed into collective conciousness if its still wanted after 50 years and it ought to be free (I mean in the public domain not free as in beer). Putting things in the public domain doesn't translate to free as in beer - you still have to get it from someplace and unless its widely available someone can certainly charge you for the convenience of making it available. Ofcourse you can turn around and host it yourself and they can't do anything about that.
What putting things in the public domain does do is allow anyone anywhere to study it freely, edit it, really do whatever they damn well please with it and not have consequences. Yes I'm being a heretic and saying that something that is old but still profitable should be given away to anyone for anything for essentially free because that will encourage creativity. It will also help ensure those works actually get preserved. If something is available freely and openly and anyone can make copies of it (books, music, movies software, whatever) then it stands a much better chance of survival then if its still controlled by one company.
Theres a massive disconnect here - Jamieson is talking about stealing music and copyright extension at the same time but not extending copyright terms is not stealing from the artist or the people who invested in them - its allowing them to make money of older stuff which they wouldn't have otherwise - in a sense its really stealing from the general public who IMHO have a right to work that is part of our common "heritage" (for want of a better term).
This one is od coming from AIM precisely because they are supposed to be independent and I thought the issue of pivate copying was more of an issue for the major labels - I've not had time to follow the money yet. I think they misunderstood something though - Gowers advocated private copying and format shifting yes but they did not say without DRM. This ofcourse begs the $64,000 question - how the heck do you get something under a DRM scheme into the public domain after the copyright term is up. Frankly I'd hope that with 50 years in the interim we could break any DRM there was quite easily by brute force if need be but the question is if the format will remain readable over that period at all. I'd say obligate companies to release material into the public domain after their copyright term is up in a current format without any restriction. Yes this costs money but they did profit of the damn thing for 50 years - its minimum payback and the cost is already pretty damned low.