The problem is that most articles that are made accessible to lay-people lose their usefulness for people who actually need to use that information. It is fine for a wikipedia article to contain a long but understandable description of a topic. But the concise technical description must remain in a prominent position. Wikipedia is first and foremost a reference source. The precise technical information is more important than the "How Stuff Works" version.
My opinion, as a mathematician, is that the first paragraph of an article should contain a concise, precise description of a topic, with all the technical terms linking to separate articles. This really doesn't take up much space, and is the format most useful for students of the subject. The average joe's description is going to be several times longer and contain less precise information, so it should go towards the beginning of the body test.
Look at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ articles to see good examples. An article like Lie Group contains the entire definition in the first sentence, making that page a very good reference for people who already know some abstract algebra. Compare with the wikipedia page, Lie Group, which has a less concise and less clear definition. Wikipedia does have a lot more in the way of historical information, and a less dense explanation of the topic, but it still isn't very accessible. It also lacks the more or less obligatory link to the wolfram page. So what audience can make use of that article?
I think what really matters is that everybody considers the Wii a safe buy. While the other consoles have GTA style games, the Wii is something that parents and grandparents view as a fun toy for the entire family. I've yet to hear any of the normal concerns about video game violence applied to the Wii.
The grandfather you saw buying a Wii could very well have been buying his first video game console, for himself and his visitors. A year ago, that would have been unthinkable. The Wii has turned out to be a Revolution after all.
Long answer: No. X11+GLX is very different from GDI+DirectX. In almost all cases, it would be easier to reverse-engineer the hardware, rather than wrap the driver api. Also, it would probably be impossible to use windows graphics drivers in a secure manner. And the extra translation layer would kill performance. If you are going to reverse-engineer the drivers, you might as well look at the hardware info, and not the software api.
Note that in some cases, it is possible to use Windows drivers on a *nix operating system. The NDIS network card driver api is well documented, and is supported by projects for Linux and FreeBSD.
This isn't an intractable problem, much as might seem to be. The way it works should be this: the voting machine has no long-term storage except for a mask rom chip that can be verified with a JTAG. The machine should have 2 slots for flash cards. One card should hold the operating system, and that card can be verified by any standard pc with a pcmcia/cf/etc. slot, and the other card will store the votes and can be wiped before the election. To make things even safer, the cards should have hardware write-protect switches. That way, the authenticity of the software could be verified during the election, if need be, without compromising the votes.
Of course, a voter-verified paper trail is still necessary.
Yep. This has every sign of being somebody's get-rich-quick scheme. I say we wait for them to get all ready to put this in production, and then just shoot everybody involved in selling the deactivation devices, on the grounds that they are sleazy bastards.
The chip in question is an RFID chip that sends out an electrical pulse to cause a chemical changes that makes the DVDs clear. I'm pretty sure that this will turn out to be easy to defeat. The solution will probably involve a half second in a microwave or exposure to an alternating magnetic field or something along those lines.
One thing I can't explain is how the military uses eye tracking to aim missiles -- it seems like that system would run into the same problems. For missiles, I think the jitter wouldn't matter much. It should be pretty easy to average the direction that the eyes are looking at, while still providing control that is as responsive as the missile's capability to change direction. Those things have a pretty large turning radius. Also, when dealing with high explosives, it matters a lot less which part of the target you hit. For air-to-air, it really doesn't matter which wing you hit, or even if you hit the engine. You still have a pretty good chance of bringing down the plane.
The only real problem would be to train the gunner to focus on the target. This would seem to be much easier when the gunner is not the same person responsible for taking evasive action from other threats, ie. two-seaters only.
It seems from your post that you live in an area that is not at all suited for pedestrian or bike travel. I would guess that fewer than half your roads have sidewalks, and that bike lanes are few and far between.
Suburban America really has an odd layout when you think about it. People tend to live in the midst of a twisty maze of cul-de-sacs, all alike. That means that it frequently takes five minutes just to drive out to the nearest major road, and if that road is busy, it can take ten or fifteen minutes to get to the nearest non-residential zone. In an area where there are actually stores within walking/biking distance, opting to walk or bike is a good idea. Provided the weather is decent, you get to have a far more relaxing trip, and you get to enjoy the environment that you aren't killing.
If you are talking about things like SSP, the time to enable that would have been with XP SP2. People shouldn't have to pay big bucks for a recompiled version of the same software.
I think he was being a bit too vague. The fatal heart attack rate would soar. Most people in America don't seem to be able to go up more than three flights of stairs with out taking a rest.
You are right that he loses the same KE either way, however, if he decelerates slowly, a larger portion of that energy will be reclaimed and stored in the batteries. If he stops suddenly, the batteries will not get much of a charge at all.
I think that Active Desktop and Channels failed not from the lack of always-on internet, but because it was so badly implemented. Every demonstration I saw of those features looked like pre-installed crapware that was a waste of screen space.
Ok, here's what's bugging me: 6 out of 19 holes are still present in Vista. That means that, in developing Vista, they removed at least 13 holes. My question: was that an accident? If those 13 holes were identified as critical vulnerabilities during Vista development and fixed, then they should have been patched in XP too. If they were accidentally fixed by more broad changes in Vista, then I guess you can see that as good, but it still calls into question MS's ability to audit code.
On the other hand, if the rewritten portions of Vista removed 70% of the critical holes, that's pretty good. They might have been working on the right modules.
What I don't get is the "bonds together four cable lines" bit. Does that mean you need to lay 3 more wires alongside the current one, or can this be done with the same physical cable that we already have? If it requires burying more cables, then it would be foolish to not bury a fiber optic cable.
Read the summary!
It bonds together four cable lines but is capable of allowing much more capacity enabling a data download speed of 150 megabits per second, or roughly 25 times faster than today's standard cable modems. What's so hard about that?
I don't think that we can blame the soldiers for feeling sorry for the robots. After all, the robots are coming closer and closer to looking and acting like living creatures. We model the robot leg systems after what we find in nature, because we can't do better than evolution yet. We constantly strive to make the robots more intelligent, so that they will be more useful. It is inevitable that the best robots will be thought of as pets or friends.
While I don't think we need to be careful about being humane to robots, we do need to be aware of the psychological effect they have on the people around them. Watching your pet armored spider or laser-equipped shark get blown up is going to be stressful.
I think the spatial finder issue is a good example of what I've been talking about. If you ignore what other operating systems (including Classic) have for a file manager, the NeXT style Finder is pretty good. The problems come when users expect it to be a spatial file manager. The OS X Finder is different from the spatial finder in a fundamental way, and people would rather dis[miss] it than take a few minutes to understand the new design. The fact that the new Finder is not spatial does not make it bad, and to say otherwise is to commit the same mistake windows users often make when confronted with the Dock or a GNOME desktop.
Apple has decided that the Finder should not be spatial, and I support that decision. I think that a spatial paradigm doesn't fit the way people use their file systems, and the situation is constantly getting worse as search technology improves. Quiksilver has made it possible for me to access any of several hundred of my most-used files in just a few key strokes, with consistency. It is so efficient that there is no point in using the Finder to actually find and open files. That reduces the Finder to a tool for moving and renaming files. Using column view, those tasks can be accomplished as easily or better than with any spatial file manager.
Your second point is simply a bug, and it doesn't have much to do with UI design. The third point is also essentially moot. Why should the finder keep mediocre features to do something, when tools like Spotlight and Quicksilver can do a much better job?
Consider how different users view the OS X Finder. Those coming from Windows will find it to be much better than explorer for most tasks. Those coming from OS 9 seem to see it as too different to like, though obviously some users prefer the new Finder. Those coming from NeXT systems will see it as a bit of a step down, but offset by the gain of great search tools. In light of that, it would be a bad business decision for Apple to encourage the use of a spatial finder. OS X was meant to be an operating system that people could switch to and consider to be an upgrade. Apple cut almost all of the obsolete technology out of the Mac OS. The spatial finder was just one of those things.
Overall, the finder does kinda suck. I should have been more specific. I really like the column view of the finder, but I have seen some pretty negative reactions to it. I can't think of any logical reason to hate the column view mode, so I think people who hate the column view are probably not being reasonable.
Yep. And that definitely won't happen. I know quite a few mid- to high-level IBM employees in the US who feel that their jobs (and even their divisions) are quite secure.
My opinion is slightly different: I think that most users know that it sucks, but they are so used to it that they have become too narrow minded to come up with a way that doesn't suck. When presented with something sufficiently different that it doesn't suck, they automatically hate it because it's different. Hence, many windows users hate or can't understand the OS X dock or finder.
This is closely related to the fact that most users won't spend more than 3 minutes to learn how to use an advanced feature, even if it will save them several hours of effort per week. This is why LaTeX is never used in a corporate setting, just in academic situations where word processors cannot the complex charts and equations.
You are right that very few people are capable of making a non-destructive patch for an OS or its desktop environment. However, most people are capable of making a coherent bugzilla entry, and following up on it.
All that really says is that the mob is smartest when people are acting independently. There is a reason that economics assumes that people are acting independently with rational self interest. It's also already obvious that most things will end up worse if designed by a committee.
So what's gone wrong? Why is the OS market dominated by a monopoly with a deeply flawed product? Mostly because switching operating systems is much harder than it should be. It is also partly because the alternatives have only become competitive within the last decade. Given the inertia that MS has, it is not surprising that they haven't been dethroned yet by a better product.
I suggest you take a look at this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2123848,00.as p. Sure, it is Dvorak, but it is pretty good evidence that the fundamental flaws in windows have not gone unnoticed (by users). Microsoft can only get away with this because most of their users have very low expectations. So, in that respect, the users are to blame for paying repeatedly for the same bugs for the past 15-20 years. But all the bugs Dvorak was complaining about are fixable, and have indeed been fixed (or never shown up) in all other operating systems.
Competition is what will drive Microsoft to fix such major flaws. Competition is the only reliable way to get them to do it. Fortunately for us all, the OS market has been seeing a lot more competition lately (but still not enough).
Slashdot Mirror
The problem is that most articles that are made accessible to lay-people lose their usefulness for people who actually need to use that information. It is fine for a wikipedia article to contain a long but understandable description of a topic. But the concise technical description must remain in a prominent position. Wikipedia is first and foremost a reference source. The precise technical information is more important than the "How Stuff Works" version.
My opinion, as a mathematician, is that the first paragraph of an article should contain a concise, precise description of a topic, with all the technical terms linking to separate articles. This really doesn't take up much space, and is the format most useful for students of the subject. The average joe's description is going to be several times longer and contain less precise information, so it should go towards the beginning of the body test.
Look at http://mathworld.wolfram.com/ articles to see good examples. An article like Lie Group contains the entire definition in the first sentence, making that page a very good reference for people who already know some abstract algebra. Compare with the wikipedia page, Lie Group, which has a less concise and less clear definition. Wikipedia does have a lot more in the way of historical information, and a less dense explanation of the topic, but it still isn't very accessible. It also lacks the more or less obligatory link to the wolfram page. So what audience can make use of that article?
I think what really matters is that everybody considers the Wii a safe buy. While the other consoles have GTA style games, the Wii is something that parents and grandparents view as a fun toy for the entire family. I've yet to hear any of the normal concerns about video game violence applied to the Wii.
The grandfather you saw buying a Wii could very well have been buying his first video game console, for himself and his visitors. A year ago, that would have been unthinkable. The Wii has turned out to be a Revolution after all.
Short answer: no.
Long answer: No. X11+GLX is very different from GDI+DirectX. In almost all cases, it would be easier to reverse-engineer the hardware, rather than wrap the driver api. Also, it would probably be impossible to use windows graphics drivers in a secure manner. And the extra translation layer would kill performance. If you are going to reverse-engineer the drivers, you might as well look at the hardware info, and not the software api.
Note that in some cases, it is possible to use Windows drivers on a *nix operating system. The NDIS network card driver api is well documented, and is supported by projects for Linux and FreeBSD.
This isn't an intractable problem, much as might seem to be. The way it works should be this: the voting machine has no long-term storage except for a mask rom chip that can be verified with a JTAG. The machine should have 2 slots for flash cards. One card should hold the operating system, and that card can be verified by any standard pc with a pcmcia/cf/etc. slot, and the other card will store the votes and can be wiped before the election. To make things even safer, the cards should have hardware write-protect switches. That way, the authenticity of the software could be verified during the election, if need be, without compromising the votes.
Of course, a voter-verified paper trail is still necessary.
Yep. This has every sign of being somebody's get-rich-quick scheme. I say we wait for them to get all ready to put this in production, and then just shoot everybody involved in selling the deactivation devices, on the grounds that they are sleazy bastards.
The chip in question is an RFID chip that sends out an electrical pulse to cause a chemical changes that makes the DVDs clear. I'm pretty sure that this will turn out to be easy to defeat. The solution will probably involve a half second in a microwave or exposure to an alternating magnetic field or something along those lines.
I'm pretty sure that YouTube would get the market share and not the DVD business.
The only real problem would be to train the gunner to focus on the target. This would seem to be much easier when the gunner is not the same person responsible for taking evasive action from other threats, ie. two-seaters only.
It seems from your post that you live in an area that is not at all suited for pedestrian or bike travel. I would guess that fewer than half your roads have sidewalks, and that bike lanes are few and far between.
Suburban America really has an odd layout when you think about it. People tend to live in the midst of a twisty maze of cul-de-sacs, all alike. That means that it frequently takes five minutes just to drive out to the nearest major road, and if that road is busy, it can take ten or fifteen minutes to get to the nearest non-residential zone. In an area where there are actually stores within walking/biking distance, opting to walk or bike is a good idea. Provided the weather is decent, you get to have a far more relaxing trip, and you get to enjoy the environment that you aren't killing.
If you are talking about things like SSP, the time to enable that would have been with XP SP2. People shouldn't have to pay big bucks for a recompiled version of the same software.
I think he was being a bit too vague. The fatal heart attack rate would soar. Most people in America don't seem to be able to go up more than three flights of stairs with out taking a rest.
You are right that he loses the same KE either way, however, if he decelerates slowly, a larger portion of that energy will be reclaimed and stored in the batteries. If he stops suddenly, the batteries will not get much of a charge at all.
I think that Active Desktop and Channels failed not from the lack of always-on internet, but because it was so badly implemented. Every demonstration I saw of those features looked like pre-installed crapware that was a waste of screen space.
Ok, here's what's bugging me: 6 out of 19 holes are still present in Vista. That means that, in developing Vista, they removed at least 13 holes. My question: was that an accident? If those 13 holes were identified as critical vulnerabilities during Vista development and fixed, then they should have been patched in XP too. If they were accidentally fixed by more broad changes in Vista, then I guess you can see that as good, but it still calls into question MS's ability to audit code.
On the other hand, if the rewritten portions of Vista removed 70% of the critical holes, that's pretty good. They might have been working on the right modules.
What I don't get is the "bonds together four cable lines" bit. Does that mean you need to lay 3 more wires alongside the current one, or can this be done with the same physical cable that we already have? If it requires burying more cables, then it would be foolish to not bury a fiber optic cable.
I don't think that we can blame the soldiers for feeling sorry for the robots. After all, the robots are coming closer and closer to looking and acting like living creatures. We model the robot leg systems after what we find in nature, because we can't do better than evolution yet. We constantly strive to make the robots more intelligent, so that they will be more useful. It is inevitable that the best robots will be thought of as pets or friends.
While I don't think we need to be careful about being humane to robots, we do need to be aware of the psychological effect they have on the people around them. Watching your pet armored spider or laser-equipped shark get blown up is going to be stressful.
I actually found the civ4 cinematics to be lacking. I think Civ2 did a great, with much more in-depth wonder movies and a much longer winning movie.
I think the spatial finder issue is a good example of what I've been talking about. If you ignore what other operating systems (including Classic) have for a file manager, the NeXT style Finder is pretty good. The problems come when users expect it to be a spatial file manager. The OS X Finder is different from the spatial finder in a fundamental way, and people would rather dis[miss] it than take a few minutes to understand the new design. The fact that the new Finder is not spatial does not make it bad, and to say otherwise is to commit the same mistake windows users often make when confronted with the Dock or a GNOME desktop.
Apple has decided that the Finder should not be spatial, and I support that decision. I think that a spatial paradigm doesn't fit the way people use their file systems, and the situation is constantly getting worse as search technology improves. Quiksilver has made it possible for me to access any of several hundred of my most-used files in just a few key strokes, with consistency. It is so efficient that there is no point in using the Finder to actually find and open files. That reduces the Finder to a tool for moving and renaming files. Using column view, those tasks can be accomplished as easily or better than with any spatial file manager.
Your second point is simply a bug, and it doesn't have much to do with UI design. The third point is also essentially moot. Why should the finder keep mediocre features to do something, when tools like Spotlight and Quicksilver can do a much better job?
Consider how different users view the OS X Finder. Those coming from Windows will find it to be much better than explorer for most tasks. Those coming from OS 9 seem to see it as too different to like, though obviously some users prefer the new Finder. Those coming from NeXT systems will see it as a bit of a step down, but offset by the gain of great search tools. In light of that, it would be a bad business decision for Apple to encourage the use of a spatial finder. OS X was meant to be an operating system that people could switch to and consider to be an upgrade. Apple cut almost all of the obsolete technology out of the Mac OS. The spatial finder was just one of those things.
Overall, the finder does kinda suck. I should have been more specific. I really like the column view of the finder, but I have seen some pretty negative reactions to it. I can't think of any logical reason to hate the column view mode, so I think people who hate the column view are probably not being reasonable.
Yep. And that definitely won't happen. I know quite a few mid- to high-level IBM employees in the US who feel that their jobs (and even their divisions) are quite secure.
My opinion is slightly different: I think that most users know that it sucks, but they are so used to it that they have become too narrow minded to come up with a way that doesn't suck. When presented with something sufficiently different that it doesn't suck, they automatically hate it because it's different. Hence, many windows users hate or can't understand the OS X dock or finder.
This is closely related to the fact that most users won't spend more than 3 minutes to learn how to use an advanced feature, even if it will save them several hours of effort per week. This is why LaTeX is never used in a corporate setting, just in academic situations where word processors cannot the complex charts and equations.
You are right that very few people are capable of making a non-destructive patch for an OS or its desktop environment. However, most people are capable of making a coherent bugzilla entry, and following up on it.
All that really says is that the mob is smartest when people are acting independently. There is a reason that economics assumes that people are acting independently with rational self interest. It's also already obvious that most things will end up worse if designed by a committee.
s p. Sure, it is Dvorak, but it is pretty good evidence that the fundamental flaws in windows have not gone unnoticed (by users). Microsoft can only get away with this because most of their users have very low expectations. So, in that respect, the users are to blame for paying repeatedly for the same bugs for the past 15-20 years. But all the bugs Dvorak was complaining about are fixable, and have indeed been fixed (or never shown up) in all other operating systems.
So what's gone wrong? Why is the OS market dominated by a monopoly with a deeply flawed product? Mostly because switching operating systems is much harder than it should be. It is also partly because the alternatives have only become competitive within the last decade. Given the inertia that MS has, it is not surprising that they haven't been dethroned yet by a better product.
I suggest you take a look at this: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,2123848,00.a
Competition is what will drive Microsoft to fix such major flaws. Competition is the only reliable way to get them to do it. Fortunately for us all, the OS market has been seeing a lot more competition lately (but still not enough).
What kind of hardware was too expensive? An Audigy card with a breakout box can be had for $99, and any new pc can handle the computation.