Na, you're not even trying. In the UK 1,990 pages is one ITT for one bunch of desktop PCs in one surgery. I hope I never see what the procurement documents for an MRI scanner look like, although there is a risk to health there: they might collapse under their own weight into a singularity.
...which in itself no longer has any meaning given the amorphous nature of Cheshire's borders. The majority of Cheshire farms have been in Manchester or Merseyside at least once in the last 40 years (never mind the last 400.)
I have just made a brain backup of you and this backup will go into this spiffy new body right here in the vac. Now go into the highly radioactive core and close that valve. It's ok, you won't die. Well, THIS incarnation of you that is currently you will, but YOU, your ideas, your knowledge, your 'spirit', however you want to call it, won't die. We will play this backup into the new body and you'll be whole again.
Which 'me' are you asking? - Hypothetical me #1 is the entity standing outside ready to rush in. He is balancing up the hassle of the restore against the benefits to others. In today's society we already have survivor guilt; this technology could eliminate that almost entirely. - Hypothetical me #2 is the guy doing the good deed. He probably feels pretty bloody good about himself. - Hypothetical me #3 is the guy waking up after the download into a new body. He feels good about #2 feeling good in his last moments and also feels good about having once been guy #0 who was backed up and subsequently chose to leverage these advantages for the good of others as well as himself. - Hypothetical me #4 is the guy that has that technology available but chose not to do it and has megadeaths on his conscience. Ick.
Me #5 is the guy typing this email, outside of your hypothetical situation, who is therefore not looking at the situation with anything like the correct assumptions or perspective.
The me typing this reply was brought up with an utterly different set of assumptions and indeed would not be psychologically equipped to deal with this biotechnology if it was sold to us by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens tomorrow. However that situation is not likely to arise... any hypothetical 'me' who had this technology available would be living in a society that already had the correct mental framework for dealing with this stuff.
A trivial but parallel example that we have today; multiple save games. There aren't many purists left that will restart a game right from the beginning if their character/avatar is killed off. We're all quite used to having our representative in the game universe killed off on a regular basis.
For further explanation of this idea, see also pretty much any sci fi written this century, especially Peter F Hamilton and Greg Egan.
A physicist that hasn't heard of Cantor's Diagonal? Man, you are gonna struggle with all the bits of physics that aren't handwaving. I advise a career in string theory for you.
What's more surprising is that you haven't heard of Wikipedia or Google either.
(Tabs down the side makes MORE sense when vertical space is at a premium, such as my 1024x600 beastie. Can someone else try and explain this please? I'm clearly doing something wrong.)
1) I would rather turn my monitor 90 degrees, than turn my head 90 degrees to read a window title.
It's amazing how little of a tab title you need to see in order to disambiguate, especially if there is a tool-tip to help. When you have the tabs across the top you STILL have this problem anyway - so this is a matter of degree.
If we are constrained and required to have a relationship between monitor size/shape and window size shape, then the best way to fix our windows is to fix our monitors.
I concur. But I can't afford that right now, and Firefox is free.
We were talking about about the shape of the Firefox window. If your window is too wide, put your mouse on the size control and make it narrower. If you are having "screen real estate" issues with your window not being tall enough for the title bar, put your mouse on your size control and make the window taller.
The point is, when the window is vertically maximised at a comfortable reading width, such as you describe, I have lots of spare space to either side that is basically unused; yet I have a number of UI elements at the top and bottom that could just as easily be at the side. How can this be a sensible state of affairs? Come to think of it, this is down to the limit on reading width, not the shape of the monitor, so this really is a basic design flaw in your average browser.
What's the problem? I don't get it. I have a lot of Windows open right now, and none of them just happen to be of a shape even approximating the shape of my monitor. The only time the shape of my monitor ever does actually correspond with the contents, is when I'm watching a video full-screen.
Well, I agree. It was YOU that suggested the shape of the monitor is wrong. I was suggested that there were more appropriate ways to use the left and right gutter. This also reminds me that the "full screen" mode is equally annoying, because again it tends to push text to the full width of the screen. A "full screen" mode that maximised vertically and pushed everything else including window decorations into the left and right gutters would be bloody marvellous, because that's what you actually want when reading text "full screen."
Tabs should be down the side. A monitor (even 4:3) is too wide to read comfortably all the way across, ergo, tabs and toolbars should be on the side where they are not using screen estate that can otherwise be used effectively for browsing.
Yes, I know Firefox does it with plugins, but I don't understand how this basic mistake can have stayed with us for what, 10 years+ of tabbed browsing...
If they can poke holes in GPL they may be able to make a case that it is not legally valid.
Indeed this may be Ballmer's gameplan, but he keeps forgetting about Europe - they'll never get away with such nonsense here. If BRIC then follow Europe rather than America, that's three decades of global expansion undone overnight - so Microsoft are playing with fire here.
Tricky area. Larry Niven talks about this in relation to Man-Kzin wars quite a bit in Scatterbrain. Writing in other people's universes is not only a grey area legally, but quite hard to do consistently.
The Mosquito does not work as advertised - we've just had one installed outside the village shop ("store" if you like:-) and pretty much all the pensioners can hear it. Now the most annoying thing about that shop is all the pensioners standing around in the aisles like some sort of Larson cartoon, asking each other if they can hear it.
Minimal kernel, just enough OS around it to boot an X server, thus providing anything that understands X11 upwards to run on the "cloud" and use the Xterm to get the GUI in front of the user. At the time the cloud was the various Unix boxen dotted around the campus and when I was a lad, there were still some X11R3 servers around.
When the NC came out (remember them?) we went up a layer of abstraction and it was the JVM that provided the framework, and at the client end this sat on top of what was effectively still an Xterm.
And now the framework is Web 2.0 and the JVM (presumably - couldn't see a mention of that in any of the articles I looked at, but maybe it's just assumed?) - a new level of abstraction and so X may or may not be the middle layer of the stack doing the actual graphics and HCI stuff. Doesn't really matter.
So: Better abstraction, due to layers on layers; longer distances and larger more complex apps thanks to explosive Internet growth and Moore's law. But none of this is actually NEW.
Anyhoo, I'm off to eBay to see if I can find myself a nice 19" colour Tektronix... and you GET OFF MY LAWN.
I read the online WaPo just about every day, plus WSJ, NYT, and a couple of the prominent aggregators. That's about all I need and have time for. I wouldn't have time to read a paper edition, and plus it's full of junk that I wouldn't normally click on. I suspect there are millions of others with needs similar to mine.
Indeed there are - which is why there is such a thriving market in free daily newspapers on public transport now in the UK. I hope you're not going to suggest flaunting an expensive and highly desirable gadget in peak time on an underground train would be a viable alternative.
Slashdot Mirror
Coeliacs don't like flapjacks, you insensitive clod!
Na, you're not even trying. In the UK 1,990 pages is one ITT for one bunch of desktop PCs in one surgery. I hope I never see what the procurement documents for an MRI scanner look like, although there is a risk to health there: they might collapse under their own weight into a singularity.
Yes, the markets work wonders for the medical practice.
Absolutely. After all, the poorest will all be dead. How's that for perfect information?
Cables? How quaint.
No. It's a very, very old word for penis.
Consider: You probably don't want to work at any future company that would refuse to hire you for that reason. If you see what I mean.
You are Mark Shuttleworth and I claim my five pounds.
Maybe to highlight the difference from 16:9 (widescreen broadcast TV)
...which in itself no longer has any meaning given the amorphous nature of Cheshire's borders. The majority of Cheshire farms have been in Manchester or Merseyside at least once in the last 40 years (never mind the last 400.)
I have just made a brain backup of you and this backup will go into this spiffy new body right here in the vac. Now go into the highly radioactive core and close that valve. It's ok, you won't die. Well, THIS incarnation of you that is currently you will, but YOU, your ideas, your knowledge, your 'spirit', however you want to call it, won't die. We will play this backup into the new body and you'll be whole again.
Which 'me' are you asking?
- Hypothetical me #1 is the entity standing outside ready to rush in. He is balancing up the hassle of the restore against the benefits to others. In today's society we already have survivor guilt; this technology could eliminate that almost entirely.
- Hypothetical me #2 is the guy doing the good deed. He probably feels pretty bloody good about himself.
- Hypothetical me #3 is the guy waking up after the download into a new body. He feels good about #2 feeling good in his last moments and also feels good about having once been guy #0 who was backed up and subsequently chose to leverage these advantages for the good of others as well as himself.
- Hypothetical me #4 is the guy that has that technology available but chose not to do it and has megadeaths on his conscience. Ick.
Me #5 is the guy typing this email, outside of your hypothetical situation, who is therefore not looking at the situation with anything like the correct assumptions or perspective.
The me typing this reply was brought up with an utterly different set of assumptions and indeed would not be psychologically equipped to deal with this biotechnology if it was sold to us by Sufficiently Advanced Aliens tomorrow. However that situation is not likely to arise... any hypothetical 'me' who had this technology available would be living in a society that already had the correct mental framework for dealing with this stuff.
A trivial but parallel example that we have today; multiple save games. There aren't many purists left that will restart a game right from the beginning if their character/avatar is killed off. We're all quite used to having our representative in the game universe killed off on a regular basis.
For further explanation of this idea, see also pretty much any sci fi written this century, especially Peter F Hamilton and Greg Egan.
A physicist that hasn't heard of Cantor's Diagonal? Man, you are gonna struggle with all the bits of physics that aren't handwaving. I advise a career in string theory for you.
What's more surprising is that you haven't heard of Wikipedia or Google either.
You'd have to scroll less if you had less crap above and below the text, n'est ce pas?
I use a netbook. Move along please.
(Tabs down the side makes MORE sense when vertical space is at a premium, such as my 1024x600 beastie. Can someone else try and explain this please? I'm clearly doing something wrong.)
1) I would rather turn my monitor 90 degrees, than turn my head 90 degrees to read a window title.
It's amazing how little of a tab title you need to see in order to disambiguate, especially if there is a tool-tip to help. When you have the tabs across the top you STILL have this problem anyway - so this is a matter of degree.
If we are constrained and required to have a relationship between monitor size/shape and window size shape, then the best way to fix our windows is to fix our monitors.
I concur. But I can't afford that right now, and Firefox is free.
We were talking about about the shape of the Firefox window. If your window is too wide, put your mouse on the size control and make it narrower. If you are having "screen real estate" issues with your window not being tall enough for the title bar, put your mouse on your size control and make the window taller.
The point is, when the window is vertically maximised at a comfortable reading width, such as you describe, I have lots of spare space to either side that is basically unused; yet I have a number of UI elements at the top and bottom that could just as easily be at the side. How can this be a sensible state of affairs?
Come to think of it, this is down to the limit on reading width, not the shape of the monitor, so this really is a basic design flaw in your average browser.
What's the problem? I don't get it.
I have a lot of Windows open right now, and none of them just happen to be of a shape even approximating the shape of my monitor. The only time the shape of my monitor ever does actually correspond with the contents, is when I'm watching a video full-screen.
Well, I agree. It was YOU that suggested the shape of the monitor is wrong. I was suggested that there were more appropriate ways to use the left and right gutter.
This also reminds me that the "full screen" mode is equally annoying, because again it tends to push text to the full width of the screen. A "full screen" mode that maximised vertically and pushed everything else including window decorations into the left and right gutters would be bloody marvellous, because that's what you actually want when reading text "full screen."
Then we're not all wrong. The parent says we should have a Fibonacci spiral, which makes him right by your logic. :-)
Tabs should be down the side. A monitor (even 4:3) is too wide to read comfortably all the way across, ergo, tabs and toolbars should be on the side where they are not using screen estate that can otherwise be used effectively for browsing.
Yes, I know Firefox does it with plugins, but I don't understand how this basic mistake can have stayed with us for what, 10 years+ of tabbed browsing...
Even if it is one function call, copyright says it is a derived work.
Citation needed. And if this is true, is every piece of Windows software a derivative work?
If they can poke holes in GPL they may be able to make a case that it is not legally valid.
Indeed this may be Ballmer's gameplan, but he keeps forgetting about Europe - they'll never get away with such nonsense here. If BRIC then follow Europe rather than America, that's three decades of global expansion undone overnight - so Microsoft are playing with fire here.
Tricky area. Larry Niven talks about this in relation to Man-Kzin wars quite a bit in Scatterbrain. Writing in other people's universes is not only a grey area legally, but quite hard to do consistently.
The Mosquito does not work as advertised - we've just had one installed outside the village shop ("store" if you like :-) and pretty much all the pensioners can hear it. Now the most annoying thing about that shop is all the pensioners standing around in the aisles like some sort of Larson cartoon, asking each other if they can hear it.
Not Even Wrong - Peter Woit
The Trouble With Science - Smolin
Both cover the current state of what used to be called GUT and is now called, um, lots of things... String Theory, Brane Theory, etc.
How many did Symbian sell in their first year? Apples with apples please...
Minimal kernel, just enough OS around it to boot an X server, thus providing anything that understands X11 upwards to run on the "cloud" and use the Xterm to get the GUI in front of the user. At the time the cloud was the various Unix boxen dotted around the campus and when I was a lad, there were still some X11R3 servers around.
When the NC came out (remember them?) we went up a layer of abstraction and it was the JVM that provided the framework, and at the client end this sat on top of what was effectively still an Xterm.
And now the framework is Web 2.0 and the JVM (presumably - couldn't see a mention of that in any of the articles I looked at, but maybe it's just assumed?) - a new level of abstraction and so X may or may not be the middle layer of the stack doing the actual graphics and HCI stuff. Doesn't really matter.
So: Better abstraction, due to layers on layers; longer distances and larger more complex apps thanks to explosive Internet growth and Moore's law. But none of this is actually NEW.
Anyhoo, I'm off to eBay to see if I can find myself a nice 19" colour Tektronix... and you GET OFF MY LAWN.
Because Nissan have a clue and the Detroit companies don't, perhaps? No, surely not, America must know best!
I read the online WaPo just about every day, plus WSJ, NYT, and a couple of the prominent aggregators. That's about all I need and have time for. I wouldn't have time to read a paper edition, and plus it's full of junk that I wouldn't normally click on. I suspect there are millions of others with needs similar to mine.
Indeed there are - which is why there is such a thriving market in free daily newspapers on public transport now in the UK. I hope you're not going to suggest flaunting an expensive and highly desirable gadget in peak time on an underground train would be a viable alternative.