Not that I don't agree with that, but law is law, as unfortunate as it may be.
That was a valid attempt, and I salute you for trying. I understand you were rushing this out to get the most impressions, but you sacrificed some quality in rushing it out the door. This is an excellent punchline, and would have done the trick quite well, if you had held off a little. The old one-two-three that leaves the reader senseless but a little irked. Very nice. Good luck in your future ventures.
Thank you for not wasting bandwidth by equipping this smiley with a nose. FYI, a web page should be up within the next few days for the Denoser script, that automates the process of denosing smileys.
This little perl script has already been making the rounds in the hacker community, and there is a lot of excitement about it. Be sure to keep an eye on the Denoser project page, as activity is going to really pick up once the word gets out.
This was not a troll, it was pointing out that people seem to post at the same rate whether or not the site is actually reachable. Please correct, moderators, the above should be market "Underrated," thanks.
That never makes a good reason to keep on doing things badly (well, unless you are MS or Intel).
MS has actually been pretty good about leaving old interfaces behind in favor of (arguably) better ones. They moved past DOS, Windows 3, and now Windows 95. Meanwhile they have used their Office suite as a testbed for new UI features (e.g., custom toolbars and menus that hide rarely used items) before introducing them to Explorer (the MS equivalent of the Mac Finder).
They seem much more committed to designing interfaces that make the users' lives easier. Yes, they stumble...MS Bob and the Paperclip are examples of innovations gone wrong. But they definitely take way more risks than Apple does. Until OS X, Apple's main source of innovation had been the shareware hacker community, whence came multitasking, windowshading, popup folders, &c. This meant that new features were limited to modifying old features, barring revolutionary improvement.
While I am all for consistency across applications, consistency of an OS for 15 years is just a sign of stubbornness.
As for Intel, they do what makes MS happy. As long as MS will write x86 code, Intel will milk the architecture for all it is worth (which isn't much more, IMO).
Sounds like prime territory for a loadable module. You basically just patch the fork/exec syscall(s) to record the new processes by uid. This not only ensures that nothing slips by, but it uses fewer resources during long periods with few new processes started.
I didn't think printers were sold below cost...if you open one up, it is just a roller and a little holder for the ink. Even the circuitry is pretty straightforward. I wouldn't be surprised if they were making a small profit on printers.
Another poster already covered this sort of, but... how is shutting down your computer "special"?
Sorry, my original post was actually tongue-in-cheek. My real reaction to this is "good riddance to bad UI design." I can't believe Apple stuck with the Apple-File-Edit-View-Label-Special menu layout for 9 versions (basically). IMO, it makes no sense.
The Apple menu was originally a hack to get around the absence of multitasking. When MultiFinder got rolled into the system, desk accessories became a thing of the past, but for some reason the Apple menu stayed. The File menu was complete nonsense, as it was understood to be used for manipulating documents in every program except the Finder, which has no "documents" per se. Labels were always nonsense. And the Special menu was incredible...I can't believe they got away with that.
And then they called it the "Finder", when it was really just a file browser. So when they actually wrote a program that finds stuff they had to call it..."Sherlock." Holy lord.
So, yeah, sorry for the confusion. I don't know where Apple got a reputation for having intuitive UIs. Even if you let them slide on the icons (and you really shouldn't) and the root menubar (another pre-multitasking holdover from the 9" screen days), they have held interface design back for a long time.
As much as I dislike Winders, I have to say that Win95 was a good thing for desktop UIs. Apple is finally volleying the shot with OS X (which is at least new, if not better). I think Gnome and KDE have each caught up with Windows as well, so maybe we will see some real innovation in UIs. I hope so.
Anyone who's bought a low-cost inkjet knows that you can spend over half the cost of the printer on ink.
Yeah, every time you buy more ink. Over the lifetime of the printer you may well end up spending several times the original printer cost on ink cartridges.
I don't see what the big deal is. Printer makers have a tough sell trying to get people to pay more to not recycle, and rightly so. One of these companies will eventually have the balls to start making easily refillable cartridges. Their lower margins will be accounted for by their boom in sales.
What kind of fool thinks that the action "shutting down your Apple computer" should be under Apple -> Shut Down!
Note that this reasoning could be used to justify putting every command from every program under the Apple menu...e.g.,
What kind of fool thinks that the action "checking the mail from your Apple computer" should be under Apple -> Check Mail!
No, I stand by my original point. "Shut Down" is a "Special" command, like "Restart", "Sleep", "Empty Trash", "Clean Up", and "Put Away". These should all be under the "Special" menu, where people will naturally look when they want to perform something special. The Apple should be reserved for activities such as Choosing and Key Caps.
Since OS 9 is no longer being supported, and OS X is not supported on any of the beige (or black, for Powerbooks) Macs, I guess the era began with the Ugly Yellow Box is finally at an end.
With it go some of the things that Mac users have come to love about their quirky boxes...high quality (but expensive) parts, Easter Eggs, strange homebrew interfaces (ADB, anyone?), tiny screens, humorous error messages that convey no information...everything that at one point made Apple Apple.
Well, I don't like it. You can have your protected memory. And while you're at it, you can remember to take your preemptive multitasking, too. We Mac users have always maintained that that kind of stuff just isn't needed for the home user, and I stand by it, even if Steve Jobs won't.
Call me crazy, but I appreciate an intuitive interface; yeah, that's right: intuitive. Since when does it make sense for "Shut Down" to be classified under a little picture of an Apple? How is your average Joe or Jane going to find it there, when it clearly should be labelled "Special". There was a time when the Apple icon was reserved for "Chooser" and "Calculator", but that time has come to pass.
Not to mention the new "brushed metal" appearance of the Apple CD player. Once upon a time, a user could choose (yes, remember choice?) from an extensive handful of horrid, non-standard color schemes for the late, great Apple CD Audio Player.
So let's raise our glasses in honor of Mac OS 1-9, the interface we hated to love for so many years. And let us launch off our Holiday Rockets in honor of Steven Jobs, our own great Lincoln, liberating the slaves of the antebellum command line. And raise too our voices, for tonight we give thanks where none thanks have dared yet go.
Thank you, Macintosh, for everything.
The Last Mac Purist,
Man, I bet this guy peed his pants when he realized he'd get to use the word "bureaux" in print.
Aside from that, the letter is really interesting. It's very well-written and persuasive, IMO. In fact, I have trouble believing it was written by a Congressperson for that very reason. Also, I wonder how many American legislators can write that clearly in English. Not to mention how direct the langauge is, actually avoiding the kinds of analogies and meaningless soundbites that fill American political speech.
The more I think of this, the more it says to me "hoax." Anyone have a read on the authenticity of the letter?
Your tasteful noseless smiley belies your poor character as indicated by your plebeian taste in liquor.
For those who are wondering, the answer is "yes".
The question is, "will one ever be able to obtain an easy to use and open source tool for removing excess noses from smileys?" Stay tuned for more info. Such a thing does exist, and will hopefully be publicly released soon, though beta versions have been floating around slashdot for a few days now.
This is interesting (plz note, moderators). While I am very skeptical of academia as a whole, my political views very strongly support the ideas of reputation and an "aristocracy of ideas" in any field.
As important as it is to allow truly great breakthroughs to surface, the "barriers to entry" play a key role in preventing crackpot ideas from wasting resources.
A lot of the theories and experiments that don't survive peer review really are crazy or fraudulant. Witness the guy in the Village Voice who claimed to have discovered a new particle, or the recent story on slashdot about the Magic Box.
As for the examples you give of valid theories that were squelched, well, they all did eventually become accepted, evidence that the system, at worse, seems to slow things down. Good ideas will stand on their own merit.
Yes, non-standard smileys are definitely an area for improvement. I know people who are very liberal in their definition of smileys, e.g., ?-> . Now, I can see a face there with a little effort, but I can also imagine a situation where that is not supposed to be a smiley at all. Like in a C++ forum.
Current plans for development are to test the contents of some of the more popular and respected smiley dictionaries for compliance.
Obviously, there are always going to be people who figure out a way to get around any denosing algorithms. But even a 95% success rate on real-world data will have an important and measurable impact on Internet traffic.
I'd like to be the first to say, I'm really excited about the possibilities of this merger. Historically, especially in the computer industry, we have seen that mergers of two good companies often create new companies that are "greater than the sum of their constituent parts." And this is no exception.
Compaq has a stellar track record, from their sleek designs to their top-of-the-line reliability and support. Their support of the old standby DEC technology has truly been a boon to IT and engineering houses. As I type this, I am using a svelte Compaq tower with a P4 chugging away. This baby is sweet, and runs Linux with nary a hitch.
As for HP, they have demonstrated time and again that they can reign supreme in the realms of laser printing and server mainframes. Their own Unix OS was a champion in its heydey, and with their recent efforts in the Linux world, we have nothing but good things to look forward to from them.
In short, in a few years we will be looking back at this as the beginning of a new era for enterprise technology. Let's hope they keep raising the bar.
I would be interested in hearing a response to this from someone in the field. Is there someone in the slashdot community who is distinguished in one of the natural sciences, who would care to comment? Thanks.
Excess noses cost Internet providers billions annually. Consider that the noseless ":)" conveys as much information as ":-)" at two-thirds the cost in bandwidth.
Slashdot, as a pillar of the Internet community, stands to make a real difference in the fight against smiley noses. It would be great if it could act as a role model in this important struggle.
Everyone: please run your messages through the following perl script to remove excess noses:
Note this is a beta version. It only handles one-line messages, and only "right-handed" smileys. Improvements are forthcoming, and patches are welcome.
I play the role of a journalist pretty well, and I am tired of ignorant people trying to find conspiracies where none exist. There are enough real problems in the world that no one with a three-digit IQ needs to come up with bogus ones.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear... I am not one of the "Slashdot Editorial Conspiracy loonies." I was just pointing out that those loonies exist, which gives you even more of a reason to follow standard journalistic practice (which you should be doing anyway) by indicating when you are doing a story that could theoretically represent a COI.
The story description did indeed follow this practice, but with an entirely snide and sarcastic tone that, IMO, demonstrated contempt for the readership. In contrast, would you expect to see the following sentence in a Time Magazine article about AOL:
"AOL, Time, and Warner Brothers Studios are all part of the world-controlling conspiracy under the AOL Time Warner umbrella better known as the Sinister AOL Keiretsu." ?
It just doesn't strike me as either incredibly professional or very mature, but that may just be me.
So, in conclusion... I don't consider being an asshole to be conspiratorial, but if you do, well I guess I'm one of the Loonies, then.;) And I have no problem with the Editors being assholes, for that matter, as long as moderators can moderate stories as, e.g., "Flamebait" (this one) or "Troll" (the "propellorhead" one) or "Redundant" (ha ha, cheap shot).
Slashdot Mirror
That was a valid attempt, and I salute you for trying. I understand you were rushing this out to get the most impressions, but you sacrificed some quality in rushing it out the door. This is an excellent punchline, and would have done the trick quite well, if you had held off a little. The old one-two-three that leaves the reader senseless but a little irked. Very nice. Good luck in your future ventures.
Thank you for not wasting bandwidth by equipping this smiley with a nose. FYI, a web page should be up within the next few days for the Denoser script, that automates the process of denosing smileys.
This little perl script has already been making the rounds in the hacker community, and there is a lot of excitement about it. Be sure to keep an eye on the Denoser project page, as activity is going to really pick up once the word gets out.
This was not a troll, it was pointing out that people seem to post at the same rate whether or not the site is actually reachable. Please correct, moderators, the above should be market "Underrated," thanks.
MS has actually been pretty good about leaving old interfaces behind in favor of (arguably) better ones. They moved past DOS, Windows 3, and now Windows 95. Meanwhile they have used their Office suite as a testbed for new UI features (e.g., custom toolbars and menus that hide rarely used items) before introducing them to Explorer (the MS equivalent of the Mac Finder).
They seem much more committed to designing interfaces that make the users' lives easier. Yes, they stumble...MS Bob and the Paperclip are examples of innovations gone wrong. But they definitely take way more risks than Apple does. Until OS X, Apple's main source of innovation had been the shareware hacker community, whence came multitasking, windowshading, popup folders, &c. This meant that new features were limited to modifying old features, barring revolutionary improvement.
While I am all for consistency across applications, consistency of an OS for 15 years is just a sign of stubbornness.
As for Intel, they do what makes MS happy. As long as MS will write x86 code, Intel will milk the architecture for all it is worth (which isn't much more, IMO).
Sounds like prime territory for a loadable module. You basically just patch the fork/exec syscall(s) to record the new processes by uid. This not only ensures that nothing slips by, but it uses fewer resources during long periods with few new processes started.
One thing I like about Gnome is that it doesn't even pretend to make sense. "Shut Down" is under "Foot".
I didn't think printers were sold below cost...if you open one up, it is just a roller and a little holder for the ink. Even the circuitry is pretty straightforward. I wouldn't be surprised if they were making a small profit on printers.
Sorry, my original post was actually tongue-in-cheek. My real reaction to this is "good riddance to bad UI design." I can't believe Apple stuck with the Apple-File-Edit-View-Label-Special menu layout for 9 versions (basically). IMO, it makes no sense.
The Apple menu was originally a hack to get around the absence of multitasking. When MultiFinder got rolled into the system, desk accessories became a thing of the past, but for some reason the Apple menu stayed. The File menu was complete nonsense, as it was understood to be used for manipulating documents in every program except the Finder, which has no "documents" per se. Labels were always nonsense. And the Special menu was incredible...I can't believe they got away with that.
And then they called it the "Finder", when it was really just a file browser. So when they actually wrote a program that finds stuff they had to call it..."Sherlock." Holy lord.
So, yeah, sorry for the confusion. I don't know where Apple got a reputation for having intuitive UIs. Even if you let them slide on the icons (and you really shouldn't) and the root menubar (another pre-multitasking holdover from the 9" screen days), they have held interface design back for a long time.
As much as I dislike Winders, I have to say that Win95 was a good thing for desktop UIs. Apple is finally volleying the shot with OS X (which is at least new, if not better). I think Gnome and KDE have each caught up with Windows as well, so maybe we will see some real innovation in UIs. I hope so.
May the Chooser rest in peace.
Yeah, every time you buy more ink. Over the lifetime of the printer you may well end up spending several times the original printer cost on ink cartridges.
I don't see what the big deal is. Printer makers have a tough sell trying to get people to pay more to not recycle, and rightly so. One of these companies will eventually have the balls to start making easily refillable cartridges. Their lower margins will be accounted for by their boom in sales.
Yes, I have read that as well. I believe, however, that it is unsupported.
Note that this reasoning could be used to justify putting every command from every program under the Apple menu...e.g.,
What kind of fool thinks that the action "checking the mail from your Apple computer" should be under Apple -> Check Mail!
No, I stand by my original point. "Shut Down" is a "Special" command, like "Restart", "Sleep", "Empty Trash", "Clean Up", and "Put Away". These should all be under the "Special" menu, where people will naturally look when they want to perform something special. The Apple should be reserved for activities such as Choosing and Key Caps.
With it go some of the things that Mac users have come to love about their quirky boxes...high quality (but expensive) parts, Easter Eggs, strange homebrew interfaces (ADB, anyone?), tiny screens, humorous error messages that convey no information...everything that at one point made Apple Apple.
Well, I don't like it. You can have your protected memory. And while you're at it, you can remember to take your preemptive multitasking, too. We Mac users have always maintained that that kind of stuff just isn't needed for the home user, and I stand by it, even if Steve Jobs won't.
Call me crazy, but I appreciate an intuitive interface; yeah, that's right: intuitive. Since when does it make sense for "Shut Down" to be classified under a little picture of an Apple? How is your average Joe or Jane going to find it there, when it clearly should be labelled "Special". There was a time when the Apple icon was reserved for "Chooser" and "Calculator", but that time has come to pass.
Not to mention the new "brushed metal" appearance of the Apple CD player. Once upon a time, a user could choose (yes, remember choice?) from an extensive handful of horrid, non-standard color schemes for the late, great Apple CD Audio Player.
So let's raise our glasses in honor of Mac OS 1-9, the interface we hated to love for so many years. And let us launch off our Holiday Rockets in honor of Steven Jobs, our own great Lincoln, liberating the slaves of the antebellum command line. And raise too our voices, for tonight we give thanks where none thanks have dared yet go.
Thank you, Macintosh, for everything. The Last Mac Purist,
Aside from that, the letter is really interesting. It's very well-written and persuasive, IMO. In fact, I have trouble believing it was written by a Congressperson for that very reason. Also, I wonder how many American legislators can write that clearly in English. Not to mention how direct the langauge is, actually avoiding the kinds of analogies and meaningless soundbites that fill American political speech.
The more I think of this, the more it says to me "hoax." Anyone have a read on the authenticity of the letter?
Holy shit that's funny. That's an awesome trick. Hehe. Rock on, dude.
Your tasteful noseless smiley belies your poor character as indicated by your plebeian taste in liquor.
For those who are wondering, the answer is "yes".
The question is, "will one ever be able to obtain an easy to use and open source tool for removing excess noses from smileys?" Stay tuned for more info. Such a thing does exist, and will hopefully be publicly released soon, though beta versions have been floating around slashdot for a few days now.
As important as it is to allow truly great breakthroughs to surface, the "barriers to entry" play a key role in preventing crackpot ideas from wasting resources.
A lot of the theories and experiments that don't survive peer review really are crazy or fraudulant. Witness the guy in the Village Voice who claimed to have discovered a new particle, or the recent story on slashdot about the Magic Box.
As for the examples you give of valid theories that were squelched, well, they all did eventually become accepted, evidence that the system, at worse, seems to slow things down. Good ideas will stand on their own merit.
Current plans for development are to test the contents of some of the more popular and respected smiley dictionaries for compliance.
Obviously, there are always going to be people who figure out a way to get around any denosing algorithms. But even a 95% success rate on real-world data will have an important and measurable impact on Internet traffic.
Compaq has a stellar track record, from their sleek designs to their top-of-the-line reliability and support. Their support of the old standby DEC technology has truly been a boon to IT and engineering houses. As I type this, I am using a svelte Compaq tower with a P4 chugging away. This baby is sweet, and runs Linux with nary a hitch.
As for HP, they have demonstrated time and again that they can reign supreme in the realms of laser printing and server mainframes. Their own Unix OS was a champion in its heydey, and with their recent efforts in the Linux world, we have nothing but good things to look forward to from them.
In short, in a few years we will be looking back at this as the beginning of a new era for enterprise technology. Let's hope they keep raising the bar.
I would be interested in hearing a response to this from someone in the field. Is there someone in the slashdot community who is distinguished in one of the natural sciences, who would care to comment? Thanks.
All you had to do was boot from a floppy or CD, mount your disk, and move the directory back. I have had to do this after toasting libc before.
Thank you, this will go into CVS.
Dude, that has nothing to do with online communities. It is called "high school."
Sorry, that first line should say
$_ = @ARGV ? shift @ARGV : <STDIN>;
And the "BR>" should just be a linebreak.
Excess noses cost Internet providers billions annually. Consider that the noseless ":)" conveys as much information as ":-)" at two-thirds the cost in bandwidth.
Slashdot, as a pillar of the Internet community, stands to make a real difference in the fight against smiley noses. It would be great if it could act as a role model in this important struggle.
Everyone: please run your messages through the following perl script to remove excess noses:
#!/usr/bin/perl -w ;g ; BR>
print;
$_ = @ARGV ? shift @ARGV :
chomp;
s/([:;8B?|\%])[-o^]([\)\(|PB9oO\@0{Xx\*D&])/$1$2/
print "\n";
Note this is a beta version. It only handles one-line messages, and only "right-handed" smileys. Improvements are forthcoming, and patches are welcome.
I'm sorry I wasn't clear... I am not one of the "Slashdot Editorial Conspiracy loonies." I was just pointing out that those loonies exist, which gives you even more of a reason to follow standard journalistic practice (which you should be doing anyway) by indicating when you are doing a story that could theoretically represent a COI.
The story description did indeed follow this practice, but with an entirely snide and sarcastic tone that, IMO, demonstrated contempt for the readership. In contrast, would you expect to see the following sentence in a Time Magazine article about AOL:
"AOL, Time, and Warner Brothers Studios are all part of the world-controlling conspiracy under the AOL Time Warner umbrella better known as the Sinister AOL Keiretsu." ?
It just doesn't strike me as either incredibly professional or very mature, but that may just be me.
So, in conclusion... I don't consider being an asshole to be conspiratorial, but if you do, well I guess I'm one of the Loonies, then. ;) And I have no problem with the Editors being assholes, for that matter, as long as moderators can moderate stories as, e.g., "Flamebait" (this one) or "Troll" (the "propellorhead" one) or "Redundant" (ha ha, cheap shot).
Please feel free to rock on forever. RNRWND.