"Standardized interfaces are overrated." I have to disagree. Unfortunately, that doesn't make Windows any better, because it's going in the direction of non-standardized. Take the scroll wheel on a mouse; for some applications, if the mouse cursor is over the window, it will scroll regardless of whether the window is in focus. For other applications, it will only scroll if the window has focus. And for others (I'm looking at you, Windows Explorer), the scroll wheel doesn't seem to work no matter what. Or take the Ribbon. Please, take it! All the applications I use every day have menus; Office is the only application that doesn't (which is why I only use it when forced to, i.e. at the office). Of course, some applications have real menus (jEdit, my favorite editor), others have cheesy "hamburger" menus, which you can't get to without standing on your head. (Some, like Firefox, at least give you a choice. That's one reason I prefer Firefox to Chrome: Chrome is all about taking away your choices.) Some applications have a title bar, some have a title bar + status bar, and some have neither. Some applications change the color of the title bar when their window has focus (that's the way all Windows applications used to be), others force you to guess whether they have focus: if there's a visual distinction, I can't see it (Office is the worst offender).
I think the last time Windows and Windows applications were more or less consistent among themselves was around 2007. Since then it's been every application for itself, and it's becoming a mess to figure out how things work in each application (I have nine open on my desktop at the moment). I don't use Linux desktops (I do a lot of command line stuff in Linux), so I don't know how that compares with the situation in Windows. (Or the MacOS.)
"Inslee is running as a climate candidate for president that can get things done in the District if elected, and this bill is a very tangible accomplishment he can now point to." It'll be tangible when (or rather, if) it succeeds by 2045; right now, it's a pledge and nothing more. So is Inslee planning on running for president in the 2048 election? (I'm also not clear what the District has to do with it; that's the *other* Washington.)
I have a love-hate relation with Outlook. I use it at work (required), and I use Thunderbird at home. Searching, or finding other emails in a thread no matter where I've stored them (or deleted them), is fast and easy in Outlook; it's so bad in Thunderbird that I use a third-party application (MailStore Home) when I need to search.
Thunderbird, otoh, makes it much easier to store emails to folders, or go to a folder, no matter how deep the folder is in my hierarchy, thanks to the Nostalgy plugin. (Ok, the last major update to TBird partly broke that, but it still sort of works.) And navigation seems easier in general, although I can't put a finger on just why.
Oh, and there's the Ribbon, which TBird thankfully lacks.
So there's good and bad. Why do you hate Outlook so?
In fact, it sounds like global warming could help kill off the fungus, making it better for the amphibians: "The fungus thrives in cool, moist conditions."
"that doesn't magically solve other environmental problems like air and water quality, pollution disposal, habitat loss, and species extinction": If we discover that global warming is predominately a natural thing, rather than a man-made thing, that could well *help* solve these other problems, in the following two ways.
First, if global warming is natural, then it might be a random (or even cyclic) effect. In either of these is true, then warming is not with us forever. Many would consider that to be good.
Second, if it's natural, then perhaps we should stop trying to solve it, because our solutions--which by hypothesis are not based on the real cause--won't help. And we can turn our time, effort and money to solving problems that we actually are causing, and which we can solve.
For example, suppose coral bleaching--to the extent that it's worse now than it once was--might be due to any number of other human causes: over fishing, pollution from land sources, pollution from ships and boats, damage by tourists (touching coral, using harmful sun screen, dragging anchors), and so forth.
Similarly for habitat loss, which IMHO surely has much more to do with farming, logging, mining etc. than with warming. All these are things that we can (if we have the will, and if all our effort isn't going to combating something else) fix.
My sense is that there has been a huge amount of progress in the last half century (yes, I'm older than that) in addressing pollution: air pollution from automobiles (leaving out VW-gate...), air pollution from steel mills, water pollution in the Great Lakes (I grew up near Lake Michigan), and in many other areas. We can continue to work on eliminating such sources of pollution, or we can try to address global warming; we'll have less success if we try to do both. (You'll notice I'm not treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.)
You might read the article here, on an actual competition with human judges between computer-produced and human-produced "expressionist" art: https://hyperallergic.com/3910... (The full study appeared at https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.070...) It's not my kind of art, and I'm not sure I can say I like any of it, but the human "participants largely preferred the machine-created artworks to those made by humans... subjects found the images generated by the machine intentional, visually structured, communicative, and inspiring, with similar, or even higher levels, compared to actual human art."
Nuts. I was going to say s.t. along those lines, but you (or rather Sonny) did so much better than I could have.
But along the lines of "it goes without saying, so I'll say it...", I was going to say that most of us humans can't make art either. At least I can't. My daughter was taking an art class, and had trouble drawing human figures. But my attempts were ludicrously worse than hers. So if making art is a criterion for being human (as opposed to AI), I'm not human.
Otoh, I think most of us humans can--and do--appreciate at least some kind of art. And most of us humans appreciate natural beauty--a beautiful sunset, or mountains, or the Grand Canyon. But that's a harder test for an AI; how would you know whether the AI actually appreciated beauty, or if it was just saying the words?
I think you misunderstood spongman. He said he could edit wsl files in ubuntu and wsl tools, but he did not edit wsl files with *windows* tools. That seems to correspond with the Microsoft statement.
For the record, I do the same as spongman: I edit my.bashrc etc. wsl files with vi in a wsl terminal (Ubuntu bash), no problem. I would not attempt to edit those files using, for example, my Windows jEdit editor. That said, I have a link from my/home/ dir to the dir I keep my Windows data in (for the record, I use c:\Data\), and I can edit files *there* with both wsl files and with my Windows editor, no problem.
I haven't seen that. I use CR in my linux programs to create a running tally of the number of records my program has processed. Of course I don't cat that to other programs, but I can't imagine crashing a program if I did.
What *really* bothers me on Linux tools is how hard it is to use most such tools with non-ASCII Unicode characters. Try grepping Devanagari or Arabic characters, for example, or using sed to modify such text. (I'm not saying Windows is better, in fact I've never really tried to do such things in cmd.exe.)
Strange the anonymous poster should mention 1984. "...[Julia] worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines."
Oops, there was a mistake in the synopsis of the article here at/. The pressure the experiment used was 23 MPa =~ 3300 psi--NOT 2300 bar. Off by an order of magnitude. This is still a very high (and dangerous) pressure, but not as outlandish as it seemed.
BTW, there are two links in the/. article. The first is too motherboard.vice.com, and that contains the incorrect figure of 2300 * atmospheric pressure. That's apparently where the 2300 bar figure in/. comes from. The other link is to an abstract written by the scientists, and it uses the figure of 23 MPa. The abstract (and presumably the full article) also addresses another issue brought up by commenters here: "Preliminary analyses indicate that this conversion process is net-energy positive and potentially has a higher energy efficiency and lower greenhouse gas emissions than incineration and mechanical recycling."
I was going to post s.t. like this, but you beat me to it.
Decades ago, I was Main Propulsion Assistant on a Guided Missile Destroyer. It was propelled by steam turbines, with steam at 1200 psi and 975 degrees (superheated). That's ~80 bar, and the steam was truly dangerous. A leak wouldn't scald you, it'd cut you in half. (I avoided that, as you may have surmised.) Some land-based boilers go higher than that, perhaps 3500 psi, or ~240 bar. For this plastic operation, they're talking nearly an order of magnitude higher than that. I can't imagine what kind of apparatus that would take (not just the pressure vessel), how much fuel (presumably plastic, but still) it would have to burn, and how long the cool-down would be to get the oil back out and put more plastic in. Unless you could somehow shred the plastic, add water, and pump that into the pressure vessel. But that would be one heck of a feed pump to pressurize to 2300 bar.
I think a better idea would be to let nature do the work: drop the plastic into a subduction zone, and wait for the oil to come back up.
As someone pointed out in a post above, the article does NOT say whether the UBI *reduced" their willingness to work, it only says it didn't *increase* their willingness to work (or to be more precise, it didn't increase their finding of work). We therefore canNOT say that it had *no" effect on searching for (or finding) work. One might read into this that there was no reduction, but the article doesn't actually say that.
All seriousness aside, the first animated slide I was was in 1976, using two sheets of plastic taped together on one side. The speaker showed the first slide, then overlaid the second on the first. The audience gasped. It was really quite nifty. (Yes, "nifty" was a word back then.)
Strange. With MsWord 2003 (and versions before, IIRC, although I am getting too old to remember that), I could customize the menus to my heart's content. One of the truly awful things about Word2007's implementation of the ribbon was there was *no* way to modify it in any way, shape or form. I think they've improved on that since then--I am told it is possible to modify the ribbon (within certain limits). But there's absolutely no reason Word, or any other program, should prevent you from modifying its menu OR its ribbon.
1) "Until you click on the menu, you have very little idea what's on it" Unless you keep the ribbon open all the time (in which case you're wasting a lot of screen space because of those icons), you can't see what's in them. And even when you do open a ribbon, you *still* can't see into half (my guestimate) the icons, specifically those icons that have a bunch of choices inside them. Take the Paste icon for instance; it has several sub-commands, but you can't see them without opening that icon.
2) "if there's no icons, and you haven't memorized positions, then you have to read through every option to find the one you're looking for" Well yes, that's a skill I learned in first grade. What's wrong with that? I have to do the same thing with the icons in the ribbon, because interpreting an icon is pure guesswork. (Unless you're an ancient Egyptian, in which case maybe you're used to memorizing hieroglyphs.) In short, you have to memorize positions on the ribbon, or find the text under each icon (which is much harder than simply finding the text in a menu).
3) "made worse by the fact that functions are very often not located on the menu you would expect": Where is the "insert row" command in Excel? It's under the "Insert" tab, right? Wrong! As I found out when I needed to insert a row in Excel the other day. I find very little logic to the layout of commands in the ribbon.
4) "menus are named such that *none* of them would lead you to believe they hold the function you're looking for." Umm, yes. What's in the "Home" tab on the ribbon? Things that have to do with your house, right? Or what's the diff between the "Design" and "Layout" tabs? And then there's that all-important Mailings tab, which is perfect for 1980s-style mail merge.
And don't even get me started on the Files tab, which teleports you into an alternative universe where you're not allowed to see what you're writing.
I'm with you more and more. For one, LaTeX does legal numbering out of the box; I've *never* been able to get it to work right in Word, all the way back to the 80s. (IANL, but so-called "legal numbering" is used in all the technical documents I've ever written.) And I can re-format the bibliography easily, by just choosing a different bibliography style.
Slashdot Mirror
"Standardized interfaces are overrated." I have to disagree. Unfortunately, that doesn't make Windows any better, because it's going in the direction of non-standardized. Take the scroll wheel on a mouse; for some applications, if the mouse cursor is over the window, it will scroll regardless of whether the window is in focus. For other applications, it will only scroll if the window has focus. And for others (I'm looking at you, Windows Explorer), the scroll wheel doesn't seem to work no matter what. Or take the Ribbon. Please, take it! All the applications I use every day have menus; Office is the only application that doesn't (which is why I only use it when forced to, i.e. at the office). Of course, some applications have real menus (jEdit, my favorite editor), others have cheesy "hamburger" menus, which you can't get to without standing on your head. (Some, like Firefox, at least give you a choice. That's one reason I prefer Firefox to Chrome: Chrome is all about taking away your choices.) Some applications have a title bar, some have a title bar + status bar, and some have neither. Some applications change the color of the title bar when their window has focus (that's the way all Windows applications used to be), others force you to guess whether they have focus: if there's a visual distinction, I can't see it (Office is the worst offender).
I think the last time Windows and Windows applications were more or less consistent among themselves was around 2007. Since then it's been every application for itself, and it's becoming a mess to figure out how things work in each application (I have nine open on my desktop at the moment). I don't use Linux desktops (I do a lot of command line stuff in Linux), so I don't know how that compares with the situation in Windows. (Or the MacOS.)
"Inslee is running as a climate candidate for president that can get things done in the District if elected, and this bill is a very tangible accomplishment he can now point to." It'll be tangible when (or rather, if) it succeeds by 2045; right now, it's a pledge and nothing more. So is Inslee planning on running for president in the 2048 election? (I'm also not clear what the District has to do with it; that's the *other* Washington.)
I have a love-hate relation with Outlook. I use it at work (required), and I use Thunderbird at home. Searching, or finding other emails in a thread no matter where I've stored them (or deleted them), is fast and easy in Outlook; it's so bad in Thunderbird that I use a third-party application (MailStore Home) when I need to search.
Thunderbird, otoh, makes it much easier to store emails to folders, or go to a folder, no matter how deep the folder is in my hierarchy, thanks to the Nostalgy plugin. (Ok, the last major update to TBird partly broke that, but it still sort of works.) And navigation seems easier in general, although I can't put a finger on just why.
Oh, and there's the Ribbon, which TBird thankfully lacks.
So there's good and bad. Why do you hate Outlook so?
I see this post has been marked 5 for "funny." I'm guessing that's because James Kelly never said that. Citation?
In fact, it sounds like global warming could help kill off the fungus, making it better for the amphibians: "The fungus thrives in cool, moist conditions."
"that doesn't magically solve other environmental problems like air and water quality, pollution disposal, habitat loss, and species extinction": If we discover that global warming is predominately a natural thing, rather than a man-made thing, that could well *help* solve these other problems, in the following two ways.
First, if global warming is natural, then it might be a random (or even cyclic) effect. In either of these is true, then warming is not with us forever. Many would consider that to be good.
Second, if it's natural, then perhaps we should stop trying to solve it, because our solutions--which by hypothesis are not based on the real cause--won't help. And we can turn our time, effort and money to solving problems that we actually are causing, and which we can solve.
For example, suppose coral bleaching--to the extent that it's worse now than it once was--might be due to any number of other human causes: over fishing, pollution from land sources, pollution from ships and boats, damage by tourists (touching coral, using harmful sun screen, dragging anchors), and so forth.
Similarly for habitat loss, which IMHO surely has much more to do with farming, logging, mining etc. than with warming. All these are things that we can (if we have the will, and if all our effort isn't going to combating something else) fix.
My sense is that there has been a huge amount of progress in the last half century (yes, I'm older than that) in addressing pollution: air pollution from automobiles (leaving out VW-gate...), air pollution from steel mills, water pollution in the Great Lakes (I grew up near Lake Michigan), and in many other areas. We can continue to work on eliminating such sources of pollution, or we can try to address global warming; we'll have less success if we try to do both. (You'll notice I'm not treating carbon dioxide as a pollutant.)
Some people go two ways as well, at least that's what he said (@0:25): https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
You might read the article here, on an actual competition with human judges between computer-produced and human-produced "expressionist" art:
https://hyperallergic.com/3910...
(The full study appeared at https://arxiv.org/abs/1706.070...) It's not my kind of art, and I'm not sure I can say I like any of it, but the human "participants largely preferred the machine-created artworks to those made by humans... subjects found the images generated by the machine intentional, visually structured, communicative, and inspiring, with similar, or even higher levels, compared to actual human art."
That's the point. It's the Turing Test, or one aspect of it.
Nuts. I was going to say s.t. along those lines, but you (or rather Sonny) did so much better than I could have.
But along the lines of "it goes without saying, so I'll say it...", I was going to say that most of us humans can't make art either. At least I can't. My daughter was taking an art class, and had trouble drawing human figures. But my attempts were ludicrously worse than hers. So if making art is a criterion for being human (as opposed to AI), I'm not human.
Otoh, I think most of us humans can--and do--appreciate at least some kind of art. And most of us humans appreciate natural beauty--a beautiful sunset, or mountains, or the Grand Canyon. But that's a harder test for an AI; how would you know whether the AI actually appreciated beauty, or if it was just saying the words?
I think you misunderstood spongman. He said he could edit wsl files in ubuntu and wsl tools, but he did not edit wsl files with *windows* tools. That seems to correspond with the Microsoft statement.
For the record, I do the same as spongman: I edit my .bashrc etc. wsl files with vi in a wsl terminal (Ubuntu bash), no problem. I would not attempt to edit those files using, for example, my Windows jEdit editor. That said, I have a link from my /home/ dir to the dir I keep my Windows data in (for the record, I use c:\Data\), and I can edit files *there* with both wsl files and with my Windows editor, no problem.
I haven't seen that. I use CR in my linux programs to create a running tally of the number of records my program has processed. Of course I don't cat that to other programs, but I can't imagine crashing a program if I did.
What *really* bothers me on Linux tools is how hard it is to use most such tools with non-ASCII Unicode characters. Try grepping Devanagari or Arabic characters, for example, or using sed to modify such text. (I'm not saying Windows is better, in fact I've never really tried to do such things in cmd.exe.)
You have to be like me. How big of an idiot are you?
Strange the anonymous poster should mention 1984. "...[Julia] worked in the Fiction Department. Presumably -- since he had sometimes seen her with oily hands and carrying a spanner -- she had some mechanical job on one of the novel-writing machines."
Oops, there was a mistake in the synopsis of the article here at /. The pressure the experiment used was 23 MPa =~ 3300 psi--NOT 2300 bar. Off by an order of magnitude. This is still a very high (and dangerous) pressure, but not as outlandish as it seemed.
BTW, there are two links in the /. article. The first is too motherboard.vice.com, and that contains the incorrect figure of 2300 * atmospheric pressure. That's apparently where the 2300 bar figure in /. comes from. The other link is to an abstract written by the scientists, and it uses the figure of 23 MPa. The abstract (and presumably the full article) also addresses another issue brought up by commenters here: "Preliminary analyses indicate that this conversion process is net-energy positive and potentially has a higher energy efficiency and lower greenhouse gas emissions than incineration and mechanical recycling."
Might oughta stand clear of the 2300 bar pressure vessel, too...
I was going to post s.t. like this, but you beat me to it.
Decades ago, I was Main Propulsion Assistant on a Guided Missile Destroyer. It was propelled by steam turbines, with steam at 1200 psi and 975 degrees (superheated). That's ~80 bar, and the steam was truly dangerous. A leak wouldn't scald you, it'd cut you in half. (I avoided that, as you may have surmised.) Some land-based boilers go higher than that, perhaps 3500 psi, or ~240 bar. For this plastic operation, they're talking nearly an order of magnitude higher than that. I can't imagine what kind of apparatus that would take (not just the pressure vessel), how much fuel (presumably plastic, but still) it would have to burn, and how long the cool-down would be to get the oil back out and put more plastic in. Unless you could somehow shred the plastic, add water, and pump that into the pressure vessel. But that would be one heck of a feed pump to pressurize to 2300 bar.
I think a better idea would be to let nature do the work: drop the plastic into a subduction zone, and wait for the oil to come back up.
As someone pointed out in a post above, the article does NOT say whether the UBI *reduced" their willingness to work, it only says it didn't *increase* their willingness to work (or to be more precise, it didn't increase their finding of work). We therefore canNOT say that it had *no" effect on searching for (or finding) work. One might read into this that there was no reduction, but the article doesn't actually say that.
To make the audience nauseated.
All seriousness aside, the first animated slide I was was in 1976, using two sheets of plastic taped together on one side. The speaker showed the first slide, then overlaid the second on the first. The audience gasped. It was really quite nifty. (Yes, "nifty" was a word back then.)
Strange. With MsWord 2003 (and versions before, IIRC, although I am getting too old to remember that), I could customize the menus to my heart's content. One of the truly awful things about Word2007's implementation of the ribbon was there was *no* way to modify it in any way, shape or form. I think they've improved on that since then--I am told it is possible to modify the ribbon (within certain limits). But there's absolutely no reason Word, or any other program, should prevent you from modifying its menu OR its ribbon.
I have the exact opposite experience.
1) "Until you click on the menu, you have very little idea what's on it" Unless you keep the ribbon open all the time (in which case you're wasting a lot of screen space because of those icons), you can't see what's in them. And even when you do open a ribbon, you *still* can't see into half (my guestimate) the icons, specifically those icons that have a bunch of choices inside them. Take the Paste icon for instance; it has several sub-commands, but you can't see them without opening that icon.
2) "if there's no icons, and you haven't memorized positions, then you have to read through every option to find the one you're looking for" Well yes, that's a skill I learned in first grade. What's wrong with that? I have to do the same thing with the icons in the ribbon, because interpreting an icon is pure guesswork. (Unless you're an ancient Egyptian, in which case maybe you're used to memorizing hieroglyphs.) In short, you have to memorize positions on the ribbon, or find the text under each icon (which is much harder than simply finding the text in a menu).
3) "made worse by the fact that functions are very often not located on the menu you would expect": Where is the "insert row" command in Excel? It's under the "Insert" tab, right? Wrong! As I found out when I needed to insert a row in Excel the other day. I find very little logic to the layout of commands in the ribbon.
4) "menus are named such that *none* of them would lead you to believe they hold the function you're looking for." Umm, yes. What's in the "Home" tab on the ribbon? Things that have to do with your house, right? Or what's the diff between the "Design" and "Layout" tabs? And then there's that all-important Mailings tab, which is perfect for 1980s-style mail merge.
And don't even get me started on the Files tab, which teleports you into an alternative universe where you're not allowed to see what you're writing.
I'm with you more and more. For one, LaTeX does legal numbering out of the box; I've *never* been able to get it to work right in Word, all the way back to the 80s. (IANL, but so-called "legal numbering" is used in all the technical documents I've ever written.) And I can re-format the bibliography easily, by just choosing a different bibliography style.
Not to mention, it just looks better.
LaTeX
In the year 496, Rome looked 20 years out of date.
An American GI is admitted to an Australian hospital during WWII. The nurse asks him, "Did you come in today?" Says he, "I hope not!"