Amen to the communicating. I'm a technical manager, and in many meetings we'll get into technical discussions. When that happens, I can see that many of us in the room may not be understanding. (Ok, at least one of us is not be understanding.) I get up and start drawing on the whiteboard what I think the speaker is saying (but keeping my mouth shut so they keep talking). My perception is that we come out of those meetings with a much better understanding than if we had just relied on words.
BTW, one of our meeting rooms is called the Whiteboard Room, because virtually the entire wall surface is covered with whiteboard. It's our most popular meeting room for technical discussions.
P.S. I forgot another gripe about Shiny New Office (sorry, I know this thread is supposed to be about Shiny New Windows...) It's the color scheme; impossible to tell whether an Office window is focused or not, no matter which of the three Office color schemes you choose.
> There's simply no significant value proposition, unless you > consider "Ooooh! Shiiiiny!" a value proposition
Agreed. And sometimes I don't even *like* the shiny new stuff. The Start menu in XP (or the Classic Start menu in Vista) is just fine, thank you; I don't *like* the Start menu in Windows 7. (And in the one PC I own that has Windows 7, I've loaded an after-market version of the Classic Start menu that Windows 7 doesn't have any more.)
And don't get me started about the Shiny New Ribbon in Office...where outline numbering is broken worse than ever, and creating a PDF of a file that has an equation in it doesn't work (the PDF omits the equation and everything after it on that page). And BTW, outline numbering, equations, and PDF all work just fine in Open Office and LibreOffice! Afaiac, Office 2007 is Shiny New Junk.
I suspect that memorization is a way of education in many places. I once taught introductory linguistics at a good university in Ecuador. One of the first assignments I gave was to show why an analysis in the book was wrong. I don't think they could quite believe the assignment at first, but it was a good introduction to what linguistics is supposed to be about--thinking, not memorizing.
Back in college, I got high As in organic chemistry and quantitative analysis (chemistry). In both classes, I was able to reason through most of the material starting from fundamentals, hence very little memorization. Then I met biochemistry. It was a grad/ undergrad class, meaning everyone gets an A or a B; a C is like flunking. I barely squeaked by with a low B. The reason is that, as far as I could tell, there were no fundamental principles; most everything was memorization, like the Krebbs Cycle. I'm sure there *are* principles, but either I didn't catch them, or they're too difficult to reason through. Protein folding would probably be an example of something that proceeds from principles, but the principles are effectively too complex for people to reason through. (This was in the early 70s, and I don't think much work had been done on protein folding.)
Moral of the story: There are things that one uses reasoning with, and there are others where reasoning doesn't get you far. I much prefer the former sorts of subjects. (There may be subjects where reasoning works, but it's beyond the capacity of the human brain--the aforementioned protein folding, for instance.)
Current generation nonsense, it's high time we return to Latin. Ita et vos per linguam nisi manifestum sermonem dederitis, quo modo scietur id quod dicitur? eritis enim in aëra loquentes. But I'd accept Old English.
> If traffic lights worked properly in the first place, people wouldn't be running them
Not true, at least not where I live. I come out of a housing area to an intersection and need to make a light onto a four lane, which becomes 8 lanes at the stoplight. The lights have sensors--mine doesn't go green unless you arrive before a certain point in the cycle, and likewise for the traffic from the opposite side of the four lane. The four lane is green for the lion's share of the cycle, yet there are often people on it who run the red.
Don't know about the previous poster, but I *hate* to move my hands off the alphanumeric part of the keyboard, look down to find out where the Home/ End keys are on this keyboard, and then when I'm done look down to find the home row keys again. (Yes, there are bumps on the F and J keys, but I often have trouble finding them without looking.) Even if the Home/ End keys were consistently placed, I'd rather have a control key shortcut for them (like control-A and control-E) that allows me to keep my fingers on the alphanumeric part. Wordstar pioneered that sort of thing decades ago, I don't know why that kind of capability (assigning control keys to be cursor movement keys) isn't built into OSs by now.
(Yes, I know about key mapping in X-Windows, but it's not enough.)
You might have a look at my posting (search for "keyboard") a ways up from yours. Like you, I'm a keyboard user; I hate it when I have to reach for the mouse. And maybe I'm even "worse" than you--I hate to take my hands off the alphanumeric part of the keyboard.
I have used a custom keyboard remapper, which I program in C, under Windows for close to 20 years now. (It was based on someone else's code.) It maps control-H to the left cursor arrow, control-J to the down arrow, etc.; control-D is seven lines down, control-W is mapped to control-right-arrow (move right by one word); control-Q turns on selecting, so that control-H becomes shift-left (select left), and the selection stays on until control-C copies the selection, c-X cuts it, or c-Q turns it back off. Vaguely similar to the old Wordstar cursor controls.
I have not found a way to do this in Linux. In X-Win, it's possible to do a partial mapping, but you're limited to mapping one key to one key. So my c-D, which should map to seven presses of the down arrow, can't be emulated, nor can the c-Q/ c-C/ c-X behavior.
I'm sure there's a way to do this in Linux, maybe mapping at the level of the keyboard driver or something; I just haven't found it. And I never want to go back to needing to move my fingers off the home row to use those cursor keys, home/end/pgup etc. keys. So for now, I'm stuck on Windows.
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> Your robot gardener grows the food
Soylent green, maybe.
The speed of light is considerably lower in certain media...it's lower in water, although not by that much.
Of course none of that has to do with Einstein's equation.
"On my desktop I have an admin account called God..." This is a copyright violation, and He will be in contact with you shortly.
Amen to the communicating. I'm a technical manager, and in many meetings we'll get into technical discussions. When that happens, I can see that many of us in the room may not be understanding. (Ok, at least one of us is not be understanding.) I get up and start drawing on the whiteboard what I think the speaker is saying (but keeping my mouth shut so they keep talking). My perception is that we come out of those meetings with a much better understanding than if we had just relied on words.
BTW, one of our meeting rooms is called the Whiteboard Room, because virtually the entire wall surface is covered with whiteboard. It's our most popular meeting room for technical discussions.
Q: "Where do you see yourself in 5 years?"
The correct answer is:
A: "In a mirror."
[womdering if this post too, along with dozens of others of mine, will to vanish in censorship.]
Some of us wish.
Not only that, the Aliens aren't going to try again. The first time ET called us, he got voicemail.
> the cost of hard disks has gone up quite a bit since the flood
Noah had hard disks? What animal ate those?
P.S. I forgot another gripe about Shiny New Office (sorry, I know this thread is supposed to be about Shiny New Windows...) It's the color scheme; impossible to tell whether an Office window is focused or not, no matter which of the three Office color schemes you choose.
There. I got it off my chest.
> There's simply no significant value proposition, unless you
> consider "Ooooh! Shiiiiny!" a value proposition
Agreed. And sometimes I don't even *like* the shiny new stuff. The Start menu in XP (or the Classic Start menu in Vista) is just fine, thank you; I don't *like* the Start menu in Windows 7. (And in the one PC I own that has Windows 7, I've loaded an after-market version of the Classic Start menu that Windows 7 doesn't have any more.)
And don't get me started about the Shiny New Ribbon in Office...where outline numbering is broken worse than ever, and creating a PDF of a file that has an equation in it doesn't work (the PDF omits the equation and everything after it on that page). And BTW, outline numbering, equations, and PDF all work just fine in Open Office and LibreOffice! Afaiac, Office 2007 is Shiny New Junk.
I suspect that memorization is a way of education in many places. I once taught introductory linguistics at a good university in Ecuador. One of the first assignments I gave was to show why an analysis in the book was wrong. I don't think they could quite believe the assignment at first, but it was a good introduction to what linguistics is supposed to be about--thinking, not memorizing.
Back in college, I got high As in organic chemistry and quantitative analysis (chemistry). In both classes, I was able to reason through most of the material starting from fundamentals, hence very little memorization. Then I met biochemistry. It was a grad/ undergrad class, meaning everyone gets an A or a B; a C is like flunking. I barely squeaked by with a low B. The reason is that, as far as I could tell, there were no fundamental principles; most everything was memorization, like the Krebbs Cycle. I'm sure there *are* principles, but either I didn't catch them, or they're too difficult to reason through. Protein folding would probably be an example of something that proceeds from principles, but the principles are effectively too complex for people to reason through. (This was in the early 70s, and I don't think much work had been done on protein folding.)
Moral of the story: There are things that one uses reasoning with, and there are others where reasoning doesn't get you far. I much prefer the former sorts of subjects. (There may be subjects where reasoning works, but it's beyond the capacity of the human brain--the aforementioned protein folding, for instance.)
Current generation nonsense, it's high time we return to Latin. Ita et vos per linguam nisi manifestum sermonem dederitis, quo modo scietur id quod dicitur? eritis enim in aëra loquentes.
But I'd accept Old English.
Citation for The Diamond Age: "The Diamond Age, Or, A Young Lady's Illustrated Primer" by Neal Stephenson, 1995.
What, haven't you heard of Galaxy Quest?
> If traffic lights worked properly in the first place, people wouldn't be running them
Not true, at least not where I live. I come out of a housing area to an intersection and need to make a light onto a four lane, which becomes 8 lanes at the stoplight. The lights have sensors--mine doesn't go green unless you arrive before a certain point in the cycle, and likewise for the traffic from the opposite side of the four lane. The four lane is green for the lion's share of the cycle, yet there are often people on it who run the red.
> I prefer to go no more than 10 MPH over the speed limit
Yeah, you (and I, who do the same thing) are going to get ticketed for obstructing traffic. Just wait!
"I find LibreOffice just as clunky and frustrating as Office" At least LibreOffice has a real menu, instead of the hieroglyphic Ribbon--right?
"Gentlemen, let us compute!" --Leibniz
"put control back where it belongs, left of 'a'": Agreed, that's where God meant it to be!
Yes, that's nice for bash or ksh, but it ought to be useable in *every* app.
Don't know about the previous poster, but I *hate* to move my hands off the alphanumeric part of the keyboard, look down to find out where the Home/ End keys are on this keyboard, and then when I'm done look down to find the home row keys again. (Yes, there are bumps on the F and J keys, but I often have trouble finding them without looking.) Even if the Home/ End keys were consistently placed, I'd rather have a control key shortcut for them (like control-A and control-E) that allows me to keep my fingers on the alphanumeric part. Wordstar pioneered that sort of thing decades ago, I don't know why that kind of capability (assigning control keys to be cursor movement keys) isn't built into OSs by now.
(Yes, I know about key mapping in X-Windows, but it's not enough.)
You might have a look at my posting (search for "keyboard") a ways up from yours. Like you, I'm a keyboard user; I hate it when I have to reach for the mouse. And maybe I'm even "worse" than you--I hate to take my hands off the alphanumeric part of the keyboard.
I have used a custom keyboard remapper, which I program in C, under Windows for close to 20 years now. (It was based on someone else's code.) It maps control-H to the left cursor arrow, control-J to the down arrow, etc.; control-D is seven lines down, control-W is mapped to control-right-arrow (move right by one word); control-Q turns on selecting, so that control-H becomes shift-left (select left), and the selection stays on until control-C copies the selection, c-X cuts it, or c-Q turns it back off. Vaguely similar to the old Wordstar cursor controls.
I have not found a way to do this in Linux. In X-Win, it's possible to do a partial mapping, but you're limited to mapping one key to one key. So my c-D, which should map to seven presses of the down arrow, can't be emulated, nor can the c-Q/ c-C/ c-X behavior.
I'm sure there's a way to do this in Linux, maybe mapping at the level of the keyboard driver or something; I just haven't found it. And I never want to go back to needing to move my fingers off the home row to use those cursor keys, home/end/pgup etc. keys. So for now, I'm stuck on Windows.
"...making Asimo more autonomous, and useful, in human environments." So long as we're still useful in robotic environments.
Oh, to be a beaver!