If you're going to wage a war, it's bad to start out by shooting a single bullet (not that that hasn't ever happened). Better to test out your weapons up to but not including shooting the other side, then--when your side is massed up with all their guns pointing at the enemy, and hopefully the enemy is not all aiming back--you all shoot together. The Romans knew that, and it's been the principle of many an Army (and Navy) since then.
Isn't that what Chamberlain and Hitler did in Munich? They worked together, and came up with an agreement about Czechoslovakia. They succeeded in creating peace for their time, I'm sure it'll work now.
On the Cyber 170/750 that I worked on, lower case characters were indeed represented with two 6-bit bytes: an upper case character with a leading back-slash, \A, \B etc. I know, because I wrote my dissertation on it. The editor automatically converted between the two (i.e. you typed 'a', the editor converted to '\A' for storage, and the editor displayed 'a'), or it would have been a mess, but it was this sequence of two chars internally. I know because when I went to my first job and wanted to get a copy of my dissertation in ASCII format, someone had to write a C program to do the conversion. That was 1984.
Re 5, Google hasn't done this because Microsoft Office does it; hence NIH. (And yes, that is one of my biggest beefs about MsOffice. Next to the ribbon, of course.)
6) Get rid of the hamburger menu, who needs menus? Menus imply that the engineers did something wrong. The user should not be able to change anything about the browser's behavior, it's already perfect, and Google Knows Best.
I don't think "screens" is a good measure for deciding whether Python is an appropriate language. I have a program with about ten thousand lines of Python code, and it runs just fine, thank you. (It imports an XML file describing the morphology of a language, and spits it back out as finite state transducer code, in under five seconds. The XML files in question tend to be a few thousand lines, generally with one open or close tag per line.) I'd hate to have coded that in any other language (*especially* XSLT, which has to be the world's most verbose language).
I don't, however, have anything better to suggest as a metric, other than the obvious speed issue.
Thanks for the pointer to EmClient, I'm downloading it now to check it out. I would find it hard to do without TBird's Nostalgy plugin, which makes filing msgs a breeze; but I'll see how EmClient handles that.
To be honest, that sounds like Google. See the outrage when they bring up a new version of Google News, or Google Maps. Google ignores the complaints, because Google Knows Better. Or take Chrome. I've used a number of browsers, and the Chrome UI is IMNSHO the absolute worst.
(Actually, re-reading your post, I guess I misunderstood--I thought you said "I know what you want better than you do." But I like my response so much that I'm going with it.)
"do they by any chance have a time-machine": Why yes, they do. Although if you thought your CPU was drawing a lot of power; the Microsoft time machine draws 1.21 gigawatts. But wait until you see the chassis!
Outlook seems to work fine for me, both email and calendaring. A few things I don't like, like the enormous file icons in Outlook 2016 (fresh in my mind, because we just graded from 2013), and the fact that you can't tell by looking whether it has keyboard focus. Oh, and that lousy ribbon... But I've got gripes about the UI on lots of software (I'm looking at you, Chrome), and overall Outlook no worse than most. My email client at home is TBird. I prefer its UI, and especially the Nostalgy plugin that makes it a breeze to file emails. But it's slow as all get-out, just plain freezes from time to time, and randomly decides to re-download every IMAP folder I have. That said, I've never seen an email client that I prefer to Outlook or TBird. (Don't get me started on webmail, I despise it.)
How long have these supposedly vulnerable cables been in place? The Internet didn't exist before the 1990s. (I know, youngsters, the ARPANet existed earlier, in fact I was using it in the late 1980s. But I'm referring to the modern network that's grown by leaps and bounds.)
I'd bet these vulnerable cables were put in place in the last couple decades at most, probably 15 years ago. And if they can be placed that quickly, then they can be replaced with newer ones over the next 15 years, a few inches (at least) higher, and we won't have to worry for a few more decades.
The reason is...well...it's because...err...well, you know...um...I dunno.
All seriousness aside, my choice of browsers (Firefox) is because it's easier to use, because it has a _real_ menu system, and because I can make configuration changes that I need.
Chrome has none of this. I can't use the backspace key because G, in its wisdom, knows better; I might some day be filling out a form, and accidentally hit the backspace key, resulting in backing out of the form instead of erasing a single character. (That's never happened to me using FF.) Yes, does the same thing, but that's a *much* less convenient set of keystrokes.
And I can't open a new tab in Chrome using FT, I have to mouse some icon. (Yes, thank you, I am a keyboard user.) I suppose there's some other keystroke in Chrome, -something-or-other, but I don't know what it is, and anyway it conflicts with other uses of keys.
My bookmarks: I imported my Firefox bookmarks, but they're buried somewhere way down in Chrome's lousy hamburger excuse; again, maybe there's some way I can quickly get there, but I don't see it. Bookmarks Bar, you say? Let's see, the reason for removing the Title Bar was to give me more vertical space for the web page I'm reading. So I want to give that space back for a lousy toolbar? Why can't I have the bookmarks *directly* accessible from a menu? Any reasonable application (like Firefox) allows you to do that.
At work, where my choices are Internet Explorer or Chrome (which is the only reason I have any experience with Chrome), I go to Sharepoint (yuch, but I'm stuck with it) and try to open an Excel doc. It comes up inside Chrome in some kind of marginally useful spreadsheet-in-browser applet. I can never do anything I want in that applet, so I invariably tell Chrome to open the spreadsheet in a real copy of Excel. Extra keystrokes to get there, despite the fact that I always know I'll need to do it.
None of the above would be a problem if Chrome offered any options. Redefine keystrokes? Nope. Rapid access to my bookmarks? Nope. Automatically open Excel files in Excel? Nope.
Who cares if Chrome is marginally faster at opening web pages? Not me!
Oh, I'm jealous... I just posted (somewhere above) my rant about the Windows key and the misplaced keys. And now I find someone who actually _has_ what I want.
Guess I've reached that point where the going gets tough... and the tough go shopping.
Seriously, I *never* use it (I use ), and every once in awhile I hit it accidentally, which is a real annoyance.
I also wish the CapsLock were a Control key, and the left and right control keys were not there... I know, there's a RegEdit fix in Windows (and probably s.t. similar in Linux), but in certain corporate environments that's locked down.
I have other complaints about modern keyboards, which only got worse since 1983 or so, but you young twerps probably don't want to put up with this old codger. ----------- Make keyboards great again!
Yes, from a time perspective it seems feasible that we're not the first generation of carbon-based life (although I could just as well believe we are, at least in this part of the universe). My question was more about DrTJ's original question (a couple-three messages higher in this thread, along with Trogre's a bit lower), namely would we recognize life if its metabolism were orders of magnitude (OOM) slower than ours. DrTJ said 5 OOMs, but I guess his point would hold for smaller OOMs as well. If some planet had life forms with such slow metabolism, I suspect their evolution would be correspondingly slow, in which case the universe might need to be that many OOMs older than it actually is before intelligent life of that sort evolved.
DrTJ also asked "would we recognize life that is 100 000 times smarter or dumber than us?" Smarter, I don't know, and I'm not even sure what that would mean. But dumber, yes; we do that all the time. It's all around us.
> a "four beer question"
I don't always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.
There's also the apocryphal story in which one of the earliest Machine Translation systems translated English to Russian and, as an evaluation, translated the Russian result back into English. Input: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." (= Matthew 26:41) The supposed output: "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten." Although this never happened, it does illustrate that ambiguity has been known as a problem for computers for many decades.
`I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!'
Slashdot Mirror
If you're going to wage a war, it's bad to start out by shooting a single bullet (not that that hasn't ever happened). Better to test out your weapons up to but not including shooting the other side, then--when your side is massed up with all their guns pointing at the enemy, and hopefully the enemy is not all aiming back--you all shoot together. The Romans knew that, and it's been the principle of many an Army (and Navy) since then.
Isn't that what Chamberlain and Hitler did in Munich? They worked together, and came up with an agreement about Czechoslovakia. They succeeded in creating peace for their time, I'm sure it'll work now.
You are perhaps a Thermian?
On the Cyber 170/750 that I worked on, lower case characters were indeed represented with two 6-bit bytes: an upper case character with a leading back-slash, \A, \B etc. I know, because I wrote my dissertation on it. The editor automatically converted between the two (i.e. you typed 'a', the editor converted to '\A' for storage, and the editor displayed 'a'), or it would have been a mess, but it was this sequence of two chars internally. I know because when I went to my first job and wanted to get a copy of my dissertation in ASCII format, someone had to write a C program to do the conversion. That was 1984.
"The chief Dufflepod hung back and warned the others that they'd find the water powerful wet..." --C.S. Lewis, Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Re 5, Google hasn't done this because Microsoft Office does it; hence NIH. (And yes, that is one of my biggest beefs about MsOffice. Next to the ribbon, of course.)
6) Get rid of the hamburger menu, who needs menus? Menus imply that the engineers did something wrong. The user should not be able to change anything about the browser's behavior, it's already perfect, and Google Knows Best.
Right, the only more nerdy encoding is the one that the CDC Cyber 170 I once worked on had. Only upper case.
I don't think "screens" is a good measure for deciding whether Python is an appropriate language. I have a program with about ten thousand lines of Python code, and it runs just fine, thank you. (It imports an XML file describing the morphology of a language, and spits it back out as finite state transducer code, in under five seconds. The XML files in question tend to be a few thousand lines, generally with one open or close tag per line.) I'd hate to have coded that in any other language (*especially* XSLT, which has to be the world's most verbose language).
I don't, however, have anything better to suggest as a metric, other than the obvious speed issue.
"Duck typing is extremely brittle..." As opposed to Duct Taping. Which is, if you will, what running TensorFlow from Python.
And before you get too down on Duct Taping, remember that's (part of) what got the Apollo 13 astronauts back from the Moon.
Thanks for the pointer to EmClient, I'm downloading it now to check it out. I would find it hard to do without TBird's Nostalgy plugin, which makes filing msgs a breeze; but I'll see how EmClient handles that.
To be honest, that sounds like Google. See the outrage when they bring up a new version of Google News, or Google Maps. Google ignores the complaints, because Google Knows Better. Or take Chrome. I've used a number of browsers, and the Chrome UI is IMNSHO the absolute worst.
(Actually, re-reading your post, I guess I misunderstood--I thought you said "I know what you want better than you do." But I like my response so much that I'm going with it.)
The last original idea they had was the Ribbon. I for one do not find that useful.
"do they by any chance have a time-machine": Why yes, they do. Although if you thought your CPU was drawing a lot of power; the Microsoft time machine draws 1.21 gigawatts. But wait until you see the chassis!
Outlook seems to work fine for me, both email and calendaring. A few things I don't like, like the enormous file icons in Outlook 2016 (fresh in my mind, because we just graded from 2013), and the fact that you can't tell by looking whether it has keyboard focus. Oh, and that lousy ribbon... But I've got gripes about the UI on lots of software (I'm looking at you, Chrome), and overall Outlook no worse than most. My email client at home is TBird. I prefer its UI, and especially the Nostalgy plugin that makes it a breeze to file emails. But it's slow as all get-out, just plain freezes from time to time, and randomly decides to re-download every IMAP folder I have. That said, I've never seen an email client that I prefer to Outlook or TBird. (Don't get me started on webmail, I despise it.)
How long have these supposedly vulnerable cables been in place? The Internet didn't exist before the 1990s. (I know, youngsters, the ARPANet existed earlier, in fact I was using it in the late 1980s. But I'm referring to the modern network that's grown by leaps and bounds.)
I'd bet these vulnerable cables were put in place in the last couple decades at most, probably 15 years ago. And if they can be placed that quickly, then they can be replaced with newer ones over the next 15 years, a few inches (at least) higher, and we won't have to worry for a few more decades.
There, that was easy!
"1.21 GW of electricity with a capacity factor": Surely you mean "1.21 GW of electricity with a flux capacitor", right?
"I need a drink." I'd settle for a DeLorean.
The reason is...well...it's because...err...well, you know...um...I dunno.
All seriousness aside, my choice of browsers (Firefox) is because it's easier to use, because it has a _real_ menu system, and because I can make configuration changes that I need.
Chrome has none of this. I can't use the backspace key because G, in its wisdom, knows better; I might some day be filling out a form, and accidentally hit the backspace key, resulting in backing out of the form instead of erasing a single character. (That's never happened to me using FF.) Yes, does the same thing, but that's a *much* less convenient set of keystrokes.
And I can't open a new tab in Chrome using FT, I have to mouse some icon. (Yes, thank you, I am a keyboard user.) I suppose there's some other keystroke in Chrome, -something-or-other, but I don't know what it is, and anyway it conflicts with other uses of keys.
My bookmarks: I imported my Firefox bookmarks, but they're buried somewhere way down in Chrome's lousy hamburger excuse; again, maybe there's some way I can quickly get there, but I don't see it. Bookmarks Bar, you say? Let's see, the reason for removing the Title Bar was to give me more vertical space for the web page I'm reading. So I want to give that space back for a lousy toolbar? Why can't I have the bookmarks *directly* accessible from a menu? Any reasonable application (like Firefox) allows you to do that.
At work, where my choices are Internet Explorer or Chrome (which is the only reason I have any experience with Chrome), I go to Sharepoint (yuch, but I'm stuck with it) and try to open an Excel doc. It comes up inside Chrome in some kind of marginally useful spreadsheet-in-browser applet. I can never do anything I want in that applet, so I invariably tell Chrome to open the spreadsheet in a real copy of Excel. Extra keystrokes to get there, despite the fact that I always know I'll need to do it.
None of the above would be a problem if Chrome offered any options. Redefine keystrokes? Nope. Rapid access to my bookmarks? Nope. Automatically open Excel files in Excel? Nope.
Who cares if Chrome is marginally faster at opening web pages? Not me!
Oh, I'm jealous... I just posted (somewhere above) my rant about the Windows key and the misplaced keys. And now I find someone who actually _has_ what I want.
Guess I've reached that point where the going gets tough... and the tough go shopping.
It gets in your way.
Seriously, I *never* use it (I use ), and every once in awhile I hit it accidentally, which is a real annoyance.
I also wish the CapsLock were a Control key, and the left and right control keys were not there... I know, there's a RegEdit fix in Windows (and probably s.t. similar in Linux), but in certain corporate environments that's locked down.
I have other complaints about modern keyboards, which only got worse since 1983 or so, but you young twerps probably don't want to put up with this old codger.
-----------
Make keyboards great again!
Why does he say every thing twice? Two times, does he really need to do that?
If I'm not about to prepare food, and if I don't suck my thumb, and if I have a normal immune system, what diff does it make?
Yes, from a time perspective it seems feasible that we're not the first generation of carbon-based life (although I could just as well believe we are, at least in this part of the universe). My question was more about DrTJ's original question (a couple-three messages higher in this thread, along with Trogre's a bit lower), namely would we recognize life if its metabolism were orders of magnitude (OOM) slower than ours. DrTJ said 5 OOMs, but I guess his point would hold for smaller OOMs as well. If some planet had life forms with such slow metabolism, I suspect their evolution would be correspondingly slow, in which case the universe might need to be that many OOMs older than it actually is before intelligent life of that sort evolved.
DrTJ also asked "would we recognize life that is 100 000 times smarter or dumber than us?" Smarter, I don't know, and I'm not even sure what that would mean. But dumber, yes; we do that all the time. It's all around us.
> a "four beer question"
I don't always drink beer. But when I do, I prefer Dos Equis.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
There's also the apocryphal story in which one of the earliest Machine Translation systems translated English to Russian and, as an evaluation, translated the Russian result back into English. Input: "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." (= Matthew 26:41) The supposed output: "The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten." Although this never happened, it does illustrate that ambiguity has been known as a problem for computers for many decades.
`I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.
`I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!'