Ever tried to plug that USB camera into a Mac? Doh!
That's strange. When I first plugged my USB camera into my Mac running OS X, an image capture application (included with the OS) popped up and offered to import my photos for me. And did so just fine. I didn't even have to install any software, as I did under OS 9, and on my PC.
Switching to Linux could save a big chunk on hardware upgrades!
Nonsense. Linux is only lighter weight than windows when you don't want to do anything involving a GUI. X is much slower than the Windows GUI, on similar hardware.
Re:My next bump will be a(nother) iMac
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New iMac Announced
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· Score: 1
Count me as another in this boat. I've been programming for half my life, spent loads of time in high school and college building/maintaining PCs, have played around with Linux and at times run it exclusively. And I now work as a programmer.
When I use a computer at home, I don't want to dick around with a lot of options and configuration -- I want to check email, surf the web, import and manage digital photos and MP3s, watch DVDs, and play games with minimal overhead. I want a computer that does these things with approximately the same ease with which my old CD player plays a disc. Except for the games thing (which I'm confident will change), my Mac running OS X is perfect for this. If I didn't already have a moderately up-to-date Mac, I would have already ordered one of the new iMacs.
Where in the Constitution does it say that cities shall not be in the communications business? This is not much different in spirit than running a postal service (which is specifically permitted to Congress in Article I, Section 8).
I doubt they'd put this restriction on it. If Chicago is like many cities, the opportunity to reduce traffic by encouraging people to telecommute would be a big selling point for this scheme.
No coding is a craft or maybe engineering, not an art. An artists's objective is to produce something that has an aesthetic quality. An engineer's or craftsman's objective is to produce something that performs a function.
Methinks you're confusing "art" with "fine art". Webster's entry for art doesn't mention aesthetics until the 4th definition, and even there, it doesn't make aesthetics a required component: "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects". Note that it's 'especially', not 'only'. The skill and creative imagination appear to be much more central to the definition, and those things certainly play a role in programming.
Even if you insist on including aesthetics in your definition of art, there's a good case to be made that once a basic set of functionality is achieved in a piece of software, improvements in aesthetics can be more valuable than further increases in raw functionality: Consider two pieces of software that serve a similar purpose, one with boatloads of bells and whistles, and one with a smaller, simpler set of functionality. The former is inaccessible and hard to use -- sure, it can do lots of neat stuff, but it's so hard to figure out how to do most things that most users touch only a fraction of that functionality, and spend a lot of time frustrated with it. The latter has less raw functionality, but because it's simpler and more elegant ("elegance" clearly being an aesthetic quality), it's far more useful to most users in practice.
Your bridge example is misleading: The function of a bridge is far simpler in nature than the function of any reasonably complex software, and thus it's relatively easy to consider utility and aesthetics as distinct attributes of a bridge. It's not so easy to consider them as distinct attributes of software.
...and the pause as the DVD player repositioned its read heads for the branching would be even more noticeable than the layer switch is to some people, which would lead to a lot of bogus, "My disc is defective!" complaints.
I wonder: Portable CD players typically have anti-skip buffers. Couldn't a similar buffering scheme be used in DVD players to eliminate the pause you mention?
First, Tog doesn't consider RSI at all - personally, I and a lot of others find that the mouse is a far bigger culprit than the keyboard when it comes to wrist pains.
Second, Tog suggests that because using the mouse is a relatively low-level, "physical" task, and that therefore, using the mouse permits people to avoid pausing the high-level cognitive functions related to whatever they're actually trying to accomplish. I don't buy this -- high-level cognitition and low-level motor control can't always coexist nicely, unless the low-level task is one you've trained very thorougly to serve a particular high-level process (e.g. touch-typing). Read up on why mobile phones cause car accidents, even in hands-free mode.
Finally, he suggests that mousing "feels" slower and that people are mouse-averse because mousing is boring. But I see no reason to accept his underlying assumption that "slow" is worse than "boring". If I'm a data entry clerk or word processor whose productivity is dependant primarily on speed of input, that might be true. But input speed isn't the bottleneck for all computer use -- and maybe not even most. It used to take me around 8-12 hours to write an essay for a literature class. Maybe a quarter of that time is spent actually interacting with the computer, rather than sitting back in my chair, looking over my notes, and thinking about what I wanted to say.
(Side note on "slow" vs. "boring": When I'm driving, I'll happily take a somewhat longer route that allows me to keep moving steadily over one that requires me to sit in traffic, even if the latter would get me to a destination sooner.)
(Side note 2: I'm not necessarily accepting the "slow" vs. "boring" trade-off that Tog poses. Considering the lack of citations, I see no reason to accept his assertions about what the research shows. Combine the lack of cites with Tog's tone of condescension and bluster, and I think that while the emperor may not be naked, he's certainly showing a lot of skin.)
Go down to the seashore and declare a war against the sea. Bill did that just as the tide began to recede, so it looked as though he was winning. But after a while, you realize that how matter how much you kick at the waves, it has no effect.
No. Bill has already won. See, personal computers don't generally come with any programming tools, any more. Or if they do, those tools are intended for simple, dull, scripting tasks -- nothing fun and elemental like a BASIC interpreter with some simple graphics abilities. Nothing to play with.
And that means that fewer kids will start learning to program young, and discover a sort pleasure in programming that is less available to those who learn later and are less self-taught. And I'd be willing to bet that a large portion of those who contribute to Linux are those who intrinsically enjoy programming. So the rate at which potential Linux developers will be created will decline.
This is a great idea. Humans are terribly fragile things, and the sheer amount of effort and expense required to feed our sci-fi-inspired fantasies of humans in space must seriously detract from more practical goals.
I think people who are excited about the idea of living in a moon or Mars colony should be made to go live on an oil drilling platform for a few months. Living in a moon or Mars colony is going to be like that, except worse.
If this got through then in theory a hacker could create their own 'tune', copyright it and let it wander the net. Then after a couple of months claim that the reason they were breaking into the FBI computer was to check that they didn't have any illegal copies of your MP3.
Ah, but see, that's where the clever $5000 limit comes in. The FBI or any other large organization can almost certainly come up with some evidence (real or otherwise) that you cost them $millions with your action. Then you're screwed.
OTOH, Joe Schmoe will have a much harder time proving damages when the private "copyright enforcement" company hired by the RIAA wipes his hard drive.
Assuming this isn't an urban legend: The low speed probably results from the fact that the user has to think consciously about each letter. When I'm typing something, I don't think about individual letters -- I think about words, and some unconscious machinery in my head translates that into the required keystrokes.
A similar system that let you think in terms of words would probably be much faster.
The article you reference speaks only of carpal tunnel syndrome, not RSI in general. And the blurb talks about "computer use" in general, and fails distinguish between different input devices, which are the real issue here. I don't think that I'm the only person who finds that while the keyboard is harmless, excessive mouse use will cause problems.
I'm also not certain that a study in which "only" 10 percent of computer users get carpal proves that computer use doesn't cause it. Without knowing what percentage of people in the control group (you know, people who don't use computers for prolonged periods) had problems, you can't really draw any conclusions from that 10 percent.
There are many illegal activities being done through anonymizing services (I will not re-enumerate them here).
Troll. You never enumerated any illegal activites being carried out through anonymizers in the first place.
From another of your comments:
I have challenged over and over again others to come up with alternatives to keeping anonymizing services from being used to support illegal activities, so far none have been proffered.
No. The burden is on you to demonstrate
that these services are being used for significant criminal activity. Until you do so, there's no burden on anyone to defend the existence and use of anonymizers.
I keep saying it over and over and no one responds. Will you give up anything to the government that will allow some reasonable means of assuring security?
Maybe. But only when I'm presented with convincing evidence that restricting these rights will actually help to maintain security. There's been no evidence published that these services are being used by terrorists (in fact, they used ordinary Hotmail accounts). So maybe you should can the hysterical posturing.
Re:You own personal transponder
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GPS Meets PCS
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· Score: 2
If my memory is correct, one of the high visibility cases of such a tracking was the capture of Pablo Escobar. The DEA had to follow his cell phone for a long time and make educated guesses to be able to intercept him. On the other end, an integrated GPS device simply phones momma and gives away its position precisely by the meter, which is orders of magnitude better than cell positions.
However, GPS, unlike triangulation, requires that the phone be trusted: One could potentially tamper with the hardware to cause it to consistently report an incorrect location. This isn't really possible against techniques like triangulation.
It's because people went ballistic at even the most innocuous of ads and started an arms race that we have the sorts of intrusive ads and methods we're now facing.
No, it isn't. The vast majority of surfers don't use any ad blocking software. The reason ads have gotten more intrusive is that even people who don't install Junkbuster or somesuch have learned to filter out ads mentally: Eye tracking studies of people surfing the web show that even when banners are displayed, most people don't even look at them, and those that do only do so very briefly. Clickthrough rates have fallen by a factor of 10 in the last few years; Use of ad-blocking software is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain this. Rather, people have simply gotten jaded.
If you keep blocking the ads, then the advertisers will give up and you will get to pay for the content. It's that simple.
I'm not entirely convinced this is a bad thing. Content providers will work hardest to satisfy the people who are actually paying them. I'd prefer that be me than that it be advertisers. Advertising-supported content is precisely why more and more of our public discourse is in the hands of large corporations whose only real motivation is profit.
I didn't think the disinfectant scene was too pr0nish... To me, it actually seemed as if the director had vague arty pretensions and thought the sensuality of the scene, mixed with the harsh dialogue, would create a lovely bit of dissonance.
There was dialogue during that scene? I didn't notice any...
BTW, yes, I am Southern-born and -bred, and I do have a small chip on my shoulder about how we've become the chosen funny minority on the screen.
Looks like more than a small chip. Maybe you should lose it. I've got a southern accent, too. Living in Boston, I occasionally get a bit of teasing about it, but nothing I can't handle.
Getting all bent out of shape about it just makes things worse: Guys like you just build a stereotype of southerners as insecure whiners. And people take the "southerners are insecure" stereotype far more seriously than the "southerners are stupid" one.
Would you prefer to be ran into a building at 600+ mph and burn in a fiery inferno along with thousands of others, or perhaps be inconvenienced of the government seeing you send porn to your geek friends at school?
There's no evidence at all that the hijackers used encrypted email, so claiming that permitting law enforcement officers to read my email will protect me from being killed by a terrorist is just silly.
Slashdot Mirror
That's strange. When I first plugged my USB camera into my Mac running OS X, an image capture application (included with the OS) popped up and offered to import my photos for me. And did so just fine. I didn't even have to install any software, as I did under OS 9, and on my PC.
Now, iPhoto comes up.
Nonsense. Linux is only lighter weight than windows when you don't want to do anything involving a GUI. X is much slower than the Windows GUI, on similar hardware.
"Vast new platform"?
Linux, vast?
Sober up.
Count me as another in this boat. I've been programming for half my life, spent loads of time in high school and college building/maintaining PCs, have played around with Linux and at times run it exclusively. And I now work as a programmer.
When I use a computer at home, I don't want to dick around with a lot of options and configuration -- I want to check email, surf the web, import and manage digital photos and MP3s, watch DVDs, and play games with minimal overhead. I want a computer that does these things with approximately the same ease with which my old CD player plays a disc. Except for the games thing (which I'm confident will change), my Mac running OS X is perfect for this. If I didn't already have a moderately up-to-date Mac, I would have already ordered one of the new iMacs.
Where in the Constitution does it say that cities shall not be in the communications business? This is not much different in spirit than running a postal service (which is specifically permitted to Congress in Article I, Section 8).
I doubt they'd put this restriction on it. If Chicago is like many cities, the opportunity to reduce traffic by encouraging people to telecommute would be a big selling point for this scheme.
Methinks you're confusing "art" with "fine art". Webster's entry for art doesn't mention aesthetics until the 4th definition, and even there, it doesn't make aesthetics a required component: "the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects". Note that it's 'especially', not 'only'. The skill and creative imagination appear to be much more central to the definition, and those things certainly play a role in programming.
Even if you insist on including aesthetics in your definition of art, there's a good case to be made that once a basic set of functionality is achieved in a piece of software, improvements in aesthetics can be more valuable than further increases in raw functionality: Consider two pieces of software that serve a similar purpose, one with boatloads of bells and whistles, and one with a smaller, simpler set of functionality. The former is inaccessible and hard to use -- sure, it can do lots of neat stuff, but it's so hard to figure out how to do most things that most users touch only a fraction of that functionality, and spend a lot of time frustrated with it. The latter has less raw functionality, but because it's simpler and more elegant ("elegance" clearly being an aesthetic quality), it's far more useful to most users in practice.
Your bridge example is misleading: The function of a bridge is far simpler in nature than the function of any reasonably complex software, and thus it's relatively easy to consider utility and aesthetics as distinct attributes of a bridge. It's not so easy to consider them as distinct attributes of software.
I wonder: Portable CD players typically have anti-skip buffers. Couldn't a similar buffering scheme be used in DVD players to eliminate the pause you mention?
The same way you estimate schedules: Come up with something that looks reasonable, then triple it.
Software Engineering is *not* "hacking" or "coding" or "programming", it's *engineering*, like building a bridge or a skyscraper.
Is designing a skyscraper or bridge pure engineering, with no art to it? Hordes of architects would disagree.
I see a few flaws in Tog's reasoning:
First, Tog doesn't consider RSI at all - personally, I and a lot of others find that the mouse is a far bigger culprit than the keyboard when it comes to wrist pains.
Second, Tog suggests that because using the mouse is a relatively low-level, "physical" task, and that therefore, using the mouse permits people to avoid pausing the high-level cognitive functions related to whatever they're actually trying to accomplish. I don't buy this -- high-level cognitition and low-level motor control can't always coexist nicely, unless the low-level task is one you've trained very thorougly to serve a particular high-level process (e.g. touch-typing). Read up on why mobile phones cause car accidents, even in hands-free mode.
Finally, he suggests that mousing "feels" slower and that people are mouse-averse because mousing is boring. But I see no reason to accept his underlying assumption that "slow" is worse than "boring". If I'm a data entry clerk or word processor whose productivity is dependant primarily on speed of input, that might be true. But input speed isn't the bottleneck for all computer use -- and maybe not even most. It used to take me around 8-12 hours to write an essay for a literature class. Maybe a quarter of that time is spent actually interacting with the computer, rather than sitting back in my chair, looking over my notes, and thinking about what I wanted to say.
(Side note on "slow" vs. "boring": When I'm driving, I'll happily take a somewhat longer route that allows me to keep moving steadily over one that requires me to sit in traffic, even if the latter would get me to a destination sooner.)
(Side note 2: I'm not necessarily accepting the "slow" vs. "boring" trade-off that Tog poses. Considering the lack of citations, I see no reason to accept his assertions about what the research shows. Combine the lack of cites with Tog's tone of condescension and bluster, and I think that while the emperor may not be naked, he's certainly showing a lot of skin.)
No. Bill has already won. See, personal computers don't generally come with any programming tools, any more. Or if they do, those tools are intended for simple, dull, scripting tasks -- nothing fun and elemental like a BASIC interpreter with some simple graphics abilities. Nothing to play with.
And that means that fewer kids will start learning to program young, and discover a sort pleasure in programming that is less available to those who learn later and are less self-taught. And I'd be willing to bet that a large portion of those who contribute to Linux are those who intrinsically enjoy programming. So the rate at which potential Linux developers will be created will decline.
This is a great idea. Humans are terribly fragile things, and the sheer amount of effort and expense required to feed our sci-fi-inspired fantasies of humans in space must seriously detract from more practical goals.
I think people who are excited about the idea of living in a moon or Mars colony should be made to go live on an oil drilling platform for a few months. Living in a moon or Mars colony is going to be like that, except worse.
Ah, but see, that's where the clever $5000 limit comes in. The FBI or any other large organization can almost certainly come up with some evidence (real or otherwise) that you cost them $millions with your action. Then you're screwed.
OTOH, Joe Schmoe will have a much harder time proving damages when the private "copyright enforcement" company hired by the RIAA wipes his hard drive.
Assuming this isn't an urban legend: The low speed probably results from the fact that the user has to think consciously about each letter. When I'm typing something, I don't think about individual letters -- I think about words, and some unconscious machinery in my head translates that into the required keystrokes.
A similar system that let you think in terms of words would probably be much faster.
Solution: Winking with the left eye is a "left click", winking with the right eye is a "right click", and blinking is just ignored.
The article you reference speaks only of carpal tunnel syndrome, not RSI in general. And the blurb talks about "computer use" in general, and fails distinguish between different input devices, which are the real issue here. I don't think that I'm the only person who finds that while the keyboard is harmless, excessive mouse use will cause problems.
I'm also not certain that a study in which "only" 10 percent of computer users get carpal proves that computer use doesn't cause it. Without knowing what percentage of people in the control group (you know, people who don't use computers for prolonged periods) had problems, you can't really draw any conclusions from that 10 percent.
Troll. You never enumerated any illegal activites being carried out through anonymizers in the first place.
From another of your comments:
I have challenged over and over again others to come up with alternatives to keeping anonymizing services from being used to support illegal activities, so far none have been proffered.
No. The burden is on you to demonstrate
that these services are being used for significant criminal activity. Until you do so, there's no burden on anyone to defend the existence and use of anonymizers.
Maybe. But only when I'm presented with convincing evidence that restricting these rights will actually help to maintain security. There's been no evidence published that these services are being used by terrorists (in fact, they used ordinary Hotmail accounts). So maybe you should can the hysterical posturing.
The Hindenburg disaster was not caused by the use of hydrogen, but rather by the material used on the skin of the zeppelin.
However, GPS, unlike triangulation, requires that the phone be trusted: One could potentially tamper with the hardware to cause it to consistently report an incorrect location. This isn't really possible against techniques like triangulation.
It's because people went ballistic at even the most innocuous of ads and started an arms race that we have the sorts of intrusive ads and methods we're now facing.
No, it isn't. The vast majority of surfers don't use any ad blocking software. The reason ads have gotten more intrusive is that even people who don't install Junkbuster or somesuch have learned to filter out ads mentally: Eye tracking studies of people surfing the web show that even when banners are displayed, most people don't even look at them, and those that do only do so very briefly. Clickthrough rates have fallen by a factor of 10 in the last few years; Use of ad-blocking software is neither necessary nor sufficient to explain this. Rather, people have simply gotten jaded.
If you keep blocking the ads, then the advertisers will give up and you will get to pay for the content. It's that simple.
I'm not entirely convinced this is a bad thing. Content providers will work hardest to satisfy the people who are actually paying them. I'd prefer that be me than that it be advertisers. Advertising-supported content is precisely why more and more of our public discourse is in the hands of large corporations whose only real motivation is profit.
There was dialogue during that scene? I didn't notice any...
Looks like more than a small chip. Maybe you should lose it. I've got a southern accent, too. Living in Boston, I occasionally get a bit of teasing about it, but nothing I can't handle.
Getting all bent out of shape about it just makes things worse: Guys like you just build a stereotype of southerners as insecure whiners. And people take the "southerners are insecure" stereotype far more seriously than the "southerners are stupid" one.
There's no evidence at all that the hijackers used encrypted email, so claiming that permitting law enforcement officers to read my email will protect me from being killed by a terrorist is just silly.