Indeed. I hate it when people say this or that (usually "evolutionism"; -ism, heh) is "just" a theory. A theory is a big deal. Perhaps creationism is "just" an educated guess, but the definition of the word theory is not. In common usage, people use the word "theory" to mean just that- an educated guess, rather than a hypothesis backed up by a lot of evidence.
And no, like you say, it's not a proof- but proofs really only exist in the world of mathematics. No scientist can say that a particular theory is 100% proven, ever. That is science, and the fact that science can adapt and grow with new information is one of its great strengths.
Wait a second. What is "skittlebrau" to you? Around these parts, skittlebrau is a drink made of dumping a handful of skittles into a 40 oz of Colt 4-5... don't tell me people drink that shit elsewhere?
Re:Yes, yes, yes, Apple's dying, blah blah blah
on
Why iPod Can't Save Apple
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
What have you seen to make you think constant growth is "by definition" unsustainable? Where in the past has economic growth not been positive over the long term?
The resources available to those of us on Earth is finite. If you assume we get some sort of intersteller space drive, you still are stuck with the size of this galaxy, and if you've the ability to leave that- the universe itself is finite.
Early on, having a fast-growth capitalist-style economy is good, I don't doubt that. It brings growth fast. But that cannot be sustained indefinately. What makes you think it could be?
It may sound retarded, but that's how capitalism works. It means nothing that you continually bring in some fixed amount of profit- bringing in 1 billion dollars of profit a year sounds amazing- but unless your profit numbers are GROWING then, according to capitalist economics, you are stagnant and dying. Capitalism means constant growth, which is by definition, wholly unsustainable.
I've seen that problem in OS 9, but not OS X. OS Classic's hibernation wasn't bad per se, it was pretty reliable- but it was a lot slower than OS X's wake-up, which is pretty much instant. I have seen classic Mac OS crash in coming out of hibernation, a bummer indeed.
Worse than that is the power usage. I have known folks who ran Linux or Windows on an x86 lappy who got the suspend to work pretty reliably. But in suspend, they got such dismal battery "life." I mean, 1.5 hours of battery life for regular use, 8 hours of suspend? I have had my Mac suspended for weeks with no problem. What is so hard about bringing the power use down when the machine is all but off?
Not sure about you,. but the Win 2k/XP hibernate/restore works fine on any machine, desktop or laptop. Granted, it is nowhere near as quick as my Mac- when I open the lid on the Mac, it's back in one second, and when I hit power on the PC, it's 45 seconds... but still, it's a successful hibernation/suspend-to-disk and restoration.
The first place I usually go is versiontracker, though sometimes they say have the program type- free, commercial, shareware wrong. Another awesome site, but with much more limited use is tinyApps. They keep track of various small, simple and free apps for Windows. Comes in handy a lot. Usually, if I need some app quick, I don't want to deal with a huge bohemoth- just give me something simple.
I have seen some pretty comprehensive demos on the vendor's site. You do not see them for every phone or every phone maker, but they are around. I remember a really good one for a new Series 60 phone... cannot remember which though. It was an almost perfect emulation of the phone and a lot of its functions.
Not sure how rare they are- I haven't been shopping for phones- but it may be worth checking for.
or... you could do what i do! augment your brain with new hardware, rather than learning a few new tricks. i use a pda, an extension of my brain that is almost always with me in my pocket. i have many good software packages for doing maths. a lot better than carrying around a ti-xx with you all the time for various reasons.
god bless the public school calculator generation!
Intelligent and wealthy people tend to have a lot fewer kids than stupid or poor folks. It may be somehow counter to your intuition, but those are the stats, ma'am. Makes sense to me, though.
Evolution never stops being in full swing. We are always evolving, although we are selecting for different traits than we used to. "devolving" is a misonomer, although a nice sounding one... We may be getting dumber as a group, but it's still evolution!
Silly child. I certainly don't know anyone- whether they believe in the religious tale of creationism or side with the view supported by scientific fact- that thinks a chimp ever turned into a human, nor that humans are derived from chimps.
It's little wonder that creationism silliness is so rapant- they have no idea what evolution is about.
Err... I mean, why would having PG books in Adobe eBook format be a good thing? Adobe eBook files are a hassle, and with no reader for any PDAs, be it a Palm OS, WinCE or Linux device, I can't see any advantage. I prefer txt, html or rtf for my ebooks, formats I can read on any PDA and any computer. And if it has to be something proprietary, at least PDB files for MobiPocket or Palm Reader allow me to read the files on PocketPC, WinCE or Palm OS. For WinCE or Linux though, I have been buying my books in.LIT, which can be converted to HTML. Yes, I actually *buy* the book, but I need some way to read it.
But Adobe eBook... bleh. The only place to read that is on a desktop/laptop OS. And who the hell reads books that way? Not I!
And for those who are out of the know- yes, every modernish PDA platform out now can read PDFs. But Adobe eBook files are *not* just simple PDF files, but something different. But even if the ebooks came in regular Adobe PDF format, it'd still suck- compare using something like Adobe Reader or Picsel Viewer for Palm OS or PocketPC or even worse, qpdf2 for the Zaurus with a nice app *designed* for reading ebooks- Palm Reader, JustReader+ or uBook.
Where are the photos? A gaming magazine had photos of the Nintendo DS recently, but I've not seen them surface anywhere online. A buddy of mine works at a gas station, and in his many bored hours reads many of the rags they stock. I saw thems myself, but when I went in again on Monday to buy it so I could make scans, the issue was gone, replaced by a new edition. I'm going nuts- I wish I would've bought the thing right then and there- but I figured someone would have scans up by now...
If these specs are to be believed, you have nothing to worry about. Nintendo isn't going to replace the standard cross pad and buttons with the touchscreen- rather, it'll augment it. I don't think there are many places that a touch screen would make sense in the kind of games I play- but there are some that would benefit from a touch screen.
Also, it opens the way to input. Perhaps this thing will be a PDA + gaming machine... The specs sure point to something like that.
Short answer- the Newton HWR system has been ported to other systems.
Long answer- On a NOS 2.x device, there are two parts to the HWR system, two seperate and different HWR softwares.
One is by ParaGraph, and it's called CalliGrapher. When configuring your Newton, it is called the cursive recognizer. CalliGrapher exists on a few platforms- Windows CE/PocketPC (as both CalliGrapher and the MS-licensed Transcriber), desktop Windows (called PenOffice there) and on Psion EPOC32. No port for Palm OS, but we may see one finally with OS 6 finally appearing. I still use CalliGrapher on WinCE these days and like it quite a bit. It's faster on today's faster CPUs- a 400 MHz XScale PXA255 is quite a bit faster than the Newton's 162 MHz StrongARM SA-1100.
Then there was the "printing" recognizer. This was Apple's own Rosetta. It has been ported to OS X, where it is now called InkWell. I usually used the cursive recognizer, switching to the printing recog far down the line. The printing recognizer was a wee bit faster, and allowed you to write umlauted and accented characters fine, even with an english Newton OS.
My first PDA was a Newton OS 1.3 Original MessagePad that my girlfriend got me. Determined to use and love it, I used it for taking notes in class and programming [1], as well as playing some games.
And of course, I had to use the handwriting recognition.
Back then, HWR wasn't great. This is the whole "eat up martha" era- and indeed, that Newt was named "Martha." The only way to get decent (though still slow) HWR was for me to start printing cleanly. It improved my penmanship quite a bit.
But then I lost it. Not a big deal, it only cost $50, picked up on eBay in '99. Then, I got a Newton MessagePad 2100- the real deal. A new HWR scheme, a much faster CPU and an overall much nicer unit. The HWR was a thousand times better, an still the best of anything I've ever used (and I've used it all). Alas, my better handwriting didn't last that long- after using the Newton 2100 for a couple years, my handwriting had devolved back to messy crap. But that wasn't a big deal, as the Newton had no problem interpreting it with 99%+ accuracy, allowing me to write a good 40-50 WPM in my crap-tastic handwriting.
What the hell is my point? Get an old, crappy Newton. You can get them cheap. Try to use its HWR. Or, get a new, expensive Palm OS 5 device and install Decuma. I am using that these days... Nowhere near as nice as Newton HWR or even CalliGrapher/Transcriver on pocketPC/WinCE. My handwriting is slowly improving, being stuck with this inferior, but still kind of nice, input method. Only printing, and very clean printing at that.
[1] That was one of the biggest reasons I decided on the Newton... It was completely programmable on the device itself, requiring no intervention, compilation or otherwise a toolchain on the desktop- unlike C++ on WinCE or C on PalmOS. You could write first-class NewtonScript apps on the Newton itself, even on one as gimpy as the OMP.
Like you said, the updates aren't a problem. At least with what we use on campus- Symantec Norton Antivirus- you can setup updating to happen automatically, once a day, twice a week, whatever.
But, you'll still be stuck buying a new subscription once every year or two to allow yourself to continue to use the LiveUpdate feature. Otherwise, you'll have to have your parents/whomever download the manual update every otherday and run the installer. That is a serious pain in the ass. I wonder how many people buy a new version of Norton every year *or* purchase a new subscription to LiveUpdate when their original subscription runs out -compared to- how many folks just let it lapse, click through complaints about not having updates and just use one, two, three year old defs.
But, with the worms and viruses you aren't really all that protected with the latest prefs and a package like Norton. Sure, *really* old viruses Norton can easily remove with no problem. But for Norvag, Beagle, MyDoom and all these other goodies, there is a lot more to it. At the very least, the user will have to reboot into safe mode and to do a scan. With some (w32.mscache comes to mind) that is all that is needed. But a lot of others require a lot more- booting into safe mode, then running a removal tool, maybe maybe even making some registry changes.
This is really all quite absurd. I work helpdesk for my college, and that is beyond a lot of these PhD'd people, even ones who are somewhat computer savvy. (although, "somewhat" has a liberal definition there!) Of course, when you do a manual or scheduled scan, or somehow Norton simply notices you're infected via the realtime protection, it doesn't tell you what you have to do to remove it... It often says something like: "virus identified. w32.whatever.@b found. quantuntine failed. clean failed" with no indicaiton to the user where they go from there. Of course, smart folks know to go google for help or just go to symantec and look the virus up for info there... But how many regular schmoes know and do this? It's a hassle.
from what I've heard, OOo is a lot better on OS X these days than it was even those 4 months ago. That said, I've not used it for even longer, so I can't vouch for this personally.
And next... What do you mean you use OOo via an Xterminal? Do you mean to say that you actually use OO via an xterm window, that is, within one? Or, do you mean you have an Xterminal box, some ditty by NEC or something that you use to run a remote OOo session? *Or* do you mean to say you run OOo remotely on your Mac using X11.app or Xfree on the Mac, running OOo either remotely displaying on the Mac, or running the X11 version locally.
The first option interests me, although I find it highly unlikely, a pipe dream for a chump like myself. There have been office suites or individual apps in suites that are accessible either through a terminal connection/xterm/console *and* in a GUI. siag is an example, having a vt100 front end and an X11 GUI. siag rules, it standing for "scheme in a grid," which both brings the power and convenience of a spreadsheet to the Scheme language (amonth others these days, including Python via a plugin!) and brings the power of Scheme to a spreadsheet. Before I discovered it, I used my own custom tools, which were somewhat gimpish. Nothing like a spreadsheet with a real language in a fully accessible form ready to go.:)
Sure, there is VBA for extending Excel. But compared to just writing in a new Scheme function in a cell it is a pain in the rear. Also, the spreadsheet takes the O.G. Lisp ideal to another level, the idea that in Lisp (and Scheme) data and code are one with each other, not two fully seperate parts as in primitive languages like C or C++. In Siag, you put that ideal in practice.
The fact that he lives in his parents' basement illustrates his extremely huge mental power. Afterall, only someone with his brain power would see that there was money to be saved living at home paying minimal rent for the barement and eating at home with mum and dad. I mean, you could save a couple hundred dollars every month! I mean, that goes a long way in those high-brow skin mags and EverQuest subscriptions...
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Indeed. I hate it when people say this or that (usually "evolutionism"; -ism, heh) is "just" a theory. A theory is a big deal. Perhaps creationism is "just" an educated guess, but the definition of the word theory is not. In common usage, people use the word "theory" to mean just that- an educated guess, rather than a hypothesis backed up by a lot of evidence.
And no, like you say, it's not a proof- but proofs really only exist in the world of mathematics. No scientist can say that a particular theory is 100% proven, ever. That is science, and the fact that science can adapt and grow with new information is one of its great strengths.
*sigh*
Or even worse, Microsoft Linux pre-1.0...
Wait a second. What is "skittlebrau" to you? Around these parts, skittlebrau is a drink made of dumping a handful of skittles into a 40 oz of Colt 4-5... don't tell me people drink that shit elsewhere?
What have you seen to make you think constant growth is "by definition" unsustainable? Where in the past has economic growth not been positive over the long term?
The resources available to those of us on Earth is finite. If you assume we get some sort of intersteller space drive, you still are stuck with the size of this galaxy, and if you've the ability to leave that- the universe itself is finite.
Early on, having a fast-growth capitalist-style economy is good, I don't doubt that. It brings growth fast. But that cannot be sustained indefinately. What makes you think it could be?
It may sound retarded, but that's how capitalism works. It means nothing that you continually bring in some fixed amount of profit- bringing in 1 billion dollars of profit a year sounds amazing- but unless your profit numbers are GROWING then, according to capitalist economics, you are stagnant and dying. Capitalism means constant growth, which is by definition, wholly unsustainable.
I've seen that problem in OS 9, but not OS X. OS Classic's hibernation wasn't bad per se, it was pretty reliable- but it was a lot slower than OS X's wake-up, which is pretty much instant. I have seen classic Mac OS crash in coming out of hibernation, a bummer indeed.
Windows suspend is that flaky.
Worse than that is the power usage. I have known folks who ran Linux or Windows on an x86 lappy who got the suspend to work pretty reliably. But in suspend, they got such dismal battery "life." I mean, 1.5 hours of battery life for regular use, 8 hours of suspend? I have had my Mac suspended for weeks with no problem. What is so hard about bringing the power use down when the machine is all but off?
Not sure about you,. but the Win 2k/XP hibernate/restore works fine on any machine, desktop or laptop. Granted, it is nowhere near as quick as my Mac- when I open the lid on the Mac, it's back in one second, and when I hit power on the PC, it's 45 seconds... but still, it's a successful hibernation/suspend-to-disk and restoration.
The first place I usually go is versiontracker, though sometimes they say have the program type- free, commercial, shareware wrong. Another awesome site, but with much more limited use is tinyApps. They keep track of various small, simple and free apps for Windows. Comes in handy a lot. Usually, if I need some app quick, I don't want to deal with a huge bohemoth- just give me something simple.
I have seen some pretty comprehensive demos on the vendor's site. You do not see them for every phone or every phone maker, but they are around. I remember a really good one for a new Series 60 phone... cannot remember which though. It was an almost perfect emulation of the phone and a lot of its functions.
Not sure how rare they are- I haven't been shopping for phones- but it may be worth checking for.
or... you could do what i do! augment your brain with new hardware, rather than learning a few new tricks. i use a pda, an extension of my brain that is almost always with me in my pocket. i have many good software packages for doing maths. a lot better than carrying around a ti-xx with you all the time for various reasons.
god bless the public school calculator generation!
Intelligent and wealthy people tend to have a lot fewer kids than stupid or poor folks. It may be somehow counter to your intuition, but those are the stats, ma'am. Makes sense to me, though.
Evolution never stops being in full swing. We are always evolving, although we are selecting for different traits than we used to. "devolving" is a misonomer, although a nice sounding one... We may be getting dumber as a group, but it's still evolution!
Silly child. I certainly don't know anyone- whether they believe in the religious tale of creationism or side with the view supported by scientific fact- that thinks a chimp ever turned into a human, nor that humans are derived from chimps.
It's little wonder that creationism silliness is so rapant- they have no idea what evolution is about.
Err... I mean, why would having PG books in Adobe eBook format be a good thing? Adobe eBook files are a hassle, and with no reader for any PDAs, be it a Palm OS, WinCE or Linux device, I can't see any advantage. I prefer txt, html or rtf for my ebooks, formats I can read on any PDA and any computer. And if it has to be something proprietary, at least PDB files for MobiPocket or Palm Reader allow me to read the files on PocketPC, WinCE or Palm OS. For WinCE or Linux though, I have been buying my books in .LIT, which can be converted to HTML. Yes, I actually *buy* the book, but I need some way to read it.
But Adobe eBook... bleh. The only place to read that is on a desktop/laptop OS. And who the hell reads books that way? Not I!
And for those who are out of the know- yes, every modernish PDA platform out now can read PDFs. But Adobe eBook files are *not* just simple PDF files, but something different. But even if the ebooks came in regular Adobe PDF format, it'd still suck- compare using something like Adobe Reader or Picsel Viewer for Palm OS or PocketPC or even worse, qpdf2 for the Zaurus with a nice app *designed* for reading ebooks- Palm Reader, JustReader+ or uBook.
Where are the photos? A gaming magazine had photos of the Nintendo DS recently, but I've not seen them surface anywhere online. A buddy of mine works at a gas station, and in his many bored hours reads many of the rags they stock. I saw thems myself, but when I went in again on Monday to buy it so I could make scans, the issue was gone, replaced by a new edition. I'm going nuts- I wish I would've bought the thing right then and there- but I figured someone would have scans up by now...
Grr!
If these specs are to be believed, you have nothing to worry about. Nintendo isn't going to replace the standard cross pad and buttons with the touchscreen- rather, it'll augment it. I don't think there are many places that a touch screen would make sense in the kind of games I play- but there are some that would benefit from a touch screen.
Also, it opens the way to input. Perhaps this thing will be a PDA + gaming machine... The specs sure point to something like that.
Short answer- the Newton HWR system has been ported to other systems.
Long answer-
On a NOS 2.x device, there are two parts to the HWR system, two seperate and different HWR softwares.
One is by ParaGraph, and it's called CalliGrapher. When configuring your Newton, it is called the cursive recognizer. CalliGrapher exists on a few platforms- Windows CE/PocketPC (as both CalliGrapher and the MS-licensed Transcriber), desktop Windows (called PenOffice there) and on Psion EPOC32. No port for Palm OS, but we may see one finally with OS 6 finally appearing. I still use CalliGrapher on WinCE these days and like it quite a bit. It's faster on today's faster CPUs- a 400 MHz XScale PXA255 is quite a bit faster than the Newton's 162 MHz StrongARM SA-1100.
Then there was the "printing" recognizer. This was Apple's own Rosetta. It has been ported to OS X, where it is now called InkWell. I usually used the cursive recognizer, switching to the printing recog far down the line. The printing recognizer was a wee bit faster, and allowed you to write umlauted and accented characters fine, even with an english Newton OS.
Lots of interesting info here.
Hrmm. I don't think /. has that many hams. Most hams are older dudes these days, it is pretty rare for younger geeks to be into ham radio.
Maybe if this story was posted to 1950s slashdot you'd be reaching more hams...
My first PDA was a Newton OS 1.3 Original MessagePad that my girlfriend got me. Determined to use and love it, I used it for taking notes in class and programming [1], as well as playing some games.
And of course, I had to use the handwriting recognition.
Back then, HWR wasn't great. This is the whole "eat up martha" era- and indeed, that Newt was named "Martha." The only way to get decent (though still slow) HWR was for me to start printing cleanly. It improved my penmanship quite a bit.
But then I lost it. Not a big deal, it only cost $50, picked up on eBay in '99. Then, I got a Newton MessagePad 2100- the real deal. A new HWR scheme, a much faster CPU and an overall much nicer unit. The HWR was a thousand times better, an still the best of anything I've ever used (and I've used it all). Alas, my better handwriting didn't last that long- after using the Newton 2100 for a couple years, my handwriting had devolved back to messy crap. But that wasn't a big deal, as the Newton had no problem interpreting it with 99%+ accuracy, allowing me to write a good 40-50 WPM in my crap-tastic handwriting.
What the hell is my point? Get an old, crappy Newton. You can get them cheap. Try to use its HWR. Or, get a new, expensive Palm OS 5 device and install Decuma. I am using that these days... Nowhere near as nice as Newton HWR or even CalliGrapher/Transcriver on pocketPC/WinCE. My handwriting is slowly improving, being stuck with this inferior, but still kind of nice, input method. Only printing, and very clean printing at that.
[1] That was one of the biggest reasons I decided on the Newton... It was completely programmable on the device itself, requiring no intervention, compilation or otherwise a toolchain on the desktop- unlike C++ on WinCE or C on PalmOS. You could write first-class NewtonScript apps on the Newton itself, even on one as gimpy as the OMP.
Man, I should get a tshirt with that.
letter vs word of law? do you mean the letter/word vs the spirit of the law?
And before DoubleSpace, there was Stacker. Even better!
Like you said, the updates aren't a problem. At least with what we use on campus- Symantec Norton Antivirus- you can setup updating to happen automatically, once a day, twice a week, whatever.
But, you'll still be stuck buying a new subscription once every year or two to allow yourself to continue to use the LiveUpdate feature. Otherwise, you'll have to have your parents/whomever download the manual update every otherday and run the installer. That is a serious pain in the ass. I wonder how many people buy a new version of Norton every year *or* purchase a new subscription to LiveUpdate when their original subscription runs out -compared to- how many folks just let it lapse, click through complaints about not having updates and just use one, two, three year old defs.
But, with the worms and viruses you aren't really all that protected with the latest prefs and a package like Norton. Sure, *really* old viruses Norton can easily remove with no problem. But for Norvag, Beagle, MyDoom and all these other goodies, there is a lot more to it. At the very least, the user will have to reboot into safe mode and to do a scan. With some (w32.mscache comes to mind) that is all that is needed. But a lot of others require a lot more- booting into safe mode, then running a removal tool, maybe maybe even making some registry changes.
This is really all quite absurd. I work helpdesk for my college, and that is beyond a lot of these PhD'd people, even ones who are somewhat computer savvy. (although, "somewhat" has a liberal definition there!) Of course, when you do a manual or scheduled scan, or somehow Norton simply notices you're infected via the realtime protection, it doesn't tell you what you have to do to remove it... It often says something like: "virus identified. w32.whatever.@b found. quantuntine failed. clean failed" with no indicaiton to the user where they go from there. Of course, smart folks know to go google for help or just go to symantec and look the virus up for info there... But how many regular schmoes know and do this? It's a hassle.
I'd just tell them to buy a Mac.
A couple things-
:)
from what I've heard, OOo is a lot better on OS X these days than it was even those 4 months ago. That said, I've not used it for even longer, so I can't vouch for this personally.
And next... What do you mean you use OOo via an Xterminal? Do you mean to say that you actually use OO via an xterm window, that is, within one? Or, do you mean you have an Xterminal box, some ditty by NEC or something that you use to run a remote OOo session? *Or* do you mean to say you run OOo remotely on your Mac using X11.app or Xfree on the Mac, running OOo either remotely displaying on the Mac, or running the X11 version locally.
The first option interests me, although I find it highly unlikely, a pipe dream for a chump like myself. There have been office suites or individual apps in suites that are accessible either through a terminal connection/xterm/console *and* in a GUI. siag is an example, having a vt100 front end and an X11 GUI. siag rules, it standing for "scheme in a grid," which both brings the power and convenience of a spreadsheet to the Scheme language (amonth others these days, including Python via a plugin!) and brings the power of Scheme to a spreadsheet. Before I discovered it, I used my own custom tools, which were somewhat gimpish. Nothing like a spreadsheet with a real language in a fully accessible form ready to go.
Sure, there is VBA for extending Excel. But compared to just writing in a new Scheme function in a cell it is a pain in the rear. Also, the spreadsheet takes the O.G. Lisp ideal to another level, the idea that in Lisp (and Scheme) data and code are one with each other, not two fully seperate parts as in primitive languages like C or C++. In Siag, you put that ideal in practice.
The fact that he lives in his parents' basement illustrates his extremely huge mental power. Afterall, only someone with his brain power would see that there was money to be saved living at home paying minimal rent for the barement and eating at home with mum and dad. I mean, you could save a couple hundred dollars every month! I mean, that goes a long way in those high-brow skin mags and EverQuest subscriptions...