The a/an rule of thumb is to use "a" if the next word sounds like it starts with a consonant, and "an" if it sounds like it starts with a vowel.
To English ears, a German speaker says "ooh ess bay", while an English speaker says "you ess bee". The y sound in this case is a consonant, so a native English speaker will say "a you ess bee stick".
All bets are off when the word following a/an starts with an h, since the letter can be silent or verbalized depending on the word and where you grew up.
Avatar's 3D was far from awesome. There were dozens of frames in the movie where post-production, or CGI, or something, left objects out of either the left eye or right eye frame. The object was usually replaced with a white blob the same shape as the missing object. Every time this happened it was as if someone stuck their thumb into my eye.
I'm one of those people who had to crank old style monitor refresh speed up to around 90 Hz to avoid flicker induced headaches. Apparently I have low persistence eyeballs. Oddly the 24 Hz of film has never been a problem for me (until 3D). I don't know why the two technologies affect me so differently.
After watching two 3D movies, Up (which irritated me because most scenes had infinite depth of focus) and then Avatar, I am not prepared to repeat the experience. If a movie is only available in 3D, I won't be buying a ticket.
IBM's PC BIOS didn't need to be reverse engineered; it was published and sold by IBM along with the PC's schematics in the technical docs for the machine.
Yes it did. IBM did not grant anybody the right to sell a machine with IBM's BIOS just by virtue of the fact that they published the asm source for it. If anything, the existence of the published source made it more difficult because every company had to prove that their BIOS was developed in a clean room.
I was interviewed for a job at the time by a company that was busily reverse engineering the BIOS.
Bad bet. The machines which were shared were almost exclusively Unix machines, often with applications running for 3 or 4 different people (some remotely from their desks and some actually present in the lab). The few shared Windows machines in the lab were treated as appliances, with each dedicated to running a single specific Windows application, such as a PROM burner or a database app to track the equipment running around the lab. Most of the Windows machines were single user, sharing a desk with a Unix computer.
Good point, however your assumption is incorrect. Most of the Windows machines were co-located with a Unix machine on the same desk, with a few more running dedicated Windows-only applications in the lab. Roughly 95-98% of the staff were regular Unix users. I can only think of three people who had only Windows machines at their desks. One admin assistant had started in the department using only a Unix machine for a few years (typing reports using *roff).
As I stated in the original comment, we didn't have root access, therefore we couldn't solve our own Unix issues. The IT people worked on 100% of the Unix issues which came up. Many of these issues were nothing more than getting a machine cleanly shut down so it could be moved.
The plural of anecdote is not data -- Frank Kotsonis
<anecdote>
Now, here are the facts as they're found in ONE PREVIOUS PLACE OF WORK:
We had roughly 150 people working in a branch office, 110 of which were a mix of hardware and software engineers. The rest were either support or upper management.
We had roughly twice as many computers as people, with the computers in the lab area shared among many people depending on who was using a bench on any particular day.
About 80% of the computers were running a couple of Unix variants, mostly Solaris. The rest of the computers were running Windows.
We had 3 full time IT people who had to support all the workstations, servers, and communications equipment.
The IT people reported that 80% of their support tickets were for the 20% Windows machines.
Since we didn't have root access to the Unix machines, many of the remaining 20% support tickets were spent in either shutting down Unix machines so we could move them to another bench, or for installing new hardware and/or software.
</anecdote>
I have yet to talk to anybody who has actually experienced a situation where Windows support and development costs were less than Unix (or Linux) support and development costs for the same staff at the same location. I figure these places must exist, because SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES seem to stumble over them all the time. I'm glad I've never worked at any of them though.
Actually, now that I think of it, these Palm Pilots haven't been recalibrated since the time they got their first batteries installed. Odd how they still work perfectly after all this time if touch screens are so bad.
Not only do I remember Palm Pilots, my wife and I still use our 6 or 7 year old machines every day. I can't remember the last time either of us had to recalibrate the screens though. That must have been at least 5 years ago.
I find that to be a strange concept now. I'm running Gentoo, and I usually don't even know that my machines have been upgraded to a new release until I read about it here on Slashdot a few days later.
Mind you, back in the day when I was still running RedHat, I tried upgrading from 8.x to 8.x+1 and it completely messed up my system. The computer was running slower than it did under Windows. A later clean install of 9.0 proved that it was the upgrade process that had broken the system. That was the event that ultimately drove me to Gentoo and I've never regretted the switch.
Indeed it is. The newsgroups proved that completely. Every single moderated group disappeared over time because moderation DOES NOT WORK.
Instead every newsreader on the planet lets you killfile trolls or other posters you find offensive. Slashdot is part way there with the friend or foe concept. Now if it would only drop the moderation nonsense, it would turn the corner and start to work as a discussion medium again.
There are too many moderators on crack who are incapable of following a discussion thread. Instead they pounce on shiny comments where somebody puts someone else down for grammar or spelling or minor misuse of some word, and completely ignore the point made by the parent poster. Since I realized this I have been reading with the threshold set to 1 to filter out anonymous comments, but keep most of the rest. Some days I wish I could set the threshold to a range from 1 to 3 so that I could block out the pointless shiny comments that got moderated to 5 by the crack users.
What about the web designers who use % in the CSS body statement? Aren't they really telling people that they are too stupid to configure their own browsers?
If I use Web Developer to edit the line and change the size to 100%/150%, the site is far easier to read. Couple the deliberate size change with the change in font (Tahoma looks smaller at the same point size than the previous/. font, whatever it was), and you wind up with a site that is harder to use.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, every other application I run has reasonable sized text in the main window. Firefox has reasonable sized text in the menus and dialog boxes. The only difference is the source of the text being displayed in the main window: coming from "web designers" who think we are all too stupid to configure our own browsers.
The designers may be correct when looking at people in bulk, but I would far prefer that they use pt (or even px) to set the base font size, and then use % in all the other tags instead of assuming that I couldn't find the browser options dialog.
How about a cookie that stores the preferred font size as you get on some sites?
Neither approach is an acceptable fix for web sites designed by people who have never heard of anything other than Windows/IE. There's no FUD involved, I'm neither fearful, uncertain, or doubtful. I'm not afraid to say, or uncertain, or doubtful that the majority of "web designers" are idiots. My employer's intranet web site is proof positive of this axiom.
Not to mention that for some bizarre reason, Options are under Edit instead of Tools on the Linux version. Damfino why. I'm sure there is probably something on some bugzilla somewhere which explains it.
lie about the display resolution and have all the non-web sourced text (menus, dialog boxes, etc.) rendered incorrectly, or
override the font size and have sidebars bleed into content areas.
Web designers these days clearly have no idea how to design webs so that they actually work on anything other than Windows/MSIE. I fail to see why/. (or anybody, really) should be rewarding this idiocy.
By the way, 25 years ago (roughly the time I started writing code) when a hack to overcome another deficiency was written into a program as a built-in feature, it was still called a hack despite being an intentional part of the code. I haven't noticed any ISO committee struck to re-define hacks any differently. So to answer your question, "since when" would be at least 25 years ago. Probably much longer.
However I only ever have this problem with web sites designed for Windows/MSIE. The fonts on EVERY other application look fine. In fact in certain cases (OOo comes to mind) the default widget fonts were huge and I had to scale them down.
I'd never be able to surf without the control-scroll wheel hack. I just question why I have to use it for so many web sites out there. The font for the "winning" redesign is slightly larger than half the size of the font on the original/. page using Linux/Firefox.
The shake will be particularly bad when you hold the camera upside down (when shooting vertical format) as shown in the article. Your hands are supposed to be under the camera, not over it.
Conventional wisdom says that the slowest speed you can shoot 35 mm film hand held is at the reciprocal of the length of the lens. If you are using a 50 mm lens, that's 1/50 sec. If you are using a 200 mm lens, that's 1/200 sec. I have found that if I hold the camera properly (both hands under it) I can usually shoot at about 4 times that exposure time (e.g. 200 mm at 1/50 sec) and get a good shot. I have taken lots of tight indoors sports shots in dim light where the people are very blurred due to their motion, but the background is sharp.
Well if it makes you feel any better, I am one of the ground swell of meta moderators who are meta moderating ALL moderations as unfair/unfunny/unwhatever. It has been obvious for several years that letting random people moderate discussions just doesn't work, so guerillas like us are trying to stop all moderation. The only moderation worth a damn is the model that Usenet used 20 years ago, i.e. kill filing specific people. Please join us in this fight and meta moderate all mods as unfair/unfunny/unwhatever.
:-) I'm sure there is there is a joke or a pun in there somewhere.
... cleaning up slums...
Which I consider her and her church partially responsible for creating and perpetuating. I don't think I've ever seen a more evil person nominated for sainthood.
... the Taleban destroying...
I consider that horrific for the loss of the human heritage, not because the artifacts were Buddist, Zoroastrian, or whatever other non-Muslim origin they may have had. Even though I am not a druid, I would consider the destruction of Stonehenge or the various standing stones in Brittany, or the pyramids (although I don't think they have much to do with the druids on either continent), in the same light.
... 30,000 Hindus that Idi Amin killed in Uganda...
Hey, he wanted a snack. Cut the guy some slack.
Would YOU like it if somebody blew up Mount Rushmore, or burnt the original copy of the American Declaration of Independence?
Well, ignoring the fact that I'm not American, I would again object on the principle that it would be lost human heritage.
Overall, we probably see eye to eye on these issues. I think the problem is not the Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. so much as the churches who have been created to subvert the teachings of the (purported) originators of the religions.
Has the fatwa on Salman Rushdie ever been lifted? This is church sanctioned murder on the order of the pope declaring that all good catholics should attempt to kill someone he doesn't like. As far as I recall, both religions frown on murder, but the churches (ref. the crusades) seem to support the concept in so far as the murder supports their power structure.
Slashdot Mirror
Google: flash read disturb
The Micron presentation is rather old, but gives a good overview of how Flash works.
The a/an rule of thumb is to use "a" if the next word sounds like it starts with a consonant, and "an" if it sounds like it starts with a vowel.
To English ears, a German speaker says "ooh ess bay", while an English speaker says "you ess bee". The y sound in this case is a consonant, so a native English speaker will say "a you ess bee stick".
All bets are off when the word following a/an starts with an h, since the letter can be silent or verbalized depending on the word and where you grew up.
Avatar's 3D was far from awesome. There were dozens of frames in the movie where post-production, or CGI, or something, left objects out of either the left eye or right eye frame. The object was usually replaced with a white blob the same shape as the missing object. Every time this happened it was as if someone stuck their thumb into my eye.
I'm one of those people who had to crank old style monitor refresh speed up to around 90 Hz to avoid flicker induced headaches. Apparently I have low persistence eyeballs. Oddly the 24 Hz of film has never been a problem for me (until 3D). I don't know why the two technologies affect me so differently.
After watching two 3D movies, Up (which irritated me because most scenes had infinite depth of focus) and then Avatar, I am not prepared to repeat the experience. If a movie is only available in 3D, I won't be buying a ticket.
IBM's PC BIOS didn't need to be reverse engineered; it was published and sold by IBM along with the PC's schematics in the technical docs for the machine.
Yes it did. IBM did not grant anybody the right to sell a machine with IBM's BIOS just by virtue of the fact that they published the asm source for it. If anything, the existence of the published source made it more difficult because every company had to prove that their BIOS was developed in a clean room.
I was interviewed for a job at the time by a company that was busily reverse engineering the BIOS.
Wow. Where do you live that your timezone is UTC+34? Here on the west coast of North America we are still working off Sunday afternoon.
Bad bet. The machines which were shared were almost exclusively Unix machines, often with applications running for 3 or 4 different people (some remotely from their desks and some actually present in the lab). The few shared Windows machines in the lab were treated as appliances, with each dedicated to running a single specific Windows application, such as a PROM burner or a database app to track the equipment running around the lab. Most of the Windows machines were single user, sharing a desk with a Unix computer.
Good point, however your assumption is incorrect. Most of the Windows machines were co-located with a Unix machine on the same desk, with a few more running dedicated Windows-only applications in the lab. Roughly 95-98% of the staff were regular Unix users. I can only think of three people who had only Windows machines at their desks. One admin assistant had started in the department using only a Unix machine for a few years (typing reports using *roff).
As I stated in the original comment, we didn't have root access, therefore we couldn't solve our own Unix issues. The IT people worked on 100% of the Unix issues which came up. Many of these issues were nothing more than getting a machine cleanly shut down so it could be moved.
The plural of anecdote is not data -- Frank Kotsonis
<anecdote>
Now, here are the facts as they're found in ONE PREVIOUS PLACE OF WORK:
We had roughly 150 people working in a branch office, 110 of which were a mix of hardware and software engineers. The rest were either support or upper management.
We had roughly twice as many computers as people, with the computers in the lab area shared among many people depending on who was using a bench on any particular day.
About 80% of the computers were running a couple of Unix variants, mostly Solaris. The rest of the computers were running Windows.
We had 3 full time IT people who had to support all the workstations, servers, and communications equipment.
</anecdote>
I have yet to talk to anybody who has actually experienced a situation where Windows support and development costs were less than Unix (or Linux) support and development costs for the same staff at the same location. I figure these places must exist, because SEVERAL INDEPENDENT RESEARCH INSTITUTES seem to stumble over them all the time. I'm glad I've never worked at any of them though.
Um, yeah. You might want to try some engineering courses next semester.
Actually, now that I think of it, these Palm Pilots haven't been recalibrated since the time they got their first batteries installed. Odd how they still work perfectly after all this time if touch screens are so bad.
Not only do I remember Palm Pilots, my wife and I still use our 6 or 7 year old machines every day. I can't remember the last time either of us had to recalibrate the screens though. That must have been at least 5 years ago.
I find that to be a strange concept now. I'm running Gentoo, and I usually don't even know that my machines have been upgraded to a new release until I read about it here on Slashdot a few days later.
Mind you, back in the day when I was still running RedHat, I tried upgrading from 8.x to 8.x+1 and it completely messed up my system. The computer was running slower than it did under Windows. A later clean install of 9.0 proved that it was the upgrade process that had broken the system. That was the event that ultimately drove me to Gentoo and I've never regretted the switch.
Indeed it is. The newsgroups proved that completely. Every single moderated group disappeared over time because moderation
DOES
NOT
WORK.
Instead every newsreader on the planet lets you killfile trolls or other posters you find offensive. Slashdot is part way there with the friend or foe concept. Now if it would only drop the moderation nonsense, it would turn the corner and start to work as a discussion medium again.
There are too many moderators on crack who are incapable of following a discussion thread. Instead they pounce on shiny comments where somebody puts someone else down for grammar or spelling or minor misuse of some word, and completely ignore the point made by the parent poster. Since I realized this I have been reading with the threshold set to 1 to filter out anonymous comments, but keep most of the rest. Some days I wish I could set the threshold to a range from 1 to 3 so that I could block out the pointless shiny comments that got moderated to 5 by the crack users.
Memorable Quotes from The Princess Bride
What about the web designers who use % in the CSS body statement? Aren't they really telling people that they are too stupid to configure their own browsers?
Looking at the body for /., the font line says:
If I use Web Developer to edit the line and change the size to 100%/150%, the site is far easier to read. Couple the deliberate size change with the change in font (Tahoma looks smaller at the same point size than the previous /. font, whatever it was), and you wind up with a site that is harder to use.
As I mentioned elsewhere in this thread, every other application I run has reasonable sized text in the main window. Firefox has reasonable sized text in the menus and dialog boxes. The only difference is the source of the text being displayed in the main window: coming from "web designers" who think we are all too stupid to configure our own browsers.
The designers may be correct when looking at people in bulk, but I would far prefer that they use pt (or even px) to set the base font size, and then use % in all the other tags instead of assuming that I couldn't find the browser options dialog.
How about a cookie that stores the preferred font size as you get on some sites?
See my other reply to this.
Neither approach is an acceptable fix for web sites designed by people who have never heard of anything other than Windows/IE. There's no FUD involved, I'm neither fearful, uncertain, or doubtful. I'm not afraid to say, or uncertain, or doubtful that the majority of "web designers" are idiots. My employer's intranet web site is proof positive of this axiom.
Not to mention that for some bizarre reason, Options are under Edit instead of Tools on the Linux version. Damfino why. I'm sure there is probably something on some bugzilla somewhere which explains it.
I will have to start looking for that obscure plug-in, although I would prefer that the web "designers" actually learn how to design something.
You have clearly missed the point.
According to you I can either:
Web designers these days clearly have no idea how to design webs so that they actually work on anything other than Windows/MSIE. I fail to see why /. (or anybody, really) should be rewarding this idiocy.
By the way, 25 years ago (roughly the time I started writing code) when a hack to overcome another deficiency was written into a program as a built-in feature, it was still called a hack despite being an intentional part of the code. I haven't noticed any ISO committee struck to re-define hacks any differently. So to answer your question, "since when" would be at least 25 years ago. Probably much longer.
However I only ever have this problem with web sites designed for Windows/MSIE. The fonts on EVERY other application look fine. In fact in certain cases (OOo comes to mind) the default widget fonts were huge and I had to scale them down.
I'd never be able to surf without the control-scroll wheel hack. I just question why I have to use it for so many web sites out there. The font for the "winning" redesign is slightly larger than half the size of the font on the original /. page using Linux/Firefox.
Or, rather, 8 pixel high sans-serif fonts are in fashion now.
Are all the "web designers" aiming for people running 640x480 screen sizes? The winner is close to illegible at 1280x1024 on a 19" CRT.
Not too bad?
What's up with the pico script? Does everybody else in the world run their screen at 640x480?
I find it absolutely amazing that someone with the nic "TubeSteak" would miss the obvious innuendo.
The shake will be particularly bad when you hold the camera upside down (when shooting vertical format) as shown in the article. Your hands are supposed to be under the camera, not over it.
Conventional wisdom says that the slowest speed you can shoot 35 mm film hand held is at the reciprocal of the length of the lens. If you are using a 50 mm lens, that's 1/50 sec. If you are using a 200 mm lens, that's 1/200 sec. I have found that if I hold the camera properly (both hands under it) I can usually shoot at about 4 times that exposure time (e.g. 200 mm at 1/50 sec) and get a good shot. I have taken lots of tight indoors sports shots in dim light where the people are very blurred due to their motion, but the background is sharp.
Well if it makes you feel any better, I am one of the ground swell of meta moderators who are meta moderating ALL moderations as unfair/unfunny/unwhatever. It has been obvious for several years that letting random people moderate discussions just doesn't work, so guerillas like us are trying to stop all moderation. The only moderation worth a damn is the model that Usenet used 20 years ago, i.e. kill filing specific people. Please join us in this fight and meta moderate all mods as unfair/unfunny/unwhatever.
:-) I'm sure there is there is a joke or a pun in there somewhere.
Which I consider her and her church partially responsible for creating and perpetuating. I don't think I've ever seen a more evil person nominated for sainthood.
I consider that horrific for the loss of the human heritage, not because the artifacts were Buddist, Zoroastrian, or whatever other non-Muslim origin they may have had. Even though I am not a druid, I would consider the destruction of Stonehenge or the various standing stones in Brittany, or the pyramids (although I don't think they have much to do with the druids on either continent), in the same light.
Hey, he wanted a snack. Cut the guy some slack.
Well, ignoring the fact that I'm not American, I would again object on the principle that it would be lost human heritage.
Overall, we probably see eye to eye on these issues. I think the problem is not the Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus, etc. so much as the churches who have been created to subvert the teachings of the (purported) originators of the religions.
Has the fatwa on Salman Rushdie ever been lifted? This is church sanctioned murder on the order of the pope declaring that all good catholics should attempt to kill someone he doesn't like. As far as I recall, both religions frown on murder, but the churches (ref. the crusades) seem to support the concept in so far as the murder supports their power structure.