I am a theoretical physics major and work as a mathematics proof reader, I have some idea of what a percent is. As you correctly state, the % sign is merely shorthand for hundredths. It implies nothing about the meaning of the scale.
Perhaps I picked a bad example, what I was getting at is that reliability is a number between 0 and 1 that lends itself to the % notation, but which is in fact interpreted exponentially. Yes, 32% is half as big a value as 64%, that does not automatically mean it is half as violent.
And of course a game can be more than 100% violent. It just depends on what you measure against. You take the most violent game on the market, set it's index to 100% (or 1 if you wish) and the next blockbuster title will be 132% violent. Of course, for clarity's sake you should write that as 132% violence index. Or simply set the reference index to 100 and call it 132 violent index.
The percent sign does not assign any special mathematical properties to a scale. Of course if the report says Pac-Man is made of 64% violence, then one might argue that it could contain only ~50% more violence. It would not, however, automatically mean that if it contained 50% more violence, the end result would be 150% as violent. That all depends on the scale, and the definition of violent.
Studying the phenomena, one might come to the conclusion that a game which depicts violence 90% of the total playing time is insignificantly more violent than one which does so 45% of the time, but the transition from 22.5% to 45% is much more relevant. Then 45% would be twice as high violence contents, but not twice as violent, but the percent notation would still be perfectly valid.
""Percent" implies certain mathematical properties" "Pac-Man is exactly twice as violent as a 32% violent game" "it is impossible for a game to be more than slightly over 50% more violent than Pac-Man"
Is this really true, though? Is a 99.99% reliable server only 1% more reliable than a 99% reliable server, for example? Many would say it is 9900% more reliable. I don't think the mere use of percentages implies that the scale is linear.
Why is that law stupid? A car is a very dangerous peice of equipment that requires a license to operate. Leaving one about unattended with the safety mechanism disabled seems like a bad thing to do.
Re:What's wrong with the interface?
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
Sorry, for some reason I did miss that one. I was reading at -1, but somehow I managed to skip your post
Since your points are conveniently numbered, I feel compelled to respond to each one in order.
1. I see your point, although in fairness I would say this is a fault of the window manager and not the application. A proper tiling window manager should offer the option of "maximize until you hit something". But, ok, as we (or at least not I) don't have that, this is a valid complaint. If you set the toolbox and dock windows to "Keep above" in Preferences->Window management at least they won't be covered by the image window.
2. This I don't understand. Of course you have to manage each window separately? The Gimp windows at least used to be properly hinted, meaning you could minimize all of them in one go and so on, if that's what you mean. I haven't tried it with the Gimp 2.x, but I assume that still holds true. (I can't test right now). Have you tried fiddling with the window management options in the preferences?
3. Yep.
4. I assume this is on Windows. Doesn't it default to the current working directory, and can't that be set in whatever they have instead of.pif files nowadays? In fairness, it does separately remember load and save directories, and persistent shortcuts can be set in the chooser, so this is, while annoying, still rather minor.
5. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but why don't you dock them? Just drag the tool options to a dock, and it will stay there and be automatically updated when you switch tools.
6. I don't use it much, but that does sound annoying. Thumbnails can be turned off, Preferences->Environment->Size of thumbnails->No thumbnails.
7. Yes! Something akin to the cropping tool, perhaps. xv has this as well. By the way, I fired up something called the selection editor, and that was just bizarre.
Good post, thanks. But still, a handful albeit valid annoyances don't make an interface deserve the kind of abuse it gets around here.
Re:What's wrong with the interface?
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 1
I fired up the Gimp and tried these operations.
1. Why you want to create a layer, do nothing with it, and then merge it again is beyond me. I find the concept of selecting the parts of the image I want to manipulate and then choose the filters to apply to be a very intuitive one. Still, I did it the way you described, and I had no problems at all doing it. Select, cut, paste, create layer, click the other layer, apply filters, click the lifted layer, menu->layer->merge down. Done.
2. Select, Script-fu -> Select -> To pattern, fill tool, select Pattern fill, fill. Done. I had never used patterns before, but thanks to their intuituve name it was immediately obvious that's what I wanted. "Script-fu" is not a very intuitive name, but anyone who has used The Gimp more than once knows that's where to look for such things. I completed this task very quickly, it was much easier than I had anticipated, I found what I was looking for (while not knowing exactly what I was looking for) in the second place I looked.
Editing individual pixels? The pencil tool with a 1 pixel brush size, just like in every single graphics package I have ever used, from MacPaint and Deluxe Paint and onwards.
I have read all the responses to my last post, and I still cannot see what is wrong with the interface. Obviously many are having trouble with it, but no one has been able to explain to me why. I don't see the inconsistency people mention, and no one has given a specific example. Why is having an MDI with non-standard window behaviour better than using your ordinary window manager, assumedly configured to your own taste? How is this consistent with the inconsistency argument? I like and use the multiple window feature a lot, I constantly tear off frequently used submenus and arrange them in a easy-to-reach manner.
(This last part wasn't specifically directed at the parent, if you missed that)
What's wrong with the interface?
on
Beginning GIMP
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Everyone is whining about The Gimp's interface, and I can't see why. I like the interface. Could someone please tell me what is so horrible about it, 'cause I feel like I'm missing something here.
"Accessibility options" and "disabled workers". That's not the responsibility of the file format. That's the responsibility of the app used to read/write that file format.
I work with preparing electronic text books for vision impaired and dyslexic students. We take ordinary text books and convert them into a format suitable for braille terminals, screen readers and other such devices. These books need much more detailed semantic markup than the what the originals have, as a lot of visual cues are lost. Our output file format (plain text with inline markup) differs quite a lot from standard word processing documents.
A well-designed word processing format could be automatically parsed and understood by non-graphical output systems as well as by those generating print output. I haven't looked much at ODF, so I don't know how good it is, but you do need to take these aspects into consideration during the file format design process to properly address them.
I saw a similar thing at a place I did some IT work. They had a really menacing caricature of Jesus looking sternly right at you, and the caption "Om du inte pröjsar kommer Jesus och tar dig!", which translates to "Pay up or Jesus will come and get you!".
Unfortunately there are more factors you need to consider than just raw fuel efficiency. The pulse and glide technique is only practical if you are alone on the road. Consider a situation with normal traffic, and every car using pulse and glide. It wouldn't work. The Prius marathoners you linked to also ran into problems with this, being pulled over by a cop for driving too slow.
The traditional technique (planning ahead and avoiding sudden changes in speed) brings not only decent fuel ecenomy, but also increased safety and ride comfort.
Well, in a way. My point was what mindset one should use. When I consider the real world, I see either what others have said about it, or what I can see with the intellectual tools available to me. Maybe what I see when I consider the world is wrong, rather than my assumptions. If so, I need not reconsider my assumptions, I need to reconsider the world.
I disagree, the world is full of scientists of Einsteins caliber. New discoveries are made all the time using that very method, and I think people would learn a lot if they applied it more often. It doesn't have to be revolutionizing cosmology, but still. I often hear people say "But that would mean [whatever], and that's not possible", when they really should be saying "But that would mean [whatever]. Interesting..." and discover something they didn't understand before. In my experience this is a much more frequent problem than people acting on obviously erroneus assumptions.
Consider the logical conclusion of your assumptions. Consider the real world. If they differ, you are wrong.
No, no, no. You might very well be right, and the world is wrong. To reiterate a famous example, Einstein considered the logical conclusion of the assumption that Maxwell's equations were true, considered the real world and saw that they differed. He went with his assumption and came up with the special theory of relativity, which obviously flew in the face of what we knew of the world. Only later was he proven correct.
This is because Tom's Hardware isn't very good. They favour quantity over substance every time.
The compositing is done on the hardware, and the screenshot function doesn't handle this. This is why you can't see any difference between the screenshots. (Either that, or only the bottom, inactive window is transparent, and there really is no difference).
What made me not read past this page was the fact that both these screenshots were posted without any comment on the fact that they look identical. Apparently, the writer couldn't be bothered with actually looking at them. A shame, too. I haven't used Windows since Win2k, and am a bit curious of what it's like nowadays.
My fellow students say this. Those who use latex generally use PuTTY to connect to a Unix shell server at the math department to do it, since they claim MiKTeX sucks. I wouldn't be surprised if the problem lies with the installation, as our IT staff is not very dedicated, but the end result is not satisfactory. Perhaps it is tricky to get installed correctly? As I said, I personally have no idea what I'm talking about here, I just know people are having trouble with it.
Interesting. I study theoretical physics and, as you suggest, write all my papers in latex. However, the computer labs at school for some reason run Windows with MikTex, which is said to suck (I use my laptop, and wouldn't know), so a lot of people use either MS Word or OO Writer for their papers.
Now, the way it goes seems to be they start out with MS Word, as it is most familiar. After having lost a couple of papers to its mysteries, they switch to OO Writer. Now, OpenOffice seems to lose just as much data (I'd say it's probably Windows which is at fault here, not the applications), but has a much nicer equation editor, so they stick with that. The amount of cursing is pretty much constant.
What makes you say OO Writer is far worse than MS Word? Last I checked (Office 2k, I think), equation support in MS Office was a joke. I have no idea what version they're running at school, but I suppose it is fairly current.
When photographing stellar objects, a few hundred miles difference in the origin of the cameras is not significant. If you want to use this screen for video conferencing, you will notice that several inches separation of the image sensors will make a significant impact on the angle to a face some 20 inches away.
I don't know enough about image processing to say whether it can be done or not, but it is probably a much harder problem than what you described.
Re:Only one way to resolve this...
on
Gmail vs Pine
·
· Score: 1
No, no. You are unscientific! Pine is clearly the best client, as this comparison shows: Best email client
"Seriously, have you ever heard of anyone getting sick from a keyboard?"
I used to work with PC support at a medium sized office. One part of this job was helping users at their desks, which involved using a lot of people's keyboards. Sometimes someone would forget to wash his or her (yes, we did have a couple of female techs) hands rediculously often (at least twice an hour), which led to catching all sorts of nasty colds.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course we are. Do you have a point?
I am a theoretical physics major and work as a mathematics proof reader, I have some idea of what a percent is. As you correctly state, the % sign is merely shorthand for hundredths. It implies nothing about the meaning of the scale.
Perhaps I picked a bad example, what I was getting at is that reliability is a number between 0 and 1 that lends itself to the % notation, but which is in fact interpreted exponentially. Yes, 32% is half as big a value as 64%, that does not automatically mean it is half as violent.
And of course a game can be more than 100% violent. It just depends on what you measure against. You take the most violent game on the market, set it's index to 100% (or 1 if you wish) and the next blockbuster title will be 132% violent. Of course, for clarity's sake you should write that as 132% violence index. Or simply set the reference index to 100 and call it 132 violent index.
The percent sign does not assign any special mathematical properties to a scale. Of course if the report says Pac-Man is made of 64% violence, then one might argue that it could contain only ~50% more violence. It would not, however, automatically mean that if it contained 50% more violence, the end result would be 150% as violent. That all depends on the scale, and the definition of violent.
Studying the phenomena, one might come to the conclusion that a game which depicts violence 90% of the total playing time is insignificantly more violent than one which does so 45% of the time, but the transition from 22.5% to 45% is much more relevant. Then 45% would be twice as high violence contents, but not twice as violent, but the percent notation would still be perfectly valid.
""Percent" implies certain mathematical properties"
"Pac-Man is exactly twice as violent as a 32% violent game"
"it is impossible for a game to be more than slightly over 50% more violent than Pac-Man"
Is this really true, though? Is a 99.99% reliable server only 1% more reliable than a 99% reliable server, for example? Many would say it is 9900% more reliable. I don't think the mere use of percentages implies that the scale is linear.
Why is that law stupid? A car is a very dangerous peice of equipment that requires a license to operate. Leaving one about unattended with the safety mechanism disabled seems like a bad thing to do.
Sorry, for some reason I did miss that one. I was reading at -1, but somehow I managed to skip your post
.pif files nowadays? In fairness, it does separately remember load and save directories, and persistent shortcuts can be set in the chooser, so this is, while annoying, still rather minor.
Since your points are conveniently numbered, I feel compelled to respond to each one in order.
1. I see your point, although in fairness I would say this is a fault of the window manager and not the application. A proper tiling window manager should offer the option of "maximize until you hit something". But, ok, as we (or at least not I) don't have that, this is a valid complaint. If you set the toolbox and dock windows to "Keep above" in Preferences->Window management at least they won't be covered by the image window.
2. This I don't understand. Of course you have to manage each window separately? The Gimp windows at least used to be properly hinted, meaning you could minimize all of them in one go and so on, if that's what you mean. I haven't tried it with the Gimp 2.x, but I assume that still holds true. (I can't test right now). Have you tried fiddling with the window management options in the preferences?
3. Yep.
4. I assume this is on Windows. Doesn't it default to the current working directory, and can't that be set in whatever they have instead of
5. Maybe I'm misunderstanding you here, but why don't you dock them? Just drag the tool options to a dock, and it will stay there and be automatically updated when you switch tools.
6. I don't use it much, but that does sound annoying. Thumbnails can be turned off, Preferences->Environment->Size of thumbnails->No thumbnails.
7. Yes! Something akin to the cropping tool, perhaps. xv has this as well. By the way, I fired up something called the selection editor, and that was just bizarre.
Good post, thanks. But still, a handful albeit valid annoyances don't make an interface deserve the kind of abuse it gets around here.
I fired up the Gimp and tried these operations.
1. Why you want to create a layer, do nothing with it, and then merge it again is beyond me. I find the concept of selecting the parts of the image I want to manipulate and then choose the filters to apply to be a very intuitive one. Still, I did it the way you described, and I had no problems at all doing it. Select, cut, paste, create layer, click the other layer, apply filters, click the lifted layer, menu->layer->merge down. Done.
2. Select, Script-fu -> Select -> To pattern, fill tool, select Pattern fill, fill. Done. I had never used patterns before, but thanks to their intuituve name it was immediately obvious that's what I wanted. "Script-fu" is not a very intuitive name, but anyone who has used The Gimp more than once knows that's where to look for such things. I completed this task very quickly, it was much easier than I had anticipated, I found what I was looking for (while not knowing exactly what I was looking for) in the second place I looked.
Editing individual pixels? The pencil tool with a 1 pixel brush size, just like in every single graphics package I have ever used, from MacPaint and Deluxe Paint and onwards.
I have read all the responses to my last post, and I still cannot see what is wrong with the interface. Obviously many are having trouble with it, but no one has been able to explain to me why. I don't see the inconsistency people mention, and no one has given a specific example. Why is having an MDI with non-standard window behaviour better than using your ordinary window manager, assumedly configured to your own taste? How is this consistent with the inconsistency argument? I like and use the multiple window feature a lot, I constantly tear off frequently used submenus and arrange them in a easy-to-reach manner.
(This last part wasn't specifically directed at the parent, if you missed that)
Everyone is whining about The Gimp's interface, and I can't see why. I like the interface. Could someone please tell me what is so horrible about it, 'cause I feel like I'm missing something here.
You didn't read my post, did you?
So another Dell laptop is disecting the exploded one? Or did the editor not reflect over the meaning of 'auto' when phrasing the header?
I'm guessing the first one.
"Accessibility options" and "disabled workers".
That's not the responsibility of the file format.
That's the responsibility of the app used to read/write that file format.
I work with preparing electronic text books for vision impaired and dyslexic students. We take ordinary text books and convert them into a format suitable for braille terminals, screen readers and other such devices. These books need much more detailed semantic markup than the what the originals have, as a lot of visual cues are lost. Our output file format (plain text with inline markup) differs quite a lot from standard word processing documents.
A well-designed word processing format could be automatically parsed and understood by non-graphical output systems as well as by those generating print output. I haven't looked much at ODF, so I don't know how good it is, but you do need to take these aspects into consideration during the file format design process to properly address them.
I saw a similar thing at a place I did some IT work. They had a really menacing caricature of Jesus looking sternly right at you, and the caption "Om du inte pröjsar kommer Jesus och tar dig!", which translates to "Pay up or Jesus will come and get you!".
I always paid for my coffee there.
Unfortunately there are more factors you need to consider than just raw fuel efficiency. The pulse and glide technique is only practical if you are alone on the road. Consider a situation with normal traffic, and every car using pulse and glide. It wouldn't work. The Prius marathoners you linked to also ran into problems with this, being pulled over by a cop for driving too slow.
The traditional technique (planning ahead and avoiding sudden changes in speed) brings not only decent fuel ecenomy, but also increased safety and ride comfort.
Well, in a way. My point was what mindset one should use. When I consider the real world, I see either what others have said about it, or what I can see with the intellectual tools available to me. Maybe what I see when I consider the world is wrong, rather than my assumptions. If so, I need not reconsider my assumptions, I need to reconsider the world.
Heh, point taken.
I disagree, the world is full of scientists of Einsteins caliber. New discoveries are made all the time using that very method, and I think people would learn a lot if they applied it more often. It doesn't have to be revolutionizing cosmology, but still. I often hear people say "But that would mean [whatever], and that's not possible", when they really should be saying "But that would mean [whatever]. Interesting ..." and discover something they didn't understand before. In my experience this is a much more frequent problem than people acting on obviously erroneus assumptions.
Consider the logical conclusion of your assumptions. Consider the real world. If they differ, you are wrong.
No, no, no. You might very well be right, and the world is wrong. To reiterate a famous example, Einstein considered the logical conclusion of the assumption that Maxwell's equations were true, considered the real world and saw that they differed. He went with his assumption and came up with the special theory of relativity, which obviously flew in the face of what we knew of the world. Only later was he proven correct.
This is how science advances.
This is because Tom's Hardware isn't very good. They favour quantity over substance every time.
The compositing is done on the hardware, and the screenshot function doesn't handle this. This is why you can't see any difference between the screenshots. (Either that, or only the bottom, inactive window is transparent, and there really is no difference).
What made me not read past this page was the fact that both these screenshots were posted without any comment on the fact that they look identical. Apparently, the writer couldn't be bothered with actually looking at them. A shame, too. I haven't used Windows since Win2k, and am a bit curious of what it's like nowadays.
So it's... what's the term now... viral? Perhaps like a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. Sounds scary to me.
I don't know who says this [...]
My fellow students say this. Those who use latex generally use PuTTY to connect to a Unix shell server at the math department to do it, since they claim MiKTeX sucks. I wouldn't be surprised if the problem lies with the installation, as our IT staff is not very dedicated, but the end result is not satisfactory. Perhaps it is tricky to get installed correctly? As I said, I personally have no idea what I'm talking about here, I just know people are having trouble with it.
Interesting. I study theoretical physics and, as you suggest, write all my papers in latex. However, the computer labs at school for some reason run Windows with MikTex, which is said to suck (I use my laptop, and wouldn't know), so a lot of people use either MS Word or OO Writer for their papers.
Now, the way it goes seems to be they start out with MS Word, as it is most familiar. After having lost a couple of papers to its mysteries, they switch to OO Writer. Now, OpenOffice seems to lose just as much data (I'd say it's probably Windows which is at fault here, not the applications), but has a much nicer equation editor, so they stick with that. The amount of cursing is pretty much constant.
What makes you say OO Writer is far worse than MS Word? Last I checked (Office 2k, I think), equation support in MS Office was a joke. I have no idea what version they're running at school, but I suppose it is fairly current.
When photographing stellar objects, a few hundred miles difference in the origin of the cameras is not significant. If you want to use this screen for video conferencing, you will notice that several inches separation of the image sensors will make a significant impact on the angle to a face some 20 inches away.
I don't know enough about image processing to say whether it can be done or not, but it is probably a much harder problem than what you described.
No, no. You are unscientific! Pine is clearly the best client, as this comparison shows:
Best email client
Unless of course you run Gnome on Linux instead of BSD...
"Seriously, have you ever heard of anyone getting sick from a keyboard?"
I used to work with PC support at a medium sized office. One part of this job was helping users at their desks, which involved using a lot of people's keyboards. Sometimes someone would forget to wash his or her (yes, we did have a couple of female techs) hands rediculously often (at least twice an hour), which led to catching all sorts of nasty colds.
I for one am glad we are rid our avian overlords.