What definition? I'll refer you to a few sources that agree with my definition.
The Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute uses the definition offered by the Robot Institute of America: "A reprogrammable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks" http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/robotics-faq/1.html#1. 1
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary says: "Robot n. a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer"
I know of several more institutions that agree with me, but can't be bothered finding references right now. What is your source?
Actually not. The general definition of the term "robot" is that it is autonomous. This needn't necessarily mean AI, a pre-programmed robotic arm is a robot (used in manufacturing plants). A human-controlled unit is not a robot, though.
The term is however often used popularly as "mechanical man", but that is not what it "really" means. (Of course, as long as both participants in a conversation agree, any definition is correct)
It is a large problem, causing many deaths and enormous damages each year. The coast guard cannot be everywhere, but the pirates can easily be anywhere. Piracy is a very violent crime, and often entire crews are killed and ships sunk after plunder. Not pretty at all.
HP have never built their own printers, they're rebadged Canon parts. You're right though, the laserjet 4's and 5's are so much more reliable than the 4100's (or *shudder* the 4050's) or 5100's that it's hard to believe it's the same brand.
I've worked with monochrome HP laser printers since laserjet II, and I would say they peaked around LJ4 or LJ5. The new ones are pretty much crap in comparison.
1. A completely version-controlled file system, so I can backtrace through changes to files and so forth, like a continuous backup.
2. Reiser4 style file/directory interchangability
3. A Plan 9:ish (i think, I might be confusing things) system of unifying the namespace, where users can install stuff into their/usr/bin without upsetting other users/usr/bin.
Give me these three things in a filesystem and I'll be a happy camper for quite a while, until I come up with new cool features.
That's pretty much what I said (or meant, anyway;). I don't use active screen borders for workspace switching, so that one isn't a problem for me. This is the nice part about choice of software, everyone can set it up just the way we like it.
(On terminology: Some window managers call them virtual desktops, some workspaces and there are probably other names as well)
I share your dislike for Xinerama. Have you looked at running with multiple screens? Using a dual-head aware window manager (I use Openbox 2.3, they dropped multihead in favour of Xinerama in 3.x) you get pretty much what you describe, except that you switch screen by moving your mouse.
The screens are still separate in the sense that windows are never split between them, and can have individual multiple virtual desktops and so forth.
Things like clipboard and xauth work perfectly across the screens, and the individual screens can still be adressed as:0.0 and:0.1. This is in my opinion much better than Xinerama.
While I am not the young man from whom you demanded an explanation, I can offer you som insight on why I do not use Xinerama for my dual-head setup.
I use a standard (non-Xinerama) dual-head config and a dual-head aware window manager (Openbox 2.x). This setup has but one serious flaw, and that is the inability to move windows between the screens. What it offers over xinerama is that it does not require xinerama-aware applications. Popup notifications never show up in between the monitors, for example. The big thing I dislike with Xinerama is that windows can be split over the two screens. I have never wanted to do this. I much prefer the ability to slide parts of windows out of view.
Another big nuisance with Xinerama is that I have yet to find a Xinerama-aware window manager that I like.
My vision of the perfect multihead desktop (which coincides with my vision of a reasonable X architecture) is pretty much X with something like xmove (which I have yet to get working on XFree86/Linux). The window manager could then be told to throw a window to the other screen when dragged to the edge, just as with virtual desktops. The bonus of using an X proxy, or preferably separating the display and server parts of the X server, is that you can move windows between computers, keep gui apps running on servers when the workstation is turned off, restart your X server (e.g. to upgrade drivers) without losing your apps, and so forth.
During a dark couple of years of my career, I edited largish reports written in Word. I would get the different chapters from different people and merge them into one document. The easiest way to do this was to export them all to plain text and then go through the entire report (which would generally be 300-500 pages) and mark it up with the correct styles. Also, you had to tread very cautiously with these documents. Once you go over a couple of hundred pages, Word starts crashing randomly.
I also worked tech support at the same place, and the track changes feature in Office (specifically in Excel, don't know about Word), while neatly integrated, routinely thrashed large documents when moved between different versions of Office. It would also crash randomly quite frequently, often choking on it's own files.
Before that I worked at a place using FrameMaker on Solaris, and now I use LaTeX on Linux, and both these solutions work, which puts them way ahead of Word.
How that application suite has risen to it's current position is beyond me. I could write a long, boring essay on why Word is harmful, but the process would likely aggravate me tremendously. Oh, and to head off the "That was then, it's really quite good now" comments: I went through Office 97, 2000, and XP, and no, it isn't getting measurably better.
When I worked as a Windows tech support, I at two separate occasions came across documents that would crash Word regardless of formatting. Loading the documents worked fine, but at the first strike of a key to edit them, Word would crash. This also happened if the entire text was cut and pasted (without formatting) into a new document. I tried pasting it into Vim and then into Word, to be sure there was no formatting left, but it still crashed. I tried turning off all spell-check, autoformatting and such features that might look at the text, and it still crashed. In the end, I could offer the two choice of either writing the thing in WordPad, or rewriting it from scratch.
After working with Word for a few years, both as a user (editing large documents, making them print-ready) and as tech support, I thouroughly hate it.
Sneaky one, that. Unfortunately, I think you were right, free browsers aren't an incendiary topic. Also, I don't think you were subtle enough, you were so obviously trying to provoke that nobody fell for it. You suck at flame warfare. Try adherring to your own principles next time.
Ok, that might complicate matters, but there is just no way compressed size can double. Consider the following example (still not completely relevant, I know):
$ ls -l total 3316 -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 922449 Jun 6 12:03 ALL_CHAPTERS.TXT -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 177417 Jun 6 12:05 ALL_CHAPTERS.TXT.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 922449 Jun 7 01:50 aLl_cHApTErs.TXt -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 198291 Jun 7 01:52 aLl_cHApTErs.TXt.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 922449 Jun 6 12:01 all_chapters.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 182350 Jun 6 12:05 all_chapters.txt.bz2 -rwxr-xr-x 1 odie users 100 Jun 7 01:50 random_caps.pl
"Readability - It's much easier to read names and addresses on the screen when they aren't mixed case."
This puts you in the minority. I have worked with readability (mostly related to layout, contrast and fonts), and to the overwhelming majority of us all caps text is significantly more difficult to read than mixed or even lower case text.
And if your compression algorithm compresses all caps text twice as much as mixed case, your compression algorithm sucks. Text is not random characters, it contains a lot of compressable repetitions, the very small portion of these that are affected by mixed case is negligible.
Consider this example:
$ ls -l total 2196 -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 922449 Jun 6 12:03 ALL_CHAPTERS.TXT -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 177417 Jun 6 12:05 ALL_CHAPTERS.TXT.bz2 -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 922449 Jun 6 12:01 all_chapters.txt -rw-r--r-- 1 odie users 182350 Jun 6 12:05 all_chapters.txt.bz2
I was going to say that SWF actually is an open standard, but I can't seem to find the licensing info for it anywhere. I seem to recollect that they opened the format, but I might be wrong. Anyway, it is well documented at OpenSWF.org.
There are several packages that produce SWF output, and if none of them are as good as Macromedia's products, they probably will be eventually.
I agree totally with your other points. I think well thought out web standards (and HTML is remarkably well thought through) are important for web democracy.
I've had one or two (I'm not sure about the second one yet, it could be something else in the system) drive failures at home. This is out of a great many hard drives I have owned. Several more have failed after laying about somewhere and not being used for a couple of years, but I don't count those.
When I worked at a medium sized office (550 PC's) we would have roughly one drive failure a week, and a PC replacement cycle of 3 years (which would occasionally stretch to 4 years depending on the economic situation, but let's ignore that for now).
So, If my tired mind is not playing tricks on me, that means 30% of the drives failed within their first three years of operation. A home computer is generally not used as much (it's the spinning up and down that wears most on the drive), and often has better quality components(!) than the utter crap HP/Compaq put in their machines these days.
The interesting thing is that significantly more of these drives failed in their first year than in their third.
Actually, the one failure a week number is probably slightly exagerated, the real value is likely closer to 20% failed within three years.
I find it very interesting to read all these people explaining how the Gimp sucks and is counter-intuitive. I'll agree that the Gimp is not a direct competitor to Photoshop, which is a much more advanced package. I personally find it very good at what it does do, however. I used to work in tech support for non-technical people. After a reform in the way web publishing was done in that organisation, many of these needed to be able to do image editing. I divided these people into two groups: basic users and not-quite basic users. The basic users I fitted with Macromedia Fireworks which is great for semi-automated web optimization.
For the not-quite basic users I tried Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro (these were the two packages previously in use within the organization). Paint Shop Pro didn't cut it for various reasons, which left me with Photoshop.
It soon became apparent that people had some trouble learning the Photoshop interface, and of course they only used a tiny fraction of the available functions. Also, with large images (high resolution scans in the 100-200 MB range) Photoshop hogged memory, and with WinXP's crappy memory management (and with most machines having 256-512 MB of RAM) it was inhibitingly slow (Note that the only thing done to these images was cropping and massive down-scaling for web use).
I tried Gimp on a couple of users with very positive results. Around half of the users preferrred the Gimp interface, and it ran much better with large images (contrary to the experience depicted in the article).
Personally, I find the Gimp and Photoshop about equivalent for the types of things I do, but I am getting much more familiar with the Gimp (because freedom matters to me), so I prefer it.
I use the Gimp on Linux, where it runs perfectly, but I did notice some stability problems in Windows. It seems from the article that the Mac port is poorly adapted to the Mac environment and has serious performance issues. Does everyone here complaining about the Gimp run MacOS? If not, what exactly is it everyone finds so troublesome with the Gimp interface?
(Note: My professional Gimp usage was about a year ago, so we were using Gimp 1.2, which I still use, as the detachable menus in 1.3/2.0 don't play well with OpenBox)
You do not need a disclaimer. If no explicit permission is granted to use the images, people have no such permission. As an extra heads-up, the kde-look pages are all marked with "All rights reserved," which is pretty much the opposite of an explicit permission to use the images as you see fit.
Hey, I am a free software zealot, of course I'll hack at your css! I am glad you appreciate it.:)
Perhaps something like this? I set a different colour for the header border as well here, which you may or may not like. Also, for this to work, set the footer <td> to class=footer and remove the colour and font info (including the <i>)
I also realized that my changes make the page considerably darker. You might feel this makes the page slightly more gloomy and sinister, although I personally do not.
I did a quick redesign of your web site colour scheme by narrowing the hue separation and decreasing the contrast somewhat. I posted the modified stylesheet here if you're interested.
I tried to make your site less startling and easier to read, while retaining the overall feel.
You're quite right, although modern interpolation techniques are very good. This is why I would want as much as 1Mp for web images, which gives me plenty of headroom when I scale them down to web sizes (often scaling down 4 times, or to 1/16 Mp)
Slashdot Mirror
"The definition"?
. 1
What definition? I'll refer you to a few sources that agree with my definition.
The Carnegie Mellon Robotics Institute uses the definition offered by the Robot Institute of America:
"A reprogrammable, multifunctional manipulator designed to move material, parts, tools, or specialized devices through various programmed motions for the performance of a variety of tasks"
http://www.frc.ri.cmu.edu/robotics-faq/1.html#1
The Concise Oxford English Dictionary says:
"Robot n. a machine capable of carrying out a complex series of actions automatically, especially one programmable by a computer"
I know of several more institutions that agree with me, but can't be bothered finding references right now. What is your source?
Although I guess you can call the[m] robots [...]
Actually not. The general definition of the term "robot" is that it is autonomous. This needn't necessarily mean AI, a pre-programmed robotic arm is a robot (used in manufacturing plants). A human-controlled unit is not a robot, though.
The term is however often used popularly as "mechanical man", but that is not what it "really" means. (Of course, as long as both participants in a conversation agree, any definition is correct)
It is a large problem, causing many deaths and enormous damages each year. The coast guard cannot be everywhere, but the pirates can easily be anywhere. Piracy is a very violent crime, and often entire crews are killed and ships sunk after plunder. Not pretty at all.
HP have never built their own printers, they're rebadged Canon parts. You're right though, the laserjet 4's and 5's are so much more reliable than the 4100's (or *shudder* the 4050's) or 5100's that it's hard to believe it's the same brand.
I've worked with monochrome HP laser printers since laserjet II, and I would say they peaked around LJ4 or LJ5. The new ones are pretty much crap in comparison.
1. A completely version-controlled file system, so I can backtrace through changes to files and so forth, like a continuous backup.
/usr/bin without upsetting other users /usr/bin.
2. Reiser4 style file/directory interchangability
3. A Plan 9:ish (i think, I might be confusing things) system of unifying the namespace, where users can install stuff into their
Give me these three things in a filesystem and I'll be a happy camper for quite a while, until I come up with new cool features.
That's pretty much what I said (or meant, anyway ;). I don't use active screen borders for workspace switching, so that one isn't a problem for me. This is the nice part about choice of software, everyone can set it up just the way we like it.
(On terminology: Some window managers call them virtual desktops, some workspaces and there are probably other names as well)
Openbox 2 (as mentioned in my earlier post ;)
I share your dislike for Xinerama. Have you looked at running with multiple screens? Using a dual-head aware window manager (I use Openbox 2.3, they dropped multihead in favour of Xinerama in 3.x) you get pretty much what you describe, except that you switch screen by moving your mouse.
:0.0 and :0.1. This is in my opinion much better than Xinerama.
The screens are still separate in the sense that windows are never split between them, and can have individual multiple virtual desktops and so forth.
Things like clipboard and xauth work perfectly across the screens, and the individual screens can still be adressed as
While I am not the young man from whom you demanded an explanation, I can offer you som insight on why I do not use Xinerama for my dual-head setup.
I use a standard (non-Xinerama) dual-head config and a dual-head aware window manager (Openbox 2.x). This setup has but one serious flaw, and that is the inability to move windows between the screens. What it offers over xinerama is that it does not require xinerama-aware applications. Popup notifications never show up in between the monitors, for example. The big thing I dislike with Xinerama is that windows can be split over the two screens. I have never wanted to do this. I much prefer the ability to slide parts of windows out of view.
Another big nuisance with Xinerama is that I have yet to find a Xinerama-aware window manager that I like.
My vision of the perfect multihead desktop (which coincides with my vision of a reasonable X architecture) is pretty much X with something like xmove (which I have yet to get working on XFree86/Linux). The window manager could then be told to throw a window to the other screen when dragged to the edge, just as with virtual desktops. The bonus of using an X proxy, or preferably separating the display and server parts of the X server, is that you can move windows between computers, keep gui apps running on servers when the workstation is turned off, restart your X server (e.g. to upgrade drivers) without losing your apps, and so forth.
Interesting. Who do you think a terrorist will shoot first, the guy with the M16 or the unarmed guy?
During a dark couple of years of my career, I edited largish reports written in Word. I would get the different chapters from different people and merge them into one document. The easiest way to do this was to export them all to plain text and then go through the entire report (which would generally be 300-500 pages) and mark it up with the correct styles. Also, you had to tread very cautiously with these documents. Once you go over a couple of hundred pages, Word starts crashing randomly.
I also worked tech support at the same place, and the track changes feature in Office (specifically in Excel, don't know about Word), while neatly integrated, routinely thrashed large documents when moved between different versions of Office. It would also crash randomly quite frequently, often choking on it's own files.
Before that I worked at a place using FrameMaker on Solaris, and now I use LaTeX on Linux, and both these solutions work, which puts them way ahead of Word.
How that application suite has risen to it's current position is beyond me. I could write a long, boring essay on why Word is harmful, but the process would likely aggravate me tremendously. Oh, and to head off the "That was then, it's really quite good now" comments: I went through Office 97, 2000, and XP, and no, it isn't getting measurably better.
When I worked as a Windows tech support, I at two separate occasions came across documents that would crash Word regardless of formatting. Loading the documents worked fine, but at the first strike of a key to edit them, Word would crash. This also happened if the entire text was cut and pasted (without formatting) into a new document. I tried pasting it into Vim and then into Word, to be sure there was no formatting left, but it still crashed. I tried turning off all spell-check, autoformatting and such features that might look at the text, and it still crashed. In the end, I could offer the two choice of either writing the thing in WordPad, or rewriting it from scratch.
After working with Word for a few years, both as a user (editing large documents, making them print-ready) and as tech support, I thouroughly hate it.
pHD? Is that an acidic degree? Perhaps you mean PhD, or Philosophiae Doctor?
Oh, how I love being pedantic.
Sneaky one, that. Unfortunately, I think you were right, free browsers aren't an incendiary topic. Also, I don't think you were subtle enough, you were so obviously trying to provoke that nobody fell for it. You suck at flame warfare. Try adherring to your own principles next time.
This puts you in the minority. I have worked with readability (mostly related to layout, contrast and fonts), and to the overwhelming majority of us all caps text is significantly more difficult to read than mixed or even lower case text.
And if your compression algorithm compresses all caps text twice as much as mixed case, your compression algorithm sucks. Text is not random characters, it contains a lot of compressable repetitions, the very small portion of these that are affected by mixed case is negligible.
Consider this example:
I was going to say that SWF actually is an open standard, but I can't seem to find the licensing info for it anywhere. I seem to recollect that they opened the format, but I might be wrong. Anyway, it is well documented at OpenSWF.org.
There are several packages that produce SWF output, and if none of them are as good as Macromedia's products, they probably will be eventually.
I agree totally with your other points. I think well thought out web standards (and HTML is remarkably well thought through) are important for web democracy.
You mean something like this?
BrookGPU
I've had one or two (I'm not sure about the second one yet, it could be something else in the system) drive failures at home. This is out of a great many hard drives I have owned. Several more have failed after laying about somewhere and not being used for a couple of years, but I don't count those.
When I worked at a medium sized office (550 PC's) we would have roughly one drive failure a week, and a PC replacement cycle of 3 years (which would occasionally stretch to 4 years depending on the economic situation, but let's ignore that for now).
So, If my tired mind is not playing tricks on me, that means 30% of the drives failed within their first three years of operation. A home computer is generally not used as much (it's the spinning up and down that wears most on the drive), and often has better quality components(!) than the utter crap HP/Compaq put in their machines these days.
The interesting thing is that significantly more of these drives failed in their first year than in their third.
Actually, the one failure a week number is probably slightly exagerated, the real value is likely closer to 20% failed within three years.
I find it very interesting to read all these people explaining how the Gimp sucks and is counter-intuitive. I'll agree that the Gimp is not a direct competitor to Photoshop, which is a much more advanced package. I personally find it very good at what it does do, however. I used to work in tech support for non-technical people. After a reform in the way web publishing was done in that organisation, many of these needed to be able to do image editing. I divided these people into two groups: basic users and not-quite basic users. The basic users I fitted with Macromedia Fireworks which is great for semi-automated web optimization.
For the not-quite basic users I tried Photoshop and Paint Shop Pro (these were the two packages previously in use within the organization). Paint Shop Pro didn't cut it for various reasons, which left me with Photoshop.
It soon became apparent that people had some trouble learning the Photoshop interface, and of course they only used a tiny fraction of the available functions. Also, with large images (high resolution scans in the 100-200 MB range) Photoshop hogged memory, and with WinXP's crappy memory management (and with most machines having 256-512 MB of RAM) it was inhibitingly slow (Note that the only thing done to these images was cropping and massive down-scaling for web use).
I tried Gimp on a couple of users with very positive results. Around half of the users preferrred the Gimp interface, and it ran much better with large images (contrary to the experience depicted in the article).
Personally, I find the Gimp and Photoshop about equivalent for the types of things I do, but I am getting much more familiar with the Gimp (because freedom matters to me), so I prefer it.
I use the Gimp on Linux, where it runs perfectly, but I did notice some stability problems in Windows. It seems from the article that the Mac port is poorly adapted to the Mac environment and has serious performance issues. Does everyone here complaining about the Gimp run MacOS? If not, what exactly is it everyone finds so troublesome with the Gimp interface?
(Note: My professional Gimp usage was about a year ago, so we were using Gimp 1.2, which I still use, as the detachable menus in 1.3/2.0 don't play well with OpenBox)
You do not need a disclaimer. If no explicit permission is granted to use the images, people have no such permission. As an extra heads-up, the kde-look pages are all marked with "All rights reserved," which is pretty much the opposite of an explicit permission to use the images as you see fit.
Oh, and you should really refurbish your html. At the very least you should add a . As it stands now the page comes up completely blank in Netscape 4.
If you're interested in getting your html up to speed with the published standards, I can warmly recommend html tidy.
Hey, I am a free software zealot, of course I'll hack at your css! I am glad you appreciate it. :)
Perhaps something like this? I set a different colour for the header border as well here, which you may or may not like. Also, for this to work, set the footer <td> to class=footer and remove the colour and font info (including the <i>)
I also realized that my changes make the page considerably darker. You might feel this makes the page slightly more gloomy and sinister, although I personally do not.
I did a quick redesign of your web site colour scheme by narrowing the hue separation and decreasing the contrast somewhat. I posted the modified stylesheet here if you're interested.
I tried to make your site less startling and easier to read, while retaining the overall feel.
Cheers,
Odie
You're quite right, although modern interpolation techniques are very good. This is why I would want as much as 1Mp for web images, which gives me plenty of headroom when I scale them down to web sizes (often scaling down 4 times, or to 1/16 Mp)