And the best part of it is...the control key is in the proper place! That is to say, it's directly left of the A key, on the home row.
Just like the Happy Hacker or Sun keyboards. Amen.
One of Jamie's trivia questions is the origin of the HYPE tag. I remember the tag well, it was an easter egg that played a sound when it was used (only in certain versions of Mosaic/Netscape), however, I haven't a clue as to when or why it was implemented.
Does anyone know? Google reveals nothing on the subject.
Chances are if you're posting here, you're not Firefox's default user base.
Their default settings are for simplification, not to please every person who touches it. That's why there are so many options & plugins available, because no two people browse similarly.
The summary currently reads, "And whether Mr. Obama becomes president, or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain do, these new tools have , by the People and for the People communicates and operates."
It should be (as stated in TFA), "And whether Mr. Obama becomes president, or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain do, these new tools have the potential to transform how a government of the People, by the People and for the People communicates and operates."
Nowhere in "Sicko" did Moore imply that Cuba was a utopian society. If anything, the exterior shots in Cuba should show how their clinging to communism (not to mention the US embargoes) have caused extreme poverty among most Cubans.
With that said, it's hard to deny that Cuba is doing some things right in regards to their healthcare system. For example, according to both the UN & the CIA world factbook, Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States does. (See list of countries by infant mortality rate on Wikipedia for a full list.) That, despite the extreme discrepancies in GDP, per capita income, etc., between the two countries.
Looking at the east coast of the US of the linked picture, it appears as though every single underseas line is going into New York City, with only a few also extending to Miami. Why is the east coast so non-redundant? Especially given NYC's recent history of being a prime target for terrorism, it seems as though you'd want lines also going into other major urban centers on the east coast, such as Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.
Does anyone know of a reason it's all being piped into New York?
His main complaint in #6 is that he doesn't like cars that beep at him to buckle his seatbelt and he doesn't like cars that auto-lock the doors. Personally, I don't mind these features, but I can understand why someone might find them annoying. As for all the other electronics going in cars nowadays, I don't mind them. If you've ever driven in a BMW, you'd probably fall in love with all of the electronics.
Not lately you won't. One of the more recent changes in BMWs & Mini Coopers are seat pressure sensors in the passenger seat. Jamie was mentioning these when he talked about buckling in a box.
My best mate has a 2007 Mini Cooper. If it detects any weight on the passenger seat, it enables the passenger airbag & puts up a seat belt warning on the dash, and produces a chime. Seems reasonable, until you realise that it's set so sensitively that even putting a slightly heavy backpack on the seat will make the belt chime go off. My laptop bag sets it off, and I don't know any person that weighs as little as my laptop (if you had a small child, they should be in a car seat in the back). A bag with a few heavy books sets it off too, or a small dog, or any other cargo.
And the most annoying part about it is that they've routed the chimes through the stereo system, so it's not something you can easily drown out or ignore with a good song. Instead it plays the chime over your music. You can imagine how annoying it is to set your bag down on the seat next to you, turn on a good song, and have it interrupted by "DING DING DING! DING DING DING!", literally every 3 seconds, until you either move said parcel to the floor (not always an option) or buckle it in.
Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear is always complaining about the computer systems in new BMWs and how they're simply too complex and do too much thinking for you, and I agree. We've gone too far into the obtrusive tech zone, and we need to take a few steps back.
And how nice of Apple to give out the update for free, instead of charging $20 to unlock the new features on an iPod Touch. You have to buy that even if all you want to do is rearrange your icons on the home screen or use "Webclips" in Safari, an application already included on the Touch.
The ridiculous thing is that the 1.1.3 update for the Touch includes all of the applications & updates to the iPod, but they just sit on the Touch, wasting space until you give Apple $20. And then they send you an 8 kilobyte PLIST file that unlocks them. So even if a Touch user doesn't buy them, the apps are sitting on the drive, wasting space on that teeny flash drive. Awesome.
This just gives Touch users further excuse to Jailbreak their iPods.
As for the iPhone, the previous firmware bricked some iPhones that weren't even hacked. They probably should have released a revised firmware a lot sooner than they did.
I honestly believe that the US would not be lagging so far behind in sciences if we finished converting fully to the metric system.
An acquaintance of mine is taking his first college-level physics class, and the professor stated on the first day that since this was an exact science, there would be no use of US customary measure, only SI units. More than half of the class was simply unaware of what these non-customary units were, and as a result, they spent a week's worth of courses going over grams, litres, metres/kilometres, etc., all the while the students bemoaned having to learn a "foreign" unit of measure. I can even recall something similar happening in my high school physics classes. What a waste!
If we're going to teach our kids to be proficient in math & science, the least we can do is give them a Base-10 system of measure with no fractions and simple conversions.
At my office, for instance, we're all big Firefox users. Everyone has it installed, everyone uses it by default. However, we're also mostly a Microsoft shop, which means Outlook/Exchange for email, calendars, etc., SQL Server as the database, Sharepoint, MS Project, etc.
All of those pieces of software have web components, and for each and every one of them, they don't work well, or at all, in Firefox.
Outlook Web Access (OWA) forces any non-IE browser to their light version, with the following message:
"The Light client provides fewer features and is sometimes faster. Use the Light client if you are on a slow connection or using a computer with unusually strict browser security settings. If you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer 6 or later, you can only use the Light client."
As a result, features that people expect in OWA in IE aren't there in Firefox, which means people open up IE to check their email on the road.
For our internal reporting, we use Microsoft Reporting Services. The reports will not render at all in Firefox, forcing people to use IE. Due to some intentionally bad code in the HTML output, the reports appear completely collapsed in Firefox, but look perfect in IE.
For the longest time, code samples on MSDN were coded in such a way that they appeared as 5-pt text in Firefox, while being 10pt in IE; you couldn't even read the samples in FF without increasing the text size in the browser to ridiculous proportions. (In fairness, I believe that's corrected now.)
The list goes on and on. I was thrilled years ago when Mozilla and then Phoenix/Firebird got NTLM support, meaning I could view my local intranet in a non-IE browser. But as long as Microsoft continues to write web software that barely works or simply doesn't function at all in Firefox, people will continue to use IE for those applications. And the more you're forced to open IE for instance A or instance B, the more likely you are to keep the browser open at all times, and just use it for everything. There's no reason for the above applications to not offer identical functionality in both browsers (and Safari & Opera too), Microsoft just refuses to do the right thing and make their products accessible for people not running IE or Windows.
The British didn't think it was better before the French did it, otherwise they (as a whole) would have adopted it first.
And apparently they still don't, given the sad state of British metrication. Petrol in litres, but fuel economy in miles per (imperial) gallon. Fruit & veg in kilograms, but weight is given in stone. And it's illegal to have road signs in metric distances. Utterly insane. But lack of adoption doesn't mean a system is automatically inferior.
And my point was that it's not just the French, nor was it originally the French, who thought that a base-10 system of measure would be useful. A British man, over a century before the French proposed it, came up with a system of measure so close to the modern metric system that it's 99% accurate by today's standards. So it should come as no surprise that people the world over find it a simpler system.
Also you mean drive capacity, not drive speed. And don't blame the metric system for discrepancies between base 10 and base 2 being used to calculate drive size, that's really reaching.
Typo on my part, but you should get your facts straight, the metric system was not invented by the French, but rather by the British. "John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, first published his ideas for a metric measure in 1668 - 120 years before the French adopted the metric system."
And metric is far, far superior. Again, what's an ounce? Avoirdupois ounce? Troy ounce? Which fluid ounce, US or UK? An Imperial fluid ounce is 1/20th of an Imperial pint, whereas a US fluid ounce is 1/16th of a US pint. And in the US, you'd better know if that pint is wet or dry! It's a difference of 78 mL!
That's not at all intuitive! The rest of the world has no problem with using base 10 measure, but for some reason people insist on clinging to their old measures. If you're going to use those, you'd better go all the way and use stones, drams, furlongs, chains, rods, etc. Quick, how many gills are in a barrel?! US gills or UK gills?;)
No.... that would be the US. We'll cling on to our beloved imperial system until the rapture comes.
The irony there being that the US customary system is quite different from the UK imperial system. Our gallons and ounces are different size, and then there's the whole issue of long & short tons vs hundredweights, both being inferior to a tonne, naturally.
And that annoying phrase of "a pint's a pint the world around" isn't even close either. What pint? An imperial pint (568 mL)? A US dry pint (551 mL)? Wet pint (473 mL)? How about an Australian pint (570 mL)? And of course in metric countries, the equivalent of a pint is either rounded down to 500 mL or up to 600 mL.
It's these kind of ambiguities that make clinging to these systems just infuriating.
I've been told that cellphones do not feed the speaker's voice back into the earpiece in the same way that landline phones do, so you wind up speaking more loudly on a cellphone than you would on a standard land line. I'm not sure how true that tidbit is, but I think many of us have noticed that people on mobile phones are generally not very quiet. If I'm in a restaurant, and someone is on their mobile, you can immediately tell due to the fact that their voice is booming across the room.
As far as I'm concerned, the mobile user speaking a "normal volume", as you suggest, is either a myth or an extremely rare occurrence. And for every one of those courteous users, there are a few thousand polar opposites who not only have no qualms about taking a call and speaking loudly, but also become extremely aggressive and possibly violent if you happen to ask them to tone it down.
Agreed. After reading several glowing reviews, playing TF2 at a mate's flat, and then hearing Portals described as absolutely flawless, I was this close to buying the Orange Box.
Not any longer.
If you're reading this, Valve, you just lost yet another sale.
Interesting concept, except that with the way it moves, it can't really walk in a straight line.
Because it swings one leg outward from the rear to the front, it's always going to essentially be side-stepping a width that's in direct proportion to the length of its legs. If it starts in a position like <|, with two legs up front and one in the rear, and then swings the rear leg outward to position |>, the next step has to be to the left or right sides. It could every other stuff in reverse and zig-zag for the net effect of a straight line, but it wouldn't work well for very narrow spaces unless it could dynamically adjust the height of its legs.
Nevertheless, I'd love to see one run at some point!
Why would anyone have to buy new wrenches? Cars have been metric for decades, even domestic makers use the metric system for their cars. Your fuel tanks are sized in litres, even if your owners manuals have the size in gallons.
Products in the US often suffer from 'hidden metrication'. Altoids are sold in 50 gram tins, but then they are labelled as "1.76 ounces". Body wash is often in 700 or 900 mL sizes, but labelled as 23.7 or 30 ounces.
Buy Listerine lately? It's only available in 250 mL, 500 mL or 1 L sizes. What about a bottle of soda-pop? 2 L. Dental floss? 50 M. A light bulb? 60 watts. Start a car? The engine's displacement is in litres as well.
Metrication is already all over in the US, you just don't realise it. Oh, and your inch was redefined as precisely 25.4 mm, so you're already metric there too.:D
Candidates have staked out early positions on topics dear to the tech industry, including increasing federal spending on research and development, allowing more highly educated foreign workers into the country, widening the availability of high-speed Internet service to create new markets for hardware and online services, and improving the state of U.S. math and science education.
Does this translate into any of these candidates supporting the finalisation of the US going metric?
(Before this question spawns any angry posts, keep in mind that metrication is inevitable, the US is already too far metricated to go back, and with just a little bit of leadership, the US could easily finish it's conversion.)
as making it more convenient for those of us who want to watch 'House MD' on Tuesday night.
If our collective priorities are so screwed up that we think watching an episode of Yet-Another-Television-Medical-Drama (YATMD) is more important than voting, then we're all in serious trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
And the best part of it is...the control key is in the proper place! That is to say, it's directly left of the A key, on the home row. Just like the Happy Hacker or Sun keyboards. Amen.
Since when do modern engineers use inches & Fahrenheit?
All that high-fructose corn syrup is terrible for you anyway.
HP did you a favour, drink water instead!
One of Jamie's trivia questions is the origin of the HYPE tag. I remember the tag well, it was an easter egg that played a sound when it was used (only in certain versions of Mosaic/Netscape), however, I haven't a clue as to when or why it was implemented.
Does anyone know? Google reveals nothing on the subject.
Chances are if you're posting here, you're not Firefox's default user base. Their default settings are for simplification, not to please every person who touches it. That's why there are so many options & plugins available, because no two people browse similarly.
The summary currently reads, "And whether Mr. Obama becomes president, or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain do, these new tools have , by the People and for the People communicates and operates."
It should be (as stated in TFA), "And whether Mr. Obama becomes president, or Mrs. Clinton or Mr. McCain do, these new tools have the potential to transform how a government of the People, by the People and for the People communicates and operates."
Kind of a big difference there.
Nowhere in "Sicko" did Moore imply that Cuba was a utopian society. If anything, the exterior shots in Cuba should show how their clinging to communism (not to mention the US embargoes) have caused extreme poverty among most Cubans.
With that said, it's hard to deny that Cuba is doing some things right in regards to their healthcare system. For example, according to both the UN & the CIA world factbook, Cuba has a lower infant mortality rate than the United States does. (See list of countries by infant mortality rate on Wikipedia for a full list.) That, despite the extreme discrepancies in GDP, per capita income, etc., between the two countries.
Public schools are "welfare-state bullshit" now?
Thank you, great post!
Looking at the east coast of the US of the linked picture, it appears as though every single underseas line is going into New York City, with only a few also extending to Miami. Why is the east coast so non-redundant? Especially given NYC's recent history of being a prime target for terrorism, it seems as though you'd want lines also going into other major urban centers on the east coast, such as Washington DC, Boston, Philadelphia, etc.
Does anyone know of a reason it's all being piped into New York?
His main complaint in #6 is that he doesn't like cars that beep at him to buckle his seatbelt and he doesn't like cars that auto-lock the doors. Personally, I don't mind these features, but I can understand why someone might find them annoying. As for all the other electronics going in cars nowadays, I don't mind them. If you've ever driven in a BMW, you'd probably fall in love with all of the electronics.
Not lately you won't. One of the more recent changes in BMWs & Mini Coopers are seat pressure sensors in the passenger seat. Jamie was mentioning these when he talked about buckling in a box.
My best mate has a 2007 Mini Cooper. If it detects any weight on the passenger seat, it enables the passenger airbag & puts up a seat belt warning on the dash, and produces a chime. Seems reasonable, until you realise that it's set so sensitively that even putting a slightly heavy backpack on the seat will make the belt chime go off. My laptop bag sets it off, and I don't know any person that weighs as little as my laptop (if you had a small child, they should be in a car seat in the back). A bag with a few heavy books sets it off too, or a small dog, or any other cargo.
And the most annoying part about it is that they've routed the chimes through the stereo system, so it's not something you can easily drown out or ignore with a good song. Instead it plays the chime over your music. You can imagine how annoying it is to set your bag down on the seat next to you, turn on a good song, and have it interrupted by "DING DING DING! DING DING DING!", literally every 3 seconds, until you either move said parcel to the floor (not always an option) or buckle it in.
Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear is always complaining about the computer systems in new BMWs and how they're simply too complex and do too much thinking for you, and I agree. We've gone too far into the obtrusive tech zone, and we need to take a few steps back.
And how nice of Apple to give out the update for free, instead of charging $20 to unlock the new features on an iPod Touch. You have to buy that even if all you want to do is rearrange your icons on the home screen or use "Webclips" in Safari, an application already included on the Touch.
The ridiculous thing is that the 1.1.3 update for the Touch includes all of the applications & updates to the iPod, but they just sit on the Touch, wasting space until you give Apple $20. And then they send you an 8 kilobyte PLIST file that unlocks them. So even if a Touch user doesn't buy them, the apps are sitting on the drive, wasting space on that teeny flash drive. Awesome.
This just gives Touch users further excuse to Jailbreak their iPods.
As for the iPhone, the previous firmware bricked some iPhones that weren't even hacked. They probably should have released a revised firmware a lot sooner than they did.
However, I assure you I am not.
I honestly believe that the US would not be lagging so far behind in sciences if we finished converting fully to the metric system.
An acquaintance of mine is taking his first college-level physics class, and the professor stated on the first day that since this was an exact science, there would be no use of US customary measure, only SI units. More than half of the class was simply unaware of what these non-customary units were, and as a result, they spent a week's worth of courses going over grams, litres, metres/kilometres, etc., all the while the students bemoaned having to learn a "foreign" unit of measure. I can even recall something similar happening in my high school physics classes. What a waste!
If we're going to teach our kids to be proficient in math & science, the least we can do is give them a Base-10 system of measure with no fractions and simple conversions.
At my office, for instance, we're all big Firefox users. Everyone has it installed, everyone uses it by default. However, we're also mostly a Microsoft shop, which means Outlook/Exchange for email, calendars, etc., SQL Server as the database, Sharepoint, MS Project, etc.
All of those pieces of software have web components, and for each and every one of them, they don't work well, or at all, in Firefox.
Outlook Web Access (OWA) forces any non-IE browser to their light version, with the following message: "The Light client provides fewer features and is sometimes faster. Use the Light client if you are on a slow connection or using a computer with unusually strict browser security settings. If you are using a browser other than Internet Explorer 6 or later, you can only use the Light client."
As a result, features that people expect in OWA in IE aren't there in Firefox, which means people open up IE to check their email on the road.
For our internal reporting, we use Microsoft Reporting Services. The reports will not render at all in Firefox, forcing people to use IE. Due to some intentionally bad code in the HTML output, the reports appear completely collapsed in Firefox, but look perfect in IE.
For the longest time, code samples on MSDN were coded in such a way that they appeared as 5-pt text in Firefox, while being 10pt in IE; you couldn't even read the samples in FF without increasing the text size in the browser to ridiculous proportions. (In fairness, I believe that's corrected now.)
The list goes on and on. I was thrilled years ago when Mozilla and then Phoenix/Firebird got NTLM support, meaning I could view my local intranet in a non-IE browser. But as long as Microsoft continues to write web software that barely works or simply doesn't function at all in Firefox, people will continue to use IE for those applications. And the more you're forced to open IE for instance A or instance B, the more likely you are to keep the browser open at all times, and just use it for everything. There's no reason for the above applications to not offer identical functionality in both browsers (and Safari & Opera too), Microsoft just refuses to do the right thing and make their products accessible for people not running IE or Windows.
The British didn't think it was better before the French did it, otherwise they (as a whole) would have adopted it first.
And apparently they still don't, given the sad state of British metrication. Petrol in litres, but fuel economy in miles per (imperial) gallon. Fruit & veg in kilograms, but weight is given in stone. And it's illegal to have road signs in metric distances. Utterly insane. But lack of adoption doesn't mean a system is automatically inferior.
And my point was that it's not just the French, nor was it originally the French, who thought that a base-10 system of measure would be useful. A British man, over a century before the French proposed it, came up with a system of measure so close to the modern metric system that it's 99% accurate by today's standards. So it should come as no surprise that people the world over find it a simpler system.
Also you mean drive capacity, not drive speed. And don't blame the metric system for discrepancies between base 10 and base 2 being used to calculate drive size, that's really reaching.
Are you sure you didn't mean a kilo of feathers on the moon instead of feathers vs moon rocks?
Typo on my part, but you should get your facts straight, the metric system was not invented by the French, but rather by the British. "John Wilkins, founder of the Royal Society, first published his ideas for a metric measure in 1668 - 120 years before the French adopted the metric system."
;)
And metric is far, far superior. Again, what's an ounce? Avoirdupois ounce? Troy ounce? Which fluid ounce, US or UK? An Imperial fluid ounce is 1/20th of an Imperial pint, whereas a US fluid ounce is 1/16th of a US pint. And in the US, you'd better know if that pint is wet or dry! It's a difference of 78 mL!
That's not at all intuitive! The rest of the world has no problem with using base 10 measure, but for some reason people insist on clinging to their old measures. If you're going to use those, you'd better go all the way and use stones, drams, furlongs, chains, rods, etc. Quick, how many gills are in a barrel?! US gills or UK gills?
The irony there being that the US customary system is quite different from the UK imperial system. Our gallons and ounces are different size, and then there's the whole issue of long & short tons vs hundredweights, both being inferior to a tonne, naturally.
And that annoying phrase of "a pint's a pint the world around" isn't even close either. What pint? An imperial pint (568 mL)? A US dry pint (551 mL)? Wet pint (473 mL)? How about an Australian pint (570 mL)? And of course in metric countries, the equivalent of a pint is either rounded down to 500 mL or up to 600 mL.
It's these kind of ambiguities that make clinging to these systems just infuriating.
I've been told that cellphones do not feed the speaker's voice back into the earpiece in the same way that landline phones do, so you wind up speaking more loudly on a cellphone than you would on a standard land line. I'm not sure how true that tidbit is, but I think many of us have noticed that people on mobile phones are generally not very quiet. If I'm in a restaurant, and someone is on their mobile, you can immediately tell due to the fact that their voice is booming across the room.
As far as I'm concerned, the mobile user speaking a "normal volume", as you suggest, is either a myth or an extremely rare occurrence. And for every one of those courteous users, there are a few thousand polar opposites who not only have no qualms about taking a call and speaking loudly, but also become extremely aggressive and possibly violent if you happen to ask them to tone it down.
Agreed. After reading several glowing reviews, playing TF2 at a mate's flat, and then hearing Portals described as absolutely flawless, I was this close to buying the Orange Box.
Not any longer.
If you're reading this, Valve, you just lost yet another sale.
That should read, "It could take every other step", not "It could every other stuff". Whoops. :)
Interesting concept, except that with the way it moves, it can't really walk in a straight line.
Because it swings one leg outward from the rear to the front, it's always going to essentially be side-stepping a width that's in direct proportion to the length of its legs. If it starts in a position like <|, with two legs up front and one in the rear, and then swings the rear leg outward to position |>, the next step has to be to the left or right sides. It could every other stuff in reverse and zig-zag for the net effect of a straight line, but it wouldn't work well for very narrow spaces unless it could dynamically adjust the height of its legs.
Nevertheless, I'd love to see one run at some point!
Why would anyone have to buy new wrenches? Cars have been metric for decades, even domestic makers use the metric system for their cars. Your fuel tanks are sized in litres, even if your owners manuals have the size in gallons.
:D
Products in the US often suffer from 'hidden metrication'. Altoids are sold in 50 gram tins, but then they are labelled as "1.76 ounces". Body wash is often in 700 or 900 mL sizes, but labelled as 23.7 or 30 ounces.
Buy Listerine lately? It's only available in 250 mL, 500 mL or 1 L sizes. What about a bottle of soda-pop? 2 L. Dental floss? 50 M. A light bulb? 60 watts. Start a car? The engine's displacement is in litres as well.
Metrication is already all over in the US, you just don't realise it. Oh, and your inch was redefined as precisely 25.4 mm, so you're already metric there too.
Does this translate into any of these candidates supporting the finalisation of the US going metric?
(Before this question spawns any angry posts, keep in mind that metrication is inevitable, the US is already too far metricated to go back, and with just a little bit of leadership, the US could easily finish it's conversion.)
as making it more convenient for those of us who want to watch 'House MD' on Tuesday night.
If our collective priorities are so screwed up that we think watching an episode of Yet-Another-Television-Medical-Drama (YATMD) is more important than voting, then we're all in serious trouble.