OS X: I hadn't known; I haven't used it since 10.4.
App Store: yes, pretty much. Maybe it's 5 points out of 10,000 but it's still going to affect some people's decision making. Now, if/when someone's Mac randomly flakes out after installing "dangerous" software, I'd be blamed for it, which will discourage me from requiring it.
ubuntu: the alternative I meant to refer to was the repositories (synaptic's been around since 2004) rather than the ubuntu software center.
Once the norm for app installation is the App Store (and perhaps Apple starts putting up "helpful" warning dialogs about "untrusted software") then, yes, for the typical Stat 101 or Stats for Poets student who's never installed any non-commercial software in her life it will be a somewhat mysterious step and 20% of the class will want me to hold their hand.
If so, they're going to need to fork a Mac OS X Scientist Edition and attend to all the confusion that would entail. I know a lot of good professors and post-docs who use Mac as a "friendly unix", and recommend it to their students for that reason. Apple has actively courted this market, and it'd be outright stupid to risk it now. Not that I'd be shocked, but I'd be fairly surprised and it'd be a really dumb move.
I don't particularly like what they're doing now, since it makes installing free software (like R) from a disk image a "mysterious" thing instead of a commonplace thing, which makes using it in introductory classes more of a burden. Nonetheless it's tolerable. I really hope they don't extrapolate as you're suggesting; as a linux user it's currently slightly easier for me to collaborate with Mac users than Windows users.
Then you would be wrong. I can't give you a rigorous definition but despite years of experience with OpenOffice.org, after just a few hours I found the Microsoft Ribbon to be better 95% of the time (here's a clue: what matters is for the usual stuff be easily accessible). This isn't to say the Ribbon is the only way, or even the best, but yeah it's a lot better than the 23 tabs, 3 rows deep, of dialog box that OO.o throws at me. I'm happy to give experimental and promising stuff several hours of learning curve-time, whoever the vendor.
As I said, for serious work I use LaTeX. For throwing a presentation together with the least effort, that doesn't look like dog shit, MS Office clobbers OO.o. That's what I mean by user friendliness. I'd love nothing more than for OO.o to do something totally out there and crazy. OO.o could be doing something really experimental; I know plenty of UI academics who'd love sticking it to Microsoft and working on a good project for token funding. But no, they're just bloating up Office 97.
I don't understand. Critics say that Microsoft Office both uses user-friendliness as lock-in and then alienates its users with the Ribbon. Which one is it?
I've used it plenty. I have memories of when OpenOffice was good, and this seems to be backed up by many people. On the other hand, maybe my standards just improved or, more likely, Microsoft and Apple have actually improved their stuff while OpenOffice is still bloating up their clone of Office 97 or whatever.
I just downloaded LibreOffice after replying to this post (note: when you have something that actually works, like Microsoft Office, you don't have to bother trying every "new" office suite in the hopes of getting something usable...). That said, I'm impressed by its speed, and it does seem cleaner than OpenOffice at least at first. Its dialog boxes are still a cluttered horrible mess, but whatever. OO seems to have money behind it; they'd be better off "wasting" some of it on a strong user-interface team rather than more developers. Seriously.
I'll try putting together a slideshow and spreadsheet with it. It's not as pretty or user-friendly as MS Office but, yeah, it's worth giving it a shot.
I write all my papers in emacs and LaTeX, so I don't care about the word processor.
Crossover Office is wine, except they take care of everything for you for a relatively small price. (It takes me less time to earn the $ to pay for cxoffice than to get wine working on even one tricky software.)
Since cxoffice is a legit contributor to wine I'm even supporting open source at the same time.
Thanks for the pointer about wine-tricks though, always good to know alternatives.
Microsoft has Mac products (whether they suck or not), but everyone I know runs the Windows versions in Parallels anyway. At any rate I doubt NYC has many Macs in use.
OpenOffice is, frankly, garbage. LibreOffice I haven't used, but is still in beta with only a few 100k downloads so I doubt it's been deployed in a large city.
Microsoft's Office software is actually pretty good and, yes, I would buy a closed-source linux version if they sold it. For the moment I use Crossover Office which, although somewhat erratic, is still a walk in the park compared to the dung-heap that is OpenOffice.
It would be better for the world if Microsoft just focussed on that and got out of the operating system-monopoly business. It might actually even be better for Microsoft in the long-term, and I suspect it's what's going to happen eventually.
Duke still has that half-parody/half-serious "macho" charm going for it. Playing Duke3d is like re-watching Commando; maybe you don't admit it, but it's a lot of cheesy fun. Also the real-time scripted deformable environments (like the earthquake level in mission 3 I think) still hold up on their own, let alone how impressive they were back then. It was a very impressive feature which they didn't trumpet as a breakthrough, but just quietly used to increase immersion.
Duke3d had heart; since they had reached basically the limits of the Doom-type rendering technology, they were free to focus on gameplay elements, and it paid off greatly.
Also, more broadly speaking I'm just saying that we should approach the patent granting system as an optimization problem. The length of a patent term should be computed (either administratively or through some cooked-up "free market" as seems to be rage these days) according to some desideratum.
How fine to make the categories, &c. are interesting questions. I'm saying that we should use economic principles to answer these things. As a statistician, I think we can estimate the optimal terms and reduce the overall uncertainty.
And, in an overall view, I think drastically shortening terms (through whatever mechanism) is the "path of least resistance" toward reform. No one will be terribly happy with it, but also not that many people will be appalled. Shorter terms will mean that patents can be granted faster (shorter term = less potential harm = faster review) as well as have potential harm of each patent minimized. The free software types will still be pissed that they exist at all, but I get the impression that the vast majority of the most valid complaints involve patents that cover things that now are common sense design principles.
Another problem that could have been circumvented if we limited patent terms to approximately "one generation of technology"/3. In this case it'd be about 12/3=4 years.
17 years is a holdover from the days of covered wagons and rail; where there were no parcel systems, no telecommunications, and no rapid prototyping plants. If we scaled 17 years by the growth in effective rate of fabrication and marketing, it'd probably be on the order a few months. Four years is shockingly conservative.
Snails have a great texture, kind of like mushrooms made out of meat.
The US price may or may not be worth it for one (in general it's not worth it for me), but I can see the appeal.
Also, snails are expensive in the US partly because we have (probably for petty political purposes) a strict import schedule for them and not much local demand or supply. In parts of Europe, snails (and similarly mussels) can be very cheap. In Belgium, mussels are a working class food. In Portugal, snails are a working class food. In France and US they are more like delicacies.
Tastes; marketing; and regional availability determine a lot and are not themselves independent. For another example, per unit of alcohol, Bud Ice is on par in price with Tanqueray Gin, and Bud Light Lime is comparable with Sierra Nevada, and yet which one is considered more "upscale"? Chicken wings used to be offal, good only for thickening soups; now they are extremely high mark-up (although somewhat "low class") bar food.
Oops. By "block," I was referring this whole time to "hide from news feed." I actually didn't know that you could really block someone entirely, which makes my post a bit ironic.:-/
So with this new info, yes, I tentatively agree with you. Blocking is a bit sociopathic.
interesting. In the real-world, I guess that I would agree. It's pretty damned cold to just ignore someone rather than man up and break things off.
Facebook feels different, though.
I think of it like this: there are many people whom I am not totally indifferent to, and want to know how they're doing, &c. However, it doesn't mean that I want to subscribe to their 'zines.
Notice, blocking only blocks posts; they can still chat and send messages to you.
Seeing as there are "hacker" (=amateur engineer) cooperatives renting office space in the middle of New York City, yes, a few grand a month is easily within the reach of "the masses" if they pool their resources.
Hell I know some people (saps and idiots) who spend nearly $1000 a month consuming media...
No, no, no. As was explained to me in the predecessor of this article, it would be impossible for independent hackers to do this because it's "too Hollywood." They would absolutely need the magical empowering guidance of a state intelligence agency, and at that point of course Israel is the obvious suspect. Duh.
Slashdot Mirror
OS X: I hadn't known; I haven't used it since 10.4.
App Store: yes, pretty much. Maybe it's 5 points out of 10,000 but it's still going to affect some people's decision making. Now, if/when someone's Mac randomly flakes out after installing "dangerous" software, I'd be blamed for it, which will discourage me from requiring it.
ubuntu: the alternative I meant to refer to was the repositories (synaptic's been around since 2004) rather than the ubuntu software center.
Once the norm for app installation is the App Store (and perhaps Apple starts putting up "helpful" warning dialogs about "untrusted software") then, yes, for the typical Stat 101 or Stats for Poets student who's never installed any non-commercial software in her life it will be a somewhat mysterious step and 20% of the class will want me to hold their hand.
If you don't believe me, just look at this http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=107340 and imagine the Apple equivalent.
If so, they're going to need to fork a Mac OS X Scientist Edition and attend to all the confusion that would entail. I know a lot of good professors and post-docs who use Mac as a "friendly unix", and recommend it to their students for that reason. Apple has actively courted this market, and it'd be outright stupid to risk it now. Not that I'd be shocked, but I'd be fairly surprised and it'd be a really dumb move.
I don't particularly like what they're doing now, since it makes installing free software (like R) from a disk image a "mysterious" thing instead of a commonplace thing, which makes using it in introductory classes more of a burden. Nonetheless it's tolerable. I really hope they don't extrapolate as you're suggesting; as a linux user it's currently slightly easier for me to collaborate with Mac users than Windows users.
Slow. Unstable. Ugly. Inconsistent (try saving a complex OOImpress document as a PDF). Rife with internecine politics.
Hopefully LibreOffice fixes some of this. It'll still be ugly, but the rest may be fixed and that might be enough.
And is the NYC Department of Education paying for Microsoft Office for those computers and not using it?
Then you would be wrong. I can't give you a rigorous definition but despite years of experience with OpenOffice.org, after just a few hours I found the Microsoft Ribbon to be better 95% of the time (here's a clue: what matters is for the usual stuff be easily accessible). This isn't to say the Ribbon is the only way, or even the best, but yeah it's a lot better than the 23 tabs, 3 rows deep, of dialog box that OO.o throws at me. I'm happy to give experimental and promising stuff several hours of learning curve-time, whoever the vendor.
As I said, for serious work I use LaTeX. For throwing a presentation together with the least effort, that doesn't look like dog shit, MS Office clobbers OO.o. That's what I mean by user friendliness. I'd love nothing more than for OO.o to do something totally out there and crazy. OO.o could be doing something really experimental; I know plenty of UI academics who'd love sticking it to Microsoft and working on a good project for token funding. But no, they're just bloating up Office 97.
I don't understand. Critics say that Microsoft Office both uses user-friendliness as lock-in and then alienates its users with the Ribbon. Which one is it?
I've used it plenty. I have memories of when OpenOffice was good, and this seems to be backed up by many people. On the other hand, maybe my standards just improved or, more likely, Microsoft and Apple have actually improved their stuff while OpenOffice is still bloating up their clone of Office 97 or whatever.
I just downloaded LibreOffice after replying to this post (note: when you have something that actually works, like Microsoft Office, you don't have to bother trying every "new" office suite in the hopes of getting something usable...). That said, I'm impressed by its speed, and it does seem cleaner than OpenOffice at least at first. Its dialog boxes are still a cluttered horrible mess, but whatever. OO seems to have money behind it; they'd be better off "wasting" some of it on a strong user-interface team rather than more developers. Seriously.
I'll try putting together a slideshow and spreadsheet with it. It's not as pretty or user-friendly as MS Office but, yeah, it's worth giving it a shot.
I write all my papers in emacs and LaTeX, so I don't care about the word processor.
Crossover Office is wine, except they take care of everything for you for a relatively small price. (It takes me less time to earn the $ to pay for cxoffice than to get wine working on even one tricky software.)
Since cxoffice is a legit contributor to wine I'm even supporting open source at the same time.
Thanks for the pointer about wine-tricks though, always good to know alternatives.
Microsoft has Mac products (whether they suck or not), but everyone I know runs the Windows versions in Parallels anyway. At any rate I doubt NYC has many Macs in use.
OpenOffice is, frankly, garbage. LibreOffice I haven't used, but is still in beta with only a few 100k downloads so I doubt it's been deployed in a large city.
Microsoft's Office software is actually pretty good and, yes, I would buy a closed-source linux version if they sold it. For the moment I use Crossover Office which, although somewhat erratic, is still a walk in the park compared to the dung-heap that is OpenOffice.
It would be better for the world if Microsoft just focussed on that and got out of the operating system-monopoly business. It might actually even be better for Microsoft in the long-term, and I suspect it's what's going to happen eventually.
It's time to chew bubblegum and troll slashdot! And I'm all out of gum.
Duke still has that half-parody/half-serious "macho" charm going for it. Playing Duke3d is like re-watching Commando; maybe you don't admit it, but it's a lot of cheesy fun. Also the real-time scripted deformable environments (like the earthquake level in mission 3 I think) still hold up on their own, let alone how impressive they were back then. It was a very impressive feature which they didn't trumpet as a breakthrough, but just quietly used to increase immersion.
Duke3d had heart; since they had reached basically the limits of the Doom-type rendering technology, they were free to focus on gameplay elements, and it paid off greatly.
consequent: adj. ... (2): logically correct or consistent.
He's saying Fox is consistently crappy and oppressive, at least to the extent that any media network can be oppressive.
It has one.
Also, more broadly speaking I'm just saying that we should approach the patent granting system as an optimization problem. The length of a patent term should be computed (either administratively or through some cooked-up "free market" as seems to be rage these days) according to some desideratum.
How fine to make the categories, &c. are interesting questions. I'm saying that we should use economic principles to answer these things. As a statistician, I think we can estimate the optimal terms and reduce the overall uncertainty.
And, in an overall view, I think drastically shortening terms (through whatever mechanism) is the "path of least resistance" toward reform. No one will be terribly happy with it, but also not that many people will be appalled. Shorter terms will mean that patents can be granted faster (shorter term = less potential harm = faster review) as well as have potential harm of each patent minimized. The free software types will still be pissed that they exist at all, but I get the impression that the vast majority of the most valid complaints involve patents that cover things that now are common sense design principles.
My mistake, I didn't intend that to be anonymous. Sorry.
Another problem that could have been circumvented if we limited patent terms to approximately "one generation of technology"/3. In this case it'd be about 12/3=4 years.
17 years is a holdover from the days of covered wagons and rail; where there were no parcel systems, no telecommunications, and no rapid prototyping plants. If we scaled 17 years by the growth in effective rate of fabrication and marketing, it'd probably be on the order a few months. Four years is shockingly conservative.
However, YOU only got one shot. Would you switch? I honestly don't know if I would or not.
Why on earth wouldn't you?
Snails have a great texture, kind of like mushrooms made out of meat.
The US price may or may not be worth it for one (in general it's not worth it for me), but I can see the appeal.
Also, snails are expensive in the US partly because we have (probably for petty political purposes) a strict import schedule for them and not much local demand or supply. In parts of Europe, snails (and similarly mussels) can be very cheap. In Belgium, mussels are a working class food. In Portugal, snails are a working class food. In France and US they are more like delicacies.
Tastes; marketing; and regional availability determine a lot and are not themselves independent. For another example, per unit of alcohol, Bud Ice is on par in price with Tanqueray Gin, and Bud Light Lime is comparable with Sierra Nevada, and yet which one is considered more "upscale"? Chicken wings used to be offal, good only for thickening soups; now they are extremely high mark-up (although somewhat "low class") bar food.
Yes, one locksmith. The rest of them don't have a problem. ;-)
...Slashdot started to hire worse editors...
where to even begin...
Oops. By "block," I was referring this whole time to "hide from news feed." I actually didn't know that you could really block someone entirely, which makes my post a bit ironic. :-/
So with this new info, yes, I tentatively agree with you. Blocking is a bit sociopathic.
interesting. In the real-world, I guess that I would agree. It's pretty damned cold to just ignore someone rather than man up and break things off.
Facebook feels different, though.
I think of it like this: there are many people whom I am not totally indifferent to, and want to know how they're doing, &c. However, it doesn't mean that I want to subscribe to their 'zines.
Notice, blocking only blocks posts; they can still chat and send messages to you.
Ditto. I wonder if these unfrienders don't know how to block (lol), or if they are so offended that blocking isn't enough (lol).
Seeing as there are "hacker" (=amateur engineer) cooperatives renting office space in the middle of New York City, yes, a few grand a month is easily within the reach of "the masses" if they pool their resources.
Hell I know some people (saps and idiots) who spend nearly $1000 a month consuming media...
No, no, no. As was explained to me in the predecessor of this article, it would be impossible for independent hackers to do this because it's "too Hollywood." They would absolutely need the magical empowering guidance of a state intelligence agency, and at that point of course Israel is the obvious suspect. Duh.