The question is whether taking notes with a pen is better than taking notes with a keyboard. The article is about how taking notes is better than not taking them at all - a completely different question. Maybe if you had taken notes while reading you would have remembered that key point.;-)
(The author of the article does touch upon "pen vs keyboard" in the comments, but he says: "I didn’t come across anything on typing, but I would guess it would have the same effect.")
Thanks for the link. I had never heard of Fr. Z, but his blog seems quite interesting. I especially enjoyed his critique of the translation of a prayer from Latin. I hope that's the correct link to the post, at least: the site isn't loading any more... slashdotted?
You're missing two things. One, people who use the internet are already exposed to all sorts of voices and opinions. Using this medium can only increase the strength with which the church's message reaches them, compared to not using it.
Two, you're singling out religion for no reason. Whenever people group around an idea, you will see a tendency to toe the party line. It can be a political party, a philosophy, a sports team, a lifestyle, a music genre, a franchise... Very high profile groups, such as political parties, have always had their own channels (eg newspapers that support their political views), but on the internet, every group can have its own fora, from Linux users to Twilight fans.
Re:Motion blur and bloom effects
on
Framerates Matter
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Your eyes introduce blur due to the reaction time of the light-sensitive cells in the retina. Fortunately, the image processing area in your brain treats blur introduced by the eyes and blur built into the frame more or less the same, so you can use blur to give the impression of smooth motion with a lower frame rate than would otherwise be necessary. This is used to good effect in cinema, where the camera's exposure time naturally introduces blur that is quite similar to the one introduced by your eye.
In the case of video games, however, it is not so clear that rendering effctive artificial motion blur saves much processing time compared to simply rendering more frames. Then again, there is a limit to how fast your monitor can update its image, so rendering more frames is no longer an option past that point.
There are three major players in the TV market in Italy: Rai, Mediaset and Sky.
Rai is owned by the state, and runs three major TV channels (Rai 1, Rai 2, Rai 3). The various parties exert some control on the different channels: it's not the case that the majority takes all. There is a parliamentary commission that watches over Rai, and it is controlled by the opposition.
Mediaset is owned by Berlusconi, and runs three major TV channels (Canale 5, Italia 1, Rete 4).
Sky is owned by Rupert Murdoch, and controls the entirety of the satellite TV market (the others use terrestrial broadcasting). It is the same size as Mediaset in terms of revenue, and is growing faster. Murdoch hates Berlusconi.
As for newspapers, the two main Italian papers are La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera.
La Repubblica is owned by Carlo De Benedetti, who hates Berlusconi. It follows a very strong anti-Berlusconi line.
Il Corriere is owned by a collection of financial and industrial interests. They don't like Berlusconi. The paper itself generally follows a moderate line. It officially endorsed Berlusconi's opponents in the past.
Berlusconi controls the newspaper Il Giornale, which is far smaller than Corriere or Repubblica. Libero, which is smaller yet than Il Giornale, supports Berlusconi, but is actually owned by a completely unrelated entrepeneur (Angelucci). Il Foglio is a tiny, tiny "opinion" paper owned by Berlusconi's divorcing wife.
There are other players in both the TV and newspaper market (especially the latter), but these are the most significant ones. To sum up, while Berlusconi has a larger control of the media than we would like, he does not "own all the major tv stations"; in fact, he doesn't even own half. The claim that he owns "all newspapers" is plain nonsense, he owns a small minority.
Another thing to bear in mind is that in Italy, as in most countries, educated people generally lean to the left. To make TV programs, or write news, you need artists and journalists, who mostly lean to the left. The only exception is Rete 4's news, but only old people watch it.
I use Spaces too, but I can't say I love it. They just let me have a fixed number of nameless screens, and I have to keep track of what's on what screen, and enforce that separation whenever I open new things. And they don't integrate with the Dock at all.
Tabbed windows let you have a dynamically changing number of groups, labeled with the title of the frontmost windows in each (which should let you know the group's theme, although being able to name them explicitly might be even better), and I haven't seen how they integrate with the KDE taskbar, but they could do some interesting things in that area.
Yes, that's the big downside of the tabbed window approach. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction, and it could be useful in many cases. I'd like to play with it.
Typographers know that overlong lines make reading harder from over five centuries of experience printing books. User interface specialists confirm it. If you like 400-character lines, maybe you're special, or maybe you simply don't know any better. I mean no offense, but your other remark suggests the latter: I have been browsing with a non-maximized window for years, and I can assure you that there is no "constant resizing and repositioning". You can just keep your windows at slightly over 1000 pixels wide, and it works fine for all websites. When you do decide to adjust things a bit (perhaps to make more room for keeping another another window visible), dragging the corner of the window (I use a Mac) is no more work than clicking on a tab or on a button in the taskbar, actions you do thousands of times a day without complaining. You're just adding maybe five clicks a day to those thousands.
OTOH, you make some good points about the history of Windows.
The point is that we want to group windows by task, not by application. Let's say I'm working on a web application, so I have a window showing the contents of the project folder, a text editor, and a browser to test the application. At the same time (where "same time" doesn't mean that I do two things at once, but that I share my time between several activities over a range of many days), I'm writing a C program, so I have another editor window (or maybe an IDE), another project folder, a terminal with man pages, more browser windows for documentation, and so on.
The Windows taskbar, in spite of its name, doesn't understand human tasks at all: instead, it would group all browsers together, all editors together, all terminals together, and so on. This is stupid and useless. With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.
You might as well ask what's the point of having windows. The concept never really caught on in Windows, in spite of its name, but it's very useful to be able to have many things on screen at once, especially when none of them requires a full screen anyway.
Take this web page: if you have a large widescreen monitor and you maximize the browser, you get a silly layout, with very long text lines that make reading harder. Many websites work around this problem by using a fixed width layout, but then you just end up with two large empty areas on the sides of the actual webpages; or, worse yet, they may be filled with animated advertisements. A better solution is to make the browser window only as wide as it needs to be, so you can use the leftover space to keep an eye on other things, such as your email or an IM conversation. If you have a large monitor, you can even open two web pages side by side.
I sent the maintainer some corrections back in April, but he thought my criticisms were too harsh and chose to ignore them.
Sometimes the translators simply failed to grasp the meaning of the original text. In panel 3, the girl says "Yokenna, kono!" ("Why you, don't dodge!") and the boy replies "Maji iteendazo!" ("Those really hurt, you know!"; they are both referring to the CDs she's throwing), but in the English translation it turns into "Stop messing around! It can't be any good!". The third girl's line, "Hamori nagara kenka shinaidee!", is not so easy to render in English, but it definitely doesn't mean "Stop talking at the same time!": it means "You were speaking in unison a minute ago [panel 2], so don't fight now!"
Other times, the translation is clumsy. In panel 1, "Saikin ninki no desktop na Linux desu!" ("It's the most popular desktop Linux these days!" - or, more literally, "It's a desktop Linux that is popular these days") becomes "It is very popular with the users, and it is the hottest desktop Linux distribution available." And that's just the first page.
I reported these and more flaws months ago, but since the maintainer took offense to my harsh but polite comment ("the translation should be redone", I said), he simply rejected the "patch". It's hard not to crack wise that this is just like a real open source project.:-)
(Actually, I know most maintainers aren't like that, so hold those Flamebait mods.:P)
Indeed, this could be a serious PR blunder for Kaspersky. His statements single-handedly changed my perception of the brand "Kaspersky" from "respected maker of Windows antivirus software" to "worse than Microsoft AIDS" (a hypothetical product with the combined potential of causing sever harm to both your computer and your own personal well-being).
Then again, I wasn't really in his potential customer pool to begin with, so it might not matter.
Well, OS 8/9 is just not OS X. The OS X Finder deals with folders of thousands of files with ease, thankfully. "Mac OS Extended" is just another name for HFS+, btw.
If only they could address the "calculate folder sizes" extreme slowness through code rather than the UI.
I don't know what you mean by "code rather than the UI". I can say, however, that calculating folder sizes is a very low-priority task on the current Finder, so it doesn't slow anything down, but if you want to know the size quickly it's often faster to do a du -sh.
In 2009, everyone is supposed to have enough bandwidth for audio; that's not the problem. What matters is the actual information bandwidth, and that's much wider for written text than for speech. We can read much faster than we can talk, and when you have text on the screen, you can skim around freely. There are some areas where audio and video are really useful (eg entertainment), but most of the time text is the superior medium for presenting information.
-ls -lr on a folder with a few hundred files in subfolders... get coffee as much of the btree is traversed
They might be mostly historic, but this one seems downright mythic to me. I have folders with thousands of files at the same level, and I've never had a problem with directory traversal: it's hard to believe that it'd be that slow with a mere few hundreds. If you tried running "ls -lR" (I'm assuming that's what you mean, because you mention subfolders and -lr wouldn't descend the tree) in a shell and it took too long, it's probably due to Terminal.app's text rendering. Pipe the output into a file, or filter it (you're not going to go through thousands of lines manually in the terminal anyway, right?), and it'll be much faster.
Really. I had an easy time at school and got excellent grades with very little effort, but that just made me lazy and unused to working hard on things I'm not particularly interested in. At the same time, I'm grateful for all knowledge the school system did manage to cram into my mind. Looking back, I only with it had made me work even harder: I'd have more knowledge, better skills, and I'd be used to working harder to boot.
In other words, I might have loved to go to video game school as a child, but as an adult I would hate to have gone to it.
Slashdot Mirror
The question is whether taking notes with a pen is better than taking notes with a keyboard. The article is about how taking notes is better than not taking them at all - a completely different question. Maybe if you had taken notes while reading you would have remembered that key point. ;-)
(The author of the article does touch upon "pen vs keyboard" in the comments, but he says: "I didn’t come across anything on typing, but I would guess it would have the same effect.")
Thanks for the link. I had never heard of Fr. Z, but his blog seems quite interesting. I especially enjoyed his critique of the translation of a prayer from Latin. I hope that's the correct link to the post, at least: the site isn't loading any more... slashdotted?
You're missing two things. One, people who use the internet are already exposed to all sorts of voices and opinions. Using this medium can only increase the strength with which the church's message reaches them, compared to not using it.
Two, you're singling out religion for no reason. Whenever people group around an idea, you will see a tendency to toe the party line. It can be a political party, a philosophy, a sports team, a lifestyle, a music genre, a franchise... Very high profile groups, such as political parties, have always had their own channels (eg newspapers that support their political views), but on the internet, every group can have its own fora, from Linux users to Twilight fans.
Your eyes introduce blur due to the reaction time of the light-sensitive cells in the retina. Fortunately, the image processing area in your brain treats blur introduced by the eyes and blur built into the frame more or less the same, so you can use blur to give the impression of smooth motion with a lower frame rate than would otherwise be necessary. This is used to good effect in cinema, where the camera's exposure time naturally introduces blur that is quite similar to the one introduced by your eye.
In the case of video games, however, it is not so clear that rendering effctive artificial motion blur saves much processing time compared to simply rendering more frames. Then again, there is a limit to how fast your monitor can update its image, so rendering more frames is no longer an option past that point.
As for newspapers, the two main Italian papers are La Repubblica and Corriere della Sera.
There are other players in both the TV and newspaper market (especially the latter), but these are the most significant ones. To sum up, while Berlusconi has a larger control of the media than we would like, he does not "own all the major tv stations"; in fact, he doesn't even own half. The claim that he owns "all newspapers" is plain nonsense, he owns a small minority.
Another thing to bear in mind is that in Italy, as in most countries, educated people generally lean to the left. To make TV programs, or write news, you need artists and journalists, who mostly lean to the left. The only exception is Rete 4's news, but only old people watch it.
Maybe Google's real goal is building a worldwide panopticon.
Oh, you mean tiled, non-overlapping windows, like on Windows 1.0? We've been there, and it sucks in practice.
I use Spaces too, but I can't say I love it. They just let me have a fixed number of nameless screens, and I have to keep track of what's on what screen, and enforce that separation whenever I open new things. And they don't integrate with the Dock at all.
Tabbed windows let you have a dynamically changing number of groups, labeled with the title of the frontmost windows in each (which should let you know the group's theme, although being able to name them explicitly might be even better), and I haven't seen how they integrate with the KDE taskbar, but they could do some interesting things in that area.
Yes, that's the big downside of the tabbed window approach. Still, it's an experiment in the right direction, and it could be useful in many cases. I'd like to play with it.
Typographers know that overlong lines make reading harder from over five centuries of experience printing books. User interface specialists confirm it. If you like 400-character lines, maybe you're special, or maybe you simply don't know any better.
I mean no offense, but your other remark suggests the latter: I have been browsing with a non-maximized window for years, and I can assure you that there is no "constant resizing and repositioning". You can just keep your windows at slightly over 1000 pixels wide, and it works fine for all websites.
When you do decide to adjust things a bit (perhaps to make more room for keeping another another window visible), dragging the corner of the window (I use a Mac) is no more work than clicking on a tab or on a button in the taskbar, actions you do thousands of times a day without complaining. You're just adding maybe five clicks a day to those thousands.
OTOH, you make some good points about the history of Windows.
The point is that we want to group windows by task, not by application. Let's say I'm working on a web application, so I have a window showing the contents of the project folder, a text editor, and a browser to test the application. At the same time (where "same time" doesn't mean that I do two things at once, but that I share my time between several activities over a range of many days), I'm writing a C program, so I have another editor window (or maybe an IDE), another project folder, a terminal with man pages, more browser windows for documentation, and so on.
The Windows taskbar, in spite of its name, doesn't understand human tasks at all: instead, it would group all browsers together, all editors together, all terminals together, and so on. This is stupid and useless. With tabbed heterogeneous windows, instead, I would be able to group webpage-related windows together, and C-related windows together. It sounds like a very useful feature to me.
You might as well ask what's the point of having windows. The concept never really caught on in Windows, in spite of its name, but it's very useful to be able to have many things on screen at once, especially when none of them requires a full screen anyway.
Take this web page: if you have a large widescreen monitor and you maximize the browser, you get a silly layout, with very long text lines that make reading harder. Many websites work around this problem by using a fixed width layout, but then you just end up with two large empty areas on the sides of the actual webpages; or, worse yet, they may be filled with animated advertisements. A better solution is to make the browser window only as wide as it needs to be, so you can use the leftover space to keep an eye on other things, such as your email or an IM conversation. If you have a large monitor, you can even open two web pages side by side.
As stated in comments on the previous Slashdot post on the case, the perpetrators were already prosecuted in 2006.
They never did that for the "Bush chimp" pictures.
I was really aiming for "Informative" there, but thanks. :S
I sent the maintainer some corrections back in April, but he thought my criticisms were too harsh and chose to ignore them.
:-) :P)
Sometimes the translators simply failed to grasp the meaning of the original text. In panel 3, the girl says "Yokenna, kono!" ("Why you, don't dodge!") and the boy replies "Maji iteendazo!" ("Those really hurt, you know!"; they are both referring to the CDs she's throwing), but in the English translation it turns into "Stop messing around! It can't be any good!". The third girl's line, "Hamori nagara kenka shinaidee!", is not so easy to render in English, but it definitely doesn't mean "Stop talking at the same time!": it means "You were speaking in unison a minute ago [panel 2], so don't fight now!"
Other times, the translation is clumsy. In panel 1, "Saikin ninki no desktop na Linux desu!" ("It's the most popular desktop Linux these days!" - or, more literally, "It's a desktop Linux that is popular these days") becomes "It is very popular with the users, and it is the hottest desktop Linux distribution available."
And that's just the first page.
I reported these and more flaws months ago, but since the maintainer took offense to my harsh but polite comment ("the translation should be redone", I said), he simply rejected the "patch". It's hard not to crack wise that this is just like a real open source project.
(Actually, I know most maintainers aren't like that, so hold those Flamebait mods.
That sounded interesting until I read: "Dependency resolution and updates are basic or not working yet."
It's not really a package manager if it doesn't do that.
I live in my mom's basement, but I'm 15.
Oh, we can tell.
Because we've never read stories of egregious mishandling of justice in America or other countries, right?
Indeed, this could be a serious PR blunder for Kaspersky. His statements single-handedly changed my perception of the brand "Kaspersky" from "respected maker of Windows antivirus software" to "worse than Microsoft AIDS" (a hypothetical product with the combined potential of causing sever harm to both your computer and your own personal well-being).
Then again, I wasn't really in his potential customer pool to begin with, so it might not matter.
Mods, mod this AC up. GP forgot to include the number of towers into the calculation (300); that brings his 0.17% up to about 50%.
If only they could address the "calculate folder sizes" extreme slowness through code rather than the UI.
I don't know what you mean by "code rather than the UI". I can say, however, that calculating folder sizes is a very low-priority task on the current Finder, so it doesn't slow anything down, but if you want to know the size quickly it's often faster to do a du -sh.
In 2009, everyone is supposed to have enough bandwidth for audio; that's not the problem. What matters is the actual information bandwidth, and that's much wider for written text than for speech. We can read much faster than we can talk, and when you have text on the screen, you can skim around freely. There are some areas where audio and video are really useful (eg entertainment), but most of the time text is the superior medium for presenting information.
-ls -lr on a folder with a few hundred files in subfolders ... get coffee as much of the btree is traversed
They might be mostly historic, but this one seems downright mythic to me. I have folders with thousands of files at the same level, and I've never had a problem with directory traversal: it's hard to believe that it'd be that slow with a mere few hundreds.
If you tried running "ls -lR" (I'm assuming that's what you mean, because you mention subfolders and -lr wouldn't descend the tree) in a shell and it took too long, it's probably due to Terminal.app's text rendering. Pipe the output into a file, or filter it (you're not going to go through thousands of lines manually in the terminal anyway, right?), and it'll be much faster.
Really. I had an easy time at school and got excellent grades with very little effort, but that just made me lazy and unused to working hard on things I'm not particularly interested in. At the same time, I'm grateful for all knowledge the school system did manage to cram into my mind. Looking back, I only with it had made me work even harder: I'd have more knowledge, better skills, and I'd be used to working harder to boot.
In other words, I might have loved to go to video game school as a child, but as an adult I would hate to have gone to it.