I find multiplying X and Y pixelcounts to get numbers like "220 million pixels" almost meaningless, because most people's intution of how exponents progress (including my own) is way off. (here's an experiment: pour some pennies onto a flat surface. Arrange them so none overlap, just a flat grouping. Guess how many there are. Then count. You probably underestimated. "10 x 10" creates a larger number than most folks' intution "expects".)
For the same reason, I find having cameras rated in megapixels annoying, and usually try to guesstimate what the resolutions would be.
Compounding this is the increase in 16:9 ratio video items, vs the old 4:3.
Reading TFA, that part struck out. I kind of knew Linus doesn't feel a compulsion to maintain neutrality in any number of issues, but still in the context of that whole "Is Intel sitting on 30nm chips" or whatever story, it kind of jumped out at me, and "Hmmm" was kind of my way of encouraging interpretation without having a dog in the fight.
(I'm very much a PC as commodity guy; for new equipment at least, processor speed or even chipset isn't even on the list, besides maybe sanity checking that it's not something ancient.)
"The good news is that a lot of hw manufacturers are actually doing the right thing. Intel in particular has improved wrt open source a lot, and for that reason I tend to suggest that when buying a machine, just make sure that you buy one with Intel graphics and wireless. That takes care of the two biggest annoyances right there."
Yeah, mod parent up... I think the grandparent post doesn't grasp how influential Wal*Mart can be in out there in the hinterlands.
And they're a bit like the Texas School Board textbook reviewers, where the clout they wield extends beyond just the people directly cut off from certain materials by it. For people who don't want their culture hedged in by the most bible-thumpin' fraction of the population, this is a problem.
Google has been doing so much hiring lately it's been scaring me a bit (though they didn't lower their standards enough to help me get passed a bombed interview;-)
But I was surprised that when hunting for references to this poem via its 2nd line ("No! Summer's beautiful, but full of doubt,") Yahoo came up with the matches I expected, and Google came up with nothing. (Hmm, at least as of last night... but both were old and quality links)
Actually, come to think of it, many DVD players do a ton of other things, from playing CDs to doing JPEG photo galleries to playing obscure video formats favored in Europe to doing MP3s, and most of the owners just don't care. So it's a mistake to think this is just about video games.
People who have all mail to a domain going to one gmail account (ok, me) noticed a bunch of this testing the waters looking spam leaking through the filters, one every two minutes or so, with both the subject and the body being a different short 6-10 character string of mostly numbers. No actual selling content.
Incidentally, for Windows lusers who realize they may have been practicing unsafe computing, is there any way to tell that you've been zombified? I know some of these worms are fairly stealthy. Some sort of external monitoring box between the router and the cable modem?
So I have one of these. One of the strongest uses I've had of its browser was this weekend, helping a buddy out w/ house refurbishing out in the sticks, actually his parents house. No wifi there, but I could touch base with the online world at night... yes I could have lived without it, but it was nice to have.
Probably my biggest problem w/ a Windows Mobile device (one of the ones w/ the slide out keyboard), besides the UI disgrace that is Outlook, was is tendency to dial up people on its own accord, due in part to *utterly* inadequate keyguarding, though I swear once it managed to call my mom despite sitting their, alone, on a shelf, face up, with nothing touching its screen.
I'm not sure how the other browsers are, but the default IE one sucked, at least compared to iPhone. (also, w/ Sprint I tended to avoid unlimited data, but I had to accept ATT's lowcost plan, and despite that as a constraint, it was actually freeing.)
Given the usual engineering/geek snobbery (I myself kind of straddle the line, ten years ago I was a double comp sci / english major) I must say I'm a little surprised not to be able to grep for and find the word "fries" anywhere in these threads.
The other surprisingly clever bit is reasonably priced but mandatory "all you can eat" data services. (Having a unique draw like the ubersleek iPhone helped push that through.)
I never messed with this stuff on Sprint, I couldn't justify the added price of smartphone-y stuff w/ uncertain content and usually craptastic interfaces. But the slickness of that glorious slab of iPhone persuaded me to shell out a bit more, and since the data is unlimited I'm not second guessing myself in using it...
You're right that common sense switched off to some degree, So that it fell in the middle of "Obvious Scam | Fish but cool, let me investigate | Let me send in a check!"
I think the other bit of misthink goes something like "I could probably get a used Laptop for that range on Ebay, why not something new if everything was lowballed?", forgetting some nuances of supply and demand and value depredation.
Not a need... a want. I needed a new phone. Sprint's bargain basement cheapest was about 1/3 the cost of an iPhone. If Sprint had a $100 replacement phone, I probably wouldn't have an iPhone today, but since money wasn't TOO much of an issue, I thought I'd try being an early adopter for a change.
And it really is a visceral pleasure to use, from the sturdy construction and heft to the amazing resolution and generally well thought out design. Granted, it ain't as good as a PDA as the palm it replaced, but it does that ok and has other pluses.
Compated to a PocketPC phone I was using a while back... even though it had a very decent slideout keyboard and touchscreen, it's browser was CRAP and it had mysterious ways of turning itself on and calling people (in my pocket, and even when on the shelf)
Huh. While I don't think I'd like the phone (I'm skeptical about exposed keypads these days), I'm impressed to realize that maybe Apple didn't come up with the idea of shrinking and zooming to view a webpage...
This is an example of a bad use of buttons. Volume controls should be knobs or sliders, not buttons.
Maybe, but I think you're much more likely to get a survivable piece of equipment, one that can stay robust despite being carried around in a pocket, with a button.
Anecdote: I love my (not particularly expensive, but not particularly cheap) digital alarm clock, nice big red LED, digital tuning... but the volume is a twisty thing around a clickable power button (not unlike a 1st gen iPod) and after a few years it is all static-ky and *extremely* non-linear in how it modifies the volume. (I tried squirting some old "color tv channel selector spray" from Radio Shack (that I had around for my old Atari 2600 paddles) to not much avail.
Also, buttons can be made so they aren't easy to hit... a physical slider or knob would be prone to getting switched to extremes accidentally, a nearly-flush button pair, not so much.
The answer, as with most things, is in the middle.
I've heard braille devices are extremely expensive, in part because they aren't really scaled for mass production.
Closed Captioning was mandating, adding a cost to each device that's much less than if it were a specialty add-on. Plus, it can come in useful in ways you don't expect... I know some immigrant families who keep it on to help with understanding and learning English.
On the other hand, you don't want useful features eliminated.
After a while, you start second guessing yourself, don't you?
Like... "am I being too academic? I mean I've hardly ever had to recurse a binary tree, and I usually use a standard library for stacks, and even then I use HashMaps and Arrays more than anything..."
But you really need to draw a line somewhere. I got so sick of dumbing down my interview question, from "give me an unoptimized routine to print the prime #s from 1 to 100" to "just give me a function that returns true or false depending on if a number is prime". Hell, maybe I should go all the way down to "assume you already have a boolean-returning 'isPrime()' function. NOW, how would you use that to print all the prime #s from 1 to 100?"
Actually, the thing I've been musing about lately are programming problems I'd be having trouble with, some of which I'd even like to implement on some personal apps. Like... how could I efficiently implement a datebook, especially one with recurring items? It's kind of an interesting data structure problem, assuming you want to avoid searching through your whole past and history to render a given time period.
For a certain generation at least, I don't think "Gameboy" really got parsed into its component parts. Neither did "Walkman" for that matter... both were just words were the first part was descriptive but the second was just filler.
And Sony did the same thing, Workstation -> Playstation.
I wonder if they made it so JSRF worked from the dual disk w/ Sega GT... so these are glitches after the new update? I got a JSRF standalone disk after the first one, the framerate problems (esp. in that stage w/ the big twisted dragon tower) were very serious.
Slashdot Mirror
I find multiplying X and Y pixelcounts to get numbers like "220 million pixels" almost meaningless, because most people's intution of how exponents progress (including my own) is way off. (here's an experiment: pour some pennies onto a flat surface. Arrange them so none overlap, just a flat grouping. Guess how many there are. Then count. You probably underestimated. "10 x 10" creates a larger number than most folks' intution "expects".)
For the same reason, I find having cameras rated in megapixels annoying, and usually try to guesstimate what the resolutions would be.
Compounding this is the increase in 16:9 ratio video items, vs the old 4:3.
Actually I was trolling to a very small degree.
Reading TFA, that part struck out.
I kind of knew Linus doesn't feel a compulsion to maintain neutrality in any number of issues, but still in the context of that whole "Is Intel sitting on 30nm chips" or whatever story, it kind of jumped out at me, and "Hmmm" was kind of my way of encouraging interpretation without having a dog in the fight.
(I'm very much a PC as commodity guy; for new equipment at least, processor speed or even chipset isn't even on the list, besides maybe sanity checking that it's not something ancient.)
"The good news is that a lot of hw manufacturers are actually doing the right thing. Intel in particular has improved wrt open source a lot, and for that reason I tend to suggest that when buying a machine, just make sure that you buy one with Intel graphics and wireless. That takes care of the two biggest annoyances right there."
Hmmm.
"Wal-Mart isn't censoring anymore than you are if you choose not to watch Fox News."
or is the situation, in some places, more like "as if Comcast chose to carry no other news network than Fox News"
I mean, there's still Satellite, right?
Yeah, mod parent up... I think the grandparent post doesn't grasp how influential Wal*Mart can be in out there in the hinterlands.
And they're a bit like the Texas School Board textbook reviewers, where the clout they wield extends beyond just the people directly cut off from certain materials by it. For people who don't want their culture hedged in by the most bible-thumpin' fraction of the population, this is a problem.
Google has been doing so much hiring lately it's been scaring me a bit (though they didn't lower their standards enough to help me get passed a bombed interview ;-)
But I was surprised that when hunting for references to this poem via its 2nd line ("No! Summer's beautiful, but full of doubt,") Yahoo came up with the matches I expected, and Google came up with nothing. (Hmm, at least as of last night... but both were old and quality links)
Actually, come to think of it, many DVD players do a ton of other things, from playing CDs to doing JPEG photo galleries to playing obscure video formats favored in Europe to doing MP3s, and most of the owners just don't care. So it's a mistake to think this is just about video games.
I'm a reasonable proficient geek, and I'm guilty of this.
Does my Wii play MP3s?
Does my Xbox 360 do JPEG photo shows?
Answer: I don't care.
Xbox 360 as a backup DVD player has come in useful, but I have enough multipurpose gadgets that I don't bother keeping track.
People who have all mail to a domain going to one gmail account (ok, me) noticed a bunch of this testing the waters looking spam leaking through the filters, one every two minutes or so, with both the subject and the body being a different short 6-10 character string of mostly numbers. No actual selling content.
Incidentally, for Windows lusers who realize they may have been practicing unsafe computing, is there any way to tell that you've been zombified? I know some of these worms are fairly stealthy. Some sort of external monitoring box between the router and the cable modem?
So I have one of these. One of the strongest uses I've had of its browser was this weekend, helping a buddy out w/ house refurbishing out in the sticks, actually his parents house. No wifi there, but I could touch base with the online world at night... yes I could have lived without it, but it was nice to have.
Probably my biggest problem w/ a Windows Mobile device (one of the ones w/ the slide out keyboard), besides the UI disgrace that is Outlook, was is tendency to dial up people on its own accord, due in part to *utterly* inadequate keyguarding, though I swear once it managed to call my mom despite sitting their, alone, on a shelf, face up, with nothing touching its screen.
I'm not sure how the other browsers are, but the default IE one sucked, at least compared to iPhone. (also, w/ Sprint I tended to avoid unlimited data, but I had to accept ATT's lowcost plan, and despite that as a constraint, it was actually freeing.)
From a UI standpoint, I think 98 was the happiest small upgrade (dwarfed by 3.1->95 of course)
Given the usual engineering/geek snobbery (I myself kind of straddle the line, ten years ago I was a double comp sci / english major) I must say I'm a little surprised not to be able to grep for and find the word "fries" anywhere in these threads.
The other surprisingly clever bit is reasonably priced but mandatory "all you can eat" data services. (Having a unique draw like the ubersleek iPhone helped push that through.)
I never messed with this stuff on Sprint, I couldn't justify the added price of smartphone-y stuff w/ uncertain content and usually craptastic interfaces. But the slickness of that glorious slab of iPhone persuaded me to shell out a bit more, and since the data is unlimited I'm not second guessing myself in using it...
You're right that common sense switched off to some degree,
So that it fell in the middle of "Obvious Scam | Fish but cool, let me investigate | Let me send in a check!"
I think the other bit of misthink goes something like "I could probably get a used Laptop for that range on Ebay, why not something new if everything was lowballed?", forgetting some nuances of supply and demand and value depredation.
Not a need... a want.
I needed a new phone. Sprint's bargain basement cheapest was about 1/3 the cost of an iPhone. If Sprint had a $100 replacement phone, I probably wouldn't have an iPhone today, but since money wasn't TOO much of an issue, I thought I'd try being an early adopter for a change.
And it really is a visceral pleasure to use, from the sturdy construction and heft to the amazing resolution and generally well thought out design. Granted, it ain't as good as a PDA as the palm it replaced, but it does that ok and has other pluses.
Compated to a PocketPC phone I was using a while back... even though it had a very decent slideout keyboard and touchscreen, it's browser was CRAP and it had mysterious ways of turning itself on and calling people (in my pocket, and even when on the shelf)
Huh. While I don't think I'd like the phone (I'm skeptical about exposed keypads these days), I'm impressed to realize that maybe Apple didn't come up with the idea of shrinking and zooming to view a webpage...
This is an example of a bad use of buttons. Volume controls should be knobs or sliders, not buttons.
Maybe, but I think you're much more likely to get a survivable piece of equipment, one that can stay robust despite being carried around in a pocket, with a button.
Anecdote: I love my (not particularly expensive, but not particularly cheap) digital alarm clock, nice big red LED, digital tuning... but the volume is a twisty thing around a clickable power button (not unlike a 1st gen iPod) and after a few years it is all static-ky and *extremely* non-linear in how it modifies the volume. (I tried squirting some old "color tv channel selector spray" from Radio Shack (that I had around for my old Atari 2600 paddles) to not much avail.
Also, buttons can be made so they aren't easy to hit... a physical slider or knob would be prone to getting switched to extremes accidentally, a nearly-flush button pair, not so much.
There are plenty of people who have a bad case of "more money than brains" now a days. But then again we are talking about the iPhone...
Show me a better handheld/pocketable web browser, maybe I'll buy it.
(I didn't mean to jump on the bandwagon, but my Cellphone and Palm got drowned on the same day.)
The answer, as with most things, is in the middle.
I've heard braille devices are extremely expensive, in part because they aren't really scaled for mass production.
Closed Captioning was mandating, adding a cost to each device that's much less than if it were a specialty add-on. Plus, it can come in useful in ways you don't expect... I know some immigrant families who keep it on to help with understanding and learning English.
On the other hand, you don't want useful features eliminated.
The thing is, it didn't sound SO good as to be absolutely implausible...
After a while, you start second guessing yourself, don't you?
Like... "am I being too academic? I mean I've hardly ever had to recurse a binary tree, and I usually use a standard library for stacks, and even then I use HashMaps and Arrays more than anything..."
But you really need to draw a line somewhere. I got so sick of dumbing down my interview question, from "give me an unoptimized routine to print the prime #s from 1 to 100" to "just give me a function that returns true or false depending on if a number is prime". Hell, maybe I should go all the way down to "assume you already have a boolean-returning 'isPrime()' function. NOW, how would you use that to print all the prime #s from 1 to 100?"
Actually, the thing I've been musing about lately are programming problems I'd be having trouble with, some of which I'd even like to implement on some personal apps. Like... how could I efficiently implement a datebook, especially one with recurring items? It's kind of an interesting data structure problem, assuming you want to avoid searching through your whole past and history to render a given time period.
my favorite bit of hiring dumbness: http://kisrael.com/viewblog.cgi?date=2005.11.09
it is ASTONISHING at the low quality of people you can interview. Degrees are only super-loosely correlated.
BTW, w/ swap two variables... could they use a third place holder, or was it meant to be more clever than that?
For a certain generation at least, I don't think "Gameboy" really got parsed into its component parts. Neither did "Walkman" for that matter... both were just words were the first part was descriptive but the second was just filler.
And Sony did the same thing, Workstation -> Playstation.
It was a decent name.
I wonder if they made it so JSRF worked from the dual disk w/ Sega GT...
so these are glitches after the new update? I got a JSRF standalone disk after the first one,
the framerate problems (esp. in that stage w/ the big twisted dragon tower) were very serious.