Show the last character as is, not hidden, but then change it visually to a * after hitting the next char.
So it would appear as.
A
*P
**P
***L
****E
This solves the 'am I typing it correct' vs dont show the password on screen.
Trust a./er to solve the non-obvious problem first (a program taking screenshots of you computer at some time interval).
What about someone looking over your shoulder as you type though? You can't have this on by default if you are in an open space (i.e. not in a basement), can you?
PS - I just have a file on my hard drive with my WPA key (add extra lines for confusion as well), copy and paste the relevant stuff, and that's that. I used to have my password set up in a file (root permissions) using ndiswrapper and wpasupplicant. This was better from a usability perspective as it had network access before logging in and, therefore, also in recovery console.
that the faster an object is moving the more massive it is. Now if it's the size of jupiter and it is orbiting its sun in only 4 hours then even if it were really close to the sun it would still be moving really really quickly.
If this were the case, you would probably have very severe tidal motions of the layers on Jupiter. The increased friction would probably cause the planet to slow down if it were close to the sun.
Although unnecessary, threading usually simplifies a program rather than adding complexity. The only caveat is that you understand threading. In my experience I've used threading to greatly reduce the size and complexity of solutions that either were or could have been implemented without them.
I only partially agree with that assertion.
I an assignment (university level) I was asked to write a multi-threaded statistics program. The IO routine provided was extremely poor for reading in large volumes of data that was expected and it was read in several times for no reason. Eg. Sum read in data slowly and then another method did something by reading in the data and called sum, thus reading the data again! It was about 30 times faster to just sum the data as it was being read from buffers. No parallel programming required.
On the other hand, I have also recently written a hard drive intensive program. The code had to be optimized to not run extremely slowly and the original approach was single threaded. Getting it to run in parallel required splitting up one huge method into several neater and more manageable methods (I had to split single threaded/multiple threaded parts). The overall code turned out much nicer and more efficient in the end.
This is another case of one guy generalizing some statement (threads make your program needlessly complex) and another guy generalizing the opposite (threads make your program simpler). In reality, the best answer is probably case dependent.
I think that what makes this news is the pictures and the new science that can be conveyed with them. If you disregard this news as "old" and not read it critically, you might be missing out on some information.
There's also the fact that I hadn't actually heard of this before today. I'm sure a lot of other./ readers hadn't either (but probably won't admit to it after reading your post).
Disclosure - Fine. I do live under a rock. But it is a both practical and fashionable rock!
Am I right to assume that this research with adult stem cells is just good enough for faster experimentation, but not actually what is thought to be implemented at the end of the process? I mention this because I remember from biology classes that, as you grow older, information gets lost in the process of cell division (you lose the information for hair color, etc).
The idea I'm thinking of is the scientists would get cells from as early as possible in life (probably newly born babies) and storing them (freeze them), in case of medical problems down the track. These cells would be used because they would have more information in them and be less likely to lose the relevant information in the splicing process done by the scientists.
After this phase, they might even be able to manufacture the right tissue cells/etc without the stem cells.
That's the way I'm thinking after reading some basic articles, etc. Just wondering if that's the correct line of reasoning.
Then you disagree with both me and Orson Wells. War of the Worlds basically was making this statement. All the technology on earth couldn't save us, only the evolution of our immune system that we paid for with a lot of dying saved us.
Orson Welles book "War of the Worlds" is science fiction. Whilst I have not read it myself, I do realize that (science) fiction sometimes portrays problems on a vast scale, brought on, in some way, by human society. This can be an attempt to make people aware of the problems the future could hold and take preventative action so that they won't become reality.
I have no quarrel with Orson Welles, but I did (and still do) have a problem with accepting all of your seemingly over-the-top arguments in your GP post when I posted my earlier response.
I don't see the doom OR gloom in seeing that all of the dying and suffering man experiences serves a purpose and isn't for nothing.
It should go without saying that needless dying and suffering can never be justified.
You cannot seriously be arguing that humanity is doomed to be wiped out by some sort of super-virus (evolving faster because of the invention of antibiotics), and the suffering along the way serves some greater purpose???
You may not have meant it like that, but please do take the time to reread you post. That is the way it came across to me.
If some programmers are not receptive, they probably just need a bit of prodding (you explaining why your approach is better), or they are right not to try (if it is clearly not going to work well this way).
Remember that developers might like coding new stuff better than fixing old stuff. In my opinion, filing bug reports for enhancements might work better if you are on the same wavelength as the developer.
No, *real* scientists use natural units and measure temperature in eV - like everything else;)
Technically they can't do that at the moment because there are 13 or so separate fundamental constants of nature. Although, I suppose that won't stop some of them writing c = PI = 1, 1 = any identity (irregular matrix, tensor or otherwise), leaving off vector squiggles when there are 2 possibilities (you're supposed to know which one), and letting the reader keep track of this nonsense.
Just imagine what would happen if they finally unify all the forces and connect those now independent constants of nature after the CERN experiment... and the guy who did it had some ridiculous last name or came up with some ludicrous unit (continuing the tradition of strings, beauty quarks, p-branes, etc).
I can fully relate to wanting certain little things to be improved because of growing annoyance with them. I absolutely hated when I scrolled over the sound and it sometimes showed mute (even though it wasn't), etc.
However, GNOME is open source. If you really want stuff done find the appropriate developer and send a detailed (and nice) bug report.
Better yet, have a go at fixing something yourself. If you manage to do something and pop up on irc or whatever as a minor developer, people will take you seriously and they should fix easy bugs you are having very quickly (as you will have had exposure to the code and should know better what to include in the bug report).
PS - I am not a GNOME developer, but I have done minor other stuff.
...install KDE 4.1, which has proper configurability.
PPS - you really put your foot in your mouth with that comment there.
Most users are dumb. You can't change that in a significant way.
Maybe so.
...the word "dumb" which is synonymous with the word "user."
Here you are taking this too far though.
I know this site has lots of traffic from people in IT, but seriously, this is a stupid mentality to have.
While it may be technically fine to treat users as "dumb," when sentiment "evolves" like this it could be harmful to the productive capacity of a workplace.
No one likes to be called "dumb." The irony of this is that the smart people who are not good with computers (think older generations of physicists, for example) won't find this place to respond to these comments.
I think what's really missing is 3D input devices.
Nah. Mario plays just as well in 3D (with good camera angles) as in 2D.
It's probably just that the 3D software navigation sucks because of poor programming. It would be a moot point if software was actually able to actively move in on what you want to see from it (that's what it should have been designed to do, but never is) with minimal prodding from the user. A mouse + scroll wheel and some buttons should be more than sufficient to navigate in 3D.
Rotating a text box so you can see additional information on the side of it would be a nuisance and does not improve in any way upon having a button that shows the additional information.
This also applies to your obvious examples of where 3D is better than 2D, e.g. representations of animals and other real life objects. To make use of the additional information, you need a way to request the computer to show you that information. Since all our input devices are also 2D, telling it how we want it to position a 3D model is always a little bit awkward.
I was talking about spatial awareness and the use of geometry to make things easier for the user. Simple, brief 3D effects (if done correctly) might make it easier for a person to associate otherwise separate things on the screen. I, for example, find it much faster to click menu items that don't move around. This is an area that has been relatively unexplored by software engineers compared to the conventional interfaces (probably because of problems with resolution/CPU speed on older monitors/machines).
Tell that to the Compiz Fusion community, etc.
Am I missing something huge? I like Compiz, but it's hardly a 3D interface. The closest to "3D" is the "desktop cube" which hardly qualifies as being a 3D navigation task. It just looks cool.
Nothing will ever be "truly 3D" on a flat monitor. However, I believe this simple example does counter this quote from the GGP:
Studies have shown over and over again that people cannot solve even the most basic true 3D navigation tasks without substantial training.
PS - maybe I'm taking this a little too seriously. However, I really would like to see more software that ought to translate directly into code that can be used for holographic displays that there seems (to me anyway) to be no good reason can't be part of a standard desktop of the future.
The people who think this should read some books on user interfaces. This kind of 3D UI has been analyzed for decades...
Back up a bit. Super Mario Bros 64 (the first 3D platform game) came out in first about a decade ago. If it took the game industry that prides itself on being "ahead" so long to get around to 3D in any meaningful way, I seriously doubt anyone could have made anything worth analyzing "decades" ago for anything. Especially not a web interface.
- while the world s 3D, the display technology itself is 2D. Introducing 3D content in 2D automatically means some information will be occluded and needs to be found through navigation.
I would really like to see something like browser viewer for a molecule (that is inherently 3D) and its chemical interactions, pictures of animals from the web, movie scenes, basically anything other than text, done better on the whole in 2D than 3D.
Plus, what is to stop text from being rendered
in a way that the immediately relevant stuff is in front of you from the start? With 3D you can also use the back (or sides as well) of text boxes to display additional information (for example a log of events)
- humans suck at 3D navigation. While we live in a 3D world, we have evolved to move on a 2D surface. Studies have shown over and over again that people cannot solve even the most basic true 3D navigation tasks without substantial training.
Could be that applications have not yet been developed and people are always willing to make a sweeping analysis of something that has not had enough time to really show its virtues.
Damn it, I want my holodeck in the future. No one is going to remember how we got there (through many failed attempts, each attempt bringing something new though), if it does come around.
- 3D is a really poor use of your "screen realestate" (i.e. the number of pixels you have on your screen). In 2D, almost all of your pixels can be used to show important content, in 3D you are bound to have lots of your pixels (often way over 50%) show 3D context that does not contribute to communicating the content itself.
Again, a lot of 3D content (non-text) is probably "missing" from what you do at the moment with computers. This content is richer than 2D equivalents because it describes a lot of detail at once, where several 2D images would otherwise be necessary.
Also, 3D does include surfaces of 2D (for example a cube). What you are using in 2D can be thought of as just a 2D projection of an environment already "3D."
You can imagine reading the text from a book using different levels of zoom as well. Zoom out too much and you see the outline, zoom in to see the content. This is a "2D" thing, but should make it much easier to navigate (even when pixels become not as important as the geometry).
Sorry for picking apart your post like this. However, citing reference sources would be nice next time.
What learning tools are being shipped with WinXP on these laptops?
FTA:
Kids and their teachers in the country will use the laptops as part of efforts to introduce more technology into classrooms in Peru, including Microsoft's Student Innovation Suite of software, which includes Microsoft Office 2003 as well as Learning Essentials 1.0 for Microsoft Office.
Plus, there's also Clippy. It would indeed be a real shame if kids weren't exposed to this guy.
We left the evolutionary race with the invention of antibiotics... meanwhile bacteria has been evolving steadily
We haven't entered into any evolutionary race as far as I know and evolution has probably sped up with globalization.
Bacteria have been successful on the evolutionary scene as indicated by their large presence throughout history. This is not the same thing as saying that they need to destroy humans to exist though.
Since bacteria are small (with the exception of Thiomargarita namibiensis), they can be completely mapped. As I understand it, one form cannot survive in all pH conditions, heat conditions, etc. To survive they would have to physically merge and become larger structures which would have more potential to break down and a lesser reproductive rate.
Bacteria change "strains" all the time (based on a probability factor fro the environment), but only within these constraints that can be mapped out (there is however an argument that many bacteria once formed our early mitochondria cells).
Until man can create a faster and more reactive system than the human immune system to combat infections, the bacteria will eventually win.
Bacteria is a part of us already and our lives, and without "good bacteria" we would die. Removing nearly all of it (even just the "bad bacteria") from our environment could be potentially very bad. The effects on things like asthma and such are still unknown.
Trying to stay ahead of microorganisms is a war that will get increasingly expensive and difficult for us, and will cost infectious strains nothing to wage forever. And the second we slip or fall behind, it's going to be disastrous for any of us who now share unfit genes.
I think that history has shown us that anything that tries to go against humans more often than not comes out second best. If I had to bet, my money would be on human ingenuity. The outstanding adversities are most likely conquerable and it is probably just a matter of time.
PS - I am not a biologist. I just remembered some stuff from high school biology and looked up some references on Wikipedia.
If anything, I would like to see Linux marketing towards the unwashed masses decline. Fewer idiots using Linux means less dumbing down, less time spent by the developers explaining basic usage, and more time actually improving the product. The end result then becomes better for those who don't need their hand held.
I agree. More software ought to follow in the footsteps of KDE 4.0. This way developers could develop for the sake of developing software. And, because they wouldn't have to worry about things like users actually using their products, they wouldn't have so many of those annoying bug reports.
(PS: I'm an accelerator physicist who has worked with several of these machines.)
no your not. If you were, you would have provided more facts to prove your story, and you wouldn't have posted 'alomst' the same post twice. you're a toll, and you've never seen an accelerator except on websites.... just like the rest of us.
As a student in physics myself (believe it or not I suppose) I'd like to point out that, when studying quantum mechanics and particle physics, the lecturers frequently made spelling mistakes and pronunciation errors. This is likely due to the fact that English is a second language for some of these people and this did not impair their ability to write equations.
Some physicists plainly have disdain for learning how to efficiently operate a computer. Terribly programmed scripts are the norm. It seems to me hardly likely to get many computer science facts from a physicist beyond the basics (as they specialize in what they are good at after all - physics).
However, I'd like to think that CERN - the place where Tim Bernard Lee and co. laid the foundations for HTML - has perfectly capable computer science people to write efficient safeguards into their system.
You, parent poster, on the other hand, I do not think can be trusted to evaluate whether or not the GP poster is actually an accelerator physicist (as claimed) based on the incorrect spelling of "alomst" and a few facts. Indeed you first sentence has two grammatical mistakes (it should be "No you're not"). Plus, you're conviction is trollworthy.
PS - for the record, I am not sure whether the GP poster is actually an accelerator physicist. I believe all information on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt.
Everywhere is the place where you learn to deal nicely with incompetent people. A university even more so because the things you do there are usually less critical than in "real-life".
It sounds like he was dealing nicely with the IT goons... I mean administrators. Are you sure you have RTFA?
The breach allowed access to the Campus Cards that students use as debit cards for campus purchases, including photocopiers, food kiosks and the bookstore.
With the information, the hacker could also have accessed e-mails, course registrations, library records and personal financial information about loans and scholarships.
I think the rude way would have been to steal money of other people's cards, set all the photocopiers to continually print random insults about the IT admins using their own accounts, order heaps of food, buy out all the books in the bookstore, and sign up all the admins to a variety of inappropriate websites using their accounts.
It's hard to imagine how he could have been nicer than sending that 16-page paper detailing how he breached the university's security.
Slashdot Mirror
Show the last character as is, not hidden, but then change it visually to a * after hitting the next char.
So it would appear as.
A *P **P ***L ****E
This solves the 'am I typing it correct' vs dont show the password on screen.
Trust a ./er to solve the non-obvious problem first (a program taking screenshots of you computer at some time interval).
What about someone looking over your shoulder as you type though? You can't have this on by default if you are in an open space (i.e. not in a basement), can you?
PS - I just have a file on my hard drive with my WPA key (add extra lines for confusion as well), copy and paste the relevant stuff, and that's that. I used to have my password set up in a file (root permissions) using ndiswrapper and wpasupplicant. This was better from a usability perspective as it had network access before logging in and, therefore, also in recovery console.
Discomfort... a feature!? You must have been conned by some pretty clever marketing here.
This is akin to the bug trackers that list enhancements as bugs to be avoided.
that the faster an object is moving the more massive it is. Now if it's the size of jupiter and it is orbiting its sun in only 4 hours then even if it were really close to the sun it would still be moving really really quickly.
If this were the case, you would probably have very severe tidal motions of the layers on Jupiter. The increased friction would probably cause the planet to slow down if it were close to the sun.
Although unnecessary, threading usually simplifies a program rather than adding complexity. The only caveat is that you understand threading. In my experience I've used threading to greatly reduce the size and complexity of solutions that either were or could have been implemented without them.
I only partially agree with that assertion.
I an assignment (university level) I was asked to write a multi-threaded statistics program. The IO routine provided was extremely poor for reading in large volumes of data that was expected and it was read in several times for no reason. Eg. Sum read in data slowly and then another method did something by reading in the data and called sum, thus reading the data again! It was about 30 times faster to just sum the data as it was being read from buffers. No parallel programming required.
On the other hand, I have also recently written a hard drive intensive program. The code had to be optimized to not run extremely slowly and the original approach was single threaded. Getting it to run in parallel required splitting up one huge method into several neater and more manageable methods (I had to split single threaded/multiple threaded parts). The overall code turned out much nicer and more efficient in the end.
This is another case of one guy generalizing some statement (threads make your program needlessly complex) and another guy generalizing the opposite (threads make your program simpler). In reality, the best answer is probably case dependent.
I think that what makes this news is the pictures and the new science that can be conveyed with them. If you disregard this news as "old" and not read it critically, you might be missing out on some information.
There's also the fact that I hadn't actually heard of this before today. I'm sure a lot of other ./ readers hadn't either (but probably won't admit to it after reading your post).
Disclosure - Fine. I do live under a rock. But it is a both practical and fashionable rock!
I hope you're being sarcastic...The earth is accepted by scientists to be 4.5 billion years old.
Sorry for being picky, but I think you meant to say 4.5 plus-or-minus 0.1 billion years old.
See, 6000 years is an okay estimate if there is an error bar of 4.6 billion years.
Am I right to assume that this research with adult stem cells is just good enough for faster experimentation, but not actually what is thought to be implemented at the end of the process? I mention this because I remember from biology classes that, as you grow older, information gets lost in the process of cell division (you lose the information for hair color, etc).
The idea I'm thinking of is the scientists would get cells from as early as possible in life (probably newly born babies) and storing them (freeze them), in case of medical problems down the track. These cells would be used because they would have more information in them and be less likely to lose the relevant information in the splicing process done by the scientists.
After this phase, they might even be able to manufacture the right tissue cells/etc without the stem cells.
That's the way I'm thinking after reading some basic articles, etc. Just wondering if that's the correct line of reasoning.
Isn't it inaccurate to say "World's oldest rocks found"?
It does say 'oldest rocks' in quotation marks in the article's title.
Since this is not a technical article and rocks/minerals look pretty much the same to me, I was however confused to see this quote in the FTA:
The only things known to be older are mineral grains called zircons from Western Australia, which date back 4.36 billion years.
Then you disagree with both me and Orson Wells. War of the Worlds basically was making this statement. All the technology on earth couldn't save us, only the evolution of our immune system that we paid for with a lot of dying saved us.
Orson Welles book "War of the Worlds" is science fiction. Whilst I have not read it myself, I do realize that (science) fiction sometimes portrays problems on a vast scale, brought on, in some way, by human society. This can be an attempt to make people aware of the problems the future could hold and take preventative action so that they won't become reality.
I have no quarrel with Orson Welles, but I did (and still do) have a problem with accepting all of your seemingly over-the-top arguments in your GP post when I posted my earlier response.
I don't see the doom OR gloom in seeing that all of the dying and suffering man experiences serves a purpose and isn't for nothing.
It should go without saying that needless dying and suffering can never be justified.
You cannot seriously be arguing that humanity is doomed to be wiped out by some sort of super-virus (evolving faster because of the invention of antibiotics), and the suffering along the way serves some greater purpose???
You may not have meant it like that, but please do take the time to reread you post. That is the way it came across to me.
Better would be some tool for translating some of those comments at the end of the article into coherent, well written remarks or arguments.
I mean, just because you're still adding features to it, doesn't mean that it has to be called beta, does it?
Actually, there's a simple solution to this.
So, how will they respond to a bug report on fixing the screensaver configuration?
Case in point. Read down a bit to here.
If some programmers are not receptive, they probably just need a bit of prodding (you explaining why your approach is better), or they are right not to try (if it is clearly not going to work well this way).
Remember that developers might like coding new stuff better than fixing old stuff. In my opinion, filing bug reports for enhancements might work better if you are on the same wavelength as the developer.
No, *real* scientists use natural units and measure temperature in eV - like everything else ;)
Technically they can't do that at the moment because there are 13 or so separate fundamental constants of nature. Although, I suppose that won't stop some of them writing c = PI = 1, 1 = any identity (irregular matrix, tensor or otherwise), leaving off vector squiggles when there are 2 possibilities (you're supposed to know which one), and letting the reader keep track of this nonsense.
Just imagine what would happen if they finally unify all the forces and connect those now independent constants of nature after the CERN experiment... and the guy who did it had some ridiculous last name or came up with some ludicrous unit (continuing the tradition of strings, beauty quarks, p-branes, etc).
You shouldn't use such over-the-top language.
I can fully relate to wanting certain little things to be improved because of growing annoyance with them. I absolutely hated when I scrolled over the sound and it sometimes showed mute (even though it wasn't), etc.
However, GNOME is open source. If you really want stuff done find the appropriate developer and send a detailed (and nice) bug report.
Better yet, have a go at fixing something yourself. If you manage to do something and pop up on irc or whatever as a minor developer, people will take you seriously and they should fix easy bugs you are having very quickly (as you will have had exposure to the code and should know better what to include in the bug report).
PS - I am not a GNOME developer, but I have done minor other stuff.
...install KDE 4.1, which has proper configurability.
PPS - you really put your foot in your mouth with that comment there.
Most users are dumb. You can't change that in a significant way.
Maybe so.
...the word "dumb" which is synonymous with the word "user."
Here you are taking this too far though.
I know this site has lots of traffic from people in IT, but seriously, this is a stupid mentality to have.
While it may be technically fine to treat users as "dumb," when sentiment "evolves" like this it could be harmful to the productive capacity of a workplace.
No one likes to be called "dumb." The irony of this is that the smart people who are not good with computers (think older generations of physicists, for example) won't find this place to respond to these comments.
Car Analogy : I got in my car and drove to work - which make of car was it : I don't know, and don't care, it got me here anyway....
You can drive your foot powered bumper car to work if you must.
Why can't Mozilla just put the EULA in the help->about as a box or something, like in WINE.
I think what's really missing is 3D input devices.
Nah. Mario plays just as well in 3D (with good camera angles) as in 2D.
It's probably just that the 3D software navigation sucks because of poor programming. It would be a moot point if software was actually able to actively move in on what you want to see from it (that's what it should have been designed to do, but never is) with minimal prodding from the user. A mouse + scroll wheel and some buttons should be more than sufficient to navigate in 3D.
Rotating a text box so you can see additional information on the side of it would be a nuisance and does not improve in any way upon having a button that shows the additional information.
This also applies to your obvious examples of where 3D is better than 2D, e.g. representations of animals and other real life objects. To make use of the additional information, you need a way to request the computer to show you that information. Since all our input devices are also 2D, telling it how we want it to position a 3D model is always a little bit awkward.
I was talking about spatial awareness and the use of geometry to make things easier for the user. Simple, brief 3D effects (if done correctly) might make it easier for a person to associate otherwise separate things on the screen. I, for example, find it much faster to click menu items that don't move around. This is an area that has been relatively unexplored by software engineers compared to the conventional interfaces (probably because of problems with resolution/CPU speed on older monitors/machines).
Tell that to the Compiz Fusion community, etc.
Am I missing something huge? I like Compiz, but it's hardly a 3D interface. The closest to "3D" is the "desktop cube" which hardly qualifies as being a 3D navigation task. It just looks cool.
Nothing will ever be "truly 3D" on a flat monitor. However, I believe this simple example does counter this quote from the GGP:
Studies have shown over and over again that people cannot solve even the most basic true 3D navigation tasks without substantial training.
PS - maybe I'm taking this a little too seriously. However, I really would like to see more software that ought to translate directly into code that can be used for holographic displays that there seems (to me anyway) to be no good reason can't be part of a standard desktop of the future.
The people who think this should read some books on user interfaces. This kind of 3D UI has been analyzed for decades...
Back up a bit. Super Mario Bros 64 (the first 3D platform game) came out in first about a decade ago. If it took the game industry that prides itself on being "ahead" so long to get around to 3D in any meaningful way, I seriously doubt anyone could have made anything worth analyzing "decades" ago for anything. Especially not a web interface.
- while the world s 3D, the display technology itself is 2D. Introducing 3D content in 2D automatically means some information will be occluded and needs to be found through navigation.
I would really like to see something like browser viewer for a molecule (that is inherently 3D) and its chemical interactions, pictures of animals from the web, movie scenes, basically anything other than text, done better on the whole in 2D than 3D.
Plus, what is to stop text from being rendered in a way that the immediately relevant stuff is in front of you from the start? With 3D you can also use the back (or sides as well) of text boxes to display additional information (for example a log of events)
- humans suck at 3D navigation. While we live in a 3D world, we have evolved to move on a 2D surface. Studies have shown over and over again that people cannot solve even the most basic true 3D navigation tasks without substantial training.
Tell that to the Compiz Fusion community, etc.
Could be that applications have not yet been developed and people are always willing to make a sweeping analysis of something that has not had enough time to really show its virtues.
Damn it, I want my holodeck in the future. No one is going to remember how we got there (through many failed attempts, each attempt bringing something new though), if it does come around.
- 3D is a really poor use of your "screen realestate" (i.e. the number of pixels you have on your screen). In 2D, almost all of your pixels can be used to show important content, in 3D you are bound to have lots of your pixels (often way over 50%) show 3D context that does not contribute to communicating the content itself.
Again, a lot of 3D content (non-text) is probably "missing" from what you do at the moment with computers. This content is richer than 2D equivalents because it describes a lot of detail at once, where several 2D images would otherwise be necessary.
Also, 3D does include surfaces of 2D (for example a cube). What you are using in 2D can be thought of as just a 2D projection of an environment already "3D."
You can imagine reading the text from a book using different levels of zoom as well. Zoom out too much and you see the outline, zoom in to see the content. This is a "2D" thing, but should make it much easier to navigate (even when pixels become not as important as the geometry).
Sorry for picking apart your post like this. However, citing reference sources would be nice next time.
What learning tools are being shipped with WinXP on these laptops?
FTA:
Kids and their teachers in the country will use the laptops as part of efforts to introduce more technology into classrooms in Peru, including Microsoft's Student Innovation Suite of software, which includes Microsoft Office 2003 as well as Learning Essentials 1.0 for Microsoft Office.
Plus, there's also Clippy. It would indeed be a real shame if kids weren't exposed to this guy.
Too much doom and gloom in your post I think.
We left the evolutionary race with the invention of antibiotics... meanwhile bacteria has been evolving steadily
We haven't entered into any evolutionary race as far as I know and evolution has probably sped up with globalization.
Bacteria have been successful on the evolutionary scene as indicated by their large presence throughout history. This is not the same thing as saying that they need to destroy humans to exist though.
Since bacteria are small (with the exception of Thiomargarita namibiensis), they can be completely mapped. As I understand it, one form cannot survive in all pH conditions, heat conditions, etc. To survive they would have to physically merge and become larger structures which would have more potential to break down and a lesser reproductive rate.
Bacteria change "strains" all the time (based on a probability factor fro the environment), but only within these constraints that can be mapped out (there is however an argument that many bacteria once formed our early mitochondria cells).
Until man can create a faster and more reactive system than the human immune system to combat infections, the bacteria will eventually win.
Bacteria is a part of us already and our lives, and without "good bacteria" we would die. Removing nearly all of it (even just the "bad bacteria") from our environment could be potentially very bad. The effects on things like asthma and such are still unknown.
Trying to stay ahead of microorganisms is a war that will get increasingly expensive and difficult for us, and will cost infectious strains nothing to wage forever. And the second we slip or fall behind, it's going to be disastrous for any of us who now share unfit genes.
I think that history has shown us that anything that tries to go against humans more often than not comes out second best. If I had to bet, my money would be on human ingenuity. The outstanding adversities are most likely conquerable and it is probably just a matter of time.
PS - I am not a biologist. I just remembered some stuff from high school biology and looked up some references on Wikipedia.
If anything, I would like to see Linux marketing towards the unwashed masses decline. Fewer idiots using Linux means less dumbing down, less time spent by the developers explaining basic usage, and more time actually improving the product. The end result then becomes better for those who don't need their hand held.
I agree. More software ought to follow in the footsteps of KDE 4.0. This way developers could develop for the sake of developing software. And, because they wouldn't have to worry about things like users actually using their products, they wouldn't have so many of those annoying bug reports.
(PS: I'm an accelerator physicist who has worked with several of these machines.)
no your not. If you were, you would have provided more facts to prove your story, and you wouldn't have posted 'alomst' the same post twice. you're a toll, and you've never seen an accelerator except on websites.... just like the rest of us.
As a student in physics myself (believe it or not I suppose) I'd like to point out that, when studying quantum mechanics and particle physics, the lecturers frequently made spelling mistakes and pronunciation errors. This is likely due to the fact that English is a second language for some of these people and this did not impair their ability to write equations.
Some physicists plainly have disdain for learning how to efficiently operate a computer. Terribly programmed scripts are the norm. It seems to me hardly likely to get many computer science facts from a physicist beyond the basics (as they specialize in what they are good at after all - physics).
However, I'd like to think that CERN - the place where Tim Bernard Lee and co. laid the foundations for HTML - has perfectly capable computer science people to write efficient safeguards into their system.
You, parent poster, on the other hand, I do not think can be trusted to evaluate whether or not the GP poster is actually an accelerator physicist (as claimed) based on the incorrect spelling of "alomst" and a few facts. Indeed you first sentence has two grammatical mistakes (it should be "No you're not"). Plus, you're conviction is trollworthy.
PS - for the record, I am not sure whether the GP poster is actually an accelerator physicist. I believe all information on the internet should be taken with a grain of salt.
Another way to look at that is 6/10ths of a Comcast Monthly Cap per second.
Actually, I think you'll find that it's actually 3/5ths of a Comcast Monthly Cap per second.
Everywhere is the place where you learn to deal nicely with incompetent people. A university even more so because the things you do there are usually less critical than in "real-life".
It sounds like he was dealing nicely with the IT goons... I mean administrators. Are you sure you have RTFA?
The breach allowed access to the Campus Cards that students use as debit cards for campus purchases, including photocopiers, food kiosks and the bookstore.
With the information, the hacker could also have accessed e-mails, course registrations, library records and personal financial information about loans and scholarships.
I think the rude way would have been to steal money of other people's cards, set all the photocopiers to continually print random insults about the IT admins using their own accounts, order heaps of food, buy out all the books in the bookstore, and sign up all the admins to a variety of inappropriate websites using their accounts.
It's hard to imagine how he could have been nicer than sending that 16-page paper detailing how he breached the university's security.