It's not really that much slower... You can still press the first letter of the menu or menu item to select it. The only difference is that if there are two items with the same letter, you have to either press that first letter multiple times, or type the subsequent characters of the name.
It actually works exactly like the list-related controls in the rest of the OS.
OTOH, the next of kin should not be in the picture here. These are works that should be in the public domain now for a variety of reasons. The worthless relatives should not have the ability to interfere with any of the greedy schmucks.
I agree with you for the most part, but I would note that Christopher Tolkien has been instrumental in editing and releasing huge amounts of his father's unreleased material. He appears to have both a geniune love for the material and a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of even the most esoteric Tolkien works (of which there is probably more raw material than LOTR and the Hobbit combined).
For example, the Silmarillion (which covers much of the backstory that is only implied during LOTR) would probably not have been able to be released without the extensive editing and reorganization that Christopher performed.
Given that LOTR and the Hobbit are part of an extremely vast mythology that is hugely important in explaining the details of those stories, I can't say that he shouldn't have some claim and control of his father's material.
Remember "Beast with a Billion Backs"? OK, now that I've jogged your memory have the suppressed images come back to mind? That film reset every major character relationship in the entire show. Yet another reason it sucked, in addition to being a really transparent author tract on polyamory.
I started responding and this got long, so, apologies in advance....
I don't think it's fair to say it reset any relationships. Amy has always been promiscuous and easily manipulated, but as far as we know has been completely faithful to Kif, and did think he was permanently dead. Despite Kif's anger over her affair with Zapp, by 'Green Yonder' it was clear that he wanted her back, and the ending set us up to believe they are together again.
As for Fry and Leela, there are constant scenarios throughout the continuity where it seemed obvious they cared for each other and wanted to be together, but one or the other pursued another relationship instead. Think of "The Sting" or "Devil's Hands", where we're taken out on very poignant examples of how close they are, only to be followed by "Bender's Score" when Leela has no compunctions about going after 'Lars'.
That same fickleness about relationships (you know, like what happens all the time in real life) have been going on throughout the series, which is why they're in a dangerous position now. The Fry/Leela dynamic is easily one of the most significant focus points of the show, which is why I'm afraid the authors will be compelled to escalate their relationship, which could easily be disastrous.
I enjoyed all the movies a great deal, so I can't agree with you about "Beast" sucking, but I think the writers' intent was to cover both sides of the issues of polyamory and promiscuity. Depending on your perspective, you could read it both ways. Obviously one perspective is to see how happy Universe Gamma was and assume it was a pro-polyamory (or anti-jealousy) piece.
Myself, at no point did I perceive Yeebo as anything but an antagonist, and assumed Bender's demonic army plans were meant to give him the Anti-Hero attitude that he does so well. I thought his closing statement of, "There is no great love without great jealousy!" caps everything off and reverts the continuity appropriately, as long as you were prepared to assume that human happiness is *NOT* always the highest goal.
I would think so. That was the whole point of that ending, to give them either a final conclusion (the crew is dead, or basically gone from our universe), or an easy way to back out of that conclusion.
Remember, they went through a wormhole earlier in the plot (the final hole of the golf course), and it only took them a "short" distance away, so they can pretty much pop up anywhere and go back to business as usual. There's no need (as someone else mentioned above) to 'reboot', or have them in a different universe, or anything like that.
</spoilers>
One of the best things about Futurama is the characterization of the universe in the future. Basically anything can happen anytime anywhere, so there's never any need to use major plot devices to 'reboot' the plot.
OTOH, Futurama, unlike the Simpsons, is far more willing to make major continuity events, like the Fry and Leela situation. I'll be interested to see how they handle that; I'm embarrassed to say I knew enough about the show Friends that I wouldn't want to see the "Ross and Rachel" debacle take place on Futurama.
hmm, so instead you focused on a detail of the GP's comment to the extent that you took the time to translate (or find/paste the translation of) the text, despite the fact that the actual meaning of said text was clearly not required.
One distinction I would like to point out is that ASCAP is *not* like the RIAA -- ASCAP actually pays the artists they represent when they force someone to pay up for licensing purposes.
I don't agree with their stance on this particular issue, or their attempts to charge people who are playing radio (stations that have already paid the ASCAP fees).
But it's an important distinction that they are actually defending the rights of artists, even if those rights are overblown. It's a far cry from the RIAA who will never be handing down a penny of the handful of successful lawsuits they've filed.
The reality of the situation is that there is basically no such thing as a Composers' Union in the US, so ASCAP/BMI association is the only way a composer or songwriter can get reimbursed for the use of their works on an international level.
I got an idea, how's about we ask someone about to die from it what it should be called? Maybe they might give us some perspective about whether the name is worth arguing about.
Agreed. Then we can ask the friends and relatives of the 30,000 people who died from the "regular" flu last year.
This is a serious outbreak, but the reporting is needlessly sensational. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to make light of something that is being blown completely out of proportion.
I didn't know this, but it only makes me more angry. The places that have Cablevision are the places that I would never live, either because of crime issues, or huge distance from Manhattan (where I work). Yeah, it's a lot of Brooklyn....
I don't have any hard data for you, but I recently moved from Yonkers, NY to Brooklyn, NY and had to give up Cablevision for Time Warner.
With Cablevision, I could regularly pull down 5-7 MBytes/sec down and had at least 250 Kbytes/sec up. It was paradise!
Of course, now that I have time warner, my max upstream is a whopping 60 Kbytes/sec, and my downstream never goes above 1 Mbyte/sec.
Granted, Yonkers is only about a tenth of the size of Brooklyn population-wise, but everyone else I knew in Westchester county (about half the size of Brooklyn) got similar speeds from Cablevision.
I doubt that CV customers will see a true 100 mbit connection, but my experiences in a densely populated area lead me to believe they will get fairly close to delivering on this promise...
...but what a difference 3 years makes when the current kernel has been basically synced to the MS upgrade cycle...
I don't think it's fair to claim the kernel is synced to the MS upgrade cycle -- the kernel is not the problem, it's the desktop environments and the distros that feature them that are chasing the OSX/MS "bells and whistles".
I've never felt compelled to post a "why is this on/." comment, but this review pushed me over the edge.
This was by far the least informative review I've ever seen posted here, and it's a close contender for the most poorly written one.
First there's the fact that the reviewer's greatest criticism was that the author failed to discuss whitespace usage -- in a non-whitespace-sensitive language no less. The reviewer mentions that many books assume expertise with PHP or another scripting language, I wonder what exactly this reviewer's background is to be so concerned with such a detail.
Next, we've got the constant usage of 'n00b'. Okay, using 'n00b' might be funny or quirky if you use it once, but the rest of the time, let's try for a modicum of professionalism. I've may have never written in Ruby before, but it's a gross understatement to refer to me as a 'n00b'.
The rest of the review reads like it was written by someone's 14-year-old cousin. I'm not looking for Chaucer here, but nearly every paragraph reads like an itemized list of loosely related topics. On top of that, five of the first six paragraphs could be describing basically *any* programming book: "The book is split into chapters that each cover a topic. Sample code is provided. Sometimes it's fully explained. Sometimes it's not. The book assumes you know some things already, but don't know other things."
Like I said, it's honestly not my habit to complain about free stuff, and I know the pointlessness of asking for greater editorial oversight from the/. staff. I would just like to suggest to anyone that's thinking about writing a technical book review to learn from these mistakes, or at least make an effort to study other tech reviews as guides to style and content.
Of course. From the time the article is published until the point in time that you read the article, this man is juxtaposed between the state of BEING Spiderman, and the state of NOT BEING Spiderman.
This is an excellent a thought experiment that illustrates the problems with the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Commenting.
True, but you *can* take honor and use it to get additional credit. If you are able to pay your bills in full and on time, you will still have far more economic flexibility than the bailed out homeowners who, despite avoiding foreclosure, still have a record of months of non- or late-payments.
Or, you know, another 2-3 torrent sites will appear to fill the void within 7-10 days, and the circle of life continues.
The problem with the oft-proposed solutions of distributed trackers or trust-based sharing is that in addition to making it more difficult for the media empires, it does the same for regular people.
The *AA are gaining assets and funding all the time, and any attempt to make it more difficult for them to infiltrate a segment of the sharing community is far more likely to present a problem for "honest" users than for the gestapo.
The current response to these shutdowns is bothersome for a few days, but it closely mirrors the response of the Internet at large when resources are preempted.
What I ended up doing for various webapps (PHP and Python, although Python's port of Lucene actually loads the Java runtime, and is fairly fast) is create a simple local server that a PHP script can communicate with over sockets and a trivial protocol.
This is fairly straightforward for me since most of the time I just want Lucene to return a list of document IDs. I use those IDs to create a temp table that I can do additional queries against in SQL.
Running it as a separate server allows me to use the original Java codebase (which make updating the library easy), and also avoid the overhead of loading/instantiating Lucene from PHP on every request.
I would be interested to see an example of Python code where a change to whitespace causes two identical-looking pieces of code to do two different things.
The only issues that *ever* come up in such a scenario is a SyntaxError, and pretty much the only reason they ever happen en masse is due to indiscriminate copy-and-paste coding.
Syntax errors can barely even be called bugs, and in any significant project the amount of time you're going to spend dealing with them is easily dwarfed by the *real* bugs that are a natural part of the development process.
If developers are spending a truly inordinate amount of time on whitespace issues, it can only be due to lack of discretion and attention to detail, which I would be willing to wager is increasing the number of "real" bugs emerging as well.
I instinctively agreed with you are first, but then I got thinking.
How is having a screen flat on the desk any different than the work situation for someone who works at a desk where the computer isn't their primary work interface?
Accountants, architects, anyone who deals with large amounts of books or historical ledgers, or even just regular paperwork. These jobs had worked for years at completely flat or slightly inclined surfaces. Granted, many of the typical versions of these jobs are now computer-bound, but I'm sure you can think of several other examples...
Why would a slightly inclined touch-screen be so bad as a primary work surface? I imagine it's just a matter of setting up the right ergonomics, and we've got a huge industry already devoted to solving those kind of problems...
There's no gun to your head to pay taxes, just a financial threat (yeah, you can go to jail for tax evasion, but only because you can't afford to pay the taxes you owe).
If Apple didn't support DRM in iTunes, few if any of the labels would have signed on at the time. Even now, it's clear that the majors continue to believe it's a requirement, and would quite possibly not sell their music through iTunes, thus impacting Apple's bottom line.
This comes as no surprise to me. I work for a small record label that provides a streaming audio service to about 150 colleges and institutions. Many of our clients like to have information about our content stored in their institutional catalog/OPAC.
The thing is, these catalog systems pretty much only accept MARC-formatted records. The MARC format is kind of obscure, and it's nothing we want to generate ourselves, so we provide CSV data to OCLC and they convert it to MARC format for us.
The amazing part of the racket they're running is that we have to *pay* OCLC to make these records for us, and then they turn around and require *another* payment from anyone who wants to use the records.
We aren't even entitled to our own copy of the data they've converted for us. Presumably, if we wanted it, we'd have to purchase it from the people we gave it to in the first place. It's needless to say, but we also don't see any kind of profit sharing from OCLC when 150 libraries each purchase thousands of these records.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not really that much slower... You can still press the first letter of the menu or menu item to select it. The only difference is that if there are two items with the same letter, you have to either press that first letter multiple times, or type the subsequent characters of the name.
It actually works exactly like the list-related controls in the rest of the OS.
OTOH, the next of kin should not be in the picture here. These are works
that should be in the public domain now for a variety of reasons. The
worthless relatives should not have the ability to interfere with any of
the greedy schmucks.
I agree with you for the most part, but I would note that Christopher Tolkien has been instrumental in editing and releasing huge amounts of his father's unreleased material. He appears to have both a geniune love for the material and a fairly encyclopedic knowledge of even the most esoteric Tolkien works (of which there is probably more raw material than LOTR and the Hobbit combined).
For example, the Silmarillion (which covers much of the backstory that is only implied during LOTR) would probably not have been able to be released without the extensive editing and reorganization that Christopher performed.
Given that LOTR and the Hobbit are part of an extremely vast mythology that is hugely important in explaining the details of those stories, I can't say that he shouldn't have some claim and control of his father's material.
er, "Yivo", of course
Remember "Beast with a Billion Backs"? OK, now that I've jogged your memory have the suppressed images come back to mind? That film reset every major character relationship in the entire show. Yet another reason it sucked, in addition to being a really transparent author tract on polyamory.
I started responding and this got long, so, apologies in advance....
I don't think it's fair to say it reset any relationships. Amy has always been promiscuous and easily manipulated, but as far as we know has been completely faithful to Kif, and did think he was permanently dead. Despite Kif's anger over her affair with Zapp, by 'Green Yonder' it was clear that he wanted her back, and the ending set us up to believe they are together again.
As for Fry and Leela, there are constant scenarios throughout the continuity where it seemed obvious they cared for each other and wanted to be together, but one or the other pursued another relationship instead. Think of "The Sting" or "Devil's Hands", where we're taken out on very poignant examples of how close they are, only to be followed by "Bender's Score" when Leela has no compunctions about going after 'Lars'.
That same fickleness about relationships (you know, like what happens all the time in real life) have been going on throughout the series, which is why they're in a dangerous position now. The Fry/Leela dynamic is easily one of the most significant focus points of the show, which is why I'm afraid the authors will be compelled to escalate their relationship, which could easily be disastrous.
I enjoyed all the movies a great deal, so I can't agree with you about "Beast" sucking, but I think the writers' intent was to cover both sides of the issues of polyamory and promiscuity. Depending on your perspective, you could read it both ways. Obviously one perspective is to see how happy Universe Gamma was and assume it was a pro-polyamory (or anti-jealousy) piece.
Myself, at no point did I perceive Yeebo as anything but an antagonist, and assumed Bender's demonic army plans were meant to give him the Anti-Hero attitude that he does so well. I thought his closing statement of, "There is no great love without great jealousy!" caps everything off and reverts the continuity appropriately, as long as you were prepared to assume that human happiness is *NOT* always the highest goal.
<spoilers>
I would think so. That was the whole point of that ending, to give them either a final conclusion (the crew is dead, or basically gone from our universe), or an easy way to back out of that conclusion.
Remember, they went through a wormhole earlier in the plot (the final hole of the golf course), and it only took them a "short" distance away, so they can pretty much pop up anywhere and go back to business as usual. There's no need (as someone else mentioned above) to 'reboot', or have them in a different universe, or anything like that.
</spoilers>
One of the best things about Futurama is the characterization of the universe in the future. Basically anything can happen anytime anywhere, so there's never any need to use major plot devices to 'reboot' the plot.
OTOH, Futurama, unlike the Simpsons, is far more willing to make major continuity events, like the Fry and Leela situation. I'll be interested to see how they handle that; I'm embarrassed to say I knew enough about the show Friends that I wouldn't want to see the "Ross and Rachel" debacle take place on Futurama.
[snip latin translation]
What was that about my attention span?
hmm, so instead you focused on a detail of the GP's comment to the extent that you took the time to translate (or find/paste the translation of) the text, despite the fact that the actual meaning of said text was clearly not required.
clearly a network admin ;-)
One distinction I would like to point out is that ASCAP is *not* like the RIAA -- ASCAP actually pays the artists they represent when they force someone to pay up for licensing purposes.
I don't agree with their stance on this particular issue, or their attempts to charge people who are playing radio (stations that have already paid the ASCAP fees).
But it's an important distinction that they are actually defending the rights of artists, even if those rights are overblown. It's a far cry from the RIAA who will never be handing down a penny of the handful of successful lawsuits they've filed.
The reality of the situation is that there is basically no such thing as a Composers' Union in the US, so ASCAP/BMI association is the only way a composer or songwriter can get reimbursed for the use of their works on an international level.
hi, welcome to the club. we have juice and cookies on tuesdays.
- star wars fan
I got an idea, how's about we ask someone about to die from it what it should be called? Maybe they might give us some perspective about whether the name is worth arguing about.
Agreed. Then we can ask the friends and relatives of the 30,000 people who died from the "regular" flu last year.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/HEALTH/04/28/regular.flu/?iref=mpstoryview
This is a serious outbreak, but the reporting is needlessly sensational. I don't think it's unreasonable for people to make light of something that is being blown completely out of proportion.
I didn't know this, but it only makes me more angry. The places that have Cablevision are the places that I would never live, either because of crime issues, or huge distance from Manhattan (where I work). Yeah, it's a lot of Brooklyn....
I don't have any hard data for you, but I recently moved from Yonkers, NY to Brooklyn, NY and had to give up Cablevision for Time Warner.
With Cablevision, I could regularly pull down 5-7 MBytes/sec down and had at least 250 Kbytes/sec up. It was paradise!
Of course, now that I have time warner, my max upstream is a whopping 60 Kbytes/sec, and my downstream never goes above 1 Mbyte/sec.
Granted, Yonkers is only about a tenth of the size of Brooklyn population-wise, but everyone else I knew in Westchester county (about half the size of Brooklyn) got similar speeds from Cablevision.
I doubt that CV customers will see a true 100 mbit connection, but my experiences in a densely populated area lead me to believe they will get fairly close to delivering on this promise...
Seriously, thanks for that ;-)
...but what a difference 3 years makes when the current kernel has been basically synced to the MS upgrade cycle...
I don't think it's fair to claim the kernel is synced to the MS upgrade cycle -- the kernel is not the problem, it's the desktop environments and the distros that feature them that are chasing the OSX/MS "bells and whistles".
I've never felt compelled to post a "why is this on /." comment, but this review pushed me over the edge.
This was by far the least informative review I've ever seen posted here, and it's a close contender for the most poorly written one.
First there's the fact that the reviewer's greatest criticism was that the author failed to discuss whitespace usage -- in a non-whitespace-sensitive language no less. The reviewer mentions that many books assume expertise with PHP or another scripting language, I wonder what exactly this reviewer's background is to be so concerned with such a detail.
Next, we've got the constant usage of 'n00b'. Okay, using 'n00b' might be funny or quirky if you use it once, but the rest of the time, let's try for a modicum of professionalism. I've may have never written in Ruby before, but it's a gross understatement to refer to me as a 'n00b'.
The rest of the review reads like it was written by someone's 14-year-old cousin. I'm not looking for Chaucer here, but nearly every paragraph reads like an itemized list of loosely related topics. On top of that, five of the first six paragraphs could be describing basically *any* programming book: "The book is split into chapters that each cover a topic. Sample code is provided. Sometimes it's fully explained. Sometimes it's not. The book assumes you know some things already, but don't know other things."
Like I said, it's honestly not my habit to complain about free stuff, and I know the pointlessness of asking for greater editorial oversight from the /. staff. I would just like to suggest to anyone that's thinking about writing a technical book review to learn from these mistakes, or at least make an effort to study other tech reviews as guides to style and content.
Of course. From the time the article is published until the point in time that you read the article, this man is juxtaposed between the state of BEING Spiderman, and the state of NOT BEING Spiderman.
This is an excellent a thought experiment that illustrates the problems with the Copenhagen interpretation of Quantum Commenting.
True, but you *can* take honor and use it to get additional credit. If you are able to pay your bills in full and on time, you will still have far more economic flexibility than the bailed out homeowners who, despite avoiding foreclosure, still have a record of months of non- or late-payments.
Or, you know, another 2-3 torrent sites will appear to fill the void within 7-10 days, and the circle of life continues.
The problem with the oft-proposed solutions of distributed trackers or trust-based sharing is that in addition to making it more difficult for the media empires, it does the same for regular people.
The *AA are gaining assets and funding all the time, and any attempt to make it more difficult for them to infiltrate a segment of the sharing community is far more likely to present a problem for "honest" users than for the gestapo.
The current response to these shutdowns is bothersome for a few days, but it closely mirrors the response of the Internet at large when resources are preempted.
Our reader always works. You must have a counterfeit license.
Spread your legs and place your hands in the yellow circles, please.
I prefer the iReflect, which uses a particle-based medium. The resulting picture is quite a bit more danceable.
What I ended up doing for various webapps (PHP and Python, although Python's port of Lucene actually loads the Java runtime, and is fairly fast) is create a simple local server that a PHP script can communicate with over sockets and a trivial protocol.
This is fairly straightforward for me since most of the time I just want Lucene to return a list of document IDs. I use those IDs to create a temp table that I can do additional queries against in SQL.
Running it as a separate server allows me to use the original Java codebase (which make updating the library easy), and also avoid the overhead of loading/instantiating Lucene from PHP on every request.
...if Microsoft had published this kind of data on users downloading habits, this would have been published under YRO.
That's because if Microsoft tracked this information, they wouldn't have asked your permission to opt-in.
I would be interested to see an example of Python code where a change to whitespace causes two identical-looking pieces of code to do two different things.
The only issues that *ever* come up in such a scenario is a SyntaxError, and pretty much the only reason they ever happen en masse is due to indiscriminate copy-and-paste coding.
Syntax errors can barely even be called bugs, and in any significant project the amount of time you're going to spend dealing with them is easily dwarfed by the *real* bugs that are a natural part of the development process.
If developers are spending a truly inordinate amount of time on whitespace issues, it can only be due to lack of discretion and attention to detail, which I would be willing to wager is increasing the number of "real" bugs emerging as well.
I instinctively agreed with you are first, but then I got thinking.
How is having a screen flat on the desk any different than the work situation for someone who works at a desk where the computer isn't their primary work interface?
Accountants, architects, anyone who deals with large amounts of books or historical ledgers, or even just regular paperwork. These jobs had worked for years at completely flat or slightly inclined surfaces. Granted, many of the typical versions of these jobs are now computer-bound, but I'm sure you can think of several other examples...
Why would a slightly inclined touch-screen be so bad as a primary work surface? I imagine it's just a matter of setting up the right ergonomics, and we've got a huge industry already devoted to solving those kind of problems...
There's no gun to your head to pay taxes, just a financial threat (yeah, you can go to jail for tax evasion, but only because you can't afford to pay the taxes you owe).
If Apple didn't support DRM in iTunes, few if any of the labels would have signed on at the time. Even now, it's clear that the majors continue to believe it's a requirement, and would quite possibly not sell their music through iTunes, thus impacting Apple's bottom line.
I think it's an apt analogy.
This comes as no surprise to me. I work for a small record label that provides a streaming audio service to about 150 colleges and institutions. Many of our clients like to have information about our content stored in their institutional catalog/OPAC.
The thing is, these catalog systems pretty much only accept MARC-formatted records. The MARC format is kind of obscure, and it's nothing we want to generate ourselves, so we provide CSV data to OCLC and they convert it to MARC format for us.
The amazing part of the racket they're running is that we have to *pay* OCLC to make these records for us, and then they turn around and require *another* payment from anyone who wants to use the records.
We aren't even entitled to our own copy of the data they've converted for us. Presumably, if we wanted it, we'd have to purchase it from the people we gave it to in the first place. It's needless to say, but we also don't see any kind of profit sharing from OCLC when 150 libraries each purchase thousands of these records.