I agree. I had the same problem w/ resolution with Kubuntu and so I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and used the autodetect features. After restarting the machine I couldn't get past the KDE login screen (kept flashing colors, then going black & resetting itself to 1024x768). So I hand-edited the xorg.conf file to mess with the modes and set the default color depth to 24 instead of 16 and now my KDE is happily running at 1280x1024.
How many "ordinary" Windows users are able to take such measures just to get a decent desktop resolution? Not many, I'd think.
I agree. I was just about to post the same question myself. We use Zen Cart at our company and it's worked really great. We went from unpacking the tar file to our first transaction in two weeks.
Or you could download and install the Preferential Extension (Project page | [Extension Room) and be able to edit settings directly from the Tools menu.
Exactly right, Julesh. I'm a published fiction writer and have read manuscripts for a couple magazines. In my experience, 99.9995% of manuscripts that arrived with italics all over them and text in six different typefaces ended up in the trash (or went right back into the SASE).
The Courier rule is (or at least was where I worked) a bit less strict than it used to be. Many people use Times or Palatino these days. This annoys some editors but is not the stroke of death that it used to be.
Check out this place.. My wife's ancestors build this house in 1636 and it's still standing. Sure, it gets a lot of love & attention, and nobody really lives in it anymore, but it's still there.
But make sure you have a good foundation. Our farmhouse here in upstate NY is 103 years old and the fieldstone foundation still shifts a bit in the winter. One wall in particular is bowed in and had to be reinforced with a channel beam.
So, If you live in a cold climate, don't underestimate the power of deep frost to move your house & send cracks up through the walls. I'm told that this isn't as much of a problem with "modern" poured concrete, but only time will be the final judge.
Other than that our house is solid as a...um, rock.
Check out Fallingwater. That house has a very unique cantilevered structure that many engineers doubted when it was built, but it's held up better than everyone (except the always self-assured Mr. Wright) expected. It takes maintenance, though, and lots of $$, so I guess the lesson there is that any house you expect to be standing in 300 years is going to require that you leave a sizable estate...
That's just plain wrong. Did you happen to live near a city like Pittsburgh or Detroit in the 80s? I did (Pittsburgh, specifically Johnstown, PA). The steel companies were decidedly disloyal to the workers and happily shipped many, many steel jobs to Asia & South America.
If you remember, the Japan panic in the 80s was also related to cheap labor. They were building better cars and electronics than we were and at much lower costs. Whether or not this was due to labor unions driving up costs or Americans simply increasing their standard of living will be debated forever, but that was the reason.
This is very reminiscient of the "Godzilla has arrived" mania that swept the US back in the 1980s. Mayne serious people then believed that Japan was going to buy the US (in cash) and then enslave us all in their Toyota factories. We know now how wrong they were.
India is certainly becoming a force in the global IT industry, but let's not get swept away by Fast Company's muscular prose and usual hyperbole.
Also, I think it's important to remember that real economic growth comes more from innovation than from cheap labor. Companies are willing to pay developers $150K a year if the products they're creating will cover those costs and return a large profit to boot. A lot of the work being offloaded to India (or at least the work that my previous employer shipped there) was maintenanced release testing, legacy OS ports, code cleanup, etc. Nobody was asking them to design the next killer app.
Of course, maybe it's good that these waves of paranoia wash ashore every few years. They prevent us from getting complacent.
Yes, but the full clause in Article I, Section 8, states that the legislature's power is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
Authors and inventors, which I interpret to mean the actual author or inventor, not the great-grandchildren of the author or inventor, or future sharholders in a corporation that descended from the author or inventor or purchased the rights from the author or inventor.
I only have a minimal knowledge of coding, but I do know a bit about writing, and this guy's poetry (or at least the excerpt in the interview) is pretty bad. The rhythm is bad, there's no interesting, imagery, etc. But that's just my opinion (he said, knowing he was about to be flamed...).
But can great coders be taught? I don't think so. A debate has been raging within the creative community for years about the value of MFAs. Many people see them as a cynical way for universities to bring in extra money by bilking minimally talented people who want to "learn" how to write.
Just like great writers, great coders seem to have an extra intuitive "something" that the rest of us don't. In my experience, the best software engineer I've worked with doesn't even have a college degree. He started coding and studying math & logic on his own at age twelve and simply evolved from there. He was a kind of computer science savant. His talent was very impressive but very mysterious, just like Faulkner's, or Eliot's, or Bishop's.
OK, I took the NYT bait and downloaded this "revolutionary" software. From a UI perspective, it's a mess. I'm having trouble even figuring out how to use the damn thing. This shite is supposed to improve my computing experience & make Windows "irrelevant"? For my files, I can find them easier with freakin' Windows Explorer. As for strings, I'll take grep, awk, sed, etc., thanks. The depth-perspective representation stuff he's trying is nothing new at all. I saw an Australian guy give a paper on this very thing at a SIG-CHI conference in 2000.
On the technical side, it doesn't even seem to work right! No matter what I search for, or in what "stream" I look for it, or what filter options I use, it simply returns these tiled icons of the contents of my "My Documents" folder. I even searched for words that I know don't exist on my drive (e.g., "pr0n") and got the same results.
In short, he's a joke. H.L. Mencken on professors: "Consider the pedagogue in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons."
You're right that TV has replaced magazine serialization.
Serialization was very popular in the past. In fact, early novels were simply bound versions of the chapters in stories that first appeared in serial magazines. Almost all of Dickens' novels appeared first in serials. Collier's and the Saturday Evening Post published them well into the 50s, when (coincidentally?) television went mainstream.
I think serialization could be popuar again, especially in genre fiction (fantasy, mystery, etc.), which tends to be more plot-driven and episodic than "serious" fiction.
To me, the problems seems to be the distribution medium. Web head that I am, I can't read a long piece of fiction on a computer screen. I gotta see it on paper, and I don't mean Letter or A4 with crap fonts.
Does anyone know what ever happened to Barnes & Noble's plans for "print on demand"? They piloted a service where the book files (PDF?) were fetched off a network and then printed and bound right in the store. That seems to me like a good approach to serialized fiction on the net. You get your chapter once a month and then have it printed at Kinko's or something. Each chapter could be printed as a folio and saddle-stitched, then when the story ended you could have all the folios bound into a nice book.
No doubt about it, but not until Kaman can reduce the price drastically. By say, 90% or so. I don't see that happening for many years. To the majority of people in the developing world, a dilapidated, fourth-hand, $10 bicycle is a lifetime investment.
The Segway HT also seems a bit too heavy. 65 pounds is a lot of weight to carry in and out of the office every day. Also, these things will be very hard to secure. There's an encrypted key associated with each unit, but that's hardly going to stop a thief from tearing the ignition guts out and "hot-wiring" it like a car, or--even simpler--tackling you as you round a dark corner and whizzing away with both $3,000 scooter and key intact. A bicycle, by comparison, is easier to nick but requires far less mazuma to replace, thereby making it less attractive to steal.
I may be cynical, but b/c these things are so expensive that my unscientific estimate of the frequency of attempted nicking incidents would be something on the order of "every time you turn it on."
Lots of potential, to be sure, but this is still the proof-of-concept/early adopter stage. In other words, it's a nifty toy for trust-funded ecology fanatics and "Hammacher Schlemmer" subscribers.
I'm kind of bummed b/c I thought it was going to use a revolutionary engine of some kind. Something totally wild and super efficient, like a high-torque Stirling or hydrogen-powered Wankel (rotary). In that case the engine itself would have been a revolutionary "core technology," not these self-balancing whirligigs that he uses to balance the scooter.
The Segway is definitely cool, but it doesn't quite live up to its billing as the Next Leap Forward in human progress. In my mind, it's not much compared to such low-tech miracles as the HippoRoller and the Pot-in-Pot Cooling System (story 1), (story 2)).
I haven't noticed any holes, but the rump of my favorite khakis has taken on the texture of terri-cloth. Other than that the Aeron's OK in my book. I've had it almost a year now and it has definitely reduced my back & shoulder fatigue.
I've used Software Tool and Die (www.std.com) in Brookline, Mass. for five years. Basic dial-up web access, pop3, telnet. They claim to be the country's oldest public ISP.
The service is great, the support people know what the hell they're talking about, and I can talk to them any time, day or night, with a local phone call. All this for $6 a month.
In short, it's too good; it can't last much longer. Every month when I get my statement I expect to find out that they've been bought out.
Re:Reminds me of...A BIG mistake by Apple
on
OS X on x86?
·
· Score: 1
I'm still using a Dell P90/64MB/WinNT. My core apps are Web browser, FTP, telnet, e-mail and, believe ot or not, FrameMaker6. I also maintain a small Web site with it. This little machine suits me fine, but I am kind of bummed that it won't run The Sims.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree. I had the same problem w/ resolution with Kubuntu and so I ran dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg and used the autodetect features. After restarting the machine I couldn't get past the KDE login screen (kept flashing colors, then going black & resetting itself to 1024x768). So I hand-edited the xorg.conf file to mess with the modes and set the default color depth to 24 instead of 16 and now my KDE is happily running at 1280x1024.
How many "ordinary" Windows users are able to take such measures just to get a decent desktop resolution? Not many, I'd think.
That would be "utter" crap. Udders are the things on cows that squirt out milk.
Man, the April Fools posts are so obvious this year.
I agree. I was just about to post the same question myself. We use Zen Cart at our company and it's worked really great. We went from unpacking the tar file to our first transaction in two weeks.
Surround that with
See what happens when you don't preview?
Excellent. Most egggscellent...
Or you could download and install the Preferential Extension (Project page | [Extension Room) and be able to edit settings directly from the Tools menu.
JMHO
That's a great essay. Those with points, please mod up!
Exactly right, Julesh. I'm a published fiction writer and have read manuscripts for a couple magazines. In my experience, 99.9995% of manuscripts that arrived with italics all over them and text in six different typefaces ended up in the trash (or went right back into the SASE).
The Courier rule is (or at least was where I worked) a bit less strict than it used to be. Many people use Times or Palatino these days. This annoys some editors but is not the stroke of death that it used to be.
Personally, I use TextPad on Windows.
Check out this place.. My wife's ancestors build this house in 1636 and it's still standing. Sure, it gets a lot of love & attention, and nobody really lives in it anymore, but it's still there.
So, If you live in a cold climate, don't underestimate the power of deep frost to move your house & send cracks up through the walls. I'm told that this isn't as much of a problem with "modern" poured concrete, but only time will be the final judge.
Other than that our house is solid as a...um, rock.
Check out Fallingwater. That house has a very unique cantilevered structure that many engineers doubted when it was built, but it's held up better than everyone (except the always self-assured Mr. Wright) expected. It takes maintenance, though, and lots of $$, so I guess the lesson there is that any house you expect to be standing in 300 years is going to require that you leave a sizable estate...
In the 80s, employers were loyal to employees.
That's just plain wrong. Did you happen to live near a city like Pittsburgh or Detroit in the 80s? I did (Pittsburgh, specifically Johnstown, PA). The steel companies were decidedly disloyal to the workers and happily shipped many, many steel jobs to Asia & South America.
If you remember, the Japan panic in the 80s was also related to cheap labor. They were building better cars and electronics than we were and at much lower costs. Whether or not this was due to labor unions driving up costs or Americans simply increasing their standard of living will be debated forever, but that was the reason.
This is very reminiscient of the "Godzilla has arrived" mania that swept the US back in the 1980s. Mayne serious people then believed that Japan was going to buy the US (in cash) and then enslave us all in their Toyota factories. We know now how wrong they were.
India is certainly becoming a force in the global IT industry, but let's not get swept away by Fast Company's muscular prose and usual hyperbole.
Also, I think it's important to remember that real economic growth comes more from innovation than from cheap labor. Companies are willing to pay developers $150K a year if the products they're creating will cover those costs and return a large profit to boot. A lot of the work being offloaded to India (or at least the work that my previous employer shipped there) was maintenanced release testing, legacy OS ports, code cleanup, etc. Nobody was asking them to design the next killer app.
Of course, maybe it's good that these waves of paranoia wash ashore every few years. They prevent us from getting complacent.
Yes, but the full clause in Article I, Section 8, states that the legislature's power is: "To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;"
Authors and inventors, which I interpret to mean the actual author or inventor, not the great-grandchildren of the author or inventor, or future sharholders in a corporation that descended from the author or inventor or purchased the rights from the author or inventor.
Am I misinterpreting the scope here??
I only have a minimal knowledge of coding, but I do know a bit about writing, and this guy's poetry (or at least the excerpt in the interview) is pretty bad. The rhythm is bad, there's no interesting, imagery, etc. But that's just my opinion (he said, knowing he was about to be flamed...).
But can great coders be taught? I don't think so. A debate has been raging within the creative community for years about the value of MFAs. Many people see them as a cynical way for universities to bring in extra money by bilking minimally talented people who want to "learn" how to write.
Just like great writers, great coders seem to have an extra intuitive "something" that the rest of us don't. In my experience, the best software engineer I've worked with doesn't even have a college degree. He started coding and studying math & logic on his own at age twelve and simply evolved from there. He was a kind of computer science savant. His talent was very impressive but very mysterious, just like Faulkner's, or Eliot's, or Bishop's.
On the technical side, it doesn't even seem to work right! No matter what I search for, or in what "stream" I look for it, or what filter options I use, it simply returns these tiled icons of the contents of my "My Documents" folder. I even searched for words that I know don't exist on my drive (e.g., "pr0n") and got the same results.
In short, he's a joke. H.L. Mencken on professors: "Consider the pedagogue in his highest incarnation: the university professor. What is his function? Simply to pass on to fresh generations of numskulls a body of so-called knowledge that is fragmentary, unimportant, and, in large part, untrue. His whole professional activity is circumscribed by the prejudices, vanities and avarices of his university trustees, i.e., a committee of soap-boilers, nail manufacturers, bank-directors and politicians. The moment he offends these vermin he is undone. He cannot so much as think aloud without running a risk of having them fan his pantaloons."
I think serialization could be popuar again, especially in genre fiction (fantasy, mystery, etc.), which tends to be more plot-driven and episodic than "serious" fiction.
To me, the problems seems to be the distribution medium. Web head that I am, I can't read a long piece of fiction on a computer screen. I gotta see it on paper, and I don't mean Letter or A4 with crap fonts.
Does anyone know what ever happened to Barnes & Noble's plans for "print on demand"? They piloted a service where the book files (PDF?) were fetched off a network and then printed and bound right in the store. That seems to me like a good approach to serialized fiction on the net. You get your chapter once a month and then have it printed at Kinko's or something. Each chapter could be printed as a folio and saddle-stitched, then when the story ended you could have all the folios bound into a nice book.
The Segway HT also seems a bit too heavy. 65 pounds is a lot of weight to carry in and out of the office every day. Also, these things will be very hard to secure. There's an encrypted key associated with each unit, but that's hardly going to stop a thief from tearing the ignition guts out and "hot-wiring" it like a car, or--even simpler--tackling you as you round a dark corner and whizzing away with both $3,000 scooter and key intact. A bicycle, by comparison, is easier to nick but requires far less mazuma to replace, thereby making it less attractive to steal.
I may be cynical, but b/c these things are so expensive that my unscientific estimate of the frequency of attempted nicking incidents would be something on the order of "every time you turn it on."
Lots of potential, to be sure, but this is still the proof-of-concept/early adopter stage. In other words, it's a nifty toy for trust-funded ecology fanatics and "Hammacher Schlemmer" subscribers.
I'm kind of bummed b/c I thought it was going to use a revolutionary engine of some kind. Something totally wild and super efficient, like a high-torque Stirling or hydrogen-powered Wankel (rotary). In that case the engine itself would have been a revolutionary "core technology," not these self-balancing whirligigs that he uses to balance the scooter.
The Segway is definitely cool, but it doesn't quite live up to its billing as the Next Leap Forward in human progress. In my mind, it's not much compared to such low-tech miracles as the HippoRoller and the Pot-in-Pot Cooling System (story 1), (story 2)).
I haven't noticed any holes, but the rump of my favorite khakis has taken on the texture of terri-cloth. Other than that the Aeron's OK in my book. I've had it almost a year now and it has definitely reduced my back & shoulder fatigue.
The service is great, the support people know what the hell they're talking about, and I can talk to them any time, day or night, with a local phone call. All this for $6 a month.
In short, it's too good; it can't last much longer. Every month when I get my statement I expect to find out that they've been bought out.
I'm still using a Dell P90/64MB/WinNT. My core apps are Web browser, FTP, telnet, e-mail and, believe ot or not, FrameMaker6. I also maintain a small Web site with it. This little machine suits me fine, but I am kind of bummed that it won't run The Sims.
Sorry, it was "-255 EXTRACTION_FAILED"