What if you get a dialog box with a couple of text fields, maybe a pulldown, and a OK, Default, Cancel trio of buttons at the bottom.
In Windows, you can navigate that whole dialog using arrow keys and tab or shift-tab. In Mac, it's annoyingly inconsistent whether you can navigate those fields and buttons with keys, so you have to switch over to the mouse, then back to the keyboard afterwards. This, in my opinion, is garbage. When are they going to fix this? For the OS that's supposedly focused on useability, that certainly is a big pain in the ass.
um - I can call up my CM in Mac OS by click-and-hold. I wait for the timeout, and boom, there's my CM. Now, in Winders, when I want a CM, sometimes there's a delay that's just plain inexcusable. I have a PII 333, I want to create a folder, say. I have to hold down the right mouse button for the CM - most of the time, that's a fairly rapid thing, 2-5 seconds, then I go to the "new" selection, and often it takes 20-30 seconds for the submenu to pop up. That is complete bullshit. If I want a new folder on the Mac, I simply do a command-N, and boom, new folder appears. Instantly.
well, if extra buttons are there to make up for bad ui design, the Mac sure could use a few extra buttons.
Specific examples: bad/inconsistent keyboard dialog navigation (use of tab or arrows to allow button clickage without having to take your hands off the keyboard). I love my Mac, it's the best there is, but I do HATE the fact that there's no way to use it without a mouse. At least on a Winders machine, if you don't feel like moving your hand off the keyboard to close out an annoying dialog, you can do it. With the Mac, if the button you want isn't the highlighted one, you can't dismiss it without using the mouse.
The thing that really burns me, is that 5-7 years ago, there was this "alternative scene" in music, and the pop music wasn't all that bad. Sure, there was a lot of crap "alternative" out there, but there was some good stuff being played on the radio.
Now, i was never really much of a Nirvanna fan, but doesn't it seem like it all ended, folded up and went away when Kurt Cobain blew his brains out? I mean, pop music was rock n roll back then, now, it's different, it's sort of this weird r&b/rappy/dancie/gap commercial stuff. Was Kurt Cobain really that important? What the hell happened?
The fact is, the musical landscape is dominated by four corporate giants, and the indies are there, but they're such minor players in the distribution and promotion infrastructure, that anything outside the money-making "formula" is lost. It's a LOT harder now to find good stuff than it was 5-7 years ago.
I also believe that socially, there has been a mass-rejection of nonconformist music among kids who were shocked at the whole black-trenchcoat scene when Columbine went down. It's a backlash against the Primus/Marylin Manson/Ministry set. (hm - if I listen to n'synch, and don't wear black, people wont think I'm a freak and am going to kill them).
It's offtopic! The above post has NOTHING to do with technology concerning archival data storage.
If you have been spanked, then you must be a bad boy, you must have done something to deserve it. Go to your room and stop whining on/.. Nobody cares about your problem, if they did, then somebody would have posted a discussion on the topic: Slashdot user whines about mistreatment by moderators, staff.
"GRBs doesn't contain any visible portion, unfortunately"
But I thought that was the whole point of this, to get a GRB located so we could steeer a visible light telescope over to it's part of the sky, and record the visible-light portion.
usually, I post some smart-ass karma-whoring drivel.
This time I have a question. I'm not likely to understand the answer, but why don't you try me?
How do you calculate the redshift of a gamma-ray burst. I'm not talking about the visible light portion, I'm talking about the gamma-ray portion. If the waves are attenuated by the object's physical movement away from us, first-off, wouldn't the waves be shifted into a different part of the spectrum, gamma rays being at the extreme, high-frequency end? Also, how do we know what the "original" frequency was, prior to the redshifted signal arriving, so we can calculate the amount of redshift.
I'm hoping this is an answer a normal human can understand, because I'm neither an astrophysicist, nor do I play one on TV, and if I did, I sure as hell wouldn't look like Jodie Foster! (what a hottie! Better than Natalie Portman if you ask me.)
I disagree. People are stupid. Do you know how many Brittney Spears albums sold? They'll bend over and buy them, they'll pay double, and they'll pay double again each time to listen. Eventually, when the technology permits it, they'll pay for the privilege of *remembering* what they heard.
among the.0001% of society that are geeks, DIVX died because of use-limited licensing. but in the broader market, the real reason DIVX died is it confused consumers on standards, and the sellers of standard DVD technology quashed this competition, they didn't want to pay the DIVX licensing fee to distribute their products.
Last week, I was infected with my very first virus in eight years of fairly reckless computing.
This virus was the fairly benign Live Stages virus. The attachment had the icon of a TXT file, and the extension was even TXT, so I thought it was okay to click on. Just a buddy sending me a joke, right? I had that funny feeling, and it opened in Notepad - whew. No problem right? Notepad's just a simple text viewer right? the previous logic was, never click on an attachment that might carry executable code - I thought I had nothing to fear from a TXT file viewed in Notepad.
Well, the file was NOT a TXT file, it was an SHS file. The name was "Stages.txt.shs". The SHS was hidden. Even though I selected "show all extensions" in Explorer. This particular extension is hidden. Even just viewing it in Notepad ran the code and infected my system. Luckily, this virus doesn't do much other than spread itself. I was able to use Symantec's tool to undo it.
This is totally f-cked up. The fact that a special form of executable content can be contained in a file that hides it's extension (and therefore, true nature), in the name of user friendlyness, it is a security hole.
I congratulate the writer of this virus, and I salute you. You screwed up my day, but you steeled my resolve, and strenghtened my opinion, that Microsoft has no business writing and selling any kind of software, period. The architecture that resulted in ILOVEYOU was simply incompetence. The architecture that resulted in Stages is GROSS NEGLIGENCE of a culpable degree.
but, believe it or not, if the story has FTL travel, then, in most cases, we're talking about "science fantasy".
Star Trek more often than not falls into this category, mainly due to the sheer volume of material they have produced over the years, not all of it can be good. In a few cases though, Star Trek has portrayed some ideas faithful to the hard-SF genre.
A lot of hard-SF doesn't revolve around space-travel or space-battles, because it's just so silly and impractical. Of course, it isn't a classical human drama without those elements, so those things are very pervasive in the world of SF (Science Fantasy). I'd say that the best example of hard-SF I can think of right now is The Andromeda Strain (book, not the movie). The author (Crichton) put a lot of thought and effort into the scientific principals and current theories regarding his story, and the issues they raise. That is why when you read the story today, although it's clearly dated material, it's still a believable story. The only "sketchy" parts are; how exactly did the alien germ process hard radiation? There was no mechanism for this. They didn't go into that at all. I think Xenobiology wasn't all that advanced back in the early '70's, compared to today.
If the laws of space and time and physics and all that junk were set up as a "very intricate machine" to run it's course, (deterministic or not), then the active interference occurred when the machine was built, and continues after it is "set in motion".
Otherwise, there would be no machine, no gears, no continuing laws of space and time, etc.
I fail to see the difference. If God had enough foresight to design the universe to operate in this way, then it's functionally the same as if the gears weren't connected, but He was turning them by hand continuously anyway. It's the difference between me telling a small child to look both ways before crossing the street, and physically guiding them to the curb, grabbing their head, turning it, and safely guiding the child across. The end result is the same. (except the kid probably feels a bit more comfortable at being trusted to do as directed. ..)
Based on the extortion that went on when MS got Steve Jobs to put IE as default on MacOS in exchange for MSOffice-Mac, I'm guessing a similar thing is going on with MS's purchase of Bungie.
Bungie's Halo was Steve Jobs' flagship evidence to the computing world that the Mac was a viable gaming platform. Microsoft's recent purchase of Bungie makes Steve Jobs look like an idiot. I'm guessing the deal will go down like this: (Apple already dumped Game Sprockets. . . hm) Apple will announce that it is dumping Quartz, and replacing it with some bastardized DirectX-based technology from Microsoft, and Halo will be available for Mac - but behind the scenes, MS has ripped out the guts of Halo and replaced them with DirectX so it will run on XBox, and the only easy way to port it would be to port DirectX to Mac. Won't that suck?
There may still be technical hurdles to PS2, DC, and Xbox (used to be a box, now it's a sandwich?) - and I'm sure MS is probably riggin^H^H^H^H^H^Hengineering XBox so that an emulator can't be built without violating some copyright or trade secret or some other BS.
And, it will depend on the success of a given console in the market, and th number of exclusive titles. If a given console doesn't have enough exclusive titles, then there's really no incentive to go through all the effort and risk of producing an emulator for that console. If the best games are on XBox and DC, and PS2, and if you have a PS2 emulator, what's the point of making an emulator for XBox and DC? None.
Or, "simultaneous" in this case could simply be an oversimplification meant to convey a plot device whose technical implications have no bearing on the outcome.
If it's meant to mean "generally simultaneous", then why are we going there?
What are we doing to that poor horse, and why does it smell so bad?
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo
(who is Don DeLillo? help me. I am feeble. I cannot enter his name into Ask Jeeves. Is Jeeves Gay? What happened to Jeeves' evil twin? Did the good twin murder him? Doesn't that make the good twin evil? Or just quasi-evil?)
If you did see complete evidence for the miraculous, then there are two possibilities. It really did happen, or you are insane. Either way, what's the difference? Reality doesn't happen until you connect the dots.
Picking nits is what "hard SF" is all about. A work of SF cannot be considered "hard" (IMNSHO) if the author does not have the technical knowledge to make it accurate and do-able.
I'd like to see a book on this topic written by Umberto Eco. It would be deliciously baroque, would it not?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Re:God, root, what's the difference?
on
Calculating God
·
· Score: 1
nobody can "become" God (if you're referring to the God described in Christian, Judaic, or Islamic religions). Unless they can go backwards in time and retroactively create the universe.
A person (with a stretch of the imagination, within the confines of this discussion), could, in theory, develop or acquire enough technology, power, what have you, to be worshipped as a god, have god-like powers, potentially god-equivalent powers. But a being who was created, can not create the entire universe, that being being a part of the universe. That is a logical paradox. But probably something only God could pull-off.
Slashdot Mirror
But there's a deficit in the design.
What if you get a dialog box with a couple of text fields, maybe a pulldown, and a OK, Default, Cancel trio of buttons at the bottom.
In Windows, you can navigate that whole dialog using arrow keys and tab or shift-tab. In Mac, it's annoyingly inconsistent whether you can navigate those fields and buttons with keys, so you have to switch over to the mouse, then back to the keyboard afterwards. This, in my opinion, is garbage. When are they going to fix this? For the OS that's supposedly focused on useability, that certainly is a big pain in the ass.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
um - I can call up my CM in Mac OS by click-and-hold. I wait for the timeout, and boom, there's my CM. Now, in Winders, when I want a CM, sometimes there's a delay that's just plain inexcusable. I have a PII 333, I want to create a folder, say. I have to hold down the right mouse button for the CM - most of the time, that's a fairly rapid thing, 2-5 seconds, then I go to the "new" selection, and often it takes 20-30 seconds for the submenu to pop up. That is complete bullshit.
If I want a new folder on the Mac, I simply do a command-N, and boom, new folder appears. Instantly.
Winders is garbage.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
well, if extra buttons are there to make up for bad ui design, the Mac sure could use a few extra buttons.
Specific examples:
bad/inconsistent keyboard dialog navigation (use of tab or arrows to allow button clickage without having to take your hands off the keyboard). I love my Mac, it's the best there is, but I do HATE the fact that there's no way to use it without a mouse. At least on a Winders machine, if you don't feel like moving your hand off the keyboard to close out an annoying dialog, you can do it. With the Mac, if the button you want isn't the highlighted one, you can't dismiss it without using the mouse.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
The thing that really burns me, is that 5-7 years ago, there was this "alternative scene" in music, and the pop music wasn't all that bad. Sure, there was a lot of crap "alternative" out there, but there was some good stuff being played on the radio.
Now, i was never really much of a Nirvanna fan, but doesn't it seem like it all ended, folded up and went away when Kurt Cobain blew his brains out? I mean, pop music was rock n roll back then, now, it's different, it's sort of this weird r&b/rappy/dancie/gap commercial stuff. Was Kurt Cobain really that important? What the hell happened?
The fact is, the musical landscape is dominated by four corporate giants, and the indies are there, but they're such minor players in the distribution and promotion infrastructure, that anything outside the money-making "formula" is lost. It's a LOT harder now to find good stuff than it was 5-7 years ago.
I also believe that socially, there has been a mass-rejection of nonconformist music among kids who were shocked at the whole black-trenchcoat scene when Columbine went down. It's a backlash against the Primus/Marylin Manson/Ministry set. (hm - if I listen to n'synch, and don't wear black, people wont think I'm a freak and am going to kill them).
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Interesting my left nut!
/.. Nobody cares about your problem, if they did, then somebody would have posted a discussion on the topic: Slashdot user whines about mistreatment by moderators, staff.
It's offtopic! The above post has NOTHING to do with technology concerning archival data storage.
If you have been spanked, then you must be a bad boy, you must have done something to deserve it. Go to your room and stop whining on
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
in 10000 years, this WILL be visible to the naked eye. Because we'll all have evolved back into microbes by then. We'll be called "midichlorians".
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
"GRBs doesn't contain any visible portion, unfortunately"
But I thought that was the whole point of this, to get a GRB located so we could steeer a visible light telescope over to it's part of the sky, and record the visible-light portion.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
usually, I post some smart-ass karma-whoring drivel.
This time I have a question. I'm not likely to understand the answer, but why don't you try me?
How do you calculate the redshift of a gamma-ray burst. I'm not talking about the visible light portion, I'm talking about the gamma-ray portion. If the waves are attenuated by the object's physical movement away from us, first-off, wouldn't the waves be shifted into a different part of the spectrum, gamma rays being at the extreme, high-frequency end? Also, how do we know what the "original" frequency was, prior to the redshifted signal arriving, so we can calculate the amount of redshift.
I'm hoping this is an answer a normal human can understand, because I'm neither an astrophysicist, nor do I play one on TV, and if I did, I sure as hell wouldn't look like Jodie Foster! (what a hottie! Better than Natalie Portman if you ask me.)
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I disagree. People are stupid. Do you know how many Brittney Spears albums sold? They'll bend over and buy them, they'll pay double, and they'll pay double again each time to listen. Eventually, when the technology permits it, they'll pay for the privilege of *remembering* what they heard.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
of course, doing this is against the law, now that we have DMCA, or WIPO, or, what is it now?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I was just remembering that old Metallica song-
whoops! time to cut Lars another check!
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
among the .0001% of society that are geeks, DIVX died because of use-limited licensing. but in the broader market, the real reason DIVX died is it confused consumers on standards, and the sellers of standard DVD technology quashed this competition, they didn't want to pay the DIVX licensing fee to distribute their products.
It's the sad truth.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
ILOVEYOU was a tempest in a teapot.
Last week, I was infected with my very first virus in eight years of fairly reckless computing.
This virus was the fairly benign Live Stages virus. The attachment had the icon of a TXT file, and the extension was even TXT, so I thought it was okay to click on. Just a buddy sending me a joke, right? I had that funny feeling, and it opened in Notepad - whew. No problem right? Notepad's just a simple text viewer right? the previous logic was, never click on an attachment that might carry executable code - I thought I had nothing to fear from a TXT file viewed in Notepad.
Well, the file was NOT a TXT file, it was an SHS file. The name was "Stages.txt.shs". The SHS was hidden. Even though I selected "show all extensions" in Explorer. This particular extension is hidden. Even just viewing it in Notepad ran the code and infected my system. Luckily, this virus doesn't do much other than spread itself. I was able to use Symantec's tool to undo it.
This is totally f-cked up. The fact that a special form of executable content can be contained in a file that hides it's extension (and therefore, true nature), in the name of user friendlyness, it is a security hole.
I congratulate the writer of this virus, and I salute you. You screwed up my day, but you steeled my resolve, and strenghtened my opinion, that Microsoft has no business writing and selling any kind of software, period. The architecture that resulted in ILOVEYOU was simply incompetence. The architecture that resulted in Stages is GROSS NEGLIGENCE of a culpable degree.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
The other reply was pretty good too -
but, believe it or not, if the story has FTL travel, then, in most cases, we're talking about "science fantasy".
Star Trek more often than not falls into this category, mainly due to the sheer volume of material they have produced over the years, not all of it can be good. In a few cases though, Star Trek has portrayed some ideas faithful to the hard-SF genre.
A lot of hard-SF doesn't revolve around space-travel or space-battles, because it's just so silly and impractical. Of course, it isn't a classical human drama without those elements, so those things are very pervasive in the world of SF (Science Fantasy).
I'd say that the best example of hard-SF I can think of right now is The Andromeda Strain (book, not the movie). The author (Crichton) put a lot of thought and effort into the scientific principals and current theories regarding his story, and the issues they raise. That is why when you read the story today, although it's clearly dated material, it's still a believable story. The only "sketchy" parts are; how exactly did the alien germ process hard radiation? There was no mechanism for this. They didn't go into that at all. I think Xenobiology wasn't all that advanced back in the early '70's, compared to today.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
oops, got an even better one;
NASA is expecting that the Martians will probably be avid hockey fans and end every other sentance with "eh?"
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
I suppose if Discover Channel is involved, they'll be selling tickets to willing vacationers.
(obscurely referring to the rare dinosaur fossil auctions Discovery Channel has run from sponsored digs).
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
If the laws of space and time and physics and all that junk were set up as a "very intricate machine" to run it's course, (deterministic or not), then the active interference occurred when the machine was built, and continues after it is "set in motion".
.)
Otherwise, there would be no machine, no gears, no continuing laws of space and time, etc.
I fail to see the difference. If God had enough foresight to design the universe to operate in this way, then it's functionally the same as if the gears weren't connected, but He was turning them by hand continuously anyway. It's the difference between me telling a small child to look both ways before crossing the street, and physically guiding them to the curb, grabbing their head, turning it, and safely guiding the child across. The end result is the same. (except the kid probably feels a bit more comfortable at being trusted to do as directed. .
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
What would be really sweet, is if Connectix released their PS2 emulator before PS2 was released in the states.
The ultimate "F-U Sony!"
They should put a little sticker on the package:
"It's a Phony!"
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
The way things are going lately, you probably could patent rotary blades in any context. Hell, you could probably patent any and all blades.
Hey, shit! I gotta get me over to the patent office PRONTO!
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Based on the extortion that went on when MS got Steve Jobs to put IE as default on MacOS in exchange for MSOffice-Mac, I'm guessing a similar thing is going on with MS's purchase of Bungie.
Bungie's Halo was Steve Jobs' flagship evidence to the computing world that the Mac was a viable gaming platform. Microsoft's recent purchase of Bungie makes Steve Jobs look like an idiot. I'm guessing the deal will go down like this:
(Apple already dumped Game Sprockets. . . hm)
Apple will announce that it is dumping Quartz, and replacing it with some bastardized DirectX-based technology from Microsoft, and Halo will be available for Mac - but behind the scenes, MS has ripped out the guts of Halo and replaced them with DirectX so it will run on XBox, and the only easy way to port it would be to port DirectX to Mac.
Won't that suck?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
There may still be technical hurdles to PS2, DC, and Xbox (used to be a box, now it's a sandwich?) - and I'm sure MS is probably riggin^H^H^H^H^H^Hengineering XBox so that an emulator can't be built without violating some copyright or trade secret or some other BS.
And, it will depend on the success of a given console in the market, and th number of exclusive titles. If a given console doesn't have enough exclusive titles, then there's really no incentive to go through all the effort and risk of producing an emulator for that console. If the best games are on XBox and DC, and PS2, and if you have a PS2 emulator, what's the point of making an emulator for XBox and DC? None.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Or, "simultaneous" in this case could simply be an oversimplification meant to convey a plot device whose technical implications have no bearing on the outcome.
If it's meant to mean "generally simultaneous", then why are we going there?
What are we doing to that poor horse, and why does it smell so bad?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Somebody the other day had a .sig that said:
Reality does not happen until you analyze the dots. -Don DeLillo
(who is Don DeLillo? help me. I am feeble. I cannot enter his name into Ask Jeeves. Is Jeeves Gay? What happened to Jeeves' evil twin? Did the good twin murder him? Doesn't that make the good twin evil? Or just quasi-evil?)
If you did see complete evidence for the miraculous, then there are two possibilities. It really did happen, or you are insane. Either way, what's the difference? Reality doesn't happen until you connect the dots.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
Picking nits is what "hard SF" is all about. A work of SF cannot be considered "hard" (IMNSHO) if the author does not have the technical knowledge to make it accurate and do-able.
I'd like to see a book on this topic written by Umberto Eco. It would be deliciously baroque, would it not?
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!
nobody can "become" God (if you're referring to the God described in Christian, Judaic, or Islamic religions). Unless they can go backwards in time and retroactively create the universe.
A person (with a stretch of the imagination, within the confines of this discussion), could, in theory, develop or acquire enough technology, power, what have you, to be worshipped as a god, have god-like powers, potentially god-equivalent powers. But a being who was created, can not create the entire universe, that being being a part of the universe. That is a logical paradox. But probably something only God could pull-off.
If it ain't broke, fix it 'til it is!