On problem with that scheme: I never, ever talk to my closest friend on Facebook. In fact, if we were able to get an objective measure of closeness/intimacy for each of my friends, created and ordered list from that measure, facebook contact frequency would peak well below the top of the list because other communication modes would take over: email, instant messaging, text messaging, phone calls, hard drinking in bars, etc.
For any algorithm to do better than a rough approximation, it would have to be aware of all communication modes to some extent.
(Unless, of course, there are people who only interact on facebook.)
Consumers do not consider (quantify) the energy cost of operating some gadget over its lifetime so it is the upfront (manufacturing) price that attracts consumer dollars. And it is cheaper to build a less efficient device than a more efficient one.
Let P be "is old and bloated" Let Q be "is not worth keeping"
1. If Gecko has property P, then Gecko has property Q 2. Suppose Gecko has property P 3. Then Gecko has property Q
The poster's question works out to be: since Gecko has property Q (="is not worth keeping") (which follows from the above), why in god's name would Mozilla hang onto it?
But the poster presupposed that Gecko has property P (="is old and bloated"), so we have no reason to think it has property Q (="is not worth keeping"), making the whole question baseless.
A paper by Ann Senghas discusses the age effects of acquisition and development that we're talking about (in the context of Nicaraguan Sign Lanugage. Technical, but good.
While the term "spontaneous" is thrown around in popular accounts of Nicaraguan Sign Language, there was more going on.
Before the 1970s, the was no deaf community in Nicaragua. Each deaf child had to make their own way in life, usually aided by a crude system of signs--called a home signing system--developed with their speaking parents. In the 1970s, however, a school for the deaf was founded and children from all over Nicaragua came to it. There was some debate over which sign language was going to be taught at the school and things stalled for awhile, but in the mean time the children standardized their home signing systems with one another--made them uniform--and developed a pidgin language, which may be thought of as a language lacking some of the sophistication in grammar we associate with language. For the most part, the teachers were able to cope with this pidgin language, though sometimes it became incomprehensible.
Now very relevant to TFA is that as younger children came to the school (and other children grew up), the older kids continued to use this pidgin language (into adulthood even) but the youngest children showed signs of a more sophisticated language. So much so that their teachers who had managed to communicate, however haltingly, with with the students of the school found themselves completely unable to understand the young children by the late 1980s. Each new class of students--joining the school at a very young age--was able to adapt and extend the language, making it more expressive and robust because--as this article would argue--their young brains were so much better equipped to the task.
What Nicaraguan Sign Language suggests is not only are children better equipped to learn a language, they are likely to be the source of language invention. Each "generation" of deaf Nicaraguan children were able to use the language of their predecessors with a greater fluency. That is, they invented new degrees of fluency, new nuances of expression.
Disclaimer: I'm a linguistics student, though this isn't my field.
The exodus from the Church of Finland is just another example of the desire of citizens to opt out of certain government services that do not serve them. As an American I would like to opt out of Social Security, farm subsidies, K-12 public schools, and public television.
Sure, if you'll let me opt out of defense. Everything other single program (except Social Security) is just pocket money. Hell, I'll double my contribution to every non-defense program if I can get out of paying for defense.
I may not come out ahead, financially speaking (though it would be close), but we'll sure have a better society. And I'll sleep better at night to boot.
Police officers are civil servents. If they are singling out and harassing him because he "has a history of being verbally abusive" towards officers, then they are "a bunch of corrupt (expletives)" and should be removed. Civil servents should be held to the highest standard, not the lowest.
--> load in less than 5 seconds on 1+G CPUs, all O/S
Well yes, that would be nice.
--> use less memory when a large number of pages are loaded (I can easily use most of my 256M on my laptop), maybe provide a max memory limit option
(1) Your OS of choice should manage memory, not an application. Its also not reasonable to expect mozilla to do memory management on so many different platforms, especially closed ones (Windows). (2) If you think swapping out would be better, I'm afraid you're mistaken.
--> include mozilla.org packages for Linux O/S (rpms, debs, etc.) released along with the default tarball and accessible for update programs (e.g., yum) (O/S/package release managers?)
Packaging for different operating systems (especially Linux distributions) is not the responsibility of the mozilla foundation. Also consider that mozilla foundation would be showing un due favour to larger distributions (RedHat, SuSe, whatever's big in asia) be doing this packaging. It is best to main neutral. Also note that the larger distributions need less (and probably want less) assitance in packaging.
--> support Active X controls under Windows
I really am begining to suspect this is a troll.
--> option to shrink the text (reduce font size, ec.) when I shrink a window
Interesting, though I think this would be better implimented in the display mangement system (depending on platform). I can imagine this being done ins display postscript fairly easily.
--> include integration with desktop search and include a free search add-on for non-Windows O/Ss
I don't really know what you're asking here. What's a free search add on for non-windows? Like, google bar? You could easily write an extension to use find or locate on a UNIX within the google bar. You'd just need to find a nice way to present the results in mozilla (just a list of links, I'd guess, pointing to things like "file://my/stuff/is/here")
--> include an easier ability to get updates, plugins, etc. and load them in via current native format without a cycle of "download, save, rpm -Uvh, etc." but not without prompting and some type of verification (easier but not automatic and not a virus/trojan vector)
Updates, again, should be handled by the platform (distributions included). I can understand the arguement for plugins, but I thought this existed (though I don't often use mozilla or firefox). I know it alteast works for themes, so could probably be extended.
--> updates, packages, etc. for Linux should be in the native package formats (rpm, deb, etc.)
Again, distributions should handle this.
--> include an RSS reader
I bet this is planned, and I agree with you. If it's not, than it is not for a good reason (to difficult to impliment well, beyond the scope of mozilla). Looks like someone else has already brought up Sage and LiveBookmarks.
--> provide some form of diagnostics to the user when mozilla fails to properly start (I've had this with multiple O/Ss and multiple versions -- it fails to start and no error is displayed)
That's what the console is for. And don't just brush this aside as elietest. That is the canonical method for displaying program information. You could write a wrapper for mozilla such that it displays console messages in a little window (maybe even XUL window assuming XUL is functioning).
--> provide some form of reset settings/options when you can't get mozilla to properly load
I don't quite understand what you're asking again, sorry. Like "'revert' to a new installation, saving my extensions, plugins and bookmarks?" I don't understand why this should be a special options because (1) it's pretty trivial to to manually and (2) mozilla doesn't have enough problems to demand this sort of tool. And don't t
Along with all the other replies, the the deployment of of high bandwith connections on the cheap in countries like south korea is also largely due to the fact that connections to the high speed internal (intra-nation) network is cheap versus connections to the large external (internet) network.
There buisness plan is to bet some very large portion of all traffic will not leave the nation in quesion.
I've found pannini to be fairly common-place in California. Seems like every sandwich shop, bistro, et cetera, where I spend any time (sf bay, sacramento, central coast, pasadena) carry some form of pannini.
I must say that I am a fan, so I probably keep my eye out for them more than most.
To those who find binary drivers too distasteful, but still want to find the best card for their needs: the DRI project has a very useful catalogue of supported cards to aid you in your selection.
For example, there documentation on ATi's cards: http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/ATI
I recently picked up a ATi FireGL 8800 because of information on dri.sf.net and have never been happier with a card. It doesn't perform as well as the FireGL X1-128 that has now moved to my secondary workstation, but not having to deal with ATi's drivers and having the 8800 work equally well in FreeBSD and Linux is more than enough of a reward.
I have also used nVidia's binary drivers (with a card that has moved to a media box), but they are not ideal either. I will say performance is remarkable however.
I suppose my graphics needs have become more modest, however, and others may have more pragmatic concerns.
Michael Spivaks' CALCULUS is the finest example of an introductory analysis text I've ever encountered. That hefty volume is partly the reason I eneded up studying math.
With all the responses, it has become very obvious that an XML stream, or some other type of interface/api is necessary for this dataset. It would be a shame to leave a system underutilized with an inflexible and disappointingly sparse interface.
Many good suggestions, though I think if we ever come to the functionality you describe, it will be from generous hackers and an XML stream, as others have mentioned.
Not that it wouldn't't be wonderful, but it's disappointingly difficult to get people (employers) to pay for such luxuries.
I think the notification idea is brilliant. If a user could create a travel profile that they would use on a daily basis, they could be provided with information concerning unusual traffic patterns, the rise and fall of peak volumes, etc. Probably won't get to do it, but I think it is great nonetheless.
Realtime accident data is important too, and hopefully incorporated.
I hope to be able just what you pointed out, making accessible trends for the day of the week, travel around holidays. Exactly.
It's still in development stages, and we haven't settled on any single hardware configuration. I'm sorry if that is what you are looking for. Internally, it's now residing on a few stock x86 servers.
On the software end, all the components are written in perl and C. Running on Linux. Debian and Redhat currently, but it may change, as the state is now toying with Linux standardization. The database elements are PostgreSQL.
If you were curious about the details of the remote traffic and weather monitoring stations, there are many holes in my knowledge (I work for a contractor, and am a student). If you curious about that part of the system, please reply and I can give you a more complete answer in the, US Pacific Time, morning.
Concerning weather data, currently we use our stations to predict fog forming conditions and, once visibility starts to drop, provide warning to motorists on changeable message signs.
I could see visibility information being a useful overlay to any realtime traffic information, providing warning signs of potential slowdowns.
California's Department of Transportation is working on a similar system and I am working on the backend to a web interface similar to WSDOT's.
If there are any users of similar systems for planning travel routes/times on slashdot, what features did you find valuable, superfluous, or altogether lacking?
Is it valuable to have historic data? If so, how far back? Archived hourly analysis of traffic volumes, average time of travel on predefined routes? As a user, would you be interested in data beyond delays and congestion. Site specific information giving visibility, weather, etc?
I ment "what do you think the average slashdot readers age is", sorry for the confusion. I thought it would be interesting to find out what the slashdot community thinks of it's readers age.
The Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Information Technology must keep open communication because the worst thing that can happen is incompatibility. When the institutes finish work on such localized versions (dialects?) they must above all be compatible even if it means modifying the original language slightly. As for whether to call a file a "file", look at the hundreds of translations of linux. Numbers anyone??
I would also like to note that i'm happy that the majority of the population of India and China are starting out with a real operating system, so when Microsoft tries to go and gain ground in the Indian OS debate the enlightened Indians will simply laugh at the silly little operation system.
Slashdot Mirror
For consumers what is the benefit of another choice with more choices?
Fixed that for you. And the answer is choice is the benefit for consumers. Maybe even competition for consumers by providers.
On problem with that scheme: I never, ever talk to my closest friend on Facebook. In fact, if we were able to get an objective measure of closeness/intimacy for each of my friends, created and ordered list from that measure, facebook contact frequency would peak well below the top of the list because other communication modes would take over: email, instant messaging, text messaging, phone calls, hard drinking in bars, etc.
For any algorithm to do better than a rough approximation, it would have to be aware of all communication modes to some extent.
(Unless, of course, there are people who only interact on facebook.)
Consumers do not consider (quantify) the energy cost of operating some gadget over its lifetime so it is the upfront (manufacturing) price that attracts consumer dollars. And it is cheaper to build a less efficient device than a more efficient one.
Maybe I am getting old, but I'm always surprised when someone brings up Zelda in a design discussion and doesn't talk about a Link to the Past.
I just re-read your post. The above is what I remember begging the question to be---distinct from circular reasoning. I may be wrong.
He presupposes Gecko is old and bloated.
Let P be "is old and bloated"
Let Q be "is not worth keeping"
1. If Gecko has property P, then Gecko has property Q
2. Suppose Gecko has property P
3. Then Gecko has property Q
The poster's question works out to be: since Gecko has property Q (="is not worth keeping") (which follows from the above), why in god's name would Mozilla hang onto it?
But the poster presupposed that Gecko has property P (="is old and bloated"), so we have no reason to think it has property Q (="is not worth keeping"), making the whole question baseless.
Columbia's Language Acquisition and Development lab is a good place to start.
http://www.columbia.edu/~as1038/
A paper by Ann Senghas discusses the age effects of acquisition and development that we're talking about (in the context of Nicaraguan Sign Lanugage. Technical, but good.
http://www.columbia.edu/~as1038/pdf/Senghas1995a.pdf
While the term "spontaneous" is thrown around in popular accounts of Nicaraguan Sign Language, there was more going on.
Before the 1970s, the was no deaf community in Nicaragua. Each deaf child had to make their own way in life, usually aided by a crude system of signs--called a home signing system--developed with their speaking parents. In the 1970s, however, a school for the deaf was founded and children from all over Nicaragua came to it. There was some debate over which sign language was going to be taught at the school and things stalled for awhile, but in the mean time the children standardized their home signing systems with one another--made them uniform--and developed a pidgin language, which may be thought of as a language lacking some of the sophistication in grammar we associate with language. For the most part, the teachers were able to cope with this pidgin language, though sometimes it became incomprehensible.
Now very relevant to TFA is that as younger children came to the school (and other children grew up), the older kids continued to use this pidgin language (into adulthood even) but the youngest children showed signs of a more sophisticated language. So much so that their teachers who had managed to communicate, however haltingly, with with the students of the school found themselves completely unable to understand the young children by the late 1980s. Each new class of students--joining the school at a very young age--was able to adapt and extend the language, making it more expressive and robust because--as this article would argue--their young brains were so much better equipped to the task.
What Nicaraguan Sign Language suggests is not only are children better equipped to learn a language, they are likely to be the source of language invention. Each "generation" of deaf Nicaraguan children were able to use the language of their predecessors with a greater fluency. That is, they invented new degrees of fluency, new nuances of expression.
Disclaimer: I'm a linguistics student, though this isn't my field.
Your idea of patriotism is supporting a terrifically costly war against another nation in a mis-guided attempt to secure low oil prices? Fair enough.
Mine is attempting to give every one of my fellow citizens an equal opportunity for political and economic security.
So, you see, your lack of patriotism disgusts me.
Sure, if you'll let me opt out of defense. Everything other single program (except Social Security) is just pocket money. Hell, I'll double my contribution to every non-defense program if I can get out of paying for defense.
I may not come out ahead, financially speaking (though it would be close), but we'll sure have a better society. And I'll sleep better at night to boot.
Police officers are civil servents. If they are singling out and harassing him because he "has a history of being verbally abusive" towards officers, then they are "a bunch of corrupt (expletives)" and should be removed. Civil servents should be held to the highest standard, not the lowest.
I wanted to mod, but I'll just commment.
--> load in less than 5 seconds on 1+G CPUs, all O/S
Well yes, that would be nice.
--> use less memory when a large number of pages are loaded (I can easily use most of my 256M on my laptop), maybe provide a max memory limit option
(1) Your OS of choice should manage memory, not an application. Its also not reasonable to expect mozilla to do memory management on so many different platforms, especially closed ones (Windows). (2) If you think swapping out would be better, I'm afraid you're mistaken.
--> include mozilla.org packages for Linux O/S (rpms, debs, etc.) released along with the default tarball and accessible for update programs (e.g., yum) (O/S/package release managers?)
Packaging for different operating systems (especially Linux distributions) is not the responsibility of the mozilla foundation. Also consider that mozilla foundation would be showing un due favour to larger distributions (RedHat, SuSe, whatever's big in asia) be doing this packaging. It is best to main neutral. Also note that the larger distributions need less (and probably want less) assitance in packaging.
--> support Active X controls under Windows
I really am begining to suspect this is a troll.
--> option to shrink the text (reduce font size, ec.) when I shrink a window
Interesting, though I think this would be better implimented in the display mangement system (depending on platform). I can imagine this being done ins display postscript fairly easily.
--> include integration with desktop search and include a free search add-on for non-Windows O/Ss
I don't really know what you're asking here. What's a free search add on for non-windows? Like, google bar? You could easily write an extension to use find or locate on a UNIX within the google bar. You'd just need to find a nice way to present the results in mozilla (just a list of links, I'd guess, pointing to things like "file://my/stuff/is/here")
--> include an easier ability to get updates, plugins, etc. and load them in via current native format without a cycle of "download, save, rpm -Uvh, etc." but not without prompting and some type of verification (easier but not automatic and not a virus/trojan vector)
Updates, again, should be handled by the platform (distributions included). I can understand the arguement for plugins, but I thought this existed (though I don't often use mozilla or firefox). I know it alteast works for themes, so could probably be extended.
--> updates, packages, etc. for Linux should be in the native package formats (rpm, deb, etc.)
Again, distributions should handle this.
--> include an RSS reader
I bet this is planned, and I agree with you. If it's not, than it is not for a good reason (to difficult to impliment well, beyond the scope of mozilla). Looks like someone else has already brought up Sage and LiveBookmarks.
--> provide some form of diagnostics to the user when mozilla fails to properly start (I've had this with multiple O/Ss and multiple versions -- it fails to start and no error is displayed)
That's what the console is for. And don't just brush this aside as elietest. That is the canonical method for displaying program information. You could write a wrapper for mozilla such that it displays console messages in a little window (maybe even XUL window assuming XUL is functioning).
--> provide some form of reset settings/options when you can't get mozilla to properly load
I don't quite understand what you're asking again, sorry. Like "'revert' to a new installation, saving my extensions, plugins and bookmarks?" I don't understand why this should be a special options because (1) it's pretty trivial to to manually and (2) mozilla doesn't have enough problems to demand this sort of tool. And don't t
Along with all the other replies, the the deployment of of high bandwith connections on the cheap in countries like south korea is also largely due to the fact that connections to the high speed internal (intra-nation) network is cheap versus connections to the large external (internet) network.
There buisness plan is to bet some very large portion of all traffic will not leave the nation in quesion.
Easy.
If terraforming Mars seems benign, then examine your position regarding the policies justified by Manifest Destiny.
I am most afraid when people think I'm joking.
Still using the 2.7 kernel? I didn't know gentoo had forked its own kernel and incremented version numbers.
Note sarcasm.
I've found pannini to be fairly common-place in California. Seems like every sandwich shop, bistro, et cetera, where I spend any time (sf bay, sacramento, central coast, pasadena) carry some form of pannini.
I must say that I am a fan, so I probably keep my eye out for them more than most.
To those who find binary drivers too distasteful, but still want to find the best card for their needs: the DRI project has a very useful catalogue of supported cards to aid you in your selection.
For example, there documentation on ATi's cards: http://dri.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/moin.cgi/ATI
I recently picked up a ATi FireGL 8800 because of information on dri.sf.net and have never been happier with a card. It doesn't perform as well as the FireGL X1-128 that has now moved to my secondary workstation, but not having to deal with ATi's drivers and having the 8800 work equally well in FreeBSD and Linux is more than enough of a reward.
I have also used nVidia's binary drivers (with a card that has moved to a media box), but they are not ideal either. I will say performance is remarkable however.
I suppose my graphics needs have become more modest, however, and others may have more pragmatic concerns.
Michael Spivaks' CALCULUS is the finest example of an introductory analysis text I've ever encountered. That hefty volume is partly the reason I eneded up studying math.
mints
With all the responses, it has become very obvious that an XML stream, or some other type of interface/api is necessary for this dataset. It would be a shame to leave a system underutilized with an inflexible and disappointingly sparse interface.
Many good suggestions, though I think if we ever come to the functionality you describe, it will be from generous hackers and an XML stream, as others have mentioned.
Not that it wouldn't't be wonderful, but it's disappointingly difficult to get people (employers) to pay for such luxuries.
I'm depressed now.
I think the notification idea is brilliant. If a user could create a travel profile that they would use on a daily basis, they could be provided with information concerning unusual traffic patterns, the rise and fall of peak volumes, etc. Probably won't get to do it, but I think it is great nonetheless.
Realtime accident data is important too, and hopefully incorporated.
I hope to be able just what you pointed out, making accessible trends for the day of the week, travel around holidays. Exactly.
Thank you a lot for your input.
It's still in development stages, and we haven't settled on any single hardware configuration. I'm sorry if that is what you are looking for. Internally, it's now residing on a few stock x86 servers.
On the software end, all the components are written in perl and C. Running on Linux. Debian and Redhat currently, but it may change, as the state is now toying with Linux standardization. The database elements are PostgreSQL.
If you were curious about the details of the remote traffic and weather monitoring stations, there are many holes in my knowledge (I work for a contractor, and am a student). If you curious about that part of the system, please reply and I can give you a more complete answer in the, US Pacific Time, morning.
Concerning weather data, currently we use our stations to predict fog forming conditions and, once visibility starts to drop, provide warning to motorists on changeable message signs.
I could see visibility information being a useful overlay to any realtime traffic information, providing warning signs of potential slowdowns.
Hope that helped.
California's Department of Transportation is working on a similar system and I am working on the backend to a web interface similar to WSDOT's.
If there are any users of similar systems for planning travel routes/times on slashdot, what features did you find valuable, superfluous, or altogether lacking?
Is it valuable to have historic data? If so, how far back? Archived hourly analysis of traffic volumes, average time of travel on predefined routes? As a user, would you be interested in data beyond delays and congestion. Site specific information giving visibility, weather, etc?
Thank you for any responses!
I ment "what do you think the average slashdot readers age is", sorry for the confusion. I thought it would be interesting to find out what the slashdot community thinks of it's readers age.
The Indian Institute of Technology and the Indian Institute of Information Technology must keep open communication because the worst thing that can happen is incompatibility. When the institutes finish work on such localized versions (dialects?) they must above all be compatible even if it means modifying the original language slightly. As for whether to call a file a "file", look at the hundreds of translations of linux. Numbers anyone??
I would also like to note that i'm happy that the majority of the population of India and China are starting out with a real operating system, so when Microsoft tries to go and gain ground in the Indian OS debate the enlightened Indians will simply laugh at the silly little operation system.