Castro and the communist government aren't a walk in the park (e.g. human rights abuses, limited democractic rights for population, dictatorial powers) but its not nearly as bad as portrayed in the American media.
That's the most ridiculously self-contradictory statement I've read all year. For some specifics on the human rights abuses you mentioned, see this page. A choice quote that's relevant at the moment, since numerous people are being arrested for "pre-crime dangerousness" lately:
"If a person is deemed to fall under any of the types of dangerousness cited above, so-called security measures may be taken against him, and these may be either "pre-criminal" or "post-criminal". According to the Criminal Code, "security measures may be decreed to prevent the commission of crimes or by reason of their commission." In the case of pre-crime security measures, Article 78 provides that a person declared to be dangerous may be subjected to therapeutic measures, re-education or surveillance by the Revolutionary National Police. One therapeutic measure, according to Article 79, consists of internment in a social. psychiatric or detoxification institute. Article 80 provides that re-education measures are to be applied to antisocial individuals, consisting of internment in a specialized work or study institute, and delivery to a labor collective for control and guidance of their dangerous conduct. The term of these measures ranges from one year to four years. In addition, the Revolutionary National Police, according to Article 81, have a surveillance system consisting of "guidance and control over the conduct of a dangerous person." This measure may also last for a period of one to four years. Article 82 provides that the security measures may include the imprisonment of a person "depending on the degree of danger he presents and the possibilities of his re-education."
Summary: you can be arrested and detained for up to four years because the police think you appear dangerous and might commit a crime. Police are using this power to imprison people who are not criminals by any stretch of the imagination - it's a purely repressive tactic, used to intimidate and control.
If anything, the American media is too soft on Cuba, often forgetting (as apparently you have) that it is one of the last holdouts of an unacceptably repressive style of government that much of the 20th century was spent abolishing. Unless you actually live there, you do the Cuban people a disservice by trying to diminish the seriousness of these problems.
They are already (and have been for nearly 10 years) using a tabbed MDI scheme for Visual Studio (their development software).
That doesn't sound right. The last versions I have are Visual C++ 6 and Visual Interdev 6, both copyright up to 1998, and neither use tabs for MDI documents, although they use tabs for other things, like switching between views of a file or project. So, assuming you're talking about some later version that actually uses tabs for MDI, it has to be later than '98, which means it hasn't been around for anywhere close to 10 years.
In any case, just because the dev tools guys have a clue doesn't mean the Office guys would share that clue. Look at the way Hungarian notation got completely misinterpreted within Microsoft itself, between the Office guys and the systems guys, for example.
That's a separate issue, though: the reason you have to care which app is hosting a document or application is because Windows never quite managed to achieve true document-centric computing.
It would be possible to have a window manager which supported a hierarchy of top-level windows, each of which could contain multiple documents and/or applications of different types. In fact, browsers get us partway there, since they can host web pages, PDFs, Office docs etc. Multiple desktop systems support something similar in a different way.
If that model were implemented consistently enough, you could organize your active desktop documents & apps into a two-level hierarchy as you see fit, even without multiple desktops. The current state of the art allows you to approximate this, with multiple windows combined with MDI or tabs, but you have to put up with some limitations and inconsistencies in the abstraction.
It can still be very useful, though, and no-one forces you to open multiple tabs.
See, it's not Microsoft's fault. It's just that they're not able to hire* as many programmers as they need, which puts a limit on the amount of innovation they're able to do. It's those darn American programmers -- all they want to do is sit around and eat triple-decker hamburgers and earn a "decent living". If you want better software, lift the H1-B visa cap!
Both of these applications went SDI a LONG time ago.
Yeah, I realized that after I posted... Thing is, I still run Office 97 on my Win2K machine, but I switched my main desktop to Linux a LONG time ago.
The switch to SDI seems to have been driven by a combination of two factors -- dumb users and/or a poor user interface to MDI. Part of the problem with MDI is that Microsoft's implementation of it didn't have a visual metaphor. It was famously confusing for ordinary end users. People seem to adapt to tabbed browsing just fine, though, and the visual metaphor is the reason for that.
Perhaps the real reason that Microsoft has been slow to adapt tabs in IE is they realize how they screwed up in eliminating MDI, instead of just improving its interface. They want to postpone the inevitable day when they have to resurrect MDI with tabs, and the associated ribbing they'll get from the rest of the industry when they do that. If they delay long enough, they'll be able to spin it as an "innovation" in Office instead of correcting a mistake.
The point that I was trying to make is that tabbed browsing creates a metaphor that is independent of any other window manager, including those used by Windows and Mac OS X.
That's not true in principle, at least in the case of Windows. See my post about MDI.
However, Mozilla and Firefox didn't follow the (Windows-based) MDI standards for the keys they use, and don't provide a Window menu for navigating between tabs, so in that sense, their tabbed implementation of MDI is indeed non-standard. However, in principle, a tabbed interface can be MDI-compliant, as various editors, IDEs and the like demonstrate.
More generally, the argument that there should only be one way to switch contexts is an argument for complete flatness vs. hierarchy in desktop organization. Flatness makes sense for a certain kind of user, who typically isn't doing very much at the same time. However, demanding users typically find that it can be useful to have multiple items open at the same time, and once you do that, having a way to organize them into a hierarchy (even if only a two-level one) can be useful. For example, I might open a number of related documents in the same instance of a word processor. The fact that you can't navigate to the exact document you want by switching windows is part of the point -- from the top level, all you want is a way to navigate to a particular collection of documents. All the usual reasons to choose hierarchical organization apply.
Do you also never open more than one document at a time in a given instance of Word or Excel?
From very early on, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft software has had the ability to open multiple documents in the same application -- it's known as MDI, Multiple Document Interface. Tabbed browsing implements exactly the same model, except that it provides a more directly intuitive model for accessing multiple documents -- instead of using Ctrl-F6 (who came up with that?!) or the Window menu, you can use Ctrl-Tab or click on a visible, labelled tab.
Basically, tabbed browsing provides a more usable version of MDI, and shows up just how lacking in innovation Microsoft really is, not just in their browser but in one of their major cash-cow product lines, Office.
I agree, Lambda the Ultimate is a great way to keep up with academic research, at least related to programming languages (which are pretty central to computing, of course). It seems like one of a kind, though. What other good ones are out there?
I never realized that local california papers had such high readership in Bangalore or Boston or all the many other places/. readers read.
You don't know the San Jose Mercury, then. It was very widely read and influential during the dot-com boom in particular, and certainly would have been heavily read in Boston and probably Bangalore too (considering the software tech connection).
For the last 6 months, the community over at Wikinews has been building up a citizen journalism project that does not narrow its focus on a single region, or a single to topic.
Focus can be a good thing. When I look at the Wikinews home page right now, I see an eclectic mix of headlines that look as though they might have been ripped from a combination of Reuters and Slashdot, but really not much of interest to me.
This is intended as a constructive question: what is it that's going to bring readers back to Wikinews day after day? What can they expect to see? If the answer is a fairly random collection of stories on any possible topic, why do you think that's better than sites which do focus more closely on particular regions or topics?
Most of the best real-life examples of journalism are either topic-focused or region focused. It's difficult to be the best at everything.
I'm a physicist (grad student), so I have a more idealistic view of things, I suppose: nobody wants to make millions off of gamma-ray bursts, so it's a little more civil out here.
I beg to differ. As soon as my orbiting gamma ray burst generator platform is operational, I plan to make millions, perhaps even billions, very soon after I threaten to fry Washington D.C.!
So if you're a Bush supporter, it's not possible to be skeptical about the specific ways in which the war on terrorism is being practiced, for example?
Is Pat Buchanan a Kerry supporter? (He disagrees with Bush on much of his foreign policy.)
Your reading between the lines and jumping to conclusions is not "the only way to get people to put their cards on the table", it's a singularly unproductive way to discuss anything at all. However, politicians know this, and they try to frame issues in a "you're with us or against us" way, so that instead of having honest debate about issues, everything is twisted into us vs. them jihads.
How does it feel to be a jihadist, albeit a rhetorical one? For you, the infidels are apparently Kerry supporters, and anyone who states an opinion which might be held by a Kerry supporter is the enemy, to be attacked regardless of any actual merits in their specific opinions. Again, that's why I said you were part of the problem.
The post I responded to could not have been simpler (in its ridicule of some scientists)
You seem to have taken the original post almost personally. I took it as being aimed more at the overall system, which is certainly worthy of some ridicule. Even if the OP holds all of the political opinions you imagine he does, it still isn't particularly relevant to the original point.
It's not a question of having a solid opinion -- it's jumping to conclusions about the implications of what the OP said, and distorting the discussion along your predefined political lines, which seem highly simplistic -- e.g. what does John Kerry have to do with this? You're part of the problem in the sense that you don't contribute anything, you only distort along entirely predictable, but utterly misguided, lines.
Go and re-read the post you responded to, and try to remove your filter for a second. Can you interpret it so that the poster isn't concerned about partisan politics at all? Exercise that brain, for pity's sake!
To give you the benefit of the doubt (belatedly, I admit), perhaps you're unaware of just how many proposals come out with "could be used against terrorism" tacked on the end nowadays. There was another one on Slashdot yesterday, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The OP has a point -- it is sort of sad. One reason it's sad is that it's so often dishonest -- it's like the games where adding something like "in bed" to the end of a sentence is supposed to make it funny. Adding "could be used against terrorism" is supposed to make it fundable.
The funny thing is, who's being fooled here? Not the people granting the funds -- they're not stupid, they have good advisory panels. No, the only people being fooled are citizens who take these things at face value.
That's the only explanation I can think of for the spin on the Slashdot posting. I think it's a legitimate question to raise, but to present it with the headline "China Locks in its Net-Citizenry" is just ludicrous, and extremely inflammatory. Only on Slashdot, where the term "editor" has a unique definition. Timothy ought to be ashamed of himself.
The only real advantage 64-bit has over 32-bit for anyone outside of the supercomputing realm is the memory it can access.
That's not the only advantage. For example, high-performance 64-bit integers can be very useful in a variety of applications. 32 bits makes for integers that are often just a little too small, and 64 bits gives plenty of breathing room.
Thanks for the info. What you describe is really what I meant by having copper "come into" your home. At first I thought the Verizon router might take fiber directly, so I was surprised to hear that an ordinary router would work.
Some of the alleged benefits of Flash might be fine if they were integrated into the browser. They're not. Instead, what you get, is an embedded world, an environment within an environment. The only people who actually enjoy this world are, as the OP said, the content creators and their management who don't understand what they're doing to the user experience by ghettoizing their content into a closed, non-standard format.
It's part of a hazing ritual which has been performed every generation since airplanes were first invented. They're never going to actually let consumers have flying cars, it'd be too dangerous. But it's fun to exploit the bright-eyed naivete of every fresh new batch of young 'uns...
Slashdot Mirror
Summary: you can be arrested and detained for up to four years because the police think you appear dangerous and might commit a crime. Police are using this power to imprison people who are not criminals by any stretch of the imagination - it's a purely repressive tactic, used to intimidate and control.
If anything, the American media is too soft on Cuba, often forgetting (as apparently you have) that it is one of the last holdouts of an unacceptably repressive style of government that much of the 20th century was spent abolishing. Unless you actually live there, you do the Cuban people a disservice by trying to diminish the seriousness of these problems.
That doesn't sound right. The last versions I have are Visual C++ 6 and Visual Interdev 6, both copyright up to 1998, and neither use tabs for MDI documents, although they use tabs for other things, like switching between views of a file or project. So, assuming you're talking about some later version that actually uses tabs for MDI, it has to be later than '98, which means it hasn't been around for anywhere close to 10 years.
In any case, just because the dev tools guys have a clue doesn't mean the Office guys would share that clue. Look at the way Hungarian notation got completely misinterpreted within Microsoft itself, between the Office guys and the systems guys, for example.
That's a separate issue, though: the reason you have to care which app is hosting a document or application is because Windows never quite managed to achieve true document-centric computing.
It would be possible to have a window manager which supported a hierarchy of top-level windows, each of which could contain multiple documents and/or applications of different types. In fact, browsers get us partway there, since they can host web pages, PDFs, Office docs etc. Multiple desktop systems support something similar in a different way.
If that model were implemented consistently enough, you could organize your active desktop documents & apps into a two-level hierarchy as you see fit, even without multiple desktops. The current state of the art allows you to approximate this, with multiple windows combined with MDI or tabs, but you have to put up with some limitations and inconsistencies in the abstraction.
It can still be very useful, though, and no-one forces you to open multiple tabs.
See, it's not Microsoft's fault. It's just that they're not able to hire* as many programmers as they need, which puts a limit on the amount of innovation they're able to do. It's those darn American programmers -- all they want to do is sit around and eat triple-decker hamburgers and earn a "decent living". If you want better software, lift the H1-B visa cap!
(* read: don't want to pay for)
Yeah, I realized that after I posted... Thing is, I still run Office 97 on my Win2K machine, but I switched my main desktop to Linux a LONG time ago.
The switch to SDI seems to have been driven by a combination of two factors -- dumb users and/or a poor user interface to MDI. Part of the problem with MDI is that Microsoft's implementation of it didn't have a visual metaphor. It was famously confusing for ordinary end users. People seem to adapt to tabbed browsing just fine, though, and the visual metaphor is the reason for that.
Perhaps the real reason that Microsoft has been slow to adapt tabs in IE is they realize how they screwed up in eliminating MDI, instead of just improving its interface. They want to postpone the inevitable day when they have to resurrect MDI with tabs, and the associated ribbing they'll get from the rest of the industry when they do that. If they delay long enough, they'll be able to spin it as an "innovation" in Office instead of correcting a mistake.
That's not true in principle, at least in the case of Windows. See my post about MDI.
However, Mozilla and Firefox didn't follow the (Windows-based) MDI standards for the keys they use, and don't provide a Window menu for navigating between tabs, so in that sense, their tabbed implementation of MDI is indeed non-standard. However, in principle, a tabbed interface can be MDI-compliant, as various editors, IDEs and the like demonstrate.
More generally, the argument that there should only be one way to switch contexts is an argument for complete flatness vs. hierarchy in desktop organization. Flatness makes sense for a certain kind of user, who typically isn't doing very much at the same time. However, demanding users typically find that it can be useful to have multiple items open at the same time, and once you do that, having a way to organize them into a hierarchy (even if only a two-level one) can be useful. For example, I might open a number of related documents in the same instance of a word processor. The fact that you can't navigate to the exact document you want by switching windows is part of the point -- from the top level, all you want is a way to navigate to a particular collection of documents. All the usual reasons to choose hierarchical organization apply.
Ctrl-Shift-Tab goes in the other direction.
Do you also never open more than one document at a time in a given instance of Word or Excel?
From very early on, Microsoft Office and other Microsoft software has had the ability to open multiple documents in the same application -- it's known as MDI, Multiple Document Interface. Tabbed browsing implements exactly the same model, except that it provides a more directly intuitive model for accessing multiple documents -- instead of using Ctrl-F6 (who came up with that?!) or the Window menu, you can use Ctrl-Tab or click on a visible, labelled tab.
Basically, tabbed browsing provides a more usable version of MDI, and shows up just how lacking in innovation Microsoft really is, not just in their browser but in one of their major cash-cow product lines, Office.
I agree, Lambda the Ultimate is a great way to keep up with academic research, at least related to programming languages (which are pretty central to computing, of course). It seems like one of a kind, though. What other good ones are out there?
Focus can be a good thing. When I look at the Wikinews home page right now, I see an eclectic mix of headlines that look as though they might have been ripped from a combination of Reuters and Slashdot, but really not much of interest to me.
This is intended as a constructive question: what is it that's going to bring readers back to Wikinews day after day? What can they expect to see? If the answer is a fairly random collection of stories on any possible topic, why do you think that's better than sites which do focus more closely on particular regions or topics?
Most of the best real-life examples of journalism are either topic-focused or region focused. It's difficult to be the best at everything.
I beg to differ. As soon as my orbiting gamma ray burst generator platform is operational, I plan to make millions, perhaps even billions, very soon after I threaten to fry Washington D.C.!
So if you're a Bush supporter, it's not possible to be skeptical about the specific ways in which the war on terrorism is being practiced, for example?
Is Pat Buchanan a Kerry supporter? (He disagrees with Bush on much of his foreign policy.)
Your reading between the lines and jumping to conclusions is not "the only way to get people to put their cards on the table", it's a singularly unproductive way to discuss anything at all. However, politicians know this, and they try to frame issues in a "you're with us or against us" way, so that instead of having honest debate about issues, everything is twisted into us vs. them jihads.
How does it feel to be a jihadist, albeit a rhetorical one? For you, the infidels are apparently Kerry supporters, and anyone who states an opinion which might be held by a Kerry supporter is the enemy, to be attacked regardless of any actual merits in their specific opinions. Again, that's why I said you were part of the problem.
You seem to have taken the original post almost personally. I took it as being aimed more at the overall system, which is certainly worthy of some ridicule. Even if the OP holds all of the political opinions you imagine he does, it still isn't particularly relevant to the original point.It's not a question of having a solid opinion -- it's jumping to conclusions about the implications of what the OP said, and distorting the discussion along your predefined political lines, which seem highly simplistic -- e.g. what does John Kerry have to do with this? You're part of the problem in the sense that you don't contribute anything, you only distort along entirely predictable, but utterly misguided, lines.
Go and re-read the post you responded to, and try to remove your filter for a second. Can you interpret it so that the poster isn't concerned about partisan politics at all? Exercise that brain, for pity's sake!
To give you the benefit of the doubt (belatedly, I admit), perhaps you're unaware of just how many proposals come out with "could be used against terrorism" tacked on the end nowadays. There was another one on Slashdot yesterday, and that's just the tip of the iceberg. The OP has a point -- it is sort of sad. One reason it's sad is that it's so often dishonest -- it's like the games where adding something like "in bed" to the end of a sentence is supposed to make it funny. Adding "could be used against terrorism" is supposed to make it fundable.
The funny thing is, who's being fooled here? Not the people granting the funds -- they're not stupid, they have good advisory panels. No, the only people being fooled are citizens who take these things at face value.
You're the one inserting your simplistic binary political filter into the situation. In so doing, you become part of the problem.
That neutron bombardment can't be good for brain tissue, is all I can think.
Don't screw with the timeline -- they have to get through the monolithium phase on their own!
You'll find out once you reach puberty.
That's the only explanation I can think of for the spin on the Slashdot posting. I think it's a legitimate question to raise, but to present it with the headline "China Locks in its Net-Citizenry" is just ludicrous, and extremely inflammatory. Only on Slashdot, where the term "editor" has a unique definition. Timothy ought to be ashamed of himself.
Thanks for the info. What you describe is really what I meant by having copper "come into" your home. At first I thought the Verizon router might take fiber directly, so I was surprised to hear that an ordinary router would work.
I'm curious, how does the connection come into your house? Still on copper phone lines, or something else?
Some of the alleged benefits of Flash might be fine if they were integrated into the browser. They're not. Instead, what you get, is an embedded world, an environment within an environment. The only people who actually enjoy this world are, as the OP said, the content creators and their management who don't understand what they're doing to the user experience by ghettoizing their content into a closed, non-standard format.
It's part of a hazing ritual which has been performed every generation since airplanes were first invented. They're never going to actually let consumers have flying cars, it'd be too dangerous. But it's fun to exploit the bright-eyed naivete of every fresh new batch of young 'uns...