... or you get a lot of email with embedded remote-linked images. Which, of course, most of us do.
I agree on the scripting/active content part, but it's not quite as simple as only opening network connections to the email server. HTML email means that your email client is really a web browser in disguise.
It's one thing to have an ignorant user, but someone who is informed enough to know that the word "Start" means the next step to running a program is usually "All Programs" isn't completely ignorant. When you just completely make up terms like "Start Bar", that are named similarly to things that they already know, they'll just assume that is what you are referring to.
"Taskbar Notification Area" and "System Tray" are both perfectly acceptable, and non-ambiguous, terms to refer to the icon area that sits to the left of the clock in Windows. If you told me to go to the "Start Bar" I'd click the start menu, and I've been using computers since before MS-DOS came out.
When dealing with newbies, it's vitally important that you learn the proper terminology for stuff first, and teach them the proper terms. That way, when you tell them to google their problems later, they won't be confused by the real terms. And if you're going to make names up, at least make them unambiguous. Anything that begins with the word "Start" in Windows is going to automatically mean the button that has the word "Start" on it to most users. That's why nothing else in the Windows desktop has the word "Start" in its name. Microsoft was smart and picked very unambiguous names for everything on the desktop, and this terminology started in 1995.
Knowing computers for your own use is one thing, but a lot of the problems we have today is that people who don't know how to show others how to use them, and they end up trying to memorize ten terms for each thing when they talk to different people.
If you were teaching your kids how to drive, would you tell them to turn the car by turning the adjustment knob and stop the car by applying pressure to the stop bar? No. You'd use the terms "steering wheel" and "brake". Standard terminology is really important when learning a new skill.
I, for one, welcome our stupid-people killing overlo... hey, who are you guys? Where in the hell did you come from? What's the gun for? NO! STOP! NNOOOOO[BANG]
No, because then he'd be asking Youtube for an RCA to explain the SLA. I'd add more TLA's, but I don't work for IBM any more and I don't have access to "whatis".
Re:Dancing kitties will still be there?
on
YouTube Is Down
·
· Score: 3, Funny
U meen I cn haz Kntuky Fryed Kittah?
Re:it's back....
on
YouTube Is Down
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Until you get all the slashdotters going to check the see if the web site is up, then the site gets slashdotted. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Assuming you were (a) smart enough to be running your Windows user as non-admin, and (b) inattentive enough to be unaware that you needed those rights you set yourself up not to have in order to install software.:)
How is drinking yogurt going to help? The only way yogurt dissolves capsacin is due to the fats in it, and that requires direct contact between the yogurt and the capsacin.
Smear the lhassi all over your body before the battle, and you might be better off. Leave it on for a few hours, and your trenchmates will need the gas masks.
I remember a program about the same time as CatchUp called OilChange that worked in a similar fashion - scanned the registry and hard drive for known files from common applications, determined the current version, and allowed you to at least tell what of your software was out of date. A few programs could be updated from right in the tool, most just sent you to the vendor's home page so you could download the updates.
In addition, half the apps I run now have their own update checking stuff.. some check on startup, some check every day, some check once a week... finding the settings for this (if the settings are even exposed) can be a to of fun too.. etc.
I think my favorites used to be the ones that checked when the app started up. Adobe Acrobat Reader was really bad about this. "Would you like to take 30 minutes out of your day to load an Adobe Downloader so you can load the latest version of Adobe Reader so you can reboot and then have to come back to this page so you can read this one-page document, or ignore this and I'll pester you the next time you try to open a document?"
One of the things that drove me into the loving arms of Linux Mint. I don't install software, I add repositories and select the software I want installed. When new versions come out, the centralized updater tells me about them, and with a few clicks o'da mouse and one typing of my password, the dependencies are resolved and the packages are loaded and I'm done. Oh, and I almost never have to reboot after updates.
I'm not saying that the clumsy update tools are Microsoft's fault - the vendors have all insisted on going their own way - but it would have been nice to have updates for things like Flash, Adobe, etc all done as part of a daily centralized check rather than 20 background apps bugging me at odd times and a number of other software simply interrupting me when I tried to start it up.
It's supposed to stop you from doing something by incapacitating you with pain and temporarily blinding you.
Whether you are rolling on the floor screaming and ripping your eyeballs out by their bloody stalks, or rolling on the ground screaming and blindly smearing mango Lassi on your eyes is really irrelevant - your hands are otherwise occupied and cannot go for your gun, and you are temporarily blind.
Plus I have to imagine something this high on the Scoville scale would actually do some burn damage before you can wash the capsacin away with your oh-so-handy dairy product. This stuff is ten times as potent as pepper spray, and by all accounts pepper spray REALLY HURTS. Something ten times as potent would probably look at your yogurt and laugh derisively as it sets in enough tissue damage to make you feel pain for a significant period of time.
Sorry, but it's not. At least not to a lot of us. Maybe it is to you, but then why would you even care about this device enough to post your derision at the enhanced features?
I carry a Blackberry. I do use it for phone calls. Very, very rarely. I probably make about 3-4 calls a week on it, and it's my only telephone.
I also use it for emails, Gmail, calendar, text messaging, instant messenger, contact manager, surfing the web, reading news on RSS, listening to music, taking photos and videos, Geocaching, driving directions, checking traffic, making small edits to Word and Excel documents, tethering my laptop to it for production support issues, recording voice notes, a flashlight, and probably a few other things that aren't coming to mind at the moment. If it had a pair of pliers and a good blade, I could consolidate to one thing on my belt.
It's not a telephone, it's a smartphone. It's primary purpose is no longer verbal communication. That is one of its functions. For me, frankly, voice is not one of the more important features on my smartphone. But it is useful to have a phone from time to time.
I do understand that there is a significant segment of the population that just wants a phone without all the gadgets. Great! Buy one.
[phone rings, Quake-Catcher volunteer answers] Volunteer: "Hello?" Quake-Catcher Scientist: "Hi, Mr. Jones. We'd like to ask you some questions about a highly-localized event last night." V: "What?" S: "We clearly read a 8.8 Richter reading in your apartment last night around 10PM, but we can't confirm this with any other data." V: [puts hand over handset] "HONEY?! DID YOU LEAVE THE LAPTOP IN THE BED LAST NIGHT?!"
I want this for my MOUSE. No, seriously. I'd pay decent money for this.
If the tracking gets that good, you could put three buttons just below the spacebar:
- Left Click
- Track
- Right Click
When I push the TRACK button, I want the cursor to go where I'm looking. Then I can click on the right or left mouse buttons as desired, and even hold the mouse button to select, etc.
The reason I would want a "Track" button is to keep the thing from tracking the cursor with my typing all the time. That would drive me as batty as the suggested application of this tech.
I suppose you could do a right-wink/left-wink thing as long as you made it so the eye needed to be closed for longer than an ordinary blink, but having.:)
I feel the same way. My wife's ASUS eeePC Netbook came with a 350GB 5400RPM hard drive. It works OK, and of course an SSD would have jacked the price way up from the $300 price we got it for, but I'd still have preferred even a 16GB SSD drive on the thing. She'll never store any serious data on it.
It does have an SD expansion slot - I may at some point pick up a 16GB SD chip for it and see if I can boot Mint off the SD chip instead, then see if I can power down the hard drive in the BIOS as an experiment.
You can beat a properly-built and operating SSD with a stick and there's a very low likelihood of damage, while the spinning hard drive will almost die an immediate and horrible death. And as long as the controller holds up, whatever data is on the SSD will almost certainly be OK on it. So, physically, a well-built SSD is a tough little rascal.
But the media contained in it has a lifespan of somewhere on the order of five years of relatively ordinary use. The spindles might not fail, since it has none, but you'll find slowly diminishing capacity and performance near the end of the lifespan of the drive. Compare this to spinning hard drives, where I have a 20GB drive I bought when 20GB drives were new (late 90s) that still performs as well as the day I purchased it. I have SMART monitoring on and it keeps coming up all-green. It's been in continuous use for well over ten years. I use it only for an OS drive and don't keep any data on it any more because one of these days it's just going to die, but I'd be nearing end-of-life on my second SSD drive by now.
Now, there is one advantage of SSDs. They fail earlier, but the failure is usually in the form of loss of capacity and performance. Drive failures are rarely as dramatic as a spindle lockup or head crash, so you can usually get your data off the drive while it still works fine. Data-loss failures do occur, but they are (AFAIK) somewhat rare.
Oh, sorry, I actually missed that in the original post, but you make an excellent point. Yes, using the dot for both decimal point AND thousands separator is really, horribly bad practice.
Slashdot Mirror
... or you get a lot of email with embedded remote-linked images. Which, of course, most of us do.
I agree on the scripting/active content part, but it's not quite as simple as only opening network connections to the email server. HTML email means that your email client is really a web browser in disguise.
It's one thing to have an ignorant user, but someone who is informed enough to know that the word "Start" means the next step to running a program is usually "All Programs" isn't completely ignorant. When you just completely make up terms like "Start Bar", that are named similarly to things that they already know, they'll just assume that is what you are referring to.
"Taskbar Notification Area" and "System Tray" are both perfectly acceptable, and non-ambiguous, terms to refer to the icon area that sits to the left of the clock in Windows. If you told me to go to the "Start Bar" I'd click the start menu, and I've been using computers since before MS-DOS came out.
When dealing with newbies, it's vitally important that you learn the proper terminology for stuff first, and teach them the proper terms. That way, when you tell them to google their problems later, they won't be confused by the real terms. And if you're going to make names up, at least make them unambiguous. Anything that begins with the word "Start" in Windows is going to automatically mean the button that has the word "Start" on it to most users. That's why nothing else in the Windows desktop has the word "Start" in its name. Microsoft was smart and picked very unambiguous names for everything on the desktop, and this terminology started in 1995.
Knowing computers for your own use is one thing, but a lot of the problems we have today is that people who don't know how to show others how to use them, and they end up trying to memorize ten terms for each thing when they talk to different people.
If you were teaching your kids how to drive, would you tell them to turn the car by turning the adjustment knob and stop the car by applying pressure to the stop bar? No. You'd use the terms "steering wheel" and "brake". Standard terminology is really important when learning a new skill.
I, for one, welcome our stupid-people killing overlo... hey, who are you guys? Where in the hell did you come from? What's the gun for? NO! STOP! NNOOOOO[BANG]
But then how would he get fed?
No, that parses to "hots ex y via gra pan a loon s 4u"
In other words, previously-married people with y chromosome will have their temperatures increased via a grey pan full of loons, and it's all for you.
This is not the pr0n you're looking for, and if it is you are one sick bastard.
No, because then he'd be asking Youtube for an RCA to explain the SLA. I'd add more TLA's, but I don't work for IBM any more and I don't have access to "whatis".
U meen I cn haz Kntuky Fryed Kittah?
Until you get all the slashdotters going to check the see if the web site is up, then the site gets slashdotted. Self-fulfilling prophecy.
Assuming you were (a) smart enough to be running your Windows user as non-admin, and (b) inattentive enough to be unaware that you needed those rights you set yourself up not to have in order to install software. :)
mintUpdate just ROCKS.
I know reading the article is a pain sometimes, but in this case it's in the summary:
It swaps between EVDO Rev. A, WiMAX and Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g on demand.
How is drinking yogurt going to help? The only way yogurt dissolves capsacin is due to the fats in it, and that requires direct contact between the yogurt and the capsacin.
Smear the lhassi all over your body before the battle, and you might be better off. Leave it on for a few hours, and your trenchmates will need the gas masks.
I remember a program about the same time as CatchUp called OilChange that worked in a similar fashion - scanned the registry and hard drive for known files from common applications, determined the current version, and allowed you to at least tell what of your software was out of date. A few programs could be updated from right in the tool, most just sent you to the vendor's home page so you could download the updates.
In addition, half the apps I run now have their own update checking stuff.. some check on startup, some check every day, some check once a week... finding the settings for this (if the settings are even exposed) can be a to of fun too.. etc.
I think my favorites used to be the ones that checked when the app started up. Adobe Acrobat Reader was really bad about this. "Would you like to take 30 minutes out of your day to load an Adobe Downloader so you can load the latest version of Adobe Reader so you can reboot and then have to come back to this page so you can read this one-page document, or ignore this and I'll pester you the next time you try to open a document?"
One of the things that drove me into the loving arms of Linux Mint. I don't install software, I add repositories and select the software I want installed. When new versions come out, the centralized updater tells me about them, and with a few clicks o'da mouse and one typing of my password, the dependencies are resolved and the packages are loaded and I'm done. Oh, and I almost never have to reboot after updates.
I'm not saying that the clumsy update tools are Microsoft's fault - the vendors have all insisted on going their own way - but it would have been nice to have updates for things like Flash, Adobe, etc all done as part of a daily centralized check rather than 20 background apps bugging me at odd times and a number of other software simply interrupting me when I tried to start it up.
Then the spray has had its intended effect.
It's supposed to stop you from doing something by incapacitating you with pain and temporarily blinding you.
Whether you are rolling on the floor screaming and ripping your eyeballs out by their bloody stalks, or rolling on the ground screaming and blindly smearing mango Lassi on your eyes is really irrelevant - your hands are otherwise occupied and cannot go for your gun, and you are temporarily blind.
Plus I have to imagine something this high on the Scoville scale would actually do some burn damage before you can wash the capsacin away with your oh-so-handy dairy product. This stuff is ten times as potent as pepper spray, and by all accounts pepper spray REALLY HURTS. Something ten times as potent would probably look at your yogurt and laugh derisively as it sets in enough tissue damage to make you feel pain for a significant period of time.
No, he's running one of these phones. If he stopped to think, he'd be out of battery by the time he hit [SUBMIT].
Sorry, but it's not. At least not to a lot of us. Maybe it is to you, but then why would you even care about this device enough to post your derision at the enhanced features?
I carry a Blackberry. I do use it for phone calls. Very, very rarely. I probably make about 3-4 calls a week on it, and it's my only telephone.
I also use it for emails, Gmail, calendar, text messaging, instant messenger, contact manager, surfing the web, reading news on RSS, listening to music, taking photos and videos, Geocaching, driving directions, checking traffic, making small edits to Word and Excel documents, tethering my laptop to it for production support issues, recording voice notes, a flashlight, and probably a few other things that aren't coming to mind at the moment. If it had a pair of pliers and a good blade, I could consolidate to one thing on my belt.
It's not a telephone, it's a smartphone. It's primary purpose is no longer verbal communication. That is one of its functions. For me, frankly, voice is not one of the more important features on my smartphone. But it is useful to have a phone from time to time.
I do understand that there is a significant segment of the population that just wants a phone without all the gadgets. Great! Buy one.
Manic Meerkat
Lawyers.
Configuration complete. This is a test...
So now you can be ambidextrous as you navigate the porcelain quagmire.
Did it work?
[phone rings, Quake-Catcher volunteer answers]
Volunteer: "Hello?"
Quake-Catcher Scientist: "Hi, Mr. Jones. We'd like to ask you some questions about a highly-localized event last night."
V: "What?"
S: "We clearly read a 8.8 Richter reading in your apartment last night around 10PM, but we can't confirm this with any other data."
V: [puts hand over handset] "HONEY?! DID YOU LEAVE THE LAPTOP IN THE BED LAST NIGHT?!"
but having.
Allow me to complete that sentence.
But having everyone in the office winking and blinking all the time just opens the door for unpleasant visits from HR for harassment.
I want this for my MOUSE. No, seriously. I'd pay decent money for this.
If the tracking gets that good, you could put three buttons just below the spacebar:
- Left Click
- Track
- Right Click
When I push the TRACK button, I want the cursor to go where I'm looking. Then I can click on the right or left mouse buttons as desired, and even hold the mouse button to select, etc.
The reason I would want a "Track" button is to keep the thing from tracking the cursor with my typing all the time. That would drive me as batty as the suggested application of this tech.
I suppose you could do a right-wink/left-wink thing as long as you made it so the eye needed to be closed for longer than an ordinary blink, but having. :)
I feel the same way. My wife's ASUS eeePC Netbook came with a 350GB 5400RPM hard drive. It works OK, and of course an SSD would have jacked the price way up from the $300 price we got it for, but I'd still have preferred even a 16GB SSD drive on the thing. She'll never store any serious data on it.
It does have an SD expansion slot - I may at some point pick up a 16GB SD chip for it and see if I can boot Mint off the SD chip instead, then see if I can power down the hard drive in the BIOS as an experiment.
Whoops, I said "SSD drive", didn't I? Did I really type that?
And me a Grammar Nazi. Have at it, folks. I have it coming. ;)
Durability? Umm, yes and no.
You can beat a properly-built and operating SSD with a stick and there's a very low likelihood of damage, while the spinning hard drive will almost die an immediate and horrible death. And as long as the controller holds up, whatever data is on the SSD will almost certainly be OK on it. So, physically, a well-built SSD is a tough little rascal.
But the media contained in it has a lifespan of somewhere on the order of five years of relatively ordinary use. The spindles might not fail, since it has none, but you'll find slowly diminishing capacity and performance near the end of the lifespan of the drive. Compare this to spinning hard drives, where I have a 20GB drive I bought when 20GB drives were new (late 90s) that still performs as well as the day I purchased it. I have SMART monitoring on and it keeps coming up all-green. It's been in continuous use for well over ten years. I use it only for an OS drive and don't keep any data on it any more because one of these days it's just going to die, but I'd be nearing end-of-life on my second SSD drive by now.
Now, there is one advantage of SSDs. They fail earlier, but the failure is usually in the form of loss of capacity and performance. Drive failures are rarely as dramatic as a spindle lockup or head crash, so you can usually get your data off the drive while it still works fine. Data-loss failures do occur, but they are (AFAIK) somewhat rare.
Oh, sorry, I actually missed that in the original post, but you make an excellent point. Yes, using the dot for both decimal point AND thousands separator is really, horribly bad practice.