Well, I worked as a secretary for many years in the WordPerfect 5.1 era. The answer is that, just as vi commands are hard to learn but easy to use, yes, the function keys in WordPerfect were much easier to use than mousing over menu options. Certainly not easier to learn, which is why an infrequent user gets more done with a GUI, but much more efficient to use once learned.
The point about something like the function keys, and this is often misimagined by those that don't get it, is not that you would learn or memorize all 48 function key combinations; but you would learn the top six, say. And since those six functions accounted for most of what you were doing, that's a significant gain. For those infrequently-used functions, you're poring over the template or popping up the function key help or whatever, and it probably would be easier to mouse over menus for that one.
This implies that the best interface would be a hybrid, with powerful, if cryptic, efficient command sequences and a consistent, if less efficient, GUI as well. Unfortunately, the typical implementation of this blows ("shortcut" keys); I think the best is probably gvim.
Really? I don't think so. Here I'll hit you with this one too. There is no real difference between the conctration camps set up by hitler and the contration camps set up by bush. Ok maybe the conditions are better (but then again how would any of us know) but the idea is the same. Round people up and send them away to a distant concentration camp to be "interrogated". [Emphasis added]
I agree with most of what you've said in your post, but this comparison is asinine. The "idea" of Hitler's concentration camps was to annihilate, not interrogate, to do so against millions of the innocent, not hundreds of the politically inconvenient, and represents the greatest evil we will ever know. Detaining these people without trial is wrong, yes, but don't compare Camp X-Ray with a manufactory of genocide.
I agree with most of this, there's a certain point at which the source material is just tapped and it's time to move on. However, I disagree that Picard needs to fade away, as Patrick Stewart's charisma is the sole saving grace of the NextGen cast.
Related to this, I dropped using passwords some time ago, and started using long passphrases; it happens to work great under Linux w/MD5 passwords and OpenBSD. But the problem is that these are pretty long and it's easy to make a mistake. What I'd like is to incorporate the cadence into the password, as you suggest, and take advantage of whatever "fuzzy hashing" you'd need to do that to also allow a one- or two-character variation in the password. In other words, if my password is "it's like a noodle in a salad", it would accept "it's tlike a noodle it a salad" if I often make that mistake.
This is a good point, and perhaps more explicitly, the HTML specification that includes <input type="submit"> describes specifically prior art; for surely this is a static link to a dynamic page?
His books are better than they have a right to be. Don't know about series, but I really enjoyed American Gods, Stardust is a great adult fairy tale, and Neverwhere was the book that got me reading fantasy again after a decade-long break.
To use this in automobiles. That would put a stake in the hearts of those in the middle east (assuming it's not oil based).
It is a petroleum product. But you're on the right track--we already have a way to use biofeuls in your existing diesel car. You can use a manufactured Biodiesel or roll your own more or less for free. And there are some good cars with diesel engines! Trucks, SUVs, Volkswagens and Mercedes.
Yes--arg! I hate it when stuff like this slips past. This is clear a vehicle!
Okay, I've calmed down. It should be noted that (at least in California, can't speak for the other states) local authorities can further restrict the Segway as they do skaters and so forth. Let's get out and make sure your city councils do just that.
I walk around my local downtown all the time. I can just imagine the disruption of having one of these monsters cruising down a sidewalk at 7 or 11 mph, wider than a person, without the ability to step around people or obstacles. It boggles the mind.
A picture phone isn't intended as a replacement for a digital camera. I already have a digital camera, and a good one too. But you know what I don't have in my pocket right now? That's right, a camera.
The SMS features of my phone aren't even a replacement for the two-way pager I already use for work (that pager has a QWERTY key layout, better configurability of message notification, etc.); and I'm sure the PDA functions are far more primitive that a real PDA. But such a phone combines all of these features into one device that it's reasonably for me to carry around all the time. So it may not be as good as any of those things, but it's much more useful since I will actually use it.
I don't think the argument that picture phones are "top-down" driven makes any difference. It may well be true, but I have a feeling that picture phones will catch on whether or not they are heavily hyped, and the more users there are the more options we'll have for cheaper bandwidth. Alternatively, if they wouldn't have caught on otherwise I don't think hype can "force" people to use a luxury item like this they don't have to.
You may be right that I'll use the SMS function more often than the picture function--but so what? On my phone the camera doesn't take up extra space (it's not an attachment--that is a stupid idea) and even if I use it three or four times a month, while I'm SMS-ing every day, it's still worth it. And I'll always have it sitting there to record something pretty I want to show my wife, to record a license plate in an accident I've just witnessed or to snap a picture of that new car I fancy.
Wasn't there some noise about theaters jamming cellphone bands to prevent exactly this thing? (A similar thing happened when I saw Towers, I think--I didn't see the phone but I heard the mumbled conversation).
I've found that merely asking someone to stop what they're doing, in a normal tone of voice, usually works and it generally pays to be polite, at least to start with.
This thing was a tank, it lasted 20 years. It still worked in fact, I just got tired of using a VCR without a remote control. It was an all-metal toploader, and when you ejected a tape it blew it out like a gourmand spitting out corked wine. It was huge and indestructible.
I'm actually surprised there hasn't been too much "but that's not science fiction, it's cyberpunk, fantasy or horror!" in this discussion.
I find it interesting that Neal Stephenson's novels are almost always in the bookstore together, under Science Fiction, though only Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are really science fiction, right? Big U., Zodiac and Cryptonomicon seem to me sort of sci-fi flavored contemporary fiction.
It's probably no accident that some of this really good science fiction is hard to categorize as such, because stories that fit so neatly into a genre probably aren't very good.
A device that connects an otherwise isolated villager to the Internet
could help with these other priorities, rather than detract from
them. For example, it might expose people to birth control
information who
might otherwise not have it. How about information on
treadle pumps or getting clean
water? It might be difficult for the population to which the Simputer
is targeted to get this information via nonelectronic means, for any price.
I would have loved to watch a show about average folks in the middle of a really crappy situation having to overcome their own inadequacies before they could even think about dealing with the rest of the universe. Big missed opportunity.
I think Firefly has some of these elements, which is one of the reasons I like it. It's the best sci-fi I've seen in a long time.
Another option might be to assign your risk of security vulnerabilities to someone else by outsourcing. UltraDNS will run your authoritative services, and you can maybe get recursive service from your datacenter provider; if not then at least you can firewall off the internal servers from the outside world and reduce the risk of attack.
I more or less concur--the vast majority of the data in question is best represented by ASCII text with no markup, and the few exceptions are hardly damaging to the text.
However, there are a few problems--one of which is that each project has slightly different rules for registering or not registering textual enhancement, like italic or bold, or special characters. One project, for example, asked me to render italics for emphasis using all caps, except when the word is "I", when it should be underscores, or when it is a title or vessel, when it should be left out (i.e. "I do not want to sail on the Titanic" becomes "_I_ do NOT want to sail on the Titanic"). Another wanted me to include HTML markup for italics (<I></I>).
Huh?
Some projects want you to flatten 8-bit characters (á [a with accent] becomes a), others want them preserved, but are ambiguous about what character set encoding is desirable. ISO-8859 Latin-1 would probably be a common choice, but one project asks you to preserve 8-bit characters using the "Windows Character Somethingorother" tool and I'm pretty sure it will encode using some Windows code page. And of course, the resulting PG text files are not MIME documents and will not carry their character set encodings with them.
There are perfectly fine policy-based solutions to these problems, but there seems to be no master policy for these things, or at least the project instructions don't reflect one if there is.
A few years ago, I read an article that you can fit every person/family in the world with their own house, and the area it would take would be able the size of Texas.
Which is, after all, a better use of Texas than what we're doing with it now.
Yes, I got this when I overwrote the password file with garbage on the company's only HP-UX server and then tried to su to fix it. I was at home, called in, told everybody not to log out under any circumstances while I drove in quick.
Look closer at the Sigfried & Roy commercial--that's an external phone. I think the camera/phone thing is kind of cool, but not if there's a large silver McNugget you have to plug into it.
I'm waiting for the first "Beowulf Cluster of these things" post--how long will it be?
The obvious problem with this is that adding space is not necessarily the Right Thing to do--it becomes easy for a poorly written or configured program to consume all the space in your SAN. In other words, yes, the problem is easy to solve in the special case that you know you always want to add space to/var and never delete anything; but is not really possible to do in a fully general way.
However, such a solution might be fine with Sun, who wants to sell you disk.
Really, you can automate handling disk full issues? What does such a program do? Like, it decides, "here are some files I'm pretty sure you don't need?"
Doing this in the general case is suck[1]; the special case (hmmm./var always keeps filling up, better just get rid of the old files in Apache's cache once in a while) is trivial but not something Sun can tackle.
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Well, I worked as a secretary for many years in the WordPerfect 5.1 era. The answer is that, just as vi commands are hard to learn but easy to use, yes, the function keys in WordPerfect were much easier to use than mousing over menu options. Certainly not easier to learn, which is why an infrequent user gets more done with a GUI, but much more efficient to use once learned.
The point about something like the function keys, and this is often misimagined by those that don't get it, is not that you would learn or memorize all 48 function key combinations; but you would learn the top six, say. And since those six functions accounted for most of what you were doing, that's a significant gain. For those infrequently-used functions, you're poring over the template or popping up the function key help or whatever, and it probably would be easier to mouse over menus for that one.
This implies that the best interface would be a hybrid, with powerful, if cryptic, efficient command sequences and a consistent, if less efficient, GUI as well. Unfortunately, the typical implementation of this blows ("shortcut" keys); I think the best is probably gvim.
I agree with most of what you've said in your post, but this comparison is asinine. The "idea" of Hitler's concentration camps was to annihilate, not interrogate, to do so against millions of the innocent, not hundreds of the politically inconvenient, and represents the greatest evil we will ever know. Detaining these people without trial is wrong, yes, but don't compare Camp X-Ray with a manufactory of genocide.
I agree with most of this, there's a certain point at which the source material is just tapped and it's time to move on. However, I disagree that Picard needs to fade away, as Patrick Stewart's charisma is the sole saving grace of the NextGen cast.
Related to this, I dropped using passwords some time ago, and started using long passphrases; it happens to work great under Linux w/MD5 passwords and OpenBSD. But the problem is that these are pretty long and it's easy to make a mistake. What I'd like is to incorporate the cadence into the password, as you suggest, and take advantage of whatever "fuzzy hashing" you'd need to do that to also allow a one- or two-character variation in the password. In other words, if my password is "it's like a noodle in a salad", it would accept "it's tlike a noodle it a salad" if I often make that mistake.
This is a good point, and perhaps more explicitly, the HTML specification that includes <input type="submit"> describes specifically prior art; for surely this is a static link to a dynamic page?
His books are better than they have a right to be. Don't know about series, but I really enjoyed American Gods, Stardust is a great adult fairy tale, and Neverwhere was the book that got me reading fantasy again after a decade-long break.
Doesn't sonicMQ use a database though?
I ran into this when of my customers set up an Oracle database to use sonicMQ and I was wondering why they didn't just use Oracle AQ instead.
It is a petroleum product. But you're on the right track--we already have a way to use biofeuls in your existing diesel car. You can use a manufactured Biodiesel or roll your own more or less for free. And there are some good cars with diesel engines! Trucks, SUVs, Volkswagens and Mercedes.
I have to get one of those chairs just so I can sit in it and cry "I am not a number! I am a free man!"
Yes--arg! I hate it when stuff like this slips past. This is clear a vehicle!
Okay, I've calmed down. It should be noted that (at least in California, can't speak for the other states) local authorities can further restrict the Segway as they do skaters and so forth. Let's get out and make sure your city councils do just that.
I walk around my local downtown all the time. I can just imagine the disruption of having one of these monsters cruising down a sidewalk at 7 or 11 mph, wider than a person, without the ability to step around people or obstacles. It boggles the mind.
A picture phone isn't intended as a replacement for a digital camera. I already have a digital camera, and a good one too. But you know what I don't have in my pocket right now? That's right, a camera.
The SMS features of my phone aren't even a replacement for the two-way pager I already use for work (that pager has a QWERTY key layout, better configurability of message notification, etc.); and I'm sure the PDA functions are far more primitive that a real PDA. But such a phone combines all of these features into one device that it's reasonably for me to carry around all the time. So it may not be as good as any of those things, but it's much more useful since I will actually use it.
I don't think the argument that picture phones are "top-down" driven makes any difference. It may well be true, but I have a feeling that picture phones will catch on whether or not they are heavily hyped, and the more users there are the more options we'll have for cheaper bandwidth. Alternatively, if they wouldn't have caught on otherwise I don't think hype can "force" people to use a luxury item like this they don't have to.
You may be right that I'll use the SMS function more often than the picture function--but so what? On my phone the camera doesn't take up extra space (it's not an attachment--that is a stupid idea) and even if I use it three or four times a month, while I'm SMS-ing every day, it's still worth it. And I'll always have it sitting there to record something pretty I want to show my wife, to record a license plate in an accident I've just witnessed or to snap a picture of that new car I fancy.
Wasn't there some noise about theaters jamming cellphone bands to prevent exactly this thing? (A similar thing happened when I saw Towers, I think--I didn't see the phone but I heard the mumbled conversation).
I've found that merely asking someone to stop what they're doing, in a normal tone of voice, usually works and it generally pays to be polite, at least to start with.
This thing was a tank, it lasted 20 years. It still worked in fact, I just got tired of using a VCR without a remote control. It was an all-metal toploader, and when you ejected a tape it blew it out like a gourmand spitting out corked wine. It was huge and indestructible.
I'm actually surprised there hasn't been too much "but that's not science fiction, it's cyberpunk, fantasy or horror!" in this discussion.
I find it interesting that Neal Stephenson's novels are almost always in the bookstore together, under Science Fiction, though only Snow Crash and The Diamond Age are really science fiction, right? Big U., Zodiac and Cryptonomicon seem to me sort of sci-fi flavored contemporary fiction.
It's probably no accident that some of this really good science fiction is hard to categorize as such, because stories that fit so neatly into a genre probably aren't very good.
I disagree.
A device that connects an otherwise isolated villager to the Internet could help with these other priorities, rather than detract from them. For example, it might expose people to birth control information who might otherwise not have it. How about information on treadle pumps or getting clean water? It might be difficult for the population to which the Simputer is targeted to get this information via nonelectronic means, for any price.
I think Firefly has some of these elements, which is one of the reasons I like it. It's the best sci-fi I've seen in a long time.
Another option might be to assign your risk of security vulnerabilities to someone else by outsourcing. UltraDNS will run your authoritative services, and you can maybe get recursive service from your datacenter provider; if not then at least you can firewall off the internal servers from the outside world and reduce the risk of attack.
You got that right--SGI gives it to you fast and hard.
I more or less concur--the vast majority of the data in question is best represented by ASCII text with no markup, and the few exceptions are hardly damaging to the text.
However, there are a few problems--one of which is that each project has slightly different rules for registering or not registering textual enhancement, like italic or bold, or special characters. One project, for example, asked me to render italics for emphasis using all caps, except when the word is "I", when it should be underscores, or when it is a title or vessel, when it should be left out (i.e. "I do not want to sail on the Titanic" becomes "_I_ do NOT want to sail on the Titanic"). Another wanted me to include HTML markup for italics (<I></I>).
Huh?
Some projects want you to flatten 8-bit characters (á [a with accent] becomes a), others want them preserved, but are ambiguous about what character set encoding is desirable. ISO-8859 Latin-1 would probably be a common choice, but one project asks you to preserve 8-bit characters using the "Windows Character Somethingorother" tool and I'm pretty sure it will encode using some Windows code page. And of course, the resulting PG text files are not MIME documents and will not carry their character set encodings with them.
There are perfectly fine policy-based solutions to these problems, but there seems to be no master policy for these things, or at least the project instructions don't reflect one if there is.
A few years ago, I read an article that you can fit every person/family in the world with their own house, and the area it would take would be able the size of Texas.
Which is, after all, a better use of Texas than what we're doing with it now.
My favorite MacOS error was:
The application "Unknown" has unexpectedly quit because an error of type 1 occurred.
However, my favorite all-time error message was one coded by a coworker:
Error-0: Something happen. Maybe at time %i.
We still talk about that one.
Yes, I got this when I overwrote the password file with garbage on the company's only HP-UX server and then tried to su to fix it. I was at home, called in, told everybody not to log out under any circumstances while I drove in quick.
Look closer at the Sigfried & Roy commercial--that's an external phone. I think the camera/phone thing is kind of cool, but not if there's a large silver McNugget you have to plug into it.
I'm waiting for the first "Beowulf Cluster of these things" post--how long will it be?
The obvious problem with this is that adding space is not necessarily the Right Thing to do--it becomes easy for a poorly written or configured program to consume all the space in your SAN. In other words, yes, the problem is easy to solve in the special case that you know you always want to add space to /var and never delete anything; but is not really possible to do in a fully general way.
However, such a solution might be fine with Sun, who wants to sell you disk.
Really, you can automate handling disk full issues? What does such a program do? Like, it decides, "here are some files I'm pretty sure you don't need?"
/var always keeps filling up, better just get rid of the old files in Apache's cache once in a while) is trivial but not something Sun can tackle.
Doing this in the general case is suck[1]; the special case (hmmm.
[1] Yes I just wrote "is suck." And I meant it.