Whenever commercials come on TV, I SWITCH TO ANOTHER CHANNEL without commercials.
I don't know about you, but where I live, all the channels tend to play commercials at almost exactly the same time. There's a good microeconomics argument about why this happens so often.
i don't have cite for this, but my guess is that those kids who take years to learn to spell didn't start learning it until the teacher showed them at school, probably around age six or seven.
I can't speak from your experience, but at least a couple of people I know who are bad spellers had serious problems learning because they're dyslexic. For one in particular, the condition wasn't acknowledged by her teachers, and they treated her as as if she was simply unattentive and lazy rather than trying to learn. More effective teaching methods probably would have helped more, but with particularly bad dyslexia there are still some limits, irrespective of how hard someone's trying.
Most of his voices sound like Billy West doing them. Mind, Mel Blanc had a lot of voices which were recognisably his, too, but Mel could do some voices I never knew were his.
I've been working my way through all the DVD commentaries in the last few months. There's a commentary in the middle somewhere where three of the voice actors -- Billy West, John DiMaggio and someone else (maybe Maurice Lamarche?) were challenged to mimic Zoidberg one after the other in a double-blind demonstration for the listeners. I was quite fascinated at how they were all able to get an indistinguishible the correct voice so accurately. The one actor who sounded a bit off was Billy West himself (who actually plays Zoidberg), and that was just because he was trying to trick the listeners.
Most of West's characters sound pretty different to me, and I wouldn't have picked out that they were the same actor without being told... at least no more accurately than with any other actor. Perhaps you happen to be extra sensitive, but my own opinion is that he's a very good voice actor.
I've been an assistant teacher in several comp-sci courses with large proportions of Chinese students, and although I didn't see any formal studies, there certainly appeared to be a much higher rate of plagiarism in those groups than other people.
I think part of it was due to English language problems. The Chinese students in the course would often get together in groups to translate a set of questions from English, work on the answers, and then collectively translate it back to very similar (even identical) English.
In other cases, it was just straight cheating.
My girlfriend also tutors and supervises exams for different courses, and she's had situations where more than half the class was cheating in tests. Her Chinese office-mate told her that it's at least partly due to a completely different culture in China. Apparently you don't elevate your status in China by being an individual and creative. Instead, you get higher status by fitting in, and by copying what people of higher status do already, as exactly as possible. It won't get you to a better position, but at least you'll be nearer to a better position. So if someone considered an expert in a field (such as a textbook author) says something, it's important to agree and say exactly the same thing. The easiest way to do that is to simply copy the text -- perhaps also to memorise it, but ultimately say as similar-a-thing as possible.
I certainly don't want to claim that all Chinese students are likely to be cheating, which would be completely unfair to the people who really do spend a lot of time and effort to learn the subject properly. I've had more than a few Chinese friends who spent a lot of effort into individual efforts, and did really well at it. There's certainly a major culture gap, though, and sometimes I wonder if some of the universities in western countries spend enough time and resources considering that people who come from China might not always understand or appreciate how important it is to learn to think for themselves.
Outlook 97 would do just fine for me and probably 98% of the world.
I'd quite happily go with a slightly simpler edition of Outlook if it'd do away with the bugs. We have to support Outlook in a small/medium (400 users) organisation, and it's frequently having problems, crashing, and just doing weird unexplained things.
To top it off, trying to write plugins for Outlook is awful. It's littered with annoying API bugs. To be fair, however, Microsoft's lack of clear Outlook API documentation in favour of documentation-by-example means that it's hard to distinguish between what's a bug and what is simply bad and nonsensical design.
no handbook of how to keep the bug count down and avoid introducing security flaws
How about by making it a nitemare for someone to submit a useful bug report, short of paying for a support contract? I bet that helps keep the bug count down.
All of these have the same root cause: the government and government employees did not consider the private data in their custody important enough to require rigorous controls and rigorous controls were not implemented. We could break down the problems into training issues, operational issues, etc., and politicians certainly will. But I would guess that the issue was due to a lack of political motivation to hold accountable every state IT group that has access to private data.
Why do you consider government to be the root cause of the problem here? If all this can happen in a government organisation and you hear about it, consider how much can just as easily happen in a private organisation and you hear nothing. I know of plenty of organisations, most of them commercial, that have very slack IT policies -- if most of these organisations were compromised in a similar way, it'd be unlikely you'd hear anything whatsoever unless there was a leak, or a compelling legal reason for them to come forward.
Government is clearly not perfect. In places where there's corruption, there's absolutely the possibility of influence from people with political agendas. There are in private organisations, too. In well organised government, though, which realisitcally might rule out much of the USA, government organisations tend to have more strict policies that they have to adhere to than anyone else. They also have less of a commercial incentive to keep quiet about things when they go wrong.
All that we need is to convince the few editors that he is, in fact, a full-time troll, And that his rantings do not deserve a place on the front page because they are neither news, nor are they 'stuff that matters'.
I just wish he'd be given his own category. That way I can block him from my personal front page in favour of more interesting stories, and those who want to be trolled can still be trolled. I'd settle for the slashdot editors deciding not to post his crap anymore, but I just don't think that's realistic. As sad as it is, Dvorak drives Slashdot activity as much as he drives his own pageviews.
Because that's what DNF will have. The idea, the plan, the layout, it's 5 years old. Yes, of course they will "add" stuff to make it "current", but it will be plugged into it and feel attached rather than a core part of the game.
Are you kidding? They can take any current game engine in the works and slap the name Duke Nukem on it. It might not be outstandingly brilliant and live up to the hype, but it'll at least be up to par with everything else.
The part that makes it Duke Nukem is the back story. If there was a decent back story developed 5 years ago, or 10 years ago for that matter, it could be attached to most of today's game engines without an issue.
Sure, Linux still supports QMAGIC and ZMAGIC A.out binaries, but last time I wanted to run a binary from that era, I had to download and compile libc5.
It's a fair enough comment, but I think it's beneficial that you're still able to download and compile libc5 and get it running. You mentioned that open source is what keeps these things running, and I agree that it's a great thing. Trying to get many closed source products running years after they were last sold and supported is next to impossible, for legal reasons if not technical reasons.
Personally I'd prefer that maintainers trimmed the old API's every so often in order to be able to provide better quality software overall. It may be necessary to take extra steps occasionally to get some ancient compatibility working, but it's at least possible to do this, and unlikely to happen often if ever.
The problem for Microsoft (I presume) is that it has to put so much effort into supporting legacy API's, because the small number of often highly paying customers out there who need to run legacy applications have no alternatives for getting their software working, short of perhaps switching to the competition, which Microsoft has made it clear it doesn't want.
IT should be strict about policy around spreadsheets... spreadsheets are great powerful tools, but they shouldn't be anointed as applications.
I see where yoo're coming from, but I'm not so sure about this particular statement -- after all, a spreadsheet is effectively quite a specialised functional program. It can have bugs if it hasn't been designed well, but so can imperitive programs. Try writing a complex program where you're not at risk of changing something a million miles away by changing one line. From my observations it can happen all the time if a programmer's not careful, and sometimes even if they are careful.
The difference is that until now, a lot more research and education has probably gone into writing imperitive programs. People who usually write spreadsheets, on the other hand, tend to get their education of them (if any) as an afterthought to some quite different financial education. Personally I think the problems lie mostly with the techniques people use to create complex spreadsheets, and there's probably a lot that could be improved with the spreadsheet applications, too, to help prevent bugs from being introduced.
I doubt many people use well developed and proven techniques for engineering their spreadsheet applications, and if they did, I doubt that the spreadsheet applications would support them. Putting more emphasis on separating the raw data from the logic would be a good start in my opinion. Some people who are better at doing this go to lengths to colour code things, lock cells, and so on, but the tools don't exactly encourage or force people to do this.
But this is all just similar to the sorts of research that have been going into more obvious types of software development over the last two decades or more. Personally I don't have a problem with treating spreadsheets as applications in our own system. Fortunately in our case, the people who write and use them here tend to know sufficiently about what they're doing that they're not so brittle. Also for those sorts of applications, they simply seem to be the best tool for the job.
Re:more proof the RIAA/MPAA are insane
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Death By DMCA
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· Score: 1
If the networks can no longer count on people watching at least some ads, how are they to pay for content? The day most people have "auto-commercial-skip" is the day advertisers stop paying to be a part of the program. At that point, the networks would have to charge the consumers directly. Are you interested in paying even more for cable TV then?
They already are charging consumers directly, as far as I'm concerned. It may be different for you in which case fair enough, but where I am (non-US), the major selling point for subscription television (satellite, cable, etc) over free-to-air broadcasters, when it was introduced about 15 years ago, was its lack of commercials. The point was to pay a little extra and get shows that weren't corrupted and edited to oblivion to fit in commercials.
This lasted for a few years, until the pay-TV operators had built up a reasonable consumer base and decided to start competing with free-to-air channels for major media material. One very good example (but not the only one) is with major sporting events. Now, not only has the value of sporting events gone up hugely, it also means that the free-to-air broadcasters can no longer afford the rights to air them, compared with subscription operators who are simply vast amounts of cash. Anyone wanting to watch them has to pay a subscription service. The irony with this subscription is that it doesn't fund the ability to stage the event on television where people can see it, it merely funds the ability for one television operator to out-bid another, which would have been equally accessible to viewers. Once rights are obtained, the operator has a monopoly, and often the ability to push subscription rates up even further.
The further irony in all of this is both that the sports themselves have become hugely commercialised, which I personally think is to their detriment. It's also meant that the subscription TV providers have started piping in just as many commercials than their free-to-air counterparts, making the TV equally as crappy... with the exception that they also have a monopoly on certain things, which (surprisingly) is purchased with people's subscriptions.
I don't know what the answer is, either, but personally I think it is possible to offer quality television with few or no commercials on a subscription alone of the operator isn't so concerned about attracting as many viewers as possible. (Hell, it's possible on a publicly funded budget if there's a reasonable amount of funding available -- BBC's been producing quality TV for its public for a long time, even if it doesn't appeal to as many people from the USA.) Quality TV on a subscription certainly used to happen. The problem, I think, is that there just aren't many people out there who actually care enough about quality television. It's much easier to make money with minimal effort by pumping trash at them, and simply making sure that it's slightly better than the trash that's available for free.
Tell your citizens that its cheaper and they'll thank you for it. The details about where the saved monegy goes usually become obfuscated however.
I work in a non-US government department. Our government has its own policy on Open Source (developed by another dept), which is non-committal but non-inhibiting, and little more than a document that describes the main issues with using open source. The public and politicians don't know whether we use OSS or not, and I doubt they care. (Except for one politician who released a press release on OSS once, but it didn't get noticed by anyone.)
When it comes to using OSS, we simply use it when it makes sense to do so. There's no iron fist reaching down dictating to us what to do, and I hope there never is. We give our users Windows desktops because that's what they tend to be most comfortable with, we run predominantly Windows servers administered by people who know what they're doing, and also have a few Linux boxes thrown in where it makes sense to do so. Any or all of this may change in the future, but I like to think that it'll change because we've decided it's appropriate to change. We use open source in all sorts of places for support systems. Usually it's because the open source apps available for those particular tasks do a better job, or are more reliably supported. We use a lot of closed source software, too, because sometimes there just aren't the OSS apps for the specialist needs that certain people in the department have.
Amusingly it's often easier to get help from an interested community than it is from a closed source distributor who's charging a large support contract. Personally I think that the main purpose of support contracts is to be able to attribute blame to someone else not having fixed a problem, but they're still needed with closed source because it's impossible for anyone else to fix the problem. It's probably every month or so that we come across Outlook or some other similar app displaying a weird behaviour, the company (Microsoft in this case) ignores it, and all that people in the community can say is that 'it happens for me too, maybe try this'. Open source is completely different. eg. I'm currently writing an in-house CA software, and the two projects we've found that are easiest to use for building this (OpenSSL and CryptLib), are both Open Source. They both have active communities, and I'm quite confident that if/when I have problems or find bugs with either, there would be an immediate response, whether it's fixing them, or telling me what I should be doing differently.
Open source and closed source both have their place, and I think it's great when governments develop an official awareness of them. In my own government, though, I really hope we never get forced to use one or the other for political reasons.
with some of the largest drops linked to user interface for Internet and e-mail services.
While we're on the topic, which phones would people recommend for having good user interfaces?
I'm on my second phone in about the past six years, and in both cases I've gone for the cheapest one on the shelf -- which in both cases has been a bottom-of-the-line Alcatel. Both have gotten the job done (I'm on a prepay plan and mostly just carry a phone so people can contact me, and sometimes for SMS), but I've found the UI of both phones to be horrendous for anything beyond talking on them. I'm not too surprised by this given what I paid, but I've been reluctant to spend more on anything better because from what I've seen of other people's feature-packed phones, a lot of companies simply don't put a lot of thought into designing helpful user interfaces.
The worst examples I've found have been with SMS, but only because I don't bother even trying to use my phone for anything more advanced. Sending an SMS message from my cheap Alcatel requires 13 actions! This doesn't include keying in the message, and it doesn't include scrolling through the directory to find the recipient. It does involve indicating that I want to send a message, followed by a string of confirming and re-confirming the person I want to send it to, before finally confirming that I still want to send it. To top it off, a couple of these actions have waits of several seconds while the phone goes to do some searching through various databases that shouldn't really be necessary.
The phone also has a limit of 20 SMS messages (which I think is standard for the SIM card it's storing it on). This would be understandable, but it's next to impossible to delete them efficiently to make space for more. It's only possible to delete one message at a time, and doing so takes 9 actions and a lot of waiting in between several of them.
So far I've been a cheapskate and I doubt I'm an ideal customer for the phone companies, but I'll quite happily pay for something if I'm convinced it'll be more useful than what I have. If anyone can suggest phones they've encountered that have good and well thought through UI's, rather than just packing the phones with impossible to use features, I'd love to hear about them.
Re:I just can't get the hang of vim
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Vim 7 Released
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Have you considered using the Windows gVim? (Unfortunately this would be dependent on having access to a Windows system, of course.) Many of the commands are available through drop-down menus, but also have the command keys listed in the menu. If you have access to a Windows machine, it might be a useful way to learn.
Because if you swing the bat enough times eventually you'll hit the ball.
Not to mention that if you ask for something ridiculously stupid, and ask enough times, chances are that you'll eventually get a compromise that's either ridiculous or stupid.
But paper often gets you in the door for the interview.
This is absolutely true in many cases, but it's often also important to have very specific experience... even if it seems pointless. Personally I had trouble even getting through the recruitment agents when I was looking for work early on. I'd come out of a postgraduate degree at 'varsity, but with only intermittent commercial experience and lots of academic work experience (part time jobs while studying, etc). Consequently, I had a pretty good certification record, but not a very good demonstration record for applying my skills outside of open source which had been most available to me.
The most frustrating thing, however, was that most recruitment agents (with the exception of perhaps 10% of them to be fair), didn't actually know how to assess tech people in the first place. What they would do was cross-reference commercial experience with particular buzz words, and screen people based on whether they had both. Most jobs that were available for me to apply for (relatively small town, unfortunately) were Microsoft-based technologies. Consequently, they were looking for buzz-words such as SQL Server,.Net, C#, etc etc.
The fact that the bulk of my experience (including commercial but also academic jobs) was with specific technologies like PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux, Python, C, Java, and so on, didn't help me, even with all the theory backing and with being able to demonstrate that I was very capable using these specific technologies. Going in to speak to the agents, it was pretty obvious that many of them didn't actually even understand what a lot of these systems were.
I thought it fair enough that the recruitment agents were looking for people who had skills rather than certifications. On the other hand, I also got the impression that they didn't really have a clue how to rate many of the skills. If an employer had stated they wanted someone who could drive a bright red truck, they'd rather put forward a candidate who can demonstrate being able to drive a bright red tricycle than someone who'd had lots of proven experience driving a bright blue truck.
That's behind me now, fortunately, and I was able to get a good job as a.Net developer in an organisation through having inside contacts... which I guess is the ultimate way to do it if you possibly can. Now I'm happily building up my experience with Microsoft technologies simply so I can say that I have it, because it's more valuable than I first thought it was. To top it off, when I see others in the organisation flipping through the lists of candidates provided by recruitment agents for other jobs, it's hardly surprising to hear them comment that none of them seem any good.
I find it odd that the only people in politics that "say it how it is" can be found on the comedy channel. It's almost... funny.
It seems like a standard dilemma to me. Comedians such as Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have nothing to lose. They're certainly not going to lose popularity with their audience, and if anything will gain more followers. They'll probably never have another chance to do what they've done, but they probably wouldn't have anyway.
For journalists and news networks on the other hand, the nature of how the competition works means they have everything to lose. If a journalist steps too far outside the bounds of what the government considers "acceptable" for a journalist, they probably won't be allowed in again... unless everyone does the same thing at once making it impossible for the press secretaries to ignore, which seems unlikely. Access to high government officials is everything to many news networks, especially the larger ones, so getting the network rejected could spell a big demotion if not the end of a journalist's career.
I "get" Linux and use it for some things I do. I am very proficient in getting it to do what I want it to do. BUT the usability of the OS as a desktop stinks. It is nowhere close to Microsoft in that realm.
I appreciate where you're coming from, but I personally feel a bit awkward hearing people refer to Windows as a "usable" OS. Ultimately it depends on your definition of usability, but there are plenty of occasions, imho, where Windows (and applications built on it) quite seriously fails to be usable.
They range from the user banging their head against the wall having problems figuring out how to do something, through to basic things that have been known for ages... such as putting the more important things for the mouse to access near the edges and corners of the screen. More than 10 years after the last revolutionary Windows UI (Windows 95 in my mind), Windows still tends to arrange for borders to be on the edge pixels, meaning a user has to spend a lot more effort getting the mouse to a correct position to click. Third party Windows applications are frequently less usable (in my mind) because they strive to mimic the Microsoft Windows way of doing things, usually to avoid losing a consistency aspect which is probably as important.
I'm definitely not trying to claim that most Linux based desktops are any better. I just don't think it's completely appropriate to say that Windows is "usable" because many people happen to be trained to use it to some degree and it has better application and driver support, at least any more than a few linux distros being more "usable" because they have a more integrated and stable way of distributing third party packages. I'd consider all of these things as also being important for making a lot of decisions about how appropriate an OS will be for getting things done, but they shouldn't be grouped with usability.
I'm looking forward to the new Office 12 UI, which I hear is revolutionary on the UI front -- I haven't had an opportunity to see the beta's yet. I'm also hoping that Vista does something to fix a lot of the very basic usability issues that are duplicated in every Windows app... although I was hoping that before both XP and Win98 were released. What I do know is that Linux provides a more useful expert-user interface for the way I like to work, and that's one of several major reasons that I prefer to use it.
It's very natural for children to be curious about each others bodies, etc, and by the time you hit mid-teens, for males at least that develops into a draw towards pornography.
Arguably even this is just a consequence of society repressing what children see. I'm pretty sure that a lot of naturists will claim that their children have few if any issues with porn, because there's nothing particularly special or unusual about nudity in the first place.
Except for perhaps certain fetishes, the popularity of a lot of pornography seems to be a consequence of the taboo that society puts on it in the first place.
The more heavily patented (with associated royalties, etc) something is, the less likely it is that industry will actually use it...
Not at all. As soon as someone owns a patent on it, there's someone to develop a more solid concept behind the technology (such as a specific implementation), and -- most importantly -- to market the idea.
Contrary to popular belief in modern society, not all patent holders simply sit on a patent in the hope that someone might stumble on their vague idea. Some of them actually do what was expected of the patent system when it began, and try to develop their idea into a marketable product.
Re:I got my anti-windmill dvd in the mail last wee
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Tilting At Windmills
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· Score: 2, Interesting
Funny thing about it, they don't want a windfarm ruining thier view, but they have no problem building a $500,000 house on a previously wooded hillside, and running the nice road up the side of the hill to drive there.
Down the road from where I live (Wellington, New Zealand), there are a group of local residents trying to block the impending wind turbines. The complaints are a combination of property values, living aesthetics, and so on, as usually happens when this sort if thing happens. There's also a handful of trampers (that's a NZ word for hiking) who think it should be left undeveloped for recreational reasons. Fortunately (I think), it doesn't look like they're going to stop it from going ahead. The power companies aren't exactly helping, though. They've been doing the standard corporate marketing thing of trying to get consents for twice as much as what they could possibly get, simply so they can then tone it down and look like they're making a compromise from the original plan.
All that said, I do have some sympathy for the property values crowd. I like going on long walks, and as much as I dislike the way that a lot of land with great views, etc, gets divided up, sold and fenced off so that only a single person can access it, that's effectively the way that capitalist society is arranged. The incentives everywhere tell people that they have to own property and look after their finances for the future. Otherwise someone else will push in and take the money and land anyway, and you'll end up with nothing for the future.
I'm unlikely to build a million dollar summer house in a remote area with an expensive driveway and fence it off, because I don't agree with that way of doing things. That said, if I bought a $250,000 house in the city and someone decided to build a prison next door (severly lowering the property value), I'd be seriously annoyed... because a $250,000 home dropping to a $150,000 value means that I suddenly have $100,000 less towards whatever's in my retirement fund. And that's huge. This isn't even going into the possibility that a property might have a much higher value to me than anyone else. Perhaps I developed a property near the sea because I had a critical need to get a boat in and out, and it might simply not be possible to find something that meets the same needs elsewhere.
If people buy and develop properties with full knowledge of what's likely to happen, I have little sympathy for them. But we also really need systems to make sure that people can't do this sort of thing without being made clearly aware of it beforehand. If that's not possible, then I personally think that governments should arrange ways that residents can get properly compensated for the value of their property that they're likely to be losing. This might be by requiring that companies applying for consents to develop land pay out a pre-determined "fair" rate of compensation to surrounding property owners, or through some other means.
This only took me one day to hack up, I am back to work on other stuff.
And thanks for doing it. I don't think it's a bad thing to offer a service where people can park their domains, although personally I prefer that people only own the domains with a good reason besides squatting.
The main problem that I guess I have is that a major claimed reason for this (as stated quite clearly in paragraph 2) seems to be to skew Netcraft's statistics. If people choose to park their domains on an OSS system, and potentially advertise things and generate income for OSS projects, then great. But trying to promote an artificial popularity contest on someone else's ground (Netcraft in this case) seems to be asking for trouble.
Netcraft controls its published statistics as much as Google controls its published search rankings and casino's control the odds of people's winnings. If a loophole is noticed that lets people momentarily beat the system, it'll just be fixed in whatever way Netcraft chooses to reflect whatever Netcraft wants to present. Trying to out-smart Netcraft with parked domains feels very similar to trying to influence search rankings without providing useful content. (Personally I hate website operators who do this.)
It is absolutely necessary and useful to block Microsoft wins in this area if you value your freedom to choose Apache.
If it's so important to fight Microsoft's publicity machine, why not simply discredit it? Sure, it's hard to get through to some people, and some will never get the message. If you just try to mislead them further, though, you're not getting through to them at all, and those people will just go scurrying back to Microsoft again after its next media release.
A good way to start would be to compile some real information that's backed up by verifiable and reputable citations, clearly and concisely demonstrating that Microsoft's claimed advantage is due to a small number of large companies that use IIS to host vast numbers of identical, useless parked websites that contain no information. After this, it might be useful to compile and present additional information that shows the real distribution between Apache, IIS, and whatever else, based on a clearly stated and reasonable definition of what makes a useful production website.... and if you happen to go this far, make it look more reputable than Microsoft's arguably baseless claims.
Throw it together on a straightforward, direct-to-the-point website that gives Microsoft credit where it's due, but explains clearly where and why credit isn't due. Provide the information so that people can easily be referred to it, and it'd be much more helpful than trying to beat Microsoft at it's own spin and misleading of the consumer.
If there's a weakness in Microsoft's marketing techniques, it's not that someone else can out-market them by providing even more fluff. The biggest weakness is that Microsoft's claims often don't really have any substance. If it's important to you to stop Microsoft from misleading consumers, you should really start by pointing out to them that they're being misled.
I have a lot of respect for what Bruce Perens has done in the past and the stances that he's taken on issues, but I don't really understand this one at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you, but where I live, all the channels tend to play commercials at almost exactly the same time. There's a good microeconomics argument about why this happens so often.
I can't speak from your experience, but at least a couple of people I know who are bad spellers had serious problems learning because they're dyslexic. For one in particular, the condition wasn't acknowledged by her teachers, and they treated her as as if she was simply unattentive and lazy rather than trying to learn. More effective teaching methods probably would have helped more, but with particularly bad dyslexia there are still some limits, irrespective of how hard someone's trying.
I've been working my way through all the DVD commentaries in the last few months. There's a commentary in the middle somewhere where three of the voice actors -- Billy West, John DiMaggio and someone else (maybe Maurice Lamarche?) were challenged to mimic Zoidberg one after the other in a double-blind demonstration for the listeners. I was quite fascinated at how they were all able to get an indistinguishible the correct voice so accurately. The one actor who sounded a bit off was Billy West himself (who actually plays Zoidberg), and that was just because he was trying to trick the listeners.
Most of West's characters sound pretty different to me, and I wouldn't have picked out that they were the same actor without being told... at least no more accurately than with any other actor. Perhaps you happen to be extra sensitive, but my own opinion is that he's a very good voice actor.
I've been an assistant teacher in several comp-sci courses with large proportions of Chinese students, and although I didn't see any formal studies, there certainly appeared to be a much higher rate of plagiarism in those groups than other people.
I think part of it was due to English language problems. The Chinese students in the course would often get together in groups to translate a set of questions from English, work on the answers, and then collectively translate it back to very similar (even identical) English.
In other cases, it was just straight cheating.
My girlfriend also tutors and supervises exams for different courses, and she's had situations where more than half the class was cheating in tests. Her Chinese office-mate told her that it's at least partly due to a completely different culture in China. Apparently you don't elevate your status in China by being an individual and creative. Instead, you get higher status by fitting in, and by copying what people of higher status do already, as exactly as possible. It won't get you to a better position, but at least you'll be nearer to a better position. So if someone considered an expert in a field (such as a textbook author) says something, it's important to agree and say exactly the same thing. The easiest way to do that is to simply copy the text -- perhaps also to memorise it, but ultimately say as similar-a-thing as possible.
I certainly don't want to claim that all Chinese students are likely to be cheating, which would be completely unfair to the people who really do spend a lot of time and effort to learn the subject properly. I've had more than a few Chinese friends who spent a lot of effort into individual efforts, and did really well at it. There's certainly a major culture gap, though, and sometimes I wonder if some of the universities in western countries spend enough time and resources considering that people who come from China might not always understand or appreciate how important it is to learn to think for themselves.
Now that would be impressive. Many of the Microsoft users I'm familiar with tend to blame Microsoft application problems on the IT staff.
How about by making it a nitemare for someone to submit a useful bug report, short of paying for a support contract? I bet that helps keep the bug count down.
Why do you consider government to be the root cause of the problem here? If all this can happen in a government organisation and you hear about it, consider how much can just as easily happen in a private organisation and you hear nothing. I know of plenty of organisations, most of them commercial, that have very slack IT policies -- if most of these organisations were compromised in a similar way, it'd be unlikely you'd hear anything whatsoever unless there was a leak, or a compelling legal reason for them to come forward.
Government is clearly not perfect. In places where there's corruption, there's absolutely the possibility of influence from people with political agendas. There are in private organisations, too. In well organised government, though, which realisitcally might rule out much of the USA, government organisations tend to have more strict policies that they have to adhere to than anyone else. They also have less of a commercial incentive to keep quiet about things when they go wrong.
I just wish he'd be given his own category. That way I can block him from my personal front page in favour of more interesting stories, and those who want to be trolled can still be trolled. I'd settle for the slashdot editors deciding not to post his crap anymore, but I just don't think that's realistic. As sad as it is, Dvorak drives Slashdot activity as much as he drives his own pageviews.
Are you kidding? They can take any current game engine in the works and slap the name Duke Nukem on it. It might not be outstandingly brilliant and live up to the hype, but it'll at least be up to par with everything else.
The part that makes it Duke Nukem is the back story. If there was a decent back story developed 5 years ago, or 10 years ago for that matter, it could be attached to most of today's game engines without an issue.
It's a fair enough comment, but I think it's beneficial that you're still able to download and compile libc5 and get it running. You mentioned that open source is what keeps these things running, and I agree that it's a great thing. Trying to get many closed source products running years after they were last sold and supported is next to impossible, for legal reasons if not technical reasons.
Personally I'd prefer that maintainers trimmed the old API's every so often in order to be able to provide better quality software overall. It may be necessary to take extra steps occasionally to get some ancient compatibility working, but it's at least possible to do this, and unlikely to happen often if ever.
The problem for Microsoft (I presume) is that it has to put so much effort into supporting legacy API's, because the small number of often highly paying customers out there who need to run legacy applications have no alternatives for getting their software working, short of perhaps switching to the competition, which Microsoft has made it clear it doesn't want.
I see where yoo're coming from, but I'm not so sure about this particular statement -- after all, a spreadsheet is effectively quite a specialised functional program. It can have bugs if it hasn't been designed well, but so can imperitive programs. Try writing a complex program where you're not at risk of changing something a million miles away by changing one line. From my observations it can happen all the time if a programmer's not careful, and sometimes even if they are careful.
The difference is that until now, a lot more research and education has probably gone into writing imperitive programs. People who usually write spreadsheets, on the other hand, tend to get their education of them (if any) as an afterthought to some quite different financial education. Personally I think the problems lie mostly with the techniques people use to create complex spreadsheets, and there's probably a lot that could be improved with the spreadsheet applications, too, to help prevent bugs from being introduced.
I doubt many people use well developed and proven techniques for engineering their spreadsheet applications, and if they did, I doubt that the spreadsheet applications would support them. Putting more emphasis on separating the raw data from the logic would be a good start in my opinion. Some people who are better at doing this go to lengths to colour code things, lock cells, and so on, but the tools don't exactly encourage or force people to do this.
But this is all just similar to the sorts of research that have been going into more obvious types of software development over the last two decades or more. Personally I don't have a problem with treating spreadsheets as applications in our own system. Fortunately in our case, the people who write and use them here tend to know sufficiently about what they're doing that they're not so brittle. Also for those sorts of applications, they simply seem to be the best tool for the job.
They already are charging consumers directly, as far as I'm concerned. It may be different for you in which case fair enough, but where I am (non-US), the major selling point for subscription television (satellite, cable, etc) over free-to-air broadcasters, when it was introduced about 15 years ago, was its lack of commercials. The point was to pay a little extra and get shows that weren't corrupted and edited to oblivion to fit in commercials.
This lasted for a few years, until the pay-TV operators had built up a reasonable consumer base and decided to start competing with free-to-air channels for major media material. One very good example (but not the only one) is with major sporting events. Now, not only has the value of sporting events gone up hugely, it also means that the free-to-air broadcasters can no longer afford the rights to air them, compared with subscription operators who are simply vast amounts of cash. Anyone wanting to watch them has to pay a subscription service. The irony with this subscription is that it doesn't fund the ability to stage the event on television where people can see it, it merely funds the ability for one television operator to out-bid another, which would have been equally accessible to viewers. Once rights are obtained, the operator has a monopoly, and often the ability to push subscription rates up even further.
The further irony in all of this is both that the sports themselves have become hugely commercialised, which I personally think is to their detriment. It's also meant that the subscription TV providers have started piping in just as many commercials than their free-to-air counterparts, making the TV equally as crappy... with the exception that they also have a monopoly on certain things, which (surprisingly) is purchased with people's subscriptions.
I don't know what the answer is, either, but personally I think it is possible to offer quality television with few or no commercials on a subscription alone of the operator isn't so concerned about attracting as many viewers as possible. (Hell, it's possible on a publicly funded budget if there's a reasonable amount of funding available -- BBC's been producing quality TV for its public for a long time, even if it doesn't appeal to as many people from the USA.) Quality TV on a subscription certainly used to happen. The problem, I think, is that there just aren't many people out there who actually care enough about quality television. It's much easier to make money with minimal effort by pumping trash at them, and simply making sure that it's slightly better than the trash that's available for free.
I work in a non-US government department. Our government has its own policy on Open Source (developed by another dept), which is non-committal but non-inhibiting, and little more than a document that describes the main issues with using open source. The public and politicians don't know whether we use OSS or not, and I doubt they care. (Except for one politician who released a press release on OSS once, but it didn't get noticed by anyone.)
When it comes to using OSS, we simply use it when it makes sense to do so. There's no iron fist reaching down dictating to us what to do, and I hope there never is. We give our users Windows desktops because that's what they tend to be most comfortable with, we run predominantly Windows servers administered by people who know what they're doing, and also have a few Linux boxes thrown in where it makes sense to do so. Any or all of this may change in the future, but I like to think that it'll change because we've decided it's appropriate to change. We use open source in all sorts of places for support systems. Usually it's because the open source apps available for those particular tasks do a better job, or are more reliably supported. We use a lot of closed source software, too, because sometimes there just aren't the OSS apps for the specialist needs that certain people in the department have.
Amusingly it's often easier to get help from an interested community than it is from a closed source distributor who's charging a large support contract. Personally I think that the main purpose of support contracts is to be able to attribute blame to someone else not having fixed a problem, but they're still needed with closed source because it's impossible for anyone else to fix the problem. It's probably every month or so that we come across Outlook or some other similar app displaying a weird behaviour, the company (Microsoft in this case) ignores it, and all that people in the community can say is that 'it happens for me too, maybe try this'. Open source is completely different. eg. I'm currently writing an in-house CA software, and the two projects we've found that are easiest to use for building this (OpenSSL and CryptLib), are both Open Source. They both have active communities, and I'm quite confident that if/when I have problems or find bugs with either, there would be an immediate response, whether it's fixing them, or telling me what I should be doing differently.
Open source and closed source both have their place, and I think it's great when governments develop an official awareness of them. In my own government, though, I really hope we never get forced to use one or the other for political reasons.
While we're on the topic, which phones would people recommend for having good user interfaces?
I'm on my second phone in about the past six years, and in both cases I've gone for the cheapest one on the shelf -- which in both cases has been a bottom-of-the-line Alcatel. Both have gotten the job done (I'm on a prepay plan and mostly just carry a phone so people can contact me, and sometimes for SMS), but I've found the UI of both phones to be horrendous for anything beyond talking on them. I'm not too surprised by this given what I paid, but I've been reluctant to spend more on anything better because from what I've seen of other people's feature-packed phones, a lot of companies simply don't put a lot of thought into designing helpful user interfaces.
The worst examples I've found have been with SMS, but only because I don't bother even trying to use my phone for anything more advanced. Sending an SMS message from my cheap Alcatel requires 13 actions! This doesn't include keying in the message, and it doesn't include scrolling through the directory to find the recipient. It does involve indicating that I want to send a message, followed by a string of confirming and re-confirming the person I want to send it to, before finally confirming that I still want to send it. To top it off, a couple of these actions have waits of several seconds while the phone goes to do some searching through various databases that shouldn't really be necessary.
The phone also has a limit of 20 SMS messages (which I think is standard for the SIM card it's storing it on). This would be understandable, but it's next to impossible to delete them efficiently to make space for more. It's only possible to delete one message at a time, and doing so takes 9 actions and a lot of waiting in between several of them.
So far I've been a cheapskate and I doubt I'm an ideal customer for the phone companies, but I'll quite happily pay for something if I'm convinced it'll be more useful than what I have. If anyone can suggest phones they've encountered that have good and well thought through UI's, rather than just packing the phones with impossible to use features, I'd love to hear about them.
Have you considered using the Windows gVim? (Unfortunately this would be dependent on having access to a Windows system, of course.) Many of the commands are available through drop-down menus, but also have the command keys listed in the menu. If you have access to a Windows machine, it might be a useful way to learn.
Not to mention that if you ask for something ridiculously stupid, and ask enough times, chances are that you'll eventually get a compromise that's either ridiculous or stupid.
This is absolutely true in many cases, but it's often also important to have very specific experience... even if it seems pointless. Personally I had trouble even getting through the recruitment agents when I was looking for work early on. I'd come out of a postgraduate degree at 'varsity, but with only intermittent commercial experience and lots of academic work experience (part time jobs while studying, etc). Consequently, I had a pretty good certification record, but not a very good demonstration record for applying my skills outside of open source which had been most available to me.
The most frustrating thing, however, was that most recruitment agents (with the exception of perhaps 10% of them to be fair), didn't actually know how to assess tech people in the first place. What they would do was cross-reference commercial experience with particular buzz words, and screen people based on whether they had both. Most jobs that were available for me to apply for (relatively small town, unfortunately) were Microsoft-based technologies. Consequently, they were looking for buzz-words such as SQL Server, .Net, C#, etc etc.
The fact that the bulk of my experience (including commercial but also academic jobs) was with specific technologies like PostgreSQL, Apache, Linux, Python, C, Java, and so on, didn't help me, even with all the theory backing and with being able to demonstrate that I was very capable using these specific technologies. Going in to speak to the agents, it was pretty obvious that many of them didn't actually even understand what a lot of these systems were.
I thought it fair enough that the recruitment agents were looking for people who had skills rather than certifications. On the other hand, I also got the impression that they didn't really have a clue how to rate many of the skills. If an employer had stated they wanted someone who could drive a bright red truck, they'd rather put forward a candidate who can demonstrate being able to drive a bright red tricycle than someone who'd had lots of proven experience driving a bright blue truck.
That's behind me now, fortunately, and I was able to get a good job as a .Net developer in an organisation through having inside contacts... which I guess is the ultimate way to do it if you possibly can. Now I'm happily building up my experience with Microsoft technologies simply so I can say that I have it, because it's more valuable than I first thought it was. To top it off, when I see others in the organisation flipping through the lists of candidates provided by recruitment agents for other jobs, it's hardly surprising to hear them comment that none of them seem any good.
It seems like a standard dilemma to me. Comedians such as Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart have nothing to lose. They're certainly not going to lose popularity with their audience, and if anything will gain more followers. They'll probably never have another chance to do what they've done, but they probably wouldn't have anyway.
For journalists and news networks on the other hand, the nature of how the competition works means they have everything to lose. If a journalist steps too far outside the bounds of what the government considers "acceptable" for a journalist, they probably won't be allowed in again... unless everyone does the same thing at once making it impossible for the press secretaries to ignore, which seems unlikely. Access to high government officials is everything to many news networks, especially the larger ones, so getting the network rejected could spell a big demotion if not the end of a journalist's career.
I appreciate where you're coming from, but I personally feel a bit awkward hearing people refer to Windows as a "usable" OS. Ultimately it depends on your definition of usability, but there are plenty of occasions, imho, where Windows (and applications built on it) quite seriously fails to be usable.
They range from the user banging their head against the wall having problems figuring out how to do something, through to basic things that have been known for ages... such as putting the more important things for the mouse to access near the edges and corners of the screen. More than 10 years after the last revolutionary Windows UI (Windows 95 in my mind), Windows still tends to arrange for borders to be on the edge pixels, meaning a user has to spend a lot more effort getting the mouse to a correct position to click. Third party Windows applications are frequently less usable (in my mind) because they strive to mimic the Microsoft Windows way of doing things, usually to avoid losing a consistency aspect which is probably as important.
I'm definitely not trying to claim that most Linux based desktops are any better. I just don't think it's completely appropriate to say that Windows is "usable" because many people happen to be trained to use it to some degree and it has better application and driver support, at least any more than a few linux distros being more "usable" because they have a more integrated and stable way of distributing third party packages. I'd consider all of these things as also being important for making a lot of decisions about how appropriate an OS will be for getting things done, but they shouldn't be grouped with usability.
I'm looking forward to the new Office 12 UI, which I hear is revolutionary on the UI front -- I haven't had an opportunity to see the beta's yet. I'm also hoping that Vista does something to fix a lot of the very basic usability issues that are duplicated in every Windows app... although I was hoping that before both XP and Win98 were released. What I do know is that Linux provides a more useful expert-user interface for the way I like to work, and that's one of several major reasons that I prefer to use it.
Arguably even this is just a consequence of society repressing what children see. I'm pretty sure that a lot of naturists will claim that their children have few if any issues with porn, because there's nothing particularly special or unusual about nudity in the first place.
Except for perhaps certain fetishes, the popularity of a lot of pornography seems to be a consequence of the taboo that society puts on it in the first place.
Not at all. As soon as someone owns a patent on it, there's someone to develop a more solid concept behind the technology (such as a specific implementation), and -- most importantly -- to market the idea.
Contrary to popular belief in modern society, not all patent holders simply sit on a patent in the hope that someone might stumble on their vague idea. Some of them actually do what was expected of the patent system when it began, and try to develop their idea into a marketable product.
Down the road from where I live (Wellington, New Zealand), there are a group of local residents trying to block the impending wind turbines. The complaints are a combination of property values, living aesthetics, and so on, as usually happens when this sort if thing happens. There's also a handful of trampers (that's a NZ word for hiking) who think it should be left undeveloped for recreational reasons. Fortunately (I think), it doesn't look like they're going to stop it from going ahead. The power companies aren't exactly helping, though. They've been doing the standard corporate marketing thing of trying to get consents for twice as much as what they could possibly get, simply so they can then tone it down and look like they're making a compromise from the original plan.
All that said, I do have some sympathy for the property values crowd. I like going on long walks, and as much as I dislike the way that a lot of land with great views, etc, gets divided up, sold and fenced off so that only a single person can access it, that's effectively the way that capitalist society is arranged. The incentives everywhere tell people that they have to own property and look after their finances for the future. Otherwise someone else will push in and take the money and land anyway, and you'll end up with nothing for the future.
I'm unlikely to build a million dollar summer house in a remote area with an expensive driveway and fence it off, because I don't agree with that way of doing things. That said, if I bought a $250,000 house in the city and someone decided to build a prison next door (severly lowering the property value), I'd be seriously annoyed... because a $250,000 home dropping to a $150,000 value means that I suddenly have $100,000 less towards whatever's in my retirement fund. And that's huge. This isn't even going into the possibility that a property might have a much higher value to me than anyone else. Perhaps I developed a property near the sea because I had a critical need to get a boat in and out, and it might simply not be possible to find something that meets the same needs elsewhere.
If people buy and develop properties with full knowledge of what's likely to happen, I have little sympathy for them. But we also really need systems to make sure that people can't do this sort of thing without being made clearly aware of it beforehand. If that's not possible, then I personally think that governments should arrange ways that residents can get properly compensated for the value of their property that they're likely to be losing. This might be by requiring that companies applying for consents to develop land pay out a pre-determined "fair" rate of compensation to surrounding property owners, or through some other means.
And thanks for doing it. I don't think it's a bad thing to offer a service where people can park their domains, although personally I prefer that people only own the domains with a good reason besides squatting.
The main problem that I guess I have is that a major claimed reason for this (as stated quite clearly in paragraph 2) seems to be to skew Netcraft's statistics. If people choose to park their domains on an OSS system, and potentially advertise things and generate income for OSS projects, then great. But trying to promote an artificial popularity contest on someone else's ground (Netcraft in this case) seems to be asking for trouble.
Netcraft controls its published statistics as much as Google controls its published search rankings and casino's control the odds of people's winnings. If a loophole is noticed that lets people momentarily beat the system, it'll just be fixed in whatever way Netcraft chooses to reflect whatever Netcraft wants to present. Trying to out-smart Netcraft with parked domains feels very similar to trying to influence search rankings without providing useful content. (Personally I hate website operators who do this.)
If it's so important to fight Microsoft's publicity machine, why not simply discredit it? Sure, it's hard to get through to some people, and some will never get the message. If you just try to mislead them further, though, you're not getting through to them at all, and those people will just go scurrying back to Microsoft again after its next media release.
A good way to start would be to compile some real information that's backed up by verifiable and reputable citations, clearly and concisely demonstrating that Microsoft's claimed advantage is due to a small number of large companies that use IIS to host vast numbers of identical, useless parked websites that contain no information. After this, it might be useful to compile and present additional information that shows the real distribution between Apache, IIS, and whatever else, based on a clearly stated and reasonable definition of what makes a useful production website. ... and if you happen to go this far, make it look more reputable than Microsoft's arguably baseless claims.
Throw it together on a straightforward, direct-to-the-point website that gives Microsoft credit where it's due, but explains clearly where and why credit isn't due. Provide the information so that people can easily be referred to it, and it'd be much more helpful than trying to beat Microsoft at it's own spin and misleading of the consumer.
If there's a weakness in Microsoft's marketing techniques, it's not that someone else can out-market them by providing even more fluff. The biggest weakness is that Microsoft's claims often don't really have any substance. If it's important to you to stop Microsoft from misleading consumers, you should really start by pointing out to them that they're being misled.
I have a lot of respect for what Bruce Perens has done in the past and the stances that he's taken on issues, but I don't really understand this one at all.