If someone was driving a car and didn't know what "check oil" meant they would be idiots, correct?
Any well-built car doesn't turn on a "check oil" light every 20 minutes without very good reason and causing a great catastrophe most of the time. If it did, people wouldn't take it seriously.
The rate of change from the devs is so much faster than most other browsers. (Opera may be better, I don't know, I never use it, I don't like the ads) Pop-ups are starting to bother FF users, so the Mozilla guys start to sort it out.
For what it's worth, a good bug at bugzilla to keep an eye on whenever there are popup problems is #176958. (bugzilla.mozilla.org not linked due to the block on slashdot referrals.) That's the main popups-not-being-blocked bug, and it has linked dependencies on all of the known specific popup bugs.
IE could have had a popup blocker all along; it's not like it would be hard for MS to code. So why didn't they? Probably because they believed in the ridiculous philosophy that intrusive popups are a legitimate source of ad revenue.
Sometimes I just wonder if it's more likely that Microsoft is just paranoid about being seen to stomp on others' business interests. Ad revenue for some businesses aside providing a decent popup blocker would almost certainly have driven at least several other companies out of business.
Several years of slackness have meant there are suddenly a lot of businesses in existance that profit on fixing gaps in Microsoft software, notably things that other Operating Systems tend to provide by default. For instance:
The huge market for anti-virus software is probably largely driven by some very shoddy security in past Microsoft products. Microsoft would have to be very careful about bundling their own security tools or anti-virus stuff with the OS, lest companies like Symantec try to take them to court. (And it would be high profile.)
Perhaps the only reason that MS Office doesn't provide some kind of "export to pdf" option is that Adobe is a large company that already sells third party Office products to do exactly that. If Microsoft bundled pdf exporting with Office, it might remove the incentive for lots of people to purchase anything Adobe, and there would probably be a high profile legal battle.
Whenever Microsoft does something to improve their products, someone's likely to be driven out of business because there are so many third party products out there that only exist to fill in Microsoft's shortcomings. Personally I think Microsoft is paranoid about bad press, and probably has an in-house policy to consider things very carefully before adding any bundled functionality that might be seen to clash with other established products.
They should make their policy simple. Googlebomb google and stop getting linked from Google. After a few businesses get nailed and put out to pasture the rest will learn and their results will once more become relevant.
I agree completely, although it'd help to provide a decent explanation for people to explain why it's so important not to try to manipulate results, particularly in terms that marketing people and CEO's can at least understand even if they don't like it.
I have one particular friend who's really into marketing, and does it as a profession. We disagree strongly on a lot of things to do with that, but he's so absolutely enthusiastic about what he does that I've given up trying to talk to him about it.
In his mind, he's not really out to cheat or step on other people, or give himself any unfair advantage. As far as he's concerned, he's just entirely interested in "presence building" for his websites. This isn't just for his business, either -- he experiments with it as a hobby, and tries to get his personal websites highly rated. It hasn't even occurred to him that he might be annoying the search engines or people who use them. As far as he's concerned, any low-rated content that he has is only low rated because people might not have seen it yet, and he's trying to "help along the process" in some way.
And his websites are hideous clutter to look at, too, as a result of everything he does to get them rated highly. Once you've bypassed the actual content, about 9/10 of each page is a combination of emptiness (often background-coloured text), hugely sized words that are often random and have little or nothing to do with the main content that he's presenting, and massive amounts of links to all sorts of weird places.
I find this type of attitude frustrating to deal with, because whenever I place content on the web, I figure that if it's important enough then the search engines will promote it. As far as I'm aware, this is also what's intended to happen. It's not something that many marketing people can comprehend, though.
I'm not sure if providing a decent explanation of what search engines want in order to work properly would do much to help. Unless there's one available, though, I don't think there's much hope for any of these people to understand. If Google provided such an introductory document beyond the token amount hidden in their FAQ, I could at least point my friend to it to demonstrate that what he's doing really goes against what the search engine opertors would like him to do in order to get his content promoted appropriately.
Why should MSFT be held to some high standard for a tool that they include in their software?
You're kidding, right?
Considering the Microsoft Grammar Checker tool is about as advanced as any grammar checking tool of its kind that's available from elsewhere, I don't think it's reasonable to expect Microsoft to improve upon it.
It's no big secret between linguists and software developers that defining appropriate English grammar, let alone verifying it, is a very difficult thing to do. It's also not as if competitors like OpenOffice and AbiWord have superior grammar checkers -- last I checked, they didn't offer it at all. It's not even superceeded by unix utilities such as style and diction.
It's okay to expect things from Microsoft for which there's reason to believe are actually possible, but don't expect the unrealistic.
What you're missing is the fact that this is one of the hardest problems ever tackled by computer science.
Perhaps we should all ditch English and start speaking a more structured language for which it's easier to develop a decent grammar checker.
I'm not exactly serious, and I agree with you, but to the best of my understanding, English is a very yucky language compared with some others when it comes to consistency. I'd be interested to see how well grammar checking projects are going in some other languages.
It's no big surprise from your own post that you don't care deeply about grammar in the first place, so it shouldn't be news to hear that you'd rather switch it off.
Noone can do it (yet), not microsoft, and not any serious scientific team. There is no such thing as a usable grammar checker.
It'd be more correct to say that there's no such thing as an accurate grammar checker. It's silly to take the Microsoft Grammar Checker's determinations as authoritative, but that doesn't mean that it's not useful.
In the past, I've found the grammar checker to be very useful in identifying certain issues that I'd missed, so I can check them again. It doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with it, and there have been more than a few times when I've ignored its suggestions for good reason. There have also been more than enough times, however, when the suggestions it's made have been extremely helpful.
It's never going to be correct all the time, but that doesn't make it useless. If you don't like it, then don't use it, but just because you dislike a certain feature doesn't make it worthless.
I'm given to understand that the Simpsons is a popular program, but it is so profoundly anti-intellectual that I can't stand it at all.
I may have misunderstood you or what you mean by anti-intellectual, but personally I've found The Simpsons to be, by far, one of the most insightful shows on TV. Once you look past the humour and the sometimes really bad (occasionally pathetic) joke, especially in more recent episodes, it's a very good satirical commentary on society. It's also not afraid to make fun of itself, and it does so frequently.
If you have an opportunity, I highly recommend Planet Simpson, by Chris Turner. He's a self-confessed Simpsons fan and goes off on tangents a little from time to time, but otherwise I found it to be a very good analysis of The Simpsons and the multitudes of hidden satire of today's society that makes it such a well thought out show.
Clearly the show's not for everyone. If you don't like it then good for you for not watching it. But anti-intellectual is something that The Simpsons definitely isn't, and I think it's short-sighted to call it such. It has stacks more depth and thought put into it than most other relatively shallow content on TV.
These visualisations are quite neat. I've often wanted a word processor that would be able to do something like this. I tried writing on a private wiki at one point, but it still presents the changes between different versions very separate and discrete from each other, and from the editing, so it didn't work terribly well.
When I write things, the text often evolves a lot over several days. I usually blurt out everything I want to say at the beginning, and then go back and edit it over and over again until it's expressed how I want it. One problem, though, is that when I go away and come back again, it's not always obvious which parts are the most volatile, and might need the most attention. It often takes a while to get back into the right mode of figuring out where the complicated parts are, and editing the document.
Writing on paper is still very different from a word processor. It's very obvious where a lot has been crossed out and changed over and over again, and previous crossed-out versions, even if they're on paper that's been put aside, are often still visible and easily accessible during the rest of the process. In a word processor, though, nearly all of this contextual information is lost. At best it's possible to "track changes", and that particular tool is relatively simple and usually aimed at being able to see some one-off changes that someone else has made to your document.
Beyond just tracking changes, which is a very linear representation, I'd love to be able to have some kind of visual representation surrounding the text to indicate the stability of different sections of what I've been writing.
Some useful ideas might perhaps include different coloured backgrounds to represent the volatility of sections of text, blocks of text that get moved a lot, being able to quickly flip back to what a small section used to be (without necessarily committing to it), and so on. Perhaps even a draft mode that shoves text aside (maybe above or below), but still leaves it accessible while editing the replacement text.
As a writing tool, it'd be a very helpful extension to any of the open source word processors out there. I bet there's a great niche market in authoring tools that current word processors really don't cater to right now.
And the conflicts you're talking about will only occur if you try to install the same deb and autopackage on purpose.
Thanks for the response.
A possible example that comes to mind might be if I installed an autopackage package (eg. for something new when it first came out), and then used apt to install something else later that depended on the.deb version of that package, perhaps several months afterwards when it's in the.deb archive. If apt doesn't realise that the AutoPackage rendition is already installed, it'll presumably try to fetch and install the respective.deb as a dependency for installation automatically, and they'll conflict.
Granted that it's probably not something that would be very common, and I don't want it to sound as if I think it's a major issue. But I always feel somewhat at odds when I know there may be special cases to look out for. It sounds as if this is the sort of thing that might be tackled later on, so I'm looking forward to it.
Conflicts with existing package managers
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AutoPackaging for Linux
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm presently running Debian. I've briefly played with making my own.deb files so I'd be able to install some of my own things without necessarily completely losing track of everywhere they were scattered. With all of the extra meta files that need editing, the source packages versus binary packages, and everything else, though, the whole process of designing a.deb package looked a bit too structured and complicated for me to bother learning about... at least within the time I was prepared to spend.
If AutoPackage has a straightforward way to generate a simple package, such as from a tar.gz file, I might find it very helpful. What I'm wondering about, though, is how bad does it get when two package managers conflict? eg. Apt and AutoPackage might end up trying to control the same file, get mixed up between what manager is providing a particular dependency (particularly if Apt tries to grab a package that AutoPackage has already installed), or whatever else.
It also sounds a bit of extra work having two sets of commands to manage packages on one system, so ideally (in my world), I guess AutoPackage would wrap around Apt or whatever other manager, and invoke it when appropriate. Does AutoPackage just fight for control when there are conflicts, or does it integrate with other package managers nicely?
The server seems to be very slashdotted right now, so I can't do much reading up on it. Does this sort of conflict thing turn out to be much of a problem?
Except that Microsoft developers get access to the people who wrote the specifications.
I don't know how accurate your source is, but my friend at Microsoft is quite adament that people working on different products at Microsoft are hardly even allowed to talk to each other. After all the court action in the past, Microsoft's set an in-house policy that basically says that each product team is only allowed to access other teams' specifications that have also been released in public.
Having said that, it wouldn't surprise me the slightest bit if executives make decisions from time to time that completely ignore this policy, if they think they can get away with it. But in the general case, programmers at Microsoft aren't allowed to talk to each other about the internal workings of independent projects except to distribute already published material. I suspect that this would be enforced quite a lot between the Windows/IE barrier, given all the accusations in the past.
Personally I think the bigger problem is getting Windows to stop bundling, loading and using IE at every opportunity if and when it's not wanted. I haven't used Windows seriously for several years, but it can't be that easy to change the assumption that many Microsoft and Third Part applications seem to have, that IE will always be available on a Windows system.
My understanding was that this was the whole issue. If IE were to be removed, many applications would simply break. Windows would also break, since it uses IE's API (which, by the way, is published for any operating system to use) to do so many things.
Is this still a problem? I haven't used Windows seriously for several years now, although to me XP appeared that Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer were still based on the same engine, even when I'd changed my default browser.
I came across one a few months ago and reported it, and it still doesn't seem to've been fixed. (Bug 273851 in bugzilla, which I'm not linking to directly because bugzilla blocks slashdot referers.) There's a short and straightforward test case - try it out.
There's also a general bug that references all popup-blocker bugs. If you'd like to see all of those that've been reported, check out bug 176958.
I suspect it's a matter of time before annoying website developers start browsing bugzilla and taking advantages of the popup blocker bugs, if they're not already. Hopefully that'll provide some decent motivation to get them fixed.
no, not just the industry, but almost unique in post-1989 history itself -- in the careless way they treat data as code.
I don't disagree with you in general, but could you please clarify what you mean about this more specifically? I realise that separating data and code is a big security thing, but I'm not particularly a security enthusiast beyond what I need to know.
As far as I'm aware, any system that supports scripting languages, Linux included (consider the number of scripts in your typical/usr/bin directory that'll be executed as root one day) is treating code as data and data as code. Things that are definitely executables can easily be kept protected in memory by an operating system, but not everything's obviously an executable.
Is the main difference here just that most scripting interpreters don't offer default access to volatile things like pointers, that might let a script get direct memory access?
I don't know if you have any academic connections, but you'll usually find that university libraries stock lots of journals in dead tree format. I'm often amazed at some of the obscure books and journals I've wanted that've turned out to been shelved in my local university.
Complete online journal and proceeding archives are a relatively new invention that requires a certain amount of technical expertise, and it's no surprise that a lot of publishers simply haven't caught up.
If you're near an academic library, check if they have the journal (or whatever publication) and the relevant issue listed in their catalogue, which will more likely than not be published somewhere online. (Otherwise you might have to visit the libary and use their catalogue locally, or just contact and ask them.) If it's there, you may just be able to wander in to read it from the shelf without any complications. Chances are you'll need to be a student or staff member to issue something, but there's always the photocopier.
If it's not there, if you don't live near enough, or if you do want to issue it for some reason, you could always try what the other response suggested -- ask for an interlibrary loan. Most librarians tend to like helping people with that sort of thing, not to mention that it's their job.
Was the girl chinese? Just wondering if it's partly due to culture (parents or something).
No, she wasn't. I do suspect it might have been at least partly to do with the environment she grew up in, including role models, and so on. I never found out much about the rest of her family, but I'm pretty sure that her best friend was beaten up quite regularly by her own boyfriend, although I wasn't able to prove it. Very sad, really, especially since I can see exactly how it's all likely to be repeated in the next generation.
It was just crazy how she was acting -- the most frustrating part was that I couldn't change her attitude no matter what I said... she just expected to be treated that way. She wanted to be told what to do, wanted all her decisions made for her, and seemed to refuse to acknowledge that she had a life of her own or a say in anything.
So Mensa is an "old boy network"? The worse for it.
Eh? I'm not a Mensa member, but I am a member of a social sports club and an amateur astronomical society. They're called extra-curricular activities, and they're a very good way to meet interesting people with common interests and attitudes.
Both of my groups are full of people with whom I share common interests, and both are full of great contacts for other things in life if I ever want help. How is that different from Mensa, and how does that make any of these like an "old boy network"?
Just as my and many other people's interests happen to be in a certain area shouldn't mean that someone else's interests shouldn't be allowed to be in the realm of puzzle solving and so on, and whatever else Mensan's engage in.
Go to any mall and you'll see a not-so-attractive man walking around with a beautiful, well-endowed lady in tow while he's making fun of her to his friends, or is putting her down. He never calls, he never does the dishes, he never puts the seat down, and most of all, he's getting some.
Really, though, would you want a partner like that?
I had one once, and it was awful -- she was so convinced that she was useless and constantly putting herself down. I felt really sorry for her because somewhere along the line she'd been seriously messed up, but I also wouldn't wish her on anyone. In any case it lasted for a matter of weeks before I dumped her (or she interpreted it that way) because I just couldn't stand it any more.
The way that she acted a lot of the time suggested that she was expecting to be beaten for some of the things she did, no matter how much I constantly told her that there was nothing wrong and I wasn't going to treat her like that. She never actually listened to me, and all the time she was assuming I was someone I wasn't. Honestly, it wasn't until I'd met her that I understood how it's possible that some women put up with that kind of crap from guys. She was practically inviting it, and with someone else she would've gotten it. (No, I didn't oblige.)
It took me a while to get over that, but my current girlfriend, who took a while to find, is very assertive. If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away, and I do the same for her. It's a whole lot better.
So, instead of being a mechanism to prevent people from accidentally locking their keys in their car, it was instead a mechanism to train people to hold their door handle up when closing the car door.
I guess that was your experience, which was fair enough. I'd be interested to know how many other people have a similar problem, though, which would be a more accurate measure of how good or bad the idea is.
Personally I noticed early on that it could be a problem, and I made an effort to avoid getting into the habit of locking the door from the inside before closing it. Usually I've locked the car from the outside with the key. More recently, I use the remote. (Aside from being convenient, it also cuts down a lot on paint scratches.)
I'm not exactly an insider (apart from living in the same town as Peter Jackson), but I don't think that's so much the issue here. As far as I can tell, he wants what's fair and what he was contracted for. Even if you love your day-job, you should make sure that your employer isn't ripping you off. They are getting your work out of it, after all. Look how much Newline's benefiting from Jackson's work. I'd be annoyed if they weren't giving me my fair share that'd been previously arranged.
What Peter Jackson loves a lot is making movies (and various other things like restoring WW1 fighter planes). He's built up an entire industry in NZ, based around his film-making and special effects companies, which personally I think do a very good job. If Newline's shortchanged him by several tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (I forget how much it is), it automatically hinders his ability to do everything else that he really loves doing, including his own investment in other films that he thinks are worth making.
In any case, I don't think he's another George Lucas. The telling point for me is that Lucas has been irritating his fans in exchange for the money he can make from them. Jackson's simply fighting with his employer for what he thinks he's owed.
Space travel has always been dangerous, PERIOD. Astronauts have always known that everytime they strap themselves in, there's a reasonable chance that they won't be coming back. Apollo 1 made that point real clear, and the Challenger incident further punctuated the point.
These are certainly true facts, but I think they're missing the point a little. NASA and the government would almost certainly support sending up shuttles with life-risking astronauts if they thought that the public would support it. But the public doesn't support it, or at least not in the way you might think they do.
The major differences with what you've cited are that those were missions that people saw as being very important. Apollo was all about beating the Russians during the cold war, and the public were prepared to risk some lives if it was necessary. Challenger was in 1986 -- the shuttle was relatively new and it wasn't realised just how dangerous it was. Many people would have thought (or hoped) that it was a one-off.
With this situation, however, we're talking about a routine on-going government-supported day-to-day program where one in fifty missions fails and everyone dies. I don't know the exact number, but it's more than one percent and that may just be because we've been lucky for all we know.
Unless there's something at stake that involves patriotism on a wartime scale, it's always going to be tough to convince people to pour billions of dollars into something that's openly known to have such a dismal safety record, especially when the perceived return is dubious (keep in mind that for better or worse, most people don't prioritise science). Every time a shuttle is destroyed, everyone will ask the same questions over again, wondering why they're funding such a monstrosity.
the hubble is obsolete because of the fact that there are cheaper and better telescope projects out there that should be initiated. some of those programs are mentioned here on/. all the time!
I must have missed discussion of these projects that make the Hubble obsolete. Please enlighten us.
I agree, especially with the marketing and management. For a small business to succeed, it's very important to actually be able to sell the product. Realistically it doesn't have to be a product that someone actually wants for them to be convinced that they want to buy it.
I used to work for a startup company. I was invited to work there by the CEO shortly after I got my comp-sci degree. The CEO was a friend of mine from a previous workplace. We were building an application for a niche market of government accounting employees.
We had fantastic people and it was a great place to work. Those running and funding the company had all come out of government accounting. They knew exactly what was needed, they were good at communicating it to us as programmers, and we were developing a really good product that would've been very useful, particularly for governments in small countries who didn't have a lot of money to spent on massive infrastructures. To top it off, we definitely weren't spending a lot of money, and I can vouch for that.
Where it fell over was that although we had a very experienced government accounting consultant flying around the world selling our product, the competition had more successful marketers. (It didn't help that our guy was having health problems.)
I have to admit that it was very frustrating to see the marketing people from SAP go to these small governments and convince them to spend ten times as much on a dinosaur of a product that they had no need for and for which they'd be required build their own system on top of all over again, anyway. What we had that essentially did exactly what they really needed immediately. SAP's entire marketing strategy was based on Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and it worked for them.
Our company ended up merging into a slightly larger company out of town. I left as part of that agreement, and went back to university to do an MSc, which admittedly I'd also been quite keen to do when I'd finished my earlier degree.
I hate marketing, personally. I hate selling people things that I think they don't need, and I hate asking more money for something than what I think it's worth to me. This isn't realistic in most of the real world, of course, which is why I'd make a bad marketer, and this experience just reinforced my view of it. Our marketing guy was very good, but SAP's was better, and they also had the benefit of being from a big company and being able to spread FUD.
I couldn't fully stress the importance of having people in a small business who are really good at marketing, though, if you're not. In today's world, being able to actually sell something is more important than making something useful.
How often do you buy CDs? Since mp3's got popular, I barely buy any physical CDs anymore.
I now buy a lot more CD's than I ever used to. Until a few years ago I very rarely bought CD's or other music media, because I didn't want to spend that amount of money without really having any idea of what I'd be getting. There's not a lot you can tell from a CD cover, and it's usually difficult to sample something more than a few minutes in a CD store.
Since MP3's have been available, I often download one or two of an album that looks promising and keep them around to listen to for a few weeks. If I still like what I hear after that time, I'll usually go out and buy the album with the knowledge that it's less likely I'm throwing away money on something I won't listen to in the long term. MP3's that I get sick of don't stay around for long.
Looking down my playlist, I can see that I have bought the respective CD's for most of what's on there.
I think passwords/authentication have to work in both directions. Perhaps e-banking would be more secure if the banking site had to show you proof of authenticity (for example, you ask the system a question about your file, and see if it responds correctly).
I think this is already in place and widely used, although the present implementation seems quite hypocritical to me.
Supposedly at least, and someone might correct me on this, my understanding is that this is what protocols such as https are supposed to do already. (I'm not an expert on which protocol does what, so apologies if I have my terminology mixed up.) The bank verifies itself via a certificate issued by a third party (such as Verisign) that your web browser's distributor has decided to trust. (You, in theory.)
Much of it is idealism and I'm sure the usefulness of this is all quite challengable, of course. I personally doubt that most people actively decide which third parties they want to trust for authentication, but simply accept whatever comes with their browser, wherever it came from. (eg. How many people out there have installed Firefox from a disk given to them by a friend?) I also suspect that many people simply install random certificates and "trust" whatever additional entities they're told they need by anonymous distributors of software.
It's as if the trust model started out with good intentions, but it was scaled back once everyone realised that most people simply don't prioritise complicated decisions about who to trust. Now we have all those decisions made for us by entities who might as well be anonymous.
What you've suggested seems to enforce a much more active method of users authenticating their bank, and it might work better. It'd take some effort to get past that barrier of people not bothering with what they find irritating, however.
Slashdot Mirror
Any well-built car doesn't turn on a "check oil" light every 20 minutes without very good reason and causing a great catastrophe most of the time. If it did, people wouldn't take it seriously.
For what it's worth, a good bug at bugzilla to keep an eye on whenever there are popup problems is #176958. (bugzilla.mozilla.org not linked due to the block on slashdot referrals.) That's the main popups-not-being-blocked bug, and it has linked dependencies on all of the known specific popup bugs.
Sometimes I just wonder if it's more likely that Microsoft is just paranoid about being seen to stomp on others' business interests. Ad revenue for some businesses aside providing a decent popup blocker would almost certainly have driven at least several other companies out of business.
Several years of slackness have meant there are suddenly a lot of businesses in existance that profit on fixing gaps in Microsoft software, notably things that other Operating Systems tend to provide by default. For instance:
Whenever Microsoft does something to improve their products, someone's likely to be driven out of business because there are so many third party products out there that only exist to fill in Microsoft's shortcomings. Personally I think Microsoft is paranoid about bad press, and probably has an in-house policy to consider things very carefully before adding any bundled functionality that might be seen to clash with other established products.
I agree completely, although it'd help to provide a decent explanation for people to explain why it's so important not to try to manipulate results, particularly in terms that marketing people and CEO's can at least understand even if they don't like it.
I have one particular friend who's really into marketing, and does it as a profession. We disagree strongly on a lot of things to do with that, but he's so absolutely enthusiastic about what he does that I've given up trying to talk to him about it.
In his mind, he's not really out to cheat or step on other people, or give himself any unfair advantage. As far as he's concerned, he's just entirely interested in "presence building" for his websites. This isn't just for his business, either -- he experiments with it as a hobby, and tries to get his personal websites highly rated. It hasn't even occurred to him that he might be annoying the search engines or people who use them. As far as he's concerned, any low-rated content that he has is only low rated because people might not have seen it yet, and he's trying to "help along the process" in some way.
And his websites are hideous clutter to look at, too, as a result of everything he does to get them rated highly. Once you've bypassed the actual content, about 9/10 of each page is a combination of emptiness (often background-coloured text), hugely sized words that are often random and have little or nothing to do with the main content that he's presenting, and massive amounts of links to all sorts of weird places.
I find this type of attitude frustrating to deal with, because whenever I place content on the web, I figure that if it's important enough then the search engines will promote it. As far as I'm aware, this is also what's intended to happen. It's not something that many marketing people can comprehend, though.
I'm not sure if providing a decent explanation of what search engines want in order to work properly would do much to help. Unless there's one available, though, I don't think there's much hope for any of these people to understand. If Google provided such an introductory document beyond the token amount hidden in their FAQ, I could at least point my friend to it to demonstrate that what he's doing really goes against what the search engine opertors would like him to do in order to get his content promoted appropriately.
Considering the Microsoft Grammar Checker tool is about as advanced as any grammar checking tool of its kind that's available from elsewhere, I don't think it's reasonable to expect Microsoft to improve upon it.
It's no big secret between linguists and software developers that defining appropriate English grammar, let alone verifying it, is a very difficult thing to do. It's also not as if competitors like OpenOffice and AbiWord have superior grammar checkers -- last I checked, they didn't offer it at all. It's not even superceeded by unix utilities such as style and diction.
It's okay to expect things from Microsoft for which there's reason to believe are actually possible, but don't expect the unrealistic.
Perhaps we should all ditch English and start speaking a more structured language for which it's easier to develop a decent grammar checker.
I'm not exactly serious, and I agree with you, but to the best of my understanding, English is a very yucky language compared with some others when it comes to consistency. I'd be interested to see how well grammar checking projects are going in some other languages.
It's no big surprise from your own post that you don't care deeply about grammar in the first place, so it shouldn't be news to hear that you'd rather switch it off.
It'd be more correct to say that there's no such thing as an accurate grammar checker. It's silly to take the Microsoft Grammar Checker's determinations as authoritative, but that doesn't mean that it's not useful.
In the past, I've found the grammar checker to be very useful in identifying certain issues that I'd missed, so I can check them again. It doesn't necessarily mean that I agree with it, and there have been more than a few times when I've ignored its suggestions for good reason. There have also been more than enough times, however, when the suggestions it's made have been extremely helpful.
It's never going to be correct all the time, but that doesn't make it useless. If you don't like it, then don't use it, but just because you dislike a certain feature doesn't make it worthless.
I may have misunderstood you or what you mean by anti-intellectual, but personally I've found The Simpsons to be, by far, one of the most insightful shows on TV. Once you look past the humour and the sometimes really bad (occasionally pathetic) joke, especially in more recent episodes, it's a very good satirical commentary on society. It's also not afraid to make fun of itself, and it does so frequently.
If you have an opportunity, I highly recommend Planet Simpson, by Chris Turner. He's a self-confessed Simpsons fan and goes off on tangents a little from time to time, but otherwise I found it to be a very good analysis of The Simpsons and the multitudes of hidden satire of today's society that makes it such a well thought out show.
Clearly the show's not for everyone. If you don't like it then good for you for not watching it. But anti-intellectual is something that The Simpsons definitely isn't, and I think it's short-sighted to call it such. It has stacks more depth and thought put into it than most other relatively shallow content on TV.
These visualisations are quite neat. I've often wanted a word processor that would be able to do something like this. I tried writing on a private wiki at one point, but it still presents the changes between different versions very separate and discrete from each other, and from the editing, so it didn't work terribly well.
When I write things, the text often evolves a lot over several days. I usually blurt out everything I want to say at the beginning, and then go back and edit it over and over again until it's expressed how I want it. One problem, though, is that when I go away and come back again, it's not always obvious which parts are the most volatile, and might need the most attention. It often takes a while to get back into the right mode of figuring out where the complicated parts are, and editing the document.
Writing on paper is still very different from a word processor. It's very obvious where a lot has been crossed out and changed over and over again, and previous crossed-out versions, even if they're on paper that's been put aside, are often still visible and easily accessible during the rest of the process. In a word processor, though, nearly all of this contextual information is lost. At best it's possible to "track changes", and that particular tool is relatively simple and usually aimed at being able to see some one-off changes that someone else has made to your document.
Beyond just tracking changes, which is a very linear representation, I'd love to be able to have some kind of visual representation surrounding the text to indicate the stability of different sections of what I've been writing.
Some useful ideas might perhaps include different coloured backgrounds to represent the volatility of sections of text, blocks of text that get moved a lot, being able to quickly flip back to what a small section used to be (without necessarily committing to it), and so on. Perhaps even a draft mode that shoves text aside (maybe above or below), but still leaves it accessible while editing the replacement text.
As a writing tool, it'd be a very helpful extension to any of the open source word processors out there. I bet there's a great niche market in authoring tools that current word processors really don't cater to right now.
Thanks for the response.
A possible example that comes to mind might be if I installed an autopackage package (eg. for something new when it first came out), and then used apt to install something else later that depended on the .deb version of that package, perhaps several months afterwards when it's in the .deb archive. If apt doesn't realise that the AutoPackage rendition is already installed, it'll presumably try to fetch and install the respective .deb as a dependency for installation automatically, and they'll conflict.
Granted that it's probably not something that would be very common, and I don't want it to sound as if I think it's a major issue. But I always feel somewhat at odds when I know there may be special cases to look out for. It sounds as if this is the sort of thing that might be tackled later on, so I'm looking forward to it.
I'm presently running Debian. I've briefly played with making my own .deb files so I'd be able to install some of my own things without necessarily completely losing track of everywhere they were scattered. With all of the extra meta files that need editing, the source packages versus binary packages, and everything else, though, the whole process of designing a .deb package looked a bit too structured and complicated for me to bother learning about... at least within the time I was prepared to spend.
If AutoPackage has a straightforward way to generate a simple package, such as from a tar.gz file, I might find it very helpful. What I'm wondering about, though, is how bad does it get when two package managers conflict? eg. Apt and AutoPackage might end up trying to control the same file, get mixed up between what manager is providing a particular dependency (particularly if Apt tries to grab a package that AutoPackage has already installed), or whatever else.
It also sounds a bit of extra work having two sets of commands to manage packages on one system, so ideally (in my world), I guess AutoPackage would wrap around Apt or whatever other manager, and invoke it when appropriate. Does AutoPackage just fight for control when there are conflicts, or does it integrate with other package managers nicely?
The server seems to be very slashdotted right now, so I can't do much reading up on it. Does this sort of conflict thing turn out to be much of a problem?
I don't know how accurate your source is, but my friend at Microsoft is quite adament that people working on different products at Microsoft are hardly even allowed to talk to each other. After all the court action in the past, Microsoft's set an in-house policy that basically says that each product team is only allowed to access other teams' specifications that have also been released in public.
Having said that, it wouldn't surprise me the slightest bit if executives make decisions from time to time that completely ignore this policy, if they think they can get away with it. But in the general case, programmers at Microsoft aren't allowed to talk to each other about the internal workings of independent projects except to distribute already published material. I suspect that this would be enforced quite a lot between the Windows/IE barrier, given all the accusations in the past.
Personally I think the bigger problem is getting Windows to stop bundling, loading and using IE at every opportunity if and when it's not wanted. I haven't used Windows seriously for several years, but it can't be that easy to change the assumption that many Microsoft and Third Part applications seem to have, that IE will always be available on a Windows system.
My understanding was that this was the whole issue. If IE were to be removed, many applications would simply break. Windows would also break, since it uses IE's API (which, by the way, is published for any operating system to use) to do so many things.
Is this still a problem? I haven't used Windows seriously for several years now, although to me XP appeared that Windows Explorer and Internet Explorer were still based on the same engine, even when I'd changed my default browser.
I came across one a few months ago and reported it, and it still doesn't seem to've been fixed. (Bug 273851 in bugzilla, which I'm not linking to directly because bugzilla blocks slashdot referers.) There's a short and straightforward test case - try it out.
There's also a general bug that references all popup-blocker bugs. If you'd like to see all of those that've been reported, check out bug 176958.
I suspect it's a matter of time before annoying website developers start browsing bugzilla and taking advantages of the popup blocker bugs, if they're not already. Hopefully that'll provide some decent motivation to get them fixed.
I don't disagree with you in general, but could you please clarify what you mean about this more specifically? I realise that separating data and code is a big security thing, but I'm not particularly a security enthusiast beyond what I need to know.
As far as I'm aware, any system that supports scripting languages, Linux included (consider the number of scripts in your typical /usr/bin directory that'll be executed as root one day) is treating code as data and data as code. Things that are definitely executables can easily be kept protected in memory by an operating system, but not everything's obviously an executable.
Is the main difference here just that most scripting interpreters don't offer default access to volatile things like pointers, that might let a script get direct memory access?
I don't know if you have any academic connections, but you'll usually find that university libraries stock lots of journals in dead tree format. I'm often amazed at some of the obscure books and journals I've wanted that've turned out to been shelved in my local university.
Complete online journal and proceeding archives are a relatively new invention that requires a certain amount of technical expertise, and it's no surprise that a lot of publishers simply haven't caught up.
If you're near an academic library, check if they have the journal (or whatever publication) and the relevant issue listed in their catalogue, which will more likely than not be published somewhere online. (Otherwise you might have to visit the libary and use their catalogue locally, or just contact and ask them.) If it's there, you may just be able to wander in to read it from the shelf without any complications. Chances are you'll need to be a student or staff member to issue something, but there's always the photocopier.
If it's not there, if you don't live near enough, or if you do want to issue it for some reason, you could always try what the other response suggested -- ask for an interlibrary loan. Most librarians tend to like helping people with that sort of thing, not to mention that it's their job.
No, she wasn't. I do suspect it might have been at least partly to do with the environment she grew up in, including role models, and so on. I never found out much about the rest of her family, but I'm pretty sure that her best friend was beaten up quite regularly by her own boyfriend, although I wasn't able to prove it. Very sad, really, especially since I can see exactly how it's all likely to be repeated in the next generation.
It was just crazy how she was acting -- the most frustrating part was that I couldn't change her attitude no matter what I said... she just expected to be treated that way. She wanted to be told what to do, wanted all her decisions made for her, and seemed to refuse to acknowledge that she had a life of her own or a say in anything.
Eh? I'm not a Mensa member, but I am a member of a social sports club and an amateur astronomical society. They're called extra-curricular activities, and they're a very good way to meet interesting people with common interests and attitudes.
Both of my groups are full of people with whom I share common interests, and both are full of great contacts for other things in life if I ever want help. How is that different from Mensa, and how does that make any of these like an "old boy network"?
Just as my and many other people's interests happen to be in a certain area shouldn't mean that someone else's interests shouldn't be allowed to be in the realm of puzzle solving and so on, and whatever else Mensan's engage in.
Really, though, would you want a partner like that?
I had one once, and it was awful -- she was so convinced that she was useless and constantly putting herself down. I felt really sorry for her because somewhere along the line she'd been seriously messed up, but I also wouldn't wish her on anyone. In any case it lasted for a matter of weeks before I dumped her (or she interpreted it that way) because I just couldn't stand it any more.
The way that she acted a lot of the time suggested that she was expecting to be beaten for some of the things she did, no matter how much I constantly told her that there was nothing wrong and I wasn't going to treat her like that. She never actually listened to me, and all the time she was assuming I was someone I wasn't. Honestly, it wasn't until I'd met her that I understood how it's possible that some women put up with that kind of crap from guys. She was practically inviting it, and with someone else she would've gotten it. (No, I didn't oblige.)
It took me a while to get over that, but my current girlfriend, who took a while to find, is very assertive. If she doesn't like something I say or do, she'll make sure I know straight away, and I do the same for her. It's a whole lot better.
I guess that was your experience, which was fair enough. I'd be interested to know how many other people have a similar problem, though, which would be a more accurate measure of how good or bad the idea is.
Personally I noticed early on that it could be a problem, and I made an effort to avoid getting into the habit of locking the door from the inside before closing it. Usually I've locked the car from the outside with the key. More recently, I use the remote. (Aside from being convenient, it also cuts down a lot on paint scratches.)
I'm not exactly an insider (apart from living in the same town as Peter Jackson), but I don't think that's so much the issue here. As far as I can tell, he wants what's fair and what he was contracted for. Even if you love your day-job, you should make sure that your employer isn't ripping you off. They are getting your work out of it, after all. Look how much Newline's benefiting from Jackson's work. I'd be annoyed if they weren't giving me my fair share that'd been previously arranged.
What Peter Jackson loves a lot is making movies (and various other things like restoring WW1 fighter planes). He's built up an entire industry in NZ, based around his film-making and special effects companies, which personally I think do a very good job. If Newline's shortchanged him by several tens or hundreds of millions of dollars (I forget how much it is), it automatically hinders his ability to do everything else that he really loves doing, including his own investment in other films that he thinks are worth making.
In any case, I don't think he's another George Lucas. The telling point for me is that Lucas has been irritating his fans in exchange for the money he can make from them. Jackson's simply fighting with his employer for what he thinks he's owed.
These are certainly true facts, but I think they're missing the point a little. NASA and the government would almost certainly support sending up shuttles with life-risking astronauts if they thought that the public would support it. But the public doesn't support it, or at least not in the way you might think they do.
The major differences with what you've cited are that those were missions that people saw as being very important. Apollo was all about beating the Russians during the cold war, and the public were prepared to risk some lives if it was necessary. Challenger was in 1986 -- the shuttle was relatively new and it wasn't realised just how dangerous it was. Many people would have thought (or hoped) that it was a one-off.
With this situation, however, we're talking about a routine on-going government-supported day-to-day program where one in fifty missions fails and everyone dies. I don't know the exact number, but it's more than one percent and that may just be because we've been lucky for all we know.
Unless there's something at stake that involves patriotism on a wartime scale, it's always going to be tough to convince people to pour billions of dollars into something that's openly known to have such a dismal safety record, especially when the perceived return is dubious (keep in mind that for better or worse, most people don't prioritise science). Every time a shuttle is destroyed, everyone will ask the same questions over again, wondering why they're funding such a monstrosity.
I must have missed discussion of these projects that make the Hubble obsolete. Please enlighten us.
I agree, especially with the marketing and management. For a small business to succeed, it's very important to actually be able to sell the product. Realistically it doesn't have to be a product that someone actually wants for them to be convinced that they want to buy it.
I used to work for a startup company. I was invited to work there by the CEO shortly after I got my comp-sci degree. The CEO was a friend of mine from a previous workplace. We were building an application for a niche market of government accounting employees.
We had fantastic people and it was a great place to work. Those running and funding the company had all come out of government accounting. They knew exactly what was needed, they were good at communicating it to us as programmers, and we were developing a really good product that would've been very useful, particularly for governments in small countries who didn't have a lot of money to spent on massive infrastructures. To top it off, we definitely weren't spending a lot of money, and I can vouch for that.
Where it fell over was that although we had a very experienced government accounting consultant flying around the world selling our product, the competition had more successful marketers. (It didn't help that our guy was having health problems.)
I have to admit that it was very frustrating to see the marketing people from SAP go to these small governments and convince them to spend ten times as much on a dinosaur of a product that they had no need for and for which they'd be required build their own system on top of all over again, anyway. What we had that essentially did exactly what they really needed immediately. SAP's entire marketing strategy was based on Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and it worked for them.
Our company ended up merging into a slightly larger company out of town. I left as part of that agreement, and went back to university to do an MSc, which admittedly I'd also been quite keen to do when I'd finished my earlier degree.
I hate marketing, personally. I hate selling people things that I think they don't need, and I hate asking more money for something than what I think it's worth to me. This isn't realistic in most of the real world, of course, which is why I'd make a bad marketer, and this experience just reinforced my view of it. Our marketing guy was very good, but SAP's was better, and they also had the benefit of being from a big company and being able to spread FUD.
I couldn't fully stress the importance of having people in a small business who are really good at marketing, though, if you're not. In today's world, being able to actually sell something is more important than making something useful.
I now buy a lot more CD's than I ever used to. Until a few years ago I very rarely bought CD's or other music media, because I didn't want to spend that amount of money without really having any idea of what I'd be getting. There's not a lot you can tell from a CD cover, and it's usually difficult to sample something more than a few minutes in a CD store.
Since MP3's have been available, I often download one or two of an album that looks promising and keep them around to listen to for a few weeks. If I still like what I hear after that time, I'll usually go out and buy the album with the knowledge that it's less likely I'm throwing away money on something I won't listen to in the long term. MP3's that I get sick of don't stay around for long.
Looking down my playlist, I can see that I have bought the respective CD's for most of what's on there.
I think this is already in place and widely used, although the present implementation seems quite hypocritical to me.
Supposedly at least, and someone might correct me on this, my understanding is that this is what protocols such as https are supposed to do already. (I'm not an expert on which protocol does what, so apologies if I have my terminology mixed up.) The bank verifies itself via a certificate issued by a third party (such as Verisign) that your web browser's distributor has decided to trust. (You, in theory.)
Much of it is idealism and I'm sure the usefulness of this is all quite challengable, of course. I personally doubt that most people actively decide which third parties they want to trust for authentication, but simply accept whatever comes with their browser, wherever it came from. (eg. How many people out there have installed Firefox from a disk given to them by a friend?) I also suspect that many people simply install random certificates and "trust" whatever additional entities they're told they need by anonymous distributors of software.
It's as if the trust model started out with good intentions, but it was scaled back once everyone realised that most people simply don't prioritise complicated decisions about who to trust. Now we have all those decisions made for us by entities who might as well be anonymous.
What you've suggested seems to enforce a much more active method of users authenticating their bank, and it might work better. It'd take some effort to get past that barrier of people not bothering with what they find irritating, however.