The problem of course is when you get your work done absurdly fast, preparing to get your spare half day off, and instead get handed the next project, complete with a revised time estimate showing that it "can" (and thus must) be done a half day faster than expected. I seem to recall there was a fairly popular quote a few years back covering this "phenomena".. I can't for the life of me remember it or where it came from though..:P..
This is something that has consistently annoyed me. The reason backspacing is "soooo" bad is a layover from typewriter era as best I can tell --even on a typewriter with a good working backspace, if you don't notice it before you've gone to the next line, you throw the page away.
This of course is complete BS in a modern word processor. I frequently use not only the backspace key, but things like word-left and the end key to correct my mistakes in a fraction of the time it would take to backspace all the way back and fix it.
A modern typing test should really do a few things:
a) measure mistakes after the entire text is typed. Would work even better with a count-up clock and a "Done" button than with a count-down clock like typingtest has.
b) allow you to use the full range of editing keys in , including things like autocorrect and autocomplete (even when they autocomplete something wrong). Of course this is highly impractical unless the typing test is actually built into the word processor, but thats about the only way to get accurate real-world results using that particular program.
Until those two conditions are met, typing tests of this sort are pretty much only measuring how fast you can type on a really really fast typewriter.
I'm afraid I must disagree almost entirely with your post. The "average" (ie: tie jockey in a closet working for a big company who pays MS big $$$ for many thousand copies of Windows and Word) user could care less what his or her program is doing in the background -- its the system admin's job to worry about such things. All this person cares about is being able to use Word and look at websites when they think the boss isn't watching. Most home users aren't a whole lot further ahead either (although this is changing as those of us who grew up with computers in school and everywhere else start growing up and get our own purchasing power).
As for your examples.. I agree that personalised menus are about the worst idea seen in years. NO one likes to have their stuff randomly disappearing on them no matter how infrequently they use it. The command line/start menu one -- only if you find one of the folk who are actually still migrating to a GUI these days.. I've never heard of anyone who doesn't use Linux or similar 99% of their lives asking how to type a command line. While click-through "Wizards" are often much longer than they really should be, they're still far preferable to most people than having to memorize/lookup and (correctly) type a 100+ character command line. As for Adobe, I don't know much about their other products but Acrobat reader is (in my opinion) just terrible. It defaults to page-at-a-time so that it jumps an entire screen if you scroll one line too far. It won't let you close a standalone window if there are any PDFs open in a browser. It refuses to load half the time (has a frozen copy stuck in memory that you have to ctrl-alt-del to kill). Randomly decides to zoom in to usually 150-200% for no good reason, even when you're using the hand (scrolling) tool. And I've recently found that the search within a browser window at 800x600 (what I'm stuck with at work due to crappy monitors) cuts off the results box with no scrollbar to get to it. I'm sure I could go on if I felt like it. I really hope their non-free programs are better designed.
Oh and lets not forget the documentation. Actually lets do so. Almost all software documentation (OSS included) is pretty much entirely useless except as a reference for someone who's done it before and just needs a refresh.
I think its more the fact that they dont RTFA and assume that the article is referring to the good old Shared Source BS, which from what I recall (not that I've read over it in a long long time) fits a good amount of the negative comments posted on this thread..
20 bugs in 18 months with number of systems likely into the billions (you did say ALL). That's damn near rock solid by today's software engineering standards.
My guess would be closer to 20 bugs in 18 seconds, if you're lucky.. especially considering this would have to be implemented by each and every vendor to have ever an IP implementation (again with that ALL thing). Ouch.
XP does this in a rudimentary fashion with the "Open with..." submenu. It allows you to associate a filetype with more than one program (and remembers the associations you've previously made). You can also (indirectly) change the default action this way.
On the other hand, it doesn't let you add arbitrary options to the menu (like "rename to.jpg" for.jpeg files -- you'd have to come up with a program to do so and associate that), but its better than nothing and I've found it extremely useful at times. Certainly a lot easier than trying to do anything through their file types dialog box (which I've found has actually become -less- intuitive since 98, if thats possible).
You can bet the things they'll pull out won't be IE, OE and Messenger. It'll be mostly stuff from the administrative tools, user profile options, ICS, etc.
The kind of stuff that 90% of "normal" consumers don't really use anyway, so that they can justify a new price level for people who can't (or don't want to) afford home edition.
And of course, if they decide not to release this stripped down (and lower-priced) version in the wealthier countries (US:P), then they'll have the best of both markets -- most people here aren't going to bother going through customs and everything for a cheaper copy of windows, and most people in Thailand and wherever will have a version of windows available at a price they can better afford.
Hopefully they won't decide to strip ICF:P (I doubt they will given all the security hounds on them these days and SP2 supposedly turning on the firewall by default and whatever else).
People like you seem to take for granted that God just exists.
Boils down to the same thing in my mind. The whole big bang theory is pure speculation with only minor evidence from what I've ever seen, mostly based on the idea that the fundamental forces worked somehow differently in the first few nanoseconds of the universe's creation.
That said, IANAAP (astro-physicist:P) so maybe they've got better evidence hidden somewhere I normally wouldn't look, but in my mind a simple check-in with the laws of conservation of matter/energy would imply that either matter or energy would have had to exist (either would do since they can be equated using good old E=MC^2), or the laws of physics in pre-universe empty space would have had to allow the ability to create something from nothing.
No matter what your views on the beginning of the universe, the reality is we're taking a lot of it on faith, regardless of whether we believe in science or religion or some combination of the two.
theres some math for you. Nothing says 3, 4 or 7 have to be quantities! Heck if we consider the possibility that im using the symbols 3, 4, and 7 as something other than the common usage (which isn't even the case in all parts of -this- world), they might not even be real numbers!
Want something even more interesting?
(sqrt(2)^sqrt(2))^sqrt(2) = 2 (try it;))
Have fun trying to associate sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) with any real-world quantities (not that I'm saying its impossible, but my guess is that it won't be an overly intuitive representation of the mathematics or vice-versa).
as opposed to speed limits imposed on the upstream (upload) side of the connection.
that is, he was referring to the fact that instead of capping you on the modem in your house, they should be capping you on their servers/routers/etc that you dont have physical access to.
OK. If I start creating my own PowerPuff Girl cartoons and distributing them (i.e. I write the script, draw the cartoons, etc.), I'm gonna get sued. Under what kind of IP protection am I sued?
Trademark would be my guess.
If I make a movie based on a recent book without permission, under what kind of IP protection am I being sued? Can't be trademark. Who trademarks a book? It would have to by copyright (right?) But I'm not stealing the book word for word, I'm reimplenting an idea (i.e. the plot).
If I'm not mistaken, copyright covers derivative works as well as the original, with a few fair use exceptions (short quotes for articles, etc), so you'd probably be nailed there.
From the other comments here, it doesn't seem like too many people consider them "the good guys". I went to the MSFreePC page myself and to me it looked a heckuva lot like it should have been in a popup window or a spam email -- a questionable "scam" filled more with bright colors than content. Admittedly I didn't bother going past the second page, but what I did see certainly didn't impress me.
No, its a badly written sentence thats trying to say 90% of all big music is geared for the teenager range and that they should be producing more "grown up" music instead of looking for the next brittney or backstreet boys. Which of course is entirely against RIAA logic. They follow the idea that "Adults have more money, but most of that isnt -disposable- money". Whereas most teenagers are off flipping burgers for $5 an hour and bringing in the bucks but dont generally have to pay rent/food/etc yet. Whether the Wired guy is right or not in the age of downloading (also mostly kids/teenagers) is another question, but thats the main reason (*cough* as I've mostly read in/. stories) the RIAA targets youngsters.
Not to mention that people who manage to download a complete film and bother watching it have it instantly removed from their machines (and therefore unavailable for other people to download from them). As good as all this sounds, they need to get rid of the whole single-use idea if they want to have this work as more than a Kazaa interface to their own download point(s). What would be more useful (assuming they 'demand' a per-viewing fee) would be to charge the $2.99 or whatever for the initial download and then charge say, $0.25 or $0.50 for future viewings -- the people who may re-watch it in the future will have an incentive to keep the file around, and the people who don't plan to re-watch will just delete the thing anyway so they wouldn't really be losing much. (Most people tend to watch movies only once or twice anyway, with the exception of course of the really good movies, which from what I've read here so far, are few and far between in Bollywood).
It says -as- competent though. Which could range anywhere from "I could rig this box tight" to "I think I know how to double-click the email icon".. To "What's a double-click?".. On the other hand, it stated only that the users had no prior experience with XP or Linux. They made no mention of whether they had prior experience with 95/98/ME or NT/2K, all of which would give a fairly large boost to the XP side of things since most non-administrative tasks are accomplished in the same way, with XP only adding a few colors and curves to the mix.
They still minimize the risks.. If you send a package containing say, 25 DVDs worth of one-time-pad, and (IIRC) a DVD can hold 5.2gig worth of data, you can now (assuming the package gets to the recipient uncompromised) send somewhere around 130gig of data before needing a new set of pads. The entire concept of the one-time-pad revolves around the idea that there's absolutely no method for determining bit n+1 given bits 0..n without the OTP bits, and this remains true even if those bits are spread across multiple messages.. so if you want to send 1,000 messages each containing say, 32,000 bits, you only need to send a single package consisting of 32,000,000 OTP bits (which by the way, mean nothing to an interceptor in transit, which means even if its intercepted you're still safe as long as you know that it was intercepted), rather than sending 1,000 plaintext messages (which if intercepted, means you immediately have a problem regardless of whether you discover that its been compromised).. On the other hand, if your enemy can only intercept one package, and you dont discover the compromise, then its probably better than the package be a single plaintext message than your OTP bits which would allow them to decrypt all 1,000 messages..
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The problem of course is when you get your work done absurdly fast, preparing to get your spare half day off, and instead get handed the next project, complete with a revised time estimate showing that it "can" (and thus must) be done a half day faster than expected. :P..
I seem to recall there was a fairly popular quote a few years back covering this "phenomena".. I can't for the life of me remember it or where it came from though..
This is something that has consistently annoyed me. The reason backspacing is "soooo" bad is a layover from typewriter era as best I can tell --even on a typewriter with a good working backspace, if you don't notice it before you've gone to the next line, you throw the page away.
This of course is complete BS in a modern word processor. I frequently use not only the backspace key, but things like word-left and the end key to correct my mistakes in a fraction of the time it would take to backspace all the way back and fix it.
A modern typing test should really do a few things:
a) measure mistakes after the entire text is typed. Would work even better with a count-up clock and a "Done" button than with a count-down clock like typingtest has.
b) allow you to use the full range of editing keys in , including things like autocorrect and autocomplete (even when they autocomplete something wrong). Of course this is highly impractical unless the typing test is actually built into the word processor, but thats about the only way to get accurate real-world results using that particular program.
Until those two conditions are met, typing tests of this sort are pretty much only measuring how fast you can type on a really really fast typewriter.
I'm afraid I must disagree almost entirely with your post. The "average" (ie: tie jockey in a closet working for a big company who pays MS big $$$ for many thousand copies of Windows and Word) user could care less what his or her program is doing in the background -- its the system admin's job to worry about such things. All this person cares about is being able to use Word and look at websites when they think the boss isn't watching. Most home users aren't a whole lot further ahead either (although this is changing as those of us who grew up with computers in school and everywhere else start growing up and get our own purchasing power).
As for your examples.. I agree that personalised menus are about the worst idea seen in years. NO one likes to have their stuff randomly disappearing on them no matter how infrequently they use it.
The command line/start menu one -- only if you find one of the folk who are actually still migrating to a GUI these days.. I've never heard of anyone who doesn't use Linux or similar 99% of their lives asking how to type a command line. While click-through "Wizards" are often much longer than they really should be, they're still far preferable to most people than having to memorize/lookup and (correctly) type a 100+ character command line.
As for Adobe, I don't know much about their other products but Acrobat reader is (in my opinion) just terrible. It defaults to page-at-a-time so that it jumps an entire screen if you scroll one line too far. It won't let you close a standalone window if there are any PDFs open in a browser. It refuses to load half the time (has a frozen copy stuck in memory that you have to ctrl-alt-del to kill). Randomly decides to zoom in to usually 150-200% for no good reason, even when you're using the hand (scrolling) tool.
And I've recently found that the search within a browser window at 800x600 (what I'm stuck with at work due to crappy monitors) cuts off the results box with no scrollbar to get to it. I'm sure I could go on if I felt like it. I really hope their non-free programs are better designed.
Oh and lets not forget the documentation. Actually lets do so. Almost all software documentation (OSS included) is pretty much entirely useless except as a reference for someone who's done it before and just needs a refresh.
I think its more the fact that they dont RTFA and assume that the article is referring to the good old Shared Source BS, which from what I recall (not that I've read over it in a long long time) fits a good amount of the negative comments posted on this thread..
The sad thing is it has a bad habit of working overly often :P.
20 bugs in 18 months with number of systems likely into the billions (you did say ALL). That's damn near rock solid by today's software engineering standards.
My guess would be closer to 20 bugs in 18 seconds, if you're lucky.. especially considering this would have to be implemented by each and every vendor to have ever an IP implementation (again with that ALL thing). Ouch.
I read that as ...the egyptian... I need sleep.. or alcohol.. or both..
Isn't it obvious? This is just a big scam by the flight simulator industry! They just don't want to have to make all those jet plane sounds anymore!
I only made it to (Score:3, Funny) before I decided it was likely bogus...
XP does this in a rudimentary fashion with the "Open with..." submenu. It allows you to associate a filetype with more than one program (and remembers the associations you've previously made). You can also (indirectly) change the default action this way.
.jpg" for .jpeg files -- you'd have to come up with a program to do so and associate that), but its better than nothing and I've found it extremely useful at times. Certainly a lot easier than trying to do anything through their file types dialog box (which I've found has actually become -less- intuitive since 98, if thats possible).
On the other hand, it doesn't let you add arbitrary options to the menu (like "rename to
You can bet the things they'll pull out won't be IE, OE and Messenger. It'll be mostly stuff from the administrative tools, user profile options, ICS, etc.
:P (I doubt they will given all the security hounds on them these days and SP2 supposedly turning on the firewall by default and whatever else).
The kind of stuff that 90% of "normal" consumers don't really use anyway, so that they can justify a new price level for people who can't (or don't want to) afford home edition.
And of course, if they decide not to release this stripped down (and lower-priced) version in the wealthier countries (US:P), then they'll have the best of both markets -- most people here aren't going to bother going through customs and everything for a cheaper copy of windows, and most people in Thailand and wherever will have a version of windows available at a price they can better afford.
Hopefully they won't decide to strip ICF
People like you seem to take for granted that God just exists.
Boils down to the same thing in my mind. The whole big bang theory is pure speculation with only minor evidence from what I've ever seen, mostly based on the idea that the fundamental forces worked somehow differently in the first few nanoseconds of the universe's creation.
That said, IANAAP (astro-physicist:P) so maybe they've got better evidence hidden somewhere I normally wouldn't look, but in my mind a simple check-in with the laws of conservation of matter/energy would imply that either matter or energy would have had to exist (either would do since they can be equated using good old E=MC^2), or the laws of physics in pre-universe empty space would have had to allow the ability to create something from nothing.
No matter what your views on the beginning of the universe, the reality is we're taking a lot of it on faith, regardless of whether we believe in science or religion or some combination of the two.
Math doesn't have to involve quantities!
;))
3 + 4 = 7
theres some math for you. Nothing says 3, 4 or 7 have to be quantities! Heck if we consider the possibility that im using the symbols 3, 4, and 7 as something other than the common usage (which isn't even the case in all parts of -this- world), they might not even be real numbers!
Want something even more interesting?
(sqrt(2)^sqrt(2))^sqrt(2) = 2 (try it
Have fun trying to associate sqrt(2)^sqrt(2) with any real-world quantities (not that I'm saying its impossible, but my guess is that it won't be an overly intuitive representation of the mathematics or vice-versa).
Singularities suck! And theres just nothing colorful about them either!
Actually he said:
It cannot remove speed limits imposed upstream
as opposed to speed limits imposed on the upstream (upload) side of the connection.
that is, he was referring to the fact that instead of capping you on the modem in your house, they should be capping you on their servers/routers/etc that you dont have physical access to.
OK. If I start creating my own PowerPuff Girl cartoons and distributing them (i.e. I write the script, draw the cartoons, etc.), I'm gonna get sued. Under what kind of IP protection am I sued?
Trademark would be my guess.
If I make a movie based on a recent book without permission, under what kind of IP protection am I being sued? Can't be trademark. Who trademarks a book? It would have to by copyright (right?) But I'm not stealing the book word for word, I'm reimplenting an idea (i.e. the plot).
If I'm not mistaken, copyright covers derivative works as well as the original, with a few fair use exceptions (short quotes for articles, etc), so you'd probably be nailed there.
Nah, NGE wasn't based in religion at all..! Really!
From the other comments here, it doesn't seem like too many people consider them "the good guys".
I went to the MSFreePC page myself and to me it looked a heckuva lot like it should have been in a popup window or a spam email -- a questionable "scam" filled more with bright colors than content. Admittedly I didn't bother going past the second page, but what I did see certainly didn't impress me.
I think this might be the first time I've seen a full-text repost moderated as "funny".
No, its a badly written sentence thats trying to say 90% of all big music is geared for the teenager range and that they should be producing more "grown up" music instead of looking for the next brittney or backstreet boys. /. stories) the RIAA targets youngsters.
Which of course is entirely against RIAA logic. They follow the idea that "Adults have more money, but most of that isnt -disposable- money". Whereas most teenagers are off flipping burgers for $5 an hour and bringing in the bucks but dont generally have to pay rent/food/etc yet.
Whether the Wired guy is right or not in the age of downloading (also mostly kids/teenagers) is another question, but thats the main reason (*cough* as I've mostly read in
Not to mention that people who manage to download a complete film and bother watching it have it instantly removed from their machines (and therefore unavailable for other people to download from them).
As good as all this sounds, they need to get rid of the whole single-use idea if they want to have this work as more than a Kazaa interface to their own download point(s).
What would be more useful (assuming they 'demand' a per-viewing fee) would be to charge the $2.99 or whatever for the initial download and then charge say, $0.25 or $0.50 for future viewings -- the people who may re-watch it in the future will have an incentive to keep the file around, and the people who don't plan to re-watch will just delete the thing anyway so they wouldn't really be losing much. (Most people tend to watch movies only once or twice anyway, with the exception of course of the really good movies, which from what I've read here so far, are few and far between in Bollywood).
It says -as- competent though. Which could range anywhere from "I could rig this box tight" to "I think I know how to double-click the email icon".. To "What's a double-click?"..
On the other hand, it stated only that the users had no prior experience with XP or Linux. They made no mention of whether they had prior experience with 95/98/ME or NT/2K, all of which would give a fairly large boost to the XP side of things since most non-administrative tasks are accomplished in the same way, with XP only adding a few colors and curves to the mix.
Which will most likely be attached to the iLoo via a security wire to prevent theft. Yay for technology!
Nah.. thats only semi-decidable since you'll never get a response from a dead cat..
The trick is to find out how to ask the box!
They still minimize the risks..
If you send a package containing say, 25 DVDs worth of one-time-pad, and (IIRC) a DVD can hold 5.2gig worth of data, you can now (assuming the package gets to the recipient uncompromised) send somewhere around 130gig of data before needing a new set of pads.
The entire concept of the one-time-pad revolves around the idea that there's absolutely no method for determining bit n+1 given bits 0..n without the OTP bits, and this remains true even if those bits are spread across multiple messages.. so if you want to send 1,000 messages each containing say, 32,000 bits, you only need to send a single package consisting of 32,000,000 OTP bits (which by the way, mean nothing to an interceptor in transit, which means even if its intercepted you're still safe as long as you know that it was intercepted), rather than sending 1,000 plaintext messages (which if intercepted, means you immediately have a problem regardless of whether you discover that its been compromised)..
On the other hand, if your enemy can only intercept one package, and you dont discover the compromise, then its probably better than the package be a single plaintext message than your OTP bits which would allow them to decrypt all 1,000 messages..