otoh, it is very much in the United States' interest to promote US businesses overseas it increases our market share in the global economy, and that is a good thing for us as a Nation, which is why the government is getting involved
Don't be ridiculous. It's not the US Government that Microsoft wants to localize its software. (And a good thing, too! I think most of us would flip if our tax dollars were used for that purpose.) Microsoft hopes that, say, the government of Lithuania will localize Microsoft Office for the Lithuanian market.
Microsoft has announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key Microsoft applications
Shouldn't that be the other way around? Why should governments be doing Microsoft's work? If Microsoft wants to sell in upper Mongolia, it ought to make the effort to localize its own damn software for that market.
If you ask me, this is just one more example of Microsoft's incredible hubris.
No, statistically your chance of losing would be 1 in 2. The 50 straight heads already happened. Yes, that part is unlikely. But once you've got 50 heads in a row, the chance that the next toss will yield a head is 1/2.
Look at it another way: the chance of getting 51 heads in a row is exactly the same as the chance of getting 50 heads and then a tail. In either case, the chance is 1/(2^51). Also, the chance of tossing 9 heads, then 3 tails, then 17 heads, then 24 tails is the same. Indeed, the chance of any single outcome is the same.
There's absolutely nothing special about a long string of consecutive heads, except that when it happens your brain recognizes that particular pattern. Try tossing a coin 30 times and jotting down the outcome. Smack your forehead and exclaim to the nearest person willing to listen "Great Gatsby! Do you know that the odds of this happening are approximately one in a billion?!"
All these articles about impending doom -- asteroids, earthquakes, pandemics, etc. -- give one the idea that because we've gone a long time without one of these things happening, the chance that we'll have an occurrance is increasing. That shows a basic misunderstanding of probability. If you toss a fair coin and get heads 50 times in a row, the probability of getting heads the next time is still 50%.
We're not 'running out of time' just because we've gone a long time without a major impact. The chance of a major impact this year is exactly the same as it has been in each of the last million years.
But how important will famine, disease, and war be when 90% of the population has been wiped out by a massive asteroid and the effects after the collision?
When, or if? It's probably true that a major impact is a near certainty. But what's the time frame for that kind of certainty? 1000 years? 10,000 years?
On the other hand, the probability for significant famine, disease, and war is 100%. That is, those things are all happening, right now. And it seems that there's a very strong chance that these problems will get worse in the near future.
I don't know about you, but I'll take a 0.01% chance that an asteroid will land on my county over a 5% chance that SARS or HIV or some drug resistant bird flu will do me in prematurely.
I don't know that double-clicking is "bad," but it should always be considered a shortcut, and never the only way to perform an operation, at least on the Mac. The same goes for contextual menus... they're often convenient, but you should be able to do the same operations without the contextual menu.
If you actually RTFA, you'll find that despite the title "The Best Newbie Interface?", the article actually does precious little to find the best. It has more to do with the author's observations while teaching a course to novice users with a particular CLI, and things that can be done to make the CLI more user-friendly.
What's more, any references to a GUI are to some unspecified version of Windows. I'm sure it's mainly my own biases showing here, but I recently had to use Windows XP for the first time in a couple years, and I had a pretty tough time myself. Early versions of MacOS were particularly easy to learn to use because they weren't full of bells and whistles, and also because Mac's used to come with a little tutorial that taught you how to do basic stuff like use a mouse, use a menu, etc. It's pretty damn obvious that not all GUI's are created equal in terms of useability for new users, and the same is certainly true of CLI's.
A final problem is with instructors. Most of us have probably taught someone to use a GUI at some point. Most of us also skip the basics and go right for the techniques that we use in everyday work, like double-clicking to launch apps or open files. But when you do that, you actually make the work more complicated. They have to learn to double-click (which can be difficult for very new users) and they have to learn *when* to double-click and when to single click. A lot of people just start double-clicking everything all the time. If you start with basics, you can give the new user just a few important rules that are very consistant.
Example: When you want to do some operation on some object, first select the object and then choose the operation. Want to open a file? First select the file by clicking on it, and then choose Open from the File menu.
The article lists features that are important for new users: dialogue, tasks, discoverability, location, appropriate notification. I suggest that these are all present in any decent user interface, whether graphical or command line driven. What's more, I think they're a lot easier to implement well in a GUI. GUI's also tend to be less modal, which IMO increases useability.
I guess what I'm saying here is that I respect the author's opinion, but I think he's mostly wrong.
So, it's pretty tough to draw any concrete conclusions about someone and their problems from a short description. On top of that, I'm not a shrink. So take this reply, and every other reply in this thread, with a major grain of salt.
Part of the problem could be that the kid in question and his peers all buy into the same 'geek' stereotype that led you to ask this question here, and which leads us to think after reading a few lines that we know something about the kid's problems. If that's the case, then it might help to find some activity outside of the Geekish Pursuits for the kid to try.
If it were me, I might say: "Look, you and I know you're pretty darn smart. But I think that you might think that being smart is the only thing you can be good at, and I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be that way. So lets go do something outside of your normal experience that'll help you believe a little more in yourself and bust out of this Geek stereotype that's currently keeping you down."
Then, I'd find some activity that I enjoy and give him a gentle introduction. A physical activity where you can start off slow and build up over time would be good. Running, cycling, or climbing might be good choices. With some encouragement from you, any one of those will build confidence and over time also turn your geek into some sort of athlete.
Another possibility is something artistic and expressive, like writing, painting, or photography.
I'm shocked! Old businesses with a strong attachment to their traditional business model are finding it difficult to change, you say? And to add injury to insult, you also tell me that they're suffering economically for this very reason? I can hardly believe it. Why, next you'll tell me that our beloved American recording industry has also fallen prey to the ogre that is technology, and that the telephone companies are having to scramble to avoid obsolescence...
Seems like a pretty obvious concept, so I'd be surprised if there aren't others. In any case, it can be handy.
Two simple, cheap things to do.
on
Quieting Your G5?
·
· Score: 4, Informative
1. Make sure the case is properly closed, with the clear plastic air deflector in place.
2. Turn down the thermostat in the studio a bit.
The G5 tower is normally extremely quiet as fan-cooled computers go, and if you hear the fans spinning up it means that the processor(s) is(are) running abnormally hot. The machine is designed to draw air in through the entire front, push it though a restriction near the processor(s), and exhaust it through the entire back. The restriction causes the air to speed up momentarily, and the net result is that you get a lot of air moving over the processor(s) quickly, but entering and leaving the machine fairly slowly, which keeps the noise down.
If the clear air deflector inside the case is removed, then there's less of a restriction to direct and accelerate the air, and that would be a problem. And when the case door is opened while the machine is on, the fans speed up immediately for similar reasons. So check that you've got that deflector installed, and that the door is closed properly.
If the air in your studio is a little on the warm side (perhaps the studio is in your attic?), then it obviously won't cool the machine very effectively. Run an air conditioner, open the window, or turn down the thermostat for a few hours before recording to cool down the air in there.
It's pretty clear to me that the designer of this aircraft not only took some physics in college, but also actually studied the textbook and did the problem sets. And there lies the problem. I'm convinced that (s)he did a few too many of those problems that start out: "Disregarding air resistance, find the..." or "Ignoring the effects of friction, calculate...."
Perhaps first year physics texts should come with a shrink wrap EULA that states something along the lines of: "The scenarios presented in this book do not accurately represent reality."
The most interesting thing about a good search engine is that for most folks, it's their front end to the Internet. Like your browser or your computer monitor, it's the window through which you see the digital world. For that reason, people tend to give it credit for all the content on the net that they wouldn't have known about otherwise. I think this is particularly true for Google because it's so comprehensive, so fast, so flexible, so easy to use.
So in some sense, Google in many people's minds is more than just the search engine. People think of Google almost the way they think of the Internet itself. People don't say "...you can search the net for that...", they say "...you can Google for that...".
Google is where AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and many others want to be. And it's (so far) conducting itself with grace, intelligence, integrity, and style. I wish it well.
My favorite pager is actually less, but I often use more just out of habit. I don't really see why MS would need to write a pager at all, given that there's not so much command line stuff anymore with Windows.
Bluetooth is great when it works (and I *do* think it's mostly a driver issue), but we can do better...
Careful there, faster != better. If I've already invested a few hundred bucks in bluetooth devices, and they work together as well as I need them to with plenty of speed to spare, then dropping support for my existing devices and switching over to some faster proto-standard is not better in my book.
The cable coming into my home has a whole lot more bandwidth than my land line or my cell phone, but I haven't yet hooked my telephone up to it. The day may come when cable is both faster AND better than land line for telephony, but it's not here yet, at least in my neighborhood.
I'd be very curious to know what part of the above is 'flamebait.' Seems more like abuse by the moderators to me.
Over the last two decades, we've seen politics in this country become much more conservative. The reason is that the religious right figured out how to organize and exert a lot of political pressure. Moderates and liberals have been much more apathetic and unorganized. You can decide for yourself whether that's good or bad, but it's true.
Pizza delivery guys, UPS drivers, and lots of other people who make many short hops in their vehicle every day will have to either add 30 seconds to each and every stop, or else just never turn off their vehicle. Unintended consequences of this law could be a decrease in worker efficiency, increased pollution, and increased vehicle theft.
Look, there's no need to apologize for what you've done if you haven't done anything wrong. Projects get cancelled... it's what happens in this line of work. Put down your relevant work experience, including that cancelled project if it's relevant. If/when it comes up in an interview, simply explain that the project was cancelled due to circumstances well beyond your control (assuming that's true) and that you're looking for an employer with somewhat more solid prospects. Tell them flat out that you're looking for an employer with more solid prospects than your last one, and ask them a question or two about the outlook for their business (in a completely interested, polite, and professional way, of course).
P.P.S. I'd sure like to figure out a way to make the word liberal lose its negative connotation..
It's not complicated. There are only two things you have to do:
1. Vote.
2. Get as many of your like-minded friends to vote.
Obviously, the most important way to vote is at the polls on election day. But you can also vote on a daily basis by speaking up in other ways. Write to your local newspapers and television stations and voice your opinion. Tell Fox News that you think their "reporting" is one-sided garbage, and send copies of your letter to the companies that advertise with them. Help raise some money for your favorite liberal-but-soon-to-be-mainstream candidate. Let your senators and congressmen know that you vote, that you'll support them if they represent your opinions, and that you'll vote for someone else if they won't. And so on.
The more you do that, the more things will shift to the liberal side. And if you can get friends to do the same, so much the better.
- Linux is derived from System V. (75) - IBM has endeavored to control the open source community. (76) - IBM plans to destroy UNIX. (77) - Linus Torvalds can't say who contributed what to Linux. (78) - A significant amount of UNIX source code is present in Linux 2.4-2.6 kernels. (79) - Linux developers are incapable of developing enterprise-grade software without stealing from SCO. (80, 81) - Only IBM's involvement in Linux made Linux viable for enterprise use, and because IBM had access to System V (82), if follows that - if follows that Linux is a clone of UNIX. (83)
he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright.
I think the thing that offended most people is that Wolfram seemed to be taking credit for other people's ideas. And also, he comes off as being tremendously pompous. He hid away for ten or more years, then comes out with a book claiming, as per the title, to have invented an entirely new way to solve problems. What's he got? Algorithms and cellular automata.
But the point stands. Code reuse is not just some unfulfilled promise in C++, and most of us who write any significant amount of C++ reuse classes all the time.
Slashdot Mirror
otoh, it is very much in the United States' interest to promote US businesses overseas
it increases our market share in the global economy, and that is a good thing for us as a Nation, which is why the government is getting involved
Don't be ridiculous. It's not the US Government that Microsoft wants to localize its software. (And a good thing, too! I think most of us would flip if our tax dollars were used for that purpose.) Microsoft hopes that, say, the government of Lithuania will localize Microsoft Office for the Lithuanian market.
Microsoft has announced plans for a program to help governments produce local language versions of key Microsoft applications
Shouldn't that be the other way around? Why should governments be doing Microsoft's work? If Microsoft wants to sell in upper Mongolia, it ought to make the effort to localize its own damn software for that market.
If you ask me, this is just one more example of Microsoft's incredible hubris.
No, statistically your chance of losing would be 1 in 2. The 50 straight heads already happened. Yes, that part is unlikely. But once you've got 50 heads in a row, the chance that the next toss will yield a head is 1/2.
Look at it another way: the chance of getting 51 heads in a row is exactly the same as the chance of getting 50 heads and then a tail. In either case, the chance is 1/(2^51). Also, the chance of tossing 9 heads, then 3 tails, then 17 heads, then 24 tails is the same. Indeed, the chance of any single outcome is the same.
There's absolutely nothing special about a long string of consecutive heads, except that when it happens your brain recognizes that particular pattern. Try tossing a coin 30 times and jotting down the outcome. Smack your forehead and exclaim to the nearest person willing to listen "Great Gatsby! Do you know that the odds of this happening are approximately one in a billion?!"
All these articles about impending doom -- asteroids, earthquakes, pandemics, etc. -- give one the idea that because we've gone a long time without one of these things happening, the chance that we'll have an occurrance is increasing. That shows a basic misunderstanding of probability. If you toss a fair coin and get heads 50 times in a row, the probability of getting heads the next time is still 50%.
We're not 'running out of time' just because we've gone a long time without a major impact. The chance of a major impact this year is exactly the same as it has been in each of the last million years.
But how important will famine, disease, and war be when 90% of the population has been wiped out by a massive asteroid and the effects after the collision?
When, or if? It's probably true that a major impact is a near certainty. But what's the time frame for that kind of certainty? 1000 years? 10,000 years?
On the other hand, the probability for significant famine, disease, and war is 100%. That is, those things are all happening, right now. And it seems that there's a very strong chance that these problems will get worse in the near future.
I don't know about you, but I'll take a 0.01% chance that an asteroid will land on my county over a 5% chance that SARS or HIV or some drug resistant bird flu will do me in prematurely.
I don't know that double-clicking is "bad," but it should always be considered a shortcut, and never the only way to perform an operation, at least on the Mac. The same goes for contextual menus... they're often convenient, but you should be able to do the same operations without the contextual menu.
If you actually RTFA, you'll find that despite the title "The Best Newbie Interface?", the article actually does precious little to find the best. It has more to do with the author's observations while teaching a course to novice users with a particular CLI, and things that can be done to make the CLI more user-friendly.
What's more, any references to a GUI are to some unspecified version of Windows. I'm sure it's mainly my own biases showing here, but I recently had to use Windows XP for the first time in a couple years, and I had a pretty tough time myself. Early versions of MacOS were particularly easy to learn to use because they weren't full of bells and whistles, and also because Mac's used to come with a little tutorial that taught you how to do basic stuff like use a mouse, use a menu, etc. It's pretty damn obvious that not all GUI's are created equal in terms of useability for new users, and the same is certainly true of CLI's.
A final problem is with instructors. Most of us have probably taught someone to use a GUI at some point. Most of us also skip the basics and go right for the techniques that we use in everyday work, like double-clicking to launch apps or open files. But when you do that, you actually make the work more complicated. They have to learn to double-click (which can be difficult for very new users) and they have to learn *when* to double-click and when to single click. A lot of people just start double-clicking everything all the time. If you start with basics, you can give the new user just a few important rules that are very consistant.
Example: When you want to do some operation on some object, first select the object and then choose the operation. Want to open a file? First select the file by clicking on it, and then choose Open from the File menu.
The article lists features that are important for new users: dialogue, tasks, discoverability, location, appropriate notification. I suggest that these are all present in any decent user interface, whether graphical or command line driven. What's more, I think they're a lot easier to implement well in a GUI. GUI's also tend to be less modal, which IMO increases useability.
I guess what I'm saying here is that I respect the author's opinion, but I think he's mostly wrong.
So, it's pretty tough to draw any concrete conclusions about someone and their problems from a short description. On top of that, I'm not a shrink. So take this reply, and every other reply in this thread, with a major grain of salt.
Part of the problem could be that the kid in question and his peers all buy into the same 'geek' stereotype that led you to ask this question here, and which leads us to think after reading a few lines that we know something about the kid's problems. If that's the case, then it might help to find some activity outside of the Geekish Pursuits for the kid to try.
If it were me, I might say: "Look, you and I know you're pretty darn smart. But I think that you might think that being smart is the only thing you can be good at, and I'm here to tell you that it doesn't have to be that way. So lets go do something outside of your normal experience that'll help you believe a little more in yourself and bust out of this Geek stereotype that's currently keeping you down."
Then, I'd find some activity that I enjoy and give him a gentle introduction. A physical activity where you can start off slow and build up over time would be good. Running, cycling, or climbing might be good choices. With some encouragement from you, any one of those will build confidence and over time also turn your geek into some sort of athlete.
Another possibility is something artistic and expressive, like writing, painting, or photography.
I'm shocked! Old businesses with a strong attachment to their traditional business model are finding it difficult to change, you say? And to add injury to insult, you also tell me that they're suffering economically for this very reason? I can hardly believe it. Why, next you'll tell me that our beloved American recording industry has also fallen prey to the ogre that is technology, and that the telephone companies are having to scramble to avoid obsolescence...
Hey, cool! Microsoft "invented" a time-lapse camera!
Another good thing to do is to get your hands on a Cocoa class browser. Here's one:
- br owser/
http://homepage2.nifty.com/hoshi-takanori/cocoa
Seems like a pretty obvious concept, so I'd be surprised if there aren't others. In any case, it can be handy.
1. Make sure the case is properly closed, with the clear plastic air deflector in place.
2. Turn down the thermostat in the studio a bit.
The G5 tower is normally extremely quiet as fan-cooled computers go, and if you hear the fans spinning up it means that the processor(s) is(are) running abnormally hot. The machine is designed to draw air in through the entire front, push it though a restriction near the processor(s), and exhaust it through the entire back. The restriction causes the air to speed up momentarily, and the net result is that you get a lot of air moving over the processor(s) quickly, but entering and leaving the machine fairly slowly, which keeps the noise down.
If the clear air deflector inside the case is removed, then there's less of a restriction to direct and accelerate the air, and that would be a problem. And when the case door is opened while the machine is on, the fans speed up immediately for similar reasons. So check that you've got that deflector installed, and that the door is closed properly.
If the air in your studio is a little on the warm side (perhaps the studio is in your attic?), then it obviously won't cool the machine very effectively. Run an air conditioner, open the window, or turn down the thermostat for a few hours before recording to cool down the air in there.
It's pretty clear to me that the designer of this aircraft not only took some physics in college, but also actually studied the textbook and did the problem sets. And there lies the problem. I'm convinced that (s)he did a few too many of those problems that start out: "Disregarding air resistance, find the..." or "Ignoring the effects of friction, calculate...."
Perhaps first year physics texts should come with a shrink wrap EULA that states something along the lines of: "The scenarios presented in this book do not accurately represent reality."
The most interesting thing about a good search engine is that for most folks, it's their front end to the Internet. Like your browser or your computer monitor, it's the window through which you see the digital world. For that reason, people tend to give it credit for all the content on the net that they wouldn't have known about otherwise. I think this is particularly true for Google because it's so comprehensive, so fast, so flexible, so easy to use.
So in some sense, Google in many people's minds is more than just the search engine. People think of Google almost the way they think of the Internet itself. People don't say "...you can search the net for that...", they say "...you can Google for that...".
Google is where AOL, Yahoo!, Microsoft, and many others want to be. And it's (so far) conducting itself with grace, intelligence, integrity, and style. I wish it well.
My favorite pager is actually less, but I often use more just out of habit. I don't really see why MS would need to write a pager at all, given that there's not so much command line stuff anymore with Windows.
If you already have your devices and they work well together, why the hell do you care about companies dropping support?
/. troller trying to make a big deal out of nothing.
Because the next time I buy a laptop, I don't want to also have to buy a new cell phone, GPS receiver, PDA, wireless mouse, etc.
Retard. You are just another reactionary
Have a nice day.
Bluetooth is great when it works (and I *do* think it's mostly a driver issue), but we can do better...
Careful there, faster != better. If I've already invested a few hundred bucks in bluetooth devices, and they work together as well as I need them to with plenty of speed to spare, then dropping support for my existing devices and switching over to some faster proto-standard is not better in my book.
The cable coming into my home has a whole lot more bandwidth than my land line or my cell phone, but I haven't yet hooked my telephone up to it. The day may come when cable is both faster AND better than land line for telephony, but it's not here yet, at least in my neighborhood.
I'd be very curious to know what part of the above is 'flamebait.' Seems more like abuse by the moderators to me.
Over the last two decades, we've seen politics in this country become much more conservative. The reason is that the religious right figured out how to organize and exert a lot of political pressure. Moderates and liberals have been much more apathetic and unorganized. You can decide for yourself whether that's good or bad, but it's true.
Pizza delivery guys, UPS drivers, and lots of other people who make many short hops in their vehicle every day will have to either add 30 seconds to each and every stop, or else just never turn off their vehicle. Unintended consequences of this law could be a decrease in worker efficiency, increased pollution, and increased vehicle theft.
Look, there's no need to apologize for what you've done if you haven't done anything wrong. Projects get cancelled... it's what happens in this line of work. Put down your relevant work experience, including that cancelled project if it's relevant. If/when it comes up in an interview, simply explain that the project was cancelled due to circumstances well beyond your control (assuming that's true) and that you're looking for an employer with somewhat more solid prospects. Tell them flat out that you're looking for an employer with more solid prospects than your last one, and ask them a question or two about the outlook for their business (in a completely interested, polite, and professional way, of course).
P.P.S. I'd sure like to figure out a way to make the word liberal lose its negative connotation..
It's not complicated. There are only two things you have to do:
1. Vote.
2. Get as many of your like-minded friends to vote.
Obviously, the most important way to vote is at the polls on election day. But you can also vote on a daily basis by speaking up in other ways. Write to your local newspapers and television stations and voice your opinion. Tell Fox News that you think their "reporting" is one-sided garbage, and send copies of your letter to the companies that advertise with them. Help raise some money for your favorite liberal-but-soon-to-be-mainstream candidate. Let your senators and congressmen know that you vote, that you'll support them if they represent your opinions, and that you'll vote for someone else if they won't. And so on.
The more you do that, the more things will shift to the liberal side. And if you can get friends to do the same, so much the better.
You can slide furthur on bullshit, than you can on concrete
Guess he forgot to tell you the down sides to this philosophy:
1. When sliding on bullshit, you mostly go downhill.
2. You end up covered in, well, shit.
3. It's hard to find a job (or a date) when you're full of shit.
Very interesting. According to SCO:
- Linux is derived from System V. (75)
- IBM has endeavored to control the open source community. (76)
- IBM plans to destroy UNIX. (77)
- Linus Torvalds can't say who contributed what to Linux. (78)
- A significant amount of UNIX source code is present in Linux 2.4-2.6 kernels. (79)
- Linux developers are incapable of developing enterprise-grade software without stealing from SCO. (80, 81)
- Only IBM's involvement in Linux made Linux viable for enterprise use, and because IBM had access to System V (82), if follows that
- if follows that Linux is a clone of UNIX. (83)
he raised the suspicions of many in scientific communities that he was taking advantage of a lot of other people's work for his sole financial gain and that he was going against the open nature of academia by using restrictive copyright.
I think the thing that offended most people is that Wolfram seemed to be taking credit for other people's ideas. And also, he comes off as being tremendously pompous. He hid away for ten or more years, then comes out with a book claiming, as per the title, to have invented an entirely new way to solve problems. What's he got? Algorithms and cellular automata.
Mea culpa, you're right. What was I thinking?
But the point stands. Code reuse is not just some unfulfilled promise in C++, and most of us who write any significant amount of C++ reuse classes all the time.