It's a kludge-- less kludgy than scattering "Clear" buttons in various dialogue boxes, but it's still a bit of a kludge. A more generic solution might be a contextual menu-- "open selection in [browser]'.
I happen to like the middle-button paste technique. It's often quite handy. But an application should probably also implement a standard "edit menu", at least for the benefit of those too uncoordinated to press a wheel down without inadvertently spinning it.
It can tell you where dams have broken, what places have flooded and will soon be flooded. It can tell you where the roads are washed out-- and where to seek emergency shelter...
But the middle-click-to-paste bit is only one of the ways X11 handles paste The other is the use of control keys. Gedit uses Control-X, Control-C, and Control-V to handle cut, copy, and paste in addition to the middle-button.
Suppose you come across a./ message, where the author simply can't be bothered to properly encode a url. No problem!
You simply select the url, and middle click in the browser's address box, where it neatly deposits itself between the 'http' and the '://' of the previous url. With keyboard commands, you can select the proposed url, copy it, select the existing url in the address box and and paste the contents of the clipboard therein.
Then you can set about removing all the spaces, so that they won't be misinterpreted as '%20'...
Oh, but you've got one of those newfangled browsers that allows you to "open selection in new tab", do you? Never mind-- though eventually, if you use enough older appss, you'll run into a situation where the use of the mouse manages to destroy the selection buffer.
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness. Through one of the obscurest quarters of London, and among haunts little loved by the gentlemen of the police, a man, evidently of the lowest orders, was wending his solitary way. He stopped twice or thrice at different shops and houses of a description correspondent with the appearance of the quartier in which they were situated,--and tended inquiry for some article or another which did not seem easily to be met with. All the answers he received were couched in the negative; and as he turned from each door he muttered to himself, in no very elegant phraseology, his disappointment and discontent.
Kincaid: 16.7 (James: 18.2) ARI: 20.6 (James:22.2) Coleman-Liau: 11.5 (James: 9.8) Flesch Index: 47.7 (James: 46.7) Fog Index: 20.4 (James: 21.7) Lix: 64.6 = higher than school year 11 (James: 64.4) SMOG-Grading: 14.3 (James: 13.5)
I think we can safely assume that some of Mr James's henchman have attempted to bribe the judges.
A readability algorithm can not evaluate the aesthetic value of a text-- it can only determine whether an author's vocabulary and style might be too complex for his chosen target audience. With that caveat, I present this face-off.
Front Page of Fark (direct dump)
Lix: 45.2 = school year 8 SMOG-Grading: 11.4
Front Page of slashdot (direct dump)
Fog Index: 14.9 Lix: 49.9 = school year 9 SMOG-Grading: 12.0
Latest entry from my Journal (text only)
Lix: 46.6 = school year 8
SMOG-Grading: 12.2
Cmdr Taco's latest Journal Entry (text only)
Lix: 31.3 = below school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 8.4
Hemos's latest Journal Entry (text only)
Lix: 24.2 = below school year 5
SMOG-Grading: 8.2
William Safire's 14 July Column
Lix: 47.1 = school year 8 SMOG-Grading: 12.8
Only a portion of style's output is shown, as quoting more statistics would trigger the slashdot junk filter.
Yeah, the Washington Post even offered suggestions (born in 1965, residing in 22070, IIRC). They didn't offer any suggestions on sex, though, so I usually flipped a coin.
Now, they require registrations-- which irked me at first, until I realized that they propbably already had my demographics in their dead tree subscription database.
I still have no idea whether the LA Times is a good paper. Is it worth the hassle of creating an alias?
You don't have to read the nytimes metro section if you don't want to. In fact, if you pick up a copy of the times in, say, Columbus, OH, that copy will be stripped of most city-centric content.
It will however, contain many more column inches on national and world news than the average small-city daily. Many of those articles will be longer and more interesting than the average, generic AP wire story.
There's a difference between "collecting information" and having "investigative skills" good enough to determine the accuracy of that information. Matt Drudge gets a lot of of stuff wrong-- and so does the Times, to a lesser degree.
Judith Miller was good at collecting the information the INC fed her, but evidently, she doesn't have the investigative skills to test false claims.
Ah, but the FAIR study doesn't attempt to use a veneer of mathematics to buttress its findings. A nice set of formulae does wonders for the authors' credibility.
The study attempts to estimate the political leanings of think tanks by correlate the frequency of positive citations of a think tank by a member of a congress with the published "liberal/conservative" score assigned to that member by various other think tanks.
So if Edward Kennedy favourably cites a study by think tank X, think tank X must be liberal. Considering that Edward Kennedy is a member of the minority, and thus challenged with the task of persuading a Senate that is controlled by the GOP, he might well choose to cite a moderate think tank in a attempt to persuade his more conservative colleagues...
He is also somewhat limited by the fact that conservative think tanks are more numerous and better funded than leftist "tanks". There is currently no "All-Union Institute for the Study of the Dialectic" to "balance" out the "Family Research Council".
The Domesday project didn't use a stock laserdisc player. It used a SCSI laserdisc player hooked up to a modified BBC microcomputer. Once you've built this esoteric bit of of hardware, you'll still have to confront the disturbing possibility of bit rot-- laserdiscs are none too durable.
So? My chances of picking up a random USB-2.0 product off the shelves and finding that it uses some kind of windows only driver are still quite high. My chances of picking up a random firewire device off the shelf and finding that it works with my mac are a bit more encouraging.
Firewire continues to be used in digital video-- it is unlikely that your cable box, hdtv, of digital vcr will be equipped with usb ports, but 1394a ports are quite common.
well, tiger is supposed to be 64 bit (finally!) so it's an excuse to buy a new g5. Finally, an Apple branded OS that will be able to use all 8 gigabytes...
As for the usefullness of Core Image-- it looks like all the fancy image compositing functions of Quartz will finally be hardware accelerated. It will make fast eye candy possible, but it also has the potential to speed up photoshop and similar applications,
And there's nothing wrong with eye candy. If it's "free" and doesn't interfere with normal workflow, it can enhance the usability of the interface. I'd be willing to bet that NextStep's opaque window dragging was dismissed as needless eye candy in the beginning.
Just to clarify, Core Image requires least a Radeon 9500 or GeForceFX 5200 to use all the features, although the library does scale. These cards support floating point vertex and fragment shaders.
The ATI Rage M6 chipset is underpowered, and is unlikely to be supported by Quartz Extreme, much less Core Image. Apparently, it's a Rage 128 derivative. found in the 550 and 667 MHz Powerbook G4s. Quartz Extreme relies on hardware support for GL_EXT_texture_rectangle, which Apple notes is only supported by "Radeon, Radeon Mobility, Radeon 7500 Mobility, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9000, Radeon 9200, Radeon 9600, Radeon 9700, Radeon 9800,GeForce 2MX, GeForce 4MX, GeForce 3, GeForce 4Ti, GeForce FX." Presumably, you can verify this for yourself by running a GLInfo program.
As far as I know, fuck and shit have never been allowed on public television. If you want to hear those words en masse, pay for HBO and watch the Sopranos. "Fuck" is rare to the point of extinction on PBS. "Shit" is not so rare, as implied by this transcript of an interview with PBS producer Rebecca Eaton.
Usually, it's the broadcast networks who've been squeamish about "bad language," for fear of offending advertisers. PBS's sponsors have usually done so for the prestige factor-- and pulling one's sponsorship or insisting on censorship can have a tendency to backfire.
For instance, my local public television station was quite willing to show Blackadder episodes uncut. When Comedy Central shows them, some of the coarser dialogue may get cut, which, of course, interferes with the delayed punchlines two scenes later.
HBO is a commercial enterprise, and as such, is not immune from commercial pressure. The films HBO shows are almost invariably ones with a proven commercial record of success, while PBS, at least occasionally, shows material of some artistic but little commercial value.
Given, also, that Dreyfuss and Black read from prepared statements, I would suggest that they planned for such an event, and had hoped to use it to gain publicity for a program that, being aired on PBS, was guaranteed a low Nielson rating.
There's little sense in not being prepared. Perhaps these preparations were started because of rumors. BTW, PBS doesn't use Neilson ratings. The individual stations may occasionally survey their members, however.
But one keen observation: I'm a movie geek, so I searched for Alan Smithee on IMDB and I get that name for directors of some of the greatest movies ever made, several are on the IMDB's top 250 list. 12 Angry Men, the Original Manchurian Candidate, Cool Hand Luke, the first Superman, etc. Interesting stuff.
No. Sidney Lumet is credited as "Sidney Lumet" for 12 Angry Men (1957). He is credited as "Alan Smithee" for Q&A (1990).
John Frankenheimer is credited as "John Frankenheimer" for The Manchurian Candidate (1957). He is credited as "Alan Smithee" for Riviera (1987)
Stuart Rosenberg is credited as "Stuart Rosenberg" for Cool Hand Luke (1967). He is credited as "Alan Smithee" for Let's Get Harry (1986).
Jackie Cooper is credited as "Jackie Cooper" for playing the role of "Perry White" in Superman (1978). He is also credited as "Jackie Cooper" for playing the role of "Alan Smithee" in Moonlight (1982).
yes yes. At least newspapers have a corrections column, and [sometimes] admit their mistakes publicly. Less conscientious web publications simply reedit in place-- which often leaves the reader with no yardstick to measure accuracy over time.
Books, however, are more often subjected to fact checking and reediting.
PhD's debating sophisticated cultural nuances amongst themselves are 'better' than talk radio/TV
This should be obvious. One can express many more ideas on one page than one can present in ninety seconds.
Newspapers are 'better' than web pages.
It depends on the newspaper. Some are simply a means of regurgitating the AP feed. But even the AP uses editors and fact checkers. Many webpages are written with little regard for honesty and accuracy.
Glossy magazines are 'better' than pulps. Hardcover is 'better' than paperback.
Most SF is now published in hardcover, before a rerelease in paperback. And glossy paper is no measure of the quality of the magazine. Archival, Acid Free Paper has been adopted by many literary magazines, though.
Hand-crafted illuminated manuscripts, slaved over by monks, that could only be owned by the Church or a wealthy nobleman, were 'better' than Gutenberg's mass-produced works that the bourgeoise could purchase
Codex Hammer: 30.8 million Rothschild Prayer Book: 8.58 million Gutenberg Bible: 5.39 million Audubon's Birds of America: 8.8 million First Folio: 6.17 million source
The Codex Hammer is in Italian (mirrored Italian, no less.) The Gutenberg Bible is Latin. The First Folio would meet with the NEA's approval, and so would the Audubon book, although the latter is nonfiction. But all those are books that will be kept in vaults, and appreciated from a distance.
The NEA wants to encourage the development of literature, not merely functional literacy. Some forms of prose can be appreciated on purely aesthetic grounds and not merely because of the facts such forms may convey.
Slashdot may be fun to read, but very few slashdotters post for the ages, carefully crafting each sentence for maximum effect. Newspapers are often good at telling the reader what happened, but the whys often remain a mystery until a book, collating additional interviews, newspaper accounts and recently declassified archival records, is published years afterwards.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a kludge-- less kludgy than scattering "Clear" buttons in various dialogue boxes, but it's still a bit of a kludge. A more generic solution might be a contextual menu-- "open selection in [browser]'.
I happen to like the middle-button paste technique. It's often quite handy. But an application should probably also implement a standard "edit menu", at least for the benefit of those too uncoordinated to press a wheel down without inadvertently spinning it.
I don't have linux, and I don't have an O2 on hand. However, I do have amaya lying around, and it doesn't handle pasted urls in that manner.
I thought the w3 browser and its hack of numbering links went out of fashion some time ago.
didn't. Netscape 4 on the O2 was clunky.
It can tell you where dams have broken, what places have flooded and will soon be flooded. It can tell you where the roads are washed out-- and where to seek emergency shelter...
But the middle-click-to-paste bit is only one of the ways X11 handles paste The other is the use of control keys. Gedit uses Control-X, Control-C, and Control-V to handle cut, copy, and paste in addition to the middle-button.
./ message, where the author simply can't be bothered to properly encode a url. No problem!
Suppose you come across a
You simply select the url, and middle click in the browser's address box, where it neatly deposits itself between the 'http' and the '://' of the previous url. With keyboard commands, you can select the proposed url, copy it, select the existing url in the address box and and paste the contents of the clipboard therein.
Then you can set about removing all the spaces, so that they won't be misinterpreted as '%20'...
Oh, but you've got one of those newfangled browsers that allows you to "open selection in new tab", do you? Never mind-- though eventually, if you use enough older appss, you'll run into a situation where the use of the mouse manages to destroy the selection buffer.
Some, not particularly aware of the limitations of machine translation, have recommended the use of babelfish.
Kincaid: 16.7 (James: 18.2)
ARI: 20.6 (James:22.2)
Coleman-Liau: 11.5 (James: 9.8)
Flesch Index: 47.7 (James: 46.7)
Fog Index: 20.4 (James: 21.7)
Lix: 64.6 = higher than school year 11 (James: 64.4)
SMOG-Grading: 14.3 (James: 13.5)
I think we can safely assume that some of Mr James's henchman have attempted to bribe the judges.
Front Page of Fark (direct dump)
Front Page of slashdot (direct dump)
Latest entry from my Journal (text only)
Cmdr Taco's latest Journal Entry (text only)
Hemos's latest Journal Entry (text only)
William Safire's 14 July Column
Only a portion of style's output is shown, as quoting more statistics would trigger the slashdot junk filter.
Yeah, the Washington Post even offered suggestions (born in 1965, residing in 22070, IIRC). They didn't offer any suggestions on sex, though, so I usually flipped a coin.
Now, they require registrations-- which irked me at first, until I realized that they propbably already had my demographics in their dead tree subscription database.
I still have no idea whether the LA Times is a good paper. Is it worth the hassle of creating an alias?
You don't have to read the nytimes metro section if you don't want to. In fact, if you pick up a copy of the times in, say, Columbus, OH, that copy will be stripped of most city-centric content.
It will however, contain many more column inches on national and world news than the average small-city daily. Many of those articles will be longer and more interesting than the average, generic AP wire story.
There's a difference between "collecting information" and having "investigative skills" good enough to determine the accuracy of that information. Matt Drudge gets a lot of of stuff wrong-- and so does the Times, to a lesser degree.
Judith Miller was good at collecting the information the INC fed her, but evidently, she doesn't have the investigative skills to test false claims.
Blair was simply good at telling stories...
Ah, but the FAIR study doesn't attempt to use a veneer of mathematics to buttress its findings. A nice set of formulae does wonders for the authors' credibility.
The study attempts to estimate the political leanings of think tanks by correlate the frequency of positive citations of a think tank by a member of a congress with the published "liberal/conservative" score assigned to that member by various other think tanks.
So if Edward Kennedy favourably cites a study by think tank X, think tank X must be liberal. Considering that Edward Kennedy is a member of the minority, and thus challenged with the task of persuading a Senate that is controlled by the GOP, he might well choose to cite a moderate think tank in a attempt to persuade his more conservative colleagues...
He is also somewhat limited by the fact that conservative think tanks are more numerous and better funded than leftist "tanks". There is currently no "All-Union Institute for the Study of the Dialectic" to "balance" out the "Family Research Council".
The Domesday project didn't use a stock laserdisc player. It used a SCSI laserdisc player hooked up to a modified BBC microcomputer. Once you've built this esoteric bit of of hardware, you'll still have to confront the disturbing possibility of bit rot-- laserdiscs are none too durable.
So? My chances of picking up a random USB-2.0 product off the shelves and finding that it uses some kind of windows only driver are still quite high. My chances of picking up a random firewire device off the shelf and finding that it works with my mac are a bit more encouraging.
Firewire continues to be used in digital video-- it is unlikely that your cable box, hdtv, of digital vcr will be equipped with usb ports, but 1394a ports are quite common.
no, the Radeon 9200 does not support all of the CoreImage operations in hardware. I gather it's time to find a concrete floor and a 6 foot drop.
well, tiger is supposed to be 64 bit (finally!) so it's an excuse to buy a new g5. Finally, an Apple branded OS that will be able to use all 8 gigabytes...
"Radeon Mobility" -> RageM6.
Damn Internal code names...
As for the usefullness of Core Image-- it looks like all the fancy image compositing functions of Quartz will finally be hardware accelerated. It will make fast eye candy possible, but it also has the potential to speed up photoshop and similar applications,
And there's nothing wrong with eye candy. If it's "free" and doesn't interfere with normal workflow, it can enhance the usability of the interface. I'd be willing to bet that NextStep's opaque window dragging was dismissed as needless eye candy in the beginning.
Just to clarify, Core Image requires least a Radeon 9500 or GeForceFX 5200 to use all the features, although the library does scale. These cards support floating point vertex and fragment shaders.
Why not use a matrix appropriate to the size of the problem? After all, most geeks have access to octave or scilab.
The ATI Rage M6 chipset is underpowered, and is unlikely to be supported by Quartz Extreme, much less Core Image. Apparently, it's a Rage 128 derivative. found in the 550 and 667 MHz Powerbook G4s. Quartz Extreme relies on hardware support for GL_EXT_texture_rectangle, which Apple notes is only supported by "Radeon, Radeon Mobility, Radeon 7500 Mobility, Radeon 8500, Radeon 9000, Radeon 9200, Radeon 9600, Radeon 9700, Radeon 9800,GeForce 2MX, GeForce 4MX, GeForce 3, GeForce 4Ti, GeForce FX." Presumably, you can verify this for yourself by running a GLInfo program.
Apparently, it's less flexible than the proposed GL_ARB_texture_non_power_of_two.
Core Image is much more sophisticated, and levergaes the vertex and pixel fragment capabilities of an current generation OpenGL card.
As far as I know, fuck and shit have never been allowed on public television. If you want to hear those words en masse, pay for HBO and watch the Sopranos.
"Fuck" is rare to the point of extinction on PBS. "Shit" is not so rare, as implied by this transcript of an interview with PBS producer Rebecca Eaton.
Usually, it's the broadcast networks who've been squeamish about "bad language," for fear of offending advertisers. PBS's sponsors have usually done so for the prestige factor-- and pulling one's sponsorship or insisting on censorship can have a tendency to backfire.
For instance, my local public television station was quite willing to show Blackadder episodes uncut. When Comedy Central shows them, some of the coarser dialogue may get cut, which, of course, interferes with the delayed punchlines two scenes later.
HBO is a commercial enterprise, and as such, is not immune from commercial pressure. The films HBO shows are almost invariably ones with a proven commercial record of success, while PBS, at least occasionally, shows material of some artistic but little commercial value.
Given, also, that Dreyfuss and Black read from prepared statements, I would suggest that they planned for such an event, and had hoped to use it to gain publicity for a program that, being aired on PBS, was guaranteed a low Nielson rating.
There's little sense in not being prepared. Perhaps these preparations were started because of rumors. BTW, PBS doesn't use Neilson ratings. The individual stations may occasionally survey their members, however.
But one keen observation: I'm a movie geek, so I searched for Alan Smithee on IMDB and I get that name for directors of some of the greatest movies ever made, several are on the IMDB's top 250 list. 12 Angry Men, the Original Manchurian Candidate, Cool Hand Luke, the first Superman, etc. Interesting stuff.
No.
Sidney Lumet is credited as "Sidney Lumet" for 12 Angry Men (1957). He is credited as "Alan Smithee" for Q&A (1990).
John Frankenheimer is credited as "John Frankenheimer" for The Manchurian Candidate (1957). He is credited as "Alan Smithee" for Riviera (1987)
Stuart Rosenberg is credited as "Stuart Rosenberg" for Cool Hand Luke (1967). He is credited as "Alan Smithee" for Let's Get Harry (1986).
Jackie Cooper is credited as "Jackie Cooper" for playing the role of "Perry White" in Superman (1978). He is also credited as "Jackie Cooper" for playing the role of "Alan Smithee" in Moonlight (1982).
yes yes. At least newspapers have a corrections column, and [sometimes] admit their mistakes publicly. Less conscientious web publications simply reedit in place-- which often leaves the reader with no yardstick to measure accuracy over time.
Books, however, are more often subjected to fact checking and reediting.
PhD's debating sophisticated cultural nuances amongst themselves are 'better' than talk radio/TV
This should be obvious. One can express many more ideas on one page than one can present in ninety seconds.
Newspapers are 'better' than web pages.
It depends on the newspaper. Some are simply a means of regurgitating the AP feed. But even the AP uses editors and fact checkers. Many webpages are written with little regard for honesty and accuracy.
Glossy magazines are 'better' than pulps.
Hardcover is 'better' than paperback.
Most SF is now published in hardcover, before a rerelease in paperback. And glossy paper is no measure of the quality of the magazine. Archival, Acid Free Paper has been adopted by many literary magazines, though.
Hand-crafted illuminated manuscripts, slaved over by monks, that could only be owned by the Church or a wealthy nobleman, were 'better' than Gutenberg's mass-produced works that the bourgeoise could purchase
Codex Hammer: 30.8 million
Rothschild Prayer Book: 8.58 million
Gutenberg Bible: 5.39 million
Audubon's Birds of America: 8.8 million
First Folio: 6.17 million
source
The Codex Hammer is in Italian (mirrored Italian, no less.) The Gutenberg Bible is Latin. The First Folio would meet with the NEA's approval, and so would the Audubon book, although the latter is nonfiction. But all those are books that will be kept in vaults, and appreciated from a distance.
The NEA wants to encourage the development of literature, not merely functional literacy. Some forms of prose can be appreciated on purely aesthetic grounds and not merely because of the facts such forms may convey.
Slashdot may be fun to read, but very few slashdotters post for the ages, carefully crafting each sentence for maximum effect. Newspapers are often good at telling the reader what happened, but the whys often remain a mystery until a book, collating additional interviews, newspaper accounts and recently declassified archival records, is published years afterwards.