Parent's post is pointless. It has nothing to do with "racism".
It has a lot more to do with the fact that a certain country building a railroad into another country is a lot less important to most of/. than the fact that said country has been spending the last several decades oppressing the country it just built a railroad to. The country that built the railroad has been killing, starving and imprisoning a large portion of the population of that other country, and doing its best to completely annihilate the culture of that country. If the oppressive railroad-building country was the United States we would be seeing the same comments. Who they are does not matter. The fact that they have built an impressive railroad does not outweigh the evil they have done and continue to do to this very day. If the US were doing the same thing to the people of British Columbia (Canada), you would be seeing the same sort of comments overshadowing the US building a technologically advanced railroad into B.C., even though most of the posters here come from the US. Would that be "racist" as well?
But we do apologize for not saying "Oooh, shiny!" and then going on about our business without bringing up the fact that there is evil afoot in that part of the world that's a hell of a lot more important than some technological advancement.
I think you're confused. Nerve cells grow back at 1mm per DAY, not per YEAR. I had some sort of nerve damage in my lower back several years ago that caused my left foot to be completely numb from the middle of the lower leg on down. Within 60 days the damaged nerves had grown back and I was able to feel and move the foot normally again. It is perfectly plausible for this woman to regain slight movement and feeling in 25 days at 1mm of nerve growth per day.
Besides which, who is to say that the growth couldn't be even faster once stem cells are introduced into the mix? It's good to be skeptical, but at least get your facts straight.
You're so very wrong. This isn't about some ideology conflict between "us" and Microsoft. This is going to be redundant information but it looks like it needs to be said again and again to get through to many people. The only way for most of the victims of Katrina to apply to FEMA for relief is on the web. They can call but FEMA will only mail them a form, and there is nowhere to mail the form to, besides the fact that the mail system is gone.
The FEMA site is requiring IE 6.0, not IE 5, 5.5, 7, or any other browser. It will only work with IE 6.0. The "intended audience" are people who have lost their homes, who are probably sitting in a shelter in some state other than Louisiana, sitting down to a donated (i.e., old) computer set up by relief workers who probably aren't very technical themselves.
A donated, old computer has a rather small chance of running the proper version of IE, if it's even running Windows in the first place. Windows is a nightmare to keep functional and secure in a stressful environment where you have multitudes of users combined with internet access, so you can bet that a lot of these computers have a Knoppix or other LiveCD inside to make it really easy to keep the machines running day after day. Some of them are also probably old Macs running OS 8 or 9. They very likely have IE on most of the Macs, but it'll be the wrong version.
Putting all this together, let's come up with a really generous estimate and say that one in four of the computers available to the Katrina victims actually has the right version of IE installed. If you only have one computer at your shelter and it isn't the lucky one, that means NOBODY at that particular shelter can get to the online FEMA application. At big shelters you'll have a one in four chance of sitting down in front of the right computer for making a FEMA application.
And why does this situation exist? Because of a couple of lines of code that arbitrarily check for a User Agent of IE 6.0, even though as more technical users have repeatedly demonstrated the form works just fine with other browsers as long as they fake the IE 6.0 User Agent code. The check and block is probably completely unnecessary. Maybe 2% of computer users will know how to get around it. The rest of them are locked out for no good reason.
Wake up and get real. This isn't about bashing Microsoft or IE. It also isn't a piddly little thing that should be ignored because "more important things" are happening. This is a stupid, incompetent coding decision that is actively stopping people (probably a lot of people) from applying for relief until they get to the "right" computer. Realistically it will be more like one in eight computers that have the right version of IE 6.0 and JavaScript enabled. And that's still being generous.
If they were requiring Safari 1.2 or Konqueror 1.0 or Opera 6.0 instead of IE 6.0, hopefully we would all be just as irritated as we are now. The name of the browser is not the important thing. What's important is having our government build web applications that are available to as many browsers and platforms as possible. So that you can sit down to damn near any kind of computer made in the last half decade and it will be useful. Neither the victims nor the relief workers need this kind of stress and incompetence from our government in an emergency situation.
The only reason that there is a menu editor is for you damn KDE freaks who were taught that bad habit. Gnome menu editing is integrated with the damn menu, everything is drag & drop or context menu. Many KDE users couldn't figure it out when in reality HIG studies by both Red Hat and I believe also Novell showed that normal users found that intuitive and having to open up a whole new program just to edit a menu in KDE was absurd.
Red Hat does quite a few studies on user interaction on the Linux desktop and they found that only 5% of a developers needs overlap with regular users. All those decisions that are made about the gui are made because 95% of the people prefer them or find them more natural. Don't let KDE's bad habits affect your opinion of Gnome.
In other words, KDE users are a bunch of idiots who are doing it the Wrong Way[tm], and that's why they can't figure out how to use almost anything in GNOME even though they figured out KDE in a matter of minutes without any instructions.
Or maybe, just maybe, GNOME doesn't provide enough clues to how it works, and its way of working is so narrowly defined by the Super-Intelligent Developer Gods that if you aren't on the Enlightened Path already you can't get there. Maybe the mind of every user doesn't work quite the same way. Maybe you and those studies don't have all the answers you think you have.
But I wouldn't want to mess with your ideology, so I'll take my blasphemy and go elsewhere. I'll stick with a simple, intuitive system that's easy to learn and use, like [BeOS|XFce|Windows|KDE|MacOSX].
The kids tend to show up between 8:30 and 9:00 am. Understandard time in November, the sun has been up for maybe 40 minutes by the time they get here. Extending Daylight Saving Time even further means that they will be walking to school in the dark, which just seems like bad policy to me. Furthermore, I bike to work at about 7:00. I really don't like being on the road when it is very dark, which it can be at 7:00. It will be even worse with more DST.
Just be glad you don't live further away from the equator. Up here in Alaska we go to school and leave school in the dark for about a third of the year. You would have to bike to work at 9:30 and leave by 3:30 during the darkest parts of the year. Of course it's even worse when you get up to and beyond the Arctic Circle. I also think more DST is a bad idea, but you don't have that much to complain about.
Posterization, JPEG compression
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Ice Lake on Mars
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· Score: 2, Informative
After looking at the highest resolution color version I noticed that you can see the square patterns of the pixels, or more likely sets of compressed pixels. This happens often with JPEG images that have been compressed a little too much. Each square of X pixels gets compressed separately and some information is lost, so that when the same square is uncompressed it doesn't always blend smoothly into the surrounding squares with regard to color and lightness. I believe this is referred to as posterization, a loss of smoothness in the color transitions where it changes in steps that can be clearly seen rather than in tiny increments.
If you look at the patterns of squares, the image seems to have been tilted counter-clockwise about ten degrees, so the vertical and horizontal lines aren't straight up and down or left and right. Oddly enough, the long green "tendrils" seem to line up very well with the lines of squares, especially the big one in the bottom left. Notice how the tendril is very straight. Looks like those areas were supposed to be slightly blue-greenish but because of the compression the color jump is a little too much and they appear to be somehow different than the colors that surround them. I don't think they were meant to be that color.
You can see the posterization, or compression artifacts, most clearly in the transitions between light and dark colors. And you'll only see it when you view the image at 100% pixel-for-pixel on your screen. If you have Photoshop or Elements open the levels dialog and drag the black slider up to about 200. The green areas will turn black and it will become very apparent that they are perfectly straight in many areas. There are some horizontal ones and some vertical ones and some nice 90-degree angles in there. Life forms of course do not make perfectly straight patterns, especially on a large scale.
I wouldn't get too excited about seeing a particular color in a space image. AFAIK every close-up image of other planets you see is a false-color composite. You can't really trust that the faint "green" discoloration you think you see is really green as it would exist here on Earth under strong sunlight and a thick nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. Color is very relative.
Is it reasonable for an ISP to censor webpages they don't agree with during contract negotiations?
Here, let me rephrase that for you:
Is it reasonable for an [any organization that controls anything public] to censor [anything] they don't agree with during [some event]?
Answer: NO. It is never reasonable. Not under any circumstances. Any organization that stoops to doing this can never be trusted again. How do you know what else they have/are/will censor?
Yes, you're missing the entire set of subplots that lead to this movie. Get the DVDs and watch the series in the proper order (not the way Fox broadcast it, completely out of order). Pay attention to the character development, which was as good or better than what you're seeing in Battlestar Galactica. Notice that the more episodes you watch the more you feel like these are real people that you personally know and want to know what might happen to them in the future.
Honestly, it's a good series. Watch it and you'll get a lot more out of this movie.
Has it ever occured to you to check the default color-process setting on your laser printer? Most office machines are left at the default setting of "Vivid for Presentations" or some such. What this means is the print engine deliberately oversaturates all the colors to make 4-color charts and colored text look good. In the process, any photo sent through will be saturated to death, resulting in the poor quality photos you describe.
Yes, it did occur to me to check the printer and print settings. Has it ever occured to you that not everyone in the world is an idiot?
It's not that things are too vivid on the lasers, it's that the colors are very bad and color/shadow transitions are very blotchy and uneven. Changing the saturation isn't going to help that. Photos simply come out looking horrible in every way and there doesn't seem to be any setting either in the printer or in the print dialogs to change that. Whereas our inkjet with Durabrite inks gives us prints just as nice as what you'd get from the developer downtown.
I'd love to get better prints from the laser, but as far as I can tell there is no way to improve its printing abilities. I'm the tech-savvy person at this organization, so if I can't figure it out then it's unlikely anyone else here could do so, and that means even if the printer can do it it's no good to us because nobody can figure out how to make it happen. If it's capable of good photo printing with certain settings those should be the default settings. Inkjets can do it right out of the box. So for photos, my main point still holds: lasers suck, inkjets don't. And I'm not talking about the high-end business market where people can afford an $8,000+ printer. That's a different ballgame that you obviously would know more about.
And if you have never printed on anything better than a $2,400 HP color laserprinter, then you have no idea what you are talking about.
I work in digital color, and do regular production work on both wide-format inkjet as well as toner devices. Particularly the HP Laserjet 9500 (an $8000 device) who's output can easily compete against litho, much less the "worst inkets".
Well pardon me, but I believe you missed my point. I was speaking to the parent poster's comment that "everyone" should be using laserjets for everything now because of cost, as if that were the only issue. Even most businesses couldn't justify $8,000 for a printer to compete against a sub-$600 archival quality inkjet. Almost anything below that price can't print photos anywhere near as nicely as a common inkjet printer.
I merely pointed out that inkjets still have their place despite the fact that they are not as cost-effective as laser printers. Home users and small businesses especially are not going to be buying any of the machines you mentioned to print photos, unless one of them costs a lot less than $1,000. Your comments don't disprove what I said.
They will just jack up the ink price further to make the final price even again. Makes me think the whole reason the head was on the cartridge was to make thirdparty cartridges difficult to make or copy.
We should all be exclusively using laserjets anyway, why is anyone happy the inkjet technology has a new lease on life?
Where I work we have a $2,400 HP color laser printer. I also have experience with a color laser printer at a local university that I'm sure cost about twice that much. Both are absolutely worthless for printing photos. Any $50 inkjet photo printer can kick their ass for photo printing, not on speed or cost but on how the prints look. The worst inkjets I've ever seen didn't print photos as badly as the laserjets do.
Graphs and charts? Sure, go color laser, if you can afford the initial investment which will be around $500 at a minimum. Laserjets are great with big blocks of color, and cheaper over the long run. But a $99 Epson inkjet that uses Ultrachrome inks will get you an archival quality photo print with incredible color gamut and accuracy, and should last 70-200 years depending on what paper you use. If you print 8x10 or larger most of the time it's also cheaper than using a commercial photo printing service.
For monochrome and non-photo color business printing, laserjets all the way. For home and business photo printing there really isn't an alternative to inkjet besides dye sublimation, and dye-sub printers are expensive and very inflexible, plus studies show that dye-sub prints fade almost as fast as most inkjet prints.
What is the deal with all the posts about transparent windows?
I can program transparent windows using c# on my 2000 box.
Is this every window can be configured to be transparent?
What am I missing?
All the inactive windows in the screenshots have semi-transparent titlebars and borders. Not only that but there is some kind of blurring algorithm that makes it look more like translucency than transparency and keeps stuff like text behind the titlebar from being quite so distracting. Not a bad implementation of transparency.
You may be interested to know that "literally" is shifting meaning--it no longer always means "exactly"; it can sometimes mean "I mean the statement intensely, although it is not an actual depiction." There is an interesting note on this phenomenon at dictionary.com
Yes, that is interesting. Without realizing it I have been using it in both the correct and incorrect way all my life. I will note a couple of things though, that support what I was saying. One, they say this change has been present for "over a hundred years", and two, it still retains the original and primary meaning to this day. If you use it correctly it will almost certainly be clearly understood which sense of the word you meant. By context, if nothing else. The incorrect usage is very strictly limited to "as an intensifier before a figurative expression". From a functional perspective even in the examples given the usage of the word almost fits the regular definition.
Languages will definitely change over time, but having an educated and literate society that cares about the rules of grammar will help to slow that change and make it possible for someone far in the future to read things we write today without too much struggle. If we do things right the average person will still be able to read Shakespeare another thousand years from now. I think that would be a good thing.
It was a rhetorical question but thanks for supporting what I was saying with some actual facts and figures that make it all make sense. I'm very bad at providing supporting evidence.
I've said it before, but it's not the diction that matters, but the message. Good grammer is only helpful to get a message across. I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum.
Sure, but if you write properly in a damn forum you'll be much less likely to write incoherently in a place where it really makes a difference. In a business report, say. Those who post in places like this while abstaining from use of proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and shift keying are certainly not saving me any time as I try to interpret the chicken scratches they call words. If you're not trying to get a message across, why are you posting?
It's all well and good to gloss over the occasional spelling or grammar error, and everyone should do that because no one is perfect. But when the errors start to outnumber the non-errors it gets very difficult for anyone to have any respect for the poster's education and/or intelligence, and thus it's difficult to respect their message. A damn forum is really no different from an important business report. You are putting yourself down on the page no matter what. Those words aren't on their own. They represent you to whoever you're talking to. What you're basically saying is that because I'm a forum reader I'm not important enough to make an effort to communicate clearly with me.
You don't save time by not using the shift key or punctuation, yet that is always the most common excuse given, as if the rules of linguistic communication are less important in this particular place of communication. A lack of respect for grammatical rules shows on a certain level a lack of respect for the people you are talking to, because you make them do extra work to try to interpret what you're saying. Just because you can read it doesn't mean we can.
The original poster is not a troll, nor is he lacking in good humor or people skills. At least, no more so than those who eschew the very rules that allow us to communicate in the first place. He's even making an effort to understand a different mindset rather than heap ridicule on people for their knowledge or lack thereof. Don't compare him to the idiots in your experience who heap criticism on you for making a few mistakes. Those people are just as stupid as the ones who can't use the shift key, they just happen to be good with grammar and spelling. So let's just leave them out of this, OK?
The main flaw in your argument is that math is constant, while language evolves. This is completely natural and more importantly, desirous. Rigid adherence to outdated grammatical constructs can only hinder communication. A perfect example would be the adoption of "google" as a verb; would you prefer to say "navigate to google's site and use it to search for widgets" or "google widgets"
I disagree, vehemently. That means strongly, and hopefully it always will, so that a few hundred years from now someone reading this thread will still be able to understand most of what we were talking about.
The flaw in your own argument is that languages used to evolve back before written language was common. Someone above made the excellent point that Chaucer is almost impossible for many people to interpret today because the spelling and meanings were so different, whereas everything from about Shakespeare forward is merely a little awkward to read, but very easy to interpret with a little practice. What changed between Chaucer and Shakespeare?
A few hundred years ago the common person began to have greater access to written materials, and as the transfer of written materials got more and more efficient and inexpensive the "evolution" of the language slowed to a crawl. The language ceased changing because everyone collectively decided that a certain spelling for every word was the most popular or made the most sense, and they made it a standard. This has made it possible for people to wander the globe their entire lives and successfully communicate with anyone, anywhere who happens to speak the same language. Without this amazing ability the progress of civilization wouldn't be going nearly so well. Communication and trading barriers would be much higher.
This is why I vehemently disagree with your comment that languages evolve such that words and phrases change their spelling and meaning over a mere generation or two, and that this is a desirous thing. It's not desirous at all to be constantly morphing spellings and meanings so that one generation of people can barely understand the next. It certainly doesn't make any sense to applaud the 50% or more of any typical high school English class who decide that using random spellings is just as good as learning the standardized version. What they are doing to the language is a very negative thing.
Languages do continue to evolve in positive ways, such as the example you mentioned of new words being coined and coming into popular use. This is a good thing, because new concepts need new words, and the language needs to be able to adapt to keep contemporary communication efficient. But adopting new words and concepts is a far cry from letting the current meanings and spellings of words disappear because people are too lazy to use the words the way they've been defined for hundreds of years.
Mathematical language is indeed a constant, that's why it's such an efficient and effective way of communicating concepts. Modern language also needs to be as constant as possible with what has already been defined without locking out new concepts and words. It used to evolve much more than it does now, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. It made for a lot of miscommunication. If you allow the language to morph "because that's what language does", you will end up with a broken, ineffective communication tool. We don't want to change the definition of the mathematical symbol "pi", so why allow the definition of the word "pie" to be changed? Bad idea. Yes, it will happen over a period of thousands of years, eventually, but there's no need to hurry the process.
Yes, it is the temperature of the liquid used to replace the blood that prevents tissue and brain damage.
There are several documented cases of people, mostly children, being successfully resuscitated without any apparent brain damage after being "dead" for between 15 minutes and over an hour. This is after falling through the ice on a lake or river and drowning in near freezing cold water. The extremely cold water puts your body into hypothermic shock, the metabolic processes all shut down and you don't get brain damage because your brain isn't doing anything so it doesn't starve for oxygen and die.
The article has the facts but I'd say it's a bit light on professionalism and heavy on sensationalism. Repeatedly referring to the dogs as eerie zombies is retarded, as is the photo that was included with the article of a dog snarling and baring his fangs, thus referencing every scary dog-back-from-the-dead movie ever made. All the scientists did was simulate exactly what happens to people who drown in near zero degree water. They ran some almost freezing cold saltwater through the veins, which induced hypothermic shock and eventually "death", but it's more like hybernation.
The cold prevented the body from deteriorating while the dog was dead, then they put the blood back in, warmed everything up and gave the animal plenty of oxygen to work with as it warmed up, and restarted the heart with an electric shock. Nothing magical. Are the millions of heart-attack victims who have ever been jump-started all "zombies" now just because they were clinically dead for a few minutes? Are they all out wandering the streets being scary and eating brains? Sheesh.
If you'd read the whole article you would have noticed that they were making references to repairing wounded soldiers or ER patients. Nothing happened to the dogs, but if you came in with a gunshot wound and were dying or you actually died, they could use this very procedure on you to "preserve" you while they worked on you, then resuscitate you after they were done with the repairs. If they perfected this technique they could probably keep people in suspension for days, weeks, or even months while they did complex surgeries. A few years from now a procedure like this could end up saving your life.
Microsoft is a platform company. Microsoft brand is based on a user "experience". Both the browser and OS are designed as complimentary components to an integrated platform. Seperating Internet Explorer and Windows will hurt the Microsoft brand as a whole.
Oh, the irony.
Yes, how ironic that Microsoft is a convicted monopoly with a history of using illegal means to maintain dominance over the market and crush competitors, and Apple isn't.
Oh, the irony.
Apple sells what are basically toasters. Their toasters don't try to control how you use the Internet, they don't use an illegal monopoly to crush competitors, and they don't keep you from interoperating with competing toasters (PCs running Windows or Linux or whatever). Your comment has no relevance to anything.
Seperating the hardware and software will hurt the Apple brand as a whole.Seperating the hardware and software will hurt the Apple brand as a whole.
On a related twist, seperating the browser and operating system will hurt the Microsoft brand as a whole.
I don't say that I'm necessarily right about that, just take it as food for thought.
Your "food for thought" might have some relevance if Apple were a monopoly with a history of using shady and illegal deals to control the market and maintain their monopoly. You be sure and let us know when that starts happening.
Gravity is only 1.8 from normal - I believe you can get used to it. Meanwhile surface is 3.2 times larger, so if it could be terraformed it will hold a lot of people from our overcrowded Earth.
Of course I put many questions aside like how would they get there, does it have any continents, how sensitive processes like childbirth are to the gravity, does its atmosphere shield properly from radiation, isn't it too cold/hot there (although this can be fixed) etc etc...
Not to mention that since it's so close to the star it may well be tidally locked with the same side always facing the star, in which case the sunward side could be used for energy and the starward side could be colonized easily. With the mass of the planet between you and the star you wouldn't have to worry so much about heat and radiation. A little genetic engineering will take care of adapting to the higher gravity.
I agree, the interface should make it very clear that you aren't working with the original files. Most OSes usually try to do this already with shortcuts/aliases/symlinks. But all the different responses you'll have to give the user when they try to move, copy or delete files from a Smart Folder is really complicating the interface with your files. I view complication as a bad thing. Especially since there is virtually no way that all operating systems will choose to implement the same options and default behaviors. It could get ugly. Moving from one type of computer to another may mean you'll no longer have any idea what dragging, deleting or copying a file will do.
I agree, labels and searches should be separated by physical media. But during the two keynotes I watched where Spotlight was being demonstrated, I didn't see any indication that Spotlight would be helping the user differentiate between physical media. "Find anything, anywhere, instantly" was the basic mantra. Just because something is a no-no doesn't mean it won't be done. But, we can always hope. I haven't actually had a chance to use Spotlight yet. Even if Spotlight doesn't do it, there's no guarantee that WinFS or some other database filesystem won't do it. After all, it's so convenient to be able to find things no matter where they are.
I agree, it is possible to drop files in the wrong folders and delete a whole folder hierarchy that you really didn't want to or mean to. However, I see a database filesystem making this much easier and faster, and making it much easier to not just throw a whole tree away but multiple trees, or what is actually much worse which is throwing away basically random leaves (files) from a bunch of different trees. You better have some damn good backup and restore procedures to put those files back in the right places. In the "oops I threw away the wrong folder" situation, you can often just go into the trash and drag it back out. No harm done. In the database filesystem situation you may not have a clue where those files even came from, because you've lost that physical location metaphor. I'm not saying this doesn't happen with regular folders, because after all you can already do searches, but it will be just that much easier to make a mistake when you have a dozen active searches going on and you're treating them like folders.
I agree, security models still apply, but it's pretty easy to authenticate as an administrator when the file manager tells you that some of the files you're throwing away are restricted. "Must be those project files I made read-only," the user will say to himself while he types in the admin password. Bam, a whole department's project files wiped out, or worse. Not everyone lives in a "properly configured" security environment, after all. I don't know that many people who have backups, either.
Database filesystems will be interesting and useful. The users will simply have to be aware of the problems and drawbacks. Getting rid of the physical metaphors will make some of those problems and drawbacks much worse, as I see it. After all, a computer is just a way to make mistakes really fast. When you make it easier to make those mistakes, well, you know how it goes.
I think there should and will always be a hierarchical folder system at least as a fallback option.
A traditional hierarchical file system has one huge advantage over a query-based one: it's fully explorable. Sometimes, I search for a file, but don't know its exact location or file-name. No problem: I can traverse the most likely places in the folder structure, and usually, I'll know the file when I see it. This is a fast and reliable process.
But what would I do if I can't formulate the proper search query for a specific file, or if I somehow messed up its metadata? I can easily see such a "filesystem database" become a cluttered boneyard for files that were created and forgotten, or became irretrievable.
I'm sure my rejection of the idea stems from the fact that I've been organizing my files in folders for what, 15 years? It'll be a hard habit to break.
You're exactly right, and I sort of brought that up, pointing out that if you can't create the right query your files will be just as lost to you as in a regular folder structure when you stick it in the wrong folder and can't remember where you put it. You can view things by time/date ranges and even when they were last accessed, but that's not always going to do the trick. Nevertheless people keep suggesting that regular folders should be abandoned. It just doesn't pan out, and it's not just because we've been using folders for 15 years. There are logical problems with database filesystems and I don't see how they can be overcome to the point where regular folders can simply disappear.
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Yep, it's totally platform independant as it will run on 9x and NT !
Hey, don't forget NT/Alpha, dude. If that isn't platform independence, I don't know what is! It's a brave new World[tm]*.
*World[tm] is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Have a nice day, Microsoft Citizen[tm]!
Parent's post is pointless. It has nothing to do with "racism".
/. than the fact that said country has been spending the last several decades oppressing the country it just built a railroad to. The country that built the railroad has been killing, starving and imprisoning a large portion of the population of that other country, and doing its best to completely annihilate the culture of that country. If the oppressive railroad-building country was the United States we would be seeing the same comments. Who they are does not matter. The fact that they have built an impressive railroad does not outweigh the evil they have done and continue to do to this very day. If the US were doing the same thing to the people of British Columbia (Canada), you would be seeing the same sort of comments overshadowing the US building a technologically advanced railroad into B.C., even though most of the posters here come from the US. Would that be "racist" as well?
It has a lot more to do with the fact that a certain country building a railroad into another country is a lot less important to most of
But we do apologize for not saying "Oooh, shiny!" and then going on about our business without bringing up the fact that there is evil afoot in that part of the world that's a hell of a lot more important than some technological advancement.
Wait, I thought the fire was supposed to come after the /.ing, not before...
Joking aside, this is pretty sad. But I'm sure they'll be back on their feet in no time and making new stuff.
I think you're confused. Nerve cells grow back at 1mm per DAY, not per YEAR. I had some sort of nerve damage in my lower back several years ago that caused my left foot to be completely numb from the middle of the lower leg on down. Within 60 days the damaged nerves had grown back and I was able to feel and move the foot normally again. It is perfectly plausible for this woman to regain slight movement and feeling in 25 days at 1mm of nerve growth per day.
Besides which, who is to say that the growth couldn't be even faster once stem cells are introduced into the mix? It's good to be skeptical, but at least get your facts straight.
You're so very wrong. This isn't about some ideology conflict between "us" and Microsoft. This is going to be redundant information but it looks like it needs to be said again and again to get through to many people. The only way for most of the victims of Katrina to apply to FEMA for relief is on the web. They can call but FEMA will only mail them a form, and there is nowhere to mail the form to, besides the fact that the mail system is gone.
The FEMA site is requiring IE 6.0, not IE 5, 5.5, 7, or any other browser. It will only work with IE 6.0. The "intended audience" are people who have lost their homes, who are probably sitting in a shelter in some state other than Louisiana, sitting down to a donated (i.e., old) computer set up by relief workers who probably aren't very technical themselves.
A donated, old computer has a rather small chance of running the proper version of IE, if it's even running Windows in the first place. Windows is a nightmare to keep functional and secure in a stressful environment where you have multitudes of users combined with internet access, so you can bet that a lot of these computers have a Knoppix or other LiveCD inside to make it really easy to keep the machines running day after day. Some of them are also probably old Macs running OS 8 or 9. They very likely have IE on most of the Macs, but it'll be the wrong version.
Putting all this together, let's come up with a really generous estimate and say that one in four of the computers available to the Katrina victims actually has the right version of IE installed. If you only have one computer at your shelter and it isn't the lucky one, that means NOBODY at that particular shelter can get to the online FEMA application. At big shelters you'll have a one in four chance of sitting down in front of the right computer for making a FEMA application.
And why does this situation exist? Because of a couple of lines of code that arbitrarily check for a User Agent of IE 6.0, even though as more technical users have repeatedly demonstrated the form works just fine with other browsers as long as they fake the IE 6.0 User Agent code. The check and block is probably completely unnecessary. Maybe 2% of computer users will know how to get around it. The rest of them are locked out for no good reason.
Wake up and get real. This isn't about bashing Microsoft or IE. It also isn't a piddly little thing that should be ignored because "more important things" are happening. This is a stupid, incompetent coding decision that is actively stopping people (probably a lot of people) from applying for relief until they get to the "right" computer. Realistically it will be more like one in eight computers that have the right version of IE 6.0 and JavaScript enabled. And that's still being generous.
If they were requiring Safari 1.2 or Konqueror 1.0 or Opera 6.0 instead of IE 6.0, hopefully we would all be just as irritated as we are now. The name of the browser is not the important thing. What's important is having our government build web applications that are available to as many browsers and platforms as possible. So that you can sit down to damn near any kind of computer made in the last half decade and it will be useful. Neither the victims nor the relief workers need this kind of stress and incompetence from our government in an emergency situation.
The only reason that there is a menu editor is for you damn KDE freaks who were taught that bad habit. Gnome menu editing is integrated with the damn menu, everything is drag & drop or context menu. Many KDE users couldn't figure it out when in reality HIG studies by both Red Hat and I believe also Novell showed that normal users found that intuitive and having to open up a whole new program just to edit a menu in KDE was absurd.
Red Hat does quite a few studies on user interaction on the Linux desktop and they found that only 5% of a developers needs overlap with regular users. All those decisions that are made about the gui are made because 95% of the people prefer them or find them more natural. Don't let KDE's bad habits affect your opinion of Gnome.
In other words, KDE users are a bunch of idiots who are doing it the Wrong Way[tm], and that's why they can't figure out how to use almost anything in GNOME even though they figured out KDE in a matter of minutes without any instructions.
Or maybe, just maybe, GNOME doesn't provide enough clues to how it works, and its way of working is so narrowly defined by the Super-Intelligent Developer Gods that if you aren't on the Enlightened Path already you can't get there. Maybe the mind of every user doesn't work quite the same way. Maybe you and those studies don't have all the answers you think you have.
But I wouldn't want to mess with your ideology, so I'll take my blasphemy and go elsewhere. I'll stick with a simple, intuitive system that's easy to learn and use, like [BeOS|XFce|Windows|KDE|MacOSX].
The kids tend to show up between 8:30 and 9:00 am. Understandard time in November, the sun has been up for maybe 40 minutes by the time they get here. Extending Daylight Saving Time even further means that they will be walking to school in the dark, which just seems like bad policy to me. Furthermore, I bike to work at about 7:00. I really don't like being on the road when it is very dark, which it can be at 7:00. It will be even worse with more DST.
Just be glad you don't live further away from the equator. Up here in Alaska we go to school and leave school in the dark for about a third of the year. You would have to bike to work at 9:30 and leave by 3:30 during the darkest parts of the year. Of course it's even worse when you get up to and beyond the Arctic Circle. I also think more DST is a bad idea, but you don't have that much to complain about.
After looking at the highest resolution color version I noticed that you can see the square patterns of the pixels, or more likely sets of compressed pixels. This happens often with JPEG images that have been compressed a little too much. Each square of X pixels gets compressed separately and some information is lost, so that when the same square is uncompressed it doesn't always blend smoothly into the surrounding squares with regard to color and lightness. I believe this is referred to as posterization, a loss of smoothness in the color transitions where it changes in steps that can be clearly seen rather than in tiny increments.
If you look at the patterns of squares, the image seems to have been tilted counter-clockwise about ten degrees, so the vertical and horizontal lines aren't straight up and down or left and right. Oddly enough, the long green "tendrils" seem to line up very well with the lines of squares, especially the big one in the bottom left. Notice how the tendril is very straight. Looks like those areas were supposed to be slightly blue-greenish but because of the compression the color jump is a little too much and they appear to be somehow different than the colors that surround them. I don't think they were meant to be that color.
You can see the posterization, or compression artifacts, most clearly in the transitions between light and dark colors. And you'll only see it when you view the image at 100% pixel-for-pixel on your screen. If you have Photoshop or Elements open the levels dialog and drag the black slider up to about 200. The green areas will turn black and it will become very apparent that they are perfectly straight in many areas. There are some horizontal ones and some vertical ones and some nice 90-degree angles in there. Life forms of course do not make perfectly straight patterns, especially on a large scale.
I wouldn't get too excited about seeing a particular color in a space image. AFAIK every close-up image of other planets you see is a false-color composite. You can't really trust that the faint "green" discoloration you think you see is really green as it would exist here on Earth under strong sunlight and a thick nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere. Color is very relative.
Is it reasonable for an ISP to censor webpages they don't agree with during contract negotiations?
Here, let me rephrase that for you:
Is it reasonable for an [any organization that controls anything public] to censor [anything] they don't agree with during [some event]?
Answer: NO. It is never reasonable. Not under any circumstances. Any organization that stoops to doing this can never be trusted again. How do you know what else they have/are/will censor?
Obviously, I must be missing something.
Yes, you're missing the entire set of subplots that lead to this movie. Get the DVDs and watch the series in the proper order (not the way Fox broadcast it, completely out of order). Pay attention to the character development, which was as good or better than what you're seeing in Battlestar Galactica. Notice that the more episodes you watch the more you feel like these are real people that you personally know and want to know what might happen to them in the future.
Honestly, it's a good series. Watch it and you'll get a lot more out of this movie.
Has it ever occured to you to check the default color-process setting on your laser printer? Most office machines are left at the default setting of "Vivid for Presentations" or some such. What this means is the print engine deliberately oversaturates all the colors to make 4-color charts and colored text look good. In the process, any photo sent through will be saturated to death, resulting in the poor quality photos you describe.
Yes, it did occur to me to check the printer and print settings. Has it ever occured to you that not everyone in the world is an idiot?
It's not that things are too vivid on the lasers, it's that the colors are very bad and color/shadow transitions are very blotchy and uneven. Changing the saturation isn't going to help that. Photos simply come out looking horrible in every way and there doesn't seem to be any setting either in the printer or in the print dialogs to change that. Whereas our inkjet with Durabrite inks gives us prints just as nice as what you'd get from the developer downtown.
I'd love to get better prints from the laser, but as far as I can tell there is no way to improve its printing abilities. I'm the tech-savvy person at this organization, so if I can't figure it out then it's unlikely anyone else here could do so, and that means even if the printer can do it it's no good to us because nobody can figure out how to make it happen. If it's capable of good photo printing with certain settings those should be the default settings. Inkjets can do it right out of the box. So for photos, my main point still holds: lasers suck, inkjets don't. And I'm not talking about the high-end business market where people can afford an $8,000+ printer. That's a different ballgame that you obviously would know more about.
And if you have never printed on anything better than a $2,400 HP color laserprinter, then you have no idea what you are talking about.
I work in digital color, and do regular production work on both wide-format inkjet as well as toner devices. Particularly the HP Laserjet 9500 (an $8000 device) who's output can easily compete against litho, much less the "worst inkets".
Well pardon me, but I believe you missed my point. I was speaking to the parent poster's comment that "everyone" should be using laserjets for everything now because of cost, as if that were the only issue. Even most businesses couldn't justify $8,000 for a printer to compete against a sub-$600 archival quality inkjet. Almost anything below that price can't print photos anywhere near as nicely as a common inkjet printer.
I merely pointed out that inkjets still have their place despite the fact that they are not as cost-effective as laser printers. Home users and small businesses especially are not going to be buying any of the machines you mentioned to print photos, unless one of them costs a lot less than $1,000. Your comments don't disprove what I said.
They will just jack up the ink price further to make the final price even again. Makes me think the whole reason the head was on the cartridge was to make thirdparty cartridges difficult to make or copy.
We should all be exclusively using laserjets anyway, why is anyone happy the inkjet technology has a new lease on life?
Where I work we have a $2,400 HP color laser printer. I also have experience with a color laser printer at a local university that I'm sure cost about twice that much. Both are absolutely worthless for printing photos. Any $50 inkjet photo printer can kick their ass for photo printing, not on speed or cost but on how the prints look. The worst inkjets I've ever seen didn't print photos as badly as the laserjets do.
Graphs and charts? Sure, go color laser, if you can afford the initial investment which will be around $500 at a minimum. Laserjets are great with big blocks of color, and cheaper over the long run. But a $99 Epson inkjet that uses Ultrachrome inks will get you an archival quality photo print with incredible color gamut and accuracy, and should last 70-200 years depending on what paper you use. If you print 8x10 or larger most of the time it's also cheaper than using a commercial photo printing service.
For monochrome and non-photo color business printing, laserjets all the way. For home and business photo printing there really isn't an alternative to inkjet besides dye sublimation, and dye-sub printers are expensive and very inflexible, plus studies show that dye-sub prints fade almost as fast as most inkjet prints.
It's all about using the right tool for the job.
What is the deal with all the posts about transparent windows?
I can program transparent windows using c# on my 2000 box.
Is this every window can be configured to be transparent?
What am I missing?
All the inactive windows in the screenshots have semi-transparent titlebars and borders. Not only that but there is some kind of blurring algorithm that makes it look more like translucency than transparency and keeps stuff like text behind the titlebar from being quite so distracting. Not a bad implementation of transparency.
You may be interested to know that "literally" is shifting meaning--it no longer always means "exactly"; it can sometimes mean "I mean the statement intensely, although it is not an actual depiction." There is an interesting note on this phenomenon at dictionary.com
Yes, that is interesting. Without realizing it I have been using it in both the correct and incorrect way all my life. I will note a couple of things though, that support what I was saying. One, they say this change has been present for "over a hundred years", and two, it still retains the original and primary meaning to this day. If you use it correctly it will almost certainly be clearly understood which sense of the word you meant. By context, if nothing else. The incorrect usage is very strictly limited to "as an intensifier before a figurative expression". From a functional perspective even in the examples given the usage of the word almost fits the regular definition.
Languages will definitely change over time, but having an educated and literate society that cares about the rules of grammar will help to slow that change and make it possible for someone far in the future to read things we write today without too much struggle. If we do things right the average person will still be able to read Shakespeare another thousand years from now. I think that would be a good thing.
It was a rhetorical question but thanks for supporting what I was saying with some actual facts and figures that make it all make sense. I'm very bad at providing supporting evidence.
I've said it before, but it's not the diction that matters, but the message. Good grammer is only helpful to get a message across. I'm not writing a fucking paper, it's an response in a damn forum.
Sure, but if you write properly in a damn forum you'll be much less likely to write incoherently in a place where it really makes a difference. In a business report, say. Those who post in places like this while abstaining from use of proper grammar, spelling, punctuation and shift keying are certainly not saving me any time as I try to interpret the chicken scratches they call words. If you're not trying to get a message across, why are you posting?
It's all well and good to gloss over the occasional spelling or grammar error, and everyone should do that because no one is perfect. But when the errors start to outnumber the non-errors it gets very difficult for anyone to have any respect for the poster's education and/or intelligence, and thus it's difficult to respect their message. A damn forum is really no different from an important business report. You are putting yourself down on the page no matter what. Those words aren't on their own. They represent you to whoever you're talking to. What you're basically saying is that because I'm a forum reader I'm not important enough to make an effort to communicate clearly with me.
You don't save time by not using the shift key or punctuation, yet that is always the most common excuse given, as if the rules of linguistic communication are less important in this particular place of communication. A lack of respect for grammatical rules shows on a certain level a lack of respect for the people you are talking to, because you make them do extra work to try to interpret what you're saying. Just because you can read it doesn't mean we can.
The original poster is not a troll, nor is he lacking in good humor or people skills. At least, no more so than those who eschew the very rules that allow us to communicate in the first place. He's even making an effort to understand a different mindset rather than heap ridicule on people for their knowledge or lack thereof. Don't compare him to the idiots in your experience who heap criticism on you for making a few mistakes. Those people are just as stupid as the ones who can't use the shift key, they just happen to be good with grammar and spelling. So let's just leave them out of this, OK?
The main flaw in your argument is that math is constant, while language evolves. This is completely natural and more importantly, desirous. Rigid adherence to outdated grammatical constructs can only hinder communication. A perfect example would be the adoption of "google" as a verb; would you prefer to say "navigate to google's site and use it to search for widgets" or "google widgets"
I disagree, vehemently. That means strongly, and hopefully it always will, so that a few hundred years from now someone reading this thread will still be able to understand most of what we were talking about.
The flaw in your own argument is that languages used to evolve back before written language was common. Someone above made the excellent point that Chaucer is almost impossible for many people to interpret today because the spelling and meanings were so different, whereas everything from about Shakespeare forward is merely a little awkward to read, but very easy to interpret with a little practice. What changed between Chaucer and Shakespeare?
A few hundred years ago the common person began to have greater access to written materials, and as the transfer of written materials got more and more efficient and inexpensive the "evolution" of the language slowed to a crawl. The language ceased changing because everyone collectively decided that a certain spelling for every word was the most popular or made the most sense, and they made it a standard. This has made it possible for people to wander the globe their entire lives and successfully communicate with anyone, anywhere who happens to speak the same language. Without this amazing ability the progress of civilization wouldn't be going nearly so well. Communication and trading barriers would be much higher.
This is why I vehemently disagree with your comment that languages evolve such that words and phrases change their spelling and meaning over a mere generation or two, and that this is a desirous thing. It's not desirous at all to be constantly morphing spellings and meanings so that one generation of people can barely understand the next. It certainly doesn't make any sense to applaud the 50% or more of any typical high school English class who decide that using random spellings is just as good as learning the standardized version. What they are doing to the language is a very negative thing.
Languages do continue to evolve in positive ways, such as the example you mentioned of new words being coined and coming into popular use. This is a good thing, because new concepts need new words, and the language needs to be able to adapt to keep contemporary communication efficient. But adopting new words and concepts is a far cry from letting the current meanings and spellings of words disappear because people are too lazy to use the words the way they've been defined for hundreds of years.
Mathematical language is indeed a constant, that's why it's such an efficient and effective way of communicating concepts. Modern language also needs to be as constant as possible with what has already been defined without locking out new concepts and words. It used to evolve much more than it does now, but that wasn't necessarily a good thing. It made for a lot of miscommunication. If you allow the language to morph "because that's what language does", you will end up with a broken, ineffective communication tool. We don't want to change the definition of the mathematical symbol "pi", so why allow the definition of the word "pie" to be changed? Bad idea. Yes, it will happen over a period of thousands of years, eventually, but there's no need to hurry the process.
Yes, it is the temperature of the liquid used to replace the blood that prevents tissue and brain damage.
There are several documented cases of people, mostly children, being successfully resuscitated without any apparent brain damage after being "dead" for between 15 minutes and over an hour. This is after falling through the ice on a lake or river and drowning in near freezing cold water. The extremely cold water puts your body into hypothermic shock, the metabolic processes all shut down and you don't get brain damage because your brain isn't doing anything so it doesn't starve for oxygen and die.
The article has the facts but I'd say it's a bit light on professionalism and heavy on sensationalism. Repeatedly referring to the dogs as eerie zombies is retarded, as is the photo that was included with the article of a dog snarling and baring his fangs, thus referencing every scary dog-back-from-the-dead movie ever made. All the scientists did was simulate exactly what happens to people who drown in near zero degree water. They ran some almost freezing cold saltwater through the veins, which induced hypothermic shock and eventually "death", but it's more like hybernation.
The cold prevented the body from deteriorating while the dog was dead, then they put the blood back in, warmed everything up and gave the animal plenty of oxygen to work with as it warmed up, and restarted the heart with an electric shock. Nothing magical. Are the millions of heart-attack victims who have ever been jump-started all "zombies" now just because they were clinically dead for a few minutes? Are they all out wandering the streets being scary and eating brains? Sheesh.
If you'd read the whole article you would have noticed that they were making references to repairing wounded soldiers or ER patients. Nothing happened to the dogs, but if you came in with a gunshot wound and were dying or you actually died, they could use this very procedure on you to "preserve" you while they worked on you, then resuscitate you after they were done with the repairs. If they perfected this technique they could probably keep people in suspension for days, weeks, or even months while they did complex surgeries. A few years from now a procedure like this could end up saving your life.
Microsoft is a platform company. Microsoft brand is based on a user "experience". Both the browser and OS are designed as complimentary components to an integrated platform. Seperating Internet Explorer and Windows will hurt the Microsoft brand as a whole.
Oh, the irony.
Yes, how ironic that Microsoft is a convicted monopoly with a history of using illegal means to maintain dominance over the market and crush competitors, and Apple isn't.
Oh, the irony.
Apple sells what are basically toasters. Their toasters don't try to control how you use the Internet, they don't use an illegal monopoly to crush competitors, and they don't keep you from interoperating with competing toasters (PCs running Windows or Linux or whatever). Your comment has no relevance to anything.
On a related twist, seperating the browser and operating system will hurt the Microsoft brand as a whole.
I don't say that I'm necessarily right about that, just take it as food for thought.
Your "food for thought" might have some relevance if Apple were a monopoly with a history of using shady and illegal deals to control the market and maintain their monopoly. You be sure and let us know when that starts happening.
Gravity is only 1.8 from normal - I believe you can get used to it. Meanwhile surface is 3.2 times larger, so if it could be terraformed it will hold a lot of people from our overcrowded Earth.
Of course I put many questions aside like how would they get there, does it have any continents, how sensitive processes like childbirth are to the gravity, does its atmosphere shield properly from radiation, isn't it too cold/hot there (although this can be fixed) etc etc...
Not to mention that since it's so close to the star it may well be tidally locked with the same side always facing the star, in which case the sunward side could be used for energy and the starward side could be colonized easily. With the mass of the planet between you and the star you wouldn't have to worry so much about heat and radiation. A little genetic engineering will take care of adapting to the higher gravity.
I agree, the interface should make it very clear that you aren't working with the original files. Most OSes usually try to do this already with shortcuts/aliases/symlinks. But all the different responses you'll have to give the user when they try to move, copy or delete files from a Smart Folder is really complicating the interface with your files. I view complication as a bad thing. Especially since there is virtually no way that all operating systems will choose to implement the same options and default behaviors. It could get ugly. Moving from one type of computer to another may mean you'll no longer have any idea what dragging, deleting or copying a file will do.
I agree, labels and searches should be separated by physical media. But during the two keynotes I watched where Spotlight was being demonstrated, I didn't see any indication that Spotlight would be helping the user differentiate between physical media. "Find anything, anywhere, instantly" was the basic mantra. Just because something is a no-no doesn't mean it won't be done. But, we can always hope. I haven't actually had a chance to use Spotlight yet. Even if Spotlight doesn't do it, there's no guarantee that WinFS or some other database filesystem won't do it. After all, it's so convenient to be able to find things no matter where they are.
I agree, it is possible to drop files in the wrong folders and delete a whole folder hierarchy that you really didn't want to or mean to. However, I see a database filesystem making this much easier and faster, and making it much easier to not just throw a whole tree away but multiple trees, or what is actually much worse which is throwing away basically random leaves (files) from a bunch of different trees. You better have some damn good backup and restore procedures to put those files back in the right places. In the "oops I threw away the wrong folder" situation, you can often just go into the trash and drag it back out. No harm done. In the database filesystem situation you may not have a clue where those files even came from, because you've lost that physical location metaphor. I'm not saying this doesn't happen with regular folders, because after all you can already do searches, but it will be just that much easier to make a mistake when you have a dozen active searches going on and you're treating them like folders.
I agree, security models still apply, but it's pretty easy to authenticate as an administrator when the file manager tells you that some of the files you're throwing away are restricted. "Must be those project files I made read-only," the user will say to himself while he types in the admin password. Bam, a whole department's project files wiped out, or worse. Not everyone lives in a "properly configured" security environment, after all. I don't know that many people who have backups, either.
Database filesystems will be interesting and useful. The users will simply have to be aware of the problems and drawbacks. Getting rid of the physical metaphors will make some of those problems and drawbacks much worse, as I see it. After all, a computer is just a way to make mistakes really fast. When you make it easier to make those mistakes, well, you know how it goes.
I think there should and will always be a hierarchical folder system at least as a fallback option.
A traditional hierarchical file system has one huge advantage over a query-based one: it's fully explorable. Sometimes, I search for a file, but don't know its exact location or file-name. No problem: I can traverse the most likely places in the folder structure, and usually, I'll know the file when I see it. This is a fast and reliable process.
But what would I do if I can't formulate the proper search query for a specific file, or if I somehow messed up its metadata? I can easily see such a "filesystem database" become a cluttered boneyard for files that were created and forgotten, or became irretrievable.
I'm sure my rejection of the idea stems from the fact that I've been organizing my files in folders for what, 15 years? It'll be a hard habit to break.
You're exactly right, and I sort of brought that up, pointing out that if you can't create the right query your files will be just as lost to you as in a regular folder structure when you stick it in the wrong folder and can't remember where you put it. You can view things by time/date ranges and even when they were last accessed, but that's not always going to do the trick. Nevertheless people keep suggesting that regular folders should be abandoned. It just doesn't pan out, and it's not just because we've been using folders for 15 years. There are logical problems with database filesystems and I don't see how they can be overcome to the point where regular folders can simply disappear.