if it is to scale, then mars is really only about 900 km away- so taking a month to get there with this new technology wouldn't be very impressive, considering i can drive 900km in about 8-9 hours
umm... sco is not canopy. canopy is an investor and partial owner of sco. that would be the same as saying that sco is baystar, or sco is (was?) royal bank of canada.
the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by Microsoft
is this a feature or a warning?
i'm not a particularly avid microsoft basher and i have nothing against using their software when it's the best tool for the job. still, i have to say that based on my experience, pretty much all of their good software was acquired from other sources. anything that they wrote themselves from the ground up (or have significantly re-written since acquiring it) tends to be, well, less than stellar.
nvidia's binary drivers are not without problems either (at least, i could never get them to work right last time i tried on my laptop). i ended up using the open source nv driver that ships with XFree, at which point, i was no better off than if i had been using an ati card.
right now, both companies offer incomplete binary only drivers for *nix, so i see no real reason to pick one over the other on that basis.
while the parent post did not go into details about marriage rates for all of the states listed, he did point out that massachusets has a higher percentage of married people than texas.
of course the statistics still don't really mean all that much. i tend to agree with one of the other posters- the states with the lowest divorce rates tend to be much more predominantly catholic than the rest of the country. while all of the christian churches frown upon divorce, the catholics seem to dislike it much more- ah, actively- than other denominations.
i would say the movie jurassic park was as good as the book, even though it was a little different. They changed around the characters a bit and even some of the plot points, but not in a way that really detracted from the movie. (imo anyways)
also, i think the lord of the rings movies proved that it is possible to do good movie adaptations of written works if you take the care to do it well. despite a lot of the criticisms from hardcore fans the movies did a good job of conveying the feeling of the books, and more importantly, they: 1) brought a whole new audience for the books 2) brought the magic of that world out of the books into another format for other audiences to enjoy.
in that sense, i think that the movie doesn't have to be better than, or even necessarily as good as the book to be worthwhile, as long as they are willing to be faithful to the source material.
besides all that, if they want to do an adaptaion, i would have higher hopes for a movie based off a good book than a video game, a comic book, or an old tv show.
I think they key accusation here was not that MGM was incorrectly cutting the pictures, but rather that they were advertising that there was more of the picture in the widescreen than the fullscreen (and possibly charging more for it) when the opposite was true.
in the description of the demo, he says that in an actual application, the left mouse button would zoom in, and the right mouse button would zoom out. but in the demo, holding the left mouse button pans the viewport, so obviously if you are going to use the left mouse button to zoom in, that would have to be moved to another button. on top of that, you would still need to use the mouse to interact with the objects, so you need another one or two buttons there. a scroll wheel would be nice too, but not necessary. so unless i'm missing something, in order to use this interface, you need at least 4 or 5 mouse buttons, or alternatively 4 different bucky bits for a one button mouse- i can only imagine telling a user to ctrl-shift-right click in order to achieve some task.
my other observation, which i don't see addressed anywhere, but i suspect is just another aspect of this being a flash demo, is that you can't reflow objects to fit your current viewport. apparently the author of the demo either uses a much lower resolution than i do or always does everything full-screen. if i zoom to a point where the text is large enough to be comfortably readable, i find i have to constantly pan back and forth to read it, which is definitely an interface no-no. Alternatively, zooming out so that the text fits width-wise results in barely readable text.
An object *can* be in several places, but in all them you see the real object - updated to the second and fully functional, not just a proxy of the object with its properties crippled.
Forgive me for not reading TFA, but how is this different from a symlink?
I had a friend in college whose keyboard did exactly that. It was the most annoying keyboard in the world to me. While I suspect it would be quite useful once you got used to it, any time i used his cumputer, roughly every sixth word would be missing its last letter and run into the next word.
the issue is not backward compatibility, the issue is forward compatibility. sure, any document created in word 98 will open fine in word 2005, but will a document created in word 2005 open in word 98? probably not, unless the author went out of his way to save it as a word 98 document.
so microsoft only needs to get a few users to upgrade. once those users upgrade it will become a pain for anyone they exchange documents with, and more and more peopple will start upgrading.
everyone here is very familiar with MS' history of backwards compatibility. but as long as they add a few new "features" to the file format with every release, they provide a constant incentive to get people to upgrade.
yes, every version can open prior version documents, but not every version can open later version documents. so once you get a few users using and creating documents with a newer version, it becomes a hassle for all the users of older versions.
so once mr. boss gets a new version of office on his shiny new laptop, he will discover that his employees can't see all the fancy tables in his latest corporate memo.... well, time for a company upgrade.
alright, i'll have dig into it a little, i suppose. the last time i tried it out, i was following along with a guide similar to this one, and about two thirds of the way through i decided it was reminding me too much of things that bothered me about other platforms i had worked with in the past. i hadn't seen anything in this article which challenged any of my initial observations, either, but i would love to be proven wrong...
I understand that, to a point- however, i don't see that it's necessary to do it in a way that places arbitrary limits on your website directory structure and prevents you from mixing static content in with your dynamic content. it also, if i am understanding how it works correctly, prevents you from using 'virtual files' to do something like:
wouldn't it be easier to just put the model (or controller maybe, i'm still a bit unclear on some aspects of MVC) as a file the doc root and make templates/ and conf/ directories? this way, besides not being restricted in your website directory structure or your ability to place static files on the sites, you could also have a little flexibility in how you manage your templates- for example, on some projects i have worked on, we stored the templates in a database and used special tools to manage them, something which wouldn't even be an option with ruby on rails.
i think it's weird because as far as a can tell there is no correlation between the directories and files in you application and the URL requested.
in a typical web setup, you have a document root. files in that document root may be images, html or xml files, or files that are to be processed by the webserver. requests for/foo.html correspond to the file foo.html in that directory. likewise, requests for foo/bar.html correspond to the file bar.html in the foo subdirectory. from time to time, there are good resons to break this model and create "virtual files" which don't really exist in the file structure, which most web programming languages allow you to handle easily, but even then, the web server and programming language still maintain the concept of a path to a file.
rails and jsp both seem to me to break this model for no good reason, and in the process, make the cases where you might want to create "virtual" files or directories not possible.
X11 is an open group specification that is implemented by XFree86, X.org, and a number of commercial X servers. R6.6 is the current version of that specification.
4.3.0 is the version of the Xfree86 software that Apple ships with OS X, which implements X11R6.6.
i wasn't calling you a troll. i was calling the original poster that i responded to a troll. i admitted that your points were valid. my response was hasty and not well thought out.
i also never stated that i was a christian. you'll notice that another poster who states he is an atheist made the same points as i attempted to, although he framed them much better than i did.
i've tried rails a little bit, and jsp before that, and wasn't particularly impressed with either. is there a reason all web frameworks require a weird directory structure? rails seems better then jsp because it doesn't require an arcane descriptor file, but it still requires you to use a funky directory structure, which means the structure of your application doesn't seem to correspond in any meaningful way with your web site structure.
why can't someone build a decent framework that follows the simple "directories are directories and files are pages" model used by asp, php, cgi, etc.
and what's with the database naming conventions? the author kind of brushes it off at the end with this statement: "Even if you have to use a legacy database that does not use the Rails naming conventions, you don't have to give up the productivity advantages of using Rails--there is still a way to tell Rails explicitly what table and column names to use." personally I would not use those conventions no matter what database i was using, nor would any decent database developer or administrator i have ever known.
at any rate, at work i program in whatever language they tell me- currently asp+jscript, before that php. for personal projects, my current favorite is perl's HTML::Mason. all the benefits of php (and then some) without the awful language conventions.
"known historical fact" may have been a strong term, but it's about as known as any other historical fact from more than ~500 years ago. the fact that a man named Jesus lived and was crucified by the romans ~2000 years ago is documented in historical texts other than the bible. of course, as far as i know, none but the bible say much about his life other than that.
as for the other- i suppose it is a wild claim. i have known scientists who have said that, but obviously 'most' was not really the right word. either way, my point was that even disregarding the bible and any other religious texts or beliefs, the existence of Jesus is easier to verify than the age of the universe.
not that that in itself really means anything. anyway, i should have known better than to feed the trolls...
i wonder if his invitation to speak was vetoed after they read a draft of his speech. as much as i agree with what he says, i know for a fact that my high school administration would never have allowed that speech, even if he edited out the "objectionable word(s)"
almost any decent investment will have higher interest rates than a federal student loan. i actually knew people in college who took out student loans to invest them and are still paying back the minimum monthly amount each month. i'm investing plenty right now despite still having over $8,000 in outstanding student loans.
if, on the other hand you had to take out PLUS loans or other non-federally funded loans, then, by all means, pay those back first...
as for where he gets it, a decent summer job can get $2000 a year right there. if he has something he can do on the side during the school year, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with another $1000 and have money left over to do whatever it is that high school kids spend their money on these days.
Slashdot Mirror
if it is to scale, then mars is really only about 900 km away- so taking a month to get there with this new technology wouldn't be very impressive, considering i can drive 900km in about 8-9 hours
umm... sco is not canopy. canopy is an investor and partial owner of sco. that would be the same as saying that sco is baystar, or sco is (was?) royal bank of canada.
the first-ever search engine built from the ground up by Microsoft
is this a feature or a warning?
i'm not a particularly avid microsoft basher and i have nothing against using their software when it's the best tool for the job. still, i have to say that based on my experience, pretty much all of their good software was acquired from other sources. anything that they wrote themselves from the ground up (or have significantly re-written since acquiring it) tends to be, well, less than stellar.
true, but there are still other problems.
1 9
http://ars.userfriendly.org/cartoons/?id=199810
but then, i suppose you're alright if you don't use your feet to play fps's.
nvidia's binary drivers are not without problems either (at least, i could never get them to work right last time i tried on my laptop). i ended up using the open source nv driver that ships with XFree, at which point, i was no better off than if i had been using an ati card.
right now, both companies offer incomplete binary only drivers for *nix, so i see no real reason to pick one over the other on that basis.
besides which, in many games, ctrl actually does something itself, so ctrl-click would really muck things up...
or, as erwin once said "it's like being born with one nipple!!"
while the parent post did not go into details about marriage rates for all of the states listed, he did point out that massachusets has a higher percentage of married people than texas.
of course the statistics still don't really mean all that much. i tend to agree with one of the other posters- the states with the lowest divorce rates tend to be much more predominantly catholic than the rest of the country. while all of the christian churches frown upon divorce, the catholics seem to dislike it much more- ah, actively- than other denominations.
i would say the movie jurassic park was as good as the book, even though it was a little different. They changed around the characters a bit and even some of the plot points, but not in a way that really detracted from the movie. (imo anyways)
also, i think the lord of the rings movies proved that it is possible to do good movie adaptations of written works if you take the care to do it well. despite a lot of the criticisms from hardcore fans the movies did a good job of conveying the feeling of the books, and more importantly, they:
1) brought a whole new audience for the books
2) brought the magic of that world out of the books into another format for other audiences to enjoy.
in that sense, i think that the movie doesn't have to be better than, or even necessarily as good as the book to be worthwhile, as long as they are willing to be faithful to the source material.
besides all that, if they want to do an adaptaion, i would have higher hopes for a movie based off a good book than a video game, a comic book, or an old tv show.
i think the "money coming out the wazoo" ad was one of my favorite ever. except maybe the salmon comercial with the guy karate fighting the bear.
I think they key accusation here was not that MGM was incorrectly cutting the pictures, but rather that they were advertising that there was more of the picture in the widescreen than the fullscreen (and possibly charging more for it) when the opposite was true.
in the description of the demo, he says that in an actual application, the left mouse button would zoom in, and the right mouse button would zoom out. but in the demo, holding the left mouse button pans the viewport, so obviously if you are going to use the left mouse button to zoom in, that would have to be moved to another button. on top of that, you would still need to use the mouse to interact with the objects, so you need another one or two buttons there. a scroll wheel would be nice too, but not necessary. so unless i'm missing something, in order to use this interface, you need at least 4 or 5 mouse buttons, or alternatively 4 different bucky bits for a one button mouse- i can only imagine telling a user to ctrl-shift-right click in order to achieve some task.
my other observation, which i don't see addressed anywhere, but i suspect is just another aspect of this being a flash demo, is that you can't reflow objects to fit your current viewport. apparently the author of the demo either uses a much lower resolution than i do or always does everything full-screen. if i zoom to a point where the text is large enough to be comfortably readable, i find i have to constantly pan back and forth to read it, which is definitely an interface no-no. Alternatively, zooming out so that the text fits width-wise results in barely readable text.
An object *can* be in several places, but in all them you see the real object - updated to the second and fully functional, not just a proxy of the object with its properties crippled.
Forgive me for not reading TFA, but how is this different from a symlink?
I had a friend in college whose keyboard did exactly that. It was the most annoying keyboard in the world to me. While I suspect it would be quite useful once you got used to it, any time i used his cumputer, roughly every sixth word would be missing its last letter and run into the next word.
the issue is not backward compatibility, the issue is forward compatibility. sure, any document created in word 98 will open fine in word 2005, but will a document created in word 2005 open in word 98? probably not, unless the author went out of his way to save it as a word 98 document.
so microsoft only needs to get a few users to upgrade. once those users upgrade it will become a pain for anyone they exchange documents with, and more and more peopple will start upgrading.
everyone here is very familiar with MS' history of backwards compatibility. but as long as they add a few new "features" to the file format with every release, they provide a constant incentive to get people to upgrade.
yes, every version can open prior version documents, but not every version can open later version documents. so once you get a few users using and creating documents with a newer version, it becomes a hassle for all the users of older versions.
so once mr. boss gets a new version of office on his shiny new laptop, he will discover that his employees can't see all the fancy tables in his latest corporate memo.... well, time for a company upgrade.
alright, i'll have dig into it a little, i suppose. the last time i tried it out, i was following along with a guide similar to this one, and about two thirds of the way through i decided it was reminding me too much of things that bothered me about other platforms i had worked with in the past. i hadn't seen anything in this article which challenged any of my initial observations, either, but i would love to be proven wrong...
I understand that, to a point- however, i don't see that it's necessary to do it in a way that places arbitrary limits on your website directory structure and prevents you from mixing static content in with your dynamic content. it also, if i am understanding how it works correctly, prevents you from using 'virtual files' to do something like:
product_info/dingbats.html
instead of:
product_info?product=dingbats
wouldn't it be easier to just put the model (or controller maybe, i'm still a bit unclear on some aspects of MVC) as a file the doc root and make templates/ and conf/ directories? this way, besides not being restricted in your website directory structure or your ability to place static files on the sites, you could also have a little flexibility in how you manage your templates- for example, on some projects i have worked on, we stored the templates in a database and used special tools to manage them, something which wouldn't even be an option with ruby on rails.
i think it's weird because as far as a can tell there is no correlation between the directories and files in you application and the URL requested.
/foo.html correspond to the file foo.html in that directory. likewise, requests for foo/bar.html correspond to the file bar.html in the foo subdirectory. from time to time, there are good resons to break this model and create "virtual files" which don't really exist in the file structure, which most web programming languages allow you to handle easily, but even then, the web server and programming language still maintain the concept of a path to a file.
in a typical web setup, you have a document root. files in that document root may be images, html or xml files, or files that are to be processed by the webserver. requests for
rails and jsp both seem to me to break this model for no good reason, and in the process, make the cases where you might want to create "virtual" files or directories not possible.
X11 is an open group specification that is implemented by XFree86, X.org, and a number of commercial X servers. R6.6 is the current version of that specification.
4.3.0 is the version of the Xfree86 software that Apple ships with OS X, which implements X11R6.6.
i wasn't calling you a troll. i was calling the original poster that i responded to a troll. i admitted that your points were valid. my response was hasty and not well thought out.
i also never stated that i was a christian. you'll notice that another poster who states he is an atheist made the same points as i attempted to, although he framed them much better than i did.
i've tried rails a little bit, and jsp before that, and wasn't particularly impressed with either. is there a reason all web frameworks require a weird directory structure? rails seems better then jsp because it doesn't require an arcane descriptor file, but it still requires you to use a funky directory structure, which means the structure of your application doesn't seem to correspond in any meaningful way with your web site structure.
why can't someone build a decent framework that follows the simple "directories are directories and files are pages" model used by asp, php, cgi, etc.
and what's with the database naming conventions? the author kind of brushes it off at the end with this statement: "Even if you have to use a legacy database that does not use the Rails naming conventions, you don't have to give up the productivity advantages of using Rails--there is still a way to tell Rails explicitly what table and column names to use." personally I would not use those conventions no matter what database i was using, nor would any decent database developer or administrator i have ever known.
at any rate, at work i program in whatever language they tell me- currently asp+jscript, before that php. for personal projects, my current favorite is perl's HTML::Mason. all the benefits of php (and then some) without the awful language conventions.
"known historical fact" may have been a strong term, but it's about as known as any other historical fact from more than ~500 years ago. the fact that a man named Jesus lived and was crucified by the romans ~2000 years ago is documented in historical texts other than the bible. of course, as far as i know, none but the bible say much about his life other than that.
as for the other- i suppose it is a wild claim. i have known scientists who have said that, but obviously 'most' was not really the right word. either way, my point was that even disregarding the bible and any other religious texts or beliefs, the existence of Jesus is easier to verify than the age of the universe.
not that that in itself really means anything.
anyway, i should have known better than to feed the trolls...
i wonder if his invitation to speak was vetoed after they read a draft of his speech. as much as i agree with what he says, i know for a fact that my high school administration would never have allowed that speech, even if he edited out the "objectionable word(s)"
almost any decent investment will have higher interest rates than a federal student loan. i actually knew people in college who took out student loans to invest them and are still paying back the minimum monthly amount each month. i'm investing plenty right now despite still having over $8,000 in outstanding student loans.
if, on the other hand you had to take out PLUS loans or other non-federally funded loans, then, by all means, pay those back first...
as for where he gets it, a decent summer job can get $2000 a year right there. if he has something he can do on the side during the school year, it shouldn't be too hard to come up with another $1000 and have money left over to do whatever it is that high school kids spend their money on these days.
and let's not forget about the boeing 767 that ran out of fuel at 41,000 feet because of a faulty fuel gauage and a pilots math mistake.