I'm not saying the GIMP is a Photoshop replacement, but you are being a litte harsh. The "Levels" tool allows you to select a white point, gray point, and black point if you so desire. Or you can do everything manually. Or you can make adjustments after selecting the white point.
Looking at the contest page, there were many many submissions. The gallery webpage is a bit confusing, but there are 12 logos per page and at least 10 pages... A contest's goal may be more than just to get a nice image; it's a good way to build community as well. (The contest winner does suck... while most submissions are crap, there are many that are nicer than the winner.)
As for your parent, the crop tool is in the toolbox on the main window. A labeled icon might be more immediately obvious... but it *is* there in addition to being buried in the Tools menu.
Well... it could, or should, perform this scan in the background *after* presenting the initial main window. Of course, that probably won't ever happen, but it would appear to solve the problem. A message somewhere (preferably not in a separate popup window) could display progress or at least info as to why all plugins are not yet available. First time users probably won't even get to the using-a-plugin stage within 45 seconds.
Hm, excellent point; I hadn't thought about it like that before. How can a person possibly claim to represent "the people" when all that person's time for the past 20 years has been spent in Washington?
Webcams, camcorders (DV and other digital kind), TV cards, digital still cams with video capabitity, digital still cam + VHS player with pause feature (ok, that would be a bit tedious) can all be used to convert analog video by filming the screen. And obviously they convert the analog world into digital, if that's covered. Or what about analog camcorder -> capture card -> computer editing. How could anyone wish to ban that?
If this law does what the summary says it does, this is insane.
You should know that when you enter the voting booth, you control but a single vote. No election has ever been decided by a single vote. Our vote counting cannot even resolve a single vote. In other words, when it comes down to it, at the moment of voting your single vote is completely and utterly irrelevant.
The best way to game the system is to attempt to convince large numbers of people to vote for "the other guy". That may indeed have an impact (though not likely, unless you have some major media outlet to use). But that does not change the fact that when you enter the booth, it's only a single vote. Use some intelligence: vote for who you think is the best.
The cobalt was stuck for three weeks. The warning sirens are a government regulation, something to do with informing workers of radiation source. The robot was brought in, but it took a while for the team (from Albuquerque) to get ready to go to White Sands with their robot.
This slashdot article is dupe. See sandia.gov for more poorly written details.
No, they wouldn't be fired; they work at a national lab:-P Seriously though, electronics that can handle intense radiation are expensive.
The other reply said what it is. The point, for me, is that I can be using my computer yet appear idle. This way my friends won't learn that I'm a total loser and spend *way* too much time on the computer. Or if I want to remain signed on but not chat with anyone, it's great to be able to appear idle but continue to use the computer. I even want it to go further and allow you to chat while remaining idle (I'm not sure if IdleMaker allows this or not... I guess if you set "no idle reporting" and use IdleMaker; can't remember) so you can chat with a privledged few while still appearing idle.
I'm very disappointed at the removal of this feature. I wonder if the IdleMaker plugin can be extended to support this option.
Have you seen the movie? I was not aware it was produced by MTV until their logo popped up... I was disappointed, but oh well. The idea for the film certainly didn't come from MTV; the DVD includes a short black and white precursor to Napoleon Dynamite. For me, I think the quality that separates films I really like from films only mildly entertaining is something like a vibe of honesty or love.. Like, I feel that Napoleon was produced in order to make a funny movie, not in order to make money. I just watched "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", and while ok was very bland and forgettable. It just had no heart. Like watching someone go to their boring job that they don't love, work 9-5, then go home. Who cares? Or take the Matrix. I really enjoy the original. But the sequels just feel like "oh, well I guess we should film *something* to finish the story...". *shrug* so I can't quite put my finger on what makes me like a movie or not... but it definitely has something to do with a feeling or vibe or "real" or "fake".
I'm not familiar with the MP3.com details, but isn't that essentially what they wanted to do ang got sued for? Keep a master copy, then dole out to anyone who could prove they had the CD? So, borrow your friends' CDs before paying for this service... I guess this way you actually need a physical copy. I assume there were or would have been ways to cheat MP3.com's service.
Exactly! Just like "Ice Hockey" for the NES. You could choose each of your four players to be skinny, medium, or fat. In general, a fatter guy could knock down and steal the puck from a skinnier guy. Fancy button work could allow a skinnier guy to steal up the fattness chain and even knock down a fatter player in some cases. The goalie was the fattest of all, being able to knock even the fat guys down on contact.
Awesome. I use exactly those methods for much the same reasons (doing math with a non-rounded "t" is just impossible). People often confuse my "1" for a "7". Do you get this often? Perhaps I need to tone down my "1".
On one hand, do you plan on behaving childishly in one forum but responsibly in another? If so, I wonder if it'd be too confusing to be able to separate out trust data "based on my personal web of trust, JohnDoe is 70% trustworthy; based on the maintainers of wikipedia, JohnDoe is 90% trustworthy."... "based on the maintainers of slashdot JohnDoe is -1 troll" On the other hand, what's to stop you from having multiple identies?
Either way, how much is such a reputation worth? Would it be common or uncommon for someone to build up a reputation/identity only to use it for vandalism (after which the reputation would be lost).
Or, more specifically, in Calvin's first attempt at making a duplicator out of his cardboard box, he climbs inside and convinces the dubious Hobbes to push the button by deriding him for wanting to hold back scientific progress; the button makes a "boink" sound prompting Hobbes to say "scientific progress goes boink?".
Well, that about ruins the joke I think. Is there a Google book search equivalent for Calvin and Hobbes? Because there should be...
whoever was in charge of the wierd half-assed pseudo MDI in Excel needs to be skinned alive and fed to ants
Seconded. It annoys me to no end that two open excel files appear as two toolbar buttons but are both within the same excel window. Why? I don't want to resort to your pseudo window manager to view two documents at once.
You miss the point. Something has to happen that will kick you off your train of thought, hopefully causing you to think "oh wait, I didn't really mean to do that". Showing a clear summary with "confirm/cancel" buttons may be nice (certainly better than an information-sparse dialog), but it's easy to learn to just click "confirm" without thinking (and the confirm step quickly becomes a waste of time). That is the problem: the fact that the confirmation can be performed without thinking. Whether the confirmation is clear and informative (your example) or devoid of info (most dialogs) is not the key issue.
The key in my example is that the dialog is not canned, but changes each time making it impossible to habitualize. Others offered alternate solutions. The key point is that if a mistake will be fatal, then do not allow the user to habitualize its excecution (e.g. by offering the same silly dialog box every time). The user will habitualize it; mistakes happen when one isn't thinking; when one isn't thinking, one isn't paying much attention to a clear summary of the proposed action.
Yup. As others have pointed out, this is yet another usability problem. If one simply mistake can cause so much damage, then it should raise a warning flag. Which it did, but apparently the warning flag was utterly useless. Silly "ok/cancel" dialogs are not enough to cause the user to stop and think about what he is doing. If such dialogs were correctly implemented, they would be extremely annoying which would lead to two things: 1) it'd be much more unlikely to make a mistake and 2) as another poster pointed out, almost *all* such dialogs are for something minor (do you really want to quit??) and better safeguarded against in some other way (e.g. "undo"), and thus would [hopefully] quickly disappear if they must be extremely annoying rather than merely annoying.
Raskin's suggestion for a dialog that would work is something like: "You are about to perform dangerous and undoable action X. If you wish to proceed, type 'Yes, perform action X' followed by the [11th] word of this sentance." You'd be asked to type a different word each time so you could not memorize it and learn to confirm the action without thinking. Highly obnoxious, yes. Hopefully designers would learn to only make use of it when absolutely necessary.
P.S. I'd just like to say that Firefox without the SessionSaver extension is painful. Why on earth isn't SessionSaver included by default? "You have 9 tabs open that took you many hours to arrange. Close them all forever: yes/no?". And if something crashes, you don't even get the annoying dialog...
Exactly. Should it be legal to sell one's self into slavery? I think any
case where one would want to do that would represent a huge power differential
and thus have little chance of being a rational decision. I believe current
laws generally disallow this, so clearly, many people have a line dividing what
one should and shouldn't be legally allowed to agree to, and at least the
selling of one's self into slavery falls on the far side of that line.
It's silicon. Silicone is a polymer. With a melting point of 1414 degC, I find it hard to believe you'll get much atomic rearrangement in silicon at 65 degC or whatever your operating temperature may be. The rule of thumb for ceramics is to sinter at about 2/3 the melting point (850 degC for Si) in order to get enough atomic movement to rearrange atoms on any reasonable timescale and densify the ceramic.
One of the key issues in reducing CMOS transistor size is the dieletric properties of the oxide layer. Decrease the size, and you must decrease thickness or increase dieletric constant of the oxide layer. SiO2 is the oxide of choice due the ease with which is is grown atop silicon. Layers thinner than one atomic layer are impossible, and layers thinner than 2-3 atomic layers may not have high integrity. Finding a suitable replacement has proven difficult. Different transistor designs may mitigate this somewhat, but not forever.
Do a car's wide tires even exert that much pressure? My foot's been rolled over by a minivan with no ill effects. Wearing steel toed boots at the time...
Let's see, 4000 lb car, 250 mm wide tires, call it 10 inches, estimate 4 in out of the circumfrence are touching the ground... That's (4000 lb) / (10 x 4 x 4 in^2) = 25 psi. Not fully understanding pressure, I wonder if the correct figure is the tire inflation pressure? (which would be about 30-35 psi I think). Either way, that doesn't sound awful. Me sitting in this chair is probably exerting about (200 lb) / (1 x 1 x 4 in^2) = 50 psi on the ground.
Forgot the name of the tech, but it looked promising when used for PKI.
Indeed, I'd love to see mainstream implementations of hash visualization (best I could do searching... I thought I had bookmarked some other links, but guess not.)
Yeah right. My friend's preferred name is not MyNameIsBob874623@hotmail.com
If you must have centralized servers ala AIM etc., number is the way to go like your parent stated. If you decentralize (yes, I like jabber's way), then large numbers of people will still be on the same domain, so you've only solved the problem for those who are able to run their own jabber server (or possibly point their own domain at a third party jabber server).
There are basically two things you do with IDs in IM: exchange them, use them to start a conversation. In the second case, the client can substitute any nickname you want for whatever the unique ID happens to be. In the first case, you want something short and memorable. People do seem to handle email addresses ok, so perhaps this is close enough to the best solution. Phone numbers also work, but there may not be enough of the short kind. Once you add area codes, country codes, etc. you've got a hard to remember number with essentialy the same info as @domain contains.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not saying the GIMP is a Photoshop replacement, but you are being a litte harsh. The "Levels" tool allows you to select a white point, gray point, and black point if you so desire. Or you can do everything manually. Or you can make adjustments after selecting the white point.
Looking at the contest page, there were many many submissions. The gallery webpage is a bit confusing, but there are 12 logos per page and at least 10 pages... A contest's goal may be more than just to get a nice image; it's a good way to build community as well. (The contest winner does suck... while most submissions are crap, there are many that are nicer than the winner.)
As for your parent, the crop tool is in the toolbox on the main window. A labeled icon might be more immediately obvious... but it *is* there in addition to being buried in the Tools menu.
Well... it could, or should, perform this scan in the background *after* presenting the initial main window. Of course, that probably won't ever happen, but it would appear to solve the problem. A message somewhere (preferably not in a separate popup window) could display progress or at least info as to why all plugins are not yet available. First time users probably won't even get to the using-a-plugin stage within 45 seconds.
Hm, excellent point; I hadn't thought about it like that before. How can a person possibly claim to represent "the people" when all that person's time for the past 20 years has been spent in Washington?
Webcams, camcorders (DV and other digital kind), TV cards, digital still cams with video capabitity, digital still cam + VHS player with pause feature (ok, that would be a bit tedious) can all be used to convert analog video by filming the screen. And obviously they convert the analog world into digital, if that's covered. Or what about analog camcorder -> capture card -> computer editing. How could anyone wish to ban that?
If this law does what the summary says it does, this is insane.
You should know that when you enter the voting booth, you control but a single vote. No election has ever been decided by a single vote. Our vote counting cannot even resolve a single vote. In other words, when it comes down to it, at the moment of voting your single vote is completely and utterly irrelevant.
The best way to game the system is to attempt to convince large numbers of people to vote for "the other guy". That may indeed have an impact (though not likely, unless you have some major media outlet to use). But that does not change the fact that when you enter the booth, it's only a single vote. Use some intelligence: vote for who you think is the best.
The cobalt was stuck for three weeks. The warning sirens are a government regulation, something to do with informing workers of radiation source. The robot was brought in, but it took a while for the team (from Albuquerque) to get ready to go to White Sands with their robot.
This slashdot article is dupe. See sandia.gov for more poorly written details.
No, they wouldn't be fired; they work at a national lab :-P Seriously though, electronics that can handle intense radiation are expensive.
So, what you're saying is that Mac users' black turtlenecks don't come from the GAP?
The other reply said what it is. The point, for me, is that I can be using my computer yet appear idle. This way my friends won't learn that I'm a total loser and spend *way* too much time on the computer. Or if I want to remain signed on but not chat with anyone, it's great to be able to appear idle but continue to use the computer. I even want it to go further and allow you to chat while remaining idle (I'm not sure if IdleMaker allows this or not... I guess if you set "no idle reporting" and use IdleMaker; can't remember) so you can chat with a privledged few while still appearing idle.
I'm very disappointed at the removal of this feature. I wonder if the IdleMaker plugin can be extended to support this option.
Have you seen the movie? I was not aware it was produced by MTV until their logo popped up... I was disappointed, but oh well. The idea for the film certainly didn't come from MTV; the DVD includes a short black and white precursor to Napoleon Dynamite. For me, I think the quality that separates films I really like from films only mildly entertaining is something like a vibe of honesty or love.. Like, I feel that Napoleon was produced in order to make a funny movie, not in order to make money. I just watched "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", and while ok was very bland and forgettable. It just had no heart. Like watching someone go to their boring job that they don't love, work 9-5, then go home. Who cares? Or take the Matrix. I really enjoy the original. But the sequels just feel like "oh, well I guess we should film *something* to finish the story...". *shrug* so I can't quite put my finger on what makes me like a movie or not... but it definitely has something to do with a feeling or vibe or "real" or "fake".
I'm not familiar with the MP3.com details, but isn't that essentially what they wanted to do ang got sued for? Keep a master copy, then dole out to anyone who could prove they had the CD? So, borrow your friends' CDs before paying for this service... I guess this way you actually need a physical copy. I assume there were or would have been ways to cheat MP3.com's service.
Exactly! Just like "Ice Hockey" for the NES. You could choose each of your four players to be skinny, medium, or fat. In general, a fatter guy could knock down and steal the puck from a skinnier guy. Fancy button work could allow a skinnier guy to steal up the fattness chain and even knock down a fatter player in some cases. The goalie was the fattest of all, being able to knock even the fat guys down on contact.
Awesome. I use exactly those methods for much the same reasons (doing math with a non-rounded "t" is just impossible). People often confuse my "1" for a "7". Do you get this often? Perhaps I need to tone down my "1".
On one hand, do you plan on behaving childishly in one forum but responsibly in another? If so, I wonder if it'd be too confusing to be able to separate out trust data "based on my personal web of trust, JohnDoe is 70% trustworthy; based on the maintainers of wikipedia, JohnDoe is 90% trustworthy." ... "based on the maintainers of slashdot JohnDoe is -1 troll" On the other hand, what's to stop you from having multiple identies?
Either way, how much is such a reputation worth? Would it be common or uncommon for someone to build up a reputation/identity only to use it for vandalism (after which the reputation would be lost).
Or, more specifically, in Calvin's first attempt at making a duplicator out of his cardboard box, he climbs inside and convinces the dubious Hobbes to push the button by deriding him for wanting to hold back scientific progress; the button makes a "boink" sound prompting Hobbes to say "scientific progress goes boink?".
Well, that about ruins the joke I think. Is there a Google book search equivalent for Calvin and Hobbes? Because there should be...
whoever was in charge of the wierd half-assed pseudo MDI in Excel needs to be skinned alive and fed to ants
Seconded. It annoys me to no end that two open excel files appear as two toolbar buttons but are both within the same excel window. Why? I don't want to resort to your pseudo window manager to view two documents at once.
You miss the point. Something has to happen that will kick you off your train of thought, hopefully causing you to think "oh wait, I didn't really mean to do that". Showing a clear summary with "confirm/cancel" buttons may be nice (certainly better than an information-sparse dialog), but it's easy to learn to just click "confirm" without thinking (and the confirm step quickly becomes a waste of time). That is the problem: the fact that the confirmation can be performed without thinking. Whether the confirmation is clear and informative (your example) or devoid of info (most dialogs) is not the key issue.
The key in my example is that the dialog is not canned, but changes each time making it impossible to habitualize. Others offered alternate solutions. The key point is that if a mistake will be fatal, then do not allow the user to habitualize its excecution (e.g. by offering the same silly dialog box every time). The user will habitualize it; mistakes happen when one isn't thinking; when one isn't thinking, one isn't paying much attention to a clear summary of the proposed action.
Yup. As others have pointed out, this is yet another usability problem. If one simply mistake can cause so much damage, then it should raise a warning flag. Which it did, but apparently the warning flag was utterly useless. Silly "ok/cancel" dialogs are not enough to cause the user to stop and think about what he is doing. If such dialogs were correctly implemented, they would be extremely annoying which would lead to two things: 1) it'd be much more unlikely to make a mistake and 2) as another poster pointed out, almost *all* such dialogs are for something minor (do you really want to quit??) and better safeguarded against in some other way (e.g. "undo"), and thus would [hopefully] quickly disappear if they must be extremely annoying rather than merely annoying.
Raskin's suggestion for a dialog that would work is something like: "You are about to perform dangerous and undoable action X. If you wish to proceed, type 'Yes, perform action X' followed by the [11th] word of this sentance." You'd be asked to type a different word each time so you could not memorize it and learn to confirm the action without thinking. Highly obnoxious, yes. Hopefully designers would learn to only make use of it when absolutely necessary.
P.S. I'd just like to say that Firefox without the SessionSaver extension is painful. Why on earth isn't SessionSaver included by default? "You have 9 tabs open that took you many hours to arrange. Close them all forever: yes/no?". And if something crashes, you don't even get the annoying dialog...
But what about the lyrics of The Gnu Song??
Hm, good point. I would like to make an offer to buy your servitude for the rest of your life minus one day ;-)
Exactly. Should it be legal to sell one's self into slavery? I think any case where one would want to do that would represent a huge power differential and thus have little chance of being a rational decision. I believe current laws generally disallow this, so clearly, many people have a line dividing what one should and shouldn't be legally allowed to agree to, and at least the selling of one's self into slavery falls on the far side of that line.
Just to be clear, are you saying binary only codecs meant for x86 Windows work on a Sparc?
It's silicon. Silicone is a polymer. With a melting point of 1414 degC, I find it hard to believe you'll get much atomic rearrangement in silicon at 65 degC or whatever your operating temperature may be. The rule of thumb for ceramics is to sinter at about 2/3 the melting point (850 degC for Si) in order to get enough atomic movement to rearrange atoms on any reasonable timescale and densify the ceramic.
One of the key issues in reducing CMOS transistor size is the dieletric properties of the oxide layer. Decrease the size, and you must decrease thickness or increase dieletric constant of the oxide layer. SiO2 is the oxide of choice due the ease with which is is grown atop silicon. Layers thinner than one atomic layer are impossible, and layers thinner than 2-3 atomic layers may not have high integrity. Finding a suitable replacement has proven difficult. Different transistor designs may mitigate this somewhat, but not forever.
Do a car's wide tires even exert that much pressure? My foot's been rolled over by a minivan with no ill effects. Wearing steel toed boots at the time...
Let's see, 4000 lb car, 250 mm wide tires, call it 10 inches, estimate 4 in out of the circumfrence are touching the ground... That's (4000 lb) / (10 x 4 x 4 in^2) = 25 psi. Not fully understanding pressure, I wonder if the correct figure is the tire inflation pressure? (which would be about 30-35 psi I think). Either way, that doesn't sound awful. Me sitting in this chair is probably exerting about (200 lb) / (1 x 1 x 4 in^2) = 50 psi on the ground.
Forgot the name of the tech, but it looked promising when used for PKI.
Indeed, I'd love to see mainstream implementations of hash visualization (best I could do searching... I thought I had bookmarked some other links, but guess not.)
Yeah right. My friend's preferred name is not MyNameIsBob874623@hotmail.com
If you must have centralized servers ala AIM etc., number is the way to go like your parent stated. If you decentralize (yes, I like jabber's way), then large numbers of people will still be on the same domain, so you've only solved the problem for those who are able to run their own jabber server (or possibly point their own domain at a third party jabber server).
There are basically two things you do with IDs in IM: exchange them, use them to start a conversation. In the second case, the client can substitute any nickname you want for whatever the unique ID happens to be. In the first case, you want something short and memorable. People do seem to handle email addresses ok, so perhaps this is close enough to the best solution. Phone numbers also work, but there may not be enough of the short kind. Once you add area codes, country codes, etc. you've got a hard to remember number with essentialy the same info as @domain contains.