Interesting comments. I've been doing a lot of family history lately and have realized that before about a eighty years ago, men were men around 18, women at 16. They started families at those ages and were responsible for their children by providing for them through very hard work. The average family sizes were larger, too.
I believe we don't teach our children to be responsible early enough. They are given cars, apartments, money for school, etc., without having to work for them. So the cause and effect of one's actions isn't really perceivable until 30. Thus the article's original questioner looks pretty silly asking such a question, he is obviously more interested in self expression than trying to understand how to responsibly provide for others beyond himself.
Yeah, yeah, I know this comes off sounding self righteous, but here in middle age I'm starting to be able to see both ends of the tunnel. You wish you could go back and do it over, but now all you can do is mete out "wisdom" for those that will listen.
For your information, I and my wife have been using Fedora Core 3 with full GNOME environment on my now six-year old P3-450 until just this week. It is not even possible to install the current Windows XP Home/Pro on this box. Yet I expect this new CeleronD 2.8GHz to run the current Linux version five years from now.
No one said an old machine was the best set up, but most of the world does not have shiny new computer hardware at the top of their paycheck priority list. Having Linux will run comfortably on old hardware is a huge bonus, one the proprietary software business models will not support.
Me too. I used Day Timer paper products for years, and then DayTimer software for 4-5 years after that. It got dropped about the same time I bought my first Palm, and the Palm Desktop software is still the most useful thing I've found. It doesn't have all the categorization capabilities the old DTO had, but as I've gotten older I've realized that minutia is less important than big picture. Palm OS and Desktop do that extremely well. Plus, Desktop is free for for Windows. (Still haven't found a trustworthy Linux clone that didn't eat all my data yet, though.)
This is not intended as a flame, but an observation from my own experience. I used to keep tons of bookmarks on a series of HTML pages. It was pretty simple, and I could reorganize via simple cut and paste. (Know thy text editor.)
But after a while, I realized it was taking some additional effort to maintain them. URLs update, site content gets revised, re-statements elsewhere are more helpful, and my interests change.
I also realized as Google continued to improve (4 years ago?) that half the time I was simple googling what I remembered, not paging through my link collection. If a URL went out of date, I would spend only a minute or so re-finding it, not the hours I imagined.
Which leads me to my current system:
1. Try not to bookmark links.
2. If you must, keep them in one of 15-20 categories.
3. Never have more than 50-60 total. Refactor constantly.
I am always pleasantly surprised at how quickly I can google some long-lost page. Or sometimes, I run across another page that is even better, which may have not even existed the first time.
Link collection is a dangerous hobby because one tends to overlook the hidden maintenance costs.
The only way another distro is going to beat Ubuntu to the punch of delivering the latest gnome is if another group of gnome developers join some other gnome tailored distro....
Please. Let's not forget that a great number of critical GNOME components are written by Red Hat employees that can get backported into Fedora before they are even "released".
The point of Free Software/Open Source is that we're all working together and that nobody is trying to out l33t anyone else.
That is interesting. Here in North Carolina, you are lucky to find a gas station with compressed air that even works, much less for free. I would be a loyal customer to any of the 10 odd stations from home to work if one would simply have a decent air system. Even for the typical $0.50 they usually charge. How is it they can all dispense three grades of fuel from 4-20 pumps, but not one has a functional compressor-tube-valve?
Excellent rebuttal to the grandparent, who's naysaying somehow was modded +5 insightful. (Of course, I forgot. This is SlashDot, where acrimony is valued more than contribution, critique more than the critiqued.)
I'm an architect and my best tool is trace paper and a pencil.
We have a full blown suites of AutoDesk software, but in early design phases you want to explore ideas so quickly that no software is going to react as quickly as sketches suggesting what your brain is thinking. That's the trick. Depicting reality before you've considered the possibilities locks you in, it restricts what your mind can consider. Once you're confident of having tested all kinds of crazy approaches, then you can start trying to depict it. Using light scribbles still keeps it fuzzy and flexible enough until you've worked out the next level of design.
What then? If you want to waste a lot of time learning software, by all means use CAD. That can help you build a scale and measurable model that can be dimensioned and taken off for construction quantities. I've been using CAD for 16 years now and it is certainly my tool of choice for drafting. (As opposed to the old ink on bond/vellum/mylar.)
After that, you might want to use some sort of visualization software. I've used Max and Vis, but have been learning to use Blender lately and find it can do just as well. (Plus it's Free! And multi-platform.)
But you are going to spend weeks and months coming up to speed on software when you could much more easily draw some scaled drawings that will do just as well. Remember, it's only been the last twenty years that *any* building has been digitally rendered... there is quite a bit of architecture accomplished without it.
I learned in school that you can't draft what your mind hasn't yet conceived. Drawing is a tool to help you see, to explore something that doesn't exist yet and to consider it's properties on your own terms. Of course it might be fun to make a huge solid block in Blender and slowly carve it away into a room. But it's certainly not the easiest!
Is it just me, or do others here feel that Ebay is a better place to sell than to buy? We have sold plenty on Ebay and always feel like we are getting top dollar. But when it comes to buying, most items look to be top price and it is very hard to find a bargin.
Obviously, some of this is simple supply and demand, but would this incremental inflation, especially in the controlled, percentage-of-the-price method Ebay uses, be making this difference?
Then does Ebay change their ways, make apology, and end up making their site better? (Being coersed into it by a lawsuite.)
I used to design labs and data centers for Cisco. IMO, the best reason for raised floor is to provide controlled, high volume HVAC directly to racks as needed. If you don't require additional cooling, then a wire-only raised floor is less useful (besides more expensive) than simply running overhead cable trays.
There seems to be a similar obsession with finding a pattern in Pi as some have with finding messages from God in the Bible.
Although you probably meant to imply something about hidden and cryptographic to that phrase, if you didn't, you might be surprised to know that believers understand the entire Bible to be a message from God in plain language.:)
The problem with this being that what is printed on the key itself is different than what is obtained when the key is pressed. I can imagine my mom, "So let me get this straight, when I press it normally it is an 'F', but when I hold down Ctrl it is a 'V'?"
Architecturally, it is generally accepted that the security of a building is opposed to it's accessibility. Take for example a grocery store. The ease with which customers can get in and out is directly related to how easy it is for the place to be robbed. Movie theater design is similar.
However, usability overcomes some of these problems by making entrances obvious, door opening automatic, lighting bright, etc. I believe a comnputer interface should be the same. Just because I have to remember a password, doesn't mean that entering it need be. Perhaps many passwords presents a different problem, but one of the supposed ideals behind biometric data is that it can be greatly complex and yet still readily available. But does that mean it's less secure?
Judging by the 50 posts thus far, Red Hat/Fedora appears to have fallen out of favor with the averaging posting SlashDot reader. Nothing but a string of complaining, despite most being unfounded or flatly wrong.
Fedora Core 3 is a terrific GNU/Linux distribution. On one hand, it contains only Free software. No proprietary, patent protected, or closed source. Everything included is safe and the principled users of software can be at ease.
On the other hand, it is very polished. There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM). Network, video card, printing, CD burning, fonts, office applications, PDF viewing, email, file browsing, graphics, etc. All the little niggles of versions past (not just Red Hat either) been resolved to result in this super clean and functional distro.
As a Red Hat user since 5.0, Fedora Core 3 is the first version I feel is good enough for a non-geek Windows user to try. There won't be any surprises. Much of this is simply the development of GNOME 2.8, but Red Hat (ok, the Fedora Core team) has done an excellent job IMO of refining the base, too.
Now I'm sure posters can (and will) lament the downside. Fedora Core 3 will not be found perfect, featureful, fastest, most flexible, most standards compliant, most free, or the most usable. But across the board, FC3 is the best at fulfilling a balanced set of these qualities.
...the "sanctity of marriage" is far more at risk in the Bible belt than in the east.
Unless the marriage rate is higher. Neither your comment or the article you linked provide statistics for the rate of marriage. If many more people marry in the Bible Belt (as might be expected where marriage is more valued) the divorce rate per marriage could actually be lower.
Read the article people. It doesn't say 58,000 ballots are missing. What it says is that of 60,000 absentee ballots distributed, only 2,000 have been returned so far.
There is no way the post office is going to loose 58,000 pieces of individually mailed letters, all which happen to be ballots. This is yet another case of Slashdot maliciously pumping false headlines and summaries to generate controversy (and thereby, hits) again.
Would everybody please stop reading "Politics:" topics so we can get back to Nerd stuff please?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the beginning of the end of Google's dominance. They've just opened the door for the competition because we can now question the integrity of the main function it serves.
The whole reason most of us began using Google ages ago was because we knew that what was entered into that lone input box on the front page would return results as accurate as could scientifically be obtained. If the search didn't result in the match you wanted, you knew it wasn't Google's fault but your own.
But now they've admitted to editing the returns. How do we know this is the only case? Perhaps another search engine would return something more accurate?
Many times, options are offered as a lazy hack instead of making a UI really usable. If 9 out of 10 users need some advanced option checked, why isn't it on by default? Why is the alternate behavior even needed?
I also think that checkboxes are sometimes offered by the programmer who can't decide how he wants his app to behave. By offering multiple behaviors, he escapes having to commit to one or the other under the guise of offering the user more. But unless you have nothing better to do than to twiddle checkboxes on and off all day, most users won't touch the defaults, meaning that all those options the programmer thought he was offering are in fact unused.
The better way to UI design is to decide what the task is and then to offer a default behavior that best offers it. If there is indeed an alternate that could be prefered by some, perhaps multiple options can be ganged together and toggled with one switch. I do this in my text editor configuration: The option to type with the words wrapped at the window margin is coupled with not setting an auto-textwidth (auto-truncation of lines at a given length) and with using tabs as true tab characters. The opposite is to auto-truncate at a set width, ignore the window margin, and use spaces instead of tabs since the two most basic behaviors are to enter text to preserve line formatting and to ignore it.
Most options aren't really options. And you have to realize that those offered have the potential to confuse more than to help. Once you develop a highly conservative perspective about offering options, you begin to value each one offered more. Besides, if the so-called power users really are, let them fiddle with configuration files, registries and source code like they claim to understand. Just don't bog down the average user!
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Interesting comments. I've been doing a lot of family history lately and have realized that before about a eighty years ago, men were men around 18, women at 16. They started families at those ages and were responsible for their children by providing for them through very hard work. The average family sizes were larger, too.
I believe we don't teach our children to be responsible early enough. They are given cars, apartments, money for school, etc., without having to work for them. So the cause and effect of one's actions isn't really perceivable until 30. Thus the article's original questioner looks pretty silly asking such a question, he is obviously more interested in self expression than trying to understand how to responsibly provide for others beyond himself.
Yeah, yeah, I know this comes off sounding self righteous, but here in middle age I'm starting to be able to see both ends of the tunnel. You wish you could go back and do it over, but now all you can do is mete out "wisdom" for those that will listen.
For your information, I and my wife have been using Fedora Core 3 with full GNOME environment on my now six-year old P3-450 until just this week. It is not even possible to install the current Windows XP Home/Pro on this box. Yet I expect this new CeleronD 2.8GHz to run the current Linux version five years from now.
No one said an old machine was the best set up, but most of the world does not have shiny new computer hardware at the top of their paycheck priority list. Having Linux will run comfortably on old hardware is a huge bonus, one the proprietary software business models will not support.
Me too. I used Day Timer paper products for years, and then DayTimer software for 4-5 years after that. It got dropped about the same time I bought my first Palm, and the Palm Desktop software is still the most useful thing I've found. It doesn't have all the categorization capabilities the old DTO had, but as I've gotten older I've realized that minutia is less important than big picture. Palm OS and Desktop do that extremely well. Plus, Desktop is free for for Windows. (Still haven't found a trustworthy Linux clone that didn't eat all my data yet, though.)
This is not intended as a flame, but an observation from my own experience. I used to keep tons of bookmarks on a series of HTML pages. It was pretty simple, and I could reorganize via simple cut and paste. (Know thy text editor.)
But after a while, I realized it was taking some additional effort to maintain them. URLs update, site content gets revised, re-statements elsewhere are more helpful, and my interests change.
I also realized as Google continued to improve (4 years ago?) that half the time I was simple googling what I remembered, not paging through my link collection. If a URL went out of date, I would spend only a minute or so re-finding it, not the hours I imagined.
Which leads me to my current system:
I am always pleasantly surprised at how quickly I can google some long-lost page. Or sometimes, I run across another page that is even better, which may have not even existed the first time.
Link collection is a dangerous hobby because one tends to overlook the hidden maintenance costs.
Please. Let's not forget that a great number of critical GNOME components are written by Red Hat employees that can get backported into Fedora before they are even "released".
The point of Free Software/Open Source is that we're all working together and that nobody is trying to out l33t anyone else.
That is interesting. Here in North Carolina, you are lucky to find a gas station with compressed air that even works, much less for free. I would be a loyal customer to any of the 10 odd stations from home to work if one would simply have a decent air system. Even for the typical $0.50 they usually charge. How is it they can all dispense three grades of fuel from 4-20 pumps, but not one has a functional compressor-tube-valve?
Of course, if you use the one true text editor, all you need to know about regular expressions is:
:)
Excellent rebuttal to the grandparent, who's naysaying somehow was modded +5 insightful. (Of course, I forgot. This is SlashDot, where acrimony is valued more than contribution, critique more than the critiqued.)
I'm an architect and my best tool is trace paper and a pencil.
We have a full blown suites of AutoDesk software, but in early design phases you want to explore ideas so quickly that no software is going to react as quickly as sketches suggesting what your brain is thinking. That's the trick. Depicting reality before you've considered the possibilities locks you in, it restricts what your mind can consider. Once you're confident of having tested all kinds of crazy approaches, then you can start trying to depict it. Using light scribbles still keeps it fuzzy and flexible enough until you've worked out the next level of design.
What then? If you want to waste a lot of time learning software, by all means use CAD. That can help you build a scale and measurable model that can be dimensioned and taken off for construction quantities. I've been using CAD for 16 years now and it is certainly my tool of choice for drafting. (As opposed to the old ink on bond/vellum/mylar.)
After that, you might want to use some sort of visualization software. I've used Max and Vis, but have been learning to use Blender lately and find it can do just as well. (Plus it's Free! And multi-platform.)
But you are going to spend weeks and months coming up to speed on software when you could much more easily draw some scaled drawings that will do just as well. Remember, it's only been the last twenty years that *any* building has been digitally rendered... there is quite a bit of architecture accomplished without it.
I learned in school that you can't draft what your mind hasn't yet conceived. Drawing is a tool to help you see, to explore something that doesn't exist yet and to consider it's properties on your own terms. Of course it might be fun to make a huge solid block in Blender and slowly carve it away into a room. But it's certainly not the easiest!
Hope that helps.
A clickable version: http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php?content=212 37.
Is it just me, or do others here feel that Ebay is a better place to sell than to buy? We have sold plenty on Ebay and always feel like we are getting top dollar. But when it comes to buying, most items look to be top price and it is very hard to find a bargin.
Obviously, some of this is simple supply and demand, but would this incremental inflation, especially in the controlled, percentage-of-the-price method Ebay uses, be making this difference?
Then does Ebay change their ways, make apology, and end up making their site better? (Being coersed into it by a lawsuite.)
I used to design labs and data centers for Cisco. IMO, the best reason for raised floor is to provide controlled, high volume HVAC directly to racks as needed. If you don't require additional cooling, then a wire-only raised floor is less useful (besides more expensive) than simply running overhead cable trays.
That's hilarious!
I use a four year old Intel Create and Share USB webcam with GnomeMeeting. Decent enough picture with average light.
Why not go used? Looks like there's plenty on Ebay.
Although you probably meant to imply something about hidden and cryptographic to that phrase, if you didn't, you might be surprised to know that believers understand the entire Bible to be a message from God in plain language. :)
The problem with this being that what is printed on the key itself is different than what is obtained when the key is pressed. I can imagine my mom, "So let me get this straight, when I press it normally it is an 'F', but when I hold down Ctrl it is a 'V'?"
Great comments, thanks for posting them.
This seems also to be an ideal product to increase the chances of your house being struck by lightning, too.
Architecturally, it is generally accepted that the security of a building is opposed to it's accessibility. Take for example a grocery store. The ease with which customers can get in and out is directly related to how easy it is for the place to be robbed. Movie theater design is similar.
However, usability overcomes some of these problems by making entrances obvious, door opening automatic, lighting bright, etc. I believe a comnputer interface should be the same. Just because I have to remember a password, doesn't mean that entering it need be. Perhaps many passwords presents a different problem, but one of the supposed ideals behind biometric data is that it can be greatly complex and yet still readily available. But does that mean it's less secure?
Judging by the 50 posts thus far, Red Hat/Fedora appears to have fallen out of favor with the averaging posting SlashDot reader. Nothing but a string of complaining, despite most being unfounded or flatly wrong.
Fedora Core 3 is a terrific GNU/Linux distribution. On one hand, it contains only Free software. No proprietary, patent protected, or closed source. Everything included is safe and the principled users of software can be at ease.
On the other hand, it is very polished. There are no dark corners of breakage, everything Just Works(TM). Network, video card, printing, CD burning, fonts, office applications, PDF viewing, email, file browsing, graphics, etc. All the little niggles of versions past (not just Red Hat either) been resolved to result in this super clean and functional distro.
As a Red Hat user since 5.0, Fedora Core 3 is the first version I feel is good enough for a non-geek Windows user to try. There won't be any surprises. Much of this is simply the development of GNOME 2.8, but Red Hat (ok, the Fedora Core team) has done an excellent job IMO of refining the base, too.
Now I'm sure posters can (and will) lament the downside. Fedora Core 3 will not be found perfect, featureful, fastest, most flexible, most standards compliant, most free, or the most usable. But across the board, FC3 is the best at fulfilling a balanced set of these qualities.
Heh, Noah's ark?
Unless the marriage rate is higher. Neither your comment or the article you linked provide statistics for the rate of marriage. If many more people marry in the Bible Belt (as might be expected where marriage is more valued) the divorce rate per marriage could actually be lower.
Not trying to flame, just curious.
Read the article people. It doesn't say 58,000 ballots are missing. What it says is that of 60,000 absentee ballots distributed, only 2,000 have been returned so far .
There is no way the post office is going to loose 58,000 pieces of individually mailed letters, all which happen to be ballots. This is yet another case of Slashdot maliciously pumping false headlines and summaries to generate controversy (and thereby, hits) again.
Would everybody please stop reading "Politics:" topics so we can get back to Nerd stuff please?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but this is the beginning of the end of Google's dominance. They've just opened the door for the competition because we can now question the integrity of the main function it serves.
The whole reason most of us began using Google ages ago was because we knew that what was entered into that lone input box on the front page would return results as accurate as could scientifically be obtained. If the search didn't result in the match you wanted, you knew it wasn't Google's fault but your own.
But now they've admitted to editing the returns. How do we know this is the only case? Perhaps another search engine would return something more accurate?
Many times, options are offered as a lazy hack instead of making a UI really usable. If 9 out of 10 users need some advanced option checked, why isn't it on by default? Why is the alternate behavior even needed?
I also think that checkboxes are sometimes offered by the programmer who can't decide how he wants his app to behave. By offering multiple behaviors, he escapes having to commit to one or the other under the guise of offering the user more. But unless you have nothing better to do than to twiddle checkboxes on and off all day, most users won't touch the defaults, meaning that all those options the programmer thought he was offering are in fact unused.
The better way to UI design is to decide what the task is and then to offer a default behavior that best offers it. If there is indeed an alternate that could be prefered by some, perhaps multiple options can be ganged together and toggled with one switch. I do this in my text editor configuration: The option to type with the words wrapped at the window margin is coupled with not setting an auto-textwidth (auto-truncation of lines at a given length) and with using tabs as true tab characters. The opposite is to auto-truncate at a set width, ignore the window margin, and use spaces instead of tabs since the two most basic behaviors are to enter text to preserve line formatting and to ignore it.
Most options aren't really options. And you have to realize that those offered have the potential to confuse more than to help. Once you develop a highly conservative perspective about offering options, you begin to value each one offered more. Besides, if the so-called power users really are, let them fiddle with configuration files, registries and source code like they claim to understand. Just don't bog down the average user!