Not too sure how things are going in the US, but that's been happening in Canada. Land claims, treaty disputes, and other wrongdoings over the years. One of the more interesting ones can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_residential_school_system... Among other atrocities committed at the residential schools was a program of sterilization at some of them... the residential school system has been described as a genocide program. And there's been some enormous lawsuits stemming from how shittily we've treated Canada's First Nations peoples.
I want to start doing, but I work in an office where they'd care if I came to work sweaty and stinky. What's the solution to this?
Take a shower? If there isn't one in your building, there's probably one in a gym that isn't too far from your building. I'm lucky, in that there's 2 showers on the ground floor where I work, but in the past I've had to get a membership at the YMCA or some other gym not too far from work. Not usually a problem in the city... that said, something aerobic at said gym is also good for weight loss... half an hour on a treadmill, elliptical, or exercise bike a day can go a very long way.
Well yes and no. Did you read the part where they measured total power expended to accomplish various tasks? Burning more power is OK if you can finish the job faster and get back into a low power state. When that is factored in the contest is a bit closer. Of course if the Nano does run for long it is going to bake your lap more than the Atom and drain the battery a lot faster.
When you're talking about an always-on device like an HTPC or even a low-powered server (I have a file & print server running on a C7 1.5GHz w/ 2GB of RAM, for example), the Atom wins out though... from TFA, the peak draw on the Atom was lower than the minimum draw on the Nano. Even though the Atom takes as much as 30% longer to perform a task, meaning that when it's multiplied out it's drawing more joules to perform the task, the fact that you don't go to a zero power state when you're not performing a task is what wins out.
I wouldn't put it in something that needs performance... but for something that's always going to be on, and going to be idle most of the time, I'd certainly go for the Atom if I were building that server again today. It isn't significantly more expensive, and it will use less power over the course of the year. It seems like a great choice for something like a small network file/print server, a house server, a car computer, or an mp3/video jukebox, etc. As I'm planning on building an off-the-grid house powered by solar, having a low-power computer that can do things like rotate the panels to track the sun, and manage power distribution to minimize consumption, those extra 4W at idle is important to me.
I think his point was more that the best way to design a user interface is to let the users actually... y'know... use it. Throw it out to a small but select non-developper beta, and take their suggestions about usability to heart.
A group of engineers sitting around, arguing about what should be where is just going to obfuscate things, and unless they get really lucky, it isn't going to result in something that's usable. Also... keep in mind the idea that nothing should be more than 3 clicks away, unless it's obscure. More than that, and users won't remember it. If it's something that they use frequently, it should be 1 click away. All about keeping the application efficient, but not cluttered.
My first thought, when I read TFS, was that he's out to lunch. He's looking for software to accomplish a task that, to my mind, should be a completely organic process. You can't write software to design your user interface for you, because people don't think like computers. You need to go through revisions and iterations until you get something that works. Oh, and sitting around watching slides is absolutely the wrong way to get a feel for how it's going to work, too. They should be presented with the actual user interface, or a mock-up if that's not possible, and actually go use it for a few days before coming back and talking about what was good and what was bad, and what needed improvement. And keep doing that until enough people are happy that you'd be comfortable unleashing it on the world.
There is another study out there that is with 12 m/os that does use engines, cars, etc that gets the same results. It's all in "The Essential Difference" by Simon Baron-Cohen, cited in a few posts above.
I can believe that one. But you originally said "newborns". A newborn baby can't see, because their eyes haven't fully formed... best practical example I can find is the following site: http://tinyeyes.com/tinyeyes/... obviously not real, exactly, but a quick Google search for "newborn vision" will reveal many articles which outline the timeline for the development of vision in infants.
I'm gonna have to agree with the AC there and ask for a citation.... a newborn baby's eyes haven't even formed fully yet, and everything's a blur for their first 2 weeks to 1 month. it's nearly 6 months before they can see as well as an adult. they identify their mother by smell.
Men do tend to be more interested in technical things. In fact, the cog. sci. department has a related hypothesis that they're currently testing. The hypothesis is that Asperger's syndrome and the autistic spectrum is just the extreme case of the male brain (literally: testosterone poisoning).
I know somebody who's transgendered (MtF) and has been diagnosed with Asperger's... though to be fair, her current psychologist thinks that it was a misdiagnosis, and that the reason she was socially retarded was because she was sent to an all-boys school, as she no longer has those social problems since going to University and now working in a coed environment. The fact that she's got an eidetic memory, a gift for languages and maths, and an IQ in the stratosphere (high 99.9th percentile) is just a coincidence. She does have other symptoms, though, like the inability to tune out background "noise" and conversation.
So the theory goes, at least... as far as facts go: neurochemically, she's got a brain that's more consistent with a female brain at the horomonal level (and she hasn't started taking horomones yet), and she has been diagnosed with Asperger's.:)
Is it just me, or are men more curious than women about IT and other related areas in general?
It's not just you. And I think it has more to do with males generally being drawn towards things of a more technical nature. I know far more males who like to tinker with things than females, which is strange given that probably 90% of my friends are female. What I've noticed is that the women tend to have more important things to worry about, and don't think about the little things that are largely inconsequential to them. It doesn't matter to me how my car works, it matters to me *that* it works. I paid for the extended warranty on it for a reason.
NAV should only be installed on a system with 70% of system resourcess free, may install on a system with 60% free.
y'know... I'm wondering where you got that, exactly... I was working tech. support for Compaq when XP came out, and I can remember the arguments and discussions we had about MS removing that little bit of information from XP... ultimately, the reason it was removed was because it was a basically useless measurement for how well a system is running. Anybody who's ever looked at the output of "free" under a *nix console will understand what I'm talking about... the first line will show physical memory usage, and will almost always be near or at 100%. The important lines are the 2nd and 3rd lines, which talk about page and swap usage respectively. You'll be at 100% physical memory utilization, but your page space could be at 5% utilization, and your swap at zero. That percentage resources available in Windows 9X was pretty much an average of the 3. Look at the task manager, which can be brought up by clicking on "task manager" after a 3-finger salute. That gives *much* more useful information about the health of a Windows NT-based system.
And if you're talking about CPU load, I'm hovering at 1-2% CPU load right now on my work system... it's a Dell Optiplex GX620, with a 2.8GHz P4 and 1GB of RAM. Currently, I have open Firefox, with 6 work tabs, Slashdot, 2 IE windows with our contact/dispatch database (which is a Java application, and in spite of all my effort simply cannot be coaxed to run under FF), MS Outlook (watching 3 mailboxes), 3 Excel spreadsheets, and an MS Word document, not counting the background apps, which include Office Communicator, and Symantec Antivirus, and an annoying little piece of software called "Night Watchman" which is part of the company's green strategy... scheduled shutdown every day at 8pm, all part of Mike's plan to make the company carbon neutral by the end of 2008.
And if you *are* talking about CPU load... if your CPU load is hovering at 30%, you've got an application running that's causing it to do that, most likely compiling or multi-media. Check task manager, and you'll see something that's sucking up the clock time. Close (or kill) that, and you're off to the races.
For what it's worth, I haven't used anybody other than ASUS for motherboards in almost every computer I've built in a decade... I have used one MSI motherboard... it was decent, but not great. Everything else has been ASUS, and I haven't had a single problem with theirs.
YMMV... some people swear at them, but I've found that their tech. support and customer service is more than willing to help. And I've also found that the last couple of ASUS motherboards I've bought have specifically advertised Linux support.
Maybe they're just fetishists... we have some pretty messed up fetishes among the human population, so why is it so hard to believe that aliens might get off by sticking things in your bum?
I'm replying to you largely because I agree with you... I don't see how it's censoring anything. I'm also a little surprised that such a law would be needed... if it were possible, I'd mod the law redundant... >.>
What I don't get is... the last console I owned before the current one was an 8-bit NES. The last handheld I owned was a Sega Gamegear. I now own a Wii, and it's already got parental controls in the system configuration menu. I admit to being largely ignorant of the options in an X-Box or PS3, but I had thought that they'd all have them, considering the current v-chip mentality that the US is taking...
But more important than that, as a Canadian, I'm scratching my head and asking what this law is going to actually change as far as labelling goes. Video games have had ESRB warnings for a long time, and at least in Canada, the ESRB warning gives two pieces of information: what the rating is, and why it got that rating. So you'll see games that are rated E, with notes like "mild cartoon violence", or games that are rated M17 for "sexual content, coarse language, violence", and stuff in between. What, exactly, was wrong with those warnings that parents were already ignoring, and what's new that parents won't ignore in future?
If parents are going to take an interest in this kind of thing, they already have the tools to do it.
I was wondering when the Opera trolls would show up....
As with most things in computing, it's impossible to really say who came up with which idea. Take OS/X's core UI. Looks an awful lot like XFCE, to the point that a previous girlfriend thought that my XFCE-based desktop *was* OS/X until she looked closer. But then... they were both stealing some core elements from the CDE, which was originally developped by a coalition of Unix vendors including Sun, HP, and IBM. The thing is... elements of CDE were outright stolen from Microsoft Windows, which arguably was stolen from... MacOS. (I say "arguably", because none other than Bill Gates himself was part of the original development of System 1.0, back in 1982.) The thing being, of course, that they were both stealing from Xerox and the PARC, which in turn was stealing from IBM.
It's convoluted. There's not really *any* way to say who came up with which idea first. Opera is certainly a good product. I use their browser in place of Symbian on my cell phone. But at the same time, since it's so difficult to really pin down who came up with which innovations first, focus instead on who has the best product now. Besides... I seem to recall tabbed browsing addons for IE before Opera was even on the radar, for example... and tabbed browsing of things like filesystems and word processing documents is something that's been in computing since before there even was a WWW. So no. The folks at Opera didn't come up with the idea.
My father was an excellent driver, even though he was blind in one eye and thus had no depth perception. He'd learned over the years how to compensate and judge distances without it. He was still driving, safely, until his health failed in his mid-80s. However, this was in part because of a class he'd been to: Alive at 55. The idea behind the class was that elderly drivers, with slower reflexes and dimming vision should limit themselves to 55 mph on the freeway and stay in the right-hand lane whenever possible. He didn't need any fancy, expensive technology to keep him safe, he just drove at a speed that was safer for him. I've always kept that in mind, and when I get old enough to worry about such things, I'll be doing exactly the same thing.
Interesting... but I wouldn't wait until you're in your old age. Not because you aren't capable of driving at speed, mind you (I wouldn't presume to say, because I haven't seen you drive. For all I know, you could be good enough for F1), and not even because it's safer (lower speed = lower kinetic energy in a crash).... because it's better on gas.
I used to be the kind of driver who'd quite happily cruise the highway at speeds approaching 150-180kph (call it 95-120mph). I consider myself to have the skill and reflexes to drive at that speed. But I don't. When I hit the highway, or any road where there isn't a lot of stop and go, I use cruise control, and stick to the speed limit and the far right lane. Still pay attention, can still step on the gas or brake as needed (and I have a manual transmission, so tapping the clutch or brake immediately cancels the cruise), can still react either defensively or aggressively as the situation warrants -and that's my biggest gripe with "defensive" driving... there are situations where you need to accelerate hard or be otherwise aggressive to get out of a danger- but I get significantly better gas mileage out of staying in the slow lanes and using cruise control.
End result? I fill up my car about once every 3 weeks where I used to fill up every 2 weeks (and I haven't changed how often or how far I drive). At $60/tank it makes a difference. And it hasn't significantly increased the duration of my commute to/from work... maybe 1-2 minutes on a 25-minute commute each way, or about 10-20 minutes longer in the car per week.
Why does it have to be applied to the windshield? Why can't the same be applied to a pair of driving glasses?
Because relative to the car, the windshield only looks in one direction. It's a lot easier to program the software to pan its projection to the height and x/y of the driver's head than it is to have motion sensors in a headset that you're wearing, and adjust the view in a 360 degree arc to reflect what you're looking at. And to do it the "easy" way would require having a camera in your glasses, meaning you'd either have to plug in every time you get into the car, or they'd have to be a lot heavier and fatiguing to allow for batteries and wireless transmitter/receiver.
Now, on a more darwinistic approach, what you'd want is to give the aids to the younger drivers, and take them off for older drivers!
No you don't. The last thing you want is to give the drivers who don't have the skill or the judgement the illusion that they can drive better than they can. Somebody who's older will usually know their own limits and capabilities much better than somebody who's younger. While this story is about cars, there's a saying in the motorcycle world that's apt: there's old riders, and bold riders, but you never see any who are bold *and* old.
They stand still to be quiet when the predator is far, but will try to run away at a right angle when the "predator" is right next to them. I am not sure why they do it, but perhaps has something to do with their danger handling mechanism.
It's easier to run in a straight line than it is to turn at high speed. The deer's survival depends on making it hard for the predator.
If your TV doesn't have more than 2 inputs, maybe you need a new TV... Mine's got 3 HDMI, 2 Component Video, 2 Composite, 1 S-Video, VGA, and coax in, as well as optical and coax digital audio out.
Slashdot Mirror
Not too sure how things are going in the US, but that's been happening in Canada. Land claims, treaty disputes, and other wrongdoings over the years. One of the more interesting ones can be found here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_residential_school_system ... Among other atrocities committed at the residential schools was a program of sterilization at some of them... the residential school system has been described as a genocide program. And there's been some enormous lawsuits stemming from how shittily we've treated Canada's First Nations peoples.
You missed that thread above about how Informative is the new Funny. :)
I think you've mistaken the ancient Greeks for the Crab People. That's ok. It's a common mistake.
Take a shower? If there isn't one in your building, there's probably one in a gym that isn't too far from your building. I'm lucky, in that there's 2 showers on the ground floor where I work, but in the past I've had to get a membership at the YMCA or some other gym not too far from work. Not usually a problem in the city... that said, something aerobic at said gym is also good for weight loss... half an hour on a treadmill, elliptical, or exercise bike a day can go a very long way.
When you're talking about an always-on device like an HTPC or even a low-powered server (I have a file & print server running on a C7 1.5GHz w/ 2GB of RAM, for example), the Atom wins out though... from TFA, the peak draw on the Atom was lower than the minimum draw on the Nano. Even though the Atom takes as much as 30% longer to perform a task, meaning that when it's multiplied out it's drawing more joules to perform the task, the fact that you don't go to a zero power state when you're not performing a task is what wins out.
I wouldn't put it in something that needs performance... but for something that's always going to be on, and going to be idle most of the time, I'd certainly go for the Atom if I were building that server again today. It isn't significantly more expensive, and it will use less power over the course of the year. It seems like a great choice for something like a small network file/print server, a house server, a car computer, or an mp3/video jukebox, etc. As I'm planning on building an off-the-grid house powered by solar, having a low-power computer that can do things like rotate the panels to track the sun, and manage power distribution to minimize consumption, those extra 4W at idle is important to me.
I think his point was more that the best way to design a user interface is to let the users actually... y'know... use it. Throw it out to a small but select non-developper beta, and take their suggestions about usability to heart.
A group of engineers sitting around, arguing about what should be where is just going to obfuscate things, and unless they get really lucky, it isn't going to result in something that's usable. Also... keep in mind the idea that nothing should be more than 3 clicks away, unless it's obscure. More than that, and users won't remember it. If it's something that they use frequently, it should be 1 click away. All about keeping the application efficient, but not cluttered.
My first thought, when I read TFS, was that he's out to lunch. He's looking for software to accomplish a task that, to my mind, should be a completely organic process. You can't write software to design your user interface for you, because people don't think like computers. You need to go through revisions and iterations until you get something that works. Oh, and sitting around watching slides is absolutely the wrong way to get a feel for how it's going to work, too. They should be presented with the actual user interface, or a mock-up if that's not possible, and actually go use it for a few days before coming back and talking about what was good and what was bad, and what needed improvement. And keep doing that until enough people are happy that you'd be comfortable unleashing it on the world.
I can believe that one. But you originally said "newborns". A newborn baby can't see, because their eyes haven't fully formed... best practical example I can find is the following site: http://tinyeyes.com/tinyeyes/ ... obviously not real, exactly, but a quick Google search for "newborn vision" will reveal many articles which outline the timeline for the development of vision in infants.
I'm gonna have to agree with the AC there and ask for a citation.... a newborn baby's eyes haven't even formed fully yet, and everything's a blur for their first 2 weeks to 1 month. it's nearly 6 months before they can see as well as an adult. they identify their mother by smell.
I know somebody who's transgendered (MtF) and has been diagnosed with Asperger's... though to be fair, her current psychologist thinks that it was a misdiagnosis, and that the reason she was socially retarded was because she was sent to an all-boys school, as she no longer has those social problems since going to University and now working in a coed environment. The fact that she's got an eidetic memory, a gift for languages and maths, and an IQ in the stratosphere (high 99.9th percentile) is just a coincidence. She does have other symptoms, though, like the inability to tune out background "noise" and conversation.
So the theory goes, at least... as far as facts go: neurochemically, she's got a brain that's more consistent with a female brain at the horomonal level (and she hasn't started taking horomones yet), and she has been diagnosed with Asperger's. :)
It's not just you. And I think it has more to do with males generally being drawn towards things of a more technical nature. I know far more males who like to tinker with things than females, which is strange given that probably 90% of my friends are female. What I've noticed is that the women tend to have more important things to worry about, and don't think about the little things that are largely inconsequential to them. It doesn't matter to me how my car works, it matters to me *that* it works. I paid for the extended warranty on it for a reason.
y'know... I'm wondering where you got that, exactly... I was working tech. support for Compaq when XP came out, and I can remember the arguments and discussions we had about MS removing that little bit of information from XP... ultimately, the reason it was removed was because it was a basically useless measurement for how well a system is running. Anybody who's ever looked at the output of "free" under a *nix console will understand what I'm talking about... the first line will show physical memory usage, and will almost always be near or at 100%. The important lines are the 2nd and 3rd lines, which talk about page and swap usage respectively. You'll be at 100% physical memory utilization, but your page space could be at 5% utilization, and your swap at zero. That percentage resources available in Windows 9X was pretty much an average of the 3. Look at the task manager, which can be brought up by clicking on "task manager" after a 3-finger salute. That gives *much* more useful information about the health of a Windows NT-based system.
And if you're talking about CPU load, I'm hovering at 1-2% CPU load right now on my work system... it's a Dell Optiplex GX620, with a 2.8GHz P4 and 1GB of RAM. Currently, I have open Firefox, with 6 work tabs, Slashdot, 2 IE windows with our contact/dispatch database (which is a Java application, and in spite of all my effort simply cannot be coaxed to run under FF), MS Outlook (watching 3 mailboxes), 3 Excel spreadsheets, and an MS Word document, not counting the background apps, which include Office Communicator, and Symantec Antivirus, and an annoying little piece of software called "Night Watchman" which is part of the company's green strategy... scheduled shutdown every day at 8pm, all part of Mike's plan to make the company carbon neutral by the end of 2008.
And if you *are* talking about CPU load... if your CPU load is hovering at 30%, you've got an application running that's causing it to do that, most likely compiling or multi-media. Check task manager, and you'll see something that's sucking up the clock time. Close (or kill) that, and you're off to the races.
For what it's worth, I haven't used anybody other than ASUS for motherboards in almost every computer I've built in a decade... I have used one MSI motherboard... it was decent, but not great. Everything else has been ASUS, and I haven't had a single problem with theirs.
YMMV... some people swear at them, but I've found that their tech. support and customer service is more than willing to help. And I've also found that the last couple of ASUS motherboards I've bought have specifically advertised Linux support.
Remember the Babylon 5 episode where Ivanova was expected to seal a treaty with a new alien race by having sex with their negotiator?
Maybe they're just fetishists... we have some pretty messed up fetishes among the human population, so why is it so hard to believe that aliens might get off by sticking things in your bum?
I'm replying to you largely because I agree with you... I don't see how it's censoring anything. I'm also a little surprised that such a law would be needed... if it were possible, I'd mod the law redundant... >.>
What I don't get is... the last console I owned before the current one was an 8-bit NES. The last handheld I owned was a Sega Gamegear. I now own a Wii, and it's already got parental controls in the system configuration menu. I admit to being largely ignorant of the options in an X-Box or PS3, but I had thought that they'd all have them, considering the current v-chip mentality that the US is taking...
But more important than that, as a Canadian, I'm scratching my head and asking what this law is going to actually change as far as labelling goes. Video games have had ESRB warnings for a long time, and at least in Canada, the ESRB warning gives two pieces of information: what the rating is, and why it got that rating. So you'll see games that are rated E, with notes like "mild cartoon violence", or games that are rated M17 for "sexual content, coarse language, violence", and stuff in between. What, exactly, was wrong with those warnings that parents were already ignoring, and what's new that parents won't ignore in future?
If parents are going to take an interest in this kind of thing, they already have the tools to do it.
why on earth would you need 36GB of storage on a firewall?
I was wondering when the Opera trolls would show up....
As with most things in computing, it's impossible to really say who came up with which idea. Take OS/X's core UI. Looks an awful lot like XFCE, to the point that a previous girlfriend thought that my XFCE-based desktop *was* OS/X until she looked closer. But then... they were both stealing some core elements from the CDE, which was originally developped by a coalition of Unix vendors including Sun, HP, and IBM. The thing is... elements of CDE were outright stolen from Microsoft Windows, which arguably was stolen from... MacOS. (I say "arguably", because none other than Bill Gates himself was part of the original development of System 1.0, back in 1982.) The thing being, of course, that they were both stealing from Xerox and the PARC, which in turn was stealing from IBM.
It's convoluted. There's not really *any* way to say who came up with which idea first. Opera is certainly a good product. I use their browser in place of Symbian on my cell phone. But at the same time, since it's so difficult to really pin down who came up with which innovations first, focus instead on who has the best product now. Besides... I seem to recall tabbed browsing addons for IE before Opera was even on the radar, for example... and tabbed browsing of things like filesystems and word processing documents is something that's been in computing since before there even was a WWW. So no. The folks at Opera didn't come up with the idea.
Interesting... but I wouldn't wait until you're in your old age. Not because you aren't capable of driving at speed, mind you (I wouldn't presume to say, because I haven't seen you drive. For all I know, you could be good enough for F1), and not even because it's safer (lower speed = lower kinetic energy in a crash).... because it's better on gas.
I used to be the kind of driver who'd quite happily cruise the highway at speeds approaching 150-180kph (call it 95-120mph). I consider myself to have the skill and reflexes to drive at that speed. But I don't. When I hit the highway, or any road where there isn't a lot of stop and go, I use cruise control, and stick to the speed limit and the far right lane. Still pay attention, can still step on the gas or brake as needed (and I have a manual transmission, so tapping the clutch or brake immediately cancels the cruise), can still react either defensively or aggressively as the situation warrants -and that's my biggest gripe with "defensive" driving... there are situations where you need to accelerate hard or be otherwise aggressive to get out of a danger- but I get significantly better gas mileage out of staying in the slow lanes and using cruise control.
End result? I fill up my car about once every 3 weeks where I used to fill up every 2 weeks (and I haven't changed how often or how far I drive). At $60/tank it makes a difference. And it hasn't significantly increased the duration of my commute to/from work... maybe 1-2 minutes on a 25-minute commute each way, or about 10-20 minutes longer in the car per week.
Because relative to the car, the windshield only looks in one direction. It's a lot easier to program the software to pan its projection to the height and x/y of the driver's head than it is to have motion sensors in a headset that you're wearing, and adjust the view in a 360 degree arc to reflect what you're looking at. And to do it the "easy" way would require having a camera in your glasses, meaning you'd either have to plug in every time you get into the car, or they'd have to be a lot heavier and fatiguing to allow for batteries and wireless transmitter/receiver.
No you don't. The last thing you want is to give the drivers who don't have the skill or the judgement the illusion that they can drive better than they can. Somebody who's older will usually know their own limits and capabilities much better than somebody who's younger. While this story is about cars, there's a saying in the motorcycle world that's apt: there's old riders, and bold riders, but you never see any who are bold *and* old.
I thought the reason that Thunderbirds didn't have that problem was because they were marionettes?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057790/
Well, that'd certainly cut down on speeding, and other unsafe driving.
It's easier to run in a straight line than it is to turn at high speed. The deer's survival depends on making it hard for the predator.
If your TV doesn't have more than 2 inputs, maybe you need a new TV... Mine's got 3 HDMI, 2 Component Video, 2 Composite, 1 S-Video, VGA, and coax in, as well as optical and coax digital audio out.
One more thing... you can also choose that option on the XPS line of gaming systems.