For many books on Amazon, you can already do this using the "Search Inside this Book" function. You can only look at a few pages before and after where your search term was found, but of course this isn't too hard to get around (go to the last visiable page, search for something on that page, and continue).
A few weeks ago I went away to write a paper on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Unfortunately I left my copy of the book at home. Enter Amazon.com: I was able to retreive all the quotes I needed based on my notes via the search function.
I'm not an admin, although admining the BES has fallen on my unhappy hands a few times.
My problems with the BES have nothing to do with admining, although I am deeply unimpressed by the BES admin system, which I unfortunately have a lot of experience with. I'm a developer. My problem is that the BES is a fundamentally flawed piece of technology. Built on a shaky foundation (it's basically a messaging system, with the network routing for J2ME applications patched on top)... and it's so deeply interwoven with Windows technology, that trying to make it work at a Linux shop like ours is a pain in the ass. I don't think I have to tell you that with the Windows platform you eitehr go ALL Microsoft, or you don't go at all.
It's an ugly, ugly technology. It's an excellent example of what happens when "customer demand" (i.e. the marketing department) drives your technological decisions.
Honestly I can't wait until this NTP patent infringment thing brings down RIM, releasing the market from the blackberry stranglehold. While the blackberry itself is a decent piece of technology (the J2ME platform is a good thing), RIM's server software is an altogether different beast. Perhaps due to legacy issues, but probably mostly for profit reasons, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server software that you MUST have to do anything with the blackberry on the back-end is a giant, proprietary mess. It is deeply dependent on Windows (integrated into the WMI), it does bizzare things to communicate with the blackberry devices (most models don't have their own TCP/IP stack, so all communication must go through the BES's proprietary protocols), the user and device management stuff is really a joke.... I jsut can't say enough bad things about this server software. It just sucks.
The I.T. world would be a better place if RIM were to collapse, taking their ugly BES with them. What we need is a BlackBerry-like device, with its own TCP stack, a very simple gateway server, using only open protocols (web services would be a really realy good thing, for example). This will not happen as long as RIM is runnign things. The BES is a cash cow for them... a single BES user licenses costs almost as much as the blackberry device itself (with the profit margin on a license being 99%).
The protein you're talking about appears to be CREB (I love how 90% of slashdotters feel compelled to post their opinions without reading the f'ing article:) For a good couple of years now, we've known that transgenic fruit flies -- and recently mice, if I'm not mistaken -- engineered to over-express CREB do have strikingly improved memory... but not in the way you think. These flies don't appear to form "more" memories, instead they just learn faster. In other words long-term potentiation seems to happen with less training/effort.
What this means for us humans -- if it means anything at all -- is pretty questionable. However if you want to go out on a limb here, drugs or genetic modifications to increase CREB production could make you learn things faster, without sacrificing that important relevance filter (i.e. remembering every license plate you see or whatever).
AIM users are like giant squid (but with fewer arms). You hear about them, occassionally a giant tentacle washes up on shore, but nobody's ever actually seen one.
Seriously though who the hell uses AIM? Nobody has ever asked me for my MSN address. For two years now, since ICQ died, it's always been MSN this MSN that. If AIM has even 10% of the MSN userbase, surely someone would have asked me for my AIM info by now? Am I missing something here?
Has anyone considered the possibility that the show was not picked up because the pilot sucked? I understand Slashdot's efforts to champion this kind of programming, but you know there is such a thing as shitty Sci Fi.
I had a Treo 600 for about two weeks, but the low resolution display drove me nuts and I ended up returning it. I paid almost $1000 (CAN) for it, so this new price doesn't seem unreasonable. Carriers will offer it for less with a contract.
Now if they could just do away with the aging and fantastically craptastic PalmOS, I'd have something to get excited about.
I work for a company that develops intranet-type applications for big mega corporations here in Canada. We've been developing and deploying apps written in XUL/JavaScript + PHP or Python for almost a year now... so far so good. Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) no one has complained about the forced switch to Firefox. In fact we tend to get thank you emails gushing with compliments about Firefox:)
XUL is here, and it works. Having all of the advantages of web-based deployment, while being able to use proper user interface elements is a godsend.
I spent the last few days Googling for some obscure Linux SATA driver information... the best Google could give me was some half-coherent mailing list posts on the subject. A quick search on "Clusty" on the other hand came up with more or less exactly the info I'd been looking for.
Many jurisdictions have so-called "whistleblower legislation" that protects you from getting fired if you report your boss' illegal activities. It's kind of a win-win situation. You get to tattle-tale on your jerk boss and then dare them to fire you afterwards (you get to sue for all kinds of money if they do it).
People tend to talk about things that are new and noteworthy. The fact that studies like this one (showing that women are better at some role), is deemed worthy of publishing in an industry paper, implies that this is somehow contrary to common belief. If it weren't, it probably wouldn't be published.
This has little to do with political correctness, and a lot to do with challenging prejudiced cultural beliefs.
By the same logic.... what right do you have to complain about someone else complaining that this post is an ad? You're not paying for slashdot. Go elsewhere if you don't like it.
This is becoming the new cliché on slashdot... "this is someone complaining about slashdot... go somewhere else if you don't like it... whine whine"
The moral here: you're free to complain about other people's complaints, but that makes your complaints kind of ironic:)
I spent two weeks over Christmas reading Slashdot from the rooftop of a building on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands off the western coast of Morocco. It was one of the few nearby places I could get a reliable wireless signal.
Really nice to be looking out at a moonlit volcano while reading inane Slashdot comments:)
Has anyone at Microsoft said anything about Firefox? I'd be curious to see what they think about all this (or if it has even registered on their radar at all).
To all those repeating the old mantra "you can't prove that we are causing the warming -- it might be natural".
Yes, the fact that global warming seems to be correlated with our spewing of CO2 into the atmosphere may be a coincidence. It might all just be part of some natural planetary cycle.
But add to this the fact that we are currently seeing a mass extinction unlike anything in the last 65 million years, and you've got quite a conspicious coincidence.
I'm surprised how few anti-warmists (or would it be anti-anti-warmists?) see this.
With most digital cameras you will get a lot of static in your image. I tried doing this with my Olympus C-3030 during the 2002 Leonoids, and my pictures turned out terrible -- more static than anything else.
As far as I know film is the way to go for long exposures.
(There's actually a way to eliminate at least some of the static if you're crafty with Photoshop -- the static tends to show up on the same pixels on you camera's CCD, so if you take one fully dark photo you can use it to substract the static in subsequent pictures).
Re:FileSystem for Grandma?
on
GNOME for Grandma
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
This is one of the oldest and one of the dumbest arguments in UI design.
Think about it... was your TV really designed to work like something else? Pressing buttons to change "channels", turn on "muting" and show "closed captioning" are all pretty abstract and bizarre sounding concepts to someone who has never used a TV. The TV user had to learn all this stuff from scratch, yet few people complain about this.
Computers shouldn't be built to behave like TV's, and TV's shouldn't be built to behave like toasters. The user interface for technology should reflect the best and most efficient way to use that particular piece of technology. If you do it right (and there's no magic bullet, other than KEEP IT SIMPLE), your average grandma will learn it just fine. Give people some credit, they're not quite as stupid as they look:)
From the description, "spatial Nautilus" sounds exactly like the Finder (file system browser) in Mac OS 9. Nothing wrong with that -- I prefer it to the annoying one-window-per-folder Windows Explorer -- but it's interesting to see this being described as the "next step" in UI design, when it's more of a step back (or a step away from Microsoftianism if you prefer).
One thing this article doesn't mention is that it turns out that your aptitude for "insight" is directly correlated with your ability on pereception-related problems.
For example, people who do well on Where's Waldo-type problems will tend to do well on seemingly unrelated insight problems (like NYTimes crossword puzzles:)
This is also true for people who are really good at flipping the Necker cube.
If anyone is interested, this is from two studies done by Schooler in the 1990's. The article here actually references those two:
Schooler JW, Melcher J (1997) The ineffability of insight. In: Smith SM, Ward TB, Finke RA, editors. The creative cognition approach. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press. 97-133.
Schooler JW, Ohlsson S, Brooks K (1993) Thoughts beyond words: When language overshadows insight. J Exp Psychol Gen 122: 166-183. Find this article online
Chess isn't nearly as interesting for A.I. as we once thought it was. Essentially it's a closed, well defined formal system. These sorts of things are relatively easy to deal with, compared to problems like "Write a good essay about the history of chess". We have a pretty good idea how to write a really good chess program, but we have no idea how to even begin to algorithmically write a good essay.
Chess is essentially a math problem. "Real world" problems however are a completely different ball game. We need to answer some very interesting and fundamental questions before we can even begin to build any interesting A.I. (A theory of relevance being one, and the frame problem being another).
Slashdot Mirror
And I thought pay-per-impression advertising was dead. Worst article layout ever.
that was fast
For many books on Amazon, you can already do this using the "Search Inside this Book" function. You can only look at a few pages before and after where your search term was found, but of course this isn't too hard to get around (go to the last visiable page, search for something on that page, and continue).
A few weeks ago I went away to write a paper on Maurice Merleau-Ponty's Phenomenology of Perception. Unfortunately I left my copy of the book at home. Enter Amazon.com: I was able to retreive all the quotes I needed based on my notes via the search function.
I'm not an admin, although admining the BES has fallen on my unhappy hands a few times.
My problems with the BES have nothing to do with admining, although I am deeply unimpressed by the BES admin system, which I unfortunately have a lot of experience with. I'm a developer. My problem is that the BES is a fundamentally flawed piece of technology. Built on a shaky foundation (it's basically a messaging system, with the network routing for J2ME applications patched on top)... and it's so deeply interwoven with Windows technology, that trying to make it work at a Linux shop like ours is a pain in the ass. I don't think I have to tell you that with the Windows platform you eitehr go ALL Microsoft, or you don't go at all.
It's an ugly, ugly technology. It's an excellent example of what happens when "customer demand" (i.e. the marketing department) drives your technological decisions.
Honestly I can't wait until this NTP patent infringment thing brings down RIM, releasing the market from the blackberry stranglehold. While the blackberry itself is a decent piece of technology (the J2ME platform is a good thing), RIM's server software is an altogether different beast. Perhaps due to legacy issues, but probably mostly for profit reasons, the BlackBerry Enterprise Server software that you MUST have to do anything with the blackberry on the back-end is a giant, proprietary mess. It is deeply dependent on Windows (integrated into the WMI), it does bizzare things to communicate with the blackberry devices (most models don't have their own TCP/IP stack, so all communication must go through the BES's proprietary protocols), the user and device management stuff is really a joke.... I jsut can't say enough bad things about this server software. It just sucks.
The I.T. world would be a better place if RIM were to collapse, taking their ugly BES with them. What we need is a BlackBerry-like device, with its own TCP stack, a very simple gateway server, using only open protocols (web services would be a really realy good thing, for example). This will not happen as long as RIM is runnign things. The BES is a cash cow for them... a single BES user licenses costs almost as much as the blackberry device itself (with the profit margin on a license being 99%).
"not a complete bastardization of Adams' work" -- Doctor Monkey ... wonder if they'll use that one in the TV commercials.
The protein you're talking about appears to be CREB (I love how 90% of slashdotters feel compelled to post their opinions without reading the f'ing article :) For a good couple of years now, we've known that transgenic fruit flies -- and recently mice, if I'm not mistaken -- engineered to over-express CREB do have strikingly improved memory... but not in the way you think. These flies don't appear to form "more" memories, instead they just learn faster. In other words long-term potentiation seems to happen with less training/effort.
What this means for us humans -- if it means anything at all -- is pretty questionable. However if you want to go out on a limb here, drugs or genetic modifications to increase CREB production could make you learn things faster, without sacrificing that important relevance filter (i.e. remembering every license plate you see or whatever).
AIM users are like giant squid (but with fewer arms). You hear about them, occassionally a giant tentacle washes up on shore, but nobody's ever actually seen one.
Seriously though who the hell uses AIM? Nobody has ever asked me for my MSN address. For two years now, since ICQ died, it's always been MSN this MSN that. If AIM has even 10% of the MSN userbase, surely someone would have asked me for my AIM info by now? Am I missing something here?
Has anyone considered the possibility that the show was not picked up because the pilot sucked? I understand Slashdot's efforts to champion this kind of programming, but you know there is such a thing as shitty Sci Fi.
I had a Treo 600 for about two weeks, but the low resolution display drove me nuts and I ended up returning it. I paid almost $1000 (CAN) for it, so this new price doesn't seem unreasonable. Carriers will offer it for less with a contract.
Now if they could just do away with the aging and fantastically craptastic PalmOS, I'd have something to get excited about.
I work for a company that develops intranet-type applications for big mega corporations here in Canada. We've been developing and deploying apps written in XUL/JavaScript + PHP or Python for almost a year now... so far so good. Surprisingly (or maybe not surprisingly) no one has complained about the forced switch to Firefox. In fact we tend to get thank you emails gushing with compliments about Firefox :)
XUL is here, and it works. Having all of the advantages of web-based deployment, while being able to use proper user interface elements is a godsend.
I spent the last few days Googling for some obscure Linux SATA driver information... the best Google could give me was some half-coherent mailing list posts on the subject. A quick search on "Clusty" on the other hand came up with more or less exactly the info I'd been looking for.
Many jurisdictions have so-called "whistleblower legislation" that protects you from getting fired if you report your boss' illegal activities. It's kind of a win-win situation. You get to tattle-tale on your jerk boss and then dare them to fire you afterwards (you get to sue for all kinds of money if they do it).
People tend to talk about things that are new and noteworthy. The fact that studies like this one (showing that women are better at some role), is deemed worthy of publishing in an industry paper, implies that this is somehow contrary to common belief. If it weren't, it probably wouldn't be published.
This has little to do with political correctness, and a lot to do with challenging prejudiced cultural beliefs.
By the same logic.... what right do you have to complain about someone else complaining that this post is an ad? You're not paying for slashdot. Go elsewhere if you don't like it.
:)
This is becoming the new cliché on slashdot... "this is someone complaining about slashdot... go somewhere else if you don't like it... whine whine"
The moral here: you're free to complain about other people's complaints, but that makes your complaints kind of ironic
Thunderbird 0.7
It runs on win32 and doesn't suck a bag of cocks.
I spent two weeks over Christmas reading Slashdot from the rooftop of a building on Tenerife, one of the Canary Islands off the western coast of Morocco. It was one of the few nearby places I could get a reliable wireless signal.
:)
Really nice to be looking out at a moonlit volcano while reading inane Slashdot comments
Has anyone at Microsoft said anything about Firefox? I'd be curious to see what they think about all this (or if it has even registered on their radar at all).
To all those repeating the old mantra "you can't prove that we are causing the warming -- it might be natural".
Yes, the fact that global warming seems to be correlated with our spewing of CO2 into the atmosphere may be a coincidence. It might all just be part of some natural planetary cycle.
But add to this the fact that we are currently seeing a mass extinction unlike anything in the last 65 million years, and you've got quite a conspicious coincidence.
I'm surprised how few anti-warmists (or would it be anti-anti-warmists?) see this.
With most digital cameras you will get a lot of static in your image. I tried doing this with my Olympus C-3030 during the 2002 Leonoids, and my pictures turned out terrible -- more static than anything else.
As far as I know film is the way to go for long exposures.
(There's actually a way to eliminate at least some of the static if you're crafty with Photoshop -- the static tends to show up on the same pixels on you camera's CCD, so if you take one fully dark photo you can use it to substract the static in subsequent pictures).
This is one of the oldest and one of the dumbest arguments in UI design.
:)
Think about it... was your TV really designed to work like something else? Pressing buttons to change "channels", turn on "muting" and show "closed captioning" are all pretty abstract and bizarre sounding concepts to someone who has never used a TV. The TV user had to learn all this stuff from scratch, yet few people complain about this.
Computers shouldn't be built to behave like TV's, and TV's shouldn't be built to behave like toasters. The user interface for technology should reflect the best and most efficient way to use that particular piece of technology. If you do it right (and there's no magic bullet, other than KEEP IT SIMPLE), your average grandma will learn it just fine. Give people some credit, they're not quite as stupid as they look
From the description, "spatial Nautilus" sounds exactly like the Finder (file system browser) in Mac OS 9. Nothing wrong with that -- I prefer it to the annoying one-window-per-folder Windows Explorer -- but it's interesting to see this being described as the "next step" in UI design, when it's more of a step back (or a step away from Microsoftianism if you prefer).
One thing this article doesn't mention is that it turns out that your aptitude for "insight" is directly correlated with your ability on pereception-related problems.
:)
For example, people who do well on Where's Waldo-type problems will tend to do well on seemingly unrelated insight problems (like NYTimes crossword puzzles
This is also true for people who are really good at flipping the Necker cube.
If anyone is interested, this is from two studies done by Schooler in the 1990's. The article here actually references those two:
Schooler JW, Melcher J (1997) The ineffability of insight. In: Smith SM, Ward TB, Finke RA, editors. The creative cognition approach. Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press. 97-133.
Schooler JW, Ohlsson S, Brooks K (1993) Thoughts beyond words: When language overshadows insight. J Exp Psychol Gen 122: 166-183. Find this article online
Chess isn't nearly as interesting for A.I. as we once thought it was. Essentially it's a closed, well defined formal system. These sorts of things are relatively easy to deal with, compared to problems like "Write a good essay about the history of chess". We have a pretty good idea how to write a really good chess program, but we have no idea how to even begin to algorithmically write a good essay.
Chess is essentially a math problem. "Real world" problems however are a completely different ball game. We need to answer some very interesting and fundamental questions before we can even begin to build any interesting A.I. (A theory of relevance being one, and the frame problem being another).
They had live coverage of the launch where I was watching (in Toronto).