Yeah, I've noticed that problem. I bought a 12" iBook a few months ago and started doing my animations on it. That was one of the first things I noticed.
There are big inconsistencies between the different versions of Adobe's SVG viewer. Version 3 for win32 doesn't support the end-marker attribute that I use for making arrowheads, but version 3 for Mac does. Version 6 (win32 only) is the only one that didn't crash Mozilla Firebird.
Before I got my Mac I was using win32 for development, and version 6 supports a lot of CSS tricks that version 3 doesn't. Most importantly, I made a common defs.svg file for all of the patterns, gradients, filters etc that I reused on every animation. Version 6 allows you to reference definitions in a separate file (ex: filter:defs.svg#shadow), but version 3 won't let you do that. When I saw that my CSS tricks were failing on the Mac, I had to include the definitions in each file individually.
Yes, I'm hard-coding in a text editor. My favorite one to use is SciTE, but there's not a version for Mac. I've been using jEdit on Mac. I always have the SVG Recommendation open in a browser tab.
Since the days of Chips & Dips and the first days of Slashdot, my first goal has always been to post stories that I thought were interesting. I think a lot of people share my idea of interesting, and that's part of why Slashdot became successful.
Slashdot is an eclectic mix of stories maintained by a small group of people, but contributed to by anyone who wants to. I think that the personality and character of Slashdot is part of the fun and charm of the site, and I think it would suck to lose it. That's why the decision of what ends up on the homepage will continue to be determined by me, Hemos, and the rest of the guys.
CmdrTaco and his gang are still in charge here, and I personally like it that way.
I did a bit of research about schizophrenia a few years ago, and one thing that I read stands out in my memory more than anything else. One very common symptom of schizophrenia is hallucination, and I was a bit surprised (although I immediately realized that I shouldn't have been) when I read that hallucinations can involve any of the five senses, or combinations of them. Tactile hallucinations are quite common.
Anyway, the thing that stands out in my memory was a schematic diagram of the brain that had two boxes, each with arrows pointing to a third box in the center. The two boxes were labeled "SENSATION" and "THOUGHT" and the third box in the center was labeled "INTEGRATION". The narrative on the opposite page explained that you can think of the brain as an integrator of thoughts and sensations, and that hallucination represents a "crossed wire" in the integration center so that the brain perceives a thought as a sensation. For example, a person may think of spiders crawling on their skin, but the brain interprets that thought as the actual sensation.
This simplified schematic model made good sense to me, and helped me to understand the phenomenon in a more analytical way, rather than just being scared of the unknown.
I've never seen the movie, but I have seen a PBS documentary about John Nash called A Beautiful Madness. It was quite interesting and talked about his condition in some depth.
Also, check out the Wikipedia article on the disease. (There's probably a good article about John Nash as well, while you're at it.)
It's been my experience (I've just been accepted to medical school) that medical conditions or procedures that are initially "scary", "disturbing" or "gross" become easier to cope with after a bit of education. Science can do wonders to calm the soul, if the condition is one that is well understood. You're correct that our current understanding of schizophrenia is relatively incomplete, but it is much better than it was in Nash's day. Where the answers are not available (or are not satisfying), you can always find comfort in some good, old-fashioned prayer or meditation.
The semantic web was discussed at some length in Weaving the Web - The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. I picked up that book for something like $5 at my university's bookstore in the discounted rack. That's one of the more interesting books I've read about computer history, and it got me thinking a lot about web standards. I have since learned CSS and XHTML and I've vowed to never go back to proprietary "HTML" hacks. The new way is better, anyway.
The semantic web doesn't make a lot of sense to people who were introduced to the web through commercial means in the mid-to-late 90's (which is most people). But it makes perfect sense in light of what Berners-Lee was originally trying to do with the web. It has gone a long way to degenerating into Just Another Way to Market Stuff to Millions of People®.
Two points were most interesting to me in Weaving the Web:
The original web server and browser written by Berners-Lee was a read/write interface. The browser was an HTML editor, and you could edit pages that you viewed from the server. This makes absolutely no sense to us now, because we've been trained to think of the web as a publishing medium instead of a collaborative medium. The early popular browsers, most notably Mosaic, didn't support editing. This bothered Berners-Lee and he continually requested that they add this feature. He was still thinking of a collaborative web, moving in the direction of the semantic web. The Mosaic (and later Netscape) developers were thinking more about commercialization.
Tim Berners-Lee at one time was suggesting to CERN (who owned the intellectual property rights to his browser and server, as well as the http protocol) that they relase it all under the GPL. His main goal was to "get it out there" so that more people could work on it, use it, and improve it. It was explained to him that businesses would be reluctant to develop web technologies because of the viral nature of the GPL, so it was released under a BSD-style license that CERN approved.
Whether or not an individual's teeth fall out has no impact on their offspring.
Wrong. An individual who has no teeth will be at a serious disadvantage to even survive, let alone reproduce, especially if they have teeth that are specialized for a particular diet (like eating tough grass or crushing mollusk shells or something). In other words, it impacts the potential to have offspring. If the tooth loss has a genetic basis, then any offspring that the toothless individual does manage to have will be similarly disadvantaged when they reach reproductive age.. However, there would be comparatively little selection on a gene that caused all of their teeth to fall out the minute they finished reproducing.
Loss of teeth is related to oral hygiene of the individual so it cannot be selected for.
This is pretty unique to humans in western cultures who eat too much refined sugar. Tooth decay like modern humans get is vanishingly rare in nature.
From an evolutionary perspective, nothing is set in stone.... so are you retaking the course next semester, then?
"Sort of set in stone" refers to phylogenetic inertia. Certain things just don't happen very often in evolution because of the difficulty of redesigning an organism. Why do ostriches have wings? Why do humans have an (apparently) nonfunctional vermiform appendix? Why do vertebrates have two sets of limbs instead of three sets? Why am I feeding a troll?
Maybe you should take a few biology courses yourself, mate.
I wondered whether I should elaborate, but the original post was getting a bit long. I guess brushing would be considered an adaptaion, but not in the strict evolutioanry sense (yes, I realize you were joking:).
I was thinking of rodents. Beavers are a good example. Their front incisors have indeterminate growth because they are not rooted. They just keep growing out of their gums for their whole lives, while the beavers keep wearing them down by chewing on wood all of the time. This is a common strategy for mammals that do lots of tooth-eroding activities. There is another rodent that has rootless molars that they use for chewing up some really tough grass (I forget the name of the species at the moment).
Elephants use a different strategy. They delay development of their molars and emerge them one at a time from their gum as the previously-emerged molar wears out. They have the exact same number of molars as any other mammal, but this strategy gives them a "new" pair every so often. Old elephants die of starvation when they wear out their last pair of molars.
Horses have absurdly long teeth that grind down very slowly throughout their lives. Horses have such tall cheeks because their upper and lower jaws are full of these long teeth.
That's what I had in mind. And brushing too, I guess. This article would be another example of an adaptation to get around the limitations of two sets of teeth.
I may be a bit strange in this, but I learned most of the CSS I know by reading theW3C Recommendation. I started reading W3C recommendations when I wanted to learn how to code SVG. Tutorials and examples were relatively rare on the web, so I just found the specification and went from there. I find W3C recommendations to be very readable, and I've since read the recommendations for CSS and every HTML since 4.0. My web design has changed dramatically (and my dislike for IE has deepened).
Has anyone else learned a web technology strictly from the specs?
I had a class in comparative vertebrate morphology last term, and we talked about this very issue. Highly innnervated teeth is a mammalian trait. Other vertebrates (reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, etc.) don't have a lot of nerves in their teeth. As you probably know, mammals have only two sets of teeth: the milk (or "baby") teeth and the adult teeth. The milk teeth fall out and are replaced during childhood/adolscence. Other vertebrates typically grow replacement teeth throughout their lives.
Why is this the case? Mammals process their food with their teeth much more than other vertebrates do. This allows us to eat more difficult things like tough plant parts and insects with hard exoskeletons that are unavailable as a food source to other vertebrates. This is one of the keys to mammalian success.
Mastication requires precise occlusion of the upper and lower teeth. Mammalian teeth have highly specialized forms for grinding, shearing, tearing, etc., and different regions of the jaw have different shapes of teeth. This precise occlusion is hard to maintain if teeth are constantly being lost and regrown, so mammals compromised: In exchange for really excellent, highly specialized teeth that allow them to exploit otherwise unavailable food resources, they only have two sets of teeth for their entire lives.
Here's a geek analogy: you have a certain amount of money you can spend on a new computer. Do you spend the big bucks and get a really great piece of hardware (like a G5 PowerMac or something) or do you buy rubbish and get two of them? Mammals decided to spend the big bucks and buy quality. Judging by the success of mammals, I'd say they made a good decision.
Having such awesome, precious teeth, mammals must protect them. The muscles of the jaw are easily strong enough to crush your teeth into powder. Having lots of nerves in teeth is one way that mammals prevent their teeth from premature destruction.
So how did mammals get away with only having two sets of teeth? Two ideas: 1) selection is weaker on older organisms that have already reproduced. Problems related to teeth wearing out are generally found among older individuals. 2) Primitive mammals were typically small (like the size of most rodents). Body size is positively correlated with lifespan in mammals, so the early mammals probably idn't live to be very old. Perhaps they didn't live long enough to wear out their teeth. By the time larger mammals evolved the dentition system was sort of set in stone, and they had to make do in other ways (and there are some amazing adaptations found among mammals for preserving their adult teeth as long as possible).
There is an article at Wikipedia on this subject which lists some of the arguements given for and against the agricultural use of genetic engineering. In a nutshell, those opposed to the practice worry about engineered plants escaping the field and growing in the wild and becoming a sort of noxious weed. Advocates of the practice say that the genomic changes made to plants are relatively small, and are comparable to traditional breeding methods.
I'm graduating next week with a bachelor's in biology. The real take-home message from all of my ecology courses is that arms-races are very common in natural systems when interactions take place between predator/prey, herbivore/plant, parasite/host, etc. Most of the efforts at genetic engineering are meant to tip the balance in favor of the organism we are interested in. This will need to be repeated ad infinitum through evolutionary time (assuming we survive for much longer as a species) as the other organism co-evolves in response to our tweakings.
I'm not too worried about genetic engineering. I think there are more dangerous and fundamental problems to worry about, like the fact that modern agriculture is based on the use of fossil fuel energy, and thus is not sustainable. Another big problem is antibiotic resistance and our behaviors which tend to select for resistant microbes (STOP using antibacterial soaps, for starters).
I use 7-zip instead of Winzip. It compresses into more formats and doesn't ask you to buy it every time you use it. It's free (as in beer) and small enough to fit on a floppy.
I use SciTE (Scintilla Text Editor) for CSS (as well as HTML, SVG, etc). Not only does it color-code your syntax, but it knows valid HTML and CSS and will alert you when you use a nonstandard element or attribute. It's really handy. I wish it knew SVG as well. It knows a bunch of other languages, but I'm not a programmer so I never use it for more than web development. It is available for Win32 and Linux (but not as a native cocoa app in OS X, unfortunately) and is distributed under a license similar to the Python license.
Someone already mentioned Filezilla, so I won't bother. Except to say that it rocks.
I learned about all of these applications from the GNUWin CD. I usually look there first when I'm looking for Free software to do something on Windows. Have a look around their software lists and you'll probably find a few interesting things to try.
I use both Firefox and Safari on OS X, and I can't decide which one I like better (or dislike least, to be honest). I use Firefox exclusively (almost religiously) when I'm on Linux or Windows. Some observations:
Safari is really quick, has great tabbed-browsing functionality, a Google search in the toolbar, and reasonably good support for web standards. But I really miss the adblock extension. Using a CSS trick helps, but is much less convenient. I've tweaked my adblock.css quite a bit and I still can't get it to block ads from Yahoo! mail. I actually use CSS quite a bit in my work - imagine a regular user trying to write his own adblocking CSS file from scratch!
Firefox has about the best support for web standards anywhere, and all of those other wonderful features that geeks love about Firefox. It looks okay on OS X, but it's so amazingly SLOW! It takes at least 30 seconds to start up on my G3 iBook. I work a lot with SVG, and the OS X version of the Adobe SVG plugin slows Firefox to a crawl.
I end up using Safari for development. I check my web-based email on Firefox. If Safari had a more robust and versatile ad blocking feature I would probably use it exclusively. I'm disappointed with the current state of Firfox on OS X. Perhaps I should try the full Mozilla? Could it possibly be faster than Firefox?
The driver made by IOXperts runs my Logitech QuickCam 3000 Pro just fine, and gives me much more flexibility than Logitech's stinking software does. There are lots of options for changing the video size, and the video and audio compression. I was pretty upset when I first bought my mac and learned that Logitech has orphaned the QuickCam Pro 3000 on mac OS X, but as soon as I had it up and running with the IOXperts driver I was happy to have better software anyway. (Logitech's customer support recommends buying the QuickCam Pro 4000 for use on OS X. Jerks.)
I also tried macam, but it didn't seem to work very well. Perhaps I was using it incorrectly.
Read the above two links, and see if you don't get the idea. It's not about the content, or access to it. It's about freedoms that we're not willing to give up. Hardware-controlled DRM for content distribution is just one step away from hardware-level control over what software you can and can't install on your machine. Imagine a future where you don't have sufficient priviledges to install Mozilla (for example) on your home computer. Should they be the ones determining what I can and can't install on my own computer? No. That's my decision. This is the problem with "trusted" computing.
Your analogy of software security to (presumably) physical world "invasion" tools (e.g., lock picks, etc.) causes me to make a prediction....we may get to the point that the unlicensed use or possession of "software entry" tools is regulated and licensed.
RMS already made that prediction, in The Right To Read (which is a really interesting read, by the way). The relevant passage:
There were ways, of course, to get around the SPA and Central
Licensing. They were themselves illegal. Dan had had a classmate in
software, Frank Martucci, who had obtained an illicit debugging tool,
and used it to skip over the copyright monitor code when reading
books. But he had told too many friends about it, and one of them
turned him in to the SPA for a reward (students deep in debt were
easily tempted into betrayal). In 2047, Frank was in prison, not for
pirate reading, but for possessing a debugger.
Dan would later learn that there was a time when anyone could have
debugging tools. There were even free debugging tools available on CD
or downloadable over the net. But ordinary users started using them
to bypass copyright monitors, and eventually a judge ruled that this
had become their principal use in actual practice. This meant they
were illegal; the debuggers' developers were sent to prison.
Programmers still needed debugging tools, of course, but debugger
vendors in 2047 distributed numbered copies only, and only to
officially licensed and bonded programmers. The debugger Dan used in
software class was kept behind a special firewall so that it could be
used only for class exercises.
His version of the prediction is a bit different, but it's the same idea. If you read through the entire story you will find an astonishing list of seemingly absurd predictions which are coming true one at a time. It's a bit unnerving to read, really.
Yesterday I spent 8.5 hours cleaning the Gaobot virus off of about a dozen machines at my work. Norton Antivirus doesn't recognize it, and Stinger doesn't clean it off, so I had to do it manually, which took a bit of time to figure out how to do. Anyway, when I was working on the last machine I noticed that the "designed for Windows XP" sticker was coming off of the case, so I pulled it all the way off and stuck it on the pipe above one of the urinals in the restroom. That made me feel slightly better. Thanks for reminding me of that. I'll go see if it's still there...
So let's be rational about this. The tool removes DRM from AAC files purchased from iTunes Music Store. Is this about fair use or piracy? Probably both, but it could be used solely for fair use. Scenario: you have an mp3 player (iPod was a bit too pricey), but you bought a song on iTMS so that you could play it on your computer in iTunes. Now you decide that you'd like to play that song on your mp3 player (which has AAC support, by the way). Is this fair use? I think so (but who's a lawyer around here anyway?). There is one hangup to this scenario, though. Do you have to agree to some terms of service before you buy from iTMS? And if so, do these terms of service say that you can't attempt to beat the DRM? In that case you would have a different problem related to breach of license, but you still have not violated copyright law.
Others will argue that breaking this DRM is civil disobedience, and is a necessary and responsible part of the protest against the music industry's scheming evils. That is a foolish plan of action, especially because all of the copyleft licenses rely on copyright law to guarantee freedom. Disregarding copyright law erodes the freedoms granted by copyleft, which is a very bad idea.
Another way to change file associations is to go into Explorer, "Tools" pull down menu, select "Folder Options", click the tab "File Types" and you can delete them from here.
Winamp is a bit tricky with file associations. There's a blanket file type called "Winamp Media File" (or something like that...I'm on my Mac right now so I can't check) which includes all of the file extensions that Winamp handles. If you go into The "Folder Options" it's not as simple as sending mp3 to Winamp, but ogg vorbis to WMP (just kidding). You have to delete the "Winamp Media File" type and create new ones for mp3, ogg, mid, wav, etc and then associate them individually with different applications.
I've always found this to be a nuisance, especially when I have the same song encoded in different formats in the same folder (like when I'm encoding the music files for my website in different formats, for example). Windows Explorer (in details view) just says "Winamp Media File" instead of telling me the file type. The only ways to find out the file type are to 1) check the box to always view the file extension, 2) open up the properties and look at the MS-DOS name, 3) open it in Winamp and view the file information, or 4) guess that the smaller one is ogg vorbis (my usual method, almost never fails).
I suppose this is a "feature" that allows users to quickly tell if something is an audio file without having to know the details of its encoding, etc. But for power users it's a pain in the neck.
I remember back in Kindergarten when all of my classmates and I wanted to be astronauts when we grew up. All of our dreams were dashed to bits the next year when the Challenger exploded. We all went back to wanting to be fire fighters or whatever.
I tell you, these Mars rovers have done more to get me excited about space exploration than anything which has happened since then. I'm currently applying to medical school, but a long-dormant part of the back of my mind whispers, "You should have been an astronaut after all!"
What an amazing day to live in, when we may be at the threshold of discovering LIFE on ANOTHER PLANET!
Maybe this service isn't for you, but for a lot of/. readers this is a nice place to find new things to listen.
Slightly off-topic, but not really: Another place for Slashdot geeks to find new things to listen to is the Open Music Registry. It's not even a store, just a link to free downloads of songs using copyleft licenses (like the EFF Open Audio License and the Creative Commons share-alike license). The listings are not extensive, but they are slowly growing. There's a lot of tunes available in ogg vorbis format, which I prefer, but quite a few artists are still using mp3.
One of my favorite artists that I discovered on the Open Music Registry is Andrew Vavrek.
(Disclaimer: I have a few songs listed there, but I am otherwise unaffiliated with the Registry.)
simoniker really just wanted to one-up David Stutz by including sugar, Shakespeare, open source, MP3s, and the British Empire in one SENTENCE! Is there a special karma bonus for that?
(Hey! I just did it too! Can I have the karma bonus as well? Nevermind the karma. Just visit my website and support the Creative Commons.)
All of this will come at the price of standards of course...
Standards are not a price, they are an investment. I use standard XHTML, CSS, and SVG in my web design because I care about the future of the web. Besides, if a standard is well-designed (like W3C recommendations tend to be), it actually makes development and maintenance easier. Anyone who has migrated from HTML 3 (or some nonstandard IE/Netscape HackML) to HTML 4 or XHTML with CSS knows what a pleasure it is to work with modern hypertext (and probably also has an abiding and bitter hatred for IE). The same could be true of package installation in Linux if the standard is well-designed.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, I've noticed that problem. I bought a 12" iBook a few months ago and started doing my animations on it. That was one of the first things I noticed.
There are big inconsistencies between the different versions of Adobe's SVG viewer. Version 3 for win32 doesn't support the end-marker attribute that I use for making arrowheads, but version 3 for Mac does. Version 6 (win32 only) is the only one that didn't crash Mozilla Firebird.
Before I got my Mac I was using win32 for development, and version 6 supports a lot of CSS tricks that version 3 doesn't. Most importantly, I made a common defs.svg file for all of the patterns, gradients, filters etc that I reused on every animation. Version 6 allows you to reference definitions in a separate file (ex: filter:defs.svg#shadow), but version 3 won't let you do that. When I saw that my CSS tricks were failing on the Mac, I had to include the definitions in each file individually.
Yes, I'm hard-coding in a text editor. My favorite one to use is SciTE, but there's not a version for Mac. I've been using jEdit on Mac. I always have the SVG Recommendation open in a browser tab.
You're wrong. From the Slashdot FAQ:
CmdrTaco and his gang are still in charge here, and I personally like it that way.
I did a bit of research about schizophrenia a few years ago, and one thing that I read stands out in my memory more than anything else. One very common symptom of schizophrenia is hallucination, and I was a bit surprised (although I immediately realized that I shouldn't have been) when I read that hallucinations can involve any of the five senses, or combinations of them. Tactile hallucinations are quite common.
Anyway, the thing that stands out in my memory was a schematic diagram of the brain that had two boxes, each with arrows pointing to a third box in the center. The two boxes were labeled "SENSATION" and "THOUGHT" and the third box in the center was labeled "INTEGRATION". The narrative on the opposite page explained that you can think of the brain as an integrator of thoughts and sensations, and that hallucination represents a "crossed wire" in the integration center so that the brain perceives a thought as a sensation. For example, a person may think of spiders crawling on their skin, but the brain interprets that thought as the actual sensation.
This simplified schematic model made good sense to me, and helped me to understand the phenomenon in a more analytical way, rather than just being scared of the unknown.
I've never seen the movie, but I have seen a PBS documentary about John Nash called A Beautiful Madness. It was quite interesting and talked about his condition in some depth.
Also, check out the Wikipedia article on the disease. (There's probably a good article about John Nash as well, while you're at it.)
It's been my experience (I've just been accepted to medical school) that medical conditions or procedures that are initially "scary", "disturbing" or "gross" become easier to cope with after a bit of education. Science can do wonders to calm the soul, if the condition is one that is well understood. You're correct that our current understanding of schizophrenia is relatively incomplete, but it is much better than it was in Nash's day. Where the answers are not available (or are not satisfying), you can always find comfort in some good, old-fashioned prayer or meditation.
The semantic web was discussed at some length in Weaving the Web - The Original Design and Ultimate Destiny of the World Wide Web by Tim Berners-Lee. I picked up that book for something like $5 at my university's bookstore in the discounted rack. That's one of the more interesting books I've read about computer history, and it got me thinking a lot about web standards. I have since learned CSS and XHTML and I've vowed to never go back to proprietary "HTML" hacks. The new way is better, anyway.
The semantic web doesn't make a lot of sense to people who were introduced to the web through commercial means in the mid-to-late 90's (which is most people). But it makes perfect sense in light of what Berners-Lee was originally trying to do with the web. It has gone a long way to degenerating into Just Another Way to Market Stuff to Millions of People®.
Two points were most interesting to me in Weaving the Web:
Wrong. An individual who has no teeth will be at a serious disadvantage to even survive, let alone reproduce, especially if they have teeth that are specialized for a particular diet (like eating tough grass or crushing mollusk shells or something). In other words, it impacts the potential to have offspring. If the tooth loss has a genetic basis, then any offspring that the toothless individual does manage to have will be similarly disadvantaged when they reach reproductive age.. However, there would be comparatively little selection on a gene that caused all of their teeth to fall out the minute they finished reproducing.
This is pretty unique to humans in western cultures who eat too much refined sugar. Tooth decay like modern humans get is vanishingly rare in nature.
"Sort of set in stone" refers to phylogenetic inertia. Certain things just don't happen very often in evolution because of the difficulty of redesigning an organism. Why do ostriches have wings? Why do humans have an (apparently) nonfunctional vermiform appendix? Why do vertebrates have two sets of limbs instead of three sets? Why am I feeding a troll?
Maybe you should take a few biology courses yourself, mate.
I wondered whether I should elaborate, but the original post was getting a bit long. I guess brushing would be considered an adaptaion, but not in the strict evolutioanry sense (yes, I realize you were joking :).
I was thinking of rodents. Beavers are a good example. Their front incisors have indeterminate growth because they are not rooted. They just keep growing out of their gums for their whole lives, while the beavers keep wearing them down by chewing on wood all of the time. This is a common strategy for mammals that do lots of tooth-eroding activities. There is another rodent that has rootless molars that they use for chewing up some really tough grass (I forget the name of the species at the moment).
Elephants use a different strategy. They delay development of their molars and emerge them one at a time from their gum as the previously-emerged molar wears out. They have the exact same number of molars as any other mammal, but this strategy gives them a "new" pair every so often. Old elephants die of starvation when they wear out their last pair of molars.
Horses have absurdly long teeth that grind down very slowly throughout their lives. Horses have such tall cheeks because their upper and lower jaws are full of these long teeth.
That's what I had in mind. And brushing too, I guess. This article would be another example of an adaptation to get around the limitations of two sets of teeth.
I may be a bit strange in this, but I learned most of the CSS I know by reading theW3C Recommendation. I started reading W3C recommendations when I wanted to learn how to code SVG. Tutorials and examples were relatively rare on the web, so I just found the specification and went from there. I find W3C recommendations to be very readable, and I've since read the recommendations for CSS and every HTML since 4.0. My web design has changed dramatically (and my dislike for IE has deepened).
Has anyone else learned a web technology strictly from the specs?
I had a class in comparative vertebrate morphology last term, and we talked about this very issue. Highly innnervated teeth is a mammalian trait. Other vertebrates (reptiles, amphibians, birds, fish, etc.) don't have a lot of nerves in their teeth. As you probably know, mammals have only two sets of teeth: the milk (or "baby") teeth and the adult teeth. The milk teeth fall out and are replaced during childhood/adolscence. Other vertebrates typically grow replacement teeth throughout their lives.
Why is this the case? Mammals process their food with their teeth much more than other vertebrates do. This allows us to eat more difficult things like tough plant parts and insects with hard exoskeletons that are unavailable as a food source to other vertebrates. This is one of the keys to mammalian success.
Mastication requires precise occlusion of the upper and lower teeth. Mammalian teeth have highly specialized forms for grinding, shearing, tearing, etc., and different regions of the jaw have different shapes of teeth. This precise occlusion is hard to maintain if teeth are constantly being lost and regrown, so mammals compromised: In exchange for really excellent, highly specialized teeth that allow them to exploit otherwise unavailable food resources, they only have two sets of teeth for their entire lives.
Here's a geek analogy: you have a certain amount of money you can spend on a new computer. Do you spend the big bucks and get a really great piece of hardware (like a G5 PowerMac or something) or do you buy rubbish and get two of them? Mammals decided to spend the big bucks and buy quality. Judging by the success of mammals, I'd say they made a good decision.
Having such awesome, precious teeth, mammals must protect them. The muscles of the jaw are easily strong enough to crush your teeth into powder. Having lots of nerves in teeth is one way that mammals prevent their teeth from premature destruction.
So how did mammals get away with only having two sets of teeth? Two ideas: 1) selection is weaker on older organisms that have already reproduced. Problems related to teeth wearing out are generally found among older individuals. 2) Primitive mammals were typically small (like the size of most rodents). Body size is positively correlated with lifespan in mammals, so the early mammals probably idn't live to be very old. Perhaps they didn't live long enough to wear out their teeth. By the time larger mammals evolved the dentition system was sort of set in stone, and they had to make do in other ways (and there are some amazing adaptations found among mammals for preserving their adult teeth as long as possible).
There is an article at Wikipedia on this subject which lists some of the arguements given for and against the agricultural use of genetic engineering. In a nutshell, those opposed to the practice worry about engineered plants escaping the field and growing in the wild and becoming a sort of noxious weed. Advocates of the practice say that the genomic changes made to plants are relatively small, and are comparable to traditional breeding methods.
I'm graduating next week with a bachelor's in biology. The real take-home message from all of my ecology courses is that arms-races are very common in natural systems when interactions take place between predator/prey, herbivore/plant, parasite/host, etc. Most of the efforts at genetic engineering are meant to tip the balance in favor of the organism we are interested in. This will need to be repeated ad infinitum through evolutionary time (assuming we survive for much longer as a species) as the other organism co-evolves in response to our tweakings.
I'm not too worried about genetic engineering. I think there are more dangerous and fundamental problems to worry about, like the fact that modern agriculture is based on the use of fossil fuel energy, and thus is not sustainable. Another big problem is antibiotic resistance and our behaviors which tend to select for resistant microbes (STOP using antibacterial soaps, for starters).
I use 7-zip instead of Winzip. It compresses into more formats and doesn't ask you to buy it every time you use it. It's free (as in beer) and small enough to fit on a floppy.
I use SciTE (Scintilla Text Editor) for CSS (as well as HTML, SVG, etc). Not only does it color-code your syntax, but it knows valid HTML and CSS and will alert you when you use a nonstandard element or attribute. It's really handy. I wish it knew SVG as well. It knows a bunch of other languages, but I'm not a programmer so I never use it for more than web development. It is available for Win32 and Linux (but not as a native cocoa app in OS X, unfortunately) and is distributed under a license similar to the Python license.
Someone already mentioned Filezilla, so I won't bother. Except to say that it rocks.
I learned about all of these applications from the GNUWin CD. I usually look there first when I'm looking for Free software to do something on Windows. Have a look around their software lists and you'll probably find a few interesting things to try.
I use both Firefox and Safari on OS X, and I can't decide which one I like better (or dislike least, to be honest). I use Firefox exclusively (almost religiously) when I'm on Linux or Windows. Some observations:
Safari is really quick, has great tabbed-browsing functionality, a Google search in the toolbar, and reasonably good support for web standards. But I really miss the adblock extension. Using a CSS trick helps, but is much less convenient. I've tweaked my adblock.css quite a bit and I still can't get it to block ads from Yahoo! mail. I actually use CSS quite a bit in my work - imagine a regular user trying to write his own adblocking CSS file from scratch!
Firefox has about the best support for web standards anywhere, and all of those other wonderful features that geeks love about Firefox. It looks okay on OS X, but it's so amazingly SLOW! It takes at least 30 seconds to start up on my G3 iBook. I work a lot with SVG, and the OS X version of the Adobe SVG plugin slows Firefox to a crawl.
I end up using Safari for development. I check my web-based email on Firefox. If Safari had a more robust and versatile ad blocking feature I would probably use it exclusively. I'm disappointed with the current state of Firfox on OS X. Perhaps I should try the full Mozilla? Could it possibly be faster than Firefox?
The driver made by IOXperts runs my Logitech QuickCam 3000 Pro just fine, and gives me much more flexibility than Logitech's stinking software does. There are lots of options for changing the video size, and the video and audio compression. I was pretty upset when I first bought my mac and learned that Logitech has orphaned the QuickCam Pro 3000 on mac OS X, but as soon as I had it up and running with the IOXperts driver I was happy to have better software anyway. (Logitech's customer support recommends buying the QuickCam Pro 4000 for use on OS X. Jerks.)
I also tried macam, but it didn't seem to work very well. Perhaps I was using it incorrectly.
Have you tried Jump N' Bump? It's not 3D or anything, but it sure is a lot of fun. And it matches your description perfectly.
Windows Update is getting a bit slow. Can someone set up a mirror? The link at this page doesn't seem to be working.
I can see that you're not a troll by reading your comment history. This is a common question that has a simple answer:
Read the above two links, and see if you don't get the idea. It's not about the content, or access to it. It's about freedoms that we're not willing to give up. Hardware-controlled DRM for content distribution is just one step away from hardware-level control over what software you can and can't install on your machine. Imagine a future where you don't have sufficient priviledges to install Mozilla (for example) on your home computer. Should they be the ones determining what I can and can't install on my own computer? No. That's my decision. This is the problem with "trusted" computing.
RMS already made that prediction, in The Right To Read (which is a really interesting read, by the way). The relevant passage:
His version of the prediction is a bit different, but it's the same idea. If you read through the entire story you will find an astonishing list of seemingly absurd predictions which are coming true one at a time. It's a bit unnerving to read, really.
Yesterday I spent 8.5 hours cleaning the Gaobot virus off of about a dozen machines at my work. Norton Antivirus doesn't recognize it, and Stinger doesn't clean it off, so I had to do it manually, which took a bit of time to figure out how to do. Anyway, when I was working on the last machine I noticed that the "designed for Windows XP" sticker was coming off of the case, so I pulled it all the way off and stuck it on the pipe above one of the urinals in the restroom. That made me feel slightly better. Thanks for reminding me of that. I'll go see if it's still there...
...It is :)
How about Star Wars Episode III: We've Lost All Hope
That ties in pretty well with Ep IV, I think.
"Real Problems" - isn't that redundant?
See also the MacSlash discussion on FairPlay.
So let's be rational about this. The tool removes DRM from AAC files purchased from iTunes Music Store. Is this about fair use or piracy? Probably both, but it could be used solely for fair use. Scenario: you have an mp3 player (iPod was a bit too pricey), but you bought a song on iTMS so that you could play it on your computer in iTunes. Now you decide that you'd like to play that song on your mp3 player (which has AAC support, by the way). Is this fair use? I think so (but who's a lawyer around here anyway?). There is one hangup to this scenario, though. Do you have to agree to some terms of service before you buy from iTMS? And if so, do these terms of service say that you can't attempt to beat the DRM? In that case you would have a different problem related to breach of license, but you still have not violated copyright law.
Others will argue that breaking this DRM is civil disobedience, and is a necessary and responsible part of the protest against the music industry's scheming evils. That is a foolish plan of action, especially because all of the copyleft licenses rely on copyright law to guarantee freedom. Disregarding copyright law erodes the freedoms granted by copyleft, which is a very bad idea.
Winamp is a bit tricky with file associations. There's a blanket file type called "Winamp Media File" (or something like that...I'm on my Mac right now so I can't check) which includes all of the file extensions that Winamp handles. If you go into The "Folder Options" it's not as simple as sending mp3 to Winamp, but ogg vorbis to WMP (just kidding). You have to delete the "Winamp Media File" type and create new ones for mp3, ogg, mid, wav, etc and then associate them individually with different applications.
I've always found this to be a nuisance, especially when I have the same song encoded in different formats in the same folder (like when I'm encoding the music files for my website in different formats, for example). Windows Explorer (in details view) just says "Winamp Media File" instead of telling me the file type. The only ways to find out the file type are to 1) check the box to always view the file extension, 2) open up the properties and look at the MS-DOS name, 3) open it in Winamp and view the file information, or 4) guess that the smaller one is ogg vorbis (my usual method, almost never fails).
I suppose this is a "feature" that allows users to quickly tell if something is an audio file without having to know the details of its encoding, etc. But for power users it's a pain in the neck.
I remember back in Kindergarten when all of my classmates and I wanted to be astronauts when we grew up. All of our dreams were dashed to bits the next year when the Challenger exploded. We all went back to wanting to be fire fighters or whatever.
I tell you, these Mars rovers have done more to get me excited about space exploration than anything which has happened since then. I'm currently applying to medical school, but a long-dormant part of the back of my mind whispers, "You should have been an astronaut after all!"
What an amazing day to live in, when we may be at the threshold of discovering LIFE on ANOTHER PLANET!
Slightly off-topic, but not really: Another place for Slashdot geeks to find new things to listen to is the Open Music Registry. It's not even a store, just a link to free downloads of songs using copyleft licenses (like the EFF Open Audio License and the Creative Commons share-alike license). The listings are not extensive, but they are slowly growing. There's a lot of tunes available in ogg vorbis format, which I prefer, but quite a few artists are still using mp3.
One of my favorite artists that I discovered on the Open Music Registry is Andrew Vavrek.
(Disclaimer: I have a few songs listed there, but I am otherwise unaffiliated with the Registry.)
simoniker really just wanted to one-up David Stutz by including sugar, Shakespeare, open source, MP3s, and the British Empire in one SENTENCE! Is there a special karma bonus for that?
(Hey! I just did it too! Can I have the karma bonus as well? Nevermind the karma. Just visit my website and support the Creative Commons.)
Standards are not a price, they are an investment. I use standard XHTML, CSS, and SVG in my web design because I care about the future of the web. Besides, if a standard is well-designed (like W3C recommendations tend to be), it actually makes development and maintenance easier. Anyone who has migrated from HTML 3 (or some nonstandard IE/Netscape HackML) to HTML 4 or XHTML with CSS knows what a pleasure it is to work with modern hypertext (and probably also has an abiding and bitter hatred for IE). The same could be true of package installation in Linux if the standard is well-designed.