While I agree with the problem of Initial Caps in writer, I don't understand your critism of calc. You change case with =UPPER(), =LOWER(), and =PROPER(). Using functions to perform operations seems perfectly reasonable to me for spreadsheet software.
The voice recognition doesn't need to be perfect, or even good, because it is all being passed through Eliza. The chatbot just needs a few choice word to key on, and will take it from there. It may be that Eliza isn't the best choice for ignoring garbage input, but I'm sure there are other chatbot options.
Ding ding. I think we have a winner! There's a Chatbot::Eliza perl module so this could be do-able. Now I want to get me one of those LED screens, so I can try this!
Ditto. I have Xubuntu on a 800 MHz notebook and UbuntuLite on a Celeron 350 MHz Notebook with 192MB RAM. The latter is surprisingly zippy, and while I use it mostly for CLI purposes (mobile webserver, network troubleshooting) it's nice having a functional desktop when needed.
Both notebooks were give-aways from my brother-in-law. When his current notebook becomes too slow under Windows, and the techs tell him he needs to upgrade, he buys a new one, keeps the old one as a backup, and gives me his previous backup. He's amazed I can do anything with them.
I watched the CBC broadcast version and didn't notice anything odd. It was fast-paced toward the end, but then a lot of them are like that. Am watching the full-length version on their site now to see what difference I can see.
Maybe the CBC could get the same editor to cut the Pirates of the Caribbean movies down to a reasonable length. That would be sweet.
True story. We had some clients coming to town for a visit and I was asked to put some fancy monitoring system in the server room. So I hooked a notebook to an external monitor, copied some mp3s onto it, and ran xmms with a bunch of spectral analyser add-ons. It looked very high-tech, and everyone was impressed. Of course I didn't tell them that it was "monitoring" Avril Lavigne music 24/7.
That is a more or less accurate, but rather misleading summary. What you call "real" football was unruly mayhem. It wasn't an organised or codified sport. And the idea that it was called "football" because it was played on foot is plausible, but as far as I know is only a theory.
The first codified form of football was association football, which later was informally called "soccer" by the English upper-class college crowd (the term soccer was hated by the English lower-class because they thought it was a snobbish upper-class word; now they hate it because they think it is an American word).
From association football evolved rugby football (invented at Rugby University), which spread and evolved into American/Canadian/Australian football. Being a newer form of football, the rules for rugby weren't as well known or adhered to by the sailors who spread it, so local variations arose.
Association football was popular in the US, but the Americans then learnt the rugby style game from Canadian college students. The US Big Five ivy league colleges then voted on which form of the game to officially adopt, and it was 3-2 in favour of the rugby style. From there, American football grew to become the dominant form in the States, and soccer has been playing catch-up there ever since.
Man, this is like the old days in rec.sport.soccer, so I might as well dust off the old sig...
that one day I will finally be able to use command line tools to work with odf documents -- like convert them to pdf or postscript, cause that would be awesome (it would also come about six years after I really really needed that kind of functionality, but oh well)
I admit, I haven't followed the Human-Computer Interaction literature in a number of years, but what you are saying flies in the face of everything I remember from back in the day. System responsiveness is a very important factor in determining how people feel about the computer systems they are using. A difference of as little as a tenth of a second can be significant. In fact, I still browse the web with images turned off, just because it is faster.
Agreed. My brother-in-law gets a new Windows laptop every few years, when his old one become too slow and unusable. He keeps the old one as a backup, and gives me his previous backup, which is now two generations behind the curve. I then install Xubuntu on it and use it as my main laptop. A PIII 800MHz is the latest of these, and it runs fine.
What if we are talking about a network share with 100,000 documents spread over 1,000 nested directories created by dozens of different users all with their own slightly different take on how information should be organised? What if we have a document that overlaps multiple categories, and could have been saved in any of a dozen places?
Shuttleworth makes a good point which unfortunately is lost on most of the people here. Keeping track of files, where they are stored, and which ones have changed recently, is something that computers would be really good at doing. To a large extent, they already do this. We just don't have a lot of good intuitive consistant cross-application cross-toolkit userspace tools to get that power into the hands of Joe and Jane User.
Compare the situation to that of any half-decent web forum. On a forum, if I want to see all the latest posts, I can. If I want to see a list of the hottest topics, I can. If I want to search the posts for a certain phrase, I can. If I want to see the 50 most recent posts made by a certain person, I can. In most cases, this can all be done with one or two clicks, or may even be displayed by default.
I think it would be nice to have that same level of functionality and ease of use, with documents on our desktop.
Yes, the correct thing is to use a firewall. But this is Joe Sixpack we are talking about. With ipv6, he could also use a switch. It looks more or less like a firewall. It would work just as well. It would be a lot cheaper. To Joe Sixpack, these are all just splitters -- they turn one cable into a bunch of cables. Plug it in, and if it works, you're good.
There is one other thing that gives me pause. With ipv6, I know that if one of my neighbours were to statically assign themselves an IP within my subnet, that my firewall and possibly my ISP's router, should prevent them sniffing my local traffic. But I kind of have to take that on faith. It's not out of the realm of possibility that a poorly implimented firewall and/or a lazy ISP could open up my network to this kind of intrusion. I have no such fear with NAT, as non-routable means non-routable.
Not existing is something that we've all got around 15 billion years experience with. Seems silly to be scared of something that you've already done for billions of years with no adverse affect.
Right. Instead of blaming the Republicans, these widespread police state tactics should be blamed on whatever fuckwit party is currently running the oountry.
The problem is, Verizon aren't the only people on the internet with crappy filtering software. Now that Mr Libshitz has his email address, I'll bet dimes to donuts that at some point he runs afoul of other filters. He may yet regret having such a "shitty" email address.
1. There's also the possibility that they are messing with us. I can see benefits to a first contact scenario in which you fake a crash and come off looking all helpless, and a lot less scary. If I can see the benefits, then so too might alien-thinking aliens. It amazes me how many intelligent rational people will implicitly assert that aliens don't exist unless they behave like humans would expect them too. ("aliens can't be real because if they were then they would surely be doing _____")
2. There was a documentary done a while back that made a very good case for cattle mutiliation being a government black op to monitor radiation absorption levels in areas near where secret nuclear testing and uranium mining has been done. Apparently the tissue (lips, anus) which are most frequently removed from mutilated cattle are the ones that also provide good indication of radiation absorption.
3. See my rant in point 1. Aliens look alien. Aliens think alien. You can't assess their likelihood of existing based on a priori assumptions about what you expect their behavior should be.
Oh and you also had a powerful macro language batchruner/scriptmaker that was well integrated with the desktop, the possiblities were limitless and it was way easier in most cases then anything you can do with cscript/wscript today.
Winbatch? That thing was/is brilliant. It's still available for modern Windowses, and it runs quite well under wine. I stayed with Win3.11 for many many years, in part because of Winbatch, and then finally switched to linux in 2000.
It has always annoyed me that linux has nothing comparable -- an app that can identify any running gui programs, record and replay mouse clicks and kestrokes to them, and scrape text from them. KDE's DCOP is the closest I've come to being able reproduce some of the stuff I was doing 15 years ago on 3.11 and it's a pale shadow.
Slashdot Mirror
So, you've demonstrated that a clitoris is hard to find, and that dicks are everywhere. Not exactly an earthshattering revelation, is it?
While I agree with the problem of Initial Caps in writer, I don't understand your critism of calc. You change case with =UPPER(), =LOWER(), and =PROPER(). Using functions to perform operations seems perfectly reasonable to me for spreadsheet software.
The voice recognition doesn't need to be perfect, or even good, because it is all being passed through Eliza. The chatbot just needs a few choice word to key on, and will take it from there. It may be that Eliza isn't the best choice for ignoring garbage input, but I'm sure there are other chatbot options.
Ding ding. I think we have a winner! There's a Chatbot::Eliza perl module so this could be do-able. Now I want to get me one of those LED screens, so I can try this!
Easy to park, sure. But try finding it afterwards in a busy shopping mall parking lot!
Ditto. I have Xubuntu on a 800 MHz notebook and UbuntuLite on a Celeron 350 MHz Notebook with 192MB RAM. The latter is surprisingly zippy, and while I use it mostly for CLI purposes (mobile webserver, network troubleshooting) it's nice having a functional desktop when needed.
Both notebooks were give-aways from my brother-in-law. When his current notebook becomes too slow under Windows, and the techs tell him he needs to upgrade, he buys a new one, keeps the old one as a backup, and gives me his previous backup. He's amazed I can do anything with them.
Toshibas BTW. Decent machines.
That's not really a properly-formed knock knock joke. How about:
Knock Knock.
Who's there?
...
...
...
...
Java!
Java who?
...
...
...
...
Java few minutes? 'Cause this might take a while.
I watched the CBC broadcast version and didn't notice anything odd. It was fast-paced toward the end, but then a lot of them are like that. Am watching the full-length version on their site now to see what difference I can see.
Maybe the CBC could get the same editor to cut the Pirates of the Caribbean movies down to a reasonable length. That would be sweet.
Here you go:
http://www.youtube.com/user/aibot21
There are many videos that are more recent, including Aiko interacting with the public, and in some cases being mobbed.
True story. We had some clients coming to town for a visit and I was asked to put some fancy monitoring system in the server room. So I hooked a notebook to an external monitor, copied some mp3s onto it, and ran xmms with a bunch of spectral analyser add-ons. It looked very high-tech, and everyone was impressed. Of course I didn't tell them that it was "monitoring" Avril Lavigne music 24/7.
That is a more or less accurate, but rather misleading summary. What you call "real" football was unruly mayhem. It wasn't an organised or codified sport. And the idea that it was called "football" because it was played on foot is plausible, but as far as I know is only a theory.
The first codified form of football was association football, which later was informally called "soccer" by the English upper-class college crowd (the term soccer was hated by the English lower-class because they thought it was a snobbish upper-class word; now they hate it because they think it is an American word).
From association football evolved rugby football (invented at Rugby University), which spread and evolved into American/Canadian/Australian football. Being a newer form of football, the rules for rugby weren't as well known or adhered to by the sailors who spread it, so local variations arose.
Association football was popular in the US, but the Americans then learnt the rugby style game from Canadian college students. The US Big Five ivy league colleges then voted on which form of the game to officially adopt, and it was 3-2 in favour of the rugby style. From there, American football grew to become the dominant form in the States, and soccer has been playing catch-up there ever since.
Man, this is like the old days in rec.sport.soccer, so I might as well dust off the old sig...
Alan Douglas
Soccer Guy/
that one day I will finally be able to use command line tools to work with odf documents -- like convert them to pdf or postscript, cause that would be awesome (it would also come about six years after I really really needed that kind of functionality, but oh well)
I admit, I haven't followed the Human-Computer Interaction literature in a number of years, but what you are saying flies in the face of everything I remember from back in the day. System responsiveness is a very important factor in determining how people feel about the computer systems they are using. A difference of as little as a tenth of a second can be significant. In fact, I still browse the web with images turned off, just because it is faster.
Agreed. My brother-in-law gets a new Windows laptop every few years, when his old one become too slow and unusable. He keeps the old one as a backup, and gives me his previous backup, which is now two generations behind the curve. I then install Xubuntu on it and use it as my main laptop. A PIII 800MHz is the latest of these, and it runs fine.
This may be pants, but here is an amusing look at the US voter preferences inside World of Warcraft
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h5Kg-K7em20
It was produced by Sandeep Parikh, who plays Zaboo on the YouTube hit The Guild, and has his own game-inspired web video comedy, The Legend of Neil.
What if we are talking about a network share with 100,000 documents spread over 1,000 nested directories created by dozens of different users all with their own slightly different take on how information should be organised? What if we have a document that overlaps multiple categories, and could have been saved in any of a dozen places?
Shuttleworth makes a good point which unfortunately is lost on most of the people here. Keeping track of files, where they are stored, and which ones have changed recently, is something that computers would be really good at doing. To a large extent, they already do this. We just don't have a lot of good intuitive consistant cross-application cross-toolkit userspace tools to get that power into the hands of Joe and Jane User.
Compare the situation to that of any half-decent web forum. On a forum, if I want to see all the latest posts, I can. If I want to see a list of the hottest topics, I can. If I want to search the posts for a certain phrase, I can. If I want to see the 50 most recent posts made by a certain person, I can. In most cases, this can all be done with one or two clicks, or may even be displayed by default.
I think it would be nice to have that same level of functionality and ease of use, with documents on our desktop.
Yes, the correct thing is to use a firewall. But this is Joe Sixpack we are talking about. With ipv6, he could also use a switch. It looks more or less like a firewall. It would work just as well. It would be a lot cheaper. To Joe Sixpack, these are all just splitters -- they turn one cable into a bunch of cables. Plug it in, and if it works, you're good.
There is one other thing that gives me pause. With ipv6, I know that if one of my neighbours were to statically assign themselves an IP within my subnet, that my firewall and possibly my ISP's router, should prevent them sniffing my local traffic. But I kind of have to take that on faith. It's not out of the realm of possibility that a poorly implimented firewall and/or a lazy ISP could open up my network to this kind of intrusion. I have no such fear with NAT, as non-routable means non-routable.
Not existing is something that we've all got around 15 billion years experience with. Seems silly to be scared of something that you've already done for billions of years with no adverse affect.
Right. Instead of blaming the Republicans, these widespread police state tactics should be blamed on whatever fuckwit party is currently running the oountry.
Doesn't have to be HD. Think massively widescreen orgy.
I'm sorry, but with 1.1 Petabytes of storage and 1.4-gigapixel cameras, they should be focussing on porn-stars, not Pan-STARRS.
The problem is, Verizon aren't the only people on the internet with crappy filtering software. Now that Mr Libshitz has his email address, I'll bet dimes to donuts that at some point he runs afoul of other filters. He may yet regret having such a "shitty" email address.
1. There's also the possibility that they are messing with us. I can see benefits to a first contact scenario in which you fake a crash and come off looking all helpless, and a lot less scary. If I can see the benefits, then so too might alien-thinking aliens. It amazes me how many intelligent rational people will implicitly assert that aliens don't exist unless they behave like humans would expect them too. ("aliens can't be real because if they were then they would surely be doing _____")
2. There was a documentary done a while back that made a very good case for cattle mutiliation being a government black op to monitor radiation absorption levels in areas near where secret nuclear testing and uranium mining has been done. Apparently the tissue (lips, anus) which are most frequently removed from mutilated cattle are the ones that also provide good indication of radiation absorption.
3. See my rant in point 1. Aliens look alien. Aliens think alien. You can't assess their likelihood of existing based on a priori assumptions about what you expect their behavior should be.
4. That's a given
Winbatch? That thing was/is brilliant. It's still available for modern Windowses, and it runs quite well under wine. I stayed with Win3.11 for many many years, in part because of Winbatch, and then finally switched to linux in 2000.
It has always annoyed me that linux has nothing comparable -- an app that can identify any running gui programs, record and replay mouse clicks and kestrokes to them, and scrape text from them. KDE's DCOP is the closest I've come to being able reproduce some of the stuff I was doing 15 years ago on 3.11 and it's a pale shadow.
That's going to put me off pudding for a while.