Interface aside (and I'm not convinced), vastly more people use google maps than google earth. So using that as your criteria for success, the answer to the story is a resounding yes.
Having to download and install an app, especially under windows, adds enough friction that any web equivalent that is even half as good will get much more use.
(As an aside, if someone comes up with a decently fast and well-featured web-based chat client, it'll be interesting to see what happens to all those funky skinnable.exe-based chat clients out there.)
For reference, it's wide enough to fit in the "by Anonymous Coward" line; the ID ends just before the end of the screen.
So, maybe about 4x the width of the joke text above.
Now, I'm not *posting* this on the PSP browser. The text entry is pretty painful. And, the browser is astoundingly slow, and seemingly won't let you pan the screen or click on anything until the entire page has loaded. Which is a killer on slashdot. That's too bad, because panning with the analog stick + square works pretty well.
The few Yahoo holdouts at work switched to Google when they introduced their much snazzier version of the Yahoo home page.
Similarly, Yahoo maps looks pretty dated compared to Google maps. The satellite view is maybe not that practical, but provides the buzz to get people to look at it. Also, it's much faster to maneouvre around in, which maybe gets them to stay. (I haven't been back to Yahoo maps for months.)
1GB of mail is an attention grabber, nothing more. And it worked pretty well as far as I can see.
So, the ipod has a buffer it fills from disk -- mine's 32MB, I think. This prevents most skipping. However, it is possible if you keep running constantly for, say, 30 minutes, to have it eventually stop playing. You then have to stand still for a few seconds for it to refill the buffer.
That's pretty rare, but I have heard a couple of hardcore runners complain about it. I guess it depends on your exercise pattern. The shuffle avoids both any skipping at all and is a lot lighter into the bargain.
Go to System Preferences, Accounts, add a new account, click on the limitations panel, choose simple finder, and check the smallest subset of applications you need to get by. (Say Safari, iTunes, maybe that's it.)
Log into the account. You'll notice there is just the dock at the bottom with an applications folder, and a documents folder. Single clicking opens apps or documents. Now, for maximum simplicity, open up each app, choose Open, and drag over the middle bar in the open dialog so the disks and default folders are covered up. That leaves no distraction from the documents folder.
That's what I do to create an account for someone who doesn't "get" all that techie computer stuff. (And fair play to them.)
Now, your point might be that there should be an option to set the machine up like this the first time you boot it up, and I'd totally agree.
Right. But how fast is spotlight? To me, that's the single most impressive thing about the google product. It gives me results from a fullish disk, with several million-plus LOC code bases on it, almost instantaneously. I'll be impressed (and happy) if spotlight is half as speedy.
Huh. So, you don't see a problem with the Bush administration writing Allawi's speech for him? A man that they are setting up as an independent leader of 'free' Iraq? You don't see anything wrong with them then turning around and using his speech to justify their view of how well the war in Iraq is going over the last week, and then again in the debate tonight?
It actually *could* be a problem if he does have naming rights. CMU has a reasonable number of alumni at Google who they're no doubt looking to hit up over the next year or two, and, given that in general there's not a lot of love lost between the two companies, it might be heavy going persuading them to cough up money for a building named after Gates.
I mean, it's hard to look askance at $20 million, but...
The article is a little misleading. Lloyd clustering has been used plenty of times previously in computer graphics and computer vision work, as the paper itself points out with some cites.
+3 Insightful? What a load of bollocks. There's not a paragraph in this post that isn't clueless or downright misleading. Even the throwaway line at the end makes it sound like the poster has confused OS X's kernel with the original mach research kernel and its microkernel concepts.
Get back to me when the windows file manager doesn't lock up when VS.NET takes a picnic because the source control server's gone down. (I have to kill.NET to be able to open folders again! How lame is that!)
Also, get back to me when NTFS has decent locking semantics. I'm sick of these damn "could everyone please exit app because I want to update it" emails. How many more years do we have to wait for it to get basic Unix/Mac hardlink functionality that'll let you replace a file while the original hangs around until all processes using it have closed it.
Slashdot strikes again. What Adobe did: link to that pc/mac comparison that one guy did that showed a Dell 3Ghz outperforming a Mac dual G4 1.24 Ghz, under the title "Prefer a PC for DV?" The link is in the "digital video products" page -- Premiere and After Effects. (Fair enough too -- if you were doing heavy video editing, it's a useful reminder of performance.) It is *not* under any of the other product pages that I can see.
So how does this justify the slashdot interpretation: "Abobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform for running Photoshop, After Effects, and Illustrator"? I don't see it.
With SimCity 4 you're being bottlenecked by RAM and then by CPU -- your card is absolutely fine. Buying more RAM would have the biggest impact. SC4 is pretty memory hungry, unfortunately, which can lead to thrashing. Hopefully some of this will be addressed in future patches/releases, but it's always going to be more CPU/memory heavy than a 3D shooter.
You might may even find bumping up the resolution gives you better visuals for not much more pain. It's one of the few games where you get a lot more detail at 1600x1200. You see correspondingly more of the city, and thus get even more of an impression of detail, which is its main graphical strength. I hope the console market doesn't totally kill the PC market because of this -- the thought of SimCity on a fuzzy NTSC TV makes me sad.
Re:XBox Live..One Gamers Perspective
on
Games of the Year
·
· Score: 1
So which Microsoftie marketing droid wrote this one?
You think they'd at least figure out what a dead giveaway the peppy market-speak quotes (I've rarely had so much fun playing video games... Setup was super easy and painless... Online play is smooth... See you online!)
Could it be the inventors of astroturfing are losing their edge?
Well, and naturally so. You don't want to waste a year reproducing something someone else has done. And you'd like to be first to the punch. Who wouldn't? (Not that it helped Leibnez.)
Guarding against this situation is part of the function of peer review. Rather than relying on the author having complete knowledge of the field, at least one senior and several junior reviewers are supposed to help fill in the gaps. Part of a reviewer's job is to suggest any citations that the author may have missed. It's fine if two people develop the same thing simultaneously -- it happens regularly. Often a conference will have two papers on the same result, precisely because of this.
When your friend started being harassed over having missed that work, that failure (if it was a failure -- sometimes people get a little over-excited) was not his or hers, but a failure of the paper committee.
Finally, it's true that many high-powered academics come across as arseholes. (And sometimes that's because they are!) But, so do many high-powered businessmen.
Well, yeah, but URLs in citations are more of an extra goody than part of the citation itself. They're certainly not a requirement.
Hopefully this will change; journals will become web based, and articles will have a permanent home at a fixed URL, rather than residing on the author's home page, which may move frequently as they leapfrog between universities, labs, and industry. I look forward to the day when a cite is *required* to be a URL!
In the meantime, Google and a printer usually saves a trip to the library these days. Or if you're subscribed to ACM's "digital library", you can get many of their journal articles or conference papers online.
Look, as someone who's written scientific papers, the claims in the article are not only false, but indicative of poor science themselves. They're making the classic experimental stats mistake. Namely, copying and pasting citations from other sources is *absolutely uncorrelated* with whether those papers have been read by the author.
Formatting citations is fussy, tedious, and annoying. You have to look up the page numbers in the journal (which you may not even have in these days of online papers), figure out who the publisher was, the issue or journal number.
I read every single one of the papers I've ever cited. But it was rare that I ever typed in a citation from scratch. Usually you get them either from an on-line citation database, from the bibtex entry helpfully supplied on the cited author's web page (scientists like being cited!) or, yes, by typing out a citation from a printed paper.
In any given field, usually some kind-hearted soul starts collecting a database of citations for others to use. For instance, here's one here:
http://www.helios32.com/resources.htm#Bibliographi es
Have a look; you'll soon twig to why people don't type these in from scratch.
Creating the citation all over from scratch when it's right there in front of you is about as pointless as adding a link to a web page by retyping some monstrous 200-character URL. Just because you copy & pasted a link doesn't mean you didn't read the article did you? (I guess slashdot is the wrong place for that particular piece of rhetoric.)
I'm disappointed in New Scientist. The pissy little diatribe about science in the story submission is par for the course. Please, leave the pontificating to people who have a clue.
Let's face it. Most IT people think better security is locking you out of your account if you mistype your password, and forcing you to change your password frequently. Works fine for the kind of person who always pays with exact change.
I mean, you should in turn ask yourself why it is that, with all the impressive mathematical/technical progress made at such conferences, probably less than 0.1% of all computer users actively use such technology to protect their privacy. A company's sysadmin is probably using ssh at least, but the CEO's secretary isn't using *anything*. Even amongst a technophile audience such as slashdot readers, who has the patience to consistently use PGP?
Last time I looked at the proceedings of a security conference, half of them seemed to be on watermarking, and what a complete waste of time it looks like that's been. With 20/20 hindsight they'd have been far better off concentrating on usability. Unfortunately the security field mostly attracts math geeks who just don't see such things as important.
What's the point of having the most secure lock in the world if no one uses it, or most people can't figure out how to lock it?
Judged from a purely consumer, average man/woman/and their collective dogs point of view, the security field has been a utter failure. (There are many other points of view from which it's been quite successful, of course.)
Slashdot Mirror
> All consoles really have is:
> noob friendly (is that really a plus)
> local multiplayer
And orders of magnitude less piracy.
Interface aside (and I'm not convinced), vastly more people use google maps than google earth. So using that as your criteria for success, the answer to the story is a resounding yes.
.exe-based chat clients out there.)
Having to download and install an app, especially under windows, adds enough friction that any web equivalent that is even half as good will get much more use.
(As an aside, if someone comes up with a decently fast and well-featured web-based chat client, it'll be interesting to see what happens to all those funky skinnable
I just read this post on the PSP 2.0 browser.
For reference, it's wide enough to fit in the "by Anonymous Coward" line; the ID ends just before the end of the screen.
So, maybe about 4x the width of the joke text above.
Now, I'm not *posting* this on the PSP browser. The text entry is pretty painful. And, the browser is astoundingly slow, and seemingly won't let you pan the screen or click on anything until the entire page has loaded. Which is a killer on slashdot. That's too bad, because panning with the analog stick + square works pretty well.
The problem is, that works both ways.
The few Yahoo holdouts at work switched to Google when they introduced their much snazzier version of the Yahoo home page.
Similarly, Yahoo maps looks pretty dated compared to Google maps. The satellite view is maybe not that practical, but provides the buzz to get people to look at it. Also, it's much faster to maneouvre around in, which maybe gets them to stay. (I haven't been back to Yahoo maps for months.)
1GB of mail is an attention grabber, nothing more. And it worked pretty well as far as I can see.
How on *earth* is this off topic?
I'm starting to think anyone who moderates off topic should be denied all further moderator points.
So, the ipod has a buffer it fills from disk -- mine's 32MB, I think. This prevents most skipping. However, it is possible if you keep running constantly for, say, 30 minutes, to have it eventually stop playing. You then have to stand still for a few seconds for it to refill the buffer.
That's pretty rare, but I have heard a couple of hardcore runners complain about it. I guess it depends on your exercise pattern. The shuffle avoids both any skipping at all and is a lot lighter into the bargain.
A.
No, I think you mean Atkinson was Burrell's champion:
n tosh&story=Well_See_About_That.txt&sortOrder=Sort% 20by%20Date&detail=medium
n tosh&story=I_Invented_Burrell.txt&sortOrder=Sort%2 0by%20Date&detail=medium
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Maci
Also, Burrell used to poke fun at Raskin's tendency to claim credit for things:
http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?project=Maci
Go to System Preferences, Accounts, add a new account, click on the limitations panel, choose simple finder, and check the smallest subset of applications you need to get by. (Say Safari, iTunes, maybe that's it.)
Log into the account. You'll notice there is just the dock at the bottom with an applications folder, and a documents folder. Single clicking opens apps or documents. Now, for maximum simplicity, open up each app, choose Open, and drag over the middle bar in the open dialog so the disks and default folders are covered up. That leaves no distraction from the documents folder.
That's what I do to create an account for someone who doesn't "get" all that techie computer stuff. (And fair play to them.)
Now, your point might be that there should be an option to set the machine up like this the first time you boot it up, and I'd totally agree.
A.
Or the annual effective subsidy to road-borne transport in the U.S.A., which was estimated at $37 billion (that's the low-ball estimate) in 1989.
6 3. htm
http://www.ecouncil.ac.cr/econ/subsidies/amdoc9
Right. But how fast is spotlight? To me, that's the single most impressive thing about the google product. It gives me results from a fullish disk, with several million-plus LOC code bases on it, almost instantaneously. I'll be impressed (and happy) if spotlight is half as speedy.
A.
Huh. So, you don't see a problem with the Bush administration writing Allawi's speech for him? A man that they are setting up as an independent leader of 'free' Iraq? You don't see anything wrong with them then turning around and using his speech to justify their view of how well the war in Iraq is going over the last week, and then again in the debate tonight?
I reckon you're pretty far gone, mate.
A.
Yeah, whatever.
It actually *could* be a problem if he does have naming rights. CMU has a reasonable number of alumni at Google who they're no doubt looking to hit up over the next year or two, and, given that in general there's not a lot of love lost between the two companies, it might be heavy going persuading them to cough up money for a building named after Gates.
I mean, it's hard to look askance at $20 million, but...
The article is a little misleading. Lloyd clustering has been used plenty of times previously in computer graphics and computer vision work, as the paper itself points out with some cites.
A.
I dunno. We're doing okay smacking around S.A. When Smith starts bleating to the papers you know you must be doing something right.
"Even more BASIC"?
"Extraordinarily BASIC"?
Or perhaps just BASICER.
A.
+3 Insightful? What a load of bollocks. There's not a paragraph in this post that isn't clueless or downright misleading. Even the throwaway line at the end makes it sound like the poster has confused OS X's kernel with the original mach research kernel and its microkernel concepts.
.NET takes a picnic because the source control server's gone down. (I have to kill .NET to be able to open folders again! How lame is that!)
Get back to me when the windows file manager doesn't lock up when VS
Also, get back to me when NTFS has decent locking semantics. I'm sick of these damn "could everyone please exit app because I want to update it" emails. How many more years do we have to wait for it to get basic Unix/Mac hardlink functionality that'll let you replace a file while the original hangs around until all processes using it have closed it.
A.
Slashdot strikes again. What Adobe did: link to that pc/mac comparison that one guy did that showed a Dell 3Ghz outperforming a Mac dual G4 1.24 Ghz, under the title "Prefer a PC for DV?" The link is in the "digital video products" page -- Premiere and After Effects. (Fair enough too -- if you were doing heavy video editing, it's a useful reminder of performance.) It is *not* under any of the other product pages that I can see.
So how does this justify the slashdot interpretation: "Abobe has picked Windows as the preferred platform for running Photoshop, After Effects, and Illustrator"? I don't see it.
A.
With SimCity 4 you're being bottlenecked by RAM and then by CPU -- your card is absolutely fine. Buying more RAM would have the biggest impact. SC4 is pretty memory hungry, unfortunately, which can lead to thrashing. Hopefully some of this will be addressed in future patches/releases, but it's always going to be more CPU/memory heavy than a 3D shooter.
You might may even find bumping up the resolution gives you better visuals for not much more pain. It's one of the few games where you get a lot more detail at 1600x1200. You see correspondingly more of the city, and thus get even more of an impression of detail, which is its main graphical strength. I hope the console market doesn't totally kill the PC market because of this -- the thought of SimCity on a fuzzy NTSC TV makes me sad.
So which Microsoftie marketing droid wrote this one?
... Setup was super easy and painless ... Online play is smooth ... See you online!)
You think they'd at least figure out what a dead giveaway the peppy market-speak quotes (I've rarely had so much fun playing video games
Could it be the inventors of astroturfing are losing their edge?
A.
Well, and naturally so. You don't want to waste a year reproducing something someone else has done. And you'd like to be first to the punch. Who wouldn't? (Not that it helped Leibnez.)
Guarding against this situation is part of the function of peer review. Rather than relying on the author having complete knowledge of the field, at least one senior and several junior reviewers are supposed to help fill in the gaps. Part of a reviewer's job is to suggest any citations that the author may have missed. It's fine if two people develop the same thing simultaneously -- it happens regularly. Often a conference will have two papers on the same result, precisely because of this.
When your friend started being harassed over having missed that work, that failure (if it was a failure -- sometimes people get a little over-excited) was not his or hers, but a failure of the paper committee.
Finally, it's true that many high-powered academics come across as arseholes. (And sometimes that's because they are!) But, so do many high-powered businessmen.
A.
Well, yeah, but URLs in citations are more of an extra goody than part of the citation itself. They're certainly not a requirement.
Hopefully this will change; journals will become web based, and articles will have a permanent home at a fixed URL, rather than residing on the author's home page, which may move frequently as they leapfrog between universities, labs, and industry. I look forward to the day when a cite is *required* to be a URL!
In the meantime, Google and a printer usually saves a trip to the library these days. Or if you're subscribed to ACM's "digital library", you can get many of their journal articles or conference papers online.
A.
Look, as someone who's written scientific papers, the claims in the article are not only false, but indicative of poor science themselves. They're making the classic experimental stats mistake. Namely, copying and pasting citations from other sources is *absolutely uncorrelated* with whether those papers have been read by the author.
i es
Formatting citations is fussy, tedious, and annoying. You have to look up the page numbers in the journal (which you may not even have in these days of online papers), figure out who the publisher was, the issue or journal number.
I read every single one of the papers I've ever cited. But it was rare that I ever typed in a citation from scratch. Usually you get them either from an on-line citation database, from the bibtex entry helpfully supplied on the cited author's web page (scientists like being cited!) or, yes, by typing out a citation from a printed paper.
In any given field, usually some kind-hearted soul starts collecting a database of citations for others to use. For instance, here's one here:
http://www.helios32.com/resources.htm#Bibliograph
Have a look; you'll soon twig to why people don't type these in from scratch.
Creating the citation all over from scratch when it's right there in front of you is about as pointless as adding a link to a web page by retyping some monstrous 200-character URL. Just because you copy & pasted a link doesn't mean you didn't read the article did you? (I guess slashdot is the wrong place for that particular piece of rhetoric.)
I'm disappointed in New Scientist. The pissy little diatribe about science in the story submission is par for the course. Please, leave the pontificating to people who have a clue.
In fact, how about a retraction? (Ha ha ha ha!)
A.
> when no-one remembers who the presidents of the
> United States of America were, or what wars were
> fought and why
and this is different from today how? =)
A. (Who's watched Leno's "jaywalk" too many times.)
Let's face it. Most IT people think better security is locking you out of your account if you mistype your password, and forcing you to change your password frequently. Works fine for the kind of person who always pays with exact change.
A.
Doesn't Grandma deserve security too?
I mean, you should in turn ask yourself why it is that, with all the impressive mathematical/technical progress made at such conferences, probably less than 0.1% of all computer users actively use such technology to protect their privacy. A company's sysadmin is probably using ssh at least, but the CEO's secretary isn't using *anything*. Even amongst a technophile audience such as slashdot readers, who has the patience to consistently use PGP?
Last time I looked at the proceedings of a security conference, half of them seemed to be on watermarking, and what a complete waste of time it looks like that's been. With 20/20 hindsight they'd have been far better off concentrating on usability. Unfortunately the security field mostly attracts math geeks who just don't see such things as important.
What's the point of having the most secure lock in the world if no one uses it, or most people can't figure out how to lock it?
Judged from a purely consumer, average man/woman/and their collective dogs point of view, the security field has been a utter failure. (There are many other points of view from which it's been quite successful, of course.)
A.