I try to test on macs as much as possible, but, lacking a mac, this becomes rather difficult.
Out of curiosity, are you considering getting a Mac now that it can run both Mac OS and Windows? It hadn't occurred to me until now that Web Developers and others who would benefit from cross-OS testing might be looking at the new Intel Macs.
=================== Shimatta This.sig has not been tested for use on/., use at your own discretion.
The major premise of the article is rather flawed; Boot Camp wasn't about "luring" in Windows users. Most of those users don't have a choice (e.g. work restrictions) or don't realize that an OS doesn't have to be unstable and/or vulnerable; they think that it's "just the way it is".
What Boot Camp does is remove the barrier to adoption. There are a number of Windows users who would like to switch, but need access to Software X or don't want to give up Game Y, and don't want to maintain two separate computers for those tasks. Now, they don't have to. Sure, rebooting is a pain, but for someone who wants to, say, use their MacBook Pro as a windows machine at work, and as a mac at home, well, they can do that easily enough.
Sure, Virtualization would be better, and I've heard (rumors, rumors, mind you) that it's coming. But Boot Camp, by removing the barrier to switching, is a very good transition state, and an acceptable end state, if Apple chose to leave it at that.
Yeah, and some people have faster internet connections than me, but they should lag the same way I do. It's only fair, after all. Hell, some people have specialized peripherals (e.g. gaming mouse, extra keypatds, joystick, etc.); they should just be ignored by the computer, because it's unfair to those who don't have them!
Setting aside the hardware envy, game creators do need to take into account that not all screens are created equal anymore. Even without extending field of view to give an "unfair" advantage to widescreen players, they could use letterboxing (filling the extra width with black space) so as not to put the widescreen users at a disadvantage.
Shimatta1, (sole?) student of the joystick/mouse style of FPS.
Hello, I'm an otaku (anime and manga addict) turned Japanese language student. I'm an older student returning to school to study Japanese.
Before we begin, I'd like to address the "hard language" meme. This depends on your definition of a "hard language", so YMMV. Unlike German, French, or other western languages that English is related to, you won't get any "freebies" in Japanese. In German, "house" is haus, "mouse" is maus, "brown" is braun, etc. There's a lot of words that are either near-identical, or close enough that you can "recycle" your English. On the other hand, though, every noun has a gender; as I recall from High School German, the walls, ceiling and floor each have different gender, even though they actually have none. You have to memorize those genders, because you can't derive them from looking at reality.
Now, looking at Japanese; loanwords from English aren't easily recognized, and rarely have the same meaning. Examples are wapuro, which is from the English "word processor". Or feminisuto, which comes from "feminist", but only took the meaning of "being nice to women" (and thus comes to be closer to the English word "gentleman"). My favorite is baikingu (pronounced like "biking"), which means "smorgasbord"! (dirived from the word "viking", as in "viking-style meal".)
What you get in exchange is regularity. Japanese has only two irregular verbs, and a handful more with an irregular form. There's a number of different verb forms, but they are regular. The sounds are regular, the vowels "a i u e o" being pronounced as in "ah, we soon get old", and for diphthongs you can just take the two sounds written and pronounce them together in sequence. You have to learn about 100 phonetic symbols (two sets of about 50, think of them as upper and lower case, though their usage of the secondary set is much closer to that of italics in English). There's 2000 ideographs (kanji), which will get you through about 90-95% of a newspaper. That sounds daunting, but if you consider that English uses over 1000 letter combinations to represent 40 sounds, and those letter combinations don't have any meaning of their own to guide you, the 2000 kanji don't seem so bad. (Tip: I recommend Henshall's "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" for those interested in kanji and/or etymology.)
As for learning, I started with the excellent Japanese for Busy People books. They provide functional Japanese intended for business use, rapidly and easily. The "fatal flaw" with the books (for me) was the lack of an included native speaker of Japanese; without a practice partner, I was finding that what I learned didn't stick. The more language practices you use (producing spoken, producing written, interpreting spoken, and interpreting written), the faster you will acquire the language. Thus, I found classes to be essential for progressing past a certain point.
Second, take a general linguistics class, one that covers the mechanical (as opposed to the social) aspects of language. You will be better able to understand the regular mechanisms of what's going on in Japanese, simplifying the rules you have to remember. Well, that's how it's working for me at least, but I'm also Majoring in Linguistics.
Third, avoid learning from anime and manga until later in your studies (around 2 years of college level Japanese). a.) They are filled with countless variants and contracted forms, but you won't understand them until you know what they are varying or contracting from. b.) They are filled with slang, archaic forms, excessive formalism, dialects, gender-marked speech, and you won't ever learn what they are and when they are appropriate from anime or manga. For example, Tomoyo from Card Captor Sakura uses extremely polite and feminine speech...with her best friend; this is -not- normal usage for polite speech (it tends to be distancing), and the feminine forms are less common among younger women, but Tomoyo is go
After browsing all those not-so-family-friendly websites, a person using IE will likely find that his browsing experience has slowed to a crawl after dealing with all the popups and spyware.
I work tech support, and when dealing with the spyware that IE lets through, I've had a number of calls that have gone over an hour just because the machine is responding so sluggishly. The grandparent post's point is that, thanks to spyware, even if IE starts out faster, it won't last long.
+4 Interesting...and all you did was pick a small trio of numbers and state that they indicate the total health of the company.
Currently, my heart beat and blood pressure is all in optimal ranges: therefore, I am in perfect health...[wachuuu!!!].
Er...'scuse me, I'd better disinfect this monitor before anyone else uses it.
The elements of decay frequently eat away at things behind the scenes; will those growth numbers look so good in two years if Longhorn still isn't out? And as someone else pointed out, Enron looked like a fantastically successful company right until it imploded.
The hint of decay is not a death sentence, but if a company's going to survive it, they need to recognize that it's happening and deal with it, not just point out their growth numbers and let the rot kill them.
Shimatta...pass me the cough drops, willya?
[PS: parent post dropped to +3 while I was typing this.]
"With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"
If they reject it, it probably won't be in favor of Open Source software. The way I see it, odds are that people will reject electronic voting entirely, if they are convinced that there's a significant problem. For those who aren't computer literate, it won't matter whether it's closed or open source software, because they would be unable to read the source code anyways. Those people, if convinced that closed source software is inherently unsuitable for the task, will likely demand that we revert back to manual or optical systems, because they can understand those.
As I recall, there was a Mark Twain quote that went something like this: "We should be careful not to take too much from a lesson. A cat who sits on a hot plate and is burned will never again sit on a hot plate, and that is good; but she will never again sit on a cold one, either." (Puddin'head Wilson's calendar, if my faulty excuse for a memory serves...).
Just my $83.25 ($.02 after applicable liscense fees, taxes, levies, and surcharges),
One diet that uses methods somewhat similar to Atkins diet is the Carbohydrate Addict's Diet (http://www.carbohydrateaddicts.com). Rather than cutting out carbs entirely, you eat them only during one meal each day. Doing this cuts down on on the cravings certain people get from carbohydrate rich diets. While I haven't really lost weight on it yet (I think; I have to go to the hospital to weigh myself as I weigh ~380 lbs, so I can't do it often), I have lost all urge to snack between meals, and can be satisfied with a small breakfast and dinner and a moderate lunch...and I often skip the breakfast.
Since the diet is low-fat and lets you eat carbs at one meal a day, it should answer many of the objections raised by the good doctor in the article.
If interested, I encourage you to check out their website: http://www.carbohydrateaddicts.com
...how does one go about pre-ordering a couple of these puppies? This is the only thing I've been wanting to get for my Dreamcast before turning it into a Linux box, but I dislike using auctions to obtain things.
Does anyone with a better grasp of Japanese see on the site how to get such a pre-order to the company?
Many years ago, when both I and my cat were younger, the movie "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" was played on the air. For those not familiar with the movie, it shows the adventures of a cat and a dog out in the wild. For the first time in her life, my cat started paying attention to the TV...right up until the first commercial break. She started losing interest then, but picked up again when the movie came back on. Each successive commercial break, however, made her lose interest faster, and made her take longer to start watching the movie again. Finally, she walked away from the TV, never again to return.
It took my many years, but finally, I too walked away from the television. The last time I tried watching TV (to see "Enterprise"), the constant and repetitive commercials drove me away after about seven weeks, only watching one hour a week.
So, proof conclusive that cats are smarter than people. =^.~=
"I think the biggest question for widespread use of these things...is power."
I can just see it now...the new, guaranteed weight loss jogging suit.
It'll display whatever you want, as long as you keep pumping those generators on the heels of your shoes. Slow down or stop for too long, and it shuts off and goes transparent. How's _that_ for incentive to keep moving? ^_^
Some points I would use if I were meeting with my Congresscritter would be these:
1.) I would suggest that it is bad legislation that assumes that all users of consumer electronics are such incorrigible pirates that they cannot be trusted with uncrippled equipment. This is akin to saying that cars cannot be equipped with engines, because they might be used to make a getaway, perform a drive-by shooting, or be operated while drunk. All such things may be justification for, say, denying driving rights as a parole condition for a convicted felon, but not limitations assumed to be necessary for the general public. Point out that, the legislation would assume that even the congresscritter him-(or her-)self cannot be trusted with uncrippled technology.
2.) Point out that, with current technology, the creation and distribution of entertainment could become a cottage industry (more likely with music than video, but still). Right now, a talented artist could write, record, and distribute his music without the recording industry's involvement, and I think that scares them more than all the pirates in Southeast Asia. The likely effect of legislation like this is that the ability to create music (or video) that does not have the blessing of the music industry will be made more difficult; the programs and devices to make legal recordings will likely become too expensive for the amateur to purchase, and will likely require some sort of proof that the purchaser is not involved in piracy (after all, involvement in piracy is assumed to be the norm, not the exception; if not, why are they doing this legislation?). By raising the difficulty of content creation, they reduce the likelihood of ever facing decent competition.
Note: IANA Creationist (I used to be, but I'm feeling much better now). I'm more of an origins agnostic; since it really doesn't make any difference what I believe happened back then, I see no need to believe any of it until someone can produce a live, unimpeachable witness. I'm not planning on holding my breath.
This answers my primary objection to evolutionary theory, which coincidentally happens to be the worst bit of sloppy thinking among evolutionists. "Survival of the Fittest", I think, is a marvelously succinct description of entropy acting on living creatures. Those best suited to resisting destruction in a given situation do so. The sloppy thinking comes from the fact that many evolutionist assume the evolutionary mechanism exists, without providing proof; that something is generating countless variations on the theme to continue to have the fittest survive and the not-so-fit weeded out. Minor genetic variations, even by selective breeding, hasn't been capable of jumping the species gap, which the theory of evolution states must have happened, not once or twice, but thousands of times. Until now, the best suggestion I've heard is the "infinite monkeys" theorem (i.e. "given enough time, anything can and will happen," a sloppy application of probability theory). This evidence clearly shows how one could go about jumping from species to species with minimal change and reasonable probability.
My only other objection is minor, but it should be considered: it takes two to tango for many species, so how do you get two or more critters with the same mutation in one place to breed with one another and start a new species? Since our current understanding of genetics indicates that one species cannot breed with another except in limited cases, this is the last question I think evolutionary theory needs to answer before it can truly be considered unassailable. Maybe there's a certain kind of radiation that only borks the Lox genes and maybe a few others, while leaving the rest alone. Maybe aliens did it. Maybe it's all a government conspiracy and the world only existed since last Thursday.
It don't matter to me, no matter what happened way back then, I'm still going to be late to work if I don't hurry. ^_^;;;
A lot of comments I've seen about the Vulcans question (or slam) the tension between them and the humans.
From what I understand about the ST timeline, until Spock came along, Vulcans and Terrans were traditionally segregated. Vulcans served on Vulcan ships, Terrans served on Terran ships. Spock was apparently something of a maverick amongst Vulcans for choosing to go to Starfleet Acadamy instead of a Vulcan school, and then serving on a Terran ship.
As for Vulcans getting irked by humans, well, how long can _anybody_ withstand complete irrationality? I'd wager five bucks that a Vulcan taking Terran tech support calls would go postal within a month. ^_^
...that this incident, tragic as it already is, will likely be used over and over to justify whatever the current administration wants through the magic of faulty logic and the phrase "We could have prevented this, if..."
I see a real possibility of a police state being enforced, even if only temporarily.
This is more standard attempt-to-discredit-something-by-dismissing-it-as -rhetoric rhetoric.
Shimatta
Entirely superceded? I think not....
on
Pulse Jet Go-kart
·
· Score: 2
Pulse jets are an inefficient design that has been entirely superceded by other engines - but wow.
IANA Rocket (or Jet) Scientist, but off the bat I'd say that these Pulse Jets of his beat the pants off other jet engines in two categories: cost of manufacture and simplicity. So long as other parameters like thrust, weight, economy and whatnot are in a useable range, these pusle jets are viable alternative to more complex jet engines...within the proper niche.
And heck, this guy managed to make significant improvements to the original design all by himself. Who knows what advances might come if a commercial entity invests in the research?
Um...assuming, of course, that the guy hasn't Darwinized himself by then. ^_^;
If every time your user has a problem, you fix it without explaining what caused it, you're going to potentially decrease the learning rate of your user base. In other words, users will commonly repeat the same mistakes, and you will commonly repeat the same fix.
Maybe, maybe not. In my experience as a tech support agent, I'd run into one of three situations;
1.) The customer has a problem that couldn't be avoided, therefore learning is irrelavent. My best example is Corrupted DUN; occasionally, for no apparent reason (and this was especially true under Winduhs 95), the Dial Up Networking software would become corrupted and have to be uninstalled and reinstalled. The user might have done something to cause it, but generally it was simply unavoidable, so fix it and get on to the next call.
2.) The customer is williing to learn what happened so they can avoid it; usually, if it's a corporate and/or internal customer as is being described in this case, they'll keep in contact with you until it's fixed and want to know what they can do to avoid this. These are the good customers, they realize that even if a problem isn't their fault, there may be something they can do to help prevent it from happening again, as opposed to...
3.) The customer cannot or will not learn. These are the ones that insist it was your fault that the computer stopped working after they deleted vital system files. These are the ones who don't know what a vital system file is and don't care; they just want more disk space. Explanation is futile; the computer will be trashed again in short order. (The worst one of these I ever dealt with was a customer who couldn't even learn that her problem wasn't even an issue for my department; she would continually call us and we'd continually tell her to call the correct department (rumor from the other department had it that she had burned out three of their agents who had been assigned to deal with her personally.))
Types one and two were the most common; type threes were the leading cause of burnout, and tend to be the ones irrevocably seared into the minds of bitter tech support agents. Type threes also tend to be the hardest ones to work with; they will commonly challenge the agent (because they assume they know more, despite all evidence to the contrary) or they're constantly mis-interpreting commands because of lack of familiarity with the system.
If a remote administration program is available and feasible (such as with an internal customer), you can bypass the most significant impediment to finding a solution; the customer. Aside from the massive savings in time and efficiency, there's also the savings in tech support wear and tear. I left a tech support job without having another job lined up because of the stress. By preventing (or at least delaying) the burn out of support agents, the company avoids the hassle of bringing in new agents and training them, as well as the lost productivity of the new agent (when compared to the productivity of the old agent had she not burnt out).
If an agent fixes the problem by remote administration, they should contact the customer, by phone or email, and provide information on what was done, what can be done to avoid it, and possibly instructions so they can fix it themselves in the future. This way, you can avoid the dumbing-down of your customer base.
As for "who would allow this to be installed?", again, look at this with corporate or internal customers; the former may well allow it for the increased speed of troubleshooting and fixing problems, the latter doesn't really have a choice. If the boss says install it, it will be installed. This also eliminates the pornographic background problem; it's not (or shouldn't be) an issue in a corporate environment. (I also question whether that would be sexual harassment; I think it would only qualify if the administratee deliberately put it up to harass the administrator.)
I do have to agree about which contact people would prefer; most would prefer to be on the phone with the agent while it was being repaired. Personally, though, I think the additional efficiency and the saved wear 'n' tear on the agent outweighs this issue.
Just my 96,280 cents (two cents after sales tax added in.)
Jon "Shimatta" Baxter, anyone need a slightly used computer geek?
Slashdot Mirror
I try to test on macs as much as possible, but, lacking a mac, this becomes rather difficult.
.sig has not been tested for use on /., use at your own discretion.
Out of curiosity, are you considering getting a Mac now that it can run both Mac OS and Windows? It hadn't occurred to me until now that Web Developers and others who would benefit from cross-OS testing might be looking at the new Intel Macs.
===================
Shimatta
This
The major premise of the article is rather flawed; Boot Camp wasn't about "luring" in Windows users. Most of those users don't have a choice (e.g. work restrictions) or don't realize that an OS doesn't have to be unstable and/or vulnerable; they think that it's "just the way it is".
What Boot Camp does is remove the barrier to adoption. There are a number of Windows users who would like to switch, but need access to Software X or don't want to give up Game Y, and don't want to maintain two separate computers for those tasks. Now, they don't have to. Sure, rebooting is a pain, but for someone who wants to, say, use their MacBook Pro as a windows machine at work, and as a mac at home, well, they can do that easily enough.
Sure, Virtualization would be better, and I've heard (rumors, rumors, mind you) that it's coming. But Boot Camp, by removing the barrier to switching, is a very good transition state, and an acceptable end state, if Apple chose to leave it at that.
The blue Shimatta1 needs food, badly.
Yeah, and some people have faster internet connections than me, but they should lag the same way I do. It's only fair, after all. Hell, some people have specialized peripherals (e.g. gaming mouse, extra keypatds, joystick, etc.); they should just be ignored by the computer, because it's unfair to those who don't have them!
Setting aside the hardware envy, game creators do need to take into account that not all screens are created equal anymore. Even without extending field of view to give an "unfair" advantage to widescreen players, they could use letterboxing (filling the extra width with black space) so as not to put the widescreen users at a disadvantage.
Shimatta1, (sole?) student of the joystick/mouse style of FPS.
Hello, I'm an otaku (anime and manga addict) turned Japanese language student. I'm an older student returning to school to study Japanese.
Before we begin, I'd like to address the "hard language" meme. This depends on your definition of a "hard language", so YMMV. Unlike German, French, or other western languages that English is related to, you won't get any "freebies" in Japanese. In German, "house" is haus, "mouse" is maus, "brown" is braun, etc. There's a lot of words that are either near-identical, or close enough that you can "recycle" your English. On the other hand, though, every noun has a gender; as I recall from High School German, the walls, ceiling and floor each have different gender, even though they actually have none. You have to memorize those genders, because you can't derive them from looking at reality.
Now, looking at Japanese; loanwords from English aren't easily recognized, and rarely have the same meaning. Examples are wapuro, which is from the English "word processor". Or feminisuto, which comes from "feminist", but only took the meaning of "being nice to women" (and thus comes to be closer to the English word "gentleman"). My favorite is baikingu (pronounced like "biking"), which means "smorgasbord"! (dirived from the word "viking", as in "viking-style meal".)
What you get in exchange is regularity. Japanese has only two irregular verbs, and a handful more with an irregular form. There's a number of different verb forms, but they are regular. The sounds are regular, the vowels "a i u e o" being pronounced as in "ah, we soon get old", and for diphthongs you can just take the two sounds written and pronounce them together in sequence. You have to learn about 100 phonetic symbols (two sets of about 50, think of them as upper and lower case, though their usage of the secondary set is much closer to that of italics in English). There's 2000 ideographs (kanji), which will get you through about 90-95% of a newspaper. That sounds daunting, but if you consider that English uses over 1000 letter combinations to represent 40 sounds, and those letter combinations don't have any meaning of their own to guide you, the 2000 kanji don't seem so bad. (Tip: I recommend Henshall's "A Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters" for those interested in kanji and/or etymology.)
As for learning, I started with the excellent Japanese for Busy People books. They provide functional Japanese intended for business use, rapidly and easily. The "fatal flaw" with the books (for me) was the lack of an included native speaker of Japanese; without a practice partner, I was finding that what I learned didn't stick. The more language practices you use (producing spoken, producing written, interpreting spoken, and interpreting written), the faster you will acquire the language. Thus, I found classes to be essential for progressing past a certain point.
Second, take a general linguistics class, one that covers the mechanical (as opposed to the social) aspects of language. You will be better able to understand the regular mechanisms of what's going on in Japanese, simplifying the rules you have to remember. Well, that's how it's working for me at least, but I'm also Majoring in Linguistics.
Third, avoid learning from anime and manga until later in your studies (around 2 years of college level Japanese). a.) They are filled with countless variants and contracted forms, but you won't understand them until you know what they are varying or contracting from. b.) They are filled with slang, archaic forms, excessive formalism, dialects, gender-marked speech, and you won't ever learn what they are and when they are appropriate from anime or manga. For example, Tomoyo from Card Captor Sakura uses extremely polite and feminine speech...with her best friend; this is -not- normal usage for polite speech (it tends to be distancing), and the feminine forms are less common among younger women, but Tomoyo is go
This got an Insightful? Cheez...
After browsing all those not-so-family-friendly websites, a person using IE will likely find that his browsing experience has slowed to a crawl after dealing with all the popups and spyware.
I work tech support, and when dealing with the spyware that IE lets through, I've had a number of calls that have gone over an hour just because the machine is responding so sluggishly. The grandparent post's point is that, thanks to spyware, even if IE starts out faster, it won't last long.
Shimatta
+4 Interesting...and all you did was pick a small trio of numbers and state that they indicate the total health of the company.
Currently, my heart beat and blood pressure is all in optimal ranges: therefore, I am in perfect health...[wachuuu!!!].
Er...'scuse me, I'd better disinfect this monitor before anyone else uses it.
The elements of decay frequently eat away at things behind the scenes; will those growth numbers look so good in two years if Longhorn still isn't out? And as someone else pointed out, Enron looked like a fantastically successful company right until it imploded.
The hint of decay is not a death sentence, but if a company's going to survive it, they need to recognize that it's happening and deal with it, not just point out their growth numbers and let the rot kill them.
Shimatta...pass me the cough drops, willya?
[PS: parent post dropped to +3 while I was typing this.]
Naw, it's voluntary, right? "Why did my screen saver kick in? And why is it playing Missile Command?!?"
"With yet another mistake, does anyone still trust closed-source electronic voting?"
If they reject it, it probably won't be in favor of Open Source software. The way I see it, odds are that people will reject electronic voting entirely, if they are convinced that there's a significant problem. For those who aren't computer literate, it won't matter whether it's closed or open source software, because they would be unable to read the source code anyways. Those people, if convinced that closed source software is inherently unsuitable for the task, will likely demand that we revert back to manual or optical systems, because they can understand those.
As I recall, there was a Mark Twain quote that went something like this: "We should be careful not to take too much from a lesson. A cat who sits on a hot plate and is burned will never again sit on a hot plate, and that is good; but she will never again sit on a cold one, either." (Puddin'head Wilson's calendar, if my faulty excuse for a memory serves...).
Just my $83.25 ($.02 after applicable liscense fees, taxes, levies, and surcharges),
Shimatta
And those three religions would be...let's see...Discordianism, Deism, and....I know, Jedi! ^_^
Shimatta
Hail Eris!
Your Mileage May Vary
" I'm waiting for the day software compares my signature with the one stored on the credit card's chip. And I'm all for it."
Sweet Eris, no!
Not that I forge anyone else's signatures...how could I? I can't even forge my _own_ signature! ^_^;;; I'd never be able to use my credit card again!
Wait a minute...hmmmm...
One diet that uses methods somewhat similar to Atkins diet is the Carbohydrate Addict's Diet (http://www.carbohydrateaddicts.com). Rather than cutting out carbs entirely, you eat them only during one meal each day. Doing this cuts down on on the cravings certain people get from carbohydrate rich diets. While I haven't really lost weight on it yet (I think; I have to go to the hospital to weigh myself as I weigh ~380 lbs, so I can't do it often), I have lost all urge to snack between meals, and can be satisfied with a small breakfast and dinner and a moderate lunch...and I often skip the breakfast. Since the diet is low-fat and lets you eat carbs at one meal a day, it should answer many of the objections raised by the good doctor in the article. If interested, I encourage you to check out their website: http://www.carbohydrateaddicts.com
...how does one go about pre-ordering a couple of these puppies? This is the only thing I've been wanting to get for my Dreamcast before turning it into a Linux box, but I dislike using auctions to obtain things.
Does anyone with a better grasp of Japanese see on the site how to get such a pre-order to the company?
Shimatta
So much to do, so little motivation.
This is a true story from my childhood.
Many years ago, when both I and my cat were younger, the movie "The Adventures of Milo and Otis" was played on the air. For those not familiar with the movie, it shows the adventures of a cat and a dog out in the wild. For the first time in her life, my cat started paying attention to the TV...right up until the first commercial break. She started losing interest then, but picked up again when the movie came back on. Each successive commercial break, however, made her lose interest faster, and made her take longer to start watching the movie again. Finally, she walked away from the TV, never again to return.
It took my many years, but finally, I too walked away from the television. The last time I tried watching TV (to see "Enterprise"), the constant and repetitive commercials drove me away after about seven weeks, only watching one hour a week.
So, proof conclusive that cats are smarter than people. =^.~=
"I think the biggest question for widespread use of these things...is power."
I can just see it now...the new, guaranteed weight loss jogging suit.
It'll display whatever you want, as long as you keep pumping those generators on the heels of your shoes. Slow down or stop for too long, and it shuts off and goes transparent. How's _that_ for incentive to keep moving? ^_^
Some points I would use if I were meeting with my Congresscritter would be these:
1.) I would suggest that it is bad legislation that assumes that all users of consumer electronics are such incorrigible pirates that they cannot be trusted with uncrippled equipment. This is akin to saying that cars cannot be equipped with engines, because they might be used to make a getaway, perform a drive-by shooting, or be operated while drunk. All such things may be justification for, say, denying driving rights as a parole condition for a convicted felon, but not limitations assumed to be necessary for the general public. Point out that, the legislation would assume that even the congresscritter him-(or her-)self cannot be trusted with uncrippled technology.
2.) Point out that, with current technology, the creation and distribution of entertainment could become a cottage industry (more likely with music than video, but still). Right now, a talented artist could write, record, and distribute his music without the recording industry's involvement, and I think that scares them more than all the pirates in Southeast Asia. The likely effect of legislation like this is that the ability to create music (or video) that does not have the blessing of the music industry will be made more difficult; the programs and devices to make legal recordings will likely become too expensive for the amateur to purchase, and will likely require some sort of proof that the purchaser is not involved in piracy (after all, involvement in piracy is assumed to be the norm, not the exception; if not, why are they doing this legislation?). By raising the difficulty of content creation, they reduce the likelihood of ever facing decent competition.
Hopefully this will be of use,
Jon "Shimatta" Baxter
Note: IANA Creationist (I used to be, but I'm feeling much better now). I'm more of an origins agnostic; since it really doesn't make any difference what I believe happened back then, I see no need to believe any of it until someone can produce a live, unimpeachable witness. I'm not planning on holding my breath.
This answers my primary objection to evolutionary theory, which coincidentally happens to be the worst bit of sloppy thinking among evolutionists. "Survival of the Fittest", I think, is a marvelously succinct description of entropy acting on living creatures. Those best suited to resisting destruction in a given situation do so. The sloppy thinking comes from the fact that many evolutionist assume the evolutionary mechanism exists, without providing proof; that something is generating countless variations on the theme to continue to have the fittest survive and the not-so-fit weeded out. Minor genetic variations, even by selective breeding, hasn't been capable of jumping the species gap, which the theory of evolution states must have happened, not once or twice, but thousands of times. Until now, the best suggestion I've heard is the "infinite monkeys" theorem (i.e. "given enough time, anything can and will happen," a sloppy application of probability theory). This evidence clearly shows how one could go about jumping from species to species with minimal change and reasonable probability.
My only other objection is minor, but it should be considered: it takes two to tango for many species, so how do you get two or more critters with the same mutation in one place to breed with one another and start a new species? Since our current understanding of genetics indicates that one species cannot breed with another except in limited cases, this is the last question I think evolutionary theory needs to answer before it can truly be considered unassailable. Maybe there's a certain kind of radiation that only borks the Lox genes and maybe a few others, while leaving the rest alone. Maybe aliens did it. Maybe it's all a government conspiracy and the world only existed since last Thursday.
It don't matter to me, no matter what happened way back then, I'm still going to be late to work if I don't hurry. ^_^;;;
A lot of comments I've seen about the Vulcans question (or slam) the tension between them and the humans.
From what I understand about the ST timeline, until Spock came along, Vulcans and Terrans were traditionally segregated. Vulcans served on Vulcan ships, Terrans served on Terran ships. Spock was apparently something of a maverick amongst Vulcans for choosing to go to Starfleet Acadamy instead of a Vulcan school, and then serving on a Terran ship.
As for Vulcans getting irked by humans, well, how long can _anybody_ withstand complete irrationality? I'd wager five bucks that a Vulcan taking Terran tech support calls would go postal within a month. ^_^
Baxter
...that this incident, tragic as it already is, will likely be used over and over to justify whatever the current administration wants through the magic of faulty logic and the phrase "We could have prevented this, if..."
I see a real possibility of a police state being enforced, even if only temporarily.
Wagers, anyone?
Baxter
This is more standard libertarian rhetoric.
s -rhetoric rhetoric.
This is more standard attempt-to-discredit-something-by-dismissing-it-a
Shimatta
Pulse jets are an inefficient design that has been entirely superceded by other engines - but wow.
IANA Rocket (or Jet) Scientist, but off the bat I'd say that these Pulse Jets of his beat the pants off other jet engines in two categories: cost of manufacture and simplicity. So long as other parameters like thrust, weight, economy and whatnot are in a useable range, these pusle jets are viable alternative to more complex jet engines...within the proper niche.
And heck, this guy managed to make significant improvements to the original design all by himself. Who knows what advances might come if a commercial entity invests in the research?
Um...assuming, of course, that the guy hasn't Darwinized himself by then. ^_^;
Shimatta
Hail Eris! All hail Discordia!
If every time your user has a problem, you fix it without explaining what caused it, you're going to potentially decrease the learning rate of your user base. In other words, users will commonly repeat the same mistakes, and you will commonly repeat the same fix.
Maybe, maybe not. In my experience as a tech support agent, I'd run into one of three situations;
1.) The customer has a problem that couldn't be avoided, therefore learning is irrelavent. My best example is Corrupted DUN; occasionally, for no apparent reason (and this was especially true under Winduhs 95), the Dial Up Networking software would become corrupted and have to be uninstalled and reinstalled. The user might have done something to cause it, but generally it was simply unavoidable, so fix it and get on to the next call.
2.) The customer is williing to learn what happened so they can avoid it; usually, if it's a corporate and/or internal customer as is being described in this case, they'll keep in contact with you until it's fixed and want to know what they can do to avoid this. These are the good customers, they realize that even if a problem isn't their fault, there may be something they can do to help prevent it from happening again, as opposed to...
3.) The customer cannot or will not learn. These are the ones that insist it was your fault that the computer stopped working after they deleted vital system files. These are the ones who don't know what a vital system file is and don't care; they just want more disk space. Explanation is futile; the computer will be trashed again in short order. (The worst one of these I ever dealt with was a customer who couldn't even learn that her problem wasn't even an issue for my department; she would continually call us and we'd continually tell her to call the correct department (rumor from the other department had it that she had burned out three of their agents who had been assigned to deal with her personally.))
Types one and two were the most common; type threes were the leading cause of burnout, and tend to be the ones irrevocably seared into the minds of bitter tech support agents. Type threes also tend to be the hardest ones to work with; they will commonly challenge the agent (because they assume they know more, despite all evidence to the contrary) or they're constantly mis-interpreting commands because of lack of familiarity with the system.
If a remote administration program is available and feasible (such as with an internal customer), you can bypass the most significant impediment to finding a solution; the customer. Aside from the massive savings in time and efficiency, there's also the savings in tech support wear and tear. I left a tech support job without having another job lined up because of the stress. By preventing (or at least delaying) the burn out of support agents, the company avoids the hassle of bringing in new agents and training them, as well as the lost productivity of the new agent (when compared to the productivity of the old agent had she not burnt out).
If an agent fixes the problem by remote administration, they should contact the customer, by phone or email, and provide information on what was done, what can be done to avoid it, and possibly instructions so they can fix it themselves in the future. This way, you can avoid the dumbing-down of your customer base.
As for "who would allow this to be installed?", again, look at this with corporate or internal customers; the former may well allow it for the increased speed of troubleshooting and fixing problems, the latter doesn't really have a choice. If the boss says install it, it will be installed. This also eliminates the pornographic background problem; it's not (or shouldn't be) an issue in a corporate environment. (I also question whether that would be sexual harassment; I think it would only qualify if the administratee deliberately put it up to harass the administrator.)
I do have to agree about which contact people would prefer; most would prefer to be on the phone with the agent while it was being repaired. Personally, though, I think the additional efficiency and the saved wear 'n' tear on the agent outweighs this issue.
Just my 96,280 cents (two cents after sales tax added in.)
Jon "Shimatta" Baxter, anyone need a slightly used computer geek?