Yes, but unless you've studied that sort of thing that's not what you're going to think of as efficiency. Efficiency by producing massive power while gulping lots of fuel is very impressive but doesn't actually reduce consumption for this sort of task.
Ahh, yes, but are we talking efficiency in terms of flying hours / miles per unit of fuel, or of kilos of fuel per horse power per hour?
Just that we're used to referring to efficiency in terms of the first but vehicles like that often do well on the second. I believe for a while the Lamborghini Countach qv (around 10mpg) was the most efficient vehicle on the road, by the second metric.
It may have high energy efficiency ratings but if it's doing that by generating massively more power than most actually need, it's no use for this sort of thing.
So why not just give them a life without parole sentence and avoid looking silly?
Can't remember the precise details but I remember once hearing of a jury giving a sentence in the order of 1300 years. This was appealed and the judge agreed it was excessive and dropped it to a mere 800 or so.
If we're heading too far down my justifying this then I'm selling my company's systems on Slashdot which, however proud of them I may be, isn't really the done thing.
Yes, I agree there are things you can do with JavaScript that would cause major problems for blind users.
Yes, for most sites what you're talking about is absolutely right. The only JavaScript most of our client users will ever see is rollovers and form validation.
The bits I'm talking about where JavaScript is absolutely required to make the interfaces work are in complex admin system setup tools that even most administrators would never touch. Perhaps they could be better done through a client application but they actually work perfectly well through a web application and doing that means it can be cross platform (really - we don't just code to or test under IE/Windows), run from any terminal rather than dedicated admin PCs and have a smaller training cycle because we don't have to teach people that they do everything except this one job in a certain way, then flip to something completely different for that bit. We've had to design for systems with blind administrators before and we haven't actually had complaints about this bit, or suggestions that this sort of thing would cause problems. I don't personally know for certain it works but we weren't warned it wouldn't and haven't been told it doesn't.
If you just use 99% of the web (probably a lot more than that, actually...) and just do so as a surfer, not using any apps more complex than webmail, I can see how JavaScript could well appear to have no valid uses beyond form validation and rollovers. For those blips on the bell curve, though, who are running the complex systems that now run over the web as opposed to previous dumb terminal systems and so on, JavaScript gives them a user interface that's just leagues ahead of where it would otherwise be.
Agree in part but where you have a significantly distrubuted client-base then a web app becomes a no-brainer. Lets you treat the PC as a very pretty, fast dumb terminal that can work for almost any user. Believe me, that's enabled functions for end users they couldn't have dreamed of before and flexibility and monitoring that the administrators couldn't have either. And you can't always run applets or install client software - sometimes, sure, but very often you don't have sufficient control over even the admin userbase. Hence we use JS...
I'm not talking about apps that replace Office here - that sort of thing makes no sense as a web app but there are plenty of distributed services that we can now do online that are very valuable.
Oops, rereading both my posts there's some unclear language there.
Users in the first meant people who use such applications in general. Users in the second meant ordinary site users, rather than people responsible for managing and administering such systems.
In the first case I have yet to set up a system that required JS for an interface to work in any more than a trivial sense - I can think of one case but that was only for a small minority of users.
In the second, the control required over the system can very easily be sufficiently large to either require a dynamic interface (even if we're just talking sections disabling each other or pre-calculating data) or significantly complicate the administration process. We go for the second, based on the viewpoint that it makes their life easier, shuts out a very, very small number of people and in any case the only users are a relatively small, tightly defined group who have responsibility for using the system. As such it's not inappropriate to specify a baseline requirement such as this.
For reference, I've never had a problem reported where users couldn't do something because they didn't have JavaScript running.
User screens I agree, I can't think of anything we've done that's fundamentally dependent on JavaScript - it might be a bit ugly but it should work.
Admin screens for system configuration, though, can require more options than is practical to have on a single page form, or some that are redundant if others are selected. I've therefore written such pages that use JavaScript to do all sorts of things to make interface elements appear and disappear based on selections or actions.
Users you have to be very, very tolerant of funny PCs (though stats show that the overwhelming majority have JavaScript running very happily, thank you, on IE5.5+). Admins are limited in number and have to use your code for their job. As long as you're sensible with setting up a proper system that works reliably and specify their requirements clearly, I have no problem whatsoever with making their life easier and stopping them entering contradictory data using JavaScript to maniuplate the form. Anyway, if it has to continually bounce back and forth to the server to dynamically redraw the interface then there's potentially a lot of requests and data transfer that can be eliminated just by doing the interface differently. Seems a sensible tradeoff to me (and yes, there are corporate systems with bandwidth limited enough that makes a difference).
As a web application programmer, yes, users of complex web apps benefit significantly from JavaScript because it means we can write interfaces that allow the sort of complexity you need to do some of the bigger jobs without having whole hosts of different screens to click through.
I've not put myself on any tests but I can certainly hear _very_ high frequency sounds. My plasma ball sounds like someone shaking around a ball full of polystyrene beads, then starts humming quite loudly when you put your hand on it. I can clearly hear the difference between a TV displaying a moving picture, a constant blank screen and white noise even when there's _no_ sound output. White noise is pretty irritating. I can hear when I turn my Psion 5mx on and off, even with the backlight off (backlight is much noisier). My dad used to have an old Canon desktop photocopier - I could hear very clearly when he left it on from the next room, which saved it getting left on overnight on several occasions. Ditto with an old 24" telly we used to have in my office. I haven't been in a position to test it for ages but I know I used to be able to hear dog whistles. Probably not in the same way as dogs because I didn't find them especially irritating but they were clearly audible. I can't hear bats, thank goodness.
Guess what? This is irritating. The sound isn't pleasant, it doesn't have any musical qualities and it's not a deliberate effect from the musician. It's a side effect that can creep through on some things because most people wouldn't notice it.
I tend to perceive electronic sources of such noise as relatively quiet - I can only hear the plasma ball over the TV or CDs on quiet passages, for example - but from that old telly I have to assume that's mostly because the sources tend to be inherently quiet. That could drive me to distraction from several metres away through a wall and a closed door while the rest of the office didn't even notice it. A recording method that filters this sort of thing out is absolutely wonderful from my point of view because it means that an annoyance to me can't creep through simply because the engineers can't hear it and I'm one of the 'lucky' people at the end of the bell curve in hearing.
Just because many don't complain doesn't mean they're not being disadvantaged. I could steal 10 pence a day from you and you probably wouldn't notice. Does that mean my theft would be permissible?
Impartial, informed observers have been saying for a very long time that Microsoft are a monopoly and illegally maintain this. That a major customer of theirs (HP, I believe) felt strongly enough that they disliked dealing with Microsoft sufficiently to go on record as stating that if they had alternative suppliers, they would deal with them instead, is surely a strong indication of Microsoft's nature. As is Microsoft feeling able to pressure IBM into dropping OS/2 and later SmartSuite through preferential pricing on Windows. Surely if there existed a sufficiently realistic competitive market in computer software, such tactics would have merely driven up sales of OS/2? It's not like it wasn't getting good reviews at the time.
Microsoft are a monopoly in the legal sense, and there can be no doubt that they have significantly abused this to the detriment of both consumers and the industry as a whole to anyone who followed the trial. That users are too apathetic and uninformed to understand they have lost out is not a defence against the monopoly charge, merely and indictment of the popular media and Microsoft's few remaining competitors.
Picked up a new mouse for a colleague earlier this week - one of those tiny laptop mice, that's what he wanted. Twit:-)
Anyway, they're putting big stickers on it indicating that because it was Microsoft hardware it would work better and more reliably with Microsoft software. On a _mouse_....
Bounces - er, yes, I'd more want to bounce cases of people who are sending from legit addresses but just _will_ _not_ unsub me from their lists, which I get a reasonable amount of. The pure spam that's coming through forged addresses is certainly a waste of time to bounce.
I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong with my Bayesian filters.
Running Moz1.4. It's collecting from two accounts, one of which can easily hit 70 spam a day so it gets plenty of information to work from. I've got a bunch of keyword matches to catch anyone mentioning viagra, webcams and so on. _All_ misses are getting marked and deleted, all false positives are getting unmarked and dealt with as necessary.
To top it off, I've never been very good at remembering to empty trashcans so I trained it on that too at the start. You can probably account for 5k messages of training in that one batch, and a mixture of spam and ham.
It's never got more than about 1% false positive rate though it doesn't seem to be getting any at the moment. It's only averaging about 70-80% spam detection maximum, though. Mails in non-European character sets get through, mails that are almost identical to ones that get caught get through. I get Viagra, Xenical, 401s, all manner of types of porn spam all missed.
Now, don't get me wrong, keyword filters were down to around 15% catch rates so I'm still delighted with 70-80%. But when I keep hearing about high 90s from other users - how, exactly? I don't get sent much HTML mail or any mail at all on pharmaceuticals, porn, dodgy information on CD and so on that isn't spam. So it's not like it's got an impossible task to judge the content and it's been being trained at over 70 a day average (guessing) since within a week of Moz1.4 launching, plus a big load on historic mail that was manually checked and corrected.
So why the heck am I getting so many more spams through my filter than most users? And why didn't they put a keyboard shortcut in place for marking as spam? Would make my life easier...
(FWIW, I still want to go for a proxy client approach and will as soon as I get the chance. I want to be able to _bounce_ spam - that'll learn 'em.)
What kind of jet engine are you using that's got a magneto or needs a spark? Or, what kind of piston-engined plane are you flying that has fly-by-wire?
How many hundred full-colour pages a year do you print that you can make your money back on a $1500 printer over a $100 on the cost of the ink refils?
Have to agree with the parent, though - just got a Canon i350 and it's great. The one piece of printer advice I always give people is to avoid Lexmark because of their astronomical running costs.
We had _one_ at my old school. I remember it as being slightly higher than the keyboard but maybe we had different model keyboards to you.
The problem _we_ had was that the button was positioned just underneat the right-hand end of the floppy drive. The number of people who forgot Macs did software eject and tried to eject disks by giving the power button a good hard shove...
Already have with me. Got the new Deep Purple and Iron Maiden albums, only to discover they were protected.
I wasn't told before I was sold them (bought them over the web) and I'm fuming. Soon as I've got a few minutes to draft a letter, the shop who sold them to me are getting pointed out that they've violated the trades descriptions act, while the bands get pointed out that I basically can't listen to these by the way I listen to almost all my music. If all music comes this way, I just stop being able to listen to new music and stop buying CDs. Doesn't help them in the least.
I was very disappointed with Radio 4 this morning covering this but not thinking to discuss that this means MS are stopping a free service, getting good publicity for themselves for free and instantly bashing all their competitors by implication. Oh, and getting referred to as a 'leading internet provider' in the UK where MSN don't operate.
This is very nasty marketing from MS, definitely increases the risk to children and should have got them shouted at loudly.
They don't take money from companies and the don't take money from unions. Bang, out of the window goes the major source of corruption and political cynicism.
Seriously, this confuses people, but my _desktop_ PC uses a trackpad. It's built in to the keyboard and it's absolutely fantastic. No more stretching my shoulder all the way out there for the mouse (seriously, hold it there for a minute or so and feel the tension building) and no more reorienting your hands constantly as you move between devices. Plus, once you're past the initial orientation phase and have the speed set right, it's just way better for GUI stuff. No, you can't paint or play Quake with it but I'm not doing them most of the time and for them, I've got mice. Just swap them over.
Made by BTC of Taiwan (http://www.btc.com.tw/). Sadly they don't seem to do them any more but if you ever catch one or something similar, pounce on it! I've got two, one for home and one for the office, and both have surivived 3 years of heavy use without complaint. Honestly, it's a normal desktop keyboard but with a trackpad below the spacebar and I can't imagine going back to anything else now.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but unless you've studied that sort of thing that's not what you're going to think of as efficiency. Efficiency by producing massive power while gulping lots of fuel is very impressive but doesn't actually reduce consumption for this sort of task.
Ahh, yes, but are we talking efficiency in terms of flying hours / miles per unit of fuel, or of kilos of fuel per horse power per hour?
Just that we're used to referring to efficiency in terms of the first but vehicles like that often do well on the second. I believe for a while the Lamborghini Countach qv (around 10mpg) was the most efficient vehicle on the road, by the second metric.
It may have high energy efficiency ratings but if it's doing that by generating massively more power than most actually need, it's no use for this sort of thing.
So why not just give them a life without parole sentence and avoid looking silly?
Can't remember the precise details but I remember once hearing of a jury giving a sentence in the order of 1300 years. This was appealed and the judge agreed it was excessive and dropped it to a mere 800 or so.
Now, how does this help respect of the law?
Input I understand but _throughput_? That sounds nasty.
If we're heading too far down my justifying this then I'm selling my company's systems on Slashdot which, however proud of them I may be, isn't really the done thing.
Yes, I agree there are things you can do with JavaScript that would cause major problems for blind users.
Yes, for most sites what you're talking about is absolutely right. The only JavaScript most of our client users will ever see is rollovers and form validation.
The bits I'm talking about where JavaScript is absolutely required to make the interfaces work are in complex admin system setup tools that even most administrators would never touch. Perhaps they could be better done through a client application but they actually work perfectly well through a web application and doing that means it can be cross platform (really - we don't just code to or test under IE/Windows), run from any terminal rather than dedicated admin PCs and have a smaller training cycle because we don't have to teach people that they do everything except this one job in a certain way, then flip to something completely different for that bit. We've had to design for systems with blind administrators before and we haven't actually had complaints about this bit, or suggestions that this sort of thing would cause problems. I don't personally know for certain it works but we weren't warned it wouldn't and haven't been told it doesn't.
If you just use 99% of the web (probably a lot more than that, actually...) and just do so as a surfer, not using any apps more complex than webmail, I can see how JavaScript could well appear to have no valid uses beyond form validation and rollovers. For those blips on the bell curve, though, who are running the complex systems that now run over the web as opposed to previous dumb terminal systems and so on, JavaScript gives them a user interface that's just leagues ahead of where it would otherwise be.
Agree in part but where you have a significantly distrubuted client-base then a web app becomes a no-brainer. Lets you treat the PC as a very pretty, fast dumb terminal that can work for almost any user. Believe me, that's enabled functions for end users they couldn't have dreamed of before and flexibility and monitoring that the administrators couldn't have either. And you can't always run applets or install client software - sometimes, sure, but very often you don't have sufficient control over even the admin userbase. Hence we use JS...
I'm not talking about apps that replace Office here - that sort of thing makes no sense as a web app but there are plenty of distributed services that we can now do online that are very valuable.
Oops, rereading both my posts there's some unclear language there.
Users in the first meant people who use such applications in general. Users in the second meant ordinary site users, rather than people responsible for managing and administering such systems.
In the first case I have yet to set up a system that required JS for an interface to work in any more than a trivial sense - I can think of one case but that was only for a small minority of users.
In the second, the control required over the system can very easily be sufficiently large to either require a dynamic interface (even if we're just talking sections disabling each other or pre-calculating data) or significantly complicate the administration process. We go for the second, based on the viewpoint that it makes their life easier, shuts out a very, very small number of people and in any case the only users are a relatively small, tightly defined group who have responsibility for using the system. As such it's not inappropriate to specify a baseline requirement such as this.
For reference, I've never had a problem reported where users couldn't do something because they didn't have JavaScript running.
User screens I agree, I can't think of anything we've done that's fundamentally dependent on JavaScript - it might be a bit ugly but it should work.
Admin screens for system configuration, though, can require more options than is practical to have on a single page form, or some that are redundant if others are selected. I've therefore written such pages that use JavaScript to do all sorts of things to make interface elements appear and disappear based on selections or actions.
Users you have to be very, very tolerant of funny PCs (though stats show that the overwhelming majority have JavaScript running very happily, thank you, on IE5.5+). Admins are limited in number and have to use your code for their job. As long as you're sensible with setting up a proper system that works reliably and specify their requirements clearly, I have no problem whatsoever with making their life easier and stopping them entering contradictory data using JavaScript to maniuplate the form. Anyway, if it has to continually bounce back and forth to the server to dynamically redraw the interface then there's potentially a lot of requests and data transfer that can be eliminated just by doing the interface differently. Seems a sensible tradeoff to me (and yes, there are corporate systems with bandwidth limited enough that makes a difference).
As a web application programmer, yes, users of complex web apps benefit significantly from JavaScript because it means we can write interfaces that allow the sort of complexity you need to do some of the bigger jobs without having whole hosts of different screens to click through.
I've not put myself on any tests but I can certainly hear _very_ high frequency sounds. My plasma ball sounds like someone shaking around a ball full of polystyrene beads, then starts humming quite loudly when you put your hand on it. I can clearly hear the difference between a TV displaying a moving picture, a constant blank screen and white noise even when there's _no_ sound output. White noise is pretty irritating. I can hear when I turn my Psion 5mx on and off, even with the backlight off (backlight is much noisier). My dad used to have an old Canon desktop photocopier - I could hear very clearly when he left it on from the next room, which saved it getting left on overnight on several occasions. Ditto with an old 24" telly we used to have in my office. I haven't been in a position to test it for ages but I know I used to be able to hear dog whistles. Probably not in the same way as dogs because I didn't find them especially irritating but they were clearly audible. I can't hear bats, thank goodness.
Guess what? This is irritating. The sound isn't pleasant, it doesn't have any musical qualities and it's not a deliberate effect from the musician. It's a side effect that can creep through on some things because most people wouldn't notice it.
I tend to perceive electronic sources of such noise as relatively quiet - I can only hear the plasma ball over the TV or CDs on quiet passages, for example - but from that old telly I have to assume that's mostly because the sources tend to be inherently quiet. That could drive me to distraction from several metres away through a wall and a closed door while the rest of the office didn't even notice it. A recording method that filters this sort of thing out is absolutely wonderful from my point of view because it means that an annoyance to me can't creep through simply because the engineers can't hear it and I'm one of the 'lucky' people at the end of the bell curve in hearing.
Just because many don't complain doesn't mean they're not being disadvantaged. I could steal 10 pence a day from you and you probably wouldn't notice. Does that mean my theft would be permissible?
Impartial, informed observers have been saying for a very long time that Microsoft are a monopoly and illegally maintain this. That a major customer of theirs (HP, I believe) felt strongly enough that they disliked dealing with Microsoft sufficiently to go on record as stating that if they had alternative suppliers, they would deal with them instead, is surely a strong indication of Microsoft's nature. As is Microsoft feeling able to pressure IBM into dropping OS/2 and later SmartSuite through preferential pricing on Windows. Surely if there existed a sufficiently realistic competitive market in computer software, such tactics would have merely driven up sales of OS/2? It's not like it wasn't getting good reviews at the time.
Microsoft are a monopoly in the legal sense, and there can be no doubt that they have significantly abused this to the detriment of both consumers and the industry as a whole to anyone who followed the trial. That users are too apathetic and uninformed to understand they have lost out is not a defence against the monopoly charge, merely and indictment of the popular media and Microsoft's few remaining competitors.
Picked up a new mouse for a colleague earlier this week - one of those tiny laptop mice, that's what he wanted. Twit :-)
Anyway, they're putting big stickers on it indicating that because it was Microsoft hardware it would work better and more reliably with Microsoft software. On a _mouse_....
I would gladly use the mirrors, if any of them actually had 1.5 release available...
Oh well. 1.4's running just fine over here anyway.
Bounces - er, yes, I'd more want to bounce cases of people who are sending from legit addresses but just _will_ _not_ unsub me from their lists, which I get a reasonable amount of. The pure spam that's coming through forged addresses is certainly a waste of time to bounce.
I'd love to know what I'm doing wrong with my Bayesian filters.
Running Moz1.4. It's collecting from two accounts, one of which can easily hit 70 spam a day so it gets plenty of information to work from. I've got a bunch of keyword matches to catch anyone mentioning viagra, webcams and so on. _All_ misses are getting marked and deleted, all false positives are getting unmarked and dealt with as necessary.
To top it off, I've never been very good at remembering to empty trashcans so I trained it on that too at the start. You can probably account for 5k messages of training in that one batch, and a mixture of spam and ham.
It's never got more than about 1% false positive rate though it doesn't seem to be getting any at the moment. It's only averaging about 70-80% spam detection maximum, though. Mails in non-European character sets get through, mails that are almost identical to ones that get caught get through. I get Viagra, Xenical, 401s, all manner of types of porn spam all missed.
Now, don't get me wrong, keyword filters were down to around 15% catch rates so I'm still delighted with 70-80%. But when I keep hearing about high 90s from other users - how, exactly? I don't get sent much HTML mail or any mail at all on pharmaceuticals, porn, dodgy information on CD and so on that isn't spam. So it's not like it's got an impossible task to judge the content and it's been being trained at over 70 a day average (guessing) since within a week of Moz1.4 launching, plus a big load on historic mail that was manually checked and corrected.
So why the heck am I getting so many more spams through my filter than most users? And why didn't they put a keyboard shortcut in place for marking as spam? Would make my life easier...
(FWIW, I still want to go for a proxy client approach and will as soon as I get the chance. I want to be able to _bounce_ spam - that'll learn 'em.)
What kind of jet engine are you using that's got a magneto or needs a spark? Or, what kind of piston-engined plane are you flying that has fly-by-wire?
I'll agree and was thinking along the same lines myself - until, just before the old colour printer died on me, I got a digital camera...
:-)
Drat, drat, drat
Ahh, I'll give you that then but you're hardly a typical domestic user then are you? :-)
How many hundred full-colour pages a year do you print that you can make your money back on a $1500 printer over a $100 on the cost of the ink refils?
Have to agree with the parent, though - just got a Canon i350 and it's great. The one piece of printer advice I always give people is to avoid Lexmark because of their astronomical running costs.
Aha! Someone else had to support them!
We had _one_ at my old school. I remember it as being slightly higher than the keyboard but maybe we had different model keyboards to you.
The problem _we_ had was that the button was positioned just underneat the right-hand end of the floppy drive. The number of people who forgot Macs did software eject and tried to eject disks by giving the power button a good hard shove...
Already have with me. Got the new Deep Purple and Iron Maiden albums, only to discover they were protected.
I wasn't told before I was sold them (bought them over the web) and I'm fuming. Soon as I've got a few minutes to draft a letter, the shop who sold them to me are getting pointed out that they've violated the trades descriptions act, while the bands get pointed out that I basically can't listen to these by the way I listen to almost all my music. If all music comes this way, I just stop being able to listen to new music and stop buying CDs. Doesn't help them in the least.
Exactly.
I was very disappointed with Radio 4 this morning covering this but not thinking to discuss that this means MS are stopping a free service, getting good publicity for themselves for free and instantly bashing all their competitors by implication. Oh, and getting referred to as a 'leading internet provider' in the UK where MSN don't operate.
This is very nasty marketing from MS, definitely increases the risk to children and should have got them shouted at loudly.
Yet one more reason why I vote LibDem.
They don't take money from companies and the don't take money from unions. Bang, out of the window goes the major source of corruption and political cynicism.
Seriously, this confuses people, but my _desktop_ PC uses a trackpad. It's built in to the keyboard and it's absolutely fantastic. No more stretching my shoulder all the way out there for the mouse (seriously, hold it there for a minute or so and feel the tension building) and no more reorienting your hands constantly as you move between devices. Plus, once you're past the initial orientation phase and have the speed set right, it's just way better for GUI stuff. No, you can't paint or play Quake with it but I'm not doing them most of the time and for them, I've got mice. Just swap them over.
Made by BTC of Taiwan (http://www.btc.com.tw/). Sadly they don't seem to do them any more but if you ever catch one or something similar, pounce on it! I've got two, one for home and one for the office, and both have surivived 3 years of heavy use without complaint. Honestly, it's a normal desktop keyboard but with a trackpad below the spacebar and I can't imagine going back to anything else now.
CU Amiga gave it high 70s percent but yes, the heading allowed for hype as well as excessive reviewing.