You're gonna get flamed, but there's a lot of truth there. I use OOo, but it makes me cuss a lot. Last night my wife was fighting with it trying to make email addresses not be mailto links without losing other formatting. It's possible, but you feel dirty afterwards. Taming numbered lists is way more work than they're worth. Moving text while keeping formatting intact without using sacrificial paragraphs is next to impossible. Whoever thought deleting a paragraph mark should produce different results from backspacing away the same paragraph mark is a prime candidate for a severe re-education program.
There's a lot of good technology in there, and I remain stubbornly hopeful that the LibreOffice effort will make it more usable. Until then, I'll put up with the serious usability issues.
"Why not zero spaces?"
Seriously, there's this guy who works in another building on our campus.He uses zero spaces between sentences.Whenever I see email from him I get angry.It's gotten to the point where I'm thinking where his building is would make a nice meteor crater.I know that's not healthy thinking.Zero spaces after sentences is annoying as all get out.
Ill challenge the notion that end-users will need retraining. Have you tried to use anything under a Linux Desktop? There would not need to be any retraining as it works the same as the XP, 2000, etc. desktop.
Sure it does. If all you do is click on the little icon on the desktop. I hope you like tickets, because you are going to get a hell of a lot.
Of course he won't get a lot of tickets. He's not porting the icon users use to create tickets! (That would be crazy.)
We (Americans) don't have to apply to grad school to keep up the rate of higher-ed citizens, because half of all those foreign students will end up being Americans anyway.
American isn't an ethnicity. We are the Borg. You are assimilating yourselves.
I hate to bust the bubble, but when I was an undergraduate (around 1979), I was going through a bunch of old Popular Science magazines in the campus library. They had a page that highlighted stuff from their magazine 25, 50, and 75 years ago. So this was almost 30 years ago now, and I believe the entry was in their "50 years ago" section in what was already an old copy of Popular Science. The entry showed a 5 bladed razor that the inventor (who was French if I recall correctly) claimed gave a much cleaner, closer shave that a single bladed razor. The illustration reminded me very much of the Trac-II I used back then, only with three more blades.
I'd love to be able to find that article again. Prior art and all that.
-- and potentially put the U.S. at risk of falling behind the rest of the world.
It was good right up to that last bit. He managed to shake the communism/capitalism black&white thing, but he's still got this "end-of-the-world = U.S. falling behind" problem.
The world is round. The U.S. is behind the rest of the world once a day -- at local midnight. At local noon, it's in front. The rest of the time it's either moving to the front or to the back. Why do so many otherwise smart people fail to realize this?
cAPSlOCK sHOULD rELEASE lIKE tYPRWRITERS
on
Is Caps Lock Dead?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
If you've ever forgotten that your CapsLock key is on, then you have probably created phrases like "dEAR sIRS." The only time I encounter the DOS use-the-shift-key-and-get-lower-case-letters feature is when I want an upper-case letter and I've forgotten that the CapsLock is on. So I have to delete, retype, and then recover my train of thought. This is one of those rare cases in which the computer really should have known what I meant.
The article included a TSR for DOS that would make a shifted letter (1) turn off CapsLock and (2) give you a capital letter. Typewriters worked this way for years, and with that TSR, so did computers running DOS.
Alas, when Windows came out, the TSR no longer worked, and I've been cUSSING aBOUT IT eVER sINCE.
Not that any of you should care, but here's what I posted to their comment site:
Going to the moon only makes sense in the context of getting raw
materials. Building ships or habitats or almost any other activity
would be a lot easier off the moon, probably at one of the libration
points.
People going to Mars doesn't make any sense unless they intend to
stay for good. If getting people back is part of the plan, then send
them to the asteroids instead. Much easier to get there, easier to
get back from, and probably easier to exploit for raw materials than
the moon, frankly.
In fact, if you're going to the moon for raw materials to build with
in high Earth orbit, it might be easier to swipe a few asteroids and
bring them back to a libration point manufacturing facility than to
bring the equivalent material up from the moon.
But Mars is not a stepping stone to anywhere; it's a destination.
Only, there's nothing to do on Mars that couldn't be better done in
Arizona.
The same could be said for the moon, except it's easier to lift raw
materials from the moon than from Mars or Earth. But that assumes
you figure out what to do with raw materials in space.
If you aren't going to figure out how to process raw materials in
bulk in space, then quit sending people. At a billion bucks a pop,
Man in Space only makes makes sense if he's building something
there.
In no case should you drop stuff down a gravity well (moon, Mars, or
Earth for that matter) unless it's going to help you get materials
back up.
Man's future in space is basically about moving materials; down is
an expense, up is an investment, construction is accrued value. The
net worth of the whole endeavor then becomes a pretty simple
equation.
(ps: I had to promise my mother I wouldn't go to the moon as long as
she was alive. She's doing okay at 72, so I can wait a little
longer.)
"...may affect whether technology companies can be held liable for their customers' behavior."
Gee, why not make the power companies responsible for their customers' behavior, too? (I guess there could be an exemption in cases where the power was used to charge a battery that was later used for bad behavior.) What about when people conspire to commit a crime while talking over the phone? Is the phone co. supposed to listen in and report everybody? Or is it just another utility?
I don't know how Linus maintains his humility, but it must really kick butt to have your pet Uni project running in a gazillion devices all over the planet. Of the several projects I did in my free time in college, _none_ of them are running in cell phones. (Of course, they were done on punch cards, but still.)
I wonder if Linux would have caught on if Linus had been named Frank. Would anyone have been interested in working with/on an OS called "Franx?"
Hey, if this is off topic, call me on my Linux powered cell phone (as soon as I get one) and tell me all about it.:-)
I made a version of this page that colors all the numbers from green (good) through white (mean) to red (bad) instead of just the outlyers. If you're interested, check out my version of the bonnie results.
I went to saa e PNG thet would ba used by whetavar thay usa to post storias to sleshdot thet will taka tha pleca of then end than end meka tham hot pink, so whan thay raviaw en erticla thay heva to meka sura ell tha as end es era right.
I not trolling per se, I'm just trolling in general...
Branch out a little and try to wrap/warp your mind around The Eyre Affair [Jasper Fforde, US softback edition Published by Penguin, February 2003], a history bending retro Sci-Fi romp through yesterday's future with Thursday Next, the Special Operations investigator who's trying to save some of the world's seminal literature from having never been written.
Who wrote Shakespeare? Who Invented the banana? What really happens when a bookworm farts? Don't read this book unless you want to find out.
man couldn't be genetically engineered by aliens
on
Starcraft
·
· Score: 5, Funny
among other things, the author claims that modern man was genetically engineered by aliens.
That couldn't be the case; it would
violate the prime directive!
Slashdot Mirror
You're gonna get flamed, but there's a lot of truth there. I use OOo, but it makes me cuss a lot. Last night my wife was fighting with it trying to make email addresses not be mailto links without losing other formatting. It's possible, but you feel dirty afterwards. Taming numbered lists is way more work than they're worth. Moving text while keeping formatting intact without using sacrificial paragraphs is next to impossible. Whoever thought deleting a paragraph mark should produce different results from backspacing away the same paragraph mark is a prime candidate for a severe re-education program.
There's a lot of good technology in there, and I remain stubbornly hopeful that the LibreOffice effort will make it more usable. Until then, I'll put up with the serious usability issues.
[1] Note that Shakespearing is cool.
"Why not zero spaces?" Seriously, there's this guy who works in another building on our campus.He uses zero spaces between sentences.Whenever I see email from him I get angry.It's gotten to the point where I'm thinking where his building is would make a nice meteor crater.I know that's not healthy thinking.Zero spaces after sentences is annoying as all get out.
Ill challenge the notion that end-users will need retraining. Have you tried to use anything under a Linux Desktop? There would not need to be any retraining as it works the same as the XP, 2000, etc. desktop.
Sure it does. If all you do is click on the little icon on the desktop. I hope you like tickets, because you are going to get a hell of a lot.
Of course he won't get a lot of tickets. He's not porting the icon users use to create tickets! (That would be crazy.)
Course he won't! We're not porting over the icon you click on to create a ticket.
Browse to http://searchredirect.windstream.net./ Select "Opt Out of this Service" on the bottom right corner of the page.
It's this back and forth that makes me wonder if we'll ever get or stay married.
I bet you will. You'll probably even like each other's spouses.
And then I fell on the floor and rebooted.
Please don't do that to me again.
While they're at it, I wish they would teach "subject /verb agreement" a little more. Reading that blurb was... painful.
Judging by the headline, it must be "s".
We (Americans) don't have to apply to grad school to keep up the rate of higher-ed citizens, because half of all those foreign students will end up being Americans anyway.
American isn't an ethnicity. We are the Borg. You are assimilating yourselves.
I swear I heard horses twice when I read the blurb. Something about that lawyer's name... Hmmm.
I hate to bust the bubble, but when I was an undergraduate (around 1979), I was going through a bunch of old Popular Science magazines in the campus library. They had a page that highlighted stuff from their magazine 25, 50, and 75 years ago. So this was almost 30 years ago now, and I believe the entry was in their "50 years ago" section in what was already an old copy of Popular Science. The entry showed a 5 bladed razor that the inventor (who was French if I recall correctly) claimed gave a much cleaner, closer shave that a single bladed razor. The illustration reminded me very much of the Trac-II I used back then, only with three more blades.
I'd love to be able to find that article again. Prior art and all that.
Of course Moore's Law is dead. And I predict that in 18 months it will be twice as dead.
It was good right up to that last bit. He managed to shake the communism/capitalism black&white thing, but he's still got this "end-of-the-world = U.S. falling behind" problem.
The world is round. The U.S. is behind the rest of the world once a day -- at local midnight. At local noon, it's in front. The rest of the time it's either moving to the front or to the back. Why do so many otherwise smart people fail to realize this?
Alas, when Windows came out, the TSR no longer worked, and I've been cUSSING aBOUT IT eVER sINCE.
Not that any of you should care, but here's what I posted to their comment site:
Going to the moon only makes sense in the context of getting raw materials. Building ships or habitats or almost any other activity would be a lot easier off the moon, probably at one of the libration points.
People going to Mars doesn't make any sense unless they intend to stay for good. If getting people back is part of the plan, then send them to the asteroids instead. Much easier to get there, easier to get back from, and probably easier to exploit for raw materials than the moon, frankly.
In fact, if you're going to the moon for raw materials to build with in high Earth orbit, it might be easier to swipe a few asteroids and bring them back to a libration point manufacturing facility than to bring the equivalent material up from the moon.
But Mars is not a stepping stone to anywhere; it's a destination. Only, there's nothing to do on Mars that couldn't be better done in Arizona.
The same could be said for the moon, except it's easier to lift raw materials from the moon than from Mars or Earth. But that assumes you figure out what to do with raw materials in space.
If you aren't going to figure out how to process raw materials in bulk in space, then quit sending people. At a billion bucks a pop, Man in Space only makes makes sense if he's building something there.
In no case should you drop stuff down a gravity well (moon, Mars, or Earth for that matter) unless it's going to help you get materials back up.
Man's future in space is basically about moving materials; down is an expense, up is an investment, construction is accrued value. The net worth of the whole endeavor then becomes a pretty simple equation.
(ps: I had to promise my mother I wouldn't go to the moon as long as she was alive. She's doing okay at 72, so I can wait a little longer.)
Gee, why not make the power companies responsible for their customers' behavior, too? (I guess there could be an exemption in cases where the power was used to charge a battery that was later used for bad behavior.) What about when people conspire to commit a crime while talking over the phone? Is the phone co. supposed to listen in and report everybody? Or is it just another utility?
I don't know how Linus maintains his humility, but it must really kick butt to have your pet Uni project running in a gazillion devices all over the planet. Of the several projects I did in my free time in college, _none_ of them are running in cell phones. (Of course, they were done on punch cards, but still.)
I wonder if Linux would have caught on if Linus had been named Frank. Would anyone have been interested in working with/on an OS called "Franx?"
Hey, if this is off topic, call me on my Linux powered cell phone (as soon as I get one) and tell me all about it.:-)
Of course it should be animated, but PNG doesn't support animations.
...but here's an animated .gif of Eric's glider that should do the trick. (GIFs are legal now, right?)
I made a version of this page that colors all the numbers from green (good) through white (mean) to red (bad) instead of just the outlyers. If you're interested, check out my version of the bonnie results.
I went to saa e PNG thet would ba used by whetavar thay usa to post storias to sleshdot thet will taka tha pleca of then end than end meka tham hot pink, so whan thay raviaw en erticla thay heva to meka sura ell tha as end es era right.
I not trolling per se, I'm just trolling in general...
Who wrote Shakespeare? Who Invented the banana? What really happens when a bookworm farts? Don't read this book unless you want to find out.
That couldn't be the case; it would violate the prime directive!
No kidding. I didn't know you would need heavy gloves for a PDA, but I'm not surprised trying to run one ("ran" one?) would be a waste of time.
Picking nits for fun and pleasure. Move along.