Careysub, let me ask you directly the question I ask in another posting above: how did your child react to the Journal?
Was she able to use it to find things? Did she type in her own tags and descriptions? Was my own failure to get the Journal to work for me just a result of my brain ossifying with age... was there something there to "get" that I just didn't get?
The meta-idea of rethinking UI from the ground up, and building something specifically directed at kids, was a wonderful idea. Frankly, the reason I bought a G1G1 machine was that I hoped to experience a fresh and wonderful user interface.
I think Sugar was a sad failure. I don't quite know what to make of the obvious riposte that I don't belong to the target audience. But an awful lot of the official Sugar documentation seemed to me to make too much use of "proof by repeated assertion." A file system organized primarily by recency (the Journal) instead of space (the Apple pre-OS-X Finder) or nested hierarchy (pre-GUI)? Wow, what a strange idea. What a fresh idea. I couldn't imagine how it could work, but all these people said it did, so after giving up on imagining it I paid $400 to experience it. Well, it sure didn't work for me.
And the claim that it works for kids because they "naturally describe what they are doing"--sorry, I just don't believe nine-year-old kids are going to type text tags and descriptions into every Journal entry so that they can find them again. Subject to correction by anyone who's actually watched real nine-year-olds playing with an XO and seen them tag and describe Journal entries, but the last several times I asked this online nobody said they had.
UI design seems to me to have peaked sometime in the early 1980s, when computer companies still needed to seduce laypersons who weren't already trained on computer usage. As "computer literacy" became more and more of a career necessity, computer companies were able to get away with more and more complexity. For me, an important downward turning point occurred when Microsoft violated Apple's UI guidelines, which stated that documents should always re-open with the insertion point positioned where it was when the document was closed--a special instance of the principle that things should stay where you put them. Microsoft couldn't be bothered; with Word, like Sisyphus, you always start with your insertion point once again having rolled down to the bottom of the hill. Other companies, eventually including Apple, followed suit, and this minor but significant point of UI design was lost, along with many others.
A fresh look at UI design is desperately needed. UI design is now in the hands of power-user snobs who revel in their ability to handle complexity. Ordinary people resign themselves to forever feeling that "I'm just a dummy when it comes to computers." The world desperately needs a user interface so simple a child could use it. A pity that Sugar isn't it.
1) For the record, all the optometrists I go to, and I thought most professional eyecare specialists, do use computerized systems that generate random charts (or at least many different charts). The only places I see the classic Snellen chart are in places like primary-care offices where they are just doing rough screenings.
2) Even if you don't look it up in Wikipedia, are you telling me that I'm the only person in the world who has learned that the 20/20 line is "DEFPOTEC" without even trying, just from being told to read it so many times? I mean, it's even pronounceable.
In Feist versus Rural Telephone Company, the court commented that copyright protects originality, not hard work. If the purpose of a photograph is to be a faithful rendition of a painting, how can it possibly have copyright protection? It does not add anything creative to the painting. It does not riff on it, it does not create a derivative work. The more effort that is expended on it, the more it becomes a high-fidelity copy of the original, and common sense says that would make it even less copyrightable than an amateur snapshot, that might "creatively" include keystone distortion or a bit of the frame or reflections off the glass.
The innumerable _parodies_ of, say, Grant Wood's "American Gothic" are surely copyrightable. But if a faithful copy of the original can be copyrighted, this is something new and pernicious in the world.
The earliest publication to the general lay public that I personally know of is their presentation on pages 118-127 of William Poundstone's book Big Secrets, Quill, 1983, ISBN 0-688-04830-7.
In other words, they were out there before the Web was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye.
Memo to "some" in the US and South Korean governments: so please be careful in future of making loose claims about North Korea doing bad stuff, unless you're sure. We don't need any Gulf of Tonkins and mobile bacteriological weapons labs. Wars have been started over less; indeed, two have. North Korea is scary enough; let's not start seeing it behind every tree.
I wondered what sorts of ads Google would put in Tom Sawyer. Cave tours? Paint companies? Anatomy textbooks? But I see that Google itself offers no paid links when I search on "Tom Sawyer."
I wondered what sorts of ads Google would put in "The Pit and the Pendulum." Rat poison? Grandfather clocks? Surcingles... whatever a surcingle is? But I see that Google itself offers no paid links when I search on "The Pit and the Pendulum."
"To Kill a Mockingbird?" No paid links. "Gargantua and Pantagruel?" No paid links. "Lolita?" No paid links.
Inserting relevant advertising into books may be sooner said than done.
Makes me think of an old recording, circa the 1980s, of Malvina Reynolds singing "Little Boxes" at a live performance. That's the one that goes "Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes all the same..." Although she wrote it, it was popularized by Pete Seeger.
Now, Pete Seeger is always talking about the "folk process" and the continuous process by which folk songs evolve, as singers change and add material. And Pete Seeger himself always, always, always puts his own twist on the songs he sings.
So Malvina Reynolds opens by saying, "Pete, you know, he does it a little different. And now, when I sing it, people say 'That's not the way it goes!' But it's my song! Yeah! I wrote it!" She doesn't sound angry about it, though, and I can't for a moment imagine her suing Pete Seeger.
But, yes, all creative people know that they borrow material from others... just as scientists know that they "stand on the shoulders of giants." Where would we be if Brahms hadn't been allowed to write "Variations on a Theme by Haydn?" Any entity that tries to stop the process of creative borrowing and transformation is the enemy of the artist, not his friend.
Copyright infringement should be restricted to mean the activities of the business entrepreneur who issues and sells near-exact reproductions of large-scale works, markets them in competition with the legitimate rightsholder, and clearly hijacks dollars that would otherwise have flowed to the author or artist. That's what everyone always thought copyright infringement meant, until the nuttiness started.
It doesn't refer to absolute freedom to put anything into Wikipedia. Indeed, it is part of a long and venerable policy page which defines what content should not go into Wikipedia, Wikipedia's "editorial policy" if you like.
"Wikipedia is not censored" covers only the limited issue of "offensive" content, such as profanity or explicit sexual material. It says that "'being objectionable' is generally not sufficient grounds for removal of content."
"Since when do planes wait for all the passengers, you already bought a ticket and they have your money. I am pretty sure they just leave to keep the airport on schedule."
They want to fill every seat on the plane. Each flight costs about the same whether there are empty seats or not, but empty seats don't pay fares.
I don't know the intricacies of how they compromise the between the conflicting requirements of filling the plane, leaving on time, and keeping passengers happy, but they're not going to push back if there are empty seats on the plane and farepaying bodies to put in them. I suppose they'd prefer to fill them with a sure-thing body on standby in the gate area than a hypothetical body going through security, but they probably have a good idea how many out-of-breath latecomers are likely to sprinting up to the gate at departure-time-plus-120 seconds, and it probably factors into the gate agent's judgement.
When I first heard of "The Legend of Zelda," the first thing I thought of was Zelda Fitzgerald, mostly because there are so few women I've ever heard of who were named Zelda. I assumed that was just a coincidence. It's very nice to discover that it wasn't: "The game's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, has said that he took the character's name from Zelda Fitzgerald. "[Zelda Fitzgerald] was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title."
Zelda was famous, yes, and beautiful yes, and for a while the Fitzgeralds were a "glamorous" and lionized couple. She also had a stormy marriage with F. Scot Fitzgerald, and was the fictionalized subject of some of his novels and stories. Zelda was famous for her unconventional behavior, and I've never been able to read between the lines to understand for sure just what this behavior consisted of; was jumping into a fountain in New York just youthful high spirits, or was there more to it than that? Every account talks of her "flirting" with men other than Fitzgerald, and famously saying that she wanted to "kiss" a thousand men; was it just flirting and just kissing? Some of what made her interesting was perhaps the prelude to her mental illness.
By all accounts, they were a sad, tragic, and unlucky couple.
Mel Elfin pretty much let the cat out of the bag. When asked how he knew that the U. S. News and World Report rankings were sound, he answeredthat he knew it because Harvard, Yale, and Princeton always landed on top.
In other words, the rankings are simply a way to give the trappings of science and objectivity to a system whose purpose is merely to reaffirm the conventional wisdom.
1) TJ-2. Written by Peter Samson for the PDP-1, it is at least a plausible candidate for "first word processor." It used a text input file, with command reminiscent of later word processing program "dot commands," although the commands were identified by an overbar character rather than a period. It produced two-column output with justified lines, and had provision for hyphenation. Because the PDP-1 facility had output equipment based on IBM electric typewriters, the output was "letter-quality." It showed a generation of hackers that computer software could be used to edited and print finished-looking text.
If not TJ-2, then TYPSET/RUNOFF, which must have been used by tens of thousands of people at universities to perform what today would be called "word processing."
2) Spacewar! Another PDP-1 program, a plausible candidate for "first video game," and certainly introduced thousands of people to the idea that computers could be used purely for fun. A somewhat subversive idea, since commercial facilities rented PDP-1 time at something like $60 per hour.
3) Bolt, Beranek and Newman's RS-1, or perhaps its antecedent, Prophet. It was not a spreadsheet, but it was, nevertheless, an easy-to-use and powerful system for medical and scientific research calculations, with "tables" as its fundamental data type, and flexible vaguely SQL-like commands for extracting data from them and performing statistical tests and calculations on them. I don't know whether Bricklin and Frankston ever saw it, but I suspect that it was "in the culture" and influenced Visicalc in a very general way.
4) FORTRAN. Unlikely as it sounds, it was a breakthrough in computer ease-of-use. Long before computers started to make headway amount the general population, they first had to make headway in the scientific community among people who were not computer experts. It was FORTRAN that brought computing within the grasp of the average scientist. It also, oddly enough, became a breakthrough in portability and the loosening of IBM's monopoly power, at least in the academic community.
5) MacWrite. Or, if you prefer, the earlier Gypsy word processing program for the Xerox Alto. Gypsy was probably the first WYSIWYG word processor that could display multiple fonts and images. MacWrite was the program that first showed hundreds of thousands of people to that style of editing. In my case, I was utterly blown away by the ability to create superscripts that were actually in smaller type than the main text.
Before MacWrite, WYSIWYG meant only that the word processing commands could be hidden, and that lines on the screen broke at the same places as the printed copy. Before MacWrite, I never saw a system that show justified text as justified on the screen, or that showed multiple columns on the screen, or showed headers, footers, and footnotes in their proper places on screen.
0.6% seems like a good ballpark figure for false positives.This research paper claims 0.6%. This article says "Commercial facial recognition technology... had a 1 percent false positive rate."
How many cops does it take to ask 90 people per second to come to the police station to answer a few questions? How many busses does it take to take 90 people per second to the police station?
Once they get there, if it takes five minutes to look at each suspect's papers, run them through the computer, and clear them, that police station waiting room will need to be big enough to hold 27,000 people.
A chain that was called "Circuit City" Lost all of the cash in its kitty;
So they gave it some whacks
With a big System Ax And now it will be Circut Shitty.
"Remember the IBM mainframes where you "upgraded" your hardware to have more disk space or memory by the Customer Engineer flipping a switch?"
I remember the "waltz-time" IBM 407 electromechanical accounting machines, "programmed" with a wired matrix board and very popular in university computing centers in the 1960s for tasks such as offline printing of punched-card decks in the 1960s.
They had extra circuitry added to them to make them skip every third processing cycle and run at 2/3 full speed, enabling IBM to sell them at a discounted price without annoying their full-price customers. So they'd go "Kagachunk, kagachunk, (pause), kagachunk, kagachunk, (pause), kagachunk, kagachunk, (pause)." I never personally did it or saw it done, but my understanding was that they could be restored to normal full-speed operation by cutting one wire.
Here's a good article. Wow, it looks new and shiny in that picture... the ones I knew always looked a little shopworn and shabby.
I assume, but do not know, that the RPG programming language was patterned on the operation of these machines.
"Then there's the question of what happens when a boulder from above hits all that glass."
When a boulder smashes the glass Old Man of the Mountains, it will provide a great opportunity for some egotistical architect to propose a new structure that would echo the look of the glass structure, perhaps in dried bear droppings covered in shiny plastic shrinkwrap.
The reason why we're fascinated by the Old Man of the Mountains is because it was shaped by nature, because it was authentic, and because it looked rugged and eternal
It's pointless and unsatisfying to replace it with something shaped by an architect, that's fake, and looks and temporary. What does that symbolize? New Hampshire, the fake imitation state?
It would be far better to acknowledge the artificiality and create a realistic face or faces... as was done on Mount Rushmore. Perhaps instead of carving the stone, it could be a clever trompe l'oeil painting, that would look solid and three-dimensional when viewed from the scenic pullout on I-93.
Who would be honored? Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote "The Great Stone Face?" Ed Sullivan, often called "The Great Stone Face?" Augustus St.-Gaudens, who created so many sculptures himself?
It had to have been a screw-up, not some subtle and clever mode on Microsoft's part.
The whole point of XP mode is to enable companies to adopt Windows 7 immediately, without the need to inventory and test every Windows application they rely on. The fact that most or all of their applications, when tested, will probably run fine under Windows 7 is irrelevant: they still need to test them all.
XP mode is supposed to solve that problem. It's supposed to get past the high-level meeting in which the CIO says "Whoa, not so fast, we can't do that until you give me the time and budget to embark on this company-wide testing program." The CIO is supposed to say "We can go full steam ahead right now. I think most of our applications will be OK and if it turns out that they aren't, they can just run them under XP mode."
If those same companies must now inventory and test every one of their computers to make sure it is capable of running Virtual XP mode, not that much has been gained. It's less work, but you still have the high-level meeting and the CIO still says "Whoa, not so fast, we can't do that until you give me the time and budget to embark on this company-wide testing program."
And again, it doesn't matter whether the number of machines that fail is small. They still need to be tested. What if the one that fails is the CEO's laptop (bought outside of company channels because he's the CEO, and he needs to be able to impress his golf buddies with a laptop that's a ounce lighter than theirs?)
Since the technology is old, and its omission from random chips is an artificial restriction in order to pay market segmentation games, Microsoft's technical people probably didn't even realize that there were modern Intel chips that didn't have it, since there was no logical engineering reason to expect it.
Oh, you remember the HyWire, then. In 2003, GM promised they'd have them in showrooms by 2010. That, they said, was why they weren't developing hybrids: they had something that was going to be much better.
Of course, for that to work we'd have had to have hydrogen filling stations on the corner by 2010 as well, and so far I haven't seen any at the local Mobil station.
Methinks the Chevy Volt is another HyWire--a PR stunt. I can't imagine Bob Lutz would want to leave at the moment of his greatest triumph, if he really believed the Volt was all he said was. But, time will tell.
What I like about this idea is that the company operating the battery replacement station gets to deal with any issues about battery life, defective batteries, improvements in battery technology, etc.
A Prius battery may be guaranteed to last ten years, but it's still around $3,000 to replace one, and pure-electric cars will need much higher capacities and presumably cost more. Batteries may be reliable on the average but it could be a major bummer if the premature failure happens to you.
This way, the station operator, who is presumably buying these in large quantities, spreads out the replacement cost and the risk. You obviously will pay more than if you owned your own battery and charged it yourself, but it will be a predictable cost that is easier to budget for.
Plus, if you do get a bad battery at one of these stations... if we assume there's a vast, dense network of them... the inconvenience of getting towed a few miles and having them just push the button for a quick, automated robot replacement will be far less than the inconvenience of getting an appointment to get your battery replaced under warranty at a car dealer.
Read something like Terry Ramsaye's "A Million and One Nights," about the early history of the movies--up to the early twenties--(Ramsaye doesn't believe the talkies have much of a future)--and, to a technical guy like me, it's incredibly boring.
It's all about complicated business maneuvers based on artificial restrictions. (The phrase "B movie" dates back to the days when distributors wouldn't rent a good movie to a theatre unless they agreed to rent a lousy movie too). The various Laemmles and Selznicks and Zukors are doing nothing but finding clever ways to restrict product flow, cutting complex deals to outdo each other.
The movies themselves are sort of a byproduct of the real industry, which is business deals. The movies are sort of a necessary evil, like the chips that are needed at a casino. Who cares who designed the chips, or whether the artwork on the chips is great or mediocre?
Patents, too. Patents and patent pools and trusts and cartels, the whole nine yards.
Why is the movie industry associated with Hollywood rather than New Jersey? No, it's not because of reliable daylight. Anyone old enough to be familiar with the little loop of film in a camera or projector that buffers between the intermittent motion at the film gate and the smooth motion of the reels, so the claw doesn't need to pull against the inertia of the reels and tear the film? You need that if you want to put the film on reels and run continuously for more than a couple of minutes.
Well, that's the famous patented Latham Loop, and the people that held the patent refused to sell cameras, only rent them at exorbitant costs. So a bunch of people decided to make movies with pirated, illegal cameras... and they did it in California to make it harder for the process servers to find them.
Printing has always been about making books cheap and available... starting with the Bible. Movies have always been about restricting product. It's in their DNA.
Slashdot Mirror
Careysub, let me ask you directly the question I ask in another posting above: how did your child react to the Journal?
Was she able to use it to find things? Did she type in her own tags and descriptions? Was my own failure to get the Journal to work for me just a result of my brain ossifying with age... was there something there to "get" that I just didn't get?
The meta-idea of rethinking UI from the ground up, and building something specifically directed at kids, was a wonderful idea. Frankly, the reason I bought a G1G1 machine was that I hoped to experience a fresh and wonderful user interface.
I think Sugar was a sad failure. I don't quite know what to make of the obvious riposte that I don't belong to the target audience. But an awful lot of the official Sugar documentation seemed to me to make too much use of "proof by repeated assertion." A file system organized primarily by recency (the Journal) instead of space (the Apple pre-OS-X Finder) or nested hierarchy (pre-GUI)? Wow, what a strange idea. What a fresh idea. I couldn't imagine how it could work, but all these people said it did, so after giving up on imagining it I paid $400 to experience it. Well, it sure didn't work for me.
And the claim that it works for kids because they "naturally describe what they are doing"--sorry, I just don't believe nine-year-old kids are going to type text tags and descriptions into every Journal entry so that they can find them again. Subject to correction by anyone who's actually watched real nine-year-olds playing with an XO and seen them tag and describe Journal entries, but the last several times I asked this online nobody said they had.
UI design seems to me to have peaked sometime in the early 1980s, when computer companies still needed to seduce laypersons who weren't already trained on computer usage. As "computer literacy" became more and more of a career necessity, computer companies were able to get away with more and more complexity. For me, an important downward turning point occurred when Microsoft violated Apple's UI guidelines, which stated that documents should always re-open with the insertion point positioned where it was when the document was closed--a special instance of the principle that things should stay where you put them. Microsoft couldn't be bothered; with Word, like Sisyphus, you always start with your insertion point once again having rolled down to the bottom of the hill. Other companies, eventually including Apple, followed suit, and this minor but significant point of UI design was lost, along with many others.
A fresh look at UI design is desperately needed. UI design is now in the hands of power-user snobs who revel in their ability to handle complexity. Ordinary people resign themselves to forever feeling that "I'm just a dummy when it comes to computers." The world desperately needs a user interface so simple a child could use it. A pity that Sugar isn't it.
1) For the record, all the optometrists I go to, and I thought most professional eyecare specialists, do use computerized systems that generate random charts (or at least many different charts). The only places I see the classic Snellen chart are in places like primary-care offices where they are just doing rough screenings.
2) Even if you don't look it up in Wikipedia, are you telling me that I'm the only person in the world who has learned that the 20/20 line is "DEFPOTEC" without even trying, just from being told to read it so many times? I mean, it's even pronounceable.
In Feist versus Rural Telephone Company, the court commented that copyright protects originality, not hard work. If the purpose of a photograph is to be a faithful rendition of a painting, how can it possibly have copyright protection? It does not add anything creative to the painting. It does not riff on it, it does not create a derivative work. The more effort that is expended on it, the more it becomes a high-fidelity copy of the original, and common sense says that would make it even less copyrightable than an amateur snapshot, that might "creatively" include keystone distortion or a bit of the frame or reflections off the glass.
The innumerable _parodies_ of, say, Grant Wood's "American Gothic" are surely copyrightable. But if a faithful copy of the original can be copyrighted, this is something new and pernicious in the world.
The earliest publication to the general lay public that I personally know of is their presentation on pages 118-127 of William Poundstone's book Big Secrets, Quill, 1983, ISBN 0-688-04830-7.
In other words, they were out there before the Web was a gleam in Tim Berners-Lee's eye.
Anyone know of any earlier publications?
Wait until the optometrists discover that Wikipedia is using an uncensored Snellen eye chart. Pssst! The big letter at the top is an "E."
Memo to "some" in the US and South Korean governments: so please be careful in future of making loose claims about North Korea doing bad stuff, unless you're sure. We don't need any Gulf of Tonkins and mobile bacteriological weapons labs. Wars have been started over less; indeed, two have. North Korea is scary enough; let's not start seeing it behind every tree.
I wondered what sorts of ads Google would put in Tom Sawyer. Cave tours? Paint companies? Anatomy textbooks? But I see that Google itself offers no paid links when I search on "Tom Sawyer."
I wondered what sorts of ads Google would put in "The Pit and the Pendulum." Rat poison? Grandfather clocks? Surcingles... whatever a surcingle is? But I see that Google itself offers no paid links when I search on "The Pit and the Pendulum."
"To Kill a Mockingbird?" No paid links. "Gargantua and Pantagruel?" No paid links. "Lolita?" No paid links.
Inserting relevant advertising into books may be sooner said than done.
Makes me think of an old recording, circa the 1980s, of Malvina Reynolds singing "Little Boxes" at a live performance. That's the one that goes "Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes made of ticky-tacky, Little boxes on the hillside, Little boxes all the same..." Although she wrote it, it was popularized by Pete Seeger.
Now, Pete Seeger is always talking about the "folk process" and the continuous process by which folk songs evolve, as singers change and add material. And Pete Seeger himself always, always, always puts his own twist on the songs he sings.
So Malvina Reynolds opens by saying, "Pete, you know, he does it a little different. And now, when I sing it, people say 'That's not the way it goes!' But it's my song! Yeah! I wrote it!" She doesn't sound angry about it, though, and I can't for a moment imagine her suing Pete Seeger.
But, yes, all creative people know that they borrow material from others... just as scientists know that they "stand on the shoulders of giants." Where would we be if Brahms hadn't been allowed to write "Variations on a Theme by Haydn?" Any entity that tries to stop the process of creative borrowing and transformation is the enemy of the artist, not his friend.
Copyright infringement should be restricted to mean the activities of the business entrepreneur who issues and sells near-exact reproductions of large-scale works, markets them in competition with the legitimate rightsholder, and clearly hijacks dollars that would otherwise have flowed to the author or artist. That's what everyone always thought copyright infringement meant, until the nuttiness started.
This is exactly right.
Furthermore, the policy statement, Wikipedia is not censored, should be read carefully.
It doesn't refer to absolute freedom to put anything into Wikipedia. Indeed, it is part of a long and venerable policy page which defines what content should not go into Wikipedia, Wikipedia's "editorial policy" if you like.
"Wikipedia is not censored" covers only the limited issue of "offensive" content, such as profanity or explicit sexual material. It says that "'being objectionable' is generally not sufficient grounds for removal of content."
"Since when do planes wait for all the passengers, you already bought a ticket and they have your money. I am pretty sure they just leave to keep the airport on schedule."
They want to fill every seat on the plane. Each flight costs about the same whether there are empty seats or not, but empty seats don't pay fares.
I don't know the intricacies of how they compromise the between the conflicting requirements of filling the plane, leaving on time, and keeping passengers happy, but they're not going to push back if there are empty seats on the plane and farepaying bodies to put in them. I suppose they'd prefer to fill them with a sure-thing body on standby in the gate area than a hypothetical body going through security, but they probably have a good idea how many out-of-breath latecomers are likely to sprinting up to the gate at departure-time-plus-120 seconds, and it probably factors into the gate agent's judgement.
When I first heard of "The Legend of Zelda," the first thing I thought of was Zelda Fitzgerald, mostly because there are so few women I've ever heard of who were named Zelda. I assumed that was just a coincidence. It's very nice to discover that it wasn't: "The game's creator, Shigeru Miyamoto, has said that he took the character's name from Zelda Fitzgerald. "[Zelda Fitzgerald] was a famous and beautiful woman from all accounts, and I liked the sound of her name. So I took the liberty of using her name for the very first Zelda title."
Zelda was famous, yes, and beautiful yes, and for a while the Fitzgeralds were a "glamorous" and lionized couple. She also had a stormy marriage with F. Scot Fitzgerald, and was the fictionalized subject of some of his novels and stories. Zelda was famous for her unconventional behavior, and I've never been able to read between the lines to understand for sure just what this behavior consisted of; was jumping into a fountain in New York just youthful high spirits, or was there more to it than that? Every account talks of her "flirting" with men other than Fitzgerald, and famously saying that she wanted to "kiss" a thousand men; was it just flirting and just kissing? Some of what made her interesting was perhaps the prelude to her mental illness.
By all accounts, they were a sad, tragic, and unlucky couple.
What a Swell Party This Is
"Have you heard that Mimsie Starr
Just got pinched in the As...tor bar?
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!
Have you heard? It's in the stars,
Next July we collide with Mars!
Well, did you evah?
What a swell party this is!"
Mel Elfin pretty much let the cat out of the bag. When asked how he knew that the U. S. News and World Report rankings were sound, he answeredthat he knew it because Harvard, Yale, and Princeton always landed on top.
In other words, the rankings are simply a way to give the trappings of science and objectivity to a system whose purpose is merely to reaffirm the conventional wisdom.
1) TJ-2. Written by Peter Samson for the PDP-1, it is at least a plausible candidate for "first word processor." It used a text input file, with command reminiscent of later word processing program "dot commands," although the commands were identified by an overbar character rather than a period. It produced two-column output with justified lines, and had provision for hyphenation. Because the PDP-1 facility had output equipment based on IBM electric typewriters, the output was "letter-quality." It showed a generation of hackers that computer software could be used to edited and print finished-looking text.
If not TJ-2, then TYPSET/RUNOFF, which must have been used by tens of thousands of people at universities to perform what today would be called "word processing."
2) Spacewar! Another PDP-1 program, a plausible candidate for "first video game," and certainly introduced thousands of people to the idea that computers could be used purely for fun. A somewhat subversive idea, since commercial facilities rented PDP-1 time at something like $60 per hour.
3) Bolt, Beranek and Newman's RS-1, or perhaps its antecedent, Prophet. It was not a spreadsheet, but it was, nevertheless, an easy-to-use and powerful system for medical and scientific research calculations, with "tables" as its fundamental data type, and flexible vaguely SQL-like commands for extracting data from them and performing statistical tests and calculations on them. I don't know whether Bricklin and Frankston ever saw it, but I suspect that it was "in the culture" and influenced Visicalc in a very general way.
4) FORTRAN. Unlikely as it sounds, it was a breakthrough in computer ease-of-use. Long before computers started to make headway amount the general population, they first had to make headway in the scientific community among people who were not computer experts. It was FORTRAN that brought computing within the grasp of the average scientist. It also, oddly enough, became a breakthrough in portability and the loosening of IBM's monopoly power, at least in the academic community.
5) MacWrite. Or, if you prefer, the earlier Gypsy word processing program for the Xerox Alto. Gypsy was probably the first WYSIWYG word processor that could display multiple fonts and images. MacWrite was the program that first showed hundreds of thousands of people to that style of editing. In my case, I was utterly blown away by the ability to create superscripts that were actually in smaller type than the main text.
Before MacWrite, WYSIWYG meant only that the word processing commands could be hidden, and that lines on the screen broke at the same places as the printed copy. Before MacWrite, I never saw a system that show justified text as justified on the screen, or that showed multiple columns on the screen, or showed headers, footers, and footnotes in their proper places on screen.
0.6% seems like a good ballpark figure for false positives.This research paper claims 0.6%. This article says "Commercial facial recognition technology ... had a 1 percent false positive rate."
15000 faces/sec * 0.6% false positives = 90 false positives per second.
How many cops does it take to ask 90 people per second to come to the police station to answer a few questions? How many busses does it take to take 90 people per second to the police station?
Once they get there, if it takes five minutes to look at each suspect's papers, run them through the computer, and clear them, that police station waiting room will need to be big enough to hold 27,000 people.
A chain that was called "Circuit City"
Lost all of the cash in its kitty;
So they gave it some whacks
With a big System Ax
And now it will be Circut Shitty.
"Remember the IBM mainframes where you "upgraded" your hardware to have more disk space or memory by the Customer Engineer flipping a switch?"
I remember the "waltz-time" IBM 407 electromechanical accounting machines, "programmed" with a wired matrix board and very popular in university computing centers in the 1960s for tasks such as offline printing of punched-card decks in the 1960s.
They had extra circuitry added to them to make them skip every third processing cycle and run at 2/3 full speed, enabling IBM to sell them at a discounted price without annoying their full-price customers. So they'd go "Kagachunk, kagachunk, (pause), kagachunk, kagachunk, (pause), kagachunk, kagachunk, (pause)." I never personally did it or saw it done, but my understanding was that they could be restored to normal full-speed operation by cutting one wire.
Here's a good article. Wow, it looks new and shiny in that picture... the ones I knew always looked a little shopworn and shabby.
I assume, but do not know, that the RPG programming language was patterned on the operation of these machines.
"Then there's the question of what happens when a boulder from above hits all that glass."
When a boulder smashes the glass Old Man of the Mountains, it will provide a great opportunity for some egotistical architect to propose a new structure that would echo the look of the glass structure, perhaps in dried bear droppings covered in shiny plastic shrinkwrap.
The reason why we're fascinated by the Old Man of the Mountains is because it was shaped by nature, because it was authentic, and because it looked rugged and eternal
It's pointless and unsatisfying to replace it with something shaped by an architect, that's fake, and looks and temporary. What does that symbolize? New Hampshire, the fake imitation state?
It would be far better to acknowledge the artificiality and create a realistic face or faces... as was done on Mount Rushmore. Perhaps instead of carving the stone, it could be a clever trompe l'oeil painting, that would look solid and three-dimensional when viewed from the scenic pullout on I-93.
Who would be honored? Nathaniel Hawthorne, who wrote "The Great Stone Face?" Ed Sullivan, often called "The Great Stone Face?" Augustus St.-Gaudens, who created so many sculptures himself?
It had to have been a screw-up, not some subtle and clever mode on Microsoft's part.
The whole point of XP mode is to enable companies to adopt Windows 7 immediately, without the need to inventory and test every Windows application they rely on. The fact that most or all of their applications, when tested, will probably run fine under Windows 7 is irrelevant: they still need to test them all.
XP mode is supposed to solve that problem. It's supposed to get past the high-level meeting in which the CIO says "Whoa, not so fast, we can't do that until you give me the time and budget to embark on this company-wide testing program." The CIO is supposed to say "We can go full steam ahead right now. I think most of our applications will be OK and if it turns out that they aren't, they can just run them under XP mode."
If those same companies must now inventory and test every one of their computers to make sure it is capable of running Virtual XP mode, not that much has been gained. It's less work, but you still have the high-level meeting and the CIO still says "Whoa, not so fast, we can't do that until you give me the time and budget to embark on this company-wide testing program."
And again, it doesn't matter whether the number of machines that fail is small. They still need to be tested. What if the one that fails is the CEO's laptop (bought outside of company channels because he's the CEO, and he needs to be able to impress his golf buddies with a laptop that's a ounce lighter than theirs?)
Since the technology is old, and its omission from random chips is an artificial restriction in order to pay market segmentation games, Microsoft's technical people probably didn't even realize that there were modern Intel chips that didn't have it, since there was no logical engineering reason to expect it.
Oh, you remember the HyWire, then. In 2003, GM promised they'd have them in showrooms by 2010. That, they said, was why they weren't developing hybrids: they had something that was going to be much better.
Of course, for that to work we'd have had to have hydrogen filling stations on the corner by 2010 as well, and so far I haven't seen any at the local Mobil station.
Methinks the Chevy Volt is another HyWire--a PR stunt. I can't imagine Bob Lutz would want to leave at the moment of his greatest triumph, if he really believed the Volt was all he said was. But, time will tell.
What I like about this idea is that the company operating the battery replacement station gets to deal with any issues about battery life, defective batteries, improvements in battery technology, etc.
A Prius battery may be guaranteed to last ten years, but it's still around $3,000 to replace one, and pure-electric cars will need much higher capacities and presumably cost more. Batteries may be reliable on the average but it could be a major bummer if the premature failure happens to you.
This way, the station operator, who is presumably buying these in large quantities, spreads out the replacement cost and the risk. You obviously will pay more than if you owned your own battery and charged it yourself, but it will be a predictable cost that is easier to budget for.
Plus, if you do get a bad battery at one of these stations... if we assume there's a vast, dense network of them... the inconvenience of getting towed a few miles and having them just push the button for a quick, automated robot replacement will be far less than the inconvenience of getting an appointment to get your battery replaced under warranty at a car dealer.
It's a good point.
Read something like Terry Ramsaye's "A Million and One Nights," about the early history of the movies--up to the early twenties--(Ramsaye doesn't believe the talkies have much of a future)--and, to a technical guy like me, it's incredibly boring.
It's all about complicated business maneuvers based on artificial restrictions. (The phrase "B movie" dates back to the days when distributors wouldn't rent a good movie to a theatre unless they agreed to rent a lousy movie too). The various Laemmles and Selznicks and Zukors are doing nothing but finding clever ways to restrict product flow, cutting complex deals to outdo each other.
The movies themselves are sort of a byproduct of the real industry, which is business deals. The movies are sort of a necessary evil, like the chips that are needed at a casino. Who cares who designed the chips, or whether the artwork on the chips is great or mediocre?
Patents, too. Patents and patent pools and trusts and cartels, the whole nine yards.
Why is the movie industry associated with Hollywood rather than New Jersey? No, it's not because of reliable daylight. Anyone old enough to be familiar with the little loop of film in a camera or projector that buffers between the intermittent motion at the film gate and the smooth motion of the reels, so the claw doesn't need to pull against the inertia of the reels and tear the film? You need that if you want to put the film on reels and run continuously for more than a couple of minutes.
Well, that's the famous patented Latham Loop, and the people that held the patent refused to sell cameras, only rent them at exorbitant costs. So a bunch of people decided to make movies with pirated, illegal cameras... and they did it in California to make it harder for the process servers to find them.
Printing has always been about making books cheap and available... starting with the Bible. Movies have always been about restricting product. It's in their DNA.