I'm reasonably net-savvy, but wife is a computer layperson. She's quite "computer literate" but has no real depth technical understanding. She bought a Gateway about six years ago, choosing Gateway because the liked the Holstein motif. She specifically wanted it to be _her_ computer and wanted me _not_ to "help" her or hang over her shoulder or kibbitz.
When you double-clicked the IE icon, it brought you to a Gateway-badged version of the Yahoo home page. So, her network experience started with Yahoo and she never turned back.
By the time I offered to help her configure Outlook Express to work with our ISP's email, something I thought she might have trouble with, she said "But I already have email." She had signed up for a Yahoo account, and she thought and still thinks that there's no reason at all to use anything else. (And she was proved right when our ISP had some infuriating email outages, lasting several days each, and my email was interrupted while Yahoo's was completely unaffected).
She uses Yahoo weather, Yahoo maps, belongs to several Yahoo groups, books her plane flights with Yahoo travel, and so forth and so on. Yahoo is well-designed, engaging, caters to novices, and is a portal to many things that she wants to do on the Internet.
It is, in fact, all the things that AOL tried to be and wasn't.
The only thing she doesn't use Yahoo for is searching. Within about a month after Google launched, I discovered it and was impressed by how much better it was than either Yahoo or Altavista. I mentioned it to her, she tried it, she loved it, and has used nothing else since.
I have no idea at all what Lycos and all the others are up to these days...
This is standard procedure for Apple. Other vendors do it too, but Apple is a bit worse.
Way back in the pre-Carly days, when HP did engineering, I found HP to be the only vendor for which it was always seemed to be true that if you saw a glossy ad for an interesting product, you could order it and get it delivered. Everyone else played the game of announcing what they hoped would be ready soon and crossing their fingers.
The most egregious Steveism of this kind I can remember occurred in the year that they announced the first G4 PowerMacs. (The G4 processor included the "Altivec" instruction extensions which could produce dramatic speedups in applications specially coded to take advantage of them).
It was in the early fall of 1999, the rumor sites had reported--accurately, it eventually transpired--that Apple was having trouble with their new motherboards and "the G4's" wouldn't ship until calendar 2000.
Steve talked about the G4 processor and repeatedly referred to "these machines." He then proceeded to demonstrate a unit that had a redesigned motherboard ("Sawtooth") with a faster bus, faster video chips, and many other speedups. With an implied smirk at the rumor sites, he said "and these machines are shipping NOW."
The only thing was, the machines that were shipping "now" were not the machines he had just demonstrated, but a machine that used a "Yikes!" motherboard, essentially the previous motherboard with minimal modifications to allow incorporation of a G4 processor. So, his words were literally true (machines with G4 processors were shipping now), but somewhat misleading... they weren't the "machines" he was showing... and performance was broadly comparable to the previous generation of machines, except in a very few applications (Photoshop) that took advantage of Altivec.
Of course, everyone remembers the initial introduction of the Mac... when the machine he unveiled on the stage spoke, using the MacInTalk speech synthesizer... although MacInTalk would not run in the 128K Macs that Apple was actually shipping.
Although the new technology is attractive, the technology in the Rocket eBook or the Franklin eBookman was more than adequate. I still have my five-year-old Rocket and I still use it. I can bring ten books on a trip in a device that's smaller and lighter than a trade paperback and have a pleasurable, immersive reading experience.
What has prevented the eBook from taking off--killed it, at least for the moment--is not the devices. It is, in order of importance: limited title availability, limited title availability, limited title availability, excessive price, and DRM. Fix those problems and the eBook market will take off, even if you have to read them on a cell phone screen.
Of these, title availability is the most serious. At one point I checked, and at that time, of about 44 books on Oprah's Book Club list, something like 35 of them were available as audiobooks... and something like six of them were available as ebooks in ANY format. And no more than about four of them in any specific format.
TFA is entitled "Screening the Latest Bestseller," but unless something changes drastically, only a small fraction of the latest bestsellers will be screenable. Maybe you don't care for Barbara Kingsolver but I do, and none of her books has ever been available as an eBook.
Price. I've had about half-a-dozen conversations with strangers who saw me using my Rocket. They would be interested, I'd hand it to them so they could scroll pages, they'd be impressed, they'd ask about price and capacity and so forth. Then would come the question: "How much do the eBooks cost?" I'd answer "About the same as a hardbound for books that are not out in paper, about the same as a paperback for books that are in paperback." They'd give me a you-gotta-be-kidding look of disbelief and that would be that. End of story.
And, DRM. Look guys, don't you get it? One of the pleasures of books is lending them. Why do you think bookplates were invented? If I can't lend my son the latest Stephen King, don't bother. True story: just last year, my wife bought a copy of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." "Wow, this is really good," she says. "You'd probably like to read it when I'm done with it." Pregnant pause. "Uh, honey... I'm afraid I've already read it. I bought it for my Rocket eBook a couple of years ago." Phooey. Paid twice for the damn book. Not that it would have mattered, as my wife doesn't own a Rocket eBook, and even if she did the content was keyed to the serial number of the individual device and I couldn't have loaned it to her anyway.
...the problems of legitimate paying customers whose credit cards will be charged but who will be unable to gain admission because their cell phone is unexpectedly incompatible, has a display that for whatever reason isn't readable, battery goes dead while waiting in line, whatever...
On January 17, 2002, p. 1, the New York Times reported, "Stung by Security Flaws, Microsoft Makes Software Safety a Top Goal" and quoted Jim Allchin said "Every developer is going to be told not to write any new line of code until they have thought out the security implications for the product" and that "the company was trying to change the culture of its software developers, who have been putting their emphasis on adding features to the company's software to increase its value."
In your opinion, has Microsoft succeeded in changing its culture so that every developer now considers security first, features second?
For an awful lot of things I'm interested in, the first page is dominated by hits on Wikipedia and its mirrors anyway. I'm sometimes frustrated (e.g. when researching a Wikipedia article) by the difficulty of finding non-Wikipedia content with Google.
I'll bet that a half-pint of yogurt or a serving of sauerkraut has more bacteria in it than a keyboard and a toilet seat combined.
Unless someone shows that human disease is actually transmitted by either of them, this is a completely meaningless fact.
(Old joke--old enough to reflect an implicit male/heterosexual point of view, sorry--: "Is it really possible to get syphilis in a public restroom?" "Yes, but it's not the most romantic place to take a girl.")
The vidicon was the first small, lightweight cheap television camera, developed IIRC in the late 1950s or early 1960s. It was a vacuum tube, but it was "about the size of a hot dog," and it enabled the development of television camera that were about the size of a VHS camcorder and cost about $1000. It was a revolution and led to the use of closed-circuit TV cameras by serious amateurs, schools, corporations, and for surveillance. (It wasn't up to broadcast quality, and TV studios continued to use the gigantic iconoscopes and image orthicons).
When it came out, the press--I particularly remember an article in Time magazine--commented that this was the invention that would for the first time make it possible to develop "telescreens" like the ones described by George Orwell, and would usher in the era where Big Brother was watching you.
Of course the problem was always that as long as it takes a human being to interpret the information, the ratio of number of spys to the number of people spied upon is too large to be economical for intruding on ordinary citizens.
But now, all of Orwell's technical visions are starting to become true--courtesy of computer technology....
...is not as good as "The DaVinci Code" or "Angel and Demons," but it kept me turning pages... and if you enjoy bizarre speculation on NASA, the NSA, and their relation to U. S. politics you'll enjoy it.
Now, about that research vessel that just happens to be stationed above an undersea volcano, whose warm waters have attracted a huge crowd of hammerhead sharks... well, you know Chekov's dictum that if you show the audience a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third...
"Brian Chase, a 38 year old operations manager at Rush Delivery in Nashville, admitted he had placed the allegations there to play a joke on a colleague..." I suppose Chase's intent was to tweak his (unnamed) colleague, not to annoy Seigenthaler...
Stokes' Field Guide to Bird Songs, which I've owned for a number of years, is a three-CD set of recordings of about 300 bird songs. iBirdPod "software" is nothing more than a very elaborate script--I think it's just AppleScript but I'm not sure--that loads these CDs into iTunes (and thence to your iPod), but makes extremely clever (ab)use of the title, artist, and album fields, the playlists, and the feature that allows the user to define starting and ending times for each track.
For example, the track named "Towhee, Eastern" is by "artist" "drink your teeeee, towhee," from "album" "Pipilo erythrophthalmus."
It's contained in playlists "birdPod-All-alpha" (which includes every bird alphabetically by common name), "birdPod-All-phylo" (which includes every bird alphabetically by scientific name), "birdPod-Forest" (which includes only forest birds), "birdPod-Shrub-Brush," "birdPod-Sparrows" and "birdPod-Urban."
Every track is "cued up" to start at the very beginning of the most common song... particularly useful since the Stokes CD's sometimes double up two or three songs in one track.
So, if you're in a forest setting you can call up the "birdPod-Forest" playlist and you hear a bird calling something like "Drink your tea," scroll through the "artists" until you get to "drink your tea," and play the song to confirm it. Or if you read about Pipilo erythrophthalmus you can scroll through birdPod-All-phylo, read off that it's the towhee, play the song, and make a mental note that the mnemonic for remembering the song is "Drink your teeeeee."
When I learned about it, my first reaction was what? they're charging money for that? I could do all that myself. Then I remembered why I didn't have my Stokes CD's on my iPod already... and I made a quick mental estimate of just how long it would take me to organize the songs... and decided it was money well spent.
If IE for the Mac were reliably compatible with sites that "require IE" this would be interesting.
And at the time IE for the Mac came out, it was interesting. I, for one, found it to be much better than Netscape in numerous ways. And at the time, the Mac business unit was trumpeting how compatible it was with Web standards.
Unfortunately, it was. And therefore is not particularly "bug-compatible" with IE for Windows.
I'm very pragmatic about browsers. I don't care about purity, I just want to get my web purchases processed. Safari is very good. In fact, my experience so far is that it is very, very rare to find sites that a) do not work with Safari that b) do work with IE for the Mac. Specifically:
a) If a site claims specifically that it "requires IE 5 or higher," it usually does not work with IE 5.2 for the Mac.
b) If a site claims to require a specific browsers and any browser other than IE is on the list, it usually will work with Safari.
c) If a site, for whatever reason, does not work with Safari, it is more likely to work with Firefox for the Mac than it is to work with IE 5.2 for the Mac.
So... unfortunately... I think this is a non-issue.
If IE for the Mac were a high-fidelity reproduction of vintage-2000 IE for Windows, it would be nice if someone had the source and tried to maintain it. As it is, I don't think there's any good reason to care.
By the way: I found out the hard way that although IE for the Mac and for Windows both have a very useful "web archive" feature, the archive files themselves are in utterly different and incompatible formats, with no known conversion tool between them.
Ask around and pick the one with the best professor. Or, heck, the most convenient hour. Or the one your friends are going to. Or the one whose textbook has the prettiest color.
You're trying to get an education, not vocational training.
They're both modern, popular, widely-used languages with C-like syntax and perhaps 80%-pure object-orientation. They are both in substantial real-world use today, but that's not very important. You may well see job ads mentioning those languages, but when it's time to interview it's just as likely that they'll want something unfashionable... or three years experience in a language that's only two years old.
Java and C# are Coke and Pepsi. Just be sure you that somewhere along the line you get a chance to use some wildly different languages with completely different styles and base assumptions.
Be sure you've also tried the computer language equivalents of kvass, chocolate milk, and Campari.
Die Gedanken sind frei My thoughts freely flower, Die Gedanken sind frei My thoughts give me power. No scholar can map them, No hunter can trap them, No man can deny: Die Gedanken sind frei!
I think as I please And this gives me pleasure, My conscience decrees, This right I must treasure; My thoughts will not cater To duke or dictator, No man can deny-- Die Gedanken sind frei!
...that they didn't think they could get the FISA court to rubberstamp?
The FISA court has only turned the government down, what, twenty times in thirty years? And the law allows them to wiretap first and get court approval afterwards... and if the court turns them down they can appeal to another secret court, and if that court turns them down they can appeal to the Supreme Court, meeting in secret session with only the government in attendance.
The mind boggles. What could they possibly have been afraid to take to FISA court?
They were one of the very first services and I would have been one of their earliest customers.
I had spent several years transferring my LP collection onto Music CD-R's via a Home Audio CD Recorder (the clas of device for which the Audio Home Recording Act of 1991 was designed). I had carefully printed adhesive labels for each and was starting to get concerned about stories that adhesive labels cause premature CD failure, so, rather than copy them CD by CD I decided to send them to RIPDigital for ripping.
Everything was all set... then I suddenly got an email from RIPDigital refusing to do it. They said they would only RIP from actual commercial CDs and would not make any exceptions. I suggested that I could send them my scans of the LP album covers, ringwear and all, as proof of ownership.
Uh-uh.
My CDs had been placed on the spindle, the package was sealed and awaiting UPS pickup. The only good thing about the transaction was that they managed to let me know just in time for me to prevent UPS from picking it up and sending my precious CDs on an unnecessary and fruitless round-trip...
"Honey, I need to take the car to the tire shop and get the corners sharpened."
Even on a small scale, concentrating the weight on even a rounded edge like that would seem an invitation to excessive wear, both on the wheels and on the surface it runs on.
It's worth RTFA just to see a reference to "Foo et al."
(The full paper title is "Optical Vortex Coronagraph" by Gregory Foo, David M. Palacios, Grover A. Swartzlander Jr., College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona).
To paraphrase what James Agee said of Walt Disney's "Victory through Air Power," I hope that Dave Girard knows what he is talking about, for I suspect that an awful lot of people who read this article are going to think that he does.
It's true that obvious vandalism, pranks, etc. get reverted quickly. It's also true that controversial material, particularly on reasonably current topics (e.g Post-invasion Iraq get attention by editors who are actually checking facts and looking for sources.
But plausible or accidental misinformation, especially if well-written, can remain in Wikipedia unchallenged for very long periods of time. Spelling errors will be corrected, sentences rewritten, but facts don't get checked in any systematic way. Two that I personally ran across:
Example number 1: From July 2003 until October 2003 the article on Jack London said that he "attended the University of California" (true) where he was the editor of the university's literary journal (not true). When I asked the editor who inserted it for his source, he replied "it was the story that was spread around at Cal when I was going there. I don't know if it's true or not, but I had no reason to doubt it at the time that I wrote the info."
Example number 2: Wikipedia policy is act immediately to remove "copyvios"--any material copied from a source that does not explicit provide a free license or is not demonstrably in the public domain. Nevertheless, from June 2004 until a couple of days ago, most of the material in Wikipedia's article on Khalil Gibran was a direct copy from a Cornell University website. Nobody happened to notice it.
These are examples I happened to catch, so I'm proud of them. But there are also two embarrassing examples. There are at least two examples I know of misinformation I personally inserted into Wikipedia. One was carelessness. The other, far worse, was a case where I inserted casual personal "knowledge" that I believed to be true but didn't check--just like the other editor who thought Jack London had edited the Berkeley literary journal. Both went uncorrected for over a year.
The large number of facts that are corrected blinds Wikipedians to the existence of many that are not. Fact-checking is haphazard and catch-as-catch-can. It all works surprisingly well, but "working surprisingly well" is not the same as "working."
...I don't think I can recall a single example of any product that was billed as an "X killer" that was even interesting, let alone "killed" X.
My first recollection of such a billing was the IBM 4341 "VAX killer" although I'm sure those sales types that always speak in military and athletic analogies had been using it for decades.
Whenever something is positioned as an "X killer" it never seems as if X needs to worry much.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm reasonably net-savvy, but wife is a computer layperson. She's quite "computer literate" but has no real depth technical understanding. She bought a Gateway about six years ago, choosing Gateway because the liked the Holstein motif. She specifically wanted it to be _her_ computer and wanted me _not_ to "help" her or hang over her shoulder or kibbitz.
When you double-clicked the IE icon, it brought you to a Gateway-badged version of the Yahoo home page. So, her network experience started with Yahoo and she never turned back.
By the time I offered to help her configure Outlook Express to work with our ISP's email, something I thought she might have trouble with, she said "But I already have email." She had signed up for a Yahoo account, and she thought and still thinks that there's no reason at all to use anything else. (And she was proved right when our ISP had some infuriating email outages, lasting several days each, and my email was interrupted while Yahoo's was completely unaffected).
She uses Yahoo weather, Yahoo maps, belongs to several Yahoo groups, books her plane flights with Yahoo travel, and so forth and so on. Yahoo is well-designed, engaging, caters to novices, and is a portal to many things that she wants to do on the Internet.
It is, in fact, all the things that AOL tried to be and wasn't.
The only thing she doesn't use Yahoo for is searching. Within about a month after Google launched, I discovered it and was impressed by how much better it was than either Yahoo or Altavista. I mentioned it to her, she tried it, she loved it, and has used nothing else since.
I have no idea at all what Lycos and all the others are up to these days...
This is standard procedure for Apple. Other vendors do it too, but Apple is a bit worse.
Way back in the pre-Carly days, when HP did engineering, I found HP to be the only vendor for which it was always seemed to be true that if you saw a glossy ad for an interesting product, you could order it and get it delivered. Everyone else played the game of announcing what they hoped would be ready soon and crossing their fingers.
The most egregious Steveism of this kind I can remember occurred in the year that they announced the first G4 PowerMacs. (The G4 processor included the "Altivec" instruction extensions which could produce dramatic speedups in applications specially coded to take advantage of them).
It was in the early fall of 1999, the rumor sites had reported--accurately, it eventually transpired--that Apple was having trouble with their new motherboards and "the G4's" wouldn't ship until calendar 2000.
Steve talked about the G4 processor and repeatedly referred to "these machines." He then proceeded to demonstrate a unit that had a redesigned motherboard ("Sawtooth") with a faster bus, faster video chips, and many other speedups. With an implied smirk at the rumor sites, he said "and these machines are shipping NOW."
The only thing was, the machines that were shipping "now" were not the machines he had just demonstrated, but a machine that used a "Yikes!" motherboard, essentially the previous motherboard with minimal modifications to allow incorporation of a G4 processor. So, his words were literally true (machines with G4 processors were shipping now), but somewhat misleading... they weren't the "machines" he was showing... and performance was broadly comparable to the previous generation of machines, except in a very few applications (Photoshop) that took advantage of Altivec.
Of course, everyone remembers the initial introduction of the Mac... when the machine he unveiled on the stage spoke, using the MacInTalk speech synthesizer... although MacInTalk would not run in the 128K Macs that Apple was actually shipping.
Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these: "It might have been."
(Sorry, I couldn't think of anything Whittier).
Although the new technology is attractive, the technology in the Rocket eBook or the Franklin eBookman was more than adequate. I still have my five-year-old Rocket and I still use it. I can bring ten books on a trip in a device that's smaller and lighter than a trade paperback and have a pleasurable, immersive reading experience.
What has prevented the eBook from taking off--killed it, at least for the moment--is not the devices. It is, in order of importance: limited title availability, limited title availability, limited title availability, excessive price, and DRM. Fix those problems and the eBook market will take off, even if you have to read them on a cell phone screen.
Of these, title availability is the most serious. At one point I checked, and at that time, of about 44 books on Oprah's Book Club list, something like 35 of them were available as audiobooks... and something like six of them were available as ebooks in ANY format. And no more than about four of them in any specific format.
TFA is entitled "Screening the Latest Bestseller," but unless something changes drastically, only a small fraction of the latest bestsellers will be screenable. Maybe you don't care for Barbara Kingsolver but I do, and none of her books has ever been available as an eBook.
Price. I've had about half-a-dozen conversations with strangers who saw me using my Rocket. They would be interested, I'd hand it to them so they could scroll pages, they'd be impressed, they'd ask about price and capacity and so forth. Then would come the question: "How much do the eBooks cost?" I'd answer "About the same as a hardbound for books that are not out in paper, about the same as a paperback for books that are in paperback." They'd give me a you-gotta-be-kidding look of disbelief and that would be that. End of story.
And, DRM. Look guys, don't you get it? One of the pleasures of books is lending them. Why do you think bookplates were invented? If I can't lend my son the latest Stephen King, don't bother. True story: just last year, my wife bought a copy of Bill Bryson's "A Short History of Nearly Everything." "Wow, this is really good," she says. "You'd probably like to read it when I'm done with it." Pregnant pause. "Uh, honey... I'm afraid I've already read it. I bought it for my Rocket eBook a couple of years ago." Phooey. Paid twice for the damn book. Not that it would have mattered, as my wife doesn't own a Rocket eBook, and even if she did the content was keyed to the serial number of the individual device and I couldn't have loaned it to her anyway.
...At that kind of resolution, panning across the Grand Canyon might give some pretty impressive results...
...the problems of legitimate paying customers whose credit cards will be charged but who will be unable to gain admission because their cell phone is unexpectedly incompatible, has a display that for whatever reason isn't readable, battery goes dead while waiting in line, whatever...
On January 17, 2002, p. 1, the New York Times reported, "Stung by Security Flaws, Microsoft Makes Software Safety a Top Goal" and quoted Jim Allchin said "Every developer is going to be told not to write any new line of code until they have thought out the security implications for the product" and that "the company was trying to change the culture of its software developers, who have been putting their emphasis on adding features to the company's software to increase its value."
In your opinion, has Microsoft succeeded in changing its culture so that every developer now considers security first, features second?
Shrug. I just use Google.
For an awful lot of things I'm interested in, the first page is dominated by hits on Wikipedia and its mirrors anyway. I'm sometimes frustrated (e.g. when researching a Wikipedia article) by the difficulty of finding non-Wikipedia content with Google.
I'll bet that a half-pint of yogurt or a serving of sauerkraut has more bacteria in it than a keyboard and a toilet seat combined.
Unless someone shows that human disease is actually transmitted by either of them, this is a completely meaningless fact.
(Old joke--old enough to reflect an implicit male/heterosexual point of view, sorry--: "Is it really possible to get syphilis in a public restroom?" "Yes, but it's not the most romantic place to take a girl.")
The vidicon was the first small, lightweight cheap television camera, developed IIRC in the late 1950s or early 1960s. It was a vacuum tube, but it was "about the size of a hot dog," and it enabled the development of television camera that were about the size of a VHS camcorder and cost about $1000. It was a revolution and led to the use of closed-circuit TV cameras by serious amateurs, schools, corporations, and for surveillance. (It wasn't up to broadcast quality, and TV studios continued to use the gigantic iconoscopes and image orthicons).
When it came out, the press--I particularly remember an article in Time magazine--commented that this was the invention that would for the first time make it possible to develop "telescreens" like the ones described by George Orwell, and would usher in the era where Big Brother was watching you.
Of course the problem was always that as long as it takes a human being to interpret the information, the ratio of number of spys to the number of people spied upon is too large to be economical for intruding on ordinary citizens.
But now, all of Orwell's technical visions are starting to become true--courtesy of computer technology....
...is not as good as "The DaVinci Code" or "Angel and Demons," but it kept me turning pages... and if you enjoy bizarre speculation on NASA, the NSA, and their relation to U. S. politics you'll enjoy it.
Now, about that research vessel that just happens to be stationed above an undersea volcano, whose warm waters have attracted a huge crowd of hammerhead sharks... well, you know Chekov's dictum that if you show the audience a gun in the first act, it must go off in the third...
I wonder how this plays out in the context of l'affaire Seigenthaler?
"Brian Chase, a 38 year old operations manager at Rush Delivery in Nashville, admitted he had placed the allegations there to play a joke on a colleague..." I suppose Chase's intent was to tweak his (unnamed) colleague, not to annoy Seigenthaler...
...is a very interesting offbeat iPod product.
Stokes' Field Guide to Bird Songs, which I've owned for a number of years, is a three-CD set of recordings of about 300 bird songs. iBirdPod "software" is nothing more than a very elaborate script--I think it's just AppleScript but I'm not sure--that loads these CDs into iTunes (and thence to your iPod), but makes extremely clever (ab)use of the title, artist, and album fields, the playlists, and the feature that allows the user to define starting and ending times for each track.
For example, the track named "Towhee, Eastern" is by "artist" "drink your teeeee, towhee," from "album" "Pipilo erythrophthalmus."
It's contained in playlists "birdPod-All-alpha" (which includes every bird alphabetically by common name), "birdPod-All-phylo" (which includes every bird alphabetically by scientific name), "birdPod-Forest" (which includes only forest birds), "birdPod-Shrub-Brush," "birdPod-Sparrows" and "birdPod-Urban."
Every track is "cued up" to start at the very beginning of the most common song... particularly useful since the Stokes CD's sometimes double up two or three songs in one track.
So, if you're in a forest setting you can call up the "birdPod-Forest" playlist and you hear a bird calling something like "Drink your tea," scroll through the "artists" until you get to "drink your tea," and play the song to confirm it. Or if you read about Pipilo erythrophthalmus you can scroll through birdPod-All-phylo, read off that it's the towhee, play the song, and make a mental note that the mnemonic for remembering the song is "Drink your teeeeee."
When I learned about it, my first reaction was what? they're charging money for that? I could do all that myself. Then I remembered why I didn't have my Stokes CD's on my iPod already... and I made a quick mental estimate of just how long it would take me to organize the songs... and decided it was money well spent.
Why not just print an entire label sheet (30 labels) for each of your regular clients and store them in binders?
What, exactly is wrong with that?
If IE for the Mac were reliably compatible with sites that "require IE" this would be interesting.
And at the time IE for the Mac came out, it was interesting. I, for one, found it to be much better than Netscape in numerous ways. And at the time, the Mac business unit was trumpeting how compatible it was with Web standards.
Unfortunately, it was. And therefore is not particularly "bug-compatible" with IE for Windows.
I'm very pragmatic about browsers. I don't care about purity, I just want to get my web purchases processed. Safari is very good. In fact, my experience so far is that it is very, very rare to find sites that a) do not work with Safari that b) do work with IE for the Mac. Specifically:
a) If a site claims specifically that it "requires IE 5 or higher," it usually does not work with IE 5.2 for the Mac.
b) If a site claims to require a specific browsers and any browser other than IE is on the list, it usually will work with Safari.
c) If a site, for whatever reason, does not work with Safari, it is more likely to work with Firefox for the Mac than it is to work with IE 5.2 for the Mac.
So... unfortunately... I think this is a non-issue.
If IE for the Mac were a high-fidelity reproduction of vintage-2000 IE for Windows, it would be nice if someone had the source and tried to maintain it. As it is, I don't think there's any good reason to care.
By the way: I found out the hard way that although IE for the Mac and for Windows both have a very useful "web archive" feature, the archive files themselves are in utterly different and incompatible formats, with no known conversion tool between them.
Ask around and pick the one with the best professor. Or, heck, the most convenient hour. Or the one your friends are going to. Or the one whose textbook has the prettiest color.
You're trying to get an education, not vocational training.
They're both modern, popular, widely-used languages with C-like syntax and perhaps 80%-pure object-orientation. They are both in substantial real-world use today, but that's not very important. You may well see job ads mentioning those languages, but when it's time to interview it's just as likely that they'll want something unfashionable... or three years experience in a language that's only two years old.
Java and C# are Coke and Pepsi. Just be sure you that somewhere along the line you get a chance to use some wildly different languages with completely different styles and base assumptions.
Be sure you've also tried the computer language equivalents of kvass, chocolate milk, and Campari.
Die Gedanken sind frei
My thoughts freely flower,
Die Gedanken sind frei
My thoughts give me power.
No scholar can map them,
No hunter can trap them,
No man can deny:
Die Gedanken sind frei!
I think as I please
And this gives me pleasure,
My conscience decrees,
This right I must treasure;
My thoughts will not cater
To duke or dictator,
No man can deny--
Die Gedanken sind frei!
Are you listening, Dubya?
...that they didn't think they could get the FISA court to rubberstamp?
The FISA court has only turned the government down, what, twenty times in thirty years? And the law allows them to wiretap first and get court approval afterwards... and if the court turns them down they can appeal to another secret court, and if that court turns them down they can appeal to the Supreme Court, meeting in secret session with only the government in attendance.
The mind boggles. What could they possibly have been afraid to take to FISA court?
They were one of the very first services and I would have been one of their earliest customers.
I had spent several years transferring my LP collection onto Music CD-R's via a Home Audio CD Recorder (the clas of device for which the Audio Home Recording Act of 1991 was designed). I had carefully printed adhesive labels for each and was starting to get concerned about stories that adhesive labels cause premature CD failure, so, rather than copy them CD by CD I decided to send them to RIPDigital for ripping.
Everything was all set... then I suddenly got an email from RIPDigital refusing to do it. They said they would only RIP from actual commercial CDs and would not make any exceptions. I suggested that I could send them my scans of the LP album covers, ringwear and all, as proof of ownership.
Uh-uh.
My CDs had been placed on the spindle, the package was sealed and awaiting UPS pickup. The only good thing about the transaction was that they managed to let me know just in time for me to prevent UPS from picking it up and sending my precious CDs on an unnecessary and fruitless round-trip...
"Honey, I need to take the car to the tire shop and get the corners sharpened."
Even on a small scale, concentrating the weight on even a rounded edge like that would seem an invitation to excessive wear, both on the wheels and on the surface it runs on.
About as practical as high heels.
It's worth RTFA just to see a reference to "Foo et al."
(The full paper title is "Optical Vortex Coronagraph" by Gregory Foo, David M. Palacios, Grover A. Swartzlander Jr., College of Optical Sciences, University of Arizona).
To paraphrase what James Agee said of Walt Disney's "Victory through Air Power," I hope that Dave Girard knows what he is talking about, for I suspect that an awful lot of people who read this article are going to think that he does.
"Nobody says cite Wikipedia in your dissertation and be done with it."
Just for the record, ordinary standards of scholarship wouldn't allow citation of the Britannica, either.
It's true that obvious vandalism, pranks, etc. get reverted quickly. It's also true that controversial material, particularly on reasonably current topics (e.g Post-invasion Iraq get attention by editors who are actually checking facts and looking for sources.
But plausible or accidental misinformation, especially if well-written, can remain in Wikipedia unchallenged for very long periods of time. Spelling errors will be corrected, sentences rewritten, but facts don't get checked in any systematic way. Two that I personally ran across:
Example number 1: From July 2003 until October 2003 the article on Jack London said that he "attended the University of California" (true) where he was the editor of the university's literary journal (not true). When I asked the editor who inserted it for his source, he replied "it was the story that was spread around at Cal when I was going there. I don't know if it's true or not, but I had no reason to doubt it at the time that I wrote the info."
Example number 2: Wikipedia policy is act immediately to remove "copyvios"--any material copied from a source that does not explicit provide a free license or is not demonstrably in the public domain. Nevertheless, from June 2004 until a couple of days ago, most of the material in Wikipedia's article on Khalil Gibran was a direct copy from a Cornell University website. Nobody happened to notice it.
These are examples I happened to catch, so I'm proud of them. But there are also two embarrassing examples. There are at least two examples I know of misinformation I personally inserted into Wikipedia. One was carelessness. The other, far worse, was a case where I inserted casual personal "knowledge" that I believed to be true but didn't check--just like the other editor who thought Jack London had edited the Berkeley literary journal. Both went uncorrected for over a year.
The large number of facts that are corrected blinds Wikipedians to the existence of many that are not. Fact-checking is haphazard and catch-as-catch-can. It all works surprisingly well, but "working surprisingly well" is not the same as "working."
...I don't think I can recall a single example of any product that was billed as an "X killer" that was even interesting, let alone "killed" X.
My first recollection of such a billing was the IBM 4341 "VAX killer" although I'm sure those sales types that always speak in military and athletic analogies had been using it for decades.
Whenever something is positioned as an "X killer" it never seems as if X needs to worry much.