Startups should take note that performing any sort of legitimate press-release on April Fools day will completely destroy any credibility you may or may not have.
I know I'm beginning to drift dangerously offtopic, but people need to realize that the Meadowlands and the Turnpike are the two absolute worst parts of the state. Newark and Camden are both victims of sprawl from NYC and Philly. Unfortunately, these are also the areas of the state that get seen most often by visitors.
Once you get away from these areas, New Jersey is really quite nice.
That's a pretty broad and overreaching statement. Both the republican and democratic parties are considerably different than they were just a few years ago.
Such a suit, to be practical, would need to be made of a fabric that can change size when exposed to a certain stimulus (electricity, air pressure, etc).
Am I the only one who thought of Batman's cape when reading this?
I should point out that you should NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
Although it is true that Gasoline in its liquid form isn't as flammible as you'd think, the vapors that evaporate off of the surface are EXPLOSIVE. Unless you can assure that there are no vapors (very difficult in practice), you run the risk of lighting the gas (and yourself) on fire. Don't do it.
Well.... the whole point of RAW isn't to share files. It's to preserve sensor data EXACTLY as it is received so that it can be processed on a computer, and not on the camera itself. This has numerous advantages, as it is possible to make substantial adjustments to the image without severely compromising image quality.
Because there are various algorithms to do this, it would be downright foolish to send a RAW file to an agency. However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing. Also, RAW files tend to be smaller than TIFFs when shot on the camera.
Verizon uses a similar technology for its FTTP network. Each node operates on a slightly different wavelength, which is separated by a passive prism-type device at the street level. Effectively, this means that in areas where FTTP is deployed, there will be no active electronics on the poles, which has numerous advantages.
Eagh. You came a little too close to reality on that one... reminds me of my classical dynamics textbook *twitch* *twitch*.
At least physicists aren't quite as sadistic as Donald Knuth, who's infamous for slipping famous unsolved problems into the problem sections of his textbooks.
Everyone brings up this argument, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
On a Windows PC, I have never had a driver problem that affected the core, preinstalled components of the system. Sure, I've had weird things happen when using beta-version drivers, or have had a driver go bad on some extraneous peripheral, but never on a component that was vital to the operation of the PC.
The only exception to this rule I can think of is the graphics driver, and even that's not so much of an issue now that ATI and NVidia both use a unified driver architecture, and Intel graphics are so generic that they're supported on just about everything. Likewise, Apple users are in pretty much the same boat, as Apple doesn't make their own video hardware.
The only difference I can think of is that Apple's dev team spends less time on compatibility testing, because unless you're mucking about with the internals of your operating system, to the end uer, Windows' driver support is excellent. Given the various firmware and AirPort driver problems Apple's had in the past, I would call it about a draw.
This may be true. However, the advent of legitimately good high-level programming languages and libraries has somewhat reduced the need for UI-designers to be good programmers.
Also, I think it's unfair to call the groups mutually exclusive. Although I don't consider myself to be particularly good at either, I do know people who excel at both, and there are plenty of examples of one-(wo)man projects that have great user interfaces and a solid code base.
Perhaps the fact that Unix/Linux encourages its users and developers to get "down and dirty" with the code has encouraged bad UI design? Web applications got a lot better once PHP became available, even though perl is probably a superior language (to an experienced programmer), and was available many years earlier. Mac OS also saw a strongly renewed interest in the free/OSS software scene after Cocoa matured, to the point that big, expensive commerical software is essentially dead on the platform (with the exceptions of MS Office, the Adobe apps, and a small set of industry specific high-end specialized applications).
Not to sound like an Apple fanboy, but they've also taken the parent poster's point to heart by completely separating the UI design application from the programmer's IDE, and making it easy for someone of a non-technical background to use. (To be fair, this is something that was carried over from NEXTStep with Cocoa, and is also present in Open/GNUStep)
I'd also point out that a disproportinately large number of artists and photographers are excellent programmers (which lends itself to good UI design).
When I was in high school, in the event of a bomb threat, our first instructions were to lock ourselves inside the building so that it would be easier for the bomb squad to locate the bomb.
To this day, I cannot understand the logic behind that decision. In fact, it's probably the one situation where "run like hell" is a completely appropriate response.
More often than not, it was simply an excuse for them to search us, and sweep for drugs while they were at it. I always wanted to hide a huge bag of dog treats in my locker to see what would happen to the drug-sniffing dogs...
I remember reading somewhere that North Korea has enough artillery pointed at Seoul to do some serious damage to the city in a matter of minutes, before any sort of counterattack could be initiated.
If NK strikes first, South Korea largest city (the world's second-largest) is effectively helpless.
Apple didn't want developers to cram essential functionality into context (right-click) menus. By eliminating the right mouse button completely, developers were "forced" into designing UIs that presented all possible options to users right up front.
The idea of right-click is somewhat counterintuitive to new users, and apple was correct to refuse to allow developers to embed essential functionality into context menus. Even to this day, many apple context menus only offer three or four options as shortcuts. Everything you can do from the context menu, you can also do from the file or edit menus. (Try deleting a file from Windows Explorer without the right mouse button or the keyboard. The option to do so simply isn't there)
That said, context menus wound up eventually becoming accepted in the PC world, and the Mighty Mouse is a concession to this fact. It does however still recognize apple's traditional viewpoint: there is virtually no chance that a new uesr will wind up hitting the right mouse button by accident, not knowing what it does. You are absolutely free to ignore its very existance. If you are privy to the fact that the mouse does indeed have a right mouse button and take 15 seconds to play around with it, you shouldn't have any problem.
You can, of course, plug any USB Keyboard or Mouse on the planet into any mac made in the past 10 years or so, and all the buttons will work as you expect them to. With a $5 adapter, you can even use a PS/2 keyboard or mouse if you have a particular attachment to legacy hardware.
The one mouse button wasn't so much an attempt at minimalism as it was an attempt to force developers to practice good UI habits. Given the user-friendliness of Macintosh applications made from circa 1984 to 1995 compared to their PC counterparts, I'd say the strategy worked. Over the course of 20 years, users became more savy, and Apple's reasons for constraining their users to one mouse button gradually went away.
(That said, I do not at all condone the hockey-puck mice or the compact keyboards that were shipped with the early iMacs. Those things were terrible. Since then, Apple keyboards have used a fairly standard layout with the addition of a few volume control keys above the numpad; I'm not sure what the GP is complaining about. It's virtually identical to the keyboards dell ships with their PCs)
An open-ended question to the slashdot/scientific/tech communities:
Why the lovefest for MIT and the Ivy Leagues?
Sure, a lot of legitimately good science has come out of Harvard and MIT. However, there's a whole slew of great science being produced at any of the other instutions in the world that gets overlooked completely, while the world goes gaga over every poorly-conceived grad project that gets conducted at the MIT Media Lab.
There's some very awesome research going on at all sorts of public institutions around the country with results that are immediately released to the public domain.
Heck... we're working on several promising leads to finding a reliable cure to Cancer, and all I hear about on the news is the horribly impractical OLPC project (their hearts are in the right place, but the project itself isn't likely to get off the ground and make a noticable impact in people's lives).
MIT and Harvard have money. Lots of money. It's no secret that the Ivy League caters to students in the upper-income brackets (and admits a few low-income students each year to look good, completely cutting out the middle classes). Exeter and Andover (two insanely expensive private High Schools in New England) combined send over 50 kids each year to Harvard. MIT's not quite as bad, but it certainly employs similar tactics by hiring high-profile faculty members. What possible reason could they have for employing RMS? The amount of useful work he's completed has dropped off exponentially as time's gone on, and he's all but abandoned GNU for some suicidal quest of self-promition.
It pains me to see Harvard graduates being rushed into high-paying jobs, whereas students from my alma-mater have a tough time even getting interviews. Perpetuating the media hype around these institutions is only going to hurt the rest of us in the long-run.
Well, Apple did after all release a PVR-like device, so your guess wasn't entirely off the mark, and I'd bet the two devices share a lot of code in common.
That said, what you're saying makes me think that in the not-too-distant future, there will be a fork of OS X similar to the Seamonkey/Firefox fork that the Mozilla project made. Carbon's long overdue for a replacement, and cocoa doesn't quite cut it for many high-profile applications.
Debate over the validity of the biological experiments on the Viking probes has been going on since the probes landed.
You see.... several of the biological experiments on Viking turned up positive. However, this result contradicted other components of the same experiment, which indicated that there were no organic molecules in the soil, among other factors, making the possibility of life existing in those soil samples remotely minute.
It was largely agreed upon that the experiments were inconclusive and poorly designed all the way back in the 80s. The fact that this guy is making this argument about an experiment that yielded a false-positive is somewhat absurd. The bits of the experiment that turned up negative would have hypothetically yielded the same result on a living organism as a dead one.
The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe was supposed to repeat/confirm several of the Viking experiments.
Of course, that's not to say that we shouldn't be reproducing these experiments to figure out what went wrong, and what produced the false positive, as I'm sure there's plenty of interesting science to be explored there as well. I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of life on mars either -- as mentioned earlier, the experiments were inconclusive.
Slashdot Mirror
Startups should take note that performing any sort of legitimate press-release on April Fools day will completely destroy any credibility you may or may not have.
I know I'm beginning to drift dangerously offtopic, but people need to realize that the Meadowlands and the Turnpike are the two absolute worst parts of the state. Newark and Camden are both victims of sprawl from NYC and Philly. Unfortunately, these are also the areas of the state that get seen most often by visitors.
Once you get away from these areas, New Jersey is really quite nice.
I don't think the lack of Animated PNG is stopping *anyone* from making banner ads. For that, we already have Flash and Animated GIF.
I hope that once and for all, we'll be able to completely kill GIF, and support PNG transparency properly in all browsers.
That's a pretty broad and overreaching statement. Both the republican and democratic parties are considerably different than they were just a few years ago.
Am I the only one who thought of Batman's cape when reading this?
Less than the Iraq War costs per day.
*ducks*
Sure. But who are we supposed to vote for?
I should point out that you should NOT TRY THIS AT HOME.
Although it is true that Gasoline in its liquid form isn't as flammible as you'd think, the vapors that evaporate off of the surface are EXPLOSIVE. Unless you can assure that there are no vapors (very difficult in practice), you run the risk of lighting the gas (and yourself) on fire. Don't do it.
I say we print out hundreds of copies of her website, and mail them all to her.
Why don't we just send David Bowie?
For the uninitiated:
The Charm Quark and Strange Quark actually do exist.
Well.... the whole point of RAW isn't to share files. It's to preserve sensor data EXACTLY as it is received so that it can be processed on a computer, and not on the camera itself. This has numerous advantages, as it is possible to make substantial adjustments to the image without severely compromising image quality.
Because there are various algorithms to do this, it would be downright foolish to send a RAW file to an agency. However, because there's no loss, converting the RAW to a TIFF is trivial, and there's no real reason not to shoot raw unless you don't plan on doing any post-processing. Also, RAW files tend to be smaller than TIFFs when shot on the camera.
Verizon uses a similar technology for its FTTP network. Each node operates on a slightly different wavelength, which is separated by a passive prism-type device at the street level. Effectively, this means that in areas where FTTP is deployed, there will be no active electronics on the poles, which has numerous advantages.
Of course, speeds are *much* faster than 10mbps.
Hmm. I've had the same experience actually.
Give Camino a try. It's a nice mix between Firefox and Safari.
They're nearly ubiquitous in South America.
And yeah. They scare the crap out of me too. Apparently, you get shocked all the time, but it's rarely ever lethal.
Eagh. You came a little too close to reality on that one... reminds me of my classical dynamics textbook *twitch* *twitch*.
At least physicists aren't quite as sadistic as Donald Knuth, who's infamous for slipping famous unsolved problems into the problem sections of his textbooks.
Everyone brings up this argument, and I can't for the life of me figure out why.
On a Windows PC, I have never had a driver problem that affected the core, preinstalled components of the system. Sure, I've had weird things happen when using beta-version drivers, or have had a driver go bad on some extraneous peripheral, but never on a component that was vital to the operation of the PC.
The only exception to this rule I can think of is the graphics driver, and even that's not so much of an issue now that ATI and NVidia both use a unified driver architecture, and Intel graphics are so generic that they're supported on just about everything. Likewise, Apple users are in pretty much the same boat, as Apple doesn't make their own video hardware.
The only difference I can think of is that Apple's dev team spends less time on compatibility testing, because unless you're mucking about with the internals of your operating system, to the end uer, Windows' driver support is excellent. Given the various firmware and AirPort driver problems Apple's had in the past, I would call it about a draw.
This may be true. However, the advent of legitimately good high-level programming languages and libraries has somewhat reduced the need for UI-designers to be good programmers.
Also, I think it's unfair to call the groups mutually exclusive. Although I don't consider myself to be particularly good at either, I do know people who excel at both, and there are plenty of examples of one-(wo)man projects that have great user interfaces and a solid code base.
Perhaps the fact that Unix/Linux encourages its users and developers to get "down and dirty" with the code has encouraged bad UI design? Web applications got a lot better once PHP became available, even though perl is probably a superior language (to an experienced programmer), and was available many years earlier. Mac OS also saw a strongly renewed interest in the free/OSS software scene after Cocoa matured, to the point that big, expensive commerical software is essentially dead on the platform (with the exceptions of MS Office, the Adobe apps, and a small set of industry specific high-end specialized applications).
Not to sound like an Apple fanboy, but they've also taken the parent poster's point to heart by completely separating the UI design application from the programmer's IDE, and making it easy for someone of a non-technical background to use. (To be fair, this is something that was carried over from NEXTStep with Cocoa, and is also present in Open/GNUStep)
I'd also point out that a disproportinately large number of artists and photographers are excellent programmers (which lends itself to good UI design).
When I was in high school, in the event of a bomb threat, our first instructions were to lock ourselves inside the building so that it would be easier for the bomb squad to locate the bomb.
To this day, I cannot understand the logic behind that decision. In fact, it's probably the one situation where "run like hell" is a completely appropriate response.
More often than not, it was simply an excuse for them to search us, and sweep for drugs while they were at it. I always wanted to hide a huge bag of dog treats in my locker to see what would happen to the drug-sniffing dogs...
Does anyone else find it ironic that a company named General Electric has inadequate AC wiring in their headquarters?
I remember reading somewhere that North Korea has enough artillery pointed at Seoul to do some serious damage to the city in a matter of minutes, before any sort of counterattack could be initiated.
If NK strikes first, South Korea largest city (the world's second-largest) is effectively helpless.
There actually is a rationale for this.
Apple didn't want developers to cram essential functionality into context (right-click) menus. By eliminating the right mouse button completely, developers were "forced" into designing UIs that presented all possible options to users right up front.
The idea of right-click is somewhat counterintuitive to new users, and apple was correct to refuse to allow developers to embed essential functionality into context menus. Even to this day, many apple context menus only offer three or four options as shortcuts. Everything you can do from the context menu, you can also do from the file or edit menus. (Try deleting a file from Windows Explorer without the right mouse button or the keyboard. The option to do so simply isn't there)
That said, context menus wound up eventually becoming accepted in the PC world, and the Mighty Mouse is a concession to this fact. It does however still recognize apple's traditional viewpoint: there is virtually no chance that a new uesr will wind up hitting the right mouse button by accident, not knowing what it does. You are absolutely free to ignore its very existance. If you are privy to the fact that the mouse does indeed have a right mouse button and take 15 seconds to play around with it, you shouldn't have any problem.
You can, of course, plug any USB Keyboard or Mouse on the planet into any mac made in the past 10 years or so, and all the buttons will work as you expect them to. With a $5 adapter, you can even use a PS/2 keyboard or mouse if you have a particular attachment to legacy hardware.
The one mouse button wasn't so much an attempt at minimalism as it was an attempt to force developers to practice good UI habits. Given the user-friendliness of Macintosh applications made from circa 1984 to 1995 compared to their PC counterparts, I'd say the strategy worked. Over the course of 20 years, users became more savy, and Apple's reasons for constraining their users to one mouse button gradually went away.
(That said, I do not at all condone the hockey-puck mice or the compact keyboards that were shipped with the early iMacs. Those things were terrible. Since then, Apple keyboards have used a fairly standard layout with the addition of a few volume control keys above the numpad; I'm not sure what the GP is complaining about. It's virtually identical to the keyboards dell ships with their PCs)
An open-ended question to the slashdot/scientific/tech communities:
Why the lovefest for MIT and the Ivy Leagues?
Sure, a lot of legitimately good science has come out of Harvard and MIT. However, there's a whole slew of great science being produced at any of the other instutions in the world that gets overlooked completely, while the world goes gaga over every poorly-conceived grad project that gets conducted at the MIT Media Lab.
There's some very awesome research going on at all sorts of public institutions around the country with results that are immediately released to the public domain.
Heck... we're working on several promising leads to finding a reliable cure to Cancer, and all I hear about on the news is the horribly impractical OLPC project (their hearts are in the right place, but the project itself isn't likely to get off the ground and make a noticable impact in people's lives).
MIT and Harvard have money. Lots of money. It's no secret that the Ivy League caters to students in the upper-income brackets (and admits a few low-income students each year to look good, completely cutting out the middle classes). Exeter and Andover (two insanely expensive private High Schools in New England) combined send over 50 kids each year to Harvard. MIT's not quite as bad, but it certainly employs similar tactics by hiring high-profile faculty members. What possible reason could they have for employing RMS? The amount of useful work he's completed has dropped off exponentially as time's gone on, and he's all but abandoned GNU for some suicidal quest of self-promition.
It pains me to see Harvard graduates being rushed into high-paying jobs, whereas students from my alma-mater have a tough time even getting interviews. Perpetuating the media hype around these institutions is only going to hurt the rest of us in the long-run.
Well, Apple did after all release a PVR-like device, so your guess wasn't entirely off the mark, and I'd bet the two devices share a lot of code in common.
That said, what you're saying makes me think that in the not-too-distant future, there will be a fork of OS X similar to the Seamonkey/Firefox fork that the Mozilla project made. Carbon's long overdue for a replacement, and cocoa doesn't quite cut it for many high-profile applications.
Debate over the validity of the biological experiments on the Viking probes has been going on since the probes landed.
You see.... several of the biological experiments on Viking turned up positive. However, this result contradicted other components of the same experiment, which indicated that there were no organic molecules in the soil, among other factors, making the possibility of life existing in those soil samples remotely minute.
It was largely agreed upon that the experiments were inconclusive and poorly designed all the way back in the 80s. The fact that this guy is making this argument about an experiment that yielded a false-positive is somewhat absurd. The bits of the experiment that turned up negative would have hypothetically yielded the same result on a living organism as a dead one.
The ill-fated Beagle 2 probe was supposed to repeat/confirm several of the Viking experiments.
Of course, that's not to say that we shouldn't be reproducing these experiments to figure out what went wrong, and what produced the false positive, as I'm sure there's plenty of interesting science to be explored there as well. I wouldn't completely rule out the possibility of life on mars either -- as mentioned earlier, the experiments were inconclusive.