I'll probably get modded into oblivion for this, but have you actually used IE8?
The UI is still several kinds of horrible, although the performance and standards-compliance is very good, and competitive with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Once IE6 is dead and buried, web developers will have a huge burden lifted off of their chests.
Although they're several years late to the party, Microsoft have indeed gotten their shit together. I'd even consider Windows 7 to be a worthy competitor to Mac OS X.
Firefox started as a community project, and is still fairly young by all accounts. It essentially consists of the SeaMonkey browser with a lot of the superfluous crap ripped out -- the Mozilla developers are still working on removing the cruft from the old codebase. Building a browser isn't exactly a trivial task.
Chrome and Safari aren't new browsers (or even anything resembling it). Both use WebKit (originally KHTML) as their backend. Chrome's memory/process protection is very cool, although it's painfully clear that Google's developers are having a hell of a time porting it to be cross-platform (essentially relying upon 3 entirely separate codebases). Chrome also uses a lot more memory than any other major browser -- although it's notable and important that it doesn't leak memory, overall usage remains astronomical.
Firefox's JavaScript performance has been gradually improving, and remains competitive with Chrome in some instances. The JavaScript "arms-race" has produced amazing results for all 3 major browsers.
Also don't forget that Firefox was the first so-called "modern" browser that ran on multiple platforms, and inspired the IE and KHTML folks to get their shit together. Not exactly a small accomplishment.
When you're the first, you don't have the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes of others.
The craptons of mercury spewed by the power plant can, in principle, be scrubbed and recaptured.
False.
But hey, the craptons of mercury tossed into landfills by Joe Six-Pack can, in principle, be reclaimed when you end up drinking it. So it all works out in the end, I guess.
Also false. Water can be filtered, and bulbs can be recycled before they ever reach the landfill.
3rd option: CFLs that don't contain mercury (or only contain trace amounts) should be available fairly soon.
Yes. The fluorescent bulbs used in virtually every commercial and industrial building on the planet for the past 50 years have created an environmental catastrophe!
All that americium in your household smoke detectors must be accumulating somewhere too, right?
NiCd batteries are pretty scary from an environmental perspective as well. However, people seem to be aware of this, and tend to dispose of them properly. Car batteries and old TV screens contain several pounds of lead, and nobody here seems to be complaining...
Fortunately, people aren't that stupid, and the quantities of mercury we're talking about aren't significant enough to cause any major ecological problems. New CFLs also contain far less mercury than old models.
Somehow, people have been using fluorescent lights for over half a century without any major incident. However, once they became associated with the environmental movement, all of this FUD about mercury is being thrown around.
Actually, when you think of it that way, the GPL functions in the exact same way. Any changes or innovations you make must be returned to the community.
Don't forget that backward compatibility is sacred to Microsoft. Similarly, I can't possibly imagine that it would be a good business decision for Microsoft to begin suing its own developers.
99.99% of LaTeX is output straight to PDF, Postscript, or (in special cases such as Wikipedia's math renderer) a rasterized image. The documentation, plugins, and user community of LaTeX all reflect this.
I haven't come across any serious usage of LaTeX in the manner that you describe it.
ODF and HTML do not support the full set of typographic features that LaTeX does. Something will almost certainly be lost in translation.
Although I suppose it's possible to craft a source document that would look good both in print and as free-flowing hypertext, you'd need a zen-like command of the language. LaTeX has enough quirks as it is. I have a very difficult time accepting this as a practical solution.
Also, if you're crafting a hypertext document, why not start with a language specifically designed for the task?
Although I agree with you in that LaTeX is widely used in the scientific community, and unambiguously offers the best typesetting facilities you'll find outside of a publishing house, is it still appropriate today?
The internet as we know it was created at CERN to facilitate the sharing of scientific information. Why are we still publishing in a format designed to be presented on dead trees?
Like it or not, a properly-formatted print article looks horrible on a screen. An article formatted for printing on A4 or Letter-sized paper will use the whole width of the page, be set in 10-point type, and use columns. Unfortunately, modern computer screens don't have nearly enough resolution to display the full width of the page alongside much else. Obviously, PDF files also don't have the ability to flow to fit the width of the screen.
LaTeX also doesn't give you the benefit of hypertext. Yes, there are various hacks you can use to add anchors and links to PDFs, although these are mere hacks on top of a broken format. Things such as high-resolution figures and hyperlinked references would be particularly beneficial for academic uses. It'd also be great to be able to see all articles linking back to what you happen to be reading. (This brings up all sorts of questions about the very nature of scientific publishing, although this is another debate entirely)
Wikipedia (more specifically, MediaWiki) actually offers a promising solution to these (and the original poster's) requirements. It provides a convenient and simplistic markup for multi-sectioned articles, flows to fit the width of the page, and also provides LaTeX's fantastic mathematical typesetting facilities. Hyperlinking to other parts of the Wiki (and to external sites) is excessively easy. I'm sure the DOI system could be integrated to allow linking back to other articles within the constraints of the existing academic publishing regime.
Google could very easily provide the "glue" to hold such a system together, although it would ultimately be better to put a public, non-profit entity in charge. It's absurd and hypocritical that so much of academic research (particularly the publishing part of it) is profit-driven.
The "too big to fail" argument was made about AIG, and is largely true.
AIG insured so many customers that no other company would have had the capital necessary to pick up the slack, not to mention that an AIG bankruptcy would have left a huge number of individuals and businesses around the globe without insurance. Liquidating $800+ billion of assets isn't easy when no other investors have that sort of capital.
(This all doesn't mean the bailout was conducted particularly well. That's an entirely different discussion.)
This is indeed true. Most notably, HIV/AIDS is much less prevalent in the gay community than it was 10 years ago, and most now tend to be extremely cautious about who they sleep with.
Education and comprehensive testing are by far the two most effective weapons against sexually transmitted infections.
Actually, things like this are becoming fairly common in the EU.
Cans of Coca-Cola sold in the UK (particularly in restaurants) are often imported from Germany (and are easily recognizable by the fact that the writing on the can is in German). Apparently it's marginally cheaper to produce and bottle Coke in Germany than it is in the UK.
My Verizon LG phone (enV2) has a micro-USB charger. I believe most other current models have the same.
I lost my original one, was in an urgent situation, and bought one from the local Verizon store. It was a generic model, and cost about $10 (no authentication, DRM, or anything of that sort). The salesman explained to me that Verizon themselves are sick of stocking 50 different kinds of chargers, and are trying to standardize on micro-USB for new models. People lose and re-buy chargers fast enough that they're not worried about losing a few sales.
Because Von Braun's notes probably remain relevant today. Von Braun is one of (if not the) most important/influential rocket scientist of the modern era.
Derivatives of the pulse-jet engines on the German V1 rockets are now being seriously examined for re-use in modern aircraft, as they use fewer moving parts and offer greater fuel efficiency than conventional engines today, despite having fallen from favor after WWII.
Just because the science and technology is old doesn't necessarily make it irrelevant. Old technologies are revisited all the time, and it's a great idea to keep the notes of the "pioneers" around for potential use in the future. You wouldn't throw away one of Einstein's manuscripts, would you?
I'd generally agree with you, although people who have had Macbooks reportedly get used to, and even start liking the chicklet-style keys.
That said, I think it is all rather silly, given that that style of keyboard effectively reduces the size of the keys. I quite like the keyboard on my 12" Powerbook, which I really do feel is the "perfect" laptop in almost every regard (my only routine annoyance is the necessity to carry around a special dongle whenever I want to use a projector).
It's built like a tank too -- I treat it rather roughly, and it's never had a major hardware problem, and still looks like it did when it was new 4 years ago. I'm not sure how the new unibody "Pro" models compare, although the Plastic macbooks were certainly a step down in terms of quality.
Apple also use the function keys to control brightness, sound, displays, etc. In fact, you need to hold down the 'Fn' key to access the "normal" functionality of the F-# keys.
The extra keys can be used to access Operating system features such as Expose and Spaces (Virtual Desktops). IMHO, these functions are important enough to warrant their own keys.
Actually, Apple who have a tendency to overthink and overdesign everything have some of the worst laptop keyboards for one very simple reason: No delete key.
There's a backspace key labeled 'Delete,' which I cannot figure out the rationale of for the life of me. My full-sized wireless keyboard also has a backspace key labeled "delete" as well as a real delete key labeled in the exact same manner.
Although Apple's always done it that way, the rest of the world has adopted different terminology, and appreciates being able to delete text on both sides of the cursor.
Also irritating is that Apple no longer even offer a full-sized wireless keyboard, while their wired keyboards default to the godawful "compact" model. This is made slightly more bothersome by the fact that Apple's keyboards are otherwise actually quite good, are visually appealing, and take up a very small footprint on my desk. Logitech's keyboards are hideous, enormous, don't use bluetooth, and very often actually cost more money than the equivalent model from Apple.
But seriously. In another thread earlier today, I came across this gem from RMS in 2007. Even more hilarious is the response to his message with an "ASCII Ribbon Campaign" banner at the bottom of his message. Hadn't seen one of those in nearly a decade.
Examining the standard deviation of the ratings received by each film should provide a reasonable (albeit imperfect) indicator of the "controversialness" of any given film.
Of course, there are a few ways to improve upon this, and I'm sure that the winning teams have taken this into account.
Slashdot Mirror
I doubt that.
Here's proof. Sorry for forgetting to include this in my original post.
The Firefox leaks do appear to have gradually been brought under control, while Safari has a more noticeable leak, and Opera leaks like a sieve.
It'd be nice to repeat this test across multiple platforms to see if any of the leaks are OS-specific.
Nah, but the common consensus among the /. crowd is that IE8 sucks, while virtually none of them have actually used it.
I'll probably get modded into oblivion for this, but have you actually used IE8?
The UI is still several kinds of horrible, although the performance and standards-compliance is very good, and competitive with Firefox, Chrome, and Safari. Once IE6 is dead and buried, web developers will have a huge burden lifted off of their chests.
Although they're several years late to the party, Microsoft have indeed gotten their shit together. I'd even consider Windows 7 to be a worthy competitor to Mac OS X.
Seriously, dude. Chill out.
Firefox started as a community project, and is still fairly young by all accounts. It essentially consists of the SeaMonkey browser with a lot of the superfluous crap ripped out -- the Mozilla developers are still working on removing the cruft from the old codebase. Building a browser isn't exactly a trivial task.
Chrome and Safari aren't new browsers (or even anything resembling it). Both use WebKit (originally KHTML) as their backend. Chrome's memory/process protection is very cool, although it's painfully clear that Google's developers are having a hell of a time porting it to be cross-platform (essentially relying upon 3 entirely separate codebases). Chrome also uses a lot more memory than any other major browser -- although it's notable and important that it doesn't leak memory, overall usage remains astronomical.
Firefox's JavaScript performance has been gradually improving, and remains competitive with Chrome in some instances. The JavaScript "arms-race" has produced amazing results for all 3 major browsers.
Also don't forget that Firefox was the first so-called "modern" browser that ran on multiple platforms, and inspired the IE and KHTML folks to get their shit together. Not exactly a small accomplishment.
When you're the first, you don't have the advantage of being able to learn from the mistakes of others.
I'm assuming you're talking about inductive lamps.
They're available, not horribly expensive, and can theoretically last for about 22 years if you turn them off at night.
What brand did you use? I haven't had good luck with the ones I've tried...
The craptons of mercury spewed by the power plant can, in principle, be scrubbed and recaptured.
False.
But hey, the craptons of mercury tossed into landfills by Joe Six-Pack can, in principle, be reclaimed when you end up drinking it. So it all works out in the end, I guess.
Also false. Water can be filtered, and bulbs can be recycled before they ever reach the landfill.
3rd option: CFLs that don't contain mercury (or only contain trace amounts) should be available fairly soon.
Yes. The fluorescent bulbs used in virtually every commercial and industrial building on the planet for the past 50 years have created an environmental catastrophe!
All that americium in your household smoke detectors must be accumulating somewhere too, right?
NiCd batteries are pretty scary from an environmental perspective as well. However, people seem to be aware of this, and tend to dispose of them properly. Car batteries and old TV screens contain several pounds of lead, and nobody here seems to be complaining...
Fortunately, people aren't that stupid, and the quantities of mercury we're talking about aren't significant enough to cause any major ecological problems. New CFLs also contain far less mercury than old models.
Somehow, people have been using fluorescent lights for over half a century without any major incident. However, once they became associated with the environmental movement, all of this FUD about mercury is being thrown around.
They're working on it. There are plans for new nuclear plants in the US that are moving forward.
However, building new power plants is expensive, takes a long time, and requires extensive infrastructure (ie. power lines) to support it.
Reducing our usage, on the other hand, can be accomplished quite easily in a short period of time.
RTFA. It's legally binding.
Actually, when you think of it that way, the GPL functions in the exact same way. Any changes or innovations you make must be returned to the community.
Don't forget that backward compatibility is sacred to Microsoft. Similarly, I can't possibly imagine that it would be a good business decision for Microsoft to begin suing its own developers.
99.99% of LaTeX is output straight to PDF, Postscript, or (in special cases such as Wikipedia's math renderer) a rasterized image. The documentation, plugins, and user community of LaTeX all reflect this.
I haven't come across any serious usage of LaTeX in the manner that you describe it.
ODF and HTML do not support the full set of typographic features that LaTeX does. Something will almost certainly be lost in translation.
Although I suppose it's possible to craft a source document that would look good both in print and as free-flowing hypertext, you'd need a zen-like command of the language. LaTeX has enough quirks as it is. I have a very difficult time accepting this as a practical solution.
Also, if you're crafting a hypertext document, why not start with a language specifically designed for the task?
Although I agree with you in that LaTeX is widely used in the scientific community, and unambiguously offers the best typesetting facilities you'll find outside of a publishing house, is it still appropriate today?
The internet as we know it was created at CERN to facilitate the sharing of scientific information. Why are we still publishing in a format designed to be presented on dead trees?
Like it or not, a properly-formatted print article looks horrible on a screen. An article formatted for printing on A4 or Letter-sized paper will use the whole width of the page, be set in 10-point type, and use columns. Unfortunately, modern computer screens don't have nearly enough resolution to display the full width of the page alongside much else. Obviously, PDF files also don't have the ability to flow to fit the width of the screen.
LaTeX also doesn't give you the benefit of hypertext. Yes, there are various hacks you can use to add anchors and links to PDFs, although these are mere hacks on top of a broken format. Things such as high-resolution figures and hyperlinked references would be particularly beneficial for academic uses. It'd also be great to be able to see all articles linking back to what you happen to be reading. (This brings up all sorts of questions about the very nature of scientific publishing, although this is another debate entirely)
Wikipedia (more specifically, MediaWiki) actually offers a promising solution to these (and the original poster's) requirements. It provides a convenient and simplistic markup for multi-sectioned articles, flows to fit the width of the page, and also provides LaTeX's fantastic mathematical typesetting facilities. Hyperlinking to other parts of the Wiki (and to external sites) is excessively easy. I'm sure the DOI system could be integrated to allow linking back to other articles within the constraints of the existing academic publishing regime.
Google could very easily provide the "glue" to hold such a system together, although it would ultimately be better to put a public, non-profit entity in charge. It's absurd and hypocritical that so much of academic research (particularly the publishing part of it) is profit-driven.
The "too big to fail" argument was made about AIG, and is largely true.
AIG insured so many customers that no other company would have had the capital necessary to pick up the slack, not to mention that an AIG bankruptcy would have left a huge number of individuals and businesses around the globe without insurance. Liquidating $800+ billion of assets isn't easy when no other investors have that sort of capital.
(This all doesn't mean the bailout was conducted particularly well. That's an entirely different discussion.)
This is indeed true. Most notably, HIV/AIDS is much less prevalent in the gay community than it was 10 years ago, and most now tend to be extremely cautious about who they sleep with.
Education and comprehensive testing are by far the two most effective weapons against sexually transmitted infections.
True, but you can't call Apple bad without being dishonest, as they're generally considered to be well above the industry average.
Can we just say that the standard for quality of smartphones needs to be raised across the industry, and leave it at that?
Actually, things like this are becoming fairly common in the EU.
Cans of Coca-Cola sold in the UK (particularly in restaurants) are often imported from Germany (and are easily recognizable by the fact that the writing on the can is in German). Apparently it's marginally cheaper to produce and bottle Coke in Germany than it is in the UK.
My Verizon LG phone (enV2) has a micro-USB charger. I believe most other current models have the same.
I lost my original one, was in an urgent situation, and bought one from the local Verizon store. It was a generic model, and cost about $10 (no authentication, DRM, or anything of that sort). The salesman explained to me that Verizon themselves are sick of stocking 50 different kinds of chargers, and are trying to standardize on micro-USB for new models. People lose and re-buy chargers fast enough that they're not worried about losing a few sales.
Because Von Braun's notes probably remain relevant today. Von Braun is one of (if not the) most important/influential rocket scientist of the modern era.
Derivatives of the pulse-jet engines on the German V1 rockets are now being seriously examined for re-use in modern aircraft, as they use fewer moving parts and offer greater fuel efficiency than conventional engines today, despite having fallen from favor after WWII.
Just because the science and technology is old doesn't necessarily make it irrelevant. Old technologies are revisited all the time, and it's a great idea to keep the notes of the "pioneers" around for potential use in the future. You wouldn't throw away one of Einstein's manuscripts, would you?
I'd generally agree with you, although people who have had Macbooks reportedly get used to, and even start liking the chicklet-style keys.
That said, I think it is all rather silly, given that that style of keyboard effectively reduces the size of the keys. I quite like the keyboard on my 12" Powerbook, which I really do feel is the "perfect" laptop in almost every regard (my only routine annoyance is the necessity to carry around a special dongle whenever I want to use a projector).
It's built like a tank too -- I treat it rather roughly, and it's never had a major hardware problem, and still looks like it did when it was new 4 years ago. I'm not sure how the new unibody "Pro" models compare, although the Plastic macbooks were certainly a step down in terms of quality.
Apple also use the function keys to control brightness, sound, displays, etc. In fact, you need to hold down the 'Fn' key to access the "normal" functionality of the F-# keys.
The extra keys can be used to access Operating system features such as Expose and Spaces (Virtual Desktops). IMHO, these functions are important enough to warrant their own keys.
Actually, Apple who have a tendency to overthink and overdesign everything have some of the worst laptop keyboards for one very simple reason: No delete key.
There's a backspace key labeled 'Delete,' which I cannot figure out the rationale of for the life of me. My full-sized wireless keyboard also has a backspace key labeled "delete" as well as a real delete key labeled in the exact same manner.
Although Apple's always done it that way, the rest of the world has adopted different terminology, and appreciates being able to delete text on both sides of the cursor.
Also irritating is that Apple no longer even offer a full-sized wireless keyboard, while their wired keyboards default to the godawful "compact" model. This is made slightly more bothersome by the fact that Apple's keyboards are otherwise actually quite good, are visually appealing, and take up a very small footprint on my desk. Logitech's keyboards are hideous, enormous, don't use bluetooth, and very often actually cost more money than the equivalent model from Apple.
1995 called. It wants its flamewar back.
But seriously. In another thread earlier today, I came across this gem from RMS in 2007. Even more hilarious is the response to his message with an "ASCII Ribbon Campaign" banner at the bottom of his message. Hadn't seen one of those in nearly a decade.
Examining the standard deviation of the ratings received by each film should provide a reasonable (albeit imperfect) indicator of the "controversialness" of any given film.
Of course, there are a few ways to improve upon this, and I'm sure that the winning teams have taken this into account.