Not to start up the old KDE vs. Gnome argument, but Nautilus embedded Gecko for quite a few of its earlier releases.
As for me, I'm slowly being converted into an Xfce user. If they can add a bit more built-in functionality than it already has (there are some options they left out that really do need to be configurable), they'll have a winner on their hands.
Agreed. The book was an absolute roller-coaster, and I was amazed by how well she tied up the loose ends in the plot at the end.
It wasn't like The Return of the King (movie), where plot ends were quickly, but sequentially tied up one by one, and it wasn't like many other books that drag out the ending far far too long, as to ruin the effect of the climax.
As for Rowling's writing style, I will continue to compare it to Kurt Vonnegut, whose books were some of the more straightforward and easily-digestible pieces of literature churned out of the 20th century, and greatly benefitted from it. Flowery and incomprehensible language isn't necessary to tell a great story!
And to address your last comment, I don't believe The Wheel of Time ever was finished conclusively. Last I heard, in a sadly ironic twist of fate, the author is now terminally ill, and the last book of the series has so many plotlines to tie up that he's having difficulty finishing it.
They should've done like LOTR, and made extended versions of the film just for the DVD release that included a bit more of the backstory and character development.
The last book is going to need this treatment if the film is to be even remotely coherent.
arry Potter certainly will never be a literary classic because of its plain and uninteresting writing, but it probably will be an enduring and popular tale because of its imaginative universe and fairly strong internal coherence.
Really? Will it not?
I imagine that it won't be regarded as one of the finest pieces of prose ever written, but I do think that it will go down as being one of the greatest stories told in print.
Rowling's simplistic writing style is a huge component of what makes it so incredibly compelling.
Kurt Vonnegut is widely regarded as being one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, and I was flabbergasted when I first started reading his works to see just how plain and straightforward they were.
Books don't need to be difficult to read to be good, and I would go as far as to say that accessibility is a concept that the literary world needs to pick up on. People don't talk like 18th-century academics these days, and it makes no sense for them to write like them.
But you've got the problem that Web Browsers (and most "modern" languages like Java) are hideously inefficient for these sort of tasks. CSS/HTML/Javascript are being contorted to do things that they were never really meant to do.
The fact that firing up Firefox to look at my GMail (which is, by all accounts one of the more efficent "Web Apps") consumes considerably more CPU time and RAM than it does to fire up a fairly robust mail client is disturbing to say the least. Let's face it -- the Web is a shitty place to get day-to-day tasks accomplished that involve any sort of interaction.
If this web app idea is to get off the ground, I'd imagine that we'll eventually be using some sort of modern derivative of the X11 protocol to natively display apps, using our screens as true thin clients. Rebol did this a few years back, and it regrettably didn't catch on (probably due to it being proprietary), but I remember checking out the tech demos, and being floored by how fast it was, even on a 56k connection.
HTML's great as an information distribution medium, but the fact that it's even being taken remotely seriously as an application platform is laughable.
I wonder what it would look like if we also plotted the funding allocated to the NSF alongside the number of papers published.
The NSF has had some serious funding woes since the 90s that very well may be causing this "draught" -- I wouldn't even go as far as to completely blame it on the Bush administration either (although they certainly did contribute).
As far as physics research goes, Clinton's cancellation of the already partially-constructed SSC easily set the entire field of particle physics back by 20 or so years. The LHC, which is being constructed in Europe as its "substitute" isn't even remotely as big or powerful as the SSC was originally planned to be.
Mario RPG was also able to very easily disregard the prior games in the franchise, because it was produced entirely by an outside developer (Square).
Personally, it's easily one of my favorite games of all time. It doesn't even pretend to take itself seriously, and has an entertaining plotline that sort of reminds me of a Pixar movie in its universal appeal.
It also managed to somehow appeal to both hardcore RPG players and "newbs". I long for more straightforward RPGs like Mario RPG, and the early Final Fantasy games (to a lesser extent of course).
I also never really got into the later games, because they tended to be released for platforms I didn't own due to Square's stupid exclusivity deals... If I'm a fan of the Mario or Zelda franchises, it's a safe bet to buy a Nintendo. But if I'm a fan of FF, it's a gamble what platform the next games going to be released under. Personally, I always felt like they "fit" best with Nintendo, but that's just me....
By the time the general public catches on to how terribly and horribly bad this is, it'll be too late to do anything about it.
There's been talk of selling or leasing our interstate highways to overseas investors as a source of tax money. I believe it's already been done in Illinois, and there are talks of doing the same for the NJ Turnpike.
The incident a year or so ago about port security being run by an overseas corporation also didn't sit well with me at all. I'm all for international trade, but there are some things that absolutely positively must stay domestic.
Sure, the mainstream tech media were good at one time for reviews of products like printers and displays, but that time passed a long time before the independent sites started to take hold.
Ever since the mainstream media sold out to their sponsors, and maintaining a friendly image to truly clueless users, they've been absolutely worthless. In essence, as long as we're talking about product reviews, they've been worthless for many yeas now. Also, go find a review that actually lays out and documents its testing procedure.
The mainstream media brought about its own death. The indie/blog community does a good job of reviewing gaming hardware, although I do agree that for general purpose reviews, it sort of stinks (with small exceptions for sites like Ars Technica and DansData)
I was thinking more along the lines that if you painted the suit black, and then plated the helmet with some kind of shiny metal, you'd look kind of like Daft Punk....
My bad. I guess I'm confusing the rhetoric we're using against "terrorists" with the rhetoric we used against "communists".
The difference here, I suppose is that the "enemy" in the 70s and 80s had more than enough firepower to obliterate just about everything, not to mention a positioning system of their own.
This is especially promising, considering that the US used to intentionally degrade its own GPS signals available to civilians, for fear that it'd be used by "terrorists".
The only thing this did was to piss off a lot of legitimate users, including the FAA and the Military when the available supply of Military GPS units dried up.
Also, a very modestly inaccurate GPS signal isn't going to deter a terrorist. Rather, it's going to encourage him to build a bigger bomb, which would result in considerably more collateral damage.
I believe the RIAA has sent letters to the effect of "Please send us the names of the students behind these IP addresses, or we will come back with a subpoena"
No, it's not at a good rubric for a Computer Scientist to compare the schedulers of two different operating systems.
However, from the user's perspective, it's a very big deal. Having used BeOS a few years ago on what was very modest hardware (even at the time), I can easily say that it felt like it was the fastest and most responsive operating system that I've ever used.
Even Linux on modern hardware doesn't come close to the snappiness of BeOS. You also can't beat the fact that it could boot from BIOS to the desktop in under 10 seconds (again, on a *very* modest PC).
Be should have been the future of Operating Systems, and it's an absolute shame that the code is lying to rot under Palm's guidance. Windows, Linux, and MacOS simply can't touch the simple elegance and efficiency that BeOS mastered almost 10 years ago, which is an absolute shame. (Remember that BeOS was released alongside Mac OS 9 and Windows 98)
Sure. I love to cook from scratch, and readily recognize that the food you prepare is better in virtually every way. I've even found that preparing a meal together can be a better "date" than going out to eat.
However, if you're living alone, and are managing a full-time job or education, it's a real challenge to prepare dinner for yourself 7 days a week, and even more of a challenge to take care of the rest of your meals.
I've also noticed that the cost of prepared foods is going way down, while the cost of "ingredients" is going up. This also seems to vary geographically...
When I lived in New Jersey, there was a huge Italian population, and most people were avid cooks (this has decreased markedly in my lifetime, though). Ingredients were very inexpensive, and prepared foods generally weren't a good value. When I moved to Virginia, I noticed that prepared foods were a bit cheaper, and that ingredients were a tad bit more money. When I lived in Alaska, prepared foods were often the close to the same price as they are on the mainland, but ingredients were obscenely expensive ($8 for a pound of flour).
Actually, I've talked with the head of IT, and was told that the (un)official policy is to ignore any requests from the RIAA that could potentially incriminate students, unless they're in the form of a legal subpoena.
I believe they've also contacted students who frequently come up in the lists of IP addresses that are requested by the RIAA, asking them to lay off the filesharing, although I've never heard this from any sort of official source...
WM has, however, honored non-subpoena requests from NBC, which asked the school to forward letters to the students in question, stating something to the effect of "Please stop downloading our shows, as it undermines our business. If you refrain from this activity in the future, no further action will be taken against you, as we are not in the business of suing helpless college students."
W&M's IT people have been remarkably good at responsibly protecting students, considering that they're fairly incompetent in most other areas. NBC's policy strikes me as being one of the only reasonable/ethical attempts to curb piracy that I've heard of.
W&M's been the subject of a pretty vicious smear campaign by a group of anonymous neo-cons. (Newt Gingrich's office and The Collegiate Network have funded these attacks, and have given scholarships to students who have "come out" against the school)
There was indeed a cross in the wren building that got removed this past year, as it was a state-owned building that wasn't explicitly used for religious purposes. The cross was NOT historically significant, and there were no records showing that there even was a cross in the room prior to 1940.
As a result of the public outcry that resulted from this decision, the president revised the policy so that the cross would be displayed upon request, on Sundays, and other religious holidays. He also appointed a committee of religion and public policy scholars, and gave them the authority to make a permanent policy as they saw fit. It was hardly "caving".
The NCAA issue was also long and drawn out across many years. After we lost a number of appeals to the NCAA, it was clear that a lengthy and expensive court battle would be our only shot at keeping our logo without being thrown out of the NCAA. Being a cash-strapped state school with an admittedly unimpressive athletic program, we made a compromise, where we kept our team in exchange for making a minor change to our logo.
Believe me. The NCAA and Wren Cross petitioners are not at all popular with students at W&M, and it's pretty well understood why the school made the decision it did.
Japan is a small insular nation, approximately 1/25 the size of the USA, and is located along major trade routes.
Any sort of direct demographic comparison is apples to oranges.
China or Russia might be a better point of comparison, although there any number of reasons why that isn't all that great of a comparison either.
Also, the USA's GDP per capita is considerably higher than that of Japan's "economic powerhouse". I never really understood the hype behind Japan's economy being so superior to the US, when there were very few numbers to back it up. They make nice cars and TVs, and all of the sudden, American citizens make inferences about the rest of the country's economy.
Can you seriously not hear the difference between a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean accent? As long as there's not much crossover (ie. a native Japanese speaker who learned English from Chinese instructors), the difference between them is night-and-day.
If you can't be bothered to learn the difference between several very distinct cultures, you have absolutely no right to comment on global issues.
Sort of like how the media occasionally manages to mistake Buddhists for Islamic Militants....
Slashdot Mirror
Not to start up the old KDE vs. Gnome argument, but Nautilus embedded Gecko for quite a few of its earlier releases.
As for me, I'm slowly being converted into an Xfce user. If they can add a bit more built-in functionality than it already has (there are some options they left out that really do need to be configurable), they'll have a winner on their hands.
Agreed. The book was an absolute roller-coaster, and I was amazed by how well she tied up the loose ends in the plot at the end.
It wasn't like The Return of the King (movie), where plot ends were quickly, but sequentially tied up one by one, and it wasn't like many other books that drag out the ending far far too long, as to ruin the effect of the climax.
As for Rowling's writing style, I will continue to compare it to Kurt Vonnegut, whose books were some of the more straightforward and easily-digestible pieces of literature churned out of the 20th century, and greatly benefitted from it. Flowery and incomprehensible language isn't necessary to tell a great story!
And to address your last comment, I don't believe The Wheel of Time ever was finished conclusively. Last I heard, in a sadly ironic twist of fate, the author is now terminally ill, and the last book of the series has so many plotlines to tie up that he's having difficulty finishing it.
They should've done like LOTR, and made extended versions of the film just for the DVD release that included a bit more of the backstory and character development.
The last book is going to need this treatment if the film is to be even remotely coherent.
Really? Will it not?
I imagine that it won't be regarded as one of the finest pieces of prose ever written, but I do think that it will go down as being one of the greatest stories told in print.
Rowling's simplistic writing style is a huge component of what makes it so incredibly compelling.
Kurt Vonnegut is widely regarded as being one of the greatest authors of the 20th century, and I was flabbergasted when I first started reading his works to see just how plain and straightforward they were.
Books don't need to be difficult to read to be good, and I would go as far as to say that accessibility is a concept that the literary world needs to pick up on. People don't talk like 18th-century academics these days, and it makes no sense for them to write like them.
Okay.
But you've got the problem that Web Browsers (and most "modern" languages like Java) are hideously inefficient for these sort of tasks. CSS/HTML/Javascript are being contorted to do things that they were never really meant to do.
The fact that firing up Firefox to look at my GMail (which is, by all accounts one of the more efficent "Web Apps") consumes considerably more CPU time and RAM than it does to fire up a fairly robust mail client is disturbing to say the least. Let's face it -- the Web is a shitty place to get day-to-day tasks accomplished that involve any sort of interaction.
If this web app idea is to get off the ground, I'd imagine that we'll eventually be using some sort of modern derivative of the X11 protocol to natively display apps, using our screens as true thin clients. Rebol did this a few years back, and it regrettably didn't catch on (probably due to it being proprietary), but I remember checking out the tech demos, and being floored by how fast it was, even on a 56k connection.
HTML's great as an information distribution medium, but the fact that it's even being taken remotely seriously as an application platform is laughable.
I think the $4.09/gallon is the real crime in this situation.
Well, if you lived in Alaska, your response would more likely be "Yeah, so?"
I wonder what it would look like if we also plotted the funding allocated to the NSF alongside the number of papers published.
The NSF has had some serious funding woes since the 90s that very well may be causing this "draught" -- I wouldn't even go as far as to completely blame it on the Bush administration either (although they certainly did contribute).
As far as physics research goes, Clinton's cancellation of the already partially-constructed SSC easily set the entire field of particle physics back by 20 or so years. The LHC, which is being constructed in Europe as its "substitute" isn't even remotely as big or powerful as the SSC was originally planned to be.
That's a lotta mach!
Slashdot needs more comments in the narrative form...
Mario RPG was also able to very easily disregard the prior games in the franchise, because it was produced entirely by an outside developer (Square).
Personally, it's easily one of my favorite games of all time. It doesn't even pretend to take itself seriously, and has an entertaining plotline that sort of reminds me of a Pixar movie in its universal appeal.
It also managed to somehow appeal to both hardcore RPG players and "newbs". I long for more straightforward RPGs like Mario RPG, and the early Final Fantasy games (to a lesser extent of course).
I also never really got into the later games, because they tended to be released for platforms I didn't own due to Square's stupid exclusivity deals... If I'm a fan of the Mario or Zelda franchises, it's a safe bet to buy a Nintendo. But if I'm a fan of FF, it's a gamble what platform the next games going to be released under. Personally, I always felt like they "fit" best with Nintendo, but that's just me....
Welcome to America.
By the time the general public catches on to how terribly and horribly bad this is, it'll be too late to do anything about it.
There's been talk of selling or leasing our interstate highways to overseas investors as a source of tax money. I believe it's already been done in Illinois, and there are talks of doing the same for the NJ Turnpike.
The incident a year or so ago about port security being run by an overseas corporation also didn't sit well with me at all. I'm all for international trade, but there are some things that absolutely positively must stay domestic.
Sure, the mainstream tech media were good at one time for reviews of products like printers and displays, but that time passed a long time before the independent sites started to take hold.
Ever since the mainstream media sold out to their sponsors, and maintaining a friendly image to truly clueless users, they've been absolutely worthless. In essence, as long as we're talking about product reviews, they've been worthless for many yeas now. Also, go find a review that actually lays out and documents its testing procedure.
The mainstream media brought about its own death. The indie/blog community does a good job of reviewing gaming hardware, although I do agree that for general purpose reviews, it sort of stinks (with small exceptions for sites like Ars Technica and DansData)
I was thinking more along the lines that if you painted the suit black, and then plated the helmet with some kind of shiny metal, you'd look kind of like Daft Punk....
My bad. I guess I'm confusing the rhetoric we're using against "terrorists" with the rhetoric we used against "communists".
The difference here, I suppose is that the "enemy" in the 70s and 80s had more than enough firepower to obliterate just about everything, not to mention a positioning system of their own.
This is especially promising, considering that the US used to intentionally degrade its own GPS signals available to civilians, for fear that it'd be used by "terrorists".
The only thing this did was to piss off a lot of legitimate users, including the FAA and the Military when the available supply of Military GPS units dried up.
Also, a very modestly inaccurate GPS signal isn't going to deter a terrorist. Rather, it's going to encourage him to build a bigger bomb, which would result in considerably more collateral damage.
Haikus are easy.
But sometimes they don't make sense.
Refrigerator
I believe the RIAA has sent letters to the effect of "Please send us the names of the students behind these IP addresses, or we will come back with a subpoena"
Correct me if I'm wrong, of course...
No, it's not at a good rubric for a Computer Scientist to compare the schedulers of two different operating systems.
However, from the user's perspective, it's a very big deal. Having used BeOS a few years ago on what was very modest hardware (even at the time), I can easily say that it felt like it was the fastest and most responsive operating system that I've ever used.
Even Linux on modern hardware doesn't come close to the snappiness of BeOS. You also can't beat the fact that it could boot from BIOS to the desktop in under 10 seconds (again, on a *very* modest PC).
Be should have been the future of Operating Systems, and it's an absolute shame that the code is lying to rot under Palm's guidance. Windows, Linux, and MacOS simply can't touch the simple elegance and efficiency that BeOS mastered almost 10 years ago, which is an absolute shame. (Remember that BeOS was released alongside Mac OS 9 and Windows 98)
Sure, it's not Mr. Fusion, but this technology sure as heck sounds cool.
On the flipside, I wonder what sort of waste products this plant is going to produce...
Sure. I love to cook from scratch, and readily recognize that the food you prepare is better in virtually every way. I've even found that preparing a meal together can be a better "date" than going out to eat.
However, if you're living alone, and are managing a full-time job or education, it's a real challenge to prepare dinner for yourself 7 days a week, and even more of a challenge to take care of the rest of your meals.
I've also noticed that the cost of prepared foods is going way down, while the cost of "ingredients" is going up. This also seems to vary geographically...
When I lived in New Jersey, there was a huge Italian population, and most people were avid cooks (this has decreased markedly in my lifetime, though). Ingredients were very inexpensive, and prepared foods generally weren't a good value. When I moved to Virginia, I noticed that prepared foods were a bit cheaper, and that ingredients were a tad bit more money. When I lived in Alaska, prepared foods were often the close to the same price as they are on the mainland, but ingredients were obscenely expensive ($8 for a pound of flour).
Actually, I've talked with the head of IT, and was told that the (un)official policy is to ignore any requests from the RIAA that could potentially incriminate students, unless they're in the form of a legal subpoena.
I believe they've also contacted students who frequently come up in the lists of IP addresses that are requested by the RIAA, asking them to lay off the filesharing, although I've never heard this from any sort of official source...
WM has, however, honored non-subpoena requests from NBC, which asked the school to forward letters to the students in question, stating something to the effect of "Please stop downloading our shows, as it undermines our business. If you refrain from this activity in the future, no further action will be taken against you, as we are not in the business of suing helpless college students."
W&M's IT people have been remarkably good at responsibly protecting students, considering that they're fairly incompetent in most other areas. NBC's policy strikes me as being one of the only reasonable/ethical attempts to curb piracy that I've heard of.
W&M's been the subject of a pretty vicious smear campaign by a group of anonymous neo-cons. (Newt Gingrich's office and The Collegiate Network have funded these attacks, and have given scholarships to students who have "come out" against the school)
There was indeed a cross in the wren building that got removed this past year, as it was a state-owned building that wasn't explicitly used for religious purposes. The cross was NOT historically significant, and there were no records showing that there even was a cross in the room prior to 1940.
As a result of the public outcry that resulted from this decision, the president revised the policy so that the cross would be displayed upon request, on Sundays, and other religious holidays. He also appointed a committee of religion and public policy scholars, and gave them the authority to make a permanent policy as they saw fit. It was hardly "caving".
The NCAA issue was also long and drawn out across many years. After we lost a number of appeals to the NCAA, it was clear that a lengthy and expensive court battle would be our only shot at keeping our logo without being thrown out of the NCAA. Being a cash-strapped state school with an admittedly unimpressive athletic program, we made a compromise, where we kept our team in exchange for making a minor change to our logo.
Believe me. The NCAA and Wren Cross petitioners are not at all popular with students at W&M, and it's pretty well understood why the school made the decision it did.
Japan is a small insular nation, approximately 1/25 the size of the USA, and is located along major trade routes.
Any sort of direct demographic comparison is apples to oranges.
China or Russia might be a better point of comparison, although there any number of reasons why that isn't all that great of a comparison either.
Also, the USA's GDP per capita is considerably higher than that of Japan's "economic powerhouse". I never really understood the hype behind Japan's economy being so superior to the US, when there were very few numbers to back it up. They make nice cars and TVs, and all of the sudden, American citizens make inferences about the rest of the country's economy.
Can you seriously not hear the difference between a Chinese, Japanese, or Korean accent? As long as there's not much crossover (ie. a native Japanese speaker who learned English from Chinese instructors), the difference between them is night-and-day.
If you can't be bothered to learn the difference between several very distinct cultures, you have absolutely no right to comment on global issues.
Sort of like how the media occasionally manages to mistake Buddhists for Islamic Militants....