I did RTFA and didn't think it was anti-science so much as anti-groupthink. I don't think this article's author is this Jim Holt, who is clearly pro-ID. I can't find much about the New Yorker's Jim Holt, but at least this attribution makes it clear it's not the same one.
No, you're not. I've had Gentoo on my elderly Thinkpad as my primary personal computer for something like three years now, and it works perfectly fine. I've had occasional problems but nothing I couldn't solve. I, too, am running from the unstable branch.
My favorite was when bash 3.1 was marked ~x86 before any of the init scripts had been updated to work with it. I rebooted at some point to find that (seemingly) almost none of the scripts in/etc/init.d or a number of other places were functional anymore. I found after a lot of wasted time that there was some problem with declaring multiple local variables on one line; something like that, anyway.
As I recall—and my memory is hazy (like the moors of Scotland)—the 3.1 ebuild was withdrawn from ~x86 perhaps the next day, but if you happened to run your update in that window, you were screwed. Never heard why that happened; didn't really care, since I managed to muddle through fixing it on my own.
(And no, I don't need a lecture on running a system with A_K=~x86...)
These standards aren't exactly handed out at the local book store, but they do exist.
This isn't exactly a complete specification of the standard, but if you've ever been curious about how much and roughly what a magstripe card can encode, it's worth a look.
I always used to get these confused, but suddenly it's obvious how to keep them straight. The "-ite" ending on "meteorite" is the same ending used for so many other earthly minerals (hematite, stalactite, anthracite, etc.). So a meteorite is the (earthly) rock you get once the meteor has fallen. And it only took me 26 years to figure that out...
Ah hah; thanks for the explanation! It's been several years since I worked with GIS tools. I remember using ESRI's ArcSomething (IMS?) to overlay training base boundaries with road maps and such, and the discrepancies varied from negligible to annoying—never anything this bad!
Odd that it's so far off in Osaka... I just zoomed in to Tokyo, and it's quite usably accurate. Any idea what accounts for the difference? Are they using a projection that just happens to be spot on for Tokyo but significantly poor for Osaka?
Thanks for pointing that out; I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed the trend. Regardless of what the editors are doing, if the submitter is not going to go to any effort to summarize the article, what's the point in having submitters at all? I can get headlines and blurbs from Google News or any of a number of other sources.
this download link looks exactly the same as a link to any other web page. The only way for your browser to tell the difference is to start downloading the file
Plenty of information is available without beginning a download, assuming you're willing to trust the server. If you (the browser developer) are lazy, examining the file extension will work most of the time (the DownloadSort extension makes use of this).
If you're only very slightly less lazy, you can just send an HTTP HEAD request and get all sorts of great information about the file: MIME type, last modified date, and file length, at least. Perhaps I only want to launch a download manager for movies or for files larger than 10MB.
Regardless, I see no reason that advanced downloading features can't be encapsulated in an extension. But I realize that this merely changes the debate into a quibble about who considers what features to be sufficiently advanced to warrant being moved into an extension...:)
I don't understand why my web browser—designed to browse web pages—needs to also be a download manager. I also don't understand why my web browser needs a spell checker. Or why it needs to be an RSS feed aggregator. There are better pieces of software for doing all of these things; let them do their job! What I wouldn't give to be able to edit my Slashdot posts in Vim, for example!
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against extensions. But why is all this functionality that has existed in the form of extensions being integrated into the core Firefox install?
* - Telephone poles OF DOOM (found in most racing games, Grand Theft Auto)
Err... ever hit a telephone pole in real life? The only reason GTA is playable is because the majority of street-lining utility poles don't completely destroy your car! (Why they were inconsistent about how much stopping power various poles have, I'm not sure...)
You mean weighted by the number of units that eventually sold? That would be very interesting, but it might be hard to get accurate info for all of those consoles. (Though perhaps some of the ones that would be most impacted by weighting would be easiest to find information on...)
Re:Missing features wishlist
on
Google Calendar
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· Score: 1
There is an option to set it to 24-hr time; I've set it that way in my calendar. Look at "Time format" under the "General" tab on the "Settings" page.
Re: If it had at least used the same offset...
on
Google Calendar
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· Score: 1
Some were shifted by two hours and some by three, possibly depending on which of the Sunbird-generated calendars the events came from. Sunbird (a.k.a. Mozilla Calendar) appears to have serious problems storing timezone information correctly, so it's possible this is not Google's fault. Though I did hand-check a few in the.ics file I have, and they looked fine before the import.
Anyone else having this little glitch where it takes two or three tries to get a recurring event to have the correct start and end times?
Cygwin — *nix-like commandline environment (screenshot would be silly)
These are the basic things I would require regardless of what kind of project I was working on. There are probably another half a dozen or so programs I would almost always install (Process Explorer, Firefox, Putty, KeePass), but these are more likely to be subject to individual preferences.
For what it's worth (probably not much!), there is already an extension to integrate the calendar into Firefox. It's based on the 0.2 codebase, but that's not necessarily a bad thing at the moment. I've been running Sunbird 0.2 for months now with only a few minor problems. The various releases and nightlies I've tried of the new codebase have all either had bad crashing problems or data loss issues. I'm really looking forward to these getting resolved; there are some great new features in the Sunbird 0.3 releases!
Of course, that's 100 simulated Earth rocks reaching a simulated Jupiter's simulated moon Europa. Usually I'd rag on the New Scientist for yet more crappy, sensationalist reporting, but this was clearly the submitter's fault.
My (unfortunately implicit and unobvious) point about Google Earth was that for the amount of effort they went to to make this gigantic, snazzy application (which you rightly point out will not run everywhere!), they could have made a smaller, slicker application that bested Google Maps on every front except possibly ubiquity.
Many of my concerns with AJAX are not inherent to it; they are problems inherent to any software development. Hence the analogy to Flash. As a specific example, Flash provides all sorts of features for accessibility: I should be able to use a well-written Flash app very easily; the app should integrate seamlessly with my browsing. However, this takes a lot of effort, and (in my experience) practically no developers are willing to make this effort.
Hence my concern (one of them, at least) that AJAX will turn into yet another platform for the development of unintuitive, inconsistent interfaces. I am curious if anyone is working on a decent set of libraries for performing standard AJAX tasks (along the lines of this, which has been making the rounds recently).
Google Maps is a fantastic application of AJAX, most definitely. I wouldn't have written this map module for Gallery2 if it did not rock my tiny world.
Keep in mind, though, two things. First, Google Maps is the exception to the rule in terms of the tradeoff between usefulness and complexity (in the sense of lacking a reasonable degradability for browsers without the necessary functionality). Second, imagine how much better Google Maps would be if it didn't have to be crammed into a browser.
Practically every new and exciting application on the web uses some form of Ajax.
If by "new and exciting" you mean "redundant and obnoxious", then yes. Yes they do. So much for being able to browse information in a way that I dictate; now I'm subject to the whims of some insane application living inside my web browser.
If that's what it comes to, why not just stick with Flash? At least with Flash, it doesn't take a dozen images and pages of CSS to effect a rounded rectangle! (This may be an exaggeration!)
I want to puke when I see the acrobat reader splash screen come on when I want to look at a file...
It won't keep you from puking, but it will give you a noticeable but unobtrusive warning, which may give you enough time to grab the nearest vomit receptacle. Check out the TargetAlert Firefox extension.
Oh, come on! It's all right there in plain English:
Michael E. Thomas has invented and patented the world's first and only concept for non-contact UV photon induced electric field poling of ferroelectric non-linear photonic bandgap crystals...
I admit, I'm not up on my plasmonic physics, but with all those big words, he's got to know what he's talking about! (His grammar could probably stand some improvement, though...)
Slashdot Mirror
I did RTFA and didn't think it was anti-science so much as anti-groupthink. I don't think this article's author is this Jim Holt, who is clearly pro-ID. I can't find much about the New Yorker's Jim Holt, but at least this attribution makes it clear it's not the same one.
No, you're not. I've had Gentoo on my elderly Thinkpad as my primary personal computer for something like three years now, and it works perfectly fine. I've had occasional problems but nothing I couldn't solve. I, too, am running from the unstable branch.
My favorite was when bash 3.1 was marked ~x86 before any of the init scripts had been updated to work with it. I rebooted at some point to find that (seemingly) almost none of the scripts in /etc/init.d or a number of other places were functional anymore. I found after a lot of wasted time that there was some problem with declaring multiple local variables on one line; something like that, anyway.
As I recall—and my memory is hazy (like the moors of Scotland)—the 3.1 ebuild was withdrawn from ~x86 perhaps the next day, but if you happened to run your update in that window, you were screwed. Never heard why that happened; didn't really care, since I managed to muddle through fixing it on my own.
(And no, I don't need a lecture on running a system with A_K=~x86...)
Well said. Thank you for reminding me why I still read through the comments!
I always used to get these confused, but suddenly it's obvious how to keep them straight. The "-ite" ending on "meteorite" is the same ending used for so many other earthly minerals (hematite, stalactite, anthracite, etc.). So a meteorite is the (earthly) rock you get once the meteor has fallen. And it only took me 26 years to figure that out...
Ah hah; thanks for the explanation! It's been several years since I worked with GIS tools. I remember using ESRI's ArcSomething (IMS?) to overlay training base boundaries with road maps and such, and the discrepancies varied from negligible to annoying—never anything this bad!
Odd that it's so far off in Osaka... I just zoomed in to Tokyo, and it's quite usably accurate. Any idea what accounts for the difference? Are they using a projection that just happens to be spot on for Tokyo but significantly poor for Osaka?
Thanks for pointing that out; I'm glad I'm not the only one who has noticed the trend. Regardless of what the editors are doing, if the submitter is not going to go to any effort to summarize the article, what's the point in having submitters at all? I can get headlines and blurbs from Google News or any of a number of other sources.
If you're only very slightly less lazy, you can just send an HTTP HEAD request and get all sorts of great information about the file: MIME type, last modified date, and file length, at least. Perhaps I only want to launch a download manager for movies or for files larger than 10MB.
Regardless, I see no reason that advanced downloading features can't be encapsulated in an extension. But I realize that this merely changes the debate into a quibble about who considers what features to be sufficiently advanced to warrant being moved into an extension... :)
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against extensions. But why is all this functionality that has existed in the form of extensions being integrated into the core Firefox install?
You mean weighted by the number of units that eventually sold? That would be very interesting, but it might be hard to get accurate info for all of those consoles. (Though perhaps some of the ones that would be most impacted by weighting would be easiest to find information on...)
There is an option to set it to 24-hr time; I've set it that way in my calendar. Look at "Time format" under the "General" tab on the "Settings" page.
Anyone else having this little glitch where it takes two or three tries to get a recurring event to have the correct start and end times?
These are the basic things I would require regardless of what kind of project I was working on. There are probably another half a dozen or so programs I would almost always install (Process Explorer, Firefox, Putty, KeePass), but these are more likely to be subject to individual preferences.
For what it's worth (probably not much!), there is already an extension to integrate the calendar into Firefox. It's based on the 0.2 codebase, but that's not necessarily a bad thing at the moment. I've been running Sunbird 0.2 for months now with only a few minor problems. The various releases and nightlies I've tried of the new codebase have all either had bad crashing problems or data loss issues. I'm really looking forward to these getting resolved; there are some great new features in the Sunbird 0.3 releases!
Lighthouses are quite common on rivers and lakes.
Many of my concerns with AJAX are not inherent to it; they are problems inherent to any software development. Hence the analogy to Flash. As a specific example, Flash provides all sorts of features for accessibility: I should be able to use a well-written Flash app very easily; the app should integrate seamlessly with my browsing. However, this takes a lot of effort, and (in my experience) practically no developers are willing to make this effort.
Hence my concern (one of them, at least) that AJAX will turn into yet another platform for the development of unintuitive, inconsistent interfaces. I am curious if anyone is working on a decent set of libraries for performing standard AJAX tasks (along the lines of this, which has been making the rounds recently).
Keep in mind, though, two things. First, Google Maps is the exception to the rule in terms of the tradeoff between usefulness and complexity (in the sense of lacking a reasonable degradability for browsers without the necessary functionality). Second, imagine how much better Google Maps would be if it didn't have to be crammed into a browser.
If that's what it comes to, why not just stick with Flash? At least with Flash, it doesn't take a dozen images and pages of CSS to effect a rounded rectangle! (This may be an exaggeration!)