I installed a box with ubuntu and prommised myself that I would use the GUI and only the GUI. I had no need to use the CLI. Grandma would have no problems either.
That's a useful approach to learning a new system. A few years ago, after reading all the rave reviews of the new Macs with OSX, I got me one. I decided to resist the temptation to take advantage of everything I knew about unix systems, and I forced myself to use the Mac tools unless I just couldn't find one to do the job.
After a couple years, I found I'd reached a plateau, and wasn't getting more efficient at using the Mac tools, so I flipped the switch that re-enabled all my unix knowledge. My productivity shot way up overnight. I now use my Mac with at least 5 Terminal windows open all the time, and curse the fact that they're not xterms. The CLI is such a faster way to do things, because it's based on language (which humans are good at) rather than pictures (which most of us are not so good at).
Still, OSX is frustrating, because even with its unix tools grafted on, it's still slow and klunky compared to any unix box. Lots of advertising hype has pushed the idea that it's pretty, and I suppose to some people it is, but simple time-and-motion tests show how far it has to go to match the speed and ease of use of any unix system. For an experienced user, of course; if you only use computers once or twice a week, I suppose a Mac might be better. In particular, Macs are pretty well designed for someone who hasn't learned to move their fingers independently. (And they're a lot better at than than MS Windows, which is loved only by people who've never learned to use anything else - and in my experience, it's even hated by those people.;-)
In any case, if you're interested in developing for non-typists, it's a good exercise to avoid using a CLI and do everything through the GUI. It's frustrating and slow, but that's how that most people prefer their computers, so you should try to make sure your stuff all works that way.
I'd be happy if Linux had fonts where one half of the letter was thicker than the other half.
Not me; I always change the fonts to the thinnest helvetica sans that I can find.
But this does illustrate the basic problem with Shuttleworth's basic argument. There's an old saying that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." You and I have different font preferences, and there's no logical or practical way to choose between them. They're just aesthetic differences. Everything else has this problem, too.
The best that can ever be done along these lines is to give the user a simple, up-front way of picking one of a set of themes. Make this part of the installation process, and put it at an easy-to-find place in the runtime menus. Do a bit of market research to find a set of themes that people like. Include a few extras that look a lot like the MS and Apple default eye candy, plus a couple of space-efficient, bare-bones themes for us fans of ergonomics.
But the idea that you can just make it look pretty is hopelessly inaccurate. There's no way that humans can be made to agree on what's pretty, at least not when it comes to something as unnatural as a computer GUI.
Or does the MS spin machine really work that well?
We didn't. What you're seeing is a side effect of the fact that the FF gang is rather open and (sometimes;-) listens to criticism. This encourages people to be critical, for some unexplained reason.
But don't worry; the next time there's an IE story, you'll be reading questions about why people are always attacking MS but never attack FF.
If "make the grade" actually means anything, it happened when the first "quality" studies were done comparing wikipedia's error rate with assorted encyclopedias and other reference material. The reports were that wikipedia's error rate was either about the same as or slightly better than the others.
The reaction of the wikipedia crowd was mostly to discuss how to improve this situation. Being "no worse than Britannica" wasn't taken as high praise. This is further evidence that wikipedia is doing something right.
Now if they can avoid the tendency of all organizations to bog down in bureaucratic protocols, they might turn into a reference site that's actually good, not just "good enough".
Hmmm... Yep; you're right. They didn't name the "hacker" in the Apple story.
Actually, in both cases I'd consider the "hacker" a public benefactor. And it'll be interesting seeing how they get treated. Will the companies involved find a rapid fix for the problem? Will they try to punish the messenger? It's obvious which is in the public interest, but companies don't always work in the public interest.
Actually, the "corpse flower" (Amorphophallus titanum, or titan arum) usually just smells like a green plant. The dead-meat smell appears only during its bloom, which typically happens once a decade or so, and lasts less than a day.
So other than the overpowering stench on the day it blooms, the rest of the time it's just another hothouse plant.
If you want to cultivate a plant with an extensive stinky blooming period, there are some smaller arums that bloom repeatedly for months on end. But they usually have a much milder smell than the corpse flower, which can be smelled a block away if it's in the open.
The reason for the stink, of course, is that these plants are adapted to being pollinated by flies, carrion beetles, and other insects that are attracted to manure or dead bodies. We should be glad that most pollinators are attracted to sweet, sugary smells.
More to the point, what effect will this have on sales?
If Apple (or independent hackers) use this information to quickly produce a fix and publish a patch, as typically happens with open source, I'll take it as a good sign, and OSX will be ranked higher in my future purchase decision.
If Apple tries to harrass Soghoian or anyone else, or closes the source, I'll take that as a sign that they're more interested in PR than fixing problems, and OSX will be ranked lower in my future purchase decisions.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, of course. I'm aware that there are people that interpret silence as "no problems". I'm also aware that such fools are often in charge of purchase decisions. But I like to think that purchase decisions in which I'm involved are made on more rational grounds.
Anyhow, I'll be watching to see how Apple reacts to this. I hope that we also read followups about this here on/., so that others can stay aware of Apple's treatment of the issue.
Also, when people pull out the "damage the institution of marriage" I usually ask them how exactly the damage occurs,...
As a resident of the state of Massachusetts, where gays have been able to marry legally for a couple of years now, I could comment on how this has affected my marriage with my wife.
It hasn't. None at all.
We have even attended a few gay weddings since they were legalized. Those didn't affect our marriage, either. They just made us a bit pleased that some friends of ours were permitted something that they were previously denied.
The "damage marriage" argument is, as far as I can tell, totally bogus. Nobody else's marriage affects yours at all. Yours is just something between you and your spouse, and if it doesn't work, it's not the fault of strangers who have married someone else.
Well, not unless they're having an affair with your spouse.;-)
The American public has little tolerance for slaughter when it is a population that looks like themselves, but finds it remarkably easy to ignore when it is of people of a different skin color, language, culture, and religion.
Actually, the recent troubles in the Balkans are an effective counter-example. Much of the reason for the slaughter there was that both the UN and the US pretty much ignored it until it was far too late. This was curious, because one thing I thought stood out in the coverage here in the US was how "ordinary" the people and their surroundings seemed. The footage of the Balkans could have been shot in small towns nearly anywhere in the American West. (It would have to be there to match the semi-arid background.) The TV shots generally were done with voice-over, so the strange language wasn't obvious. There was little in the coverage that made these people seem "strange". Yet the American (and European) population and politicians pretty much ignored them.
An interesting part of this was something that was hardly mentioned in the coverage: Much of the Balkan fighting had a single goal: eradicating Muslims. The terms "Bosnian" and "Kosovar" were in fact euphemisms for "Moslem". The other people were generally called "Serbian" (i.e., Orthodox) or "Croatian" (i.e., Catholic"); "Bosnian" and "Kosovar" usually meant "Moslem". But the only Americans who knew this were the tiny minority with some familiarity with the Balkans, and politicians with advisors with such familiarity. But most Americans didn't ignore it because the victims were a different religion; they didn't know that.
The real reason that Americans ignored the Balkans for so long was really just that it was some place far away, and therefore uninteresting. Similarly, after several years of war with Iraq, most Americans still can't point to the country on a map. They don't care, because it's far away and thus uninteresting. The media does try to emphasize the strangeness of the people there, but even that isn't very effective. Few Americans can tell you anything, good or bad, about the Iraqi population.
So it's not that the American public has much or little tolerance for slaughter; it's more like they can't be bothered to pay attention to anything that's happening in the rest of the world. Not even if the people look like Americans and their surrounding looks like Anytown, USA.
Of course, if people look strange, they're even less interesting. Except to us few weirdos who like hearing about and meeting strangers.
I don't think Americans are especially unusual in this regard.
[I]s it really ethical to distribute this kind of information... that, in the wrong hands, will cause what you are trying to prevent?
Sorry, but you can't get away with that argument this time. The information is already in the wrong hands - the people who built the equipment, and are selling it and "advising" the people running the elections.
It's quite clear from the way things have been done, and from some of the participants' comments, that they fully intend to make it easy for their clients to steal elections. The only way we can stop them is to publicise the information about what they're up to.
If we don't distribute this information to the general public, they'll continue to get away with it. The only way to straighten things out is to make as many people aware of the problems as we can.
The media companies need to decide that I own something, or that I license something, and give the rights to the consumer that correspond to the situation.
No, the companies don't need that. Maybe you do, but they don't.
They cant limit me based on the situation and change the rules only with the concern of screwing me for every penny.
They can and they are doing just that. Unless you have the technical know-how to program around their restrictions. (Or you've bought the cracking software from someone with the know-how, of course.)
paper ballets have been around for centuries and work just fine.
Rather than dancing (;-) around the topic, I'll just point out that there have been some rather large-scale problems with paper ballots, too.
Here in the US, recent elections have been followed by a number of news stories about boxes of uncounted balloots discovered days or weeks later. In each case, there were reassurances that "Someone had accidentally misplaced them", and that they didn't change the outcome of the election. Here in the Boston area, the last big election had a block of 10,000 ballots "misplaced" and then "discovered". Somewhere else in the country, there was a similar story about 20,000 misplaced ballots.
Well, maybe. But this does suggest the obvious question: When we read that only 65% of the adult population voted, how do we know that's accurate? Perhaps 95% voted, and 30% of the ballots were "misplaced", purely by accident of course. How do we know?
It's something to think about the next time you read about low voter turnout.
It's already possible to convert Music Store songs to MP3 without even using any functionality outside of iTunes.... Apple doesn't make this easy to find, of course, and in fact tries to make it look impossible...
What??? When I got my Powerbook 3 years ago, one of the first things I did was to check out iTunes' Preferences stuff. Under "Advanced", I saw the "Import Using:" menu, and selected "MP3 Encoder".
Now, when I do a "find Music/iTunes -type f..." command, I find that almost all the files' names end with ".mp3", with a few ".m4p" files. For some reason, there are four ".aif" files; they are files that I created myself with GarageBand. Dunno why they didn't get translated.
As an experiment, I copied my Music/iTunes directory to my linux web server machine a while back, and invited a number of net.friends to download files and test them. Nobody reported having any problems playing them. Well, ok, those four.aif files of mine caused problems for people without AIFF decoders, but that's about it for problems.
None of this strikes me as anything difficult to find. Putting it right there in the Preferences stuff seems like Apple's effort to make it as easy as possible.
So what am I missing here? Why was it so easy for me and difficult for others?
Maybe they the writer thought that putting it in the "Advanced" section of the Preferences stuff constituted some sort of hiding?
Why would the US attack? Occupation costs would wildly exceed the cost of just purchasing the raw materials.... It is arguable that every war since the revolution (including the civil war) was faught over one or more of these things.
With one possible exception: It's a common theory that the reason the War of 1812 started was that the US leaders saw that England, France and Spain were bogged down in the Napoleanic War and thus couldn't defend their New World colonies. So the US attacked Canada and Florida, with the intent of annexing them.
Unfortunately for the US, the war in Europe ended. England, France and Spain sent troops to North America, Washington was occupied, the government was hiding out in the countryside, and the US sued for peace. The European countries still had big problems at home, so they accepted.
Of course, since then we've heard repeatedly from many US politicians that the US has never lost a war. Heh.
I've also read in several tomes that this incident was the main reason that France sold Louisiana and Spain sold Florida to the US soon thereafter. Their politicians argued quite reasonably that it was better to sell the colonies to the Americans than to lose it all to them during the next European war.
OTOH, this might just be a post-hoc explanation that gives credit for too much foresight to the politicians.
According to U.S. Republicans, it's great when a company can pay low wages in one country and make high profits in another. Why is it worse to let individuals make high wages in one country and enjoy the low cost of living in another?
Actually, I've finally started hearing a few economists point out that this is at the heart of the problems with "internationalization". We now have a situation where corporations are free to move across borders, but labor isn't. This puts labor at a serious disadvantage. Your employer can move wherever the cost is cheapest, and sell where there's a good profit. But you and I can't do this.
It doesn't take a great genius to understand the results of such an imbalance.
To quote a standup comedian: "This War On Terror's a great idea - remember when they had a War On Drugs... and you couldn't buy drugs any more?".
Yeah; that's a good one. A similar one, real history rather than stage comedy, was back when the US government declared a "War on Poverty".
Unfortunately for the politicians, lots of poor people started asking where they could go to surrender. That war was stopped very quickly. But somehow, we still have lots of poor people. I guess the poor people won the war.
You might be right, though we've had numerous explanations of how difficult it is to ensure honest paper voting.
I suspect that part of the push for electronic voting is the perception that a computer is somehow more honest than a human. As a long-time programmer, I know that this isn't quite true, but I understand how people might make this mistake. A computer doesn't have a builtin bias like people usually do, and any behavior it has can be modified by reprogramming.
But this is confusing the issue, because a computer doesn't really have any "behavior" at all other than interpreting machine-language code. All a computer really ever does is read an opcode, interpret it, read the next opcode, interpret it, etc, until the power fails. It's the software that has "behavior", and software can be produced with any sort of bias that you like (to within the limits of your programming ability, of course).
The capabilities, features and failure modes of paper+human counters and silicon+software are so different that they're effectively incomparable. All you can do is list the problems with each, and work on solving those problems. Thus, people can be bribed and threatened; those don't work with computers. But computers' behavior can be totally modified in seconds via an IR or Bluetooth or wifi port; there is nothing comparable in humans. A computer's memory can be modified instantly, leaving no evidence of the earlier contents; this is extremely difficult and time-consuming with paper and humans. All of these problems need solutions, and the solutions for one problem don't help you much with the others.
I suspect we're facing the traditional problem of people stupidly thinking that computers are always right. Any programmer will just laugh at this, of course. I can easily write a program whose output is wrong. That's why I need to spend so much of my time debugging. But history seems to tell us that, as soon as a computer is added to a process, most people need to relearn everything they ever knew about making the process reliable. We're clearly in the early stage of that now, with voting software that's as embarrassingly buggy and insecure as the worst of Microsoft's products. To us old-timers in the computer biz, it's another "Oh, no; not again" scenario, as we fight the eternal battle to get the software developed so that it actually works right, despite all the efforts of our customers to impose low costs and deadlines that prevent us from doing the debugging properly.
Having management impose secrecy and block communication with the customers is also a well-known problem. We especially need to fight it here.
And a major problem with voting software is that most of the "customers" have strong motives to try to make it work incorrectly. In all but uncontested elections, the candidates and their supporters are trying mightily to bias the results, and if they can do this by tweaking the output of the voting hardware (paper or silicon), they'll do it. This is nearly a unique situation for software developers, and we don't have a lot of experience writing software for such customers.
That's why marijuana is not considered addictive. This doesn't change the fact that medical research does show it has harmful effects.
While true, there's a bit of misdirection in such a statement. It's not marijuana itself that's particularly harmful. Rather, it's the fact that people usually consume it in the form of smoke, and breathing smoke of any sort has harmful effects. You'd get similar harm from smoking dried oregano or grass clippings or business records or $20 bills (especially now that they contain RFID chips;-). And larger quantities of smoke is more harmful than smaller quantities.
The overuse of the term "addiction" is sorta funny, though. I especially like the concept of people being addicted to sex. All "addicted" really means these days is that you enjoy something. Being against addiction now just means you're opposed to anything that's fun.
But, at least here in America, we've always had a strong Puritanical faction. This isn't really anything new; we've just found a new way to frame it (as the political crowd likes to say).
Well, right off I noticed a change: The "Bookmarks" menu no longer has a "Manage Bookmarks" item; instead there's an "Organize Bookmarks" item. That's a significant improvement if I ever saw one! However, the window you get isn't called "Bookmarks Organizer"; it's still called "Bookmarks Manager". Oops. Time to make a bug report.
Barging ahead, though, I quickly discovered another change. It used to be that when I held down the mouse (or trackpad) button for 1/2 second or so, I got a menu. This doesn't happen now. Instead, no matter how long I hold it down, when I release the button I get some random event. With links, it follows them. With Bookmarks Manager you get the "folder" opened or closed. But no menu. Instead, I find that I have to use CTRL-click to get the menu.
Now, this isn't a real big deal. But I have had some fun in a few discussions pointing out that one of the minor advantages of the mozilla suite of apps was that a lot of little things are more time efficient than in other browsers, and this was usually my first example. You can do operations involving that "context menu" with one hand, with no need to put down your pencil or coffee cup (or whatever you're holding in the other hand;-). Now, with the new FF, you have to have one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard. No more can you just click-pause-release to get the menu.
One of the standard observations from the old efficiency-expert field is that real efficiency isn't just coming up with one flashy change; it's more often the result of a lot of small changes, none very significant taken singly, which add up to a lot of time. It seems that once again, FF has made a small change that slightly decreases usability. Not a biggie by itself, but one more small step among many that has slowly eroded its original efficiency (if that term can even be used with a straight face when talking about web browsers).
I wonder if there's a config tool somewhere that can (efficiently;-) remap various things on the keyboard and mouse, so that a user can change little things like this? It would be really nice, especially since I do a lot of web testing against the flock of browsers that I've installed, if I could make their UIs more like each other. Then I wouldn't have the constant time waste of stopping to think (or consult my notes) about how to do something in this particular browser. Or I wouldn't do something without thinking, say "Damn!", back out of what it did, and then try to remember how this browser requires that I do it.
Such a tool could be handy in converting IE users, too, if it could provide a packaged UI whose keyboard/mouse actions mimic those of IE. Then a user with IE experience wouldn't see FF as a clumsy, clunky browser that "doesn't do things right" due to different keyboard mappings. And when they get used to the radical idea of using a non-MS tool, you could point out to them that it might be even easier if they redefined a few of the keys to give them one-stroke ways of doing the things they do a lot.
I keep dreaming of tools that don't waste my time futzing with a complex, confusing UI that's slightly different in every window on my screen.
Of course, all this may exist somewhere, but I haven't found it.
Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month
This has gotta be one of the weirder (mis)uses of the term "market". After all, the competing "products" aren't for sale, and a "market" is usually a place where people sell things.
Of course, it can be difficult to establish a market when the "market leader" does the ultimate price-war thing and gives its product out for free. They did kill Netscape Corp, of course, but somehow they still didn't capture the "market".
There are some bizarre (bazarre?) economic theories at work here, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
I installed a box with ubuntu and prommised myself that I would use the GUI and only the GUI. I had no need to use the CLI. Grandma would have no problems either.
;-)
That's a useful approach to learning a new system. A few years ago, after reading all the rave reviews of the new Macs with OSX, I got me one. I decided to resist the temptation to take advantage of everything I knew about unix systems, and I forced myself to use the Mac tools unless I just couldn't find one to do the job.
After a couple years, I found I'd reached a plateau, and wasn't getting more efficient at using the Mac tools, so I flipped the switch that re-enabled all my unix knowledge. My productivity shot way up overnight. I now use my Mac with at least 5 Terminal windows open all the time, and curse the fact that they're not xterms. The CLI is such a faster way to do things, because it's based on language (which humans are good at) rather than pictures (which most of us are not so good at).
Still, OSX is frustrating, because even with its unix tools grafted on, it's still slow and klunky compared to any unix box. Lots of advertising hype has pushed the idea that it's pretty, and I suppose to some people it is, but simple time-and-motion tests show how far it has to go to match the speed and ease of use of any unix system. For an experienced user, of course; if you only use computers once or twice a week, I suppose a Mac might be better. In particular, Macs are pretty well designed for someone who hasn't learned to move their fingers independently. (And they're a lot better at than than MS Windows, which is loved only by people who've never learned to use anything else - and in my experience, it's even hated by those people.
In any case, if you're interested in developing for non-typists, it's a good exercise to avoid using a CLI and do everything through the GUI. It's frustrating and slow, but that's how that most people prefer their computers, so you should try to make sure your stuff all works that way.
I'd be happy if Linux had fonts where one half of the letter was thicker than the other half.
Not me; I always change the fonts to the thinnest helvetica sans that I can find.
But this does illustrate the basic problem with Shuttleworth's basic argument. There's an old saying that "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder." You and I have different font preferences, and there's no logical or practical way to choose between them. They're just aesthetic differences. Everything else has this problem, too.
The best that can ever be done along these lines is to give the user a simple, up-front way of picking one of a set of themes. Make this part of the installation process, and put it at an easy-to-find place in the runtime menus. Do a bit of market research to find a set of themes that people like. Include a few extras that look a lot like the MS and Apple default eye candy, plus a couple of space-efficient, bare-bones themes for us fans of ergonomics.
But the idea that you can just make it look pretty is hopelessly inaccurate. There's no way that humans can be made to agree on what's pretty, at least not when it comes to something as unnatural as a computer GUI.
When did we start hating Firefox?
;-) listens to criticism. This encourages people to be critical, for some unexplained reason.
Or does the MS spin machine really work that well?
We didn't. What you're seeing is a side effect of the fact that the FF gang is rather open and (sometimes
But don't worry; the next time there's an IE story, you'll be reading questions about why people are always attacking MS but never attack FF.
If "make the grade" actually means anything, it happened when the first "quality" studies were done comparing wikipedia's error rate with assorted encyclopedias and other reference material. The reports were that wikipedia's error rate was either about the same as or slightly better than the others.
The reaction of the wikipedia crowd was mostly to discuss how to improve this situation. Being "no worse than Britannica" wasn't taken as high praise. This is further evidence that wikipedia is doing something right.
Now if they can avoid the tendency of all organizations to bog down in bureaucratic protocols, they might turn into a reference site that's actually good, not just "good enough".
Hmmm ... Yep; you're right. They didn't name the "hacker" in the Apple story.
Actually, in both cases I'd consider the "hacker" a public benefactor. And it'll be interesting seeing how they get treated. Will the companies involved find a rapid fix for the problem? Will they try to punish the messenger? It's obvious which is in the public interest, but companies don't always work in the public interest.
Actually, the "corpse flower" (Amorphophallus titanum, or titan arum) usually just smells like a green plant. The dead-meat smell appears only during its bloom, which typically happens once a decade or so, and lasts less than a day.
So other than the overpowering stench on the day it blooms, the rest of the time it's just another hothouse plant.
If you want to cultivate a plant with an extensive stinky blooming period, there are some smaller arums that bloom repeatedly for months on end. But they usually have a much milder smell than the corpse flower, which can be smelled a block away if it's in the open.
The reason for the stink, of course, is that these plants are adapted to being pollinated by flies, carrion beetles, and other insects that are attracted to manure or dead bodies. We should be glad that most pollinators are attracted to sweet, sugary smells.
[W]ill this now harm Apple's opensourceness?
/., so that others can stay aware of Apple's treatment of the issue.
More to the point, what effect will this have on sales?
If Apple (or independent hackers) use this information to quickly produce a fix and publish a patch, as typically happens with open source, I'll take it as a good sign, and OSX will be ranked higher in my future purchase decision.
If Apple tries to harrass Soghoian or anyone else, or closes the source, I'll take that as a sign that they're more interested in PR than fixing problems, and OSX will be ranked lower in my future purchase decisions.
I can't speak for anyone but myself, of course. I'm aware that there are people that interpret silence as "no problems". I'm also aware that such fools are often in charge of purchase decisions. But I like to think that purchase decisions in which I'm involved are made on more rational grounds.
Anyhow, I'll be watching to see how Apple reacts to this. I hope that we also read followups about this here on
Only a small minority of rulers and courtiers in the Balkans under Ottoman rule were ever Muslim.
;-) ...
;-)
I think you forgot the
(Either that, or you just moved here from a parallel universe where the Ottoman Empire was very different from the one in this world.
Also, when people pull out the "damage the institution of marriage" I usually ask them how exactly the damage occurs, ...
;-)
As a resident of the state of Massachusetts, where gays have been able to marry legally for a couple of years now, I could comment on how this has affected my marriage with my wife.
It hasn't. None at all.
We have even attended a few gay weddings since they were legalized. Those didn't affect our marriage, either. They just made us a bit pleased that some friends of ours were permitted something that they were previously denied.
The "damage marriage" argument is, as far as I can tell, totally bogus. Nobody else's marriage affects yours at all. Yours is just something between you and your spouse, and if it doesn't work, it's not the fault of strangers who have married someone else.
Well, not unless they're having an affair with your spouse.
The American public has little tolerance for slaughter when it is a population that looks like themselves, but finds it remarkably easy to ignore when it is of people of a different skin color, language, culture, and religion.
Actually, the recent troubles in the Balkans are an effective counter-example. Much of the reason for the slaughter there was that both the UN and the US pretty much ignored it until it was far too late. This was curious, because one thing I thought stood out in the coverage here in the US was how "ordinary" the people and their surroundings seemed. The footage of the Balkans could have been shot in small towns nearly anywhere in the American West. (It would have to be there to match the semi-arid background.) The TV shots generally were done with voice-over, so the strange language wasn't obvious. There was little in the coverage that made these people seem "strange". Yet the American (and European) population and politicians pretty much ignored them.
An interesting part of this was something that was hardly mentioned in the coverage: Much of the Balkan fighting had a single goal: eradicating Muslims. The terms "Bosnian" and "Kosovar" were in fact euphemisms for "Moslem". The other people were generally called "Serbian" (i.e., Orthodox) or "Croatian" (i.e., Catholic"); "Bosnian" and "Kosovar" usually meant "Moslem". But the only Americans who knew this were the tiny minority with some familiarity with the Balkans, and politicians with advisors with such familiarity. But most Americans didn't ignore it because the victims were a different religion; they didn't know that.
The real reason that Americans ignored the Balkans for so long was really just that it was some place far away, and therefore uninteresting. Similarly, after several years of war with Iraq, most Americans still can't point to the country on a map. They don't care, because it's far away and thus uninteresting. The media does try to emphasize the strangeness of the people there, but even that isn't very effective. Few Americans can tell you anything, good or bad, about the Iraqi population.
So it's not that the American public has much or little tolerance for slaughter; it's more like they can't be bothered to pay attention to anything that's happening in the rest of the world. Not even if the people look like Americans and their surrounding looks like Anytown, USA.
Of course, if people look strange, they're even less interesting. Except to us few weirdos who like hearing about and meeting strangers.
I don't think Americans are especially unusual in this regard.
[I]s it really ethical to distribute this kind of information ... that, in the wrong hands, will cause what you are trying to prevent?
Sorry, but you can't get away with that argument this time. The information is already in the wrong hands - the people who built the equipment, and are selling it and "advising" the people running the elections.
It's quite clear from the way things have been done, and from some of the participants' comments, that they fully intend to make it easy for their clients to steal elections. The only way we can stop them is to publicise the information about what they're up to.
If we don't distribute this information to the general public, they'll continue to get away with it. The only way to straighten things out is to make as many people aware of the problems as we can.
Don't use commas, which aren't necessary.
Why should we stop? Torture's fun.
The media companies need to decide that I own something, or that I license something, and give the rights to the consumer that correspond to the situation.
;-)
No, the companies don't need that. Maybe you do, but they don't.
They cant limit me based on the situation and change the rules only with the concern of screwing me for every penny.
They can and they are doing just that. Unless you have the technical know-how to program around their restrictions. (Or you've bought the cracking software from someone with the know-how, of course.)
s/can'*t/shouldn't/g
paper ballets have been around for centuries and work just fine.
Rather than dancing (;-) around the topic, I'll just point out that there have been some rather large-scale problems with paper ballots, too.
Here in the US, recent elections have been followed by a number of news stories about boxes of uncounted balloots discovered days or weeks later. In each case, there were reassurances that "Someone had accidentally misplaced them", and that they didn't change the outcome of the election. Here in the Boston area, the last big election had a block of 10,000 ballots "misplaced" and then "discovered". Somewhere else in the country, there was a similar story about 20,000 misplaced ballots.
Well, maybe. But this does suggest the obvious question: When we read that only 65% of the adult population voted, how do we know that's accurate? Perhaps 95% voted, and 30% of the ballots were "misplaced", purely by accident of course. How do we know?
It's something to think about the next time you read about low voter turnout.
It's already possible to convert Music Store songs to MP3 without even using any functionality outside of iTunes. ... Apple doesn't make this easy to find, of course, and in fact tries to make it look impossible ...
..." command, I find that almost all the files' names end with ".mp3", with a few ".m4p" files. For some reason, there are four ".aif" files; they are files that I created myself with GarageBand. Dunno why they didn't get translated.
.aif files of mine caused problems for people without AIFF decoders, but that's about it for problems.
What??? When I got my Powerbook 3 years ago, one of the first things I did was to check out iTunes' Preferences stuff. Under "Advanced", I saw the "Import Using:" menu, and selected "MP3 Encoder".
Now, when I do a "find Music/iTunes -type f
As an experiment, I copied my Music/iTunes directory to my linux web server machine a while back, and invited a number of net.friends to download files and test them. Nobody reported having any problems playing them. Well, ok, those four
None of this strikes me as anything difficult to find. Putting it right there in the Preferences stuff seems like Apple's effort to make it as easy as possible.
So what am I missing here? Why was it so easy for me and difficult for others?
Maybe they the writer thought that putting it in the "Advanced" section of the Preferences stuff constituted some sort of hiding?
Why would the US attack? Occupation costs would wildly exceed the cost of just purchasing the raw materials. ... It is arguable that every war since the revolution (including the civil war) was faught over one or more of these things.
With one possible exception: It's a common theory that the reason the War of 1812 started was that the US leaders saw that England, France and Spain were bogged down in the Napoleanic War and thus couldn't defend their New World colonies. So the US attacked Canada and Florida, with the intent of annexing them.
Unfortunately for the US, the war in Europe ended. England, France and Spain sent troops to North America, Washington was occupied, the government was hiding out in the countryside, and the US sued for peace. The European countries still had big problems at home, so they accepted.
Of course, since then we've heard repeatedly from many US politicians that the US has never lost a war. Heh.
I've also read in several tomes that this incident was the main reason that France sold Louisiana and Spain sold Florida to the US soon thereafter. Their politicians argued quite reasonably that it was better to sell the colonies to the Americans than to lose it all to them during the next European war.
OTOH, this might just be a post-hoc explanation that gives credit for too much foresight to the politicians.
Everyone knows that cartoons aren't real.
George Dubya doesn't, and Ron Reagan didn't.
According to U.S. Republicans, it's great when a company can pay low wages in one country and make high profits in another. Why is it worse to let individuals make high wages in one country and enjoy the low cost of living in another?
Actually, I've finally started hearing a few economists point out that this is at the heart of the problems with "internationalization". We now have a situation where corporations are free to move across borders, but labor isn't. This puts labor at a serious disadvantage. Your employer can move wherever the cost is cheapest, and sell where there's a good profit. But you and I can't do this.
It doesn't take a great genius to understand the results of such an imbalance.
To quote a standup comedian: "This War On Terror's a great idea - remember when they had a War On Drugs... and you couldn't buy drugs any more?".
Yeah; that's a good one. A similar one, real history rather than stage comedy, was back when the US government declared a "War on Poverty".
Unfortunately for the politicians, lots of poor people started asking where they could go to surrender. That war was stopped very quickly. But somehow, we still have lots of poor people. I guess the poor people won the war.
Political metaphors can be fun.
You might be right, though we've had numerous explanations of how difficult it is to ensure honest paper voting.
I suspect that part of the push for electronic voting is the perception that a computer is somehow more honest than a human. As a long-time programmer, I know that this isn't quite true, but I understand how people might make this mistake. A computer doesn't have a builtin bias like people usually do, and any behavior it has can be modified by reprogramming.
But this is confusing the issue, because a computer doesn't really have any "behavior" at all other than interpreting machine-language code. All a computer really ever does is read an opcode, interpret it, read the next opcode, interpret it, etc, until the power fails. It's the software that has "behavior", and software can be produced with any sort of bias that you like (to within the limits of your programming ability, of course).
The capabilities, features and failure modes of paper+human counters and silicon+software are so different that they're effectively incomparable. All you can do is list the problems with each, and work on solving those problems. Thus, people can be bribed and threatened; those don't work with computers. But computers' behavior can be totally modified in seconds via an IR or Bluetooth or wifi port; there is nothing comparable in humans. A computer's memory can be modified instantly, leaving no evidence of the earlier contents; this is extremely difficult and time-consuming with paper and humans. All of these problems need solutions, and the solutions for one problem don't help you much with the others.
I suspect we're facing the traditional problem of people stupidly thinking that computers are always right. Any programmer will just laugh at this, of course. I can easily write a program whose output is wrong. That's why I need to spend so much of my time debugging. But history seems to tell us that, as soon as a computer is added to a process, most people need to relearn everything they ever knew about making the process reliable. We're clearly in the early stage of that now, with voting software that's as embarrassingly buggy and insecure as the worst of Microsoft's products. To us old-timers in the computer biz, it's another "Oh, no; not again" scenario, as we fight the eternal battle to get the software developed so that it actually works right, despite all the efforts of our customers to impose low costs and deadlines that prevent us from doing the debugging properly.
Having management impose secrecy and block communication with the customers is also a well-known problem. We especially need to fight it here.
And a major problem with voting software is that most of the "customers" have strong motives to try to make it work incorrectly. In all but uncontested elections, the candidates and their supporters are trying mightily to bias the results, and if they can do this by tweaking the output of the voting hardware (paper or silicon), they'll do it. This is nearly a unique situation for software developers, and we don't have a lot of experience writing software for such customers.
That's why marijuana is not considered addictive. This doesn't change the fact that medical research does show it has harmful effects.
;-). And larger quantities of smoke is more harmful than smaller quantities.
While true, there's a bit of misdirection in such a statement. It's not marijuana itself that's particularly harmful. Rather, it's the fact that people usually consume it in the form of smoke, and breathing smoke of any sort has harmful effects. You'd get similar harm from smoking dried oregano or grass clippings or business records or $20 bills (especially now that they contain RFID chips
The overuse of the term "addiction" is sorta funny, though. I especially like the concept of people being addicted to sex. All "addicted" really means these days is that you enjoy something. Being against addiction now just means you're opposed to anything that's fun.
But, at least here in America, we've always had a strong Puritanical faction. This isn't really anything new; we've just found a new way to frame it (as the political crowd likes to say).
Well, right off I noticed a change: The "Bookmarks" menu no longer has a "Manage Bookmarks" item; instead there's an "Organize Bookmarks" item. That's a significant improvement if I ever saw one! However, the window you get isn't called "Bookmarks Organizer"; it's still called "Bookmarks Manager". Oops. Time to make a bug report.
;-). Now, with the new FF, you have to have one hand on the mouse and one on the keyboard. No more can you just click-pause-release to get the menu.
;-) remap various things on the keyboard and mouse, so that a user can change little things like this? It would be really nice, especially since I do a lot of web testing against the flock of browsers that I've installed, if I could make their UIs more like each other. Then I wouldn't have the constant time waste of stopping to think (or consult my notes) about how to do something in this particular browser. Or I wouldn't do something without thinking, say "Damn!", back out of what it did, and then try to remember how this browser requires that I do it.
Barging ahead, though, I quickly discovered another change. It used to be that when I held down the mouse (or trackpad) button for 1/2 second or so, I got a menu. This doesn't happen now. Instead, no matter how long I hold it down, when I release the button I get some random event. With links, it follows them. With Bookmarks Manager you get the "folder" opened or closed. But no menu. Instead, I find that I have to use CTRL-click to get the menu.
Now, this isn't a real big deal. But I have had some fun in a few discussions pointing out that one of the minor advantages of the mozilla suite of apps was that a lot of little things are more time efficient than in other browsers, and this was usually my first example. You can do operations involving that "context menu" with one hand, with no need to put down your pencil or coffee cup (or whatever you're holding in the other hand
One of the standard observations from the old efficiency-expert field is that real efficiency isn't just coming up with one flashy change; it's more often the result of a lot of small changes, none very significant taken singly, which add up to a lot of time. It seems that once again, FF has made a small change that slightly decreases usability. Not a biggie by itself, but one more small step among many that has slowly eroded its original efficiency (if that term can even be used with a straight face when talking about web browsers).
I wonder if there's a config tool somewhere that can (efficiently
Such a tool could be handy in converting IE users, too, if it could provide a packaged UI whose keyboard/mouse actions mimic those of IE. Then a user with IE experience wouldn't see FF as a clumsy, clunky browser that "doesn't do things right" due to different keyboard mappings. And when they get used to the radical idea of using a non-MS tool, you could point out to them that it might be even easier if they redefined a few of the keys to give them one-stroke ways of doing the things they do a lot.
I keep dreaming of tools that don't waste my time futzing with a complex, confusing UI that's slightly different in every window on my screen.
Of course, all this may exist somewhere, but I haven't found it.
Firefox's share of the browser market has grown to 9.8 percent of the U.S. market this month
This has gotta be one of the weirder (mis)uses of the term "market". After all, the competing "products" aren't for sale, and a "market" is usually a place where people sell things.
Of course, it can be difficult to establish a market when the "market leader" does the ultimate price-war thing and gives its product out for free. They did kill Netscape Corp, of course, but somehow they still didn't capture the "market".
There are some bizarre (bazarre?) economic theories at work here, I think.
Yah; I'd noticed that. But you didn't have any suggestions for people who experienced humor.