Yeah; I've seen 5-hour delays in delivering SMS messages (and then all my accumulated test messages get delivered together;-). We're using paging systems, too, and I'd agree that they're more reliable.
But we basically have to use what's available for each individual. The medical system is full of Luddites, and when dealing with MDs and RNs, you don't give them orders. You figure out what they are willing and able to deal with, and use that. Most of them can't be persuaded to learn how to use a PDA. Cell phones they can deal with. Most cell phones now come with SMS. Somewhat fewer have paging. All have voice capability.
With the medical personnel themselves, the hospital can give them a phone, and in the cases at hand, it's a PDA phone. But we can only use the capabilities that we can get a person to learn to use. In the case of patients, it's even worse: We have little say in what sort of electronics (if any) they carry. And often they can't be taught to use anything but a phone, because they've been using phones for decades and understand that.
We can and do demo paging and SMS. All cell-phone providers seem to have an email-to-SMS gateway now. But such messages are often not seen by the person carrying the phone, and most of them can't reply (because they don't know how).
The big question now is whether we can demo voice messaging. A voice message ("Are you OK? Press 1 if you're OK; press 2 if you need help, or start talking and your message will be passed to a person.") and a way to record the replies would really help a lot.
We've tried a couple of commercial services that do things like this. They aren't very satisfactory, because they separate us from the phone by several layers of software, producing long delays before we get anything back. And the HIPAA regulations will almost certainly make it illegal for us to go through such a commercial service anyway. The only right way is to connect directly to the phone and not have any intermediaries or non-real-time relays
And, of course, if my software can connect to the phone itself, there's a good chance that I can have it drop in a pager number and/or an SMS message, for those that are known to be able to handle such things. But if the DB says they're voice-only, the software needs to talk to them and record their reply, even if that's not the technically best way to do it.
One of the interesting things about VoIP from the start was the idea that, as a programmer, I could write a program that would connect to a telephone and "talk" to whoever or whatever was there. And now that the lower levels of the phone system is widely converted to VoIP (RTP actually), it seems like this should be possible.
I've been working on a medical project that would really like to use this capability. Things like alerting medical personnel via their cellphones, and sending them voice and/or SMS messages. We've been doing lots of Net research to discover what the code looks like.
So far, we haven't found it. Lots of enticing clues that, yes, it might be possible. But tracking down leads invariable leads to circles without actually discovering any code that does it.
Of course, the spam uses are also obvious, and as part of the project, we'd like to learn how to protect the medical people from that.
Or keep it even simpler - don't wear a watch at all.
A few months back, I read an article about the recent slow decline in the sale of wrist watches in the US and Europe. It seems that people are one by one realizing that it's now nearly impossible to be out of sight of a clock of some sort, so why wear one?
Myself, I realized this 5 or 6 years ago. Then a slight rash appeared on my wrist under my current watch, and went away when I didn't wear the watch for a few days. So I simply laid it aside, and I haven't really missed it.
My computer screens all have the time in a corner. My car has the time display on the radio. In the kitchen, both the microwave and regular stove display the time. Nearly every room in the house has a clock in some gadget. Walking down the street, clocks are everywhere. My cell phone shows the time when it's not being used as a phone, so in the rare instances I can't see a clock, I can reach into my pocket and get one.
Watches really are pointless now for many of us, except as jewelry.
One of the laments I've read from the postal people is that, with the slow death of typewriters, the fraction of mail with handwritten addresses has slowly increased. The mail sorters tend to spit these out, and they have to be hand sorted.
Yeah, you can print stick-on address labels on many printers. But it's so much faster to just grab a pen that that's what most people do.
And handwritten envelope addresses are so much more personal...
Jeez; if you have access to the equipment in the art school, I'd think you'd also have access to calligraphy texts. If not, what sort of crummy art school is it?
Unless you have a serious neurological disease, legible writing is easily within your abilities.
Talk to me again in 20-30 years when your C program are as optimised and proved bug free...
This does remind me of a study some people did quite a few years ago when I was a grad student at a big university (whose identity isn't important here). They instrumented the Fortran compiler on the big central mainframe in the CS dept so that it silently checked for a number of common problems such as integer overflows, and recorded the results. They then used this for all submitted Fortran jobs (which was more than half the machine's load), and studied the results.
The main result was summarized as: More than half of the Fortran runs had at least one output value that was incorrect because of integer overflow. This actually resulted in several retractions of published papers.
One of the problems in the number crunching biz is that on most hardware, detecting integer overflow takes an extra instruction. Part of this study was a survey of users. One of the questions asked whether they would use overflow checking if it slowed the program down. Around 90% of the Fortran users answered "No." So they didn't care about correct results; they only wanted fast code.
One wag summarized this with a pair of definitions: A "good" compiler generates the fastest code that correctly implements the meaning of the source code. An "optimizing" compiler produces even faster code than that.
Anyway, it's a good idea to be very wary of anyone who puts "optimized" before "bug free". This implies that they consider speed more important than correct results. This attitude is rampant in the Fortran user community.
Even guarded criticism of glaringly obvious facts result in a post getting moderated into oblivion.
That's not my experience. I've posted a number of criticisms of the New Mac (OSX) recently. Most weren't modded at all, of course. Those that got moderator attention all got mostly positive points, despite the fact that my comments were mostly negative.
Well, to be more accurate, my comments were very mixed. I see a lot of good things about my Powerbook, but also a lot of things that could be improved. A lot of those improvements are already present in linux-based systems. Some aren't. In some cases, the things I can't find are supposedly there in OSX, but the documentation isn't good enough for a dummy like me to find or use them.
From a computer geek's viewpoint, I make it clear that I consider OSX mostly inferior to linux, but better in a few ways. I also make it clear that I recommend that Windows users switch to a Mac unless they enjoy using the worst-designed computer on the planet.
(Of course, I expect followup telling me of other computer systems I could buy that are even worse than Windows.;-)
In any case, none of this seems to have produced a religious attack from the Mac crowd. Just replies that are in turn interesting reading, and sometimes even informative.
Actually, the topic here was travel to Mars, not to another star. It's true that we'll probably never have a 6-hour flight to Mars. But there are no major engineering obstacles to reducing the time to a few months. This is quite comparable to the travel times from England to the New-World and Australian colonies in 1600.
It is well within our capabilities to colonize much of the solar system. Whether we'll ever reach another star is indeed a serious question, or rather a topic mostly for science-fiction writers. Unless we discover some Star Trek physics, we may never make it.
And in comparison with the Cro Magnon "invasion" of Europe 50,000 years ago, what little evidence we have of that implies that it took generations. The conquest actually took around 10,000 years. Scandinavia was only settled by modern humans about 5,000 years ago. The Solar System looks fairly easy in comparison.
We do have much better technology now. But we'll have to learn to do farming on asteroids and such to make a go of it.
And if there are living bacteria on Mars, it would be a real shame to contaminate them before we have a chance to study them thoroughly. They're probably not on the surface, of course; too much UV there. But it'll be interesting to see what's a few meters down.
Want to live on Mars? Be my guest. While you are spending 90% of your life in a spacesuit, I will be on the beach in Bora Bora.
Of course, our ancestors who left the plains of East Africa tens of thousands of years ago could well have made the same argument.
"Want to go to Europe? Be my guest. While you are spending 99% of your life wearing clothes that cover 90% of your body to keep out the cold, I'll be warm and comfortable here wearing not much at all."
Of course, they could have been right. For most people, life wasn't noticeably better in Europe than it was for their distant relatives in Africa. Nasty, brutish and short in both areas.
Those that headed east to Bora Bora did have it better than either, at least until those Europeans arrived.
And, of course, the Neandert[h]als might have some comments to add to the discussion, if they were still alive.
... before America was colonised by Europeans that it was explored by them beforehand.
A few months ago, I read an interesting comment on these explorations by some historian (whose name I've forgotten). His study of the records of the early expeditions to New England showed that the first around 1500 reported a coast lined with villages every few miles. The second, around 1520, described a coast nearly devoid of people, with uninhabited ruins every few miles.
What had happened during those 20 years? Measles and smallpox, mostly.
There's a reason some people are worried about carrying contagion to Mars.
Well, that hasn't happened after a few decades, and the way things are going, it's becoming less likely.
Much of this is that I've taken seriously the rhetorical question that I ran across some years ago: Would you ask your customers to stare at a lit flourescent tube for hours at a time? No? Well, if your windows default to a white background, that's exactly what you're doing. A computer display is a flourescent tube, and a white area is a fully-lit flourescent tube. A white background is a direct attack on your customers' eyes.
The sensible defense is, when facing a new machine, quickly locate the color config stuff. Set all the background to a neutral grey. Grey 40 is usually pretty good. Select the "Always use my colors" when you can. If you do this for most of the screen, you've eliminated the vendor's attacks on your eyes.
The only white backgrounds on my screen at the moment are the Location bars in the two mozilla windows, plus the two little checkboxes below this textarea. That's not enough to worry about.
It can be fun to respond to claims of user friendliness by pointing out the white backgrounds. This totally debunks any user-friendly claim. No company with any concern for their customers would ever assault their customers' eyes like that.
Anyway, my eyes are doing pretty well so far. Hope yours are, too.
Mozilla Firebird -> Preferences -> Web Features -> Fonts and Colors
I was puzzled by this for a while. The Mozilla Firebird -> Preferences got me a window, and there was a Web Features on the left, so I clicked on that. But there was no "Fonts and Colors" anywhere. Then it dawned on me: That funny button just labelled "& Colors" must be it. I clicked on it, and got a fonts window (though the colors were another window beyond that). Very weird.
I suppose that something got trashed, and it'll probably be fixed in the next download.
Not exactly hidden.
There is a certain amount of hiddenness here. Putting it inside something labelled "Web Features" is a bit of misdirection, since this has nothing to do with any web features. It's solely about local rendering. The natural place for it is behind the "Appearances" label, as the older mozilla does.
But I guess I'm used to software totally misclassifying and mislabelling things. It's a long tradition.;-)
[excerpt from California constitution declaring English the state's official language]
Actually, it makes sense that California would have done this way back in the state's beginnings. Various historians have pointed out that most governments have never declared an official language. The reason is simple. Most governments are formed by people who have a common language, and there's no point in wasting time on the topic.
When a government does declare an official language, it is almost always done as a way to oppress linguistic minority groups. This normally only happens when there is a significant minority that speaks another language, and the dominant group wants to make life difficult for that minority.
When California was becoming a US state, it was a mostly Spanish-speaking area. It had been taken over by an influx of Americans, mostly due to the Gold Rush, but they were still a linguistic minority. Outside of San Francisco and the mining areas, most of the people spoke Spanish.
So the constitution declared English the official language, for the usual reason.
The US government, when it was formed, had no such significant minority language. There were lots of minority languages, true, primarily German and French. But there was no debate about the subject, and no question about the official language.
Actually, there's a related "urban myth". You sometimes see the claim that one of the historic votes that was decided in the US Congress by one vote was whether English or German should be the official language of the new country. This turns out to be not quite what happened. First, it was the Continental Congress, but that's a nit. What the vote was really about was whether the official Congressional Record should be published in just English, or in both English and German. At the time, there were large German-speaking areas in the new country, and some of the Congress thought that those people could be better brought into full citizenry if the Record were published in their native language. They would be expected to send English-speaking reps to Congress, of course, but a Record in German would make them all better informed and thus better citizens. Bilingual publishing was voted down by one vote, mostly for reasons of cost, and the Record was published only in English. (The German-speaking population supported the Revolution anyway, because they had even greater complaints against their English oppressors than the English-speaking colonists had.)
There was no question about the working language of the US Congress or any other part of the government. Since it wasn't an issue, it was never decided or declared.
There are a few countries where the debate over the official language(s) has been actually interesting. India for example.
Just for yuks, I thought I'd check out what these fonts looked like in my browser window. I happened to be running mozilla firebird on my Powerbook at the moment, so I went to the menus, selected Preferences, looked for the fonts section -- and couldn't find it. I went through all the rest of the menus, and couldn't find the string "font" anywhere.
Anyone here know if it's possible to set firebird's fonts? Did they just overlook this? Or, more likely, did they find some clever and inventive way to hide it, including calling it something without "font" in its name?
Onward to setting fonts in mozilla itself. And safari, and IE, and maybe the old Netscape 4.7 that somehow got included.
Or maybe I won't bother. I usually override the fonts and colors anyway, so pages that set them are just wasting bandwidth.
(14 points? I usually force everything to 10 points. And people looking over my shoulder always complain about the unreadable text. But screens are always so small...;-)
Hmmm... Let's see... Let's test it on another quip I was thinking of tossing out...
I've heard that they're even outsourcing some Open Source development work to students in Finland.
Well, I guess you're right. My sarcasm-o-meter[TM] didn't trip on that one. Guess I'll have to reboot it.
(BTW, I wonder why there isn't a/. "sarcasm" rating. Maybe they couldn't figure out whether it should be -1 or +1. I've also thought there should be an "irony" rating, but that would have the same problem.)
What about people? Doesn't everybody here have at least one relative/friend who this has happened to?
Some years ago, one of the tasts that I had involved occasionally delivering some equipment for events at a nearby synagogue. The only place to park and unload was next to a glass wall that had two glass doors. One evening, when backing out in the dark, I didn't notice that the door was still open. Crunch!
The next day, when I went in to talk to the rabbi about it, first his secretary and then he laughed loudly. They had both done exactly the same thing.
Eventually they faced the problem, and put some highly-reflective stickers on the inside of the door. It looked unaesthetic from the inside, which was the main hall. But it ended the problem of a broken door every few months.
In any event, it's a bit odd to see a "news" story about problems with birds flying into glass. If you look at any birding mag from the past century, you'll find ads for stickers (mostly outlines of predatory birds like owls or falcons) to keep birds away. This has been a well-known problem ever since sheet glass was developed.
When the first "glass tower" skyscrapers started getting built back in the late 40's, there were stories about how a new task for the janatorial crew was to pick up the dead birds from the sidewalks.
Not only that, but I asked google about "great tits", and mostly I got a lot of sites about little birds. Hardly any with pictures of women with great tits.;-)
Re:How stupid do you have to be?
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... all other sites on that router ring are working properly, that the net is no slower than usual and...
So how do we know that SCO is actually suffering from any sort of attack? It's easy enough to put your server offline. They're running apache, so "apachectl stop" will do the job.
I wonder if I should stop my home server for a day or so, and start hollering loudly that I've been hit by a DOS attack. I wonder who I should accuse of attacking me? Let's see; I'm running KDE at the moment on my linux box, so it must be those evil Gnomes...
So where's the evidence that SCO is suffering from an attack of some sort? All I seem to see is that their machine isn't responding, and this has happened several times in the past week. How do we know that they haven't just turned off their server for the day?
Now if they could find ways to use my other 7 feet. It was good of Apple to build a machine designed for us Mesklinites, but why did they limit the GUI this way?
Actually, what I'd like to see is a Mac designed for use by one of Niven's Bandersnatchi. I mean, how can you use a one-button mouse if you don't have any appendages?
have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?
No, because I have one of each sitting on my desktop.
When I got the 17' Powerbook, I decided that I would give it the best chance I could, by refusing the temptation to install things like the X-Windows server and other Open-Source tools. I'd use Apple's tools and teach myself to use them. Only when I could use something without thought would I compare it with the corresponding linux tools.
Over the months, I've gotten quite comfortable with the PB, OSX, and the whole package. But when I lean back and compare them critically, I have to admit: Nearly everything is simpler, faster, and easier on the linux box. The Mac is generally prettier. And in a few cases (such as plugging in USB gadgets), it does a better job.
But so far, despite my best intentions, the Mac has turned out to be slow and clumsy compared to linux. I've even made my linux life more difficult by switching WMs occasionally. KDE one week, Gnome the next, then Enlightenment, then FVWM. This slightly slows down my linux use and sometimes produces stumbles. But still, the linux box wins on most comparisons.
One biggie is that text windows work much better on linux. One of the embarrassments of the GUI world is how much faster and more productive a CLI user is than a GUI user, for almost all tasks. And a CLI user can work on machines anywhere on the Net as easily as the onee on their desktop.
On the Mac, as on Windows, the text window is an orphan. On linux, like all unixoid systems, the text/CLI approach is well developed, and is the best way to do most tasks. On OSX, although it is a kind of unix, most of the system only works from the GUI. This is a real disappointment, and relegates it to the "toy" classification for many purposes.
It's too bad. But maybe it'll improve. Apple has only recently gone the unix route. Give them a few years of hanging with the unix crowd, and maybe they'll pick up some of the things that make linux better than OSX.
And maybe the linux gang will learn how to recognize USB gadgets smoothly and painlessly.
I think Linux has a loooong way to go as a desktop OS. The word from LinuxWorld was "It's not quite there yet.." which means that other people feel the same way.
Y'know, I've been curious about this claim. What exactly to people mean by it?
I've done a few "time and motion" tests of users of various kinds of computer systems, to see how quickly their brain/finger combination can accomplish tasks. The X-Windows systems have always won these tests quite handily, and linux seems to be somewhat (but not much) the best of the X-Windows systems.
Thus, linux and other unix users routinely cut and paste between windows, almost without thinking about it. On MS Windows and all Mac GUIs, this is a much slower operation. Your typical X-Windows user can copy as few as 4 chars faster than they can be typed; with MS and Apple systems, the cutover point is around 12 or 15 chars.
For another example, MS and Apple window software only implements the "click to focus" approach. With X-Windows, you can use the "focus follows mouse" approach, which is demonstrably easier and faster once you get a bit of experience with it.
The GUI approaches for firing up a tool are another good test case. MS Windows uses that silly Start menu, which is off in a corner, maximising mouse motion to use it. OSX has that silly "dock", which is only slightly better, but can't hold much, and the Finder approach is incredibly slow and clumsy. Linux window managers have implemented a Start-button, but they also kept the older approach of putting the same menu on the background. So you can use any visible bit of background as a "Start" menu, saving yourself a lot of mouse motion.
The linux WMs also support multiple desktops, which can be a big help in organize things when you work on multiple projects at once. When will MS and Apple supply this? And on a single desktop, a very handy thing is to be able to backgroud a window with a single middle-button click on the border or titlebar. Almost all X-Windows systems do this by default. I've asked on MS and Apple newsgroups about this, and was told "Sorry, you can't do that." But it helps a lot when working on several things at once. You work on one for a while, then middle-click on all its windows to push them to the bottom of the stack, and the windows for the next task are now on the screen. Quick and easy on linux, apparently impossible on MS and Apple windows.
There are also the 1- and 2- button mice used on Apple and MS systems. The X-Windows gang settled on a minimum of 3 buttons, as a good match for the human hand (since you need the thumb and little finger to hold the mouse). This is a good part of the X-Windows speed advantage.
(My wife likes to talk about the 16-button mouse she used some time back on some CAD/CAM jobs. Now that was nice. I tried plugging one of them into a linux box a few years ago, and was pleased to find that X Windows was ready for it. But only a few apps could really deal with it out of the box. The wish (tcl/tk) language handled it without batting an eye. On MS Windows and a Mac, you find that only a few specialized apps can even recognize the extra buttons.)
The examples go on and on. The X-Windows mob has experimented with lots of ideas, and in many cases has settled on one (or maybe two) as a Good Idea. With both MS and Apple, you take what they give you, and if there's a better idea, you wait for them to supply it. With linux, the users can develop ideas and get them into the default install. So it's not surprising that the linux gang has the most practical tools for handling most tasks.
So if linux is a faster, easier system in this sense, why do people keep saying that it's not ready for "desktop" use?
The only thing I can think of that explains this is that by "desktop" they mean something that is 100.00% identical to MS Windows. This is so that MS Windows users can use it without having to learn anything. If you use this definition, then it's obviously tr
Indeed. As I hit the Submit button, it occurred to me that I should have gone back and inserted those apostrophes. Well, you're welcome to the karma points...
(We might note that Dave didn't do this, either. Sometimes he misses a dumb joke, too.;-)
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Yeah; I've seen 5-hour delays in delivering SMS messages (and then all my accumulated test messages get delivered together ;-). We're using paging systems, too, and I'd agree that they're more reliable.
But we basically have to use what's available for each individual. The medical system is full of Luddites, and when dealing with MDs and RNs, you don't give them orders. You figure out what they are willing and able to deal with, and use that. Most of them can't be persuaded to learn how to use a PDA. Cell phones they can deal with. Most cell phones now come with SMS. Somewhat fewer have paging. All have voice capability.
With the medical personnel themselves, the hospital can give them a phone, and in the cases at hand, it's a PDA phone. But we can only use the capabilities that we can get a person to learn to use. In the case of patients, it's even worse: We have little say in what sort of electronics (if any) they carry. And often they can't be taught to use anything but a phone, because they've been using phones for decades and understand that.
We can and do demo paging and SMS. All cell-phone providers seem to have an email-to-SMS gateway now. But such messages are often not seen by the person carrying the phone, and most of them can't reply (because they don't know how).
The big question now is whether we can demo voice messaging. A voice message ("Are you OK? Press 1 if you're OK; press 2 if you need help, or start talking and your message will be passed to a person.") and a way to record the replies would really help a lot.
We've tried a couple of commercial services that do things like this. They aren't very satisfactory, because they separate us from the phone by several layers of software, producing long delays before we get anything back. And the HIPAA regulations will almost certainly make it illegal for us to go through such a commercial service anyway. The only right way is to connect directly to the phone and not have any intermediaries or non-real-time relays
And, of course, if my software can connect to the phone itself, there's a good chance that I can have it drop in a pager number and/or an SMS message, for those that are known to be able to handle such things. But if the DB says they're voice-only, the software needs to talk to them and record their reply, even if that's not the technically best way to do it.
One of the interesting things about VoIP from the start was the idea that, as a programmer, I could write a program that would connect to a telephone and "talk" to whoever or whatever was there. And now that the lower levels of the phone system is widely converted to VoIP (RTP actually), it seems like this should be possible.
I've been working on a medical project that would really like to use this capability. Things like alerting medical personnel via their cellphones, and sending them voice and/or SMS messages. We've been doing lots of Net research to discover what the code looks like.
So far, we haven't found it. Lots of enticing clues that, yes, it might be possible. But tracking down leads invariable leads to circles without actually discovering any code that does it.
Of course, the spam uses are also obvious, and as part of the project, we'd like to learn how to protect the medical people from that.
Anyone have any good clues?
Or is it all proprietary and not available to us?
Or keep it even simpler - don't wear a watch at all.
A few months back, I read an article about the recent slow decline in the sale of wrist watches in the US and Europe. It seems that people are one by one realizing that it's now nearly impossible to be out of sight of a clock of some sort, so why wear one?
Myself, I realized this 5 or 6 years ago. Then a slight rash appeared on my wrist under my current watch, and went away when I didn't wear the watch for a few days. So I simply laid it aside, and I haven't really missed it.
My computer screens all have the time in a corner. My car has the time display on the radio. In the kitchen, both the microwave and regular stove display the time. Nearly every room in the house has a clock in some gadget. Walking down the street, clocks are everywhere. My cell phone shows the time when it's not being used as a phone, so in the rare instances I can't see a clock, I can reach into my pocket and get one.
Watches really are pointless now for many of us, except as jewelry.
One of the laments I've read from the postal people is that, with the slow death of typewriters, the fraction of mail with handwritten addresses has slowly increased. The mail sorters tend to spit these out, and they have to be hand sorted.
...
Yeah, you can print stick-on address labels on many printers. But it's so much faster to just grab a pen that that's what most people do.
And handwritten envelope addresses are so much more personal
Jeez; if you have access to the equipment in the art school, I'd think you'd also have access to calligraphy texts. If not, what sort of crummy art school is it?
Unless you have a serious neurological disease, legible writing is easily within your abilities.
Talk to me again in 20-30 years when your C program are as optimised and proved bug free ...
This does remind me of a study some people did quite a few years ago when I was a grad student at a big university (whose identity isn't important here). They instrumented the Fortran compiler on the big central mainframe in the CS dept so that it silently checked for a number of common problems such as integer overflows, and recorded the results. They then used this for all submitted Fortran jobs (which was more than half the machine's load), and studied the results.
The main result was summarized as: More than half of the Fortran runs had at least one output value that was incorrect because of integer overflow. This actually resulted in several retractions of published papers.
One of the problems in the number crunching biz is that on most hardware, detecting integer overflow takes an extra instruction. Part of this study was a survey of users. One of the questions asked whether they would use overflow checking if it slowed the program down. Around 90% of the Fortran users answered "No." So they didn't care about correct results; they only wanted fast code.
One wag summarized this with a pair of definitions: A "good" compiler generates the fastest code that correctly implements the meaning of the source code. An "optimizing" compiler produces even faster code than that.
Anyway, it's a good idea to be very wary of anyone who puts "optimized" before "bug free". This implies that they consider speed more important than correct results. This attitude is rampant in the Fortran user community.
Not that they're the only ones.
Even guarded criticism of glaringly obvious facts result in a post getting moderated into oblivion.
;-)
That's not my experience. I've posted a number of criticisms of the New Mac (OSX) recently. Most weren't modded at all, of course. Those that got moderator attention all got mostly positive points, despite the fact that my comments were mostly negative.
Well, to be more accurate, my comments were very mixed. I see a lot of good things about my Powerbook, but also a lot of things that could be improved. A lot of those improvements are already present in linux-based systems. Some aren't. In some cases, the things I can't find are supposedly there in OSX, but the documentation isn't good enough for a dummy like me to find or use them.
From a computer geek's viewpoint, I make it clear that I consider OSX mostly inferior to linux, but better in a few ways. I also make it clear that I recommend that Windows users switch to a Mac unless they enjoy using the worst-designed computer on the planet.
(Of course, I expect followup telling me of other computer systems I could buy that are even worse than Windows.
In any case, none of this seems to have produced a religious attack from the Mac crowd. Just replies that are in turn interesting reading, and sometimes even informative.
Actually, the topic here was travel to Mars, not to another star. It's true that we'll probably never have a 6-hour flight to Mars. But there are no major engineering obstacles to reducing the time to a few months. This is quite comparable to the travel times from England to the New-World and Australian colonies in 1600.
It is well within our capabilities to colonize much of the solar system. Whether we'll ever reach another star is indeed a serious question, or rather a topic mostly for science-fiction writers. Unless we discover some Star Trek physics, we may never make it.
And in comparison with the Cro Magnon "invasion" of Europe 50,000 years ago, what little evidence we have of that implies that it took generations. The conquest actually took around 10,000 years. Scandinavia was only settled by modern humans about 5,000 years ago. The Solar System looks fairly easy in comparison.
We do have much better technology now. But we'll have to learn to do farming on asteroids and such to make a go of it.
And if there are living bacteria on Mars, it would be a real shame to contaminate them before we have a chance to study them thoroughly. They're probably not on the surface, of course; too much UV there. But it'll be interesting to see what's a few meters down.
Want to live on Mars? Be my guest. While you are spending 90% of your life in a spacesuit, I will be on the beach in Bora Bora.
Of course, our ancestors who left the plains of East Africa tens of thousands of years ago could well have made the same argument.
"Want to go to Europe? Be my guest. While you are spending 99% of your life wearing clothes that cover 90% of your body to keep out the cold, I'll be warm and comfortable here wearing not much at all."
Of course, they could have been right. For most people, life wasn't noticeably better in Europe than it was for their distant relatives in Africa. Nasty, brutish and short in both areas.
Those that headed east to Bora Bora did have it better than either, at least until those Europeans arrived.
And, of course, the Neandert[h]als might have some comments to add to the discussion, if they were still alive.
... before America was colonised by Europeans that it was explored by them beforehand.
A few months ago, I read an interesting comment on these explorations by some historian (whose name I've forgotten). His study of the records of the early expeditions to New England showed that the first around 1500 reported a coast lined with villages every few miles. The second, around 1520, described a coast nearly devoid of people, with uninhabited ruins every few miles.
What had happened during those 20 years? Measles and smallpox, mostly.
There's a reason some people are worried about carrying contagion to Mars.
Australia was a dumping ground for poor people the mother country didn't want and threw away as "criminals"... and hasn't turned out badly anyway.
A while ago, I heard some Aussie comment that he was glad that Australia got all the criminals and America got all the religious people.
Well, that hasn't happened after a few decades, and the way things are going, it's becoming less likely.
Much of this is that I've taken seriously the rhetorical question that I ran across some years ago: Would you ask your customers to stare at a lit flourescent tube for hours at a time? No? Well, if your windows default to a white background, that's exactly what you're doing. A computer display is a flourescent tube, and a white area is a fully-lit flourescent tube. A white background is a direct attack on your customers' eyes.
The sensible defense is, when facing a new machine, quickly locate the color config stuff. Set all the background to a neutral grey. Grey 40 is usually pretty good. Select the "Always use my colors" when you can. If you do this for most of the screen, you've eliminated the vendor's attacks on your eyes.
The only white backgrounds on my screen at the moment are the Location bars in the two mozilla windows, plus the two little checkboxes below this textarea. That's not enough to worry about.
It can be fun to respond to claims of user friendliness by pointing out the white backgrounds. This totally debunks any user-friendly claim. No company with any concern for their customers would ever assault their customers' eyes like that.
Anyway, my eyes are doing pretty well so far. Hope yours are, too.
Mozilla Firebird -> Preferences -> Web Features -> Fonts and Colors
;-)
I was puzzled by this for a while. The Mozilla Firebird -> Preferences got me a window, and there was a Web Features on the left, so I clicked on that. But there was no "Fonts and Colors" anywhere. Then it dawned on me: That funny button just labelled "& Colors" must be it. I clicked on it, and got a fonts window (though the colors were another window beyond that). Very weird.
I suppose that something got trashed, and it'll probably be fixed in the next download.
Not exactly hidden.
There is a certain amount of hiddenness here. Putting it inside something labelled "Web Features" is a bit of misdirection, since this has nothing to do with any web features. It's solely about local rendering. The natural place for it is behind the "Appearances" label, as the older mozilla does.
But I guess I'm used to software totally misclassifying and mislabelling things. It's a long tradition.
[excerpt from California constitution declaring English the state's official language]
Actually, it makes sense that California would have done this way back in the state's beginnings. Various historians have pointed out that most governments have never declared an official language. The reason is simple. Most governments are formed by people who have a common language, and there's no point in wasting time on the topic.
When a government does declare an official language, it is almost always done as a way to oppress linguistic minority groups. This normally only happens when there is a significant minority that speaks another language, and the dominant group wants to make life difficult for that minority.
When California was becoming a US state, it was a mostly Spanish-speaking area. It had been taken over by an influx of Americans, mostly due to the Gold Rush, but they were still a linguistic minority. Outside of San Francisco and the mining areas, most of the people spoke Spanish.
So the constitution declared English the official language, for the usual reason.
The US government, when it was formed, had no such significant minority language. There were lots of minority languages, true, primarily German and French. But there was no debate about the subject, and no question about the official language.
Actually, there's a related "urban myth". You sometimes see the claim that one of the historic votes that was decided in the US Congress by one vote was whether English or German should be the official language of the new country. This turns out to be not quite what happened. First, it was the Continental Congress, but that's a nit. What the vote was really about was whether the official Congressional Record should be published in just English, or in both English and German. At the time, there were large German-speaking areas in the new country, and some of the Congress thought that those people could be better brought into full citizenry if the Record were published in their native language. They would be expected to send English-speaking reps to Congress, of course, but a Record in German would make them all better informed and thus better citizens. Bilingual publishing was voted down by one vote, mostly for reasons of cost, and the Record was published only in English. (The German-speaking population supported the Revolution anyway, because they had even greater complaints against their English oppressors than the English-speaking colonists had.)
There was no question about the working language of the US Congress or any other part of the government. Since it wasn't an issue, it was never decided or declared.
There are a few countries where the debate over the official language(s) has been actually interesting. India for example.
Just for yuks, I thought I'd check out what these fonts looked like in my browser window. I happened to be running mozilla firebird on my Powerbook at the moment, so I went to the menus, selected Preferences, looked for the fonts section -- and couldn't find it. I went through all the rest of the menus, and couldn't find the string "font" anywhere.
... ;-)
Anyone here know if it's possible to set firebird's fonts? Did they just overlook this? Or, more likely, did they find some clever and inventive way to hide it, including calling it something without "font" in its name?
Onward to setting fonts in mozilla itself. And safari, and IE, and maybe the old Netscape 4.7 that somehow got included.
Or maybe I won't bother. I usually override the fonts and colors anyway, so pages that set them are just wasting bandwidth.
(14 points? I usually force everything to 10 points. And people looking over my shoulder always complain about the unreadable text. But screens are always so small
Hmmm ... Let's see ... Let's test it on another quip I was thinking of tossing out ...
/. "sarcasm" rating. Maybe they couldn't figure out whether it should be -1 or +1. I've also thought there should be an "irony" rating, but that would have the same problem.)
I've heard that they're even outsourcing some Open Source development work to students in Finland.
Well, I guess you're right. My sarcasm-o-meter[TM] didn't trip on that one. Guess I'll have to reboot it.
(BTW, I wonder why there isn't a
So not only do we have to worry about getting our real jobs shipped overseas, but also our open source development as well!
;-)
Hey, now might be a good time to look into where linux started. You might be surprised to learn that it wasn't the US.
It's also fun to point out that Linus now lives in the US.
Chauvinism won't get you far in the Open Source crowd.
What about people? Doesn't everybody here have at least one relative/friend who this has happened to?
Some years ago, one of the tasts that I had involved occasionally delivering some equipment for events at a nearby synagogue. The only place to park and unload was next to a glass wall that had two glass doors. One evening, when backing out in the dark, I didn't notice that the door was still open. Crunch!
The next day, when I went in to talk to the rabbi about it, first his secretary and then he laughed loudly. They had both done exactly the same thing.
Eventually they faced the problem, and put some highly-reflective stickers on the inside of the door. It looked unaesthetic from the inside, which was the main hall. But it ended the problem of a broken door every few months.
In any event, it's a bit odd to see a "news" story about problems with birds flying into glass. If you look at any birding mag from the past century, you'll find ads for stickers (mostly outlines of predatory birds like owls or falcons) to keep birds away. This has been a well-known problem ever since sheet glass was developed.
When the first "glass tower" skyscrapers started getting built back in the late 40's, there were stories about how a new task for the janatorial crew was to pick up the dead birds from the sidewalks.
So how did this get passed off as news?
Not only that, but I asked google about "great tits", and mostly I got a lot of sites about little birds. Hardly any with pictures of women with great tits. ;-)
... all other sites on that router ring are working properly, that the net is no slower than usual and ...
...
So how do we know that SCO is actually suffering from any sort of attack? It's easy enough to put your server offline. They're running apache, so "apachectl stop" will do the job.
I wonder if I should stop my home server for a day or so, and start hollering loudly that I've been hit by a DOS attack. I wonder who I should accuse of attacking me? Let's see; I'm running KDE at the moment on my linux box, so it must be those evil Gnomes
So where's the evidence that SCO is suffering from an attack of some sort? All I seem to see is that their machine isn't responding, and this has happened several times in the past week. How do we know that they haven't just turned off their server for the day?
What am I missing here?
Yeah; it was one of the early models. ;-)
Now if they could find ways to use my other 7 feet. It was good of Apple to build a machine designed for us Mesklinites, but why did they limit the GUI this way?
Actually, what I'd like to see is a Mac designed for use by one of Niven's Bandersnatchi. I mean, how can you use a one-button mouse if you don't have any appendages?
have you ever felt guilty over using Mac OS X instead of Linux?
No, because I have one of each sitting on my desktop.
When I got the 17' Powerbook, I decided that I would give it the best chance I could, by refusing the temptation to install things like the X-Windows server and other Open-Source tools. I'd use Apple's tools and teach myself to use them. Only when I could use something without thought would I compare it with the corresponding linux tools.
Over the months, I've gotten quite comfortable with the PB, OSX, and the whole package. But when I lean back and compare them critically, I have to admit: Nearly everything is simpler, faster, and easier on the linux box. The Mac is generally prettier. And in a few cases (such as plugging in USB gadgets), it does a better job.
But so far, despite my best intentions, the Mac has turned out to be slow and clumsy compared to linux. I've even made my linux life more difficult by switching WMs occasionally. KDE one week, Gnome the next, then Enlightenment, then FVWM. This slightly slows down my linux use and sometimes produces stumbles. But still, the linux box wins on most comparisons.
One biggie is that text windows work much better on linux. One of the embarrassments of the GUI world is how much faster and more productive a CLI user is than a GUI user, for almost all tasks. And a CLI user can work on machines anywhere on the Net as easily as the onee on their desktop.
On the Mac, as on Windows, the text window is an orphan. On linux, like all unixoid systems, the text/CLI approach is well developed, and is the best way to do most tasks. On OSX, although it is a kind of unix, most of the system only works from the GUI. This is a real disappointment, and relegates it to the "toy" classification for many purposes.
It's too bad. But maybe it'll improve. Apple has only recently gone the unix route. Give them a few years of hanging with the unix crowd, and maybe they'll pick up some of the things that make linux better than OSX.
And maybe the linux gang will learn how to recognize USB gadgets smoothly and painlessly.
I think Linux has a loooong way to go as a desktop OS. The word from LinuxWorld was "It's not quite there yet.." which means that other people feel the same way.
Y'know, I've been curious about this claim. What exactly to people mean by it?
I've done a few "time and motion" tests of users of various kinds of computer systems, to see how quickly their brain/finger combination can accomplish tasks. The X-Windows systems have always won these tests quite handily, and linux seems to be somewhat (but not much) the best of the X-Windows systems.
Thus, linux and other unix users routinely cut and paste between windows, almost without thinking about it. On MS Windows and all Mac GUIs, this is a much slower operation. Your typical X-Windows user can copy as few as 4 chars faster than they can be typed; with MS and Apple systems, the cutover point is around 12 or 15 chars.
For another example, MS and Apple window software only implements the "click to focus" approach. With X-Windows, you can use the "focus follows mouse" approach, which is demonstrably easier and faster once you get a bit of experience with it.
The GUI approaches for firing up a tool are another good test case. MS Windows uses that silly Start menu, which is off in a corner, maximising mouse motion to use it. OSX has that silly "dock", which is only slightly better, but can't hold much, and the Finder approach is incredibly slow and clumsy. Linux window managers have implemented a Start-button, but they also kept the older approach of putting the same menu on the background. So you can use any visible bit of background as a "Start" menu, saving yourself a lot of mouse motion.
The linux WMs also support multiple desktops, which can be a big help in organize things when you work on multiple projects at once. When will MS and Apple supply this? And on a single desktop, a very handy thing is to be able to backgroud a window with a single middle-button click on the border or titlebar. Almost all X-Windows systems do this by default. I've asked on MS and Apple newsgroups about this, and was told "Sorry, you can't do that." But it helps a lot when working on several things at once. You work on one for a while, then middle-click on all its windows to push them to the bottom of the stack, and the windows for the next task are now on the screen. Quick and easy on linux, apparently impossible on MS and Apple windows.
There are also the 1- and 2- button mice used on Apple and MS systems. The X-Windows gang settled on a minimum of 3 buttons, as a good match for the human hand (since you need the thumb and little finger to hold the mouse). This is a good part of the X-Windows speed advantage.
(My wife likes to talk about the 16-button mouse she used some time back on some CAD/CAM jobs. Now that was nice. I tried plugging one of them into a linux box a few years ago, and was pleased to find that X Windows was ready for it. But only a few apps could really deal with it out of the box. The wish (tcl/tk) language handled it without batting an eye. On MS Windows and a Mac, you find that only a few specialized apps can even recognize the extra buttons.)
The examples go on and on. The X-Windows mob has experimented with lots of ideas, and in many cases has settled on one (or maybe two) as a Good Idea. With both MS and Apple, you take what they give you, and if there's a better idea, you wait for them to supply it. With linux, the users can develop ideas and get them into the default install. So it's not surprising that the linux gang has the most practical tools for handling most tasks.
So if linux is a faster, easier system in this sense, why do people keep saying that it's not ready for "desktop" use?
The only thing I can think of that explains this is that by "desktop" they mean something that is 100.00% identical to MS Windows. This is so that MS Windows users can use it without having to learn anything. If you use this definition, then it's obviously tr
Indeed. As I hit the Submit button, it occurred to me that I should have gone back and inserted those apostrophes. Well, you're welcome to the karma points ...
;-)
(We might note that Dave didn't do this, either. Sometimes he misses a dumb joke, too.