I worked at a Radio Shack (a company owned store) for a few years, and the pressure to sell people expensive items, whether or not they needed them, was intense.
And that is exactly why I stopped going to Radio Shack a long time ago. Every time I go in there, I feel like lunch for the sharks. Same goes for Circuit City and Best Buy (although Best Buy seems to have dropped that mostly). I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. I'm glad to see that this high-pressure sales policy has backfired so badly. I hope these companies at some point figure it out and start encouraging their employees to behave like decent human beings, not sharks.
Because if FF loses too much market share then it will go bye-bye. Then none of us can use it. So if you like FF, then you should care at least somewhat about it's market share.
Re:For those of us who don't follow mozilla.org...
on
SeaMonkey 1.0 Released
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· Score: 1
It's been a while since I have installed Mozilla, but as I recall it also places the DOM inspector & javascript debugger as part of the customized installation exactly as FF does so that's not "by default" for Mozilla, either. So I don't see the advantage to Mozilla. And even if Mozilla did make it part of a custom install, so what? Power users will likely do a custom install, anyway.
And the tight integration with the e-mail client is a bogus feature; when you click on a mailto link within FF, Thunderbird brings up an e-mail window. What tighter integration do you need?
When Richard Walker published his Life of Hooke in 1705, he added that Hooke was
... in person but despicable, being crooked and low of stature, and as he grew older more and more deformed. He was always very pale and lean, and latterly nothing but skin and bone, with a meagre aspect, his eyes grey and full, with a sharp ingenious look whilst younger. He wore his own hair of dark brown colour, very long, and hanging neglected over his face uncut and lank, which about three years before his death he cut off and wore a periwig. He went stooping and very fast, having but a light body to carry, and a great deal of spirits and activity, especially in his youth. He was of an active, restless, indefatigable genius, even almost to the last, and always slept little to his death, oftenest continuing his studies all night, and taking a short nap in the day. His temper was melancholy, mistrustful, and jealous, which more increased upon him with his years.
It's funny...I read the description of Robert Hooke and it brings to mind many modern geeks I've known. Do these sound familiar?
very pale and lean...nothing but skin and bone
Long hair hanging neglected over his face
active, restless, indefatigable genius
slept little...continuing his studies all night
His temper was melancholy, mistrustful, and jealous
Seems to me like Robert would find modern geeks very familiar.
You open the photo the same way you open any other le with OOo--by selecting File > Open and highlighting the desired le.
If you select File > Save As while you're working with an image le, you'll end up with a le type that works only with OpenOfce.org, not an image le that can be opened by all kinds of picture-editing software. So, being a bit tricky yourself, if you plan to use an image le in anything other than an OOo document or presentation, you export it to the le format you want. Instead of choosing Save As when you want to save your graphics le all by itself instead of as part of something else, select File > Export. This brings up the Export dialog box and a list of graphics le format choices.
If you don't know one graphics le format from another, the safest choice is JPEG.
All you need to do now is pick a name for your le, decide which directory and folder are the best place to put it, and click Save.
Either the book is partially in French or you meant to say "file" instead of "le". I'm guessing somebody did a global search & replace or a spelling check that was screwed up.
You're right, and that's just one of the areas where he blew it. Opera would have been better served to keep their answers somewhat lighthearted instead of so stiff. He didn't really answer some of the questions well, I don't think. He says in a couple of places that they will be improving Opera in Merlin but he does not give any clues at all about what those improvements are. He had a great opportunity to list all the new features, but he didn't bother. His predictable answers seem like fluff written by a marketing stiff.
I guess I'm the only one on Slashdot who thinks it's reasonable for record labels to want to make some money. I strongly agree that suing the grandparents of kids for downloading is going way too far, I strongly believe in the concept of fair use and I strongly believe in limiting the time span of a copyright. But when folks are downloading songs from the Internet that they have not paid a single bit of royalties for then it doesn't seem to me that the record labels are being unreasonable by being upset about that.
I know, I'm the only person on Slashdot who feels that both sides in this issue are somewhat wrong, so please feel free to flame me.
Because by 2009 the HD capacity will be 100 GBs and cost less than your 8 GB flash card. And by that time we'll all be bitching about the uselessness of 8 GBs of storage. Batteries will likely have significantly higher capacity by then so we won't care as much, the hard drives will surely have some energy saving optimizations and the hard drives will surely be every bit as pluggable as compact flash. And if the phone/PDA/MP3 player has a GB or 2 of memory built-in (which it surely will by then), the device could spin up the drive, copy off the next few songs/videos from the disk, and then spin down the disk drive, saving tons of energy.
Remember when your PC had a whole gigabyte hard drive? Remember wondering how you could ever fill that massive beast? Okay, I'm old.
Cornice?!? I've never heard of them. It seems they did not exist before 2000, but now, just a few years later, they sound like a serious player. Too bad their privately held...might make a decent investment.
I think it's a bit unfair to assume this is simply about having the coolest toys. From the article you pointed to:
The European delegates reportedly said they would not turn off or jam signals from their satellites, even if they were used in a war with the United States.
So even if Galileo were being used against the US, Europe has declared that they will not shut down the system. It shouldn't be too hard to understand that such an extreme position leaves little negotiation room for the US.
And for what's it's worth, I REALLY question this source of information. I don't think any reasonable person would believe that site offers a balanced perspective.
If you sit down at a friend's Macintosh, with its single mouse button, you can use it with no problems.
Of course, that Mac your friend is using is running X11, the very thing the article is bashing. I'm sure the article was written before MacOS X, but the statement is now a complete contradiction of his entire argument against X.
It's not just Slashdot. Just look at any political blog on the left or right -- there is no debate, just constant character assassination and sarcastic comments.
Sigh...I wish I could disagree with you, but if I did I would be wrong. It really is very sad. Oddly enough, many of the folks who seem unable to avoid these character assassinations are frequently intelligent people, they just get so emotionally overcharged and have such little self-control that they refuse to see any truth in the arguments of their opponents. Very sad, especially their lack of the ability to admit fault.
Now, I'm not a physicist, but might a Faraday Cage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage) built with an appropriately sized mesh do the job? Just as a microwave lets some radiation out (we can see the burrito cooking inside) while keeping the harmful radiation in (we don't get toasted by the microwaves), couldn't this be used to do the reverse, that is, allow communication in while shielding the robot from radiation?
I realize that these cages must be in a specific shape to work correctly, but if the core components at least, can be shielded, this go a long way towards solving our problems.
I think you might be confusing particle radiation with electromagnetic radiation (don't feel bad, most people don't know the difference). Particle radiation is the spewing of sub-atomic particles caused by the decay of an unstable atom (think atomic bomb). Electromagnetic radiation is the emission of electromagnectic waves (think radio waves). Those are oversimplified and pretty bad definitions (I'm sure someone smarter than me will reply with better definitions...see below), but hopefully that is clear enough to make the distinction for you.
Particle radiation is generally blocked by using lead. Lead is very dense and therefore blocks the particles from passing through.
Electromagnetic radiation is generally blocked by using a Faraday cage. The cage does not need to be any specific shape to work, it just needs to fully encompass the object that is to be shielded from EMF radiation. The best Faraday cage would simply be a can; in theory, that should block all of the EM radiation. A wire mesh works as a partial Faraday cage, but will let some of the EMF through. Depending on the size and configuration of the mesh, certain frequencies will be mostly blocked by the mesh while other frequencies will pass more easily.
What's with the constant ad hominem attacks on Slashdot? If you disagree, then fine, please give some supporting facts and debate the issue. We might all be able to learn something from you. But just ridiculing someone... how is that an "insightful" argument? What has happened to the Slashdot moderation system?
RMS > You could not run free applications on such a system (sic, trusted computing). If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.
In other words. You Must Pay the Microsoft Tax.
Well, no, I don't think paying the Microsoft tax is the heart of the issue. If we were all forced to pay the MS tax one time before we could use our new hardware to our hearts content, that would really suck but would not be nearly as bad as the situation some corporations are trying to create - where you can't use your computer freely at all, legally anyway.
Dude...great find!! Very interesting that the researchers came to the same suspicion as myself. You missed what to me is the most relevant point, though:
I think I understand the experiment's spirit and intent, but the implementation could also have run into our double-serving policy where multiple ads are attempting to target the same terms and serving the same or highly similar (re-named) content.
So there you have it. They appear to be able to tell if someone is abusing their double-serving policy. It seems likely that this somehow factored into what was witnessed by Cringely's friend.
Not to burst anybody's tin-foil bubble, but there's possibly another less nefarious explanation to what is going on. As we know, Google wants to keep their Adword algorithm secret. It's quite possible that Google realized long ago that folks could map out their algorithm by simply playing with the input parameters just like Cringely's friend was doing. In order to prevent the inevitable reverse engineering of the algorithm, they might have put in some code to randomize the effectiveness of the results when Google has detected that someone is changing the parameters. If that guy wants to see if Google is really punishing him for lowering his price, he should try setting the price back to $1 and see if things go back to what they were before. I'll bet they won't.
Of course, another possibility is that they have a bug in their code. I've heard that some programmers actually make mistakes sometimes.
I didn't personally think the evidence for this theory was that compelling. According to other posts in this thread, they did a casting call without explaining what the show was about. And guess who showed up for this casting call? Lots of wannabe actors. It's seems entirely reasonable to me that the folks could be actors and also not be in on the gag. Alot of the folks who try to get on these reality shows are wannabe actors. They see it as a springboard into better gigs.
Man, that dental student really got bit hard. He apparently hadn't braced himself for the consequences. You can't just brush these things off. This is more like something I would expect to happen in Fluorida.
That's a nice thing to wish for, but it will never happen. The US tax code is incredibly complex and constantly changing. Writing tax software takes more than just programmers; it takes an army of tax accountants who read the tax code and codify it into a set of rules used by the software. Would you honestly trust a bunch of geeks (nerd herd??) to write such software?
That said, there is no reason why someone couldn't port their tax software to Linux. Or you could probably run it under Wine. Considering that the tax software so important and that it is tax deductible anyway, is it really so awful that you have to pay for it?
Slashdot Mirror
And that is exactly why I stopped going to Radio Shack a long time ago. Every time I go in there, I feel like lunch for the sharks. Same goes for Circuit City and Best Buy (although Best Buy seems to have dropped that mostly). I'm sure I'm not the only one who feels that way. I'm glad to see that this high-pressure sales policy has backfired so badly. I hope these companies at some point figure it out and start encouraging their employees to behave like decent human beings, not sharks.
Because if FF loses too much market share then it will go bye-bye. Then none of us can use it. So if you like FF, then you should care at least somewhat about it's market share.
It's been a while since I have installed Mozilla, but as I recall it also places the DOM inspector & javascript debugger as part of the customized installation exactly as FF does so that's not "by default" for Mozilla, either. So I don't see the advantage to Mozilla. And even if Mozilla did make it part of a custom install, so what? Power users will likely do a custom install, anyway.
And the tight integration with the e-mail client is a bogus feature; when you click on a mailto link within FF, Thunderbird brings up an e-mail window. What tighter integration do you need?
It's funny...I read the description of Robert Hooke and it brings to mind many modern geeks I've known. Do these sound familiar?
Seems to me like Robert would find modern geeks very familiar.
This is a total shot in the dark, but try Ctrl-J or Ctrl-M as the password.
Either the book is partially in French or you meant to say "file" instead of "le". I'm guessing somebody did a global search & replace or a spelling check that was screwed up.
You're right, and that's just one of the areas where he blew it. Opera would have been better served to keep their answers somewhat lighthearted instead of so stiff. He didn't really answer some of the questions well, I don't think. He says in a couple of places that they will be improving Opera in Merlin but he does not give any clues at all about what those improvements are. He had a great opportunity to list all the new features, but he didn't bother. His predictable answers seem like fluff written by a marketing stiff.
I guess I'm the only one on Slashdot who thinks it's reasonable for record labels to want to make some money. I strongly agree that suing the grandparents of kids for downloading is going way too far, I strongly believe in the concept of fair use and I strongly believe in limiting the time span of a copyright. But when folks are downloading songs from the Internet that they have not paid a single bit of royalties for then it doesn't seem to me that the record labels are being unreasonable by being upset about that.
I know, I'm the only person on Slashdot who feels that both sides in this issue are somewhat wrong, so please feel free to flame me.
Because by 2009 the HD capacity will be 100 GBs and cost less than your 8 GB flash card. And by that time we'll all be bitching about the uselessness of 8 GBs of storage. Batteries will likely have significantly higher capacity by then so we won't care as much, the hard drives will surely have some energy saving optimizations and the hard drives will surely be every bit as pluggable as compact flash. And if the phone/PDA/MP3 player has a GB or 2 of memory built-in (which it surely will by then), the device could spin up the drive, copy off the next few songs/videos from the disk, and then spin down the disk drive, saving tons of energy.
Remember when your PC had a whole gigabyte hard drive? Remember wondering how you could ever fill that massive beast? Okay, I'm old.
Your write, eye due no bedder. Eye maid a misteak. Sari.
Cornice?!? I've never heard of them. It seems they did not exist before 2000, but now, just a few years later, they sound like a serious player. Too bad their privately held...might make a decent investment.
Someone wants to be the only kid with cool toys
I think it's a bit unfair to assume this is simply about having the coolest toys. From the article you pointed to:
The European delegates reportedly said they would not turn off or jam signals from their satellites, even if they were used in a war with the United States.
So even if Galileo were being used against the US, Europe has declared that they will not shut down the system. It shouldn't be too hard to understand that such an extreme position leaves little negotiation room for the US.
And for what's it's worth, I REALLY question this source of information. I don't think any reasonable person would believe that site offers a balanced perspective.
Of course, that Mac your friend is using is running X11, the very thing the article is bashing. I'm sure the article was written before MacOS X, but the statement is now a complete contradiction of his entire argument against X.
It's not just Slashdot. Just look at any political blog on the left or right -- there is no debate, just constant character assassination and sarcastic comments.
Sigh...I wish I could disagree with you, but if I did I would be wrong. It really is very sad. Oddly enough, many of the folks who seem unable to avoid these character assassinations are frequently intelligent people, they just get so emotionally overcharged and have such little self-control that they refuse to see any truth in the arguments of their opponents. Very sad, especially their lack of the ability to admit fault.
Bruce Willis NEVER dies in his movies... unless he is costaring with Brad Pitt, in which case it was a mercy killing.
Although sometimes he is dead before the movie even starts.
Now, I'm not a physicist, but might a Faraday Cage (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faraday_cage) built with an appropriately sized mesh do the job? Just as a microwave lets some radiation out (we can see the burrito cooking inside) while keeping the harmful radiation in (we don't get toasted by the microwaves), couldn't this be used to do the reverse, that is, allow communication in while shielding the robot from radiation?
I realize that these cages must be in a specific shape to work correctly, but if the core components at least, can be shielded, this go a long way towards solving our problems.
I think you might be confusing particle radiation with electromagnetic radiation (don't feel bad, most people don't know the difference). Particle radiation is the spewing of sub-atomic particles caused by the decay of an unstable atom (think atomic bomb). Electromagnetic radiation is the emission of electromagnectic waves (think radio waves). Those are oversimplified and pretty bad definitions (I'm sure someone smarter than me will reply with better definitions...see below), but hopefully that is clear enough to make the distinction for you.
Particle radiation is generally blocked by using lead. Lead is very dense and therefore blocks the particles from passing through.
Electromagnetic radiation is generally blocked by using a Faraday cage. The cage does not need to be any specific shape to work, it just needs to fully encompass the object that is to be shielded from EMF radiation. The best Faraday cage would simply be a can; in theory, that should block all of the EM radiation. A wire mesh works as a partial Faraday cage, but will let some of the EMF through. Depending on the size and configuration of the mesh, certain frequencies will be mostly blocked by the mesh while other frequencies will pass more easily.
What's with the constant ad hominem attacks on Slashdot? If you disagree, then fine, please give some supporting facts and debate the issue. We might all be able to learn something from you. But just ridiculing someone ... how is that an "insightful" argument? What has happened to the Slashdot moderation system?
RMS > You could not run free applications on such a system (sic, trusted computing). If you did figure out how, and told someone, that could be a crime.
In other words. You Must Pay the Microsoft Tax.
Well, no, I don't think paying the Microsoft tax is the heart of the issue. If we were all forced to pay the MS tax one time before we could use our new hardware to our hearts content, that would really suck but would not be nearly as bad as the situation some corporations are trying to create - where you can't use your computer freely at all, legally anyway.
Dude...great find!! Very interesting that the researchers came to the same suspicion as myself. You missed what to me is the most relevant point, though:
I think I understand the experiment's spirit and intent, but the implementation could also have run into our double-serving policy where multiple ads are attempting to target the same terms and serving the same or highly similar (re-named) content.
So there you have it. They appear to be able to tell if someone is abusing their double-serving policy. It seems likely that this somehow factored into what was witnessed by Cringely's friend.
Not to burst anybody's tin-foil bubble, but there's possibly another less nefarious explanation to what is going on. As we know, Google wants to keep their Adword algorithm secret. It's quite possible that Google realized long ago that folks could map out their algorithm by simply playing with the input parameters just like Cringely's friend was doing. In order to prevent the inevitable reverse engineering of the algorithm, they might have put in some code to randomize the effectiveness of the results when Google has detected that someone is changing the parameters. If that guy wants to see if Google is really punishing him for lowering his price, he should try setting the price back to $1 and see if things go back to what they were before. I'll bet they won't.
Of course, another possibility is that they have a bug in their code. I've heard that some programmers actually make mistakes sometimes.
I didn't personally think the evidence for this theory was that compelling. According to other posts in this thread, they did a casting call without explaining what the show was about. And guess who showed up for this casting call? Lots of wannabe actors. It's seems entirely reasonable to me that the folks could be actors and also not be in on the gag. Alot of the folks who try to get on these reality shows are wannabe actors. They see it as a springboard into better gigs.
Man, that dental student really got bit hard. He apparently hadn't braced himself for the consequences. You can't just brush these things off. This is more like something I would expect to happen in Fluorida.
I took it that he has a cell phone, so can't he just call himself to get the number for the land line? "Hello, me? It's me. What's my number?" Easy.
That's a nice thing to wish for, but it will never happen. The US tax code is incredibly complex and constantly changing. Writing tax software takes more than just programmers; it takes an army of tax accountants who read the tax code and codify it into a set of rules used by the software. Would you honestly trust a bunch of geeks (nerd herd??) to write such software?
That said, there is no reason why someone couldn't port their tax software to Linux. Or you could probably run it under Wine. Considering that the tax software so important and that it is tax deductible anyway, is it really so awful that you have to pay for it?
If this is really coming out in 2006, is there any point to BluRay or HD-DVD?