AFAICT, the only people who like using webmail are people who don't actually rely on email.
Nobody can do this (yet) with a lame webmail client, nor even very well with Apple Mail nor Outlook: - Manage six or more email accounts, with hundreds of mailbox folders - Run rules or scripts automatically shuffling low-priority mail into those folders like discussion mailing lists, server error messages, and assorted bulk email that you personally don't classify as spam - Receive mail in one inbox, and reply to extended threads with quotes from another
I won't even touch on digital signing and encryption.
Then there's the whole bit about who owns and have access to your email. I haven't personally read all of the fine print in Google's, Apple's, nor Microsoft's email service terms-of-service documents, but I suspect you're not guaranteed anywhere near the meager protection your money gets in a checking account.
What other cross-platform options are there? Nobody seems to be making any suggestions.
The killer app for the big screen was and still is to enable immersive shared experiences for real-time events, like sports and various other live performances, and for long-form story-telling (ie. movies). Smaller screens, except perhaps VR goggles or some distant-future holographic room, will never compete.
As other devices with displays take over the short form functions that don't demand that immersive experience, like talking-head news and low-resolution amateur content, perhaps the big TV will become a niche device, only for those who can afford to set a system up that rivals commercial theaters. But I predict that many will still choose to have a near-theatrical experience in their homes.
Where and when I commute, the roads are rarely so empty that another vehicle would not be affected by a lane change. All of the lane changes I counted were either to pass me, or there were other cars on the road within 5-8 car lengths of the lane changer.
Taking a whole lane is just fine... if you're doing the same speed as the rest of the traffic. If you're going considerably slower, then get the fuck over to the side and quit being a hazard.
I'll bet you say that to all of the farm and construction equipment you encounter.
I did recently count, on my 10 mile pre-dawn bicycle commute to work, how many motorists I noticed violating traffic law: From the helmet-cam video I counted: 11 motorists driving pre-dawn without lights, 8 motorists failing to signal lane changes, 4 motorists failing to signal left turns, 4 motorists failed to come to a complete stop at stop signs, 3 motorists running red lights, I'm guessing at least 8 motorists significantly exceeding the posted speed limit, and two who exceeded the limit where electronic signs were showing them their speed. And that's just one Wednesday morning, on some of the least busy streets in my town. When are motorists going to start obeying the rules of the road?
1. iOS7: Multitasking? It's about time. What is this, 1984?
2. Mac Pro Desktop: All of that tubular elegance is going lost in a rats-nest of external boxes and cables because all of the expansion of that chassis has to be external--there's no internal room for optical drives, RAID arrays, media card readers/writers, etc. And SSDs big enough for media production are still way too expensive. And how do you rack mount a dozen of them in the machine room of a video editing suite (as I've done many times in my business)?
To rub salt in the wound, the money is then mostly wasted and used inefficiently.
I've worked in state and city government, and for large corporations. The government organizations I worked for did far more with far fewer resources than any of the companies I worked for. People who choose to work in government, that I encountered, were there out of idealism that they could make a difference -- happy to be there in spite of lower wages than they could get in private industry. The companies I worked for are full of greedy bastards who think primarily of their own gain, and what they can gouge the company and the customer for.
As far as England is concerned, we also tried it before Truman's new deal. We got better education for fewer resources. I'm not saying it was perfect or that it would work exaclty the same now, only that it is certainly doable.
I consider myself a product of a public school system, in the relatively poor state of Iowa, that worked very well. Lots of local community control. Lots of parental involvement.
There was a large jump in US literacy between 1940 and 1960. I would attribute that to the rise of public education programs -- which were much less common before then.
Imagine if people had twice the resources and knew the government wasn't going to help the less fortunate for them.
They'd be buying bigger TVs, bigger SUVs, and bigger houses, sending their kinds to more expensive private schools. Every man for himself! You'll have a hard time convincing most people that, if their taxes were eliminated, that they should still pay, say, 20%, to charities.
Do you like the fact that you're paying for military protection for basicly the entire globe,
Nope. I didn't vote for people who support this agenda.
...massively subsidising whole industries like airlines,
Hmmmm. A tricky one. In general, I certainly don't favor government subsidies of businesses. But take a small town like Burlington, Iowa. If there wasn't some regulation and subsidy, the town would not be served by any airlines -- the nearest airport with a commercial airline would be 2:30 hours away.
...farm corporations, telecom, transportation,
Nope.
and paying to incarcerate and destroy the lives of millions of non-violent cannibus users?
What I find interesting is that most of these examples you cite were instituted as part of a conservative or Replublican agenda. Hmmmmm.
As far as inequitable education distribution, you're completely ignoring private charity which I gaurantee will be there if the state stops funding schools and gives citizens their money back.
It's easy to get people to donate to charity for some extraordinary crises, like the tsunami. But getting them to donate for some recurring cost like running a school system for less forunate -- well lets just say that England tried that during Charles Dickens' time -- it didn't work very well.
I'll grant that our public education system could benefit from some entrepreneurial spirit. But selling off the system to a bunch of robber barons is not going to give the least fortunate among us anywhere near equal opportunity.
You might be greedy enough to think that you don't owe anything to the well-being of your fellow citizens. I for one am happy to pay, accoring to my means, to support services provided by my goverment of and by the people that I may potentially need at some future time.
Significantly reduced funding with respect to inflation, leading to mediocrity in staffing and inadequate facilities. The tax cutting regime that started with Ronald Reagan in California has starved the schools of adequate funds to operate.
OK, that's a reasonable hypothesis. Let's see what the data says. This is a spreadsheet from the 2004 federal budget, showing total educational outlays from 1962 - 2004. The bottom line is the one you want to look at, showing that educational outlays have grown approx 8x in constant 1996 dollars during that time. They did decline under Reagan (as you note), but then grew again under Bush I, Clinton and Bush II. So significantly reduced funding is probably not a cause of educational failure, and certainly not a cause from 1990-present.
That is interesting data, but to be meaningful for this discussion, it needs to be adjusted on a per-student basis -- and probably adjusted for LOCAL cost-of-living.
In our local high school, there aren't enough textbooks in most classes for students to be able to take them home to do homework! How are the students supposed to do any homework? The discovery of this left me astounded and speechless at first, and then angry.
Fundamentalist religious forces are demanding the weaking of science and math education in schools because these subjects don't coincide with their mythology. No wonder U.S. students are so weak in these subjects!
It's certainly true that fundamentalists want to change the teaching of evolution. I hadn't heard they were opposed to math - maybe you'll provide a link.
In my personal experience, as friends of a home-schooling teacher, Fundamentalist Christian parents discourage the kind of skeptical, evidence-based reasoning required to really understand mathematical logic and scientific reasoning. Some of these parents got together and scolded my friend for teaching their children to "disrespect higher authority", when all my friend suggested was that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
To date, they've had no notable success in doing so, and the Supreme Court has remained unsympathetic to arguments that teaching biological evolution infringes on 1st ammendment religious freedoms. So it's hard to see how this could be a cause of educational decline today, although maybe it could become one if the political & legal situation changes.
American schools have an entrenched bureaucracy and union structure that is powerful enough to block virtually any proposed reform, save that of pumping more money into the existing system. For example, in Washington State, our teachers' unions campaigned vigorously and successfully against our recent charter school referrendum.
I won't argue that none of that exists, though I can't say that I've seen it firsthand. I certainly would be in favor of some decentralization of school systems and encourage more local participation by parent and the community.
There are very few feedback mechanisms in the public school system, where a teacher's job performance determines his professional success, or where parents can choose to remove their students (and tax dollars) from a failing school. In most other professions, these feedback mechanisms are the way in which failing "firms" are reformed or replaced.
I think that parents are a vital part of that feedback system, if they can't be involved, then they need to elect a different school board! But to be in favor of f
When I was in primary school in Iowa in the 1960's, the school encouraged parents to volunteer to assist the teachers on a regular basis. We often had somebody's parent in the room with us in my grade school.
I would complain to the school board if I wasn't able to oversee my child's classes in some pre-arranged manner. OTOH, I found that keeping tabs on the textbook and assignments told me enough about what was going on most of the time, and allowed me to make comments to the teacher (or principal) when necessary.
Let's try to inject some accuracy into your comments...
The government has an agenda and why we give our children over to them to be "taught" is beyond me.
Certainly many elected officials, and their appointees, have hidden agendas. Their public agenda is, presumably, why people voted for them. But to dismiss public schools because of this belies a deep misunderstanding of the advantages of a public school system. A public school system is, by necessity, open to scrutiny by the entire community. Private schools are not.
They don't need the media for their propaganda, they have the schools.. and this is further proof. They are trying to ban even the constitution and delceration of independance in some school systems because it might "offend" some one.
The only case I've read about this is about a techer who was using the consitution in a Cupertino, CA public school to argue that the "Founding Fathers" intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation. Some conservative press misrepresented this as a case of "banning the constitution" in the school.
Most students these days can't even tell you what the difference between state government and federal government is and most people in this country can't even name their congressman or tell you who they represent (you) and who the senators represent(the state)
I attribute the decline in the U.S. primary education system to the following ills:
Significantly reduced funding with respect to inflation, leading to mediocrity in staffing and inadequate facilities. The tax cutting regime that started with Ronald Reagan in California has starved the schools of adequate funds to operate.
Parents take less interest in their own education, as jobs become more demaning. Relatively wealthy parents work long hours at "exempt" jobs, unable to assist their kids with homework. The kids are raised by TV instead.
Fundamentalist religious forces are demanding the weaking of science and math education in schools because these subjects don't coincide with their mythology. No wonder U.S. students are so weak in these subjects!
Bingo! From Green perspective, I agree that marraige should be strictly a function of religion, without any involvement by the state one way or another.
Civil Unions, Domestic Incorporations, or any of the other proposed systems for incorportating people into a government-recognized family unit should have few bars to entry. Indeed, a reform based on the Domestic Incorporation proposal could even help simplify adoption laws.
Apple's long neglected HyperCard was the only development environment in which children were developing applications in very soon after they could read.
A descendent of it exists in the form of "Runtime Revolution" , but even runrev has suffered feature creep, and isn't nearly as elegant and intuitive as HyperCard was.
Though I agree that the DOJ could have made the index a bit flashier, they're government agency, and they'll do the minimum required to meet the letter of the law.
But, there is a much easier way to view it -- just open multiple browser windows. (Duh!)
I opened a window for the index, a second window for the list of comment range numbers, a third one to the lists of comments in that range, and then opened and closed after reading another window for each of the comments. You can use the "find in page" command of most browsers to look for a particular commetators name. Consult your browser docs if you don't know how to "open this link in a new window".
Re:of bit rates and band widths
on
HDTV Over IP
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· Score: 4, Interesting
The standard for uncompressed HDTV is a document called SMPTE-292M -- it's a 1.485Gb/S synchronous stream typically carried over coax. There is an IETF draft RFC for carrying uncompressed SMPTE-292M over IP HERE.
The University of Washington, with the assistance of Sony and Enron, presented a demonstration of seven channels of HDTV compressed to 200Mb/S over an OC-48 backbone at the National Association of Broadcaster's convention in April of 2000. In this demo, they produced a HiDef newscast on the floor on the Las Vegas Convention Center, while the newcasters, cameras, and the broadcast transmitter were all in Seattle.
I know there were limited demonstrations of highly compressed HDTV over internet protocol almost a year before that. One group that has been working on that is a University consortium called The Research Channel.
By the time the MPEG toolkit compresses a video signal down to 50:1, a LOT of data has been discarded. You see strange artifacts (if you're watching carefully enough) such as arms disappearing while the football player is throwing the ball, or water behind a moving boat looking more like clouds. Yes, for some still images you still get the 1920X1080 resolution, but mostly you get interpolated fuzz lower than the resolution of standard-definition video.
And 2 mouse buttons causing RSI? I *could* believe that. But what's the ramafications of having to move your other hand around to the control key to do a context menu click huh?
Normally, your other (non-mouse) hand remains on the keyboard anyway. Unless you just playing games, and aren't using your keyboard.
M$ Windows isn't entirely consistent about what they use the two buttons for. The average Windows users I know rarely use the second button -- or when they do, it gets them into unexpected trouble. The way X uses the mouse buttons seems even more unintuitive and inconsistant. What good are all of those extra buttons when you have to learn what they do all over again for each application or window manager?
Some research that I read about (and wish I'd kept track of a reference to) demonstrated that more mouse buttons means more RSI. This is partially due to sharing the load among the tendons, but it has more to do with the way one holds a mouse when one can use any finger to press the button, versus the way one holds a mouse when they have to use different fingers to press different buttons.
Apple, with clear logical thought and good reason, originally considered developing around a two or three button mouse, and wisely rejected that idea after watching a statistically significant number of novice users become confused by them. Macintosh "Power" users can buy aftermarket pointing devices with a wide number of button configurations -- and they get to define what those extra buttons do.
Windows 3.1 really didn't make use of the second button. But the MacOS had context-sensitive menus (available by a holding the "Control" key on the keyboard while pressing the mouse button) for some time before Microsoft standardized on what their second button did. Some Mac "power" users, who may be ignorant of the RSI ramifications, set their second button to duplicate that operation.
Somebody needs to fix the various *nix window managers so that they can be used reasonably well with one-button mice. C'mon people, several ergonomic studies have shown that the more mouse buttons you have, the sooner you're likely to suffer RSI.
It can't be that hard for someone to configure the code to work this way. And if the Linux advocates are really serieous about attracting novice users, fewer bottons makes for an easier learning curve as well.
I agree that moderators are most qualified to moderate the topics they might also be inclined to post in. I wouldn't be surprised if limiting moderators from posting on topics they've moderated (or visa-versa) results in most of the best comments comming from ACs.
Here's a few ideas that haven't been mentioned yet:
Create several classes of moderators. The higher your class, the more you're trusted. I propose three levels to start with:
Editor: Much like Rob and a handful of his inner circle now, these people would have the ability to add or subtract more than a single moderator point per article. They could probably also delete slanderous or libelous articles, and periodically review the "Respected Moderators" (see below) for fairness and participation.
Respected Moderator: This would resemble the current group of 400 or so; perhaps the final number would be fewer. They would have the powers they have now; they could add or subtract 1 point from a limited number of articles. They would also have the ability to post to topics they've moderated.
Guest Moderator: All of the rest of the registered users on/. would get this privilege once in a while. The opportunity would appear for them randomly, perhaps once every 50 of their page loads, or once in every 5000 total/. page loads, or some other random criteria. They would only be able to moderate the articles they see in that current page load, and would only be able to moderate up, not down.
Prevent moderators from moderating comments decending along threads or subthreads from a post they made. This would reduce the moderator's ability to abuse the moderation system by influencing the course of a debate they are passionate about.
Allow two separate systems: Voting and Moderation. You could give every user (including ACs) the ability to vote on a comment, resulting in each comment having a score. The score wouldn't affect which comments people see, it would just provide an approval rating of the comment (yea, nay, abstain) as a percentage. (Example: Approval rating 19%) The present moderation system, or some improvement on it, could co-exist with this system.
The existing moderation works for me, and I would hate to see drastic changes in it too soon. I generally agree with how the moderators have scored the articles. I can see where some more subtle improvements are in order, though.
Corporate trend bandwagon at whose expense?
on
RMS on APSL
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· Score: 1
I'm waiting for the day when an individual open-source project has the kind of coordinated consistency, elegance, and simplicity of Apple's platform efforts.
To paraphrase what ESR said in his famous document, both central and distributed development models have their strength. And Apple has developed a cleaner and more elegant integrated solution, from the non-expert end-user's point of view, than any open source effort to date.
I use OpenBSD daily, and sometimes Linux (SPARC, MIPS, & PPC), and see the advantages of their openness. But these things are still a chaotic hodge-podge of inconsistency. Lots of people have contributed lots of good ideas to these projects. But each different idea from each separate contributor simply adds to the inconsistency and complexity of the entire platform.
In other words, Apple is trying to harness the advantages of open-source efforts, and still maintain the advantages of a clear consistent vision that has been the source of their strength in the past. Not only has this not been done before, but it is a very difficult compromise to get right.
RMS makes some valid and thoughtful comments from his point of view. I think in the long run, if we give them the chance, Apple and other proprietary industry players will get there. Somebody has to be the extremist in order to make the rest of us look more moderate; RMS does a great job of that. I think the tone of the comments from the major players mentioned in other posts (RMS, ESR, BP, etc.) have been thoughtful and responsible.
Apple is taking a radical risk from their, and from their shareholder's, point of view. You accuse them of attempting to make...a quick buck off the naivete of a bunch of geeks. Though I don't believe that this is their intent, only time will tell.
As for whether you or anyone else contributes to Darwin, it all depends on whether you value the unique elegance of consistency and integration that Apple's design philosophy represents. I'm convinced there is enough of a community of people who do to make contributing to code licensed under APSL worthwhile.
I for one feel that there's plenty of room in the world for the BSD-style and the GPL-style licenses to co-exist.
I think distributions of NetBSD and OpenBSD have more to fear from entanglement with Darwin, which is primarily a nice BSD distribution, than Linux or any other GPL distro does.
For those of us who prefer a BSD style *NIX, Darwin holds a lot of promise. For those of us who already have Mac hardware, it'll probably be the best straight *NIX distribution we'll be able to get our hands on for some time (though my home server is an OpenBSD Mac68k machine that chugs along quite reliably).
Slashdot Mirror
What SRemick said.
AFAICT, the only people who like using webmail are people who don't actually rely on email.
Nobody can do this (yet) with a lame webmail client, nor even very well with Apple Mail nor Outlook:
- Manage six or more email accounts, with hundreds of mailbox folders
- Run rules or scripts automatically shuffling low-priority mail into those folders like discussion mailing lists, server error messages, and assorted bulk email that you personally don't classify as spam
- Receive mail in one inbox, and reply to extended threads with quotes from another
I won't even touch on digital signing and encryption.
Then there's the whole bit about who owns and have access to your email. I haven't personally read all of the fine print in Google's, Apple's, nor Microsoft's email service terms-of-service documents, but I suspect you're not guaranteed anywhere near the meager protection your money gets in a checking account.
What other cross-platform options are there? Nobody seems to be making any suggestions.
The killer app for the big screen was and still is to enable immersive shared experiences for real-time events, like sports and various other live performances, and for long-form story-telling (ie. movies). Smaller screens, except perhaps VR goggles or some distant-future holographic room, will never compete.
As other devices with displays take over the short form functions that don't demand that immersive experience, like talking-head news and low-resolution amateur content, perhaps the big TV will become a niche device, only for those who can afford to set a system up that rivals commercial theaters. But I predict that many will still choose to have a near-theatrical experience in their homes.
Where and when I commute, the roads are rarely so empty that another vehicle would not be affected by a lane change. All of the lane changes I counted were either to pass me, or there were other cars on the road within 5-8 car lengths of the lane changer.
California requires signaling lane changes:
[ https://www.dmv.ca.gov/portal/... ]
Taking a whole lane is just fine... if you're doing the same speed as the rest of the traffic. If you're going considerably slower, then get the fuck over to the side and quit being a hazard.
I'll bet you say that to all of the farm and construction equipment you encounter.
I did recently count, on my 10 mile pre-dawn bicycle commute to work, how many motorists I noticed violating traffic law:
From the helmet-cam video I counted: 11 motorists driving pre-dawn without lights, 8 motorists failing to signal lane changes, 4 motorists failing to signal left turns, 4 motorists failed to come to a complete stop at stop signs, 3 motorists running red lights, I'm guessing at least 8 motorists significantly exceeding the posted speed limit, and two who exceeded the limit where electronic signs were showing them their speed.
And that's just one Wednesday morning, on some of the least busy streets in my town.
When are motorists going to start obeying the rules of the road?
1. iOS7: Multitasking? It's about time. What is this, 1984?
2. Mac Pro Desktop: All of that tubular elegance is going lost in a rats-nest of external boxes and cables because all of the expansion of that chassis has to be external--there's no internal room for optical drives, RAID arrays, media card readers/writers, etc. And SSDs big enough for media production are still way too expensive. And how do you rack mount a dozen of them in the machine room of a video editing suite (as I've done many times in my business)?
I've worked in state and city government, and for large corporations. The government organizations I worked for did far more with far fewer resources than any of the companies I worked for. People who choose to work in government, that I encountered, were there out of idealism that they could make a difference -- happy to be there in spite of lower wages than they could get in private industry. The companies I worked for are full of greedy bastards who think primarily of their own gain, and what they can gouge the company and the customer for.
I consider myself a product of a public school system, in the relatively poor state of Iowa, that worked very well. Lots of local community control. Lots of parental involvement.
There was a large jump in US literacy between 1940 and 1960. I would attribute that to the rise of public education programs -- which were much less common before then.
They'd be buying bigger TVs, bigger SUVs, and bigger houses, sending their kinds to more expensive private schools. Every man for himself! You'll have a hard time convincing most people that, if their taxes were eliminated, that they should still pay, say, 20%, to charities.
Nope. I didn't vote for people who support this agenda.
Hmmmm. A tricky one. In general, I certainly don't favor government subsidies of businesses. But take a small town like Burlington, Iowa. If there wasn't some regulation and subsidy, the town would not be served by any airlines -- the nearest airport with a commercial airline would be 2:30 hours away.
Nope.
What I find interesting is that most of these examples you cite were instituted as part of a conservative or Replublican agenda. Hmmmmm.
It's easy to get people to donate to charity for some extraordinary crises, like the tsunami. But getting them to donate for some recurring cost like running a school system for less forunate -- well lets just say that England tried that during Charles Dickens' time -- it didn't work very well.
I'll grant that our public education system could benefit from some entrepreneurial spirit. But selling off the system to a bunch of robber barons is not going to give the least fortunate among us anywhere near equal opportunity.
You might be greedy enough to think that you don't owe anything to the well-being of your fellow citizens. I for one am happy to pay, accoring to my means, to support services provided by my goverment of and by the people that I may potentially need at some future time.
That is interesting data, but to be meaningful for this discussion, it needs to be adjusted on a per-student basis -- and probably adjusted for LOCAL cost-of-living.
In our local high school, there aren't enough textbooks in most classes for students to be able to take them home to do homework! How are the students supposed to do any homework? The discovery of this left me astounded and speechless at first, and then angry.
In my personal experience, as friends of a home-schooling teacher, Fundamentalist Christian parents discourage the kind of skeptical, evidence-based reasoning required to really understand mathematical logic and scientific reasoning. Some of these parents got together and scolded my friend for teaching their children to "disrespect higher authority", when all my friend suggested was that "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."
This poster reinforced my statement more eloquently that I can in the time given: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137903&cid=115 33930 [slashdot.org]
I won't argue that none of that exists, though I can't say that I've seen it firsthand. I certainly would be in favor of some decentralization of school systems and encourage more local participation by parent and the community.
I think that parents are a vital part of that feedback system, if they can't be involved, then they need to elect a different school board! But to be in favor of f
This poster reinforced my statement more eloquently that I can in the time given: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=137903&cid=115 33930
When I was in primary school in Iowa in the 1960's, the school encouraged parents to volunteer to assist the teachers on a regular basis. We often had somebody's parent in the room with us in my grade school.
I would complain to the school board if I wasn't able to oversee my child's classes in some pre-arranged manner. OTOH, I found that keeping tabs on the textbook and assignments told me enough about what was going on most of the time, and allowed me to make comments to the teacher (or principal) when necessary.
Let's try to inject some accuracy into your comments...
Certainly many elected officials, and their appointees, have hidden agendas. Their public agenda is, presumably, why people voted for them. But to dismiss public schools because of this belies a deep misunderstanding of the advantages of a public school system. A public school system is, by necessity, open to scrutiny by the entire community. Private schools are not.
The only case I've read about this is about a techer who was using the consitution in a Cupertino, CA public school to argue that the "Founding Fathers" intended the U.S. to be a Christian nation. Some conservative press misrepresented this as a case of "banning the constitution" in the school.
I attribute the decline in the U.S. primary education system to the following ills:
Bingo! From Green perspective, I agree that marraige should be strictly a function of religion, without any involvement by the state one way or another.
Civil Unions, Domestic Incorporations, or any of the other proposed systems for incorportating people into a government-recognized family unit should have few bars to entry. Indeed, a reform based on the Domestic Incorporation proposal could even help simplify adoption laws.
Apple's long neglected HyperCard was the only development environment in which children were developing applications in very soon after they could read.
A descendent of it exists in the form of "Runtime Revolution" , but even runrev has suffered feature creep, and isn't nearly as elegant and intuitive as HyperCard was.
Though I agree that the DOJ could have made the index a bit flashier, they're government agency, and they'll do the minimum required to meet the letter of the law.
But, there is a much easier way to view it -- just open multiple browser windows. (Duh!)
I opened a window for the index, a second window for the list of comment range numbers, a third one to the lists of comments in that range, and then opened and closed after reading another window for each of the comments. You can use the "find in page" command of most browsers to look for a particular commetators name. Consult your browser docs if you don't know how to "open this link in a new window".
The standard for uncompressed HDTV is a document called SMPTE-292M -- it's a 1.485Gb/S synchronous stream typically carried over coax. There is an IETF draft RFC for carrying uncompressed SMPTE-292M over IP HERE.
The University of Washington, with the assistance of Sony and Enron, presented a demonstration of seven channels of HDTV compressed to 200Mb/S over an OC-48 backbone at the National Association of Broadcaster's convention in April of 2000. In this demo, they produced a HiDef newscast on the floor on the Las Vegas Convention Center, while the newcasters, cameras, and the broadcast transmitter were all in Seattle.
I know there were limited demonstrations of highly compressed HDTV over internet protocol almost a year before that. One group that has been working on that is a University consortium called The Research Channel.
By the time the MPEG toolkit compresses a video signal down to 50:1, a LOT of data has been discarded. You see strange artifacts (if you're watching carefully enough) such as arms disappearing while the football player is throwing the ball, or water behind a moving boat looking more like clouds. Yes, for some still images you still get the 1920X1080 resolution, but mostly you get interpolated fuzz lower than the resolution of standard-definition video.
Normally, your other (non-mouse) hand remains on the keyboard anyway. Unless you just playing games, and aren't using your keyboard.
We've been through this holy war before... (sigh)
M$ Windows isn't entirely consistent about what they use the two buttons for. The average Windows users I know rarely use the second button -- or when they do, it gets them into unexpected trouble. The way X uses the mouse buttons seems even more unintuitive and inconsistant. What good are all of those extra buttons when you have to learn what they do all over again for each application or window manager?
Some research that I read about (and wish I'd kept track of a reference to) demonstrated that more mouse buttons means more RSI. This is partially due to sharing the load among the tendons, but it has more to do with the way one holds a mouse when one can use any finger to press the button, versus the way one holds a mouse when they have to use different fingers to press different buttons.
Apple, with clear logical thought and good reason, originally considered developing around a two or three button mouse, and wisely rejected that idea after watching a statistically significant number of novice users become confused by them. Macintosh "Power" users can buy aftermarket pointing devices with a wide number of button configurations -- and they get to define what those extra buttons do.
Windows 3.1 really didn't make use of the second button. But the MacOS had context-sensitive menus (available by a holding the "Control" key on the keyboard while pressing the mouse button) for some time before Microsoft standardized on what their second button did. Some Mac "power" users, who may be ignorant of the RSI ramifications, set their second button to duplicate that operation.
(The subject says it all.)
Somebody needs to fix the various *nix window managers so that they can be used reasonably well with one-button mice. C'mon people, several ergonomic studies have shown that the more mouse buttons you have, the sooner you're likely to suffer RSI.
It can't be that hard for someone to configure the code to work this way. And if the Linux advocates are really serieous about attracting novice users, fewer bottons makes for an easier learning curve as well.
I agree that moderators are most qualified to moderate the topics they might also be inclined to post in. I wouldn't be surprised if limiting moderators from posting on topics they've moderated (or visa-versa) results in most of the best comments comming from ACs.
Here's a few ideas that haven't been mentioned yet:
You could give every user (including ACs) the ability to vote on a comment, resulting in each comment having a score. The score wouldn't affect which comments people see, it would just provide an approval rating of the comment (yea, nay, abstain) as a percentage.
(Example: Approval rating 19%)
The present moderation system, or some improvement on it, could co-exist with this system.
The existing moderation works for me, and I would hate to see drastic changes in it too soon. I generally agree with how the moderators have scored the articles. I can see where some more subtle improvements are in order, though.
I'm waiting for the day when an individual open-source project has the kind of coordinated consistency, elegance, and simplicity of Apple's platform efforts.
To paraphrase what ESR said in his famous document, both central and distributed development models have their strength. And Apple has developed a cleaner and more elegant integrated solution, from the non-expert end-user's point of view, than any open source effort to date.
I use OpenBSD daily, and sometimes Linux (SPARC, MIPS, & PPC), and see the advantages of their openness. But these things are still a chaotic hodge-podge of inconsistency. Lots of people have contributed lots of good ideas to these projects. But each different idea from each separate contributor simply adds to the inconsistency and complexity of the entire platform.
In other words, Apple is trying to harness the advantages of open-source efforts, and still maintain the advantages of a clear consistent vision that has been the source of their strength in the past. Not only has this not been done before, but it is a very difficult compromise to get right.
RMS makes some valid and thoughtful comments from his point of view. I think in the long run, if we give them the chance, Apple and other proprietary industry players will get there. Somebody has to be the extremist in order to make the rest of us look more moderate; RMS does a great job of that. I think the tone of the comments from the major players mentioned in other posts (RMS, ESR, BP, etc.) have been thoughtful and responsible.
Apple is taking a radical risk from their, and from their shareholder's, point of view. You accuse them of attempting to make ...a quick buck off the naivete of a bunch of geeks. Though I don't believe that this is their intent, only time will tell.
As for whether you or anyone else contributes to Darwin, it all depends on whether you value the unique elegance of consistency and integration that Apple's design philosophy represents. I'm convinced there is enough of a community of people who do to make contributing to code licensed under APSL worthwhile.
I for one feel that there's plenty of room in the world for the BSD-style and the GPL-style licenses to co-exist.
I think distributions of NetBSD and OpenBSD have more to fear from entanglement with Darwin, which is primarily a nice BSD distribution, than Linux or any other GPL distro does.
For those of us who prefer a BSD style *NIX, Darwin holds a lot of promise. For those of us who already have Mac hardware, it'll probably be the best straight *NIX distribution we'll be able to get our hands on for some time (though my home server is an OpenBSD Mac68k machine that chugs along quite reliably).
On a typical work day, I'll have 3 operating systems booted simultaneously on my Mac G3: The MacOS, SoftWindows95, and MachTen (BSD 4.4).
This seems to be an example of someone else trying to catch up to the same idea.