I'd say it depends on the person using the reader device - be it a PDA, mobile phone, smartphone, tablet or dedicated e-reader - as to whether s/he will be distracted by the other features made available by their device. I've been using some form of electronic reader ever since I got a phone capable of putting enough text on the screen (it happened to be a Nokia 'Taco' N-Gage but it could have been anything else) and have not felt distracted by the device - the opposite was true. Turn pages with one hand? Read whenever you want and wherever you are? In the dark? For a few minutes? Not so easily done using traditional print, but no problems for the electronic reader. From that N-Gage to the current Android what changed is that the screen got bigger and the resolution (as in 'dpi') higher, allowing me to cram even more text on a single page. Otherwise, the advantages remain. Does it matter that the device is capable of all those things the article talks about? No, of course not. Were I reading a traditional print book instead, distraction would be only the blink of an eye away.
To be distracted or not depends much more on the subject than on the object used by said subject.
Horses? You'll be hard-pressed to find a more finicky, vulnerable and easily damaged animal than a horse. One mortar shell in close vicinity and your supplies are on their way to Dagestan. If the horse does not bolt, it will founder instead, or eat something it shouldn't, or walk straight into something sharp, or break one of those matchstick legs, or... or... or... Better to carry the pack yourself.
Horses are not made for war. Neither are humans, but we happen to be so dumb as to go looking for it voluntarily - mostly. A horse would not do this if it were given a choice. I'd say let's respect the animal's choice, and therewith keep our own sanity.
There is another possibility here: pcAnywhere, being closed-source commercial software made by a vendor who is keen to sell as many copies to as many countries as possible, might contain one or more backdoors to enable Those_Who_Make_The_Rules (or those who pay enough) to access any pcAnywhere installation out there. These backdoors might not have changed since 2006, especially if they are based on some 'secret' certificate or another 'secret' sauce. With the source leaked, these secrets might not be so secret anymore - and might have not been so for the past 6 years. This being pcAnywhere, made by a commercial vendor who is keen to sell as much as possible while doing as little as possible, the fact that they knew the secret to be out there might not have bothered them all that much as long as it was not published in CEO magazine. Is this tin foil territory? It might sound like it, until you contemplate what mobile communications vendors regularly do to get access to controlled markets.
This story about the Iranians 'spoofing GPS' sounds unlikely. Jamming, sure, that would be easy. Spoofing, not so. I'd say it is way more likely they intercepted the (relatively slow) drone and found a way to force it down (stall its engine by dousing it with water, throw a parachute at the air intake, whatever). It would not surprise me one bit if the thing just went down all by itself and was found by the Iranians. It is not like those defense contractors are know for delivering high quality materials after all...
Every time an autistic freetard calls millions of users "sheeple" I want to pull their tongue out of their body and strangle them to death with it.
Read your reaction again, please. Does it remind you of something? It does for me.
That reaction sounds very much like the type of reaction you'll encounter when 'offending' some religion. And isn't that more or less what those 'autistic freetards' you talk about claim about the'sheeple'?
I'd say your reaction is proof that the 'autistic freetard' is at least partly right in claiming that the 'sheeple' engage in more than just rational product comparison when they make their product choices.
Who says sidecar bikes 'aren't serious transportation'? I ride my (soviet-era) Ural all year round, through all weather. Roads are often unpaved here, but that does not stop me. The distances can be substantial, but that does not stop me either. Temperature varies from around 20-25ÂC summertime to -25ÂC winter. In winter we often have up to a meter of snow on the ground.
I live in Sweden. The bike weighs 350 kg unloaded. The Red Army chased the Germans back to Berlin on (the predecessors of) these things. Not serious transportation... not for you, maybe.
I'll give you the lack of crash protection - just don't crash the thing and you'll be fine. It is them silly cagers - that is people rolling around in four-wheeled cages - you have to look out for, they are the real hazard out there on the roads.
There is one thing I just don't get with the way Chrom{e|ium} and FF do their auto-updating thing: both browsers seem to assume that the user who runs the browser should have write rights to the browser binary. The way I install software (on Linux), normal users do not have write rights, only read and execute are available. Giving users write rights to their browser binaries makes it a lot easier to subvert those binaries, either through malicious 'updates' or by the action of some external program. I see no reason to change the way I install software to something which mimics the way software was (and probably still is...) handled on the majority of Windows installations. That means I have to use different means to update these browsers, but that seems like a small trade-off compared to the alternative as describe above.
It'd be nice not to have to move a window or resize a window, but if I don't do it, how's it going to get done? The computer doesn't know where I want to put that window, or how large I want to make it.
The computer might not know where you'd place a window, or to what size you'd resize it, true. What it can make a good guess at is where that window would be placed best, and what size would be appropriate for it. This is the way many tiling window managers (Xmonad, dwm, ratpoison, etc) work, and it *does* work for many applications. The more flexible tiling window managers (Xmonad being a prime example) can be made to adapt their window placement logic to most scenarios.
You *do* have to let go of the urge to be in control of every last detail of window management for these types of window manager to be effective. For comparison, look at the difference between a word processor like ${whatever}Office and a document processor like LyX. In the former, you are assumed to take control over the exact formatting of your document, while in the latter the program does most of the formatting for you. In most cases the document processor will be far more efficient and produce better formatting than the word processor, but there are situations where the word processor is preferable. The same goes for window management. Some tiling window managers (Xmonad being one of them) can actually be made to stack windows as well for those corner cases where you want more control over window placement. It is a handy option to have at hand, even if you'll find that you hardly ever use it.
Re:new firefox release schedule moved me to Chrome
on
Firefox 8.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
Odd, isn't it? Some software works for some people, while the same software does anything but for others. Take Firefox as an example. I generally run the Minefield version, and it generally works fine. It hardly every crashes anymore - a marked change from a few years ago when running Mozilla betas was tiring at best.
Now take Chromium. It just does not work around here, on several computers by several manufactureres with several different distributions (Debian and some Ubuntu). Chromium will start rendering a page, stop, freeze, and finally give up. Time after time. On different user accounts. On different computers. Chromium is unusable here. Firefox works. It stays up as well, and keeps memory consumption within bounds:
See? It has been up for 11 days, has been cycled from 1 tab to >50 tabs to 1 tab several times. The machine this version runs on has 4GB of memory and runs Debian Sid. Firefox uses about 470 MB, flash gobbles up another 50 MB. That's it. Flash is currently playing audio in the background.
This instance of Firefox has 16 active add-ons (plus another 16 disabled).
Given that most network assets registered under facebook and related domains resolve to 0.0.0.0 on my network, this would seem like a counterproductive strategy.
In other words, making your site dependent on the availability of a function offered by facebook is not a good business strategy - more of a lousy exit strategy. Oh well, answers.com belongs in the bin anyway.
Perl is a language, just like Dutch, Swedish, English, German and most of the others. In just about any language there is, to paraphrase a well-known Perl motto, more than one way to say something. That is in many ways a good thing, especially when it comes to using the language creatively as a novelist or poet or similar type of wordsmith does.
It is true that this quality does tend to make Perl programs somewhat hard to grasp for the uninitiated in the programmers style of writing. That is another quality the Perl language shares with those other languages mentioned above - did you understand all of Finnegans Wake the first time you read it?
In other words, Perl is a writers' language. It is not an editors' language. Once you get into the right mood, Perl flows like your native language does. Done right, this can lead to great things. It can also lead to the sort of notes you made when attending those lectures you did not care about in the first place, and did not understand in the second. Use Perl for things you care about, and it will provide you the means to express yourself in just the right way (for you).
These trolls ask for it. Tar them, toss some chicken feathers over 'm and kick 'm out of their suits. I meant their offices. This scum tries to hold us hostage, why should we meekly submit?
I'm serious. Tar and feathers. I've seen worse proposals, but that goes to far so I'd go for the tar. And feathers, of course.
Variable, customer-specific pricing has been around for quite a while. Amazon has been doing it for a long, long time given that the linked article is from 2000...
Whoa there, cowboy. If you want to teach history, first learn what happened in the past. Your line should have read something like:
B&O: We do brand-specific shops Apple: me too!
or, if you don't want to limit the comparison to entertainment tech companies, insert any of the dozens of branded fashion stores (Levis, etc). Or why not include phone companies, they used to sell their own branded stuff in their own brand stores. Apple was very late in the game of brand stores. Sony, do they do brand stores as well? Never saw one...
No no no, that is not what you do when confronted with someone in a position of authority who is found incapable of making rational decisions. The right course of action is to first reward the person handsomely, treating him like a valued and honoured member of the community. Offer him (or her) a parachute so golden that it generates its own gravity. Don't ever reprimand the person, don't ever mention their incompetence. Either promote the person to a position of even more authority - put him somewhere high up in the organisation where he can safely absorb bonuses without causing direct harm - or allow him to take up a similar position in a competing business.
Remember, when you are above a certain pay scale you do not have to perform. You only have to keep up appearances. When that fails, you will be rewarded for failing.
Golden parachutes should be dropped from great height to test their ballistic performance.
There is no reason whatsoever to continue shoveling boatloads of cash to some stuffed suit just because the rest of the Ole Boy circuit pushed him in the cushy seat on the top floor. Sure, pay the person (be it man or woman) handsomely, but keep it sane. As in 'enough to live a comfortable life' sane. As in 'as much as you pay your other essential personnel'. But no more of this multi-million euro/dollar/pound chicanery 'just because'.
Get rid of the clan of parasites which has taken over the board rooms and get back to work. All of you.
And puhleeze, don't come to me about having to pay the bozo a kings ransom because that is what it takes to get 'talent'. The only talent you get by paying a ransom is that of a crook, who will do anything to get his (or her) filthy hands on just that little bit more. As history (or herstory:-) shows.
To compare it to ethanol, you'd have to somehow be able to eat the corn first, and then make the ethanol from the husks/leaves that remain.
Which is just the way ethanol is made in cellulosic ethanol plants. The food, you get to eat. The waste, you get to drink. Or drive. Not at the same time, please.
You forgot the most obvious Apple innovation, which fortunately is protected by a government-supported sole economic profit mandate (aka patent) 'till the tablets come home.
The real pertinent question to ask when trying to separate the chaff from the apples is:
"Describe them. Did they have rectangular screens and rounded corners?"
If the answer to that question is "yes" they obviously stole all they ever came up with from Apple. It would not be the first time that happened, after all.
A Roomba powered by dog hair might be hard, but it would be easy to make one powered by dog(s). In more than one way... Think Slug^H^H^H^HDogBot for the scary version (which *really* gets rid of the dog hair problem) or Cynosphere for a less terminal variety.
So if I am a garage startup in Europe: Is this a good thing?
Of course not. Suppose that you come up with something that piques the interest of one of the big boys. You'll soon be ceasing and desisting whatever it was that they want under the onslaught of a megaton of patents on everything from the way you press the 'Q' key on your keyboard to the best time of day to pick your nose. In the end they will have what they want - namely whatever it was that you did which got them interested - and you'll be left bankrupt.
Patents are not for small inventors. They are there for those with war chests full of them and, of course, lawyers.
The granddaddy of them all was the Xerox Star workstation from 1981. This was what Steve Jobs saw while visiting PARC and became the inspiration for the GUI on the Lisa/Mac. As Jobs (the 1994 Jobs) said, Apple was always "shameless about stealing great ideas". Too bad the 2011 Jobs thinks behavior which helped build up Apple should be illegal for anyone else.
Au contraire, he displayed exactly the same behaviour back in the '80s. After lifting the essence of the WIMP-desktop from PARC to create Lisa and Mac, the fruit company pouted its face (sour Apple) to the courts and whined about Microsoft 'stealing their ideas from Apple' in the famed 'look and feel' lawsuit. Of course they claimed Microsoft stole 'their ideas' without any mention of PARC, as they were already convinced those ideas were by right theirs and not Xerox's. That is what they mean when they state they 'think different', I guess.
Rounded corners, rectangular screens being 'theirs' is nothing new, really...
Teevee? Wasn't that the push video thing from before the 'net? Where you had to sit in front of some glaring, flickering cathode ray tube to see ghost images projected on the phosphorous layer in front of the thing? I heard they showed people walking on the moon on those things, for real!
How times change. Now TV is dead, but there is nobody walking on the moon.
In the UK, a huge price difference can be explained by...
...the fact that the products still sell despite the higher prices, and thus the profit margins on British consumers can be jacked up much higher than those on American consumers. More fool them.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say it depends on the person using the reader device - be it a PDA, mobile phone, smartphone, tablet or dedicated e-reader - as to whether s/he will be distracted by the other features made available by their device. I've been using some form of electronic reader ever since I got a phone capable of putting enough text on the screen (it happened to be a Nokia 'Taco' N-Gage but it could have been anything else) and have not felt distracted by the device - the opposite was true. Turn pages with one hand? Read whenever you want and wherever you are? In the dark? For a few minutes? Not so easily done using traditional print, but no problems for the electronic reader. From that N-Gage to the current Android what changed is that the screen got bigger and the resolution (as in 'dpi') higher, allowing me to cram even more text on a single page. Otherwise, the advantages remain. Does it matter that the device is capable of all those things the article talks about? No, of course not. Were I reading a traditional print book instead, distraction would be only the blink of an eye away.
To be distracted or not depends much more on the subject than on the object used by said subject.
Horses? You'll be hard-pressed to find a more finicky, vulnerable and easily damaged animal than a horse. One mortar shell in close vicinity and your supplies are on their way to Dagestan. If the horse does not bolt, it will founder instead, or eat something it shouldn't, or walk straight into something sharp, or break one of those matchstick legs, or... or... or... Better to carry the pack yourself.
Horses are not made for war. Neither are humans, but we happen to be so dumb as to go looking for it voluntarily - mostly. A horse would not do this if it were given a choice. I'd say let's respect the animal's choice, and therewith keep our own sanity.
There is another possibility here: pcAnywhere, being closed-source commercial software made by a vendor who is keen to sell as many copies to as many countries as possible, might contain one or more backdoors to enable Those_Who_Make_The_Rules (or those who pay enough) to access any pcAnywhere installation out there. These backdoors might not have changed since 2006, especially if they are based on some 'secret' certificate or another 'secret' sauce. With the source leaked, these secrets might not be so secret anymore - and might have not been so for the past 6 years. This being pcAnywhere, made by a commercial vendor who is keen to sell as much as possible while doing as little as possible, the fact that they knew the secret to be out there might not have bothered them all that much as long as it was not published in CEO magazine.
Is this tin foil territory? It might sound like it, until you contemplate what mobile communications vendors regularly do to get access to controlled markets.
This story about the Iranians 'spoofing GPS' sounds unlikely. Jamming, sure, that would be easy. Spoofing, not so. I'd say it is way more likely they intercepted the (relatively slow) drone and found a way to force it down (stall its engine by dousing it with water, throw a parachute at the air intake, whatever). It would not surprise me one bit if the thing just went down all by itself and was found by the Iranians. It is not like those defense contractors are know for delivering high quality materials after all...
I thought you just said you watched Republican Primate Debates... it must be getting late on this side of the Atlantic...
Read your reaction again, please. Does it remind you of something? It does for me.
That reaction sounds very much like the type of reaction you'll encounter when 'offending' some religion. And isn't that more or less what those 'autistic freetards' you talk about claim about the'sheeple'?
I'd say your reaction is proof that the 'autistic freetard' is at least partly right in claiming that the 'sheeple' engage in more than just rational product comparison when they make their product choices.
Who says sidecar bikes 'aren't serious transportation'? I ride my (soviet-era) Ural all year round, through all weather. Roads are often unpaved here, but that does not stop me. The distances can be substantial, but that does not stop me either. Temperature varies from around 20-25ÂC summertime to -25ÂC winter. In winter we often have up to a meter of snow on the ground.
I live in Sweden. The bike weighs 350 kg unloaded. The Red Army chased the Germans back to Berlin on (the predecessors of) these things. Not serious transportation... not for you, maybe.
I'll give you the lack of crash protection - just don't crash the thing and you'll be fine. It is them silly cagers - that is people rolling around in four-wheeled cages - you have to look out for, they are the real hazard out there on the roads.
There is one thing I just don't get with the way Chrom{e|ium} and FF do their auto-updating thing: both browsers seem to assume that the user who runs the browser should have write rights to the browser binary. The way I install software (on Linux), normal users do not have write rights, only read and execute are available. Giving users write rights to their browser binaries makes it a lot easier to subvert those binaries, either through malicious 'updates' or by the action of some external program. I see no reason to change the way I install software to something which mimics the way software was (and probably still is...) handled on the majority of Windows installations. That means I have to use different means to update these browsers, but that seems like a small trade-off compared to the alternative as describe above.
The computer might not know where you'd place a window, or to what size you'd resize it, true. What it can make a good guess at is where that window would be placed best, and what size would be appropriate for it. This is the way many tiling window managers (Xmonad, dwm, ratpoison, etc) work, and it *does* work for many applications. The more flexible tiling window managers (Xmonad being a prime example) can be made to adapt their window placement logic to most scenarios.
You *do* have to let go of the urge to be in control of every last detail of window management for these types of window manager to be effective. For comparison, look at the difference between a word processor like ${whatever}Office and a document processor like LyX. In the former, you are assumed to take control over the exact formatting of your document, while in the latter the program does most of the formatting for you. In most cases the document processor will be far more efficient and produce better formatting than the word processor, but there are situations where the word processor is preferable. The same goes for window management. Some tiling window managers (Xmonad being one of them) can actually be made to stack windows as well for those corner cases where you want more control over window placement. It is a handy option to have at hand, even if you'll find that you hardly ever use it.
Odd, isn't it? Some software works for some people, while the same software does anything but for others. Take Firefox as an example. I generally run the Minefield version, and it generally works fine. It hardly every crashes anymore - a marked change from a few years ago when running Mozilla betas was tiring at best.
Now take Chromium. It just does not work around here, on several computers by several manufactureres with several different distributions (Debian and some Ubuntu). Chromium will start rendering a page, stop, freeze, and finally give up. Time after time. On different user accounts. On different computers. Chromium is unusable here. Firefox works. It stays up as well, and keeps memory consumption within bounds:
See? It has been up for 11 days, has been cycled from 1 tab to >50 tabs to 1 tab several times. The machine this version runs on has 4GB of memory and runs Debian Sid. Firefox uses about 470 MB, flash gobbles up another 50 MB. That's it. Flash is currently playing audio in the background.
This instance of Firefox has 16 active add-ons (plus another 16 disabled).
Given that most network assets registered under facebook and related domains resolve to 0.0.0.0 on my network, this would seem like a counterproductive strategy.
In other words, making your site dependent on the availability of a function offered by facebook is not a good business strategy - more of a lousy exit strategy. Oh well, answers.com belongs in the bin anyway.
Perl is a language, just like Dutch, Swedish, English, German and most of the others. In just about any language there is, to paraphrase a well-known Perl motto, more than one way to say something. That is in many ways a good thing, especially when it comes to using the language creatively as a novelist or poet or similar type of wordsmith does.
It is true that this quality does tend to make Perl programs somewhat hard to grasp for the uninitiated in the programmers style of writing. That is another quality the Perl language shares with those other languages mentioned above - did you understand all of Finnegans Wake the first time you read it?
In other words, Perl is a writers' language. It is not an editors' language. Once you get into the right mood, Perl flows like your native language does. Done right, this can lead to great things. It can also lead to the sort of notes you made when attending those lectures you did not care about in the first place, and did not understand in the second. Use Perl for things you care about, and it will provide you the means to express yourself in just the right way (for you).
These trolls ask for it. Tar them, toss some chicken feathers over 'm and kick 'm out of their suits. I meant their offices. This scum tries to hold us hostage, why should we meekly submit?
I'm serious. Tar and feathers. I've seen worse proposals, but that goes to far so I'd go for the tar. And feathers, of course.
Variable, customer-specific pricing has been around for quite a while. Amazon has been doing it for a long, long time given that the linked article is from 2000...
Whoa there, cowboy. If you want to teach history, first learn what happened in the past. Your line should have read something like:
B&O: We do brand-specific shops
Apple: me too!
or, if you don't want to limit the comparison to entertainment tech companies, insert any of the dozens of branded fashion stores (Levis, etc). Or why not include phone companies, they used to sell their own branded stuff in their own brand stores. Apple was very late in the game of brand stores. Sony, do they do brand stores as well? Never saw one...
No no no, that is not what you do when confronted with someone in a position of authority who is found incapable of making rational decisions. The right course of action is to first reward the person handsomely, treating him like a valued and honoured member of the community. Offer him (or her) a parachute so golden that it generates its own gravity. Don't ever reprimand the person, don't ever mention their incompetence. Either promote the person to a position of even more authority - put him somewhere high up in the organisation where he can safely absorb bonuses without causing direct harm - or allow him to take up a similar position in a competing business.
Remember, when you are above a certain pay scale you do not have to perform. You only have to keep up appearances. When that fails, you will be rewarded for failing.
Let's do a simple search for that, shall we?
Google 'killing bible' and click a link. I'd say any link, but why not click the first?
Murder in the Bible
Read and weep...
Golden parachutes should be dropped from great height to test their ballistic performance.
There is no reason whatsoever to continue shoveling boatloads of cash to some stuffed suit just because the rest of the Ole Boy circuit pushed him in the cushy seat on the top floor. Sure, pay the person (be it man or woman) handsomely, but keep it sane. As in 'enough to live a comfortable life' sane. As in 'as much as you pay your other essential personnel'. But no more of this multi-million euro/dollar/pound chicanery 'just because'.
Get rid of the clan of parasites which has taken over the board rooms and get back to work. All of you.
And puhleeze, don't come to me about having to pay the bozo a kings ransom because that is what it takes to get 'talent'. The only talent you get by paying a ransom is that of a crook, who will do anything to get his (or her) filthy hands on just that little bit more. As history (or herstory :-) shows.
Which is just the way ethanol is made in cellulosic ethanol plants. The food, you get to eat. The waste, you get to drink. Or drive. Not at the same time, please.
You forgot the most obvious Apple innovation, which fortunately is protected by a government-supported sole economic profit mandate (aka patent) 'till the tablets come home.
The real pertinent question to ask when trying to separate the chaff from the apples is: "Describe them. Did they have rectangular screens and rounded corners?"
If the answer to that question is "yes" they obviously stole all they ever came up with from Apple. It would not be the first time that happened, after all.
A Roomba powered by dog hair might be hard, but it would be easy to make one powered by dog(s). In more than one way... Think Slug^H^H^H^HDogBot for the scary version (which *really* gets rid of the dog hair problem) or Cynosphere for a less terminal variety.
Of course not. Suppose that you come up with something that piques the interest of one of the big boys. You'll soon be ceasing and desisting whatever it was that they want under the onslaught of a megaton of patents on everything from the way you press the 'Q' key on your keyboard to the best time of day to pick your nose. In the end they will have what they want - namely whatever it was that you did which got them interested - and you'll be left bankrupt.
Patents are not for small inventors. They are there for those with war chests full of them and, of course, lawyers.
The granddaddy of them all was the Xerox Star workstation from 1981. This was what Steve Jobs saw while visiting PARC and became the inspiration for the GUI on the Lisa/Mac. As Jobs (the 1994 Jobs) said, Apple was always "shameless about stealing great ideas". Too bad the 2011 Jobs thinks behavior which helped build up Apple should be illegal for anyone else.
Au contraire, he displayed exactly the same behaviour back in the '80s. After lifting the essence of the WIMP-desktop from PARC to create Lisa and Mac, the fruit company pouted its face (sour Apple) to the courts and whined about Microsoft 'stealing their ideas from Apple' in the famed 'look and feel' lawsuit. Of course they claimed Microsoft stole 'their ideas' without any mention of PARC, as they were already convinced those ideas were by right theirs and not Xerox's. That is what they mean when they state they 'think different', I guess.
Rounded corners, rectangular screens being 'theirs' is nothing new, really...
Teevee? Wasn't that the push video thing from before the 'net? Where you had to sit in front of some glaring, flickering cathode ray tube to see ghost images projected on the phosphorous layer in front of the thing? I heard they showed people walking on the moon on those things, for real!
How times change. Now TV is dead, but there is nobody walking on the moon.
There is no need for further explanation.