"This was the original basis for modern anti-abortion agitation. Not that killing a fetus was immoral, but that white middle and upper class families were having fewer children."
Well, you could also say that among the original basis of the pro-abortion agitation was the fear on the part of people like Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) of what they perceived as the reproduction of inferior people, as she put it (in this 1924 article) "those parents who are least fit to reproduce the race." (That article also lists the conditions without which, in her view, children should not be born; granted, most people can probably come up with some conditions under which they'd prefer children not be born, but "most people" aren't also in favor of involuntarily sterilizing those deemed unfit, so it's necessary to think of her conditions not as idle chatter, but as rules she would have been willing to enforce:) (As the state of Indiana did.)
From The Pivot of Civilization:
"Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism." That damn sentimentalism! If not for that, we'd have had the morons long ago segregated and sterilized, so the New Race could prosper without being burdened by them (or the yellow hordes)! Right? Wait... that sounds like racist eugenics!
Lots of people are quick to say that someone else's work "needs" something. My car needs its cupholder in a sane spot, instead of so it just about blocks the radio buttons. It's true, but that's not exactly a demand on the car maker. Just a hint... MR. SUBARU!
Sometimes it's hypothetical and prescriptive; "Red Hat needs to compete in the market X, so it needs to advertise in trade publication Z and add the de-pre-mux-defrobnostication patch that this special niche requires." Fine:)
Other times, the "need" is expressed as an imperative, when the speaker has no standing to demand anything ("The GIMP interface needs to change!") etc, or (as in the headline here) where there is no single Thing to change. "Open Source" covers a huge range; it's like "Things that have the letter R." It's true that some of these things (like Catherine Zeta Jones) are beautiful, but it it does not follow that all things with "R" better our existence in quite the same way.
It's perfectly nice and positive and welcome etc that someone has decided to promulgate what they consider higher standards of quality for "Open Source" -- as long as everyone realizes that only a certain subset of open source software can be scrutinized by any given such body, that developers may have their own ideas (even if they are not universally popular, and even if they have no intention of following someone else's ideas of UI perfection), that open source's great advantage in this context is that UIs are a) frequently separate from the underlying code and b) forkable.
Damn Small Linux has a special "Frugal" mode which is intended to minimize the problem you point out with write limits. I don't know much about it, but my impression is that it does things like spool writes for as long as practical in order to reduce their total number. That, and continuing improvements to flash memory, should help quite a bit.
DSL is not nearly as full featured as bells-n-whistles live distros like Knoppix / Mepis, but dang it's pretty neat for 50MB:)
"No, but "Gimp" is. In case you didn't know, it's an offensive term for a lame person (in the "cannot walk" sense, not the "OMGLOL" sense)."
The name is the name, and it's a pretty straightforward acronym, not a strained one like some out there in the world. There's a power company in Italy (maybe it's the main one, I don't know) called PowerGenItalia; to English-speakers, this can be amusing, but it's not meant to be, and I hope if someone tries to get them to change it on that basis that they laugh him out of the room. Force breeds resistance, sometimes righteously so. If you want to blame someone for spreading the *offensive*, pejorative, un-PC sense of "gimp," blame the pompous (but skilled) filmmaker who made Pulp Fiction. Before that movie, I only ever thought of gimp as the plastic used to make little bracelets at summer camps around the country.
In fact, look at it this way: The GIMP (a cross-platform, freely distributed, volunteer-written and driven program which anyone with a computer can download and use) is giving that particular word (another) wholesome and friendly meaning, helping to drive out the naughty and unpleasant meaning by diluting its power.
"Lame" isn't exactly a currently favored word (it's about on par with "crippled," I'd speculate), though there's nothing inherently offensive it. (Still, would you ask Steven Hawking how he feels about being lame?) George Carlin said on this topic: "Crippled people are crippled. It's a perfectly honorable word. There is no shame in it. It's in the Bible: 'Jesus healed the cripples.' He didn't 'engage in rehabilitative strategies for the physically disadvantaged.'"
"Dear GIMP Developers... This is your #1 useabilty issue. YOU may like it, but appearently everyone else HATES it."
I prefer the GIMP's way. It's true that I'm more used to the GIMP now, but I used to use PhotoShop a fair amount (not professionally, but often enough to have an opinion), and the transition to the GIMP's style was a hitch, but a quick one. I soon preferred it, and still do. My Wacom tablet came with a copy of PhotoShop LE, and I was surprised when I tried it out to note how much I missed GIMP's click-anywhere-get-a-menu approach. (Also, the annoying install and license-code entry reminded of why I prefer Free software in general, but that's another story.)
Your mileage varies, but there are lots of people (judging from personal experience as well as other comments here) who like the GIMP's interface at least as well as PhotoShop's.
"Perhaps you might consider fixing it rather than telling us (how) to "deal with it".Dear GIMP Developers... This is your #1 useabilty issue. YOU may like it, but appearently everyone else HATES it. Perhaps you might consider fixing it rather than telling us (how) to "deal with it"."
a) But they *have* told you how to deal with it; if there's a way to make PhotoShop act more like the GIMP, I am unaware of it. (Which is a perfectly likely scenario.) However, I have a workaround: I use the one I like better. To "fix" the current way, IMO, would really mean breaking it, unless an interface change was introduced such that I got to keep the old way:)
Also, note that GIMP is forkable -- it's happened at least once, with CinePaint; the developers added features they needed, and the result is a product with its own strengths and weaknesses. Someone (you?) could take the code, and modify it as they like, or pay someone else to modify it to their specs, or convince enough other people to do one of these things that the same end is reached. However, the GIMP developers quite legitmately get to decide on their own priorities wrt to aesthetics and engineering.
LEDs make great close-range flashlights, and in some cases they make good medium-range ones (I keep looking for the blind-perps-at-80-yards handheld LED light, but so far no luck), and all kinds of specialty applications are great for them. (One of those 60-LED floodlamps would be great for night-time home video if you don't like the green-grainy stuff.) Too much of my copious spending money ends up in the hands of LED flashlight purveyors:)
I am tempted by this light, just because, well, LEDs, shiny. Maybe as some commenters have noted, they'd be good for businesses which only change lights en masse every few years. But at this price, the tradeoff is terrible for (even somewhat typical) householders... I could buy more compact flourescents than I am likely to use in the next few years for the same price. YMMV; if you have a 30-foot ceiling with bitch-to-get at recessed fixtures... I'm sure there are edge cases.
And *after* the next few years, what will have been the opportunity cost of this ultra-cool LED bulb? You won't have the same money to spend on the next-gen version with twice the output at half the cost (if that happens), and if uniform-brightness lighting panels come into vogue, with ceiling-mountable thin-film illuminators that work for free and cause dopamine release in all who bask in their glow, won't you feel like an idiot?:)
I'm not the most ergonomically up-to-date guy (I'm slouched on my bed at the moment, badly propped on a couple of pillows), but when it comes to monitors, LCDs make my eyes happy, and CRTs give me headaches. This was true with a big Sony Trinitron I had (85Hz refresh at the resolution I was using) and just as true, more understandably, with the smaller but newer CRT that came as part of a package deal with the last computer I bought.
I'll admit the best CRTs have better color, but I've yet to find one whose flicker didn't bother me to some degree; my new Samsung LCD (a 19") is so much better in this regard I wish I'd spent the money on it a few years ago.
To say that "digital worlds are very real places" is silly, at least if you mean that they exist outside of the universe of made-up places.
*Every* imagined place is real, in a sense -- someone thought of and defined them, crystalized their ideas in a way that both the creator and an observer can apprehend. Further, the observer might be so taken with an artificial world that he wants to extend its boundaries with the same sort of concretization: that's one reason D&D is popular. Waterworld is real, to this extent. (And I don't mean the world's largest artificial island, created for the filming; I mean the fictional Waterworld of the movie.) However, they are not therefore real in some *other* sense.
Parallel: Huckleberry Finn is real -- a real character invented by S.L. Clemens writing as Mark Twain. Now, American students have come up with a huge body of text celebrating and analyzing -- and rarely casting a bad light on -- the character of H. Finn(thanks a lot, English teachers of the world, lazy nogoodniks!), but that does not make the (real) character into something else. Are there drawings of Huck, "further adventures" penned by writers since Twain, made for TV movies? Sure -- because the human imagination doesn't like to respect all the boundaries of reality, and there's nothing that says the *imagination* has to respect them; that's the great thing about it.
(Aside: What does it mean for something to be "very real," anyhow? I don't demand a terribly rigorous reality in general -- I really enjoy dreaming, for instance -- but words "very" and "real" just don't seem to go together.)
The linked text has quite a few words, arranged in readable sentences, but I can't find much meaning in them. The semantic difference between there not being a spoon and there being an spoon that exists only in a shared fiction (and which can't hold, say, actual cottage cheese) is not one that excites me. It sounds like the interesting-but-pointless distinction you can distract certain people into deep pondering with, about whether our brain-jars are stored in a backroom at Wal-Mart, or are in individual little brain-jar huts on a pleasant island in the tropics.
I would write more, but just at the moment I hear a knocking, knocking, knocking on my chamber door, and it's either the pizza guy or my arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty.
You're right that on-screen knobs meant to be manipulated with mouse-dragging are lame; however, as another responder has pointed out, knobs also take up far less valuable space, so your channel density can be higher.
That may not be a great tradeoff for everyone -- how many channels are most home recordists really interesting in playing with at once?* -- but it's one that a lot of audio programs' designers seem to think was wise.
The real point I'd like to make though is that while on-screen knobs are lame as a mouse-driven interface tool, they're *not* necessarily bad; for instance; a combination of mouse-over activation and a PowerMate or controlled by an external MIDI control surface, for instance, might be a really nice setup. It's not perfect for on-screen control elements to scream out for off-screen controllers, but not much is. I really wish keyboards could come with a rotary controller standard -- rotation is a nice motion!
timothy
* However, there might be quite a few who *do* want a lot, I'm not denying that...
Not that I have any rack-mounted computers just yet;)
I do like the look of some high-end stereo equipment -- in fact, the visual aesthetics are (I put forth as an idea) what gets a lot of people interested in that whole nutty domain. I'll concede otherwise when Stereophile is available only as an audio magazine delivered in a plain brown wrapper;)
This case doesn't look bad -- hard to go wrong with brushed metal and right angles:) -- but from at least a few of the comments in this thread, looks may be the biggest thing it's got going. However, the "high end look" I'd prefer is that of Acoustic Research's amplifiers. Hmmm, looks like AR got bought out by Audiovox, so make that "the look of AR's amps circa 10 years ago." If stereo equipment -- and computers -- would just all be made with 19" rackmounting in mind, the world would be a brighter place, and children would never sing off key, and I would never sing at all, just in case.
Oh, sure, Microsoft could (under a suitably bizarre set of circumstances) devote a full-page ad to promotion / defense / apology of Internet Explorer, but basically don't have much reason to. (In short, it's not a money maker.)
However, that's not what I mean: what I'm saying is that Microsoft's users ("customers") and developers ("employees") don't love IE. They're not going to donate money to an advertising fund for IE simply because they think it's so good that everyone with a computer ought to at least consider it.
Now, you could say that Microsoft's customers are donating money, in part, to an advertising fund for MS and getting some "free gifts" in appreciation -- like spyware, viruses, Internet explorer... and just like the local public broadcasting station, it seems like MS doesn't like to get just one donation.
I bought one of these a few weeks ago, on clearance at local Best Buy, for $200.
It's a Toshiba/ TiVo "Media Server" thingie; a claimed 80-hour TiVo (which it's not really, at least not as sold -- keep reading) and a progressive scan DVD player. The chief reason that I kept coming back to the store and looking at this device (and wondering why they weren't flying off the shelves) is that it says right on the box "no subscription required" -- TiVo service (a chopped-down version) is included with the purchase price and tied to the unit.
Now, for $200 it's a pretty good deal (excellent, even); I was surprised to find when I checked out that there was a further $100 rebate available, but which required activation of a higher grade of TiVo service than the included free variety.
I don't like continuing payments when I can buy out in advance, though, so I paid the full (clearance) price, no rebate -- continuing payments are evil. The limited but included service is one step about the series I, which could be used as simple VCRs (without the service); from what I understand -- not much -- this is *not* possible with the series II TiVos. It might be with ultra-hacking or something, but I mean out of the box.
The limited service means that a lot of the cool TiVo features aren't there (you can't set up wishlists by actor or show-type, for instance), and that the listings go out only three days in advance, not two weeks. As you can see from the rebate and the feature-chopping, TiVo would *like* everyone with one of these to upgrade to their higher-cost service. However, 3 days is plenty for me, and a happily made trade-off to avoid a recurring bill.
Note: one of the weirder things that's crippled on this variety of TiVo is recording quality: the only option is "highest quality." Now, that sounds pretty nice in a way, since "high quality" means "good," but it also means that the recording capacity as delivered is actually way less than the 80 hours promised on the box. For me, it's not a big deal -- I mostly use TiVo to timeshift once in a while, watch Good Eats and Monk. However, there are certain shows I'd like to keep on there for later perusal; I've got the recently shown-on-cable Carlito's Way on there right now, for instance, set to never delete. There will be more like this, I'm sure, and eventually, the lie (LIE! LIE! LIE!*) on the box about the capacity will annoy me more.
You can "upgrade" (odd word, considering) the player to record at Medium and Low quality, but only if you own a subscription. This I find a pretty snarky, snively, unethical approach: the box says nothing about this requiring a subscription, while it *does* say both "80 hours" and "no subscription required." If I didn't find it actually well suited to my actual use, I'd want to dedicate some portion of my life to getting from Toshiba satisfaction on this point, but as a life-energy use, I suspect it's not very rewarding. Just caveat, lector. And, if you happen to work in Toshiba / TiVo's marketing department and let this happen, shame on you.
timothy
* No, really. Someone should burn for the glibly false advertising. Spread out over all the people who own one of these, TiVo / Toshiba has failed to deliver just how many tens of thousands of hours of promised capacity? Mendacity, mendacity, mendacity!
That sounds like a back-formation rather than the source of it. OTOH, acronymical mnemonics are fun -- and in this case, instructive. Wish my dad would learn this one;)
"Like most things there is a clear right and a clear wrong with some gray area in between."
Most things? I dunno... I have what some people consider a pretty kneejerk reaction to quite a few things (drugs should be legal, school should be voluntary and private, mayonnaise is a strong emitic), but I'd say "most things" is too big a field to call. Most things to me would seem to cover a territory within which personal philosophy / ethics would inform your decision about whether something is right or wrong. Should the U.S. have assasinated Hitler? Is it OK to clone babies to harvest stem cells? Is the death penalty ever a just punishment, and if so, when?
"In this case trying to argue that the Howard Stern show was in the grey area between decency/indecency requires a complete departure from common sense."
Certainly a lot of people find the show colloquially, vernacularly (if that's a word) "indecent." The humor is often a new grade of low-brow, not family listening in *my* family, though not necessarily the same is true for everyone. But the *legal* idea of decency / indecency is that's being talked about here, not just whether you or I think it's indecent in casual language. I'd rather that Howard Stern be on the air than, say, shows that I think actively rot the brain, like most children's cartoons.
"The standards of decency are clearly defined."
No, they're not. If they were, the FCC would have very little to do in a case like this one, too. "Community standards" alone mean that there are lots of loopholes and arguments, especially for media that can be rebroadcast, or reach areas with widely varying community standards, when / if those can even be boiled down at all. And let's just go with the idea that these standards *are* clearly defined: even if standards are defined, if enforcement is arbitrary, then the defined standards aren't very useful unless an actor has fully internalized the ethics they represent. That is, if you think a rule ("a law") is silly, unhelpful and arbitrary, you will probably act so as to not get caught (in your own estimation) rather than kowtow humbly to it. YMMV.
"Entertainers that encroach [sic] the grey area do so knowingly feeling that the risk of a fine is worth the benefit of pushing the evelope."
I'm sure you're right -- at least sometimes. As stern pointed out though (and he's not the only example -- most big U.S. cities have titillating morning shows of the same basic flavor, and then there's that terrible "Don and Mike" show, if it's still by some anti-miracle still on the air) the standards are enforced inconsistently and (seemingly) arbitrarily.
"The FCC is not trying to shut down indecent entertainers."
Either they're trying to shut them down, or milk them for cash, or play censor. None of the above impress me.
"They are trying to allocate the public resource of electro-magnetic spectrum to those services that provide some benefit to the public. There are plenty of non-public-resurce-consuming methods of distribution/broadcasting that these entertainers can choose."
Three basic responses: 1) the current allocation system is cumbersome, slow, and itself a contributor to the scarcity that the FCC claims as one of its reasons for existence. Current technology certainly allows for more channels in the same space (and the FCC is part of turning over the current spectrum to an all-digital system). The FCC's power Congress-granted power is entirely defined by its ability to control the medium, and it moves like a slug. Change is dangerous. The FCC likes to pretend that it's enforcing the Laws of Nature, which is not entirely true. (e.g. there could be lower power limits to allow more local stations, there could be narrower spectrum slices to allow more stations of slightly less fidelity, or we could have gone all-digital quite a few years ago.)
2) Who ought define what constitutes "benefit for the public"? Me and a circle
In Seattle, 1 bar sometimes, occasionally as many as three bars (celebration time!) in the house I share there, then... zero. Even in the same spot in the house; conversations longer than 5 minutes there are pretty rare without at least one dropped connection.
In primary residence of El Paso, much better. Now, El Paso may be flatter and therefore easier to cover, but I'd hate to be a national cell carrier with awful coverage in Seattle! Sure, there are hills and rain and trees -- BUILD MORE TOWERS, because there are also lots of young urbanites with cell phones.
This does one necessary thing, which is provide a way to prove (near enough) that the software being used is the software that the voting software company provided, that no one hijacked the delivery truck carrying the voting machine and swapped in one favorable to candidate X. (Or W, or K.)
What it specifically does *not* do is do anything to prove the actual security, accuracy of the included software when running as intended, or that it can't be used *other* than as intended, in a 99-extra-lives "cheat mode." While incrementing by one a pretty small number of piles several thousand times doesn't sound like a computationally tough job, Bev Harris and others have shown the numerous and substantial flaws that current systems have; I'm aware of only one state (Nevada) that will be requiring a paper trail for its electronic voting machines in case of a dispute over the electronic returns.
Hashes? Great! Put them on the outside of the envelope containing every scrap of the sourcecode in machine-readable form, along with documentation that you have completed the publically available test suite, please, and take a seat in the lobby. The taxpayers will get around to you in your turn.*
There was a bug (since fixed) that made it impossible to add or update the topics and sections assigned to a story; since the bug is now fixed, I went in and added the topics I thought appropriate.
I suspect (am not sure) that Linux is the environment under which Window Maker is most often run, just multiplying the number of Linux installs x the % of people whom might have it on the machines:)
However, as has been pointed out, the story as posted was remiss for implying that it was a Linux-only bit of news. Until the posting glitch was fixed, I thought Linux was as good a category as any, so I let it run that way.
Window Maker is excellent:) Today I used synaptic to put it on my (HD-installed Mepis) desktop system, though 0.9.0 is not yet available that way.
10 percent for Firefox (well, let's say for Mozilla browsers in general) seemed like a hedged bet:)
Everyone whose computer I've put it on seems to have taken to Firefox quickly (or in some cases, Mozilla), and I've heard several of them recommending it to other people.
I went out today and bought a low-end system; by "low-end" I mean one three times faster than any previous computer I've owned, and cheaper all-'round than any of the ones I've purchased new (incl. the cost of parts to the ones I've built bit by bit).
For $450 (a sale price, but nothing funny, no mail-in-annoyance rebates), I got an emachines system with:
- 60 GB hard drive - 512MB RAM (haven't opened case yet to see how many slots remain) - Sempron 2800+ (whatever clock speed this is) - decent if not flashy case (metal, not plastic) - DVD-CD/RW drive - integrated graphics (but free AGP slot for later) - built-in multi-format flash reader (CF etc) - included 17" CRT - surprisingly good keyboard - surprisingly bad mouse (a mechanical mouse in a system built in 2004? What are they thinking?:)) - Windows XP (which came on a restore CD, so if I ever want to learn the arcane and difficult Windows operating system I could put it back on the hard drive...) and some other SW, like MS Works.
Now, this is a system that harcore gamers would scoff at I guess, until I take them in the DeLorean to the year 2002:) More to the point, it was the cheapest system I saw in the store (a Best Buy, sorry, no Fry's in El Paso), aside from a $399 open-box P4 system*, it runs Linux dandy, and from my place on the hardware adoption curve, it feels pretty darn speedy.
For $299, a lower-spec'd system was available at CompUSA which was loaded with AOL branding and running a slowish Celeron with (iirc) 256MB RAM. But slowish by 2004 standards is not *slow*, just slower than possible. Also for $299, TigerDirect will sell you a system similar to the one I bought today (except no monitor, and slightly lesser components -- smaller HD, slower Sempron, less RAM, but c'mon, in the same ballpark).
Slashdot Mirror
"This was the original basis for modern anti-abortion agitation. Not that killing a fetus was immoral, but that white middle and upper class families were having fewer children."
:) (As the state of Indiana did.)
... demonstrates our foolhardy and extravagant sentimentalism." That damn sentimentalism! If not for that, we'd have had the morons long ago segregated and sterilized, so the New Race could prosper without being burdened by them (or the yellow hordes)! Right? Wait ... that sounds like racist eugenics!
Well, you could also say that among the original basis of the pro-abortion agitation was the fear on the part of people like Margaret Sanger (founder of Planned Parenthood) of what they perceived as the reproduction of inferior people, as she put it (in this 1924 article) "those parents who are least fit to reproduce the race." (That article also lists the conditions without which, in her view, children should not be born; granted, most people can probably come up with some conditions under which they'd prefer children not be born, but "most people" aren't also in favor of involuntarily sterilizing those deemed unfit, so it's necessary to think of her conditions not as idle chatter, but as rules she would have been willing to enforce
From The Pivot of Civilization:
"Our failure to segregate morons who are increasing and multiplying
(The Pivot of Civilization is available from Project Gutenberg, along with Sanger's "Woman and the New Race")
timothy
"Who is this 'We,' paleface?"
... MR. SUBARU!
:)
Lots of people are quick to say that someone else's work "needs" something. My car needs its cupholder in a sane spot, instead of so it just about blocks the radio buttons. It's true, but that's not exactly a demand on the car maker. Just a hint
Sometimes it's hypothetical and prescriptive; "Red Hat needs to compete in the market X, so it needs to advertise in trade publication Z and add the de-pre-mux-defrobnostication patch that this special niche requires." Fine
Other times, the "need" is expressed as an imperative, when the speaker has no standing to demand anything ("The GIMP interface needs to change!") etc, or (as in the headline here) where there is no single Thing to change. "Open Source" covers a huge range; it's like "Things that have the letter R." It's true that some of these things (like Catherine Zeta Jones) are beautiful, but it it does not follow that all things with "R" better our existence in quite the same way.
It's perfectly nice and positive and welcome etc that someone has decided to promulgate what they consider higher standards of quality for "Open Source" -- as long as everyone realizes that only a certain subset of open source software can be scrutinized by any given such body, that developers may have their own ideas (even if they are not universally popular, and even if they have no intention of following someone else's ideas of UI perfection), that open source's great advantage in this context is that UIs are a) frequently separate from the underlying code and b) forkable.
timothy
Winnie Mandela has had to account (though not very convincingly) for some interesting activities.
Used to be, Id would have been expected to produce their *own* games! What kind of a micromanaged ecomony is this, anyhow?
timothy
Damn Small Linux has a special "Frugal" mode which is intended to minimize the problem you point out with write limits. I don't know much about it, but my impression is that it does things like spool writes for as long as practical in order to reduce their total number. That, and continuing improvements to flash memory, should help quite a bit.
:)
DSL is not nearly as full featured as bells-n-whistles live distros like Knoppix / Mepis, but dang it's pretty neat for 50MB
timothy
- After all, they've been supplying us with *their* organs for years!
/me runs from the large hook swinging toward me ...
- Because the Casios that lambs had been stuck with since 1980 were really starting to annoy everyone in earshot!
- Organ music bleats the hell out of the noises sheep *usually* make!
- This time, the humans didn't just let the sheep "borrow" their organs.
- The sheep didn't bid high enough for a human calliope!
- Ha ha! Sheep have no thumbs; they'll have a heck of a time keeping the organs in tune. Ha ha!
- Now we'll get to learn the real tune to "Baa, Baa Blacksheep."
- Mostly this is to get one-up on those damned snotty cows next door.
... is "Will Open Source Solaris Kill Linux?"
The question has an answer; the answer is No.
"No, but "Gimp" is. In case you didn't know, it's an offensive term for a lame person (in the "cannot walk" sense, not the "OMGLOL" sense)."
...
The name is the name, and it's a pretty straightforward acronym, not a strained one like some out there in the world. There's a power company in Italy (maybe it's the main one, I don't know) called PowerGenItalia; to English-speakers, this can be amusing, but it's not meant to be, and I hope if someone tries to get them to change it on that basis that they laugh him out of the room. Force breeds resistance, sometimes righteously so. If you want to blame someone for spreading the *offensive*, pejorative, un-PC sense of "gimp," blame the pompous (but skilled) filmmaker who made Pulp Fiction. Before that movie, I only ever thought of gimp as the plastic used to make little bracelets at summer camps around the country.
In fact, look at it this way: The GIMP (a cross-platform, freely distributed, volunteer-written and driven program which anyone with a computer can download and use) is giving that particular word (another) wholesome and friendly meaning, helping to drive out the naughty and unpleasant meaning by diluting its power.
"Lame" isn't exactly a currently favored word (it's about on par with "crippled," I'd speculate), though there's nothing inherently offensive it. (Still, would you ask Steven Hawking how he feels about being lame?) George Carlin said on this topic: "Crippled people are crippled. It's a perfectly honorable word. There is no shame in it. It's in the Bible: 'Jesus healed the cripples.' He didn't 'engage in rehabilitative strategies for the physically disadvantaged.'"
But I digress
timothy
"Dear GIMP Developers... This is your #1 useabilty issue. YOU may like it, but appearently everyone else HATES it."
:)
I prefer the GIMP's way. It's true that I'm more used to the GIMP now, but I used to use PhotoShop a fair amount (not professionally, but often enough to have an opinion), and the transition to the GIMP's style was a hitch, but a quick one. I soon preferred it, and still do. My Wacom tablet came with a copy of PhotoShop LE, and I was surprised when I tried it out to note how much I missed GIMP's click-anywhere-get-a-menu approach. (Also, the annoying install and license-code entry reminded of why I prefer Free software in general, but that's another story.)
Your mileage varies, but there are lots of people (judging from personal experience as well as other comments here) who like the GIMP's interface at least as well as PhotoShop's.
"Perhaps you might consider fixing it rather than telling us (how) to "deal with it".Dear GIMP Developers... This is your #1 useabilty issue. YOU may like it, but appearently everyone else HATES it. Perhaps you might consider fixing it rather than telling us (how) to "deal with it"."
a) But they *have* told you how to deal with it; if there's a way to make PhotoShop act more like the GIMP, I am unaware of it. (Which is a perfectly likely scenario.) However, I have a workaround: I use the one I like better. To "fix" the current way, IMO, would really mean breaking it, unless an interface change was introduced such that I got to keep the old way
Also, note that GIMP is forkable -- it's happened at least once, with CinePaint; the developers added features they needed, and the result is a product with its own strengths and weaknesses. Someone (you?) could take the code, and modify it as they like, or pay someone else to modify it to their specs, or convince enough other people to do one of these things that the same end is reached. However, the GIMP developers quite legitmately get to decide on their own priorities wrt to aesthetics and engineering.
LEDs make great close-range flashlights, and in some cases they make good medium-range ones (I keep looking for the blind-perps-at-80-yards handheld LED light, but so far no luck), and all kinds of specialty applications are great for them. (One of those 60-LED floodlamps would be great for night-time home video if you don't like the green-grainy stuff.) Too much of my copious spending money ends up in the hands of LED flashlight purveyors :)
... I could buy more compact flourescents than I am likely to use in the next few years for the same price. YMMV; if you have a 30-foot ceiling with bitch-to-get at recessed fixtures ... I'm sure there are edge cases.
:)
I am tempted by this light, just because, well, LEDs, shiny. Maybe as some commenters have noted, they'd be good for businesses which only change lights en masse every few years. But at this price, the tradeoff is terrible for (even somewhat typical) householders
And *after* the next few years, what will have been the opportunity cost of this ultra-cool LED bulb? You won't have the same money to spend on the next-gen version with twice the output at half the cost (if that happens), and if uniform-brightness lighting panels come into vogue, with ceiling-mountable thin-film illuminators that work for free and cause dopamine release in all who bask in their glow, won't you feel like an idiot?
timothy
I'm not the most ergonomically up-to-date guy (I'm slouched on my bed at the moment, badly propped on a couple of pillows), but when it comes to monitors, LCDs make my eyes happy, and CRTs give me headaches. This was true with a big Sony Trinitron I had (85Hz refresh at the resolution I was using) and just as true, more understandably, with the smaller but newer CRT that came as part of a package deal with the last computer I bought.
I'll admit the best CRTs have better color, but I've yet to find one whose flicker didn't bother me to some degree; my new Samsung LCD (a 19") is so much better in this regard I wish I'd spent the money on it a few years ago.
timothy
I saw initial iTunes support demonstrated several months ago at OSCON, too, but now it's in the released version.
timothy
To say that "digital worlds are very real places" is silly, at least if you mean that they exist outside of the universe of made-up places.
*Every* imagined place is real, in a sense -- someone thought of and defined them, crystalized their ideas in a way that both the creator and an observer can apprehend. Further, the observer might be so taken with an artificial world that he wants to extend its boundaries with the same sort of concretization: that's one reason D&D is popular. Waterworld is real, to this extent. (And I don't mean the world's largest artificial island, created for the filming; I mean the fictional Waterworld of the movie.) However, they are not therefore real in some *other* sense.
Parallel: Huckleberry Finn is real -- a real character invented by S.L. Clemens writing as Mark Twain. Now, American students have come up with a huge body of text celebrating and analyzing -- and rarely casting a bad light on -- the character of H. Finn(thanks a lot, English teachers of the world, lazy nogoodniks!), but that does not make the (real) character into something else. Are there drawings of Huck, "further adventures" penned by writers since Twain, made for TV movies? Sure -- because the human imagination doesn't like to respect all the boundaries of reality, and there's nothing that says the *imagination* has to respect them; that's the great thing about it.
(Aside: What does it mean for something to be "very real," anyhow? I don't demand a terribly rigorous reality in general -- I really enjoy dreaming, for instance -- but words "very" and "real" just don't seem to go together.)
The linked text has quite a few words, arranged in readable sentences, but I can't find much meaning in them. The semantic difference between there not being a spoon and there being an spoon that exists only in a shared fiction (and which can't hold, say, actual cottage cheese) is not one that excites me. It sounds like the interesting-but-pointless distinction you can distract certain people into deep pondering with, about whether our brain-jars are stored in a backroom at Wal-Mart, or are in individual little brain-jar huts on a pleasant island in the tropics.
I would write more, but just at the moment I hear a knocking, knocking, knocking on my chamber door, and it's either the pizza guy or my arch-nemesis Professor Moriarty.
timothy
How's that for a dirty-sounding subject line?
...
You're right that on-screen knobs meant to be manipulated with mouse-dragging are lame; however, as another responder has pointed out, knobs also take up far less valuable space, so your channel density can be higher.
That may not be a great tradeoff for everyone -- how many channels are most home recordists really interesting in playing with at once?* -- but it's one that a lot of audio programs' designers seem to think was wise.
The real point I'd like to make though is that while on-screen knobs are lame as a mouse-driven interface tool, they're *not* necessarily bad; for instance; a combination of mouse-over activation and a PowerMate or controlled by an external MIDI control surface, for instance, might be a really nice setup. It's not perfect for on-screen control elements to scream out for off-screen controllers, but not much is. I really wish keyboards could come with a rotary controller standard -- rotation is a nice motion!
timothy
* However, there might be quite a few who *do* want a lot, I'm not denying that
I've just apt-gotten (well, actually synapticlized) this package, now to see if it works as hoped :)
timothy
Not that I have any rack-mounted computers just yet ;)
;)
:) -- but from at least a few of the comments in this thread, looks may be the biggest thing it's got going. However, the "high end look" I'd prefer is that of Acoustic Research's amplifiers. Hmmm, looks like AR got bought out by Audiovox, so make that "the look of AR's amps circa 10 years ago." If stereo equipment -- and computers -- would just all be made with 19" rackmounting in mind, the world would be a brighter place, and children would never sing off key, and I would never sing at all, just in case.
I do like the look of some high-end stereo equipment -- in fact, the visual aesthetics are (I put forth as an idea) what gets a lot of people interested in that whole nutty domain. I'll concede otherwise when Stereophile is available only as an audio magazine delivered in a plain brown wrapper
This case doesn't look bad -- hard to go wrong with brushed metal and right angles
timothy
Oh, sure, Microsoft could (under a suitably bizarre set of circumstances) devote a full-page ad to promotion / defense / apology of Internet Explorer, but basically don't have much reason to. (In short, it's not a money maker.)
... and just like the local public broadcasting station, it seems like MS doesn't like to get just one donation.
However, that's not what I mean: what I'm saying is that Microsoft's users ("customers") and developers ("employees") don't love IE. They're not going to donate money to an advertising fund for IE simply because they think it's so good that everyone with a computer ought to at least consider it.
Now, you could say that Microsoft's customers are donating money, in part, to an advertising fund for MS and getting some "free gifts" in appreciation -- like spyware, viruses, Internet explorer
timothy
I bought one of these a few weeks ago, on clearance at local Best Buy, for $200.
It's a Toshiba/ TiVo "Media Server" thingie; a claimed 80-hour TiVo (which it's not really, at least not as sold -- keep reading) and a progressive scan DVD player. The chief reason that I kept coming back to the store and looking at this device (and wondering why they weren't flying off the shelves) is that it says right on the box "no subscription required" -- TiVo service (a chopped-down version) is included with the purchase price and tied to the unit.
Now, for $200 it's a pretty good deal (excellent, even); I was surprised to find when I checked out that there was a further $100 rebate available, but which required activation of a higher grade of TiVo service than the included free variety.
I don't like continuing payments when I can buy out in advance, though, so I paid the full (clearance) price, no rebate -- continuing payments are evil. The limited but included service is one step about the series I, which could be used as simple VCRs (without the service); from what I understand -- not much -- this is *not* possible with the series II TiVos. It might be with ultra-hacking or something, but I mean out of the box.
The limited service means that a lot of the cool TiVo features aren't there (you can't set up wishlists by actor or show-type, for instance), and that the listings go out only three days in advance, not two weeks. As you can see from the rebate and the feature-chopping, TiVo would *like* everyone with one of these to upgrade to their higher-cost service. However, 3 days is plenty for me, and a happily made trade-off to avoid a recurring bill.
Note: one of the weirder things that's crippled on this variety of TiVo is recording quality: the only option is "highest quality." Now, that sounds pretty nice in a way, since "high quality" means "good," but it also means that the recording capacity as delivered is actually way less than the 80 hours promised on the box. For me, it's not a big deal -- I mostly use TiVo to timeshift once in a while, watch Good Eats and Monk. However, there are certain shows I'd like to keep on there for later perusal; I've got the recently shown-on-cable Carlito's Way on there right now, for instance, set to never delete. There will be more like this, I'm sure, and eventually, the lie (LIE! LIE! LIE!*) on the box about the capacity will annoy me more.
You can "upgrade" (odd word, considering) the player to record at Medium and Low quality, but only if you own a subscription. This I find a pretty snarky, snively, unethical approach: the box says nothing about this requiring a subscription, while it *does* say both "80 hours" and "no subscription required." If I didn't find it actually well suited to my actual use, I'd want to dedicate some portion of my life to getting from Toshiba satisfaction on this point, but as a life-energy use, I suspect it's not very rewarding. Just caveat, lector. And, if you happen to work in Toshiba / TiVo's marketing department and let this happen, shame on you.
timothy
* No, really. Someone should burn for the glibly false advertising. Spread out over all the people who own one of these, TiVo / Toshiba has failed to deliver just how many tens of thousands of hours of promised capacity? Mendacity, mendacity, mendacity!
That sounds like a back-formation rather than the source of it. OTOH, acronymical mnemonics are fun -- and in this case, instructive. Wish my dad would learn this one ;)
timothy
"Like most things there is a clear right and a clear wrong with some gray area in between."
... I have what some people consider a pretty kneejerk reaction to quite a few things (drugs should be legal, school should be voluntary and private, mayonnaise is a strong emitic), but I'd say "most things" is too big a field to call. Most things to me would seem to cover a territory within which personal philosophy / ethics would inform your decision about whether something is right or wrong. Should the U.S. have assasinated Hitler? Is it OK to clone babies to harvest stem cells? Is the death penalty ever a just punishment, and if so, when?
Most things? I dunno
"In this case trying to argue that the Howard Stern show was in the grey area between decency/indecency requires a complete departure from common sense."
Certainly a lot of people find the show colloquially, vernacularly (if that's a word) "indecent." The humor is often a new grade of low-brow, not family listening in *my* family, though not necessarily the same is true for everyone. But the *legal* idea of decency / indecency is that's being talked about here, not just whether you or I think it's indecent in casual language. I'd rather that Howard Stern be on the air than, say, shows that I think actively rot the brain, like most children's cartoons.
"The standards of decency are clearly defined."
No, they're not. If they were, the FCC would have very little to do in a case like this one, too. "Community standards" alone mean that there are lots of loopholes and arguments, especially for media that can be rebroadcast, or reach areas with widely varying community standards, when / if those can even be boiled down at all. And let's just go with the idea that these standards *are* clearly defined: even if standards are defined, if enforcement is arbitrary, then the defined standards aren't very useful unless an actor has fully internalized the ethics they represent. That is, if you think a rule ("a law") is silly, unhelpful and arbitrary, you will probably act so as to not get caught (in your own estimation) rather than kowtow humbly to it. YMMV.
"Entertainers that encroach [sic] the grey area do so knowingly feeling that the risk of a fine is worth the benefit of pushing the evelope."
I'm sure you're right -- at least sometimes. As stern pointed out though (and he's not the only example -- most big U.S. cities have titillating morning shows of the same basic flavor, and then there's that terrible "Don and Mike" show, if it's still by some anti-miracle still on the air) the standards are enforced inconsistently and (seemingly) arbitrarily.
"The FCC is not trying to shut down indecent entertainers."
Either they're trying to shut them down, or milk them for cash, or play censor. None of the above impress me.
"They are trying to allocate the public resource of electro-magnetic spectrum to those services that provide some benefit to the public. There are plenty of non-public-resurce-consuming methods of distribution/broadcasting that these entertainers can choose."
Three basic responses: 1) the current allocation system is cumbersome, slow, and itself a contributor to the scarcity that the FCC claims as one of its reasons for existence. Current technology certainly allows for more channels in the same space (and the FCC is part of turning over the current spectrum to an all-digital system). The FCC's power Congress-granted power is entirely defined by its ability to control the medium, and it moves like a slug. Change is dangerous. The FCC likes to pretend that it's enforcing the Laws of Nature, which is not entirely true. (e.g. there could be lower power limits to allow more local stations, there could be narrower spectrum slices to allow more stations of slightly less fidelity, or we could have gone all-digital quite a few years ago.)
2) Who ought define what constitutes "benefit for the public"? Me and a circle
In Seattle, 1 bar sometimes, occasionally as many as three bars (celebration time!) in the house I share there, then ... zero. Even in the same spot in the house; conversations longer than 5 minutes there are pretty rare without at least one dropped connection.
In primary residence of El Paso, much better. Now, El Paso may be flatter and therefore easier to cover, but I'd hate to be a national cell carrier with awful coverage in Seattle! Sure, there are hills and rain and trees -- BUILD MORE TOWERS, because there are also lots of young urbanites with cell phones.
timothy
This does one necessary thing, which is provide a way to prove (near enough) that the software being used is the software that the voting software company provided, that no one hijacked the delivery truck carrying the voting machine and swapped in one favorable to candidate X. (Or W, or K.)
;)
What it specifically does *not* do is do anything to prove the actual security, accuracy of the included software when running as intended, or that it can't be used *other* than as intended, in a 99-extra-lives "cheat mode." While incrementing by one a pretty small number of piles several thousand times doesn't sound like a computationally tough job, Bev Harris and others have shown the numerous and substantial flaws that current systems have; I'm aware of only one state (Nevada) that will be requiring a paper trail for its electronic voting machines in case of a dispute over the electronic returns.
Hashes? Great! Put them on the outside of the envelope containing every scrap of the sourcecode in machine-readable form, along with documentation that you have completed the publically available test suite, please, and take a seat in the lobby. The taxpayers will get around to you in your turn.*
timothy
*Oh, if it were that simple
There was a bug (since fixed) that made it impossible to add or update the topics and sections assigned to a story; since the bug is now fixed, I went in and added the topics I thought appropriate.
:)
:) Today I used synaptic to put it on my (HD-installed Mepis) desktop system, though 0.9.0 is not yet available that way.
I suspect (am not sure) that Linux is the environment under which Window Maker is most often run, just multiplying the number of Linux installs x the % of people whom might have it on the machines
However, as has been pointed out, the story as posted was remiss for implying that it was a Linux-only bit of news. Until the posting glitch was fixed, I thought Linux was as good a category as any, so I let it run that way.
Window Maker is excellent
Cheers,
timothy
10 percent for Firefox (well, let's say for Mozilla browsers in general) seemed like a hedged bet :)
Everyone whose computer I've put it on seems to have taken to Firefox quickly (or in some cases, Mozilla), and I've heard several of them recommending it to other people.
timothy
I went out today and bought a low-end system; by "low-end" I mean one three times faster than any previous computer I've owned, and cheaper all-'round than any of the ones I've purchased new (incl. the cost of parts to the ones I've built bit by bit).
:)) ...) and some other SW, like MS Works.
:) More to the point, it was the cheapest system I saw in the store (a Best Buy, sorry, no Fry's in El Paso), aside from a $399 open-box P4 system*, it runs Linux dandy, and from my place on the hardware adoption curve, it feels pretty darn speedy.
For $450 (a sale price, but nothing funny, no mail-in-annoyance rebates), I got an emachines system with:
- 60 GB hard drive
- 512MB RAM (haven't opened case yet to see how many slots remain)
- Sempron 2800+ (whatever clock speed this is)
- decent if not flashy case (metal, not plastic)
- DVD-CD/RW drive
- integrated graphics (but free AGP slot for later)
- built-in multi-format flash reader (CF etc)
- included 17" CRT
- surprisingly good keyboard
- surprisingly bad mouse (a mechanical mouse in a system built in 2004? What are they thinking?
- Windows XP (which came on a restore CD, so if I ever want to learn the arcane and difficult Windows operating system I could put it back on the hard drive
Now, this is a system that harcore gamers would scoff at I guess, until I take them in the DeLorean to the year 2002
For $299, a lower-spec'd system was available at CompUSA which was loaded with AOL branding and running a slowish Celeron with (iirc) 256MB RAM. But slowish by 2004 standards is not *slow*, just slower than possible. Also for $299, TigerDirect will sell you a system similar to the one I bought today (except no monitor, and slightly lesser components -- smaller HD, slower Sempron, less RAM, but c'mon, in the same ballpark).
timothy
*And the P4 system did *not* include a monitor.)