If you don't want to be burdoned with straining yourself why not just get rid of your computer alltogether?
Translation: "If you want to be program your automation tool to actually automate your workflow instead of creating more pointless busywork for you to do manually, why not get rid of that automation tool altogether?"
Yes. That sounds like a legitimate argument, indeed.
[With Windows 7] Right-click the taskbar. Click "Show windows side-by-side". Or am I missing something?
Yes, you're missing something. I just tried that - it tiles the windows once. It doesn't put your window manager into a tiling mode. Move a window, and now it's stacked, just like any other window. Back to cognitive burden of window micromanaging.
What I would like, and have wanted for years, is a loose tiling mode that would let me set user-defined areas on the screen - at a fairly chunky resolution, say two inch squares, because the entire idea is to get away from having to do lots of fine muscle movements at pixel-millimetre level - and have it wok a bit like a "snap to" grid in Photoshop. Drag a window and it should automatically snap to the closest available space, and remember that position. But let me resize or retile it if I need to. Couple that with a simple, sensible tab or browser pane for every type of window, not just tasks or file folders and finish off by forbidding any window to ever raise itself and grab the keyboard input without my permission, or hide itself from the window browser.
But instead, what we seem to be getting is Unity and Ribbon/Metro, which aren't really even trying to be useful, just pretty.
I was using a PalmPilot in 1998 and I loved the full-screen mode - but there's ways to do it properly on a big screen, and we haven't seen it yet.
Expansion is the solution to keeping that ponzi scheme going. Getting off the Earth, chewing up the solar system and slowly moving beyond.
Of course what most expansionist SF doesn't figure is that even devouring an entire galaxy of Earthlike planets (assuming that they exist, and that we had a vaguely hopeful theoretical pathway towards FTL, neither of which are true right now) won't work forever. The numbers are out there somewhere; I think about a century or two before we eat the whole Milky Way at current population/infrastructure buildout rates?
But if we don't get FTL, the picture changes dramatically. At STL generation-ship travel speeds, the Expanding!Space!Future will have to involve small self-sustaining communities of absolutely limited population locked in a sealed box with a finite amount of air, water, biosphere and energy for timescales of centuries to millennia. These ships will be eco-tyrannies that make the Fremen of Dune look like like slack hippies; the punishment for overbreeding will be either the entire ship dying, or getting chucked out the nearest airlock.
After enduring a trip like that, the resulting culture, when they finally get to a destination planet, might well treat it a lot more reverently than we currently do ours. They certainly won't have an economic background of expecting constant exponential growth in resource usage. So that's a potential solution, yes.
Mind you, you could get the same sociological result a bit faster and cheaper by just building sealed glass domes around all our major Earth cities and instantly shooting anyone who tries to smuggle oxygen inside.
Or maybe you've worked out 100%-efficient reversible computing?
Well, the tablet and cloud generation seem heck-bent on destroying the last 30 years of knowledge gained from network disaster preparedness and user interface design and dropping us right back to 1982, so I'd say we've pretty much got this "reversible computing" thing nailed...
Fifth trans-warp tunnel on the left, just after Dinoctopus-Mollusc World. No, not the fourth - that's the one where the Queen of England is a member of Queen. We don't a repeat of that little fracas.
Problems nobody could have forseen are going to come up,
"Bit of a bother, sir. The Soviets have called off this whole Cold War thing. Dashed unsporting, what?" "Nassssty hippie peaceniks! My preciousssssss!"
and solutions will have to be found,
"So some of our chums across the ditch have been thinking, let's try reviving the Crusades. Cos those worked out brilliantly the last time we tried that!" "Excssseeellent! You haff saved our budgetssssss!"
and nobody will be able to predict how much it will cost or how long it will take ahead of time.
"Righty-ho, here's your unlimited war budget. Course it will trash the world economy, but what's a few eggs to an omelette, eh?" "O my I am teengling just thinking about zis! It vill be like a Vorld Var Tree without ze nasssty cramped mineshafts! A Vorld Var Vour effen! Seig heil... Mr President!"
F18 (which was the loser in the competition for the F16
It does amuse me that the US defense bidding process produces all these failed/shelved designs for the Second-Bestest Nucular Bombar Ever. What happens to them? Are there defense contractors with big grudges, deep pockets and a back garage full of prototype stealth city obliterators? What happens if one of these guys decide they're tired of always being America's Second Runner-Up / Miss Congeniality 1988 in the Mass Civilian Murder, Mayhem and Catwalk/Gantry Jumpsuit Model categories... but never #1?
There's got to be a good movie in there somewhere.
Your suggestion would be kind of like trying to power a military radio by absorbing the kinetic energy of bullets being fired at the soldier carrying it.
I like your can-do attitude, soldier! That's the kind of transformative thinking that will get the revolution in military affairs right off the ground. We'll get on this right away. Spin off a defense contractor. Call it PowerCorps-E. I have Donald Rumsfeld on the line. Let's do lunch.
No. They HYPOTHESIZE that it is based on neutrinos.
HYPOTHESIZING that one could time travel within one's own lifetime, Dr Sam Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator - after having first conducted a rigorous postmortem defense of his experiment to the ethics committee, wiring the accelerator console to a roulette wheel r as an experimental control, and arranging a double-blind statistically significant sample set - and either vanishes or doesn't with probability p correlated with r, except in the case where his wavefunction fails to collapse, because, well, Quantum! In which case both.
Arrest, torture and kill everyone who says something nasty on the Internet about the company. If more than one IP of an anonymous disgruntled customer is traced back to a single city, glass that city with thermonuclear devices from orbit and put it up on the frontpage of the corp website as an inspirational grassroots marketing success story to create fantatical best-of-breed exceeded-expectations viral brand adoption among the staggering, glassy-eyed survivors.
Sheesh, this corporate image management stuff isn't rocket science!
any more than firing into a chicken coop with a shotgun and still having some chickens manage to survive means shotguns are potentially good for chicken survival.
Well, theoretically, if you keep doing this for a million generations natural selection ought to automatically breed hulking armour-plated bullet-resistant chickens. That's basic Darwin 101, innit?
In fact there's probably a US defense contractor working on exactly this idea right now...
"Should a man not be entitled to shoot flaming electric bees out of his face at the looters and the moochers? NO, says the Department of Mutant Sealife. NO, says the Humane Society. NO, says the American Psychological Association. But I rejected those answers. I chose the impossible. I chose SURPRISE GIANT DRILL ATTACK!"
"Ahem. Also I have a serious economic policy focusing on deregulation of private industry, an integrated energy/health/childcare system based on creepy orphan girls with syringes and FIRE GRENADE SPAM!"
No one will pay for a piece of software that gives the wrong answer 1 out of 100 times.
Oh if only that were true.
Sadly the entire software industry seems to keep buying and producing software that constantly gives spectacularly wrong answers to questions like "hi, I'm a totally legit packet from the Nigerian Department of Stack Overflow Inspections! Let me in, I promise I won't touch anything I don't have access to!"
I actually head a bunch of physicists at Los Alamos arguing about whether computer science was a science!
Hmm, good question. A quick comparison:
1. Can it sink a Pacific island? 2. Can it invade alien planets with a fleet of space robots? 3. Can it unleash hordes of zombies on the population of Earth?
Well, our Google datacenters are still working on 1. Just done 2. But we've had 3 nailed for quite some time now.
I'd say we're an emerging mad science with plenty of growth potential.
In other words, Noah Webster exhibited modern Americans' laziness and bent toward the dumbing down of education a couple of centuries before everyone else, so he was a pioneer of sorts.
Indeed. If oenlee heed dun thu hol job and gon straet too foenetik speling like Jorj Bernid Shor laatir proepoes.
Oh no. Not that #@$! chicken and pig analogy again.
So... what you're saying is, the chicken moved the pig's cheese?
I think I speak for us all when I say that, at the end of the day, going forward, the take-home is that we need to architect an action plan that leverages our strategic core competencies with buy-in from stakeholders across all silos to create stockholder value by outsourcing our right-sized just-in-time business processes to the Cloud. Radically, and to the max.
Slashdot Mirror
If you don't want to be burdoned with straining yourself why not just get rid of your computer alltogether?
Translation: "If you want to be program your automation tool to actually automate your workflow instead of creating more pointless busywork for you to do manually, why not get rid of that automation tool altogether?"
Yes. That sounds like a legitimate argument, indeed.
Machine learning
Excellent, so whole new classes of subtle nondeterministic failure modes for us to troubleshoot. I'll get right on that.
[With Windows 7] Right-click the taskbar. Click "Show windows side-by-side".
Or am I missing something?
Yes, you're missing something. I just tried that - it tiles the windows once. It doesn't put your window manager into a tiling mode. Move a window, and now it's stacked, just like any other window. Back to cognitive burden of window micromanaging.
What I would like, and have wanted for years, is a loose tiling mode that would let me set user-defined areas on the screen - at a fairly chunky resolution, say two inch squares, because the entire idea is to get away from having to do lots of fine muscle movements at pixel-millimetre level - and have it wok a bit like a "snap to" grid in Photoshop. Drag a window and it should automatically snap to the closest available space, and remember that position. But let me resize or retile it if I need to. Couple that with a simple, sensible tab or browser pane for every type of window, not just tasks or file folders and finish off by forbidding any window to ever raise itself and grab the keyboard input without my permission, or hide itself from the window browser.
But instead, what we seem to be getting is Unity and Ribbon/Metro, which aren't really even trying to be useful, just pretty.
I was using a PalmPilot in 1998 and I loved the full-screen mode - but there's ways to do it properly on a big screen, and we haven't seen it yet.
Plus, the lack of existing planet means we get to create one, with our own design
I wish you damn creationists would stop posting here!
You should see the Deletionist faction.
Get down into every crevice and detail the scent of the dead Cyber Knight's Skull's Eye Socket, just in case some fool decides to "sniff" at it.
Orson Scott Card, is that you? (spoilers)
Expansion is the solution to keeping that ponzi scheme going. Getting off the Earth, chewing up the solar system and slowly moving beyond.
Of course what most expansionist SF doesn't figure is that even devouring an entire galaxy of Earthlike planets (assuming that they exist, and that we had a vaguely hopeful theoretical pathway towards FTL, neither of which are true right now) won't work forever. The numbers are out there somewhere; I think about a century or two before we eat the whole Milky Way at current population/infrastructure buildout rates?
But if we don't get FTL, the picture changes dramatically. At STL generation-ship travel speeds, the Expanding!Space!Future will have to involve small self-sustaining communities of absolutely limited population locked in a sealed box with a finite amount of air, water, biosphere and energy for timescales of centuries to millennia. These ships will be eco-tyrannies that make the Fremen of Dune look like like slack hippies; the punishment for overbreeding will be either the entire ship dying, or getting chucked out the nearest airlock.
After enduring a trip like that, the resulting culture, when they finally get to a destination planet, might well treat it a lot more reverently than we currently do ours. They certainly won't have an economic background of expecting constant exponential growth in resource usage. So that's a potential solution, yes.
Mind you, you could get the same sociological result a bit faster and cheaper by just building sealed glass domes around all our major Earth cities and instantly shooting anyone who tries to smuggle oxygen inside.
Or maybe you've worked out 100%-efficient reversible computing?
Well, the tablet and cloud generation seem heck-bent on destroying the last 30 years of knowledge gained from network disaster preparedness and user interface design and dropping us right back to 1982, so I'd say we've pretty much got this "reversible computing" thing nailed...
Gee, if everybody thought that way, the horseless carriage would never have gotten off the ground.
My horseless carriage gets off the ground just fine, as long as I have a decent run-up and the cliff is high enough.
In which alternate Universe did Atlas Shrugged change the world?
The one in which the head of the Federal Reserve was a huge Ayn Rand groupie? And was appointed by a former film star?
Fifth trans-warp tunnel on the left, just after Dinoctopus-Mollusc World. No, not the fourth - that's the one where the Queen of England is a member of Queen. We don't a repeat of that little fracas.
You've been going through life all this time, content in the knowledge that the famous boy-wizard's name is Harry PORTER?
We call him "The Boy Who Carried Luggage".
We could have discovered the Higgs boson a decade sooner -- in the United States
And planted a really really tiny US flag on it, I'm guessing.
"We came in peace for all mankinx - darnit! Stupid cramped lettering! Hand me the quantum eraser!"
Problems nobody could have forseen are going to come up,
"Bit of a bother, sir. The Soviets have called off this whole Cold War thing. Dashed unsporting, what?"
"Nassssty hippie peaceniks! My preciousssssss!"
and solutions will have to be found,
"So some of our chums across the ditch have been thinking, let's try reviving the Crusades. Cos those worked out brilliantly the last time we tried that!"
"Excssseeellent! You haff saved our budgetssssss!"
and nobody will be able to predict how much it will cost or how long it will take ahead of time.
"Righty-ho, here's your unlimited war budget. Course it will trash the world economy, but what's a few eggs to an omelette, eh?"
"O my I am teengling just thinking about zis! It vill be like a Vorld Var Tree without ze nasssty cramped mineshafts! A Vorld Var Vour effen! Seig heil... Mr President!"
how I think the U.S. should shift its priorities post-Global War on Terrorism
"post"? Why do you think the GWOT will ever end?
F18 (which was the loser in the competition for the F16
It does amuse me that the US defense bidding process produces all these failed/shelved designs for the Second-Bestest Nucular Bombar Ever. What happens to them? Are there defense contractors with big grudges, deep pockets and a back garage full of prototype stealth city obliterators? What happens if one of these guys decide they're tired of always being America's Second Runner-Up / Miss Congeniality 1988 in the Mass Civilian Murder, Mayhem and Catwalk/Gantry Jumpsuit Model categories... but never #1?
There's got to be a good movie in there somewhere.
Since the vast majority of rapes go unreported
I'm curious as to how one measures an unreported event. What metrics are we using for that, and how do we show that they are accurate?
Your suggestion would be kind of like trying to power a military radio by absorbing the kinetic energy of bullets being fired at the soldier carrying it.
I like your can-do attitude, soldier! That's the kind of transformative thinking that will get the revolution in military affairs right off the ground. We'll get on this right away. Spin off a defense contractor. Call it PowerCorps-E. I have Donald Rumsfeld on the line. Let's do lunch.
No. They HYPOTHESIZE that it is based on neutrinos.
HYPOTHESIZING that one could time travel within one's own lifetime, Dr Sam Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap Accelerator - after having first conducted a rigorous postmortem defense of his experiment to the ethics committee, wiring the accelerator console to a roulette wheel r as an experimental control, and arranging a double-blind statistically significant sample set - and either vanishes or doesn't with probability p correlated with r, except in the case where his wavefunction fails to collapse, because, well, Quantum! In which case both.
So how does a company control the corp message?
Arrest, torture and kill everyone who says something nasty on the Internet about the company. If more than one IP of an anonymous disgruntled customer is traced back to a single city, glass that city with thermonuclear devices from orbit and put it up on the frontpage of the corp website as an inspirational grassroots marketing success story to create fantatical best-of-breed exceeded-expectations viral brand adoption among the staggering, glassy-eyed survivors.
Sheesh, this corporate image management stuff isn't rocket science!
any more than firing into a chicken coop with a shotgun and still having some chickens manage to survive means shotguns are potentially good for chicken survival.
Well, theoretically, if you keep doing this for a million generations natural selection ought to automatically breed hulking armour-plated bullet-resistant chickens. That's basic Darwin 101, innit?
In fact there's probably a US defense contractor working on exactly this idea right now...
far-left national socialists
I think you have your hands confused. National Socialism, and the European neo-fascists that look back fondly to it, was a far-right movement.
Andrew Ryan 2012, TAKE BACK RAPTURE!
"Should a man not be entitled to shoot flaming electric bees out of his face at the looters and the moochers? NO, says the Department of Mutant Sealife. NO, says the Humane Society. NO, says the American Psychological Association. But I rejected those answers. I chose the impossible. I chose SURPRISE GIANT DRILL ATTACK!"
"Ahem. Also I have a serious economic policy focusing on deregulation of private industry, an integrated energy/health/childcare system based on creepy orphan girls with syringes and FIRE GRENADE SPAM!"
No one will pay for a piece of software that gives the wrong answer 1 out of 100 times.
Oh if only that were true.
Sadly the entire software industry seems to keep buying and producing software that constantly gives spectacularly wrong answers to questions like "hi, I'm a totally legit packet from the Nigerian Department of Stack Overflow Inspections! Let me in, I promise I won't touch anything I don't have access to!"
I actually head a bunch of physicists at Los Alamos arguing about whether computer science was a science!
Hmm, good question. A quick comparison:
1. Can it sink a Pacific island?
2. Can it invade alien planets with a fleet of space robots?
3. Can it unleash hordes of zombies on the population of Earth?
Well, our Google datacenters are still working on 1.
Just done 2.
But we've had 3 nailed for quite some time now.
I'd say we're an emerging mad science with plenty of growth potential.
In other words, Noah Webster exhibited modern Americans' laziness and bent toward the dumbing down of education a couple of centuries before everyone else, so he was a pioneer of sorts.
Indeed. If oenlee heed dun thu hol job and gon straet too foenetik speling like Jorj Bernid Shor laatir proepoes.
Oh no. Not that #@$! chicken and pig analogy again.
So... what you're saying is, the chicken moved the pig's cheese?
I think I speak for us all when I say that, at the end of the day, going forward, the take-home is that we need to architect an action plan that leverages our strategic core competencies with buy-in from stakeholders across all silos to create stockholder value by outsourcing our right-sized just-in-time business processes to the Cloud. Radically, and to the max.