Why is memory usage increasing so much in recent years? Firefox is currently consuming 450MB on my machine with only a few tabs open.
I just checked and... you're right. Same here (Windows 7 x64). I have eight tabs open, memory usage is 450MB and counting. And I can just sit here and watch Firefox's memory usage slowly go up... and up... and up... while I do nothing. What's more, some people I know have a habit of leaving the browser running for days with hundreds of tabs. Not me. I'm so old fashioned that not only do I put my computer to sleep when I walk away from it, but I actually close all my running apps before I do so. So Firefox is never running on my machine for more than, say, 18 hours, maximum.
Parenthetically, why do "blockbuster" movie scripts suck so often?
Because of the amount of money involved in producing them. The first draft of the script is probably a potentially very interesting movie. But every financial stakeholder comes to the table with its own requirements and its own ideas of how to maximize profit from the investment. The script follows from there. The result is usually a mishmash that takes no risks, demonstrates no creativity, and swiftly degenerates into recycled, unintelligible pablum.
Right, so it will take 10 black hats a work week to crack one password. Given the ratio of black hats to usernames, I wouldn't worry too much unless you are person of relative interest.
Wait, aren't we looking at this wrong? Yes, if the black hats only had one password to crack, it would take this long. But if they've gained access to the entire password hashfile, they have many passwords to crack, and they're just trying to get lucky. Each time they pull a hash from a rainbow table, they have the equivalent of [number of users] lottery tickets. Successfully cracking one password would give them access to the machine, and no matter what level of privilege that account has, gaining any kind of access is a huge step.
I guess what I'm saying is, from the perspective of one person who wants to protect their individual account, yeah, you might not worry too much. But if you're the guy in charge of protecting the server itself -- and by extension, the security of every account on that server -- then worrying seems justified.
In some ways it is like substituting words for letters, a seven word password is only more secure than a seven character password in the sense that there are more words in a person's vocabulary than they are letters in the alphabet.
That seems to trivialize it a bit. There are only 26 letters an English-speaker can choose from (52 if you count upper and lower case separately). Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary -- which is not the unabridged one -- claims 225,000 definitions. It's true that not every word fits next to every other word if you're using grammatically-correct phrases, but cracking such a password using brute force would still be orders of magnitude more difficult. Even if you had a "dictionary" that included commonplace phrases, you could confound those attacks by mixing upper and lower case in the phrase (say, using title capitalization, or capitalizing every word, or using all caps) or applying punctuation.
I disagree. Like I said, it starts in the middle of nowhere, it ends in the middle of nowhere, and nothing really happens. It's basically a setup for RotJ, the plot of which is... destroy the Death Star. Hm, heard that before somewhere.The flirtation between Han and Leia was cute, but that's all I got out of it... cute. It's not what I'd call an actual romance. The rest is all action -- and mindless action, since, unlike the original Star Wars, the heroes don't even have a real objective. They're just thrown one obstacle after the other, and we watch them dodge. And they lose in the end. It really is hard for me to understand how people can esteem ESB so much higher than the original when it's really so much... less.
the encounter between Luke and Vader was taught with tension and actually, for a Lucas film, had effective dialogue that gave us an entirely new window on Vader's personality, beyond being the one-dimensional evil Nazi-type villain that he was in the first film.
I guess I just didn't need that out of my villain in a totally one-dimensional action-adventure series. I'm not saying ESB is a bad movie -- it's not -- but it's hardly the best of the series. I saw the original in the theater seven times. I might have seen ESB 2-3 times, I don't really remember.
Many many years ago depicting a mere spaceship was a real challenge.
I assume you mean prior to the 1950s and Forbidden Planet? Or do you mean a "realistic" spaceship -- in which case, the better example would be 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came 9 years before Star Wars (which doesn't really depict spaceships in any real sense at all).
The end result is we got somewhat uninteresting action for movies 4-6, because we showed movies 1-3 as movies 4-6. The real depth of actual story starts around episode 4, so that's where the original series started
Wow, dude, you really need to pull your head out of your genre for a while.
The reason science fiction books are always series with a minimum of three books is because that way they can sell you a minimum of three books.
If you'd broaden your horizons a little bit, however, you'd realize that most of the great literature of the world is stand-alone books. Likewise, most of the great movies ever made do not have any sequels or prequels -- The Godfather being one notable exception, which they fucked up when they tried to have lightning strike twice.
And FWIW, this thing about George Lucas "deciding to film episode 4 first" is a myth -- propagated by Lucas, but a myth nonetheless. He made a movie. When it was a success, he made more movies.
And let's be honest. Only eps 5 is actually a *good* movie. Eps 4 is only good because of the very strong characters and setting. The story is only so-so.
I will never understand people who say this.
Star Wars, the original movie (no, it wasn't called "Episode IV"), was pretty much perfect. Yeah, the story wasn't any great miracle -- pretty much a retelling of "Jack and the Beanstalk" -- but it did have strong characters, it did have good settings, and it was an action-packed and enjoyable movie.
The Empire Strikes Back is arguably better shot and better directed. But as a story, you would have no idea what's going on if you hadn't seen the first movie. Worse, it starts at some point mid-story, it ends at some point mid-story, and there isn't really any plot at all. Luke whines, Han Solo introduces us to Lando Calrissian (who betrays him), Leia bitches, and Darth Vader kills his own guys. The end. Yeah, it had some great action scenes -- but isn't tons of action with a weak story the reason we all hate the prequels? It's pretty telling when the most memorable character in the movie is a Muppet. And I remember distinctly as a kid, when Darth Vader told Luke he was his father, thinking, "That's bullshit, Vader's lying." When RotJ came out and they acted like it was the god's-honest truth, I was like, "Whaaaaaat? That's so lame."
The Star Wars series is mostly bad movies. The original Star Wars, on the other hand, remains a near-flawless miracle of filmmaking that will never be repeated.
Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation mailed me the following statement this morning:
The Document Foundation Statement about Oracle's move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation
The Internet, June 1st, 2011 - The Document Foundation constitutes a global team of hundreds of developers working together to improve the LibreOffice product for the benefit of all users. We are governed by an open, and meritocratic community headed by a diverse interim Steering Committee, and a vendor neutral Engineering Steering Committee overseeing development.
Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation. It is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice.
The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms - licensing, membership and more - to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
On the bright side, one benefit of this arrangement is the potential for future-proof licensing. The Apache License is compatible with both the LGPLv3+ and MPL licenses, allowing TDF future flexibility to move the entire codebase, to MPLv2 or future LGPL license versions. The Document Foundation believes that commercially-friendly, copy-left licensing provides the best path to constructive participation in, and growth of the project.
Thus, the event is neutral for The Document Foundation, which - as always - remains open to every company, individual or foundation that wishes to participate in co-development. There has never been a better time to get involved and advance the state of the art in free software office suites.
TDF is therefore willing to start talking with Apache Software Foundation, following the email from ASF President Jim Jagielski, who is anticipating frequent contacts between the Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation over the next few months. We all want to offer corporate and individual users worldwide the best free office suite for enterprise and personal productivity.
Finally, TDF continue executing on a time-based release plan for LibreOffice 3.4.0, due out this week, while continuing work on the bug fix release train, with 3.4.1 due in a months time, as well as ongoing feature development for the 3.5 release.
*** About The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into an open, meritocratic and democratic organization. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more inclusive, effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.
You're seriously claiming that the 'lay public' didn't realise that the 'coffin nails' they were smoking might be bad for their health until scientists told them they were?
No, I'm claiming that when people who had been told smoking was bad for them saw stories that had scientists claiming it really wasn't, many of them said, "Oh, that's a relief, then." Similarly, is there anybody on the planet who doesn't know what Coca-Cola is? Not really... and yet Coca-Cola keeps advertising.
'Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,' says Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. 'There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.'
This seems like a bad example, because it's not really "duh science" when you have an entire industry using its combined resources to silence your research. The tobacco industry spent decades flooding the journals with studies aimed at proving that smoking was harmless, or even beneficial. What's more, the tobacco industry was uniquely situated to get those results repeated in the press, while the studies that repeated the finding that smoking was harmful ended up sounding like "duh science" and went unreported. (If smoking is still bad for you, it's not news.)
In many cases, the real problem is not the science, or the journals, but how to communicate the science to the lay public, who can only really comprehend what's actually told to them. If you can't guarantee that anybody will ever hear about your findings, the only way might be to repeat them over and over, as many times as you can -- because that's what industry will do.
That data just indicates the number of families that reported "a desire to give religious or moral instruction" as a factor. I don't think that establishes the family as a "highly religious family." It could just mean the parent wants to be able to instruct the child about sex, proper behavior, etc., because they think this kind of education is lacking in the school.
But the same families were asked what the most important factor in choosing home schooling was, and there only ~30 percent responded that religion was the most important reason. I think it would be safe to deem these "highly religious families," though it's still a little speculative.
I got 70% from this paper [ncspe.org], which cites the 2003 NHES.
Well that's weird, because the 2003 NHES results are right here, and they give the figure as 30 percent, down from 33 percent in the earlier survey (the figure being the number of parents who reported religious instruction as being the most important reason for home schooling). In fact, the report you cite repeats the same data; it then goes on to claim that 70 percent of home schooled children come from "very religious families," but it doesn't explain the methodology used to derive that category. I'd love to know how they correlate the two data points.
The only problem is the sound quality is really bad. Like, really, really bad.
Every once in a while I'll hear a sample trigger properly. As soon as the demo launches, though, I hear a faint high-pitched tone which very gradually increases in volume until the game starts. And when I say high-pitched I'm talking dog whistle, give-me-a-headache high.
Not as far as I know. Brother might use different part numbers for different regions, but if the cartridge is labeled for your particular printer, it should work.
Brother was also shipping printers with full, high-capacity cartridges while HP was still shipping half-full cartridges.
I have a Brother MFC-6490CW inkjet printer. At the time I bought it, it was on sale and Amazon.com shipped it to my front door for $190, total.
I chose this particular printer largely because of a novelty: It is a multi-function machine that can both scan and print at sizes up to 11x17" (aka Tabloid or Ledger, the ISO equivalent being A3). You won't find any laser printers that can do that for less than a couple thousand dollars.
My printing needs are best described as "light." I realized that 90 percent of what I print out I print for my own use. I carry it around for however long I need it, probably a few days, and then it ends up in the recycle bin. I never print photos on photo paper, because as many people have pointed out, that's a waste of ink (and hence money). I do often print things with photographs in them, though (Web pages, etc.) so I like those printouts to be in color. I also like my text to be in color -- it makes it easier to see things like hyperlinks, highlights, annotations, etc. But I really don't care if any of it is "presentation quality," because I'm likely to be the only one who sees it.
The printer came with a set of high-capacity ink cartridges. That set lasted me, I would guess, about a year and a half. Since then I've bought off-brand, generic cartridges, and I've been mostly happy with them. The genuine Brother black ink is more water-resistant than the generic ink, but for my purposes, it mostly serves.
I don't remember what I paid for them, but checking Amazon right now, I can order a set of four high-capacity black cartridges, plus two sets of all three colors, for $10.48. They get cheaper if you buy them in bulk.
So all in all, I'd say I don't feel ripped off. I get to scan big things from time to time and print them out on big paper in color from time to time, and the rest of the time I have an adequate ink jet office machine that costs me less per year than I'd usually spend on lunch.
How can people not realize that every new technology will go through a phase where everyone implements their own idea before the industry settles on a few good ideas?
So when TFA says, "We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers," you see that as what? Whining? A bad thing?
Jakob Nielsen is one of the leading figures in human-computer interaction. His whole point is that companies and developers don't need to make it all up on the fly, because there have been decades of research conducted already into how people interact with machines and devices. There are plenty of experts, not just Nielsen, who can offer their expertise. The problem is that so far it seems like it's being ignored.
I've seen this attitude plenty of times. One job I had, they were using a contract IT guy for both desktop and server support. This guy claimed to be "on call," but if you did have a problem, it would have to wait until he swanned in at 3:30pm to take a look at it, and then not on Mondays (because he wasn't available). When they hired me to be a full-time IT guy, he didn't even seem phased. He seemed to feel he would be spending the next six months "training me" to do stuff he couldn't be bothered to do in the first place. Within about three weeks after I was on the job, the company stopped calling him altogether (and then it was basically just for things like passwords and settings that he hadn't documented anywhere). I felt for the guy -- I guess I basically put him out of some work. But his attitude just made him seem like a prick, and it was costing the company money in lost productivity.
I also tend to think you're doing yourself a disservice if you allow yourself to become truly indispensable in a specific role. Companies never sleep, but most folks like to take vacations every once in a while. And if they have any ambition at all, most folks eventually get tired of doing the same work for years. Good luck getting a promotion or a transfer to another role if you're literally indispensable at what you're doing now.
If I was the submitter, I might actually be thinking more along those lines: "Hey guys, it's come to my attention that I've become kind of indispensable, which could be a bad thing for the company. How about bringing someone on board as my direct report, who can take up some of the routine tasks and gives us a backup plan if I get sick or something?" If they agree, voila! He doesn't just get extra compensation, he gets made a manager, which is probably a step on the most practical route to getting him the equity stake he wants.
There are problems with this approach, of course. The first is that people who fancy themselves indispensable don't tend to be the type who can delegate responsibility; they'll complain, but they're also the kind of people who guard their responsibilities the most jealously.
The second problem is that in my experience, most companies don't pay managers as contractors. This should be obvious: You don't build departments around people who have no stake in the company, and who might walk away at any time. The submitter points out that he prefers to work under a contractor arrangement. He's basically already told the company that he doesn't want a management stake and prefers to work outside a normal employer/employee arrangement, so I doubt his asking for an enhanced role in the operations of the company would be met with any more favor than his request for a financial stake in the company. As plenty of others have already suggested, it sounds like he's asking for hand-outs. What is he putting on offer that would convince the company to give him anything outside his current arrangement?
likewise, you perceive pleasure at a taste which is essentially repulsive, because of pavlovian conditioning: you got drunk on the alcohol or amped on the caffeine, and that's the true source of your pleasure, not the taste. but, just like a dog salivating at a bell, a completely nonsensical reaction, you now perceive pleasure in nasty bitterness. equally nonsensical. you now confuse the secondary meaning, the taste, with the primary motivation, the drug. you associate pleasure with the pointless and essentially repulsive. it's about drug delivery, and always has been
Ah, but now you've argued yourself out of your own argument. If, as you say, it's all about drug delivery, then it should make to difference to anyone whether they drink cheap well gin from a warm glass -- and it does, to pretty much everyone.
As for coffee, clearly not every cup contains the same ingredients. Some are more acidic than others, at the very least. I know this because if I choose my coffee unwisely the result will be watery diarrhea the next day. Hence I tend to mostly make my coffee myself, and I stick to a type I know won't do that to me.
You claim that it doesn't matter that all coffees don't contain the same stuff, and that nobody really likes any kind of coffee because "bitter = poisonous" to the human animal. How then to explain the appeal of dark leafy vegetables such as spinach or arugala, which taste bitter because they have a high concentration of nutritious compounds?
Also, lots of people add sugar to coffee, so they're not claiming to be attracted to bitter coffee. (In fact, this thread started because someone said Starbuck's coffee tastes excessively burnt, and I agree.) When you add sugar to coffee, it doesn't just mask the bitterness; the flavors combine to create something new and quite pleasant. If nobody drinks coffee for any reason but drug delivery, explain the popularity of Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, or why you won't find a gelato stand without a coffee flavor.
Slashdot Mirror
Why is memory usage increasing so much in recent years? Firefox is currently consuming 450MB on my machine with only a few tabs open.
I just checked and ... you're right. Same here (Windows 7 x64). I have eight tabs open, memory usage is 450MB and counting. And I can just sit here and watch Firefox's memory usage slowly go up... and up... and up... while I do nothing. What's more, some people I know have a habit of leaving the browser running for days with hundreds of tabs. Not me. I'm so old fashioned that not only do I put my computer to sleep when I walk away from it, but I actually close all my running apps before I do so. So Firefox is never running on my machine for more than, say, 18 hours, maximum.
Parenthetically, why do "blockbuster" movie scripts suck so often?
Because of the amount of money involved in producing them. The first draft of the script is probably a potentially very interesting movie. But every financial stakeholder comes to the table with its own requirements and its own ideas of how to maximize profit from the investment. The script follows from there. The result is usually a mishmash that takes no risks, demonstrates no creativity, and swiftly degenerates into recycled, unintelligible pablum.
Right, so it will take 10 black hats a work week to crack one password. Given the ratio of black hats to usernames, I wouldn't worry too much unless you are person of relative interest.
Wait, aren't we looking at this wrong? Yes, if the black hats only had one password to crack, it would take this long. But if they've gained access to the entire password hashfile, they have many passwords to crack, and they're just trying to get lucky. Each time they pull a hash from a rainbow table, they have the equivalent of [number of users] lottery tickets. Successfully cracking one password would give them access to the machine, and no matter what level of privilege that account has, gaining any kind of access is a huge step.
I guess what I'm saying is, from the perspective of one person who wants to protect their individual account, yeah, you might not worry too much. But if you're the guy in charge of protecting the server itself -- and by extension, the security of every account on that server -- then worrying seems justified.
In some ways it is like substituting words for letters, a seven word password is only more secure than a seven character password in the sense that there are more words in a person's vocabulary than they are letters in the alphabet.
That seems to trivialize it a bit. There are only 26 letters an English-speaker can choose from (52 if you count upper and lower case separately). Merriam-Websters Collegiate Dictionary -- which is not the unabridged one -- claims 225,000 definitions. It's true that not every word fits next to every other word if you're using grammatically-correct phrases, but cracking such a password using brute force would still be orders of magnitude more difficult. Even if you had a "dictionary" that included commonplace phrases, you could confound those attacks by mixing upper and lower case in the phrase (say, using title capitalization, or capitalizing every word, or using all caps) or applying punctuation.
I disagree. Like I said, it starts in the middle of nowhere, it ends in the middle of nowhere, and nothing really happens. It's basically a setup for RotJ, the plot of which is ... destroy the Death Star. Hm, heard that before somewhere.The flirtation between Han and Leia was cute, but that's all I got out of it ... cute. It's not what I'd call an actual romance. The rest is all action -- and mindless action, since, unlike the original Star Wars, the heroes don't even have a real objective. They're just thrown one obstacle after the other, and we watch them dodge. And they lose in the end. It really is hard for me to understand how people can esteem ESB so much higher than the original when it's really so much ... less.
the encounter between Luke and Vader was taught with tension and actually, for a Lucas film, had effective dialogue that gave us an entirely new window on Vader's personality, beyond being the one-dimensional evil Nazi-type villain that he was in the first film.
I guess I just didn't need that out of my villain in a totally one-dimensional action-adventure series. I'm not saying ESB is a bad movie -- it's not -- but it's hardly the best of the series. I saw the original in the theater seven times. I might have seen ESB 2-3 times, I don't really remember.
Many many years ago depicting a mere spaceship was a real challenge.
I assume you mean prior to the 1950s and Forbidden Planet? Or do you mean a "realistic" spaceship -- in which case, the better example would be 2001: A Space Odyssey, which came 9 years before Star Wars (which doesn't really depict spaceships in any real sense at all).
When I read your first sentence, I seriously thought you were making a joke about The A-Team.
The end result is we got somewhat uninteresting action for movies 4-6, because we showed movies 1-3 as movies 4-6. The real depth of actual story starts around episode 4, so that's where the original series started
Wow, dude, you really need to pull your head out of your genre for a while.
The reason science fiction books are always series with a minimum of three books is because that way they can sell you a minimum of three books.
If you'd broaden your horizons a little bit, however, you'd realize that most of the great literature of the world is stand-alone books. Likewise, most of the great movies ever made do not have any sequels or prequels -- The Godfather being one notable exception, which they fucked up when they tried to have lightning strike twice.
And FWIW, this thing about George Lucas "deciding to film episode 4 first" is a myth -- propagated by Lucas, but a myth nonetheless. He made a movie. When it was a success, he made more movies.
And let's be honest. Only eps 5 is actually a *good* movie. Eps 4 is only good because of the very strong characters and setting. The story is only so-so.
I will never understand people who say this.
Star Wars, the original movie (no, it wasn't called "Episode IV"), was pretty much perfect. Yeah, the story wasn't any great miracle -- pretty much a retelling of "Jack and the Beanstalk" -- but it did have strong characters, it did have good settings, and it was an action-packed and enjoyable movie.
The Empire Strikes Back is arguably better shot and better directed. But as a story, you would have no idea what's going on if you hadn't seen the first movie. Worse, it starts at some point mid-story, it ends at some point mid-story, and there isn't really any plot at all. Luke whines, Han Solo introduces us to Lando Calrissian (who betrays him), Leia bitches, and Darth Vader kills his own guys. The end. Yeah, it had some great action scenes -- but isn't tons of action with a weak story the reason we all hate the prequels? It's pretty telling when the most memorable character in the movie is a Muppet. And I remember distinctly as a kid, when Darth Vader told Luke he was his father, thinking, "That's bullshit, Vader's lying." When RotJ came out and they acted like it was the god's-honest truth, I was like, "Whaaaaaat? That's so lame."
The Star Wars series is mostly bad movies. The original Star Wars, on the other hand, remains a near-flawless miracle of filmmaking that will never be repeated.
Italo Vignoli of The Document Foundation mailed me the following statement this morning:
The Document Foundation
Statement about Oracle's move to donate OpenOffice.org assets to the Apache Foundation
The Internet, June 1st, 2011 - The Document Foundation constitutes a global team of hundreds of developers working together to improve the LibreOffice product for the benefit of all users. We are governed by an open, and meritocratic community headed by a diverse interim Steering Committee, and a vendor neutral Engineering Steering Committee overseeing development.
Today we welcome Oracle's donation of code that has previously been proprietary to the Apache Software Foundation. It is great to see key user features released in a form that can be included into LibreOffice.
The Document Foundation would welcome the reuniting of the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects into a single community of equals in the wake of the departure of Oracle. The step Oracle has taken today was no doubt taken in good faith, but does not appear to directly achieve this goal. The Apache community, which we respect enormously, has very different expectations and norms - licensing, membership and more - to the existing OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice projects. We regret the missed opportunity but are committed to working with all active community members to devise the best possible future for LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
On the bright side, one benefit of this arrangement is the potential for future-proof licensing. The Apache License is compatible with both the LGPLv3+ and MPL licenses, allowing TDF future flexibility to move the entire codebase, to MPLv2 or future LGPL license versions. The Document Foundation believes that commercially-friendly, copy-left licensing provides the best path to constructive participation in, and growth of the project.
Thus, the event is neutral for The Document Foundation, which - as always - remains open to every company, individual or foundation that wishes to participate in co-development. There has never been a better time to get involved and advance the state of the art in free software office suites.
TDF is therefore willing to start talking with Apache Software Foundation, following the email from ASF President Jim Jagielski, who is anticipating frequent contacts between the Apache Software Foundation and The Document Foundation over the next few months. We all want to offer corporate and individual users worldwide the best free office suite for enterprise and personal productivity.
Finally, TDF continue executing on a time-based release plan for LibreOffice 3.4.0, due out this week, while continuing work on the bug fix release train, with 3.4.1 due in a months time, as well as ongoing feature development for the 3.5 release.
*** About The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation has the mission of facilitating the evolution of the OOo Community into an open, meritocratic and democratic organization. An independent Foundation is a better reflection of the values of our contributors, users and supporters, and will enable a more inclusive, effective, efficient and transparent community. TDF will protect past investments by building on the achievements of the first decade, will encourage wide participation within the community, and will co-ordinate activity across the community.
[Contact information deleted for mercy's sake]
You're seriously claiming that the 'lay public' didn't realise that the 'coffin nails' they were smoking might be bad for their health until scientists told them they were?
No, I'm claiming that when people who had been told smoking was bad for them saw stories that had scientists claiming it really wasn't, many of them said, "Oh, that's a relief, then." Similarly, is there anybody on the planet who doesn't know what Coca-Cola is? Not really... and yet Coca-Cola keeps advertising.
From TFA:
'Think about the number of studies that had to be published for people to realize smoking is bad for you,' says Ronald J. Iannotti, a psychologist at the National Institutes of Health. 'There are some subjects where it seems you can never publish enough.'
This seems like a bad example, because it's not really "duh science" when you have an entire industry using its combined resources to silence your research. The tobacco industry spent decades flooding the journals with studies aimed at proving that smoking was harmless, or even beneficial. What's more, the tobacco industry was uniquely situated to get those results repeated in the press, while the studies that repeated the finding that smoking was harmful ended up sounding like "duh science" and went unreported. (If smoking is still bad for you, it's not news.)
In many cases, the real problem is not the science, or the journals, but how to communicate the science to the lay public, who can only really comprehend what's actually told to them. If you can't guarantee that anybody will ever hear about your findings, the only way might be to repeat them over and over, as many times as you can -- because that's what industry will do.
That data just indicates the number of families that reported "a desire to give religious or moral instruction" as a factor. I don't think that establishes the family as a "highly religious family." It could just mean the parent wants to be able to instruct the child about sex, proper behavior, etc., because they think this kind of education is lacking in the school.
But the same families were asked what the most important factor in choosing home schooling was, and there only ~30 percent responded that religion was the most important reason. I think it would be safe to deem these "highly religious families," though it's still a little speculative.
I got 70% from this paper [ncspe.org], which cites the 2003 NHES.
Well that's weird, because the 2003 NHES results are right here, and they give the figure as 30 percent, down from 33 percent in the earlier survey (the figure being the number of parents who reported religious instruction as being the most important reason for home schooling). In fact, the report you cite repeats the same data; it then goes on to claim that 70 percent of home schooled children come from "very religious families," but it doesn't explain the methodology used to derive that category. I'd love to know how they correlate the two data points.
The only problem is the sound quality is really bad. Like, really, really bad.
Every once in a while I'll hear a sample trigger properly. As soon as the demo launches, though, I hear a faint high-pitched tone which very gradually increases in volume until the game starts. And when I say high-pitched I'm talking dog whistle, give-me-a-headache high.
The actual figure is 33 percent, according to the 2001 U.S. census, or 42 percent if you count the families that cited "morality" as their reason.
Are the cartridges region coded?
Not as far as I know. Brother might use different part numbers for different regions, but if the cartridge is labeled for your particular printer, it should work.
Brother was also shipping printers with full, high-capacity cartridges while HP was still shipping half-full cartridges.
I have a Brother MFC-6490CW inkjet printer. At the time I bought it, it was on sale and Amazon.com shipped it to my front door for $190, total.
I chose this particular printer largely because of a novelty: It is a multi-function machine that can both scan and print at sizes up to 11x17" (aka Tabloid or Ledger, the ISO equivalent being A3). You won't find any laser printers that can do that for less than a couple thousand dollars.
My printing needs are best described as "light." I realized that 90 percent of what I print out I print for my own use. I carry it around for however long I need it, probably a few days, and then it ends up in the recycle bin. I never print photos on photo paper, because as many people have pointed out, that's a waste of ink (and hence money). I do often print things with photographs in them, though (Web pages, etc.) so I like those printouts to be in color. I also like my text to be in color -- it makes it easier to see things like hyperlinks, highlights, annotations, etc. But I really don't care if any of it is "presentation quality," because I'm likely to be the only one who sees it.
The printer came with a set of high-capacity ink cartridges. That set lasted me, I would guess, about a year and a half. Since then I've bought off-brand, generic cartridges, and I've been mostly happy with them. The genuine Brother black ink is more water-resistant than the generic ink, but for my purposes, it mostly serves.
I don't remember what I paid for them, but checking Amazon right now, I can order a set of four high-capacity black cartridges, plus two sets of all three colors, for $10.48. They get cheaper if you buy them in bulk.
So all in all, I'd say I don't feel ripped off. I get to scan big things from time to time and print them out on big paper in color from time to time, and the rest of the time I have an adequate ink jet office machine that costs me less per year than I'd usually spend on lunch.
How can people not realize that every new technology will go through a phase where everyone implements their own idea before the industry settles on a few good ideas?
So when TFA says, "We urgently need to return to our basics, developing usability guidelines for these systems that are based upon solid principles of interaction design, not on the whims of the company human interface guidelines and arbitrary ideas of developers," you see that as what? Whining? A bad thing?
Jakob Nielsen is one of the leading figures in human-computer interaction. His whole point is that companies and developers don't need to make it all up on the fly, because there have been decades of research conducted already into how people interact with machines and devices. There are plenty of experts, not just Nielsen, who can offer their expertise. The problem is that so far it seems like it's being ignored.
I've seen this attitude plenty of times. One job I had, they were using a contract IT guy for both desktop and server support. This guy claimed to be "on call," but if you did have a problem, it would have to wait until he swanned in at 3:30pm to take a look at it, and then not on Mondays (because he wasn't available). When they hired me to be a full-time IT guy, he didn't even seem phased. He seemed to feel he would be spending the next six months "training me" to do stuff he couldn't be bothered to do in the first place. Within about three weeks after I was on the job, the company stopped calling him altogether (and then it was basically just for things like passwords and settings that he hadn't documented anywhere). I felt for the guy -- I guess I basically put him out of some work. But his attitude just made him seem like a prick, and it was costing the company money in lost productivity.
I also tend to think you're doing yourself a disservice if you allow yourself to become truly indispensable in a specific role. Companies never sleep, but most folks like to take vacations every once in a while. And if they have any ambition at all, most folks eventually get tired of doing the same work for years. Good luck getting a promotion or a transfer to another role if you're literally indispensable at what you're doing now.
If I was the submitter, I might actually be thinking more along those lines: "Hey guys, it's come to my attention that I've become kind of indispensable, which could be a bad thing for the company. How about bringing someone on board as my direct report, who can take up some of the routine tasks and gives us a backup plan if I get sick or something?" If they agree, voila! He doesn't just get extra compensation, he gets made a manager, which is probably a step on the most practical route to getting him the equity stake he wants.
There are problems with this approach, of course. The first is that people who fancy themselves indispensable don't tend to be the type who can delegate responsibility; they'll complain, but they're also the kind of people who guard their responsibilities the most jealously.
The second problem is that in my experience, most companies don't pay managers as contractors. This should be obvious: You don't build departments around people who have no stake in the company, and who might walk away at any time. The submitter points out that he prefers to work under a contractor arrangement. He's basically already told the company that he doesn't want a management stake and prefers to work outside a normal employer/employee arrangement, so I doubt his asking for an enhanced role in the operations of the company would be met with any more favor than his request for a financial stake in the company. As plenty of others have already suggested, it sounds like he's asking for hand-outs. What is he putting on offer that would convince the company to give him anything outside his current arrangement?
Actually I think the word you both are looking for is "straw man."
likewise, you perceive pleasure at a taste which is essentially repulsive, because of pavlovian conditioning: you got drunk on the alcohol or amped on the caffeine, and that's the true source of your pleasure, not the taste. but, just like a dog salivating at a bell, a completely nonsensical reaction, you now perceive pleasure in nasty bitterness. equally nonsensical. you now confuse the secondary meaning, the taste, with the primary motivation, the drug. you associate pleasure with the pointless and essentially repulsive. it's about drug delivery, and always has been
Ah, but now you've argued yourself out of your own argument. If, as you say, it's all about drug delivery, then it should make to difference to anyone whether they drink cheap well gin from a warm glass -- and it does, to pretty much everyone.
As for coffee, clearly not every cup contains the same ingredients. Some are more acidic than others, at the very least. I know this because if I choose my coffee unwisely the result will be watery diarrhea the next day. Hence I tend to mostly make my coffee myself, and I stick to a type I know won't do that to me.
You claim that it doesn't matter that all coffees don't contain the same stuff, and that nobody really likes any kind of coffee because "bitter = poisonous" to the human animal. How then to explain the appeal of dark leafy vegetables such as spinach or arugala, which taste bitter because they have a high concentration of nutritious compounds?
Also, lots of people add sugar to coffee, so they're not claiming to be attracted to bitter coffee. (In fact, this thread started because someone said Starbuck's coffee tastes excessively burnt, and I agree.) When you add sugar to coffee, it doesn't just mask the bitterness; the flavors combine to create something new and quite pleasant. If nobody drinks coffee for any reason but drug delivery, explain the popularity of Haagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, or why you won't find a gelato stand without a coffee flavor.
That's all true, but the Office Web Apps fall short, too, for most of the same reasons.