Or are you advocating lousy design? The Web does not, and the Web should not look the same to everyone. If you want complex graphical presentation, go with PDF: it's much more consistent and it prints better, too. (And usually has better design/production tools!) The problem, of course, is that the boss wants something that's pretty, but the customers want something that works.
So I type 'slashdot' into my browser. Which slashdot do I mean? I've got one machine, slashdot, on my local network. I've got another machine, slashdot.trolls, in the local network across the router. I've got a third machine, slashdot.trolls.killfile, on the other side of the country. I've got a fourth machine, slashdot.trolls.webby, which is actually a front-end to an SP2, and not a single machine at all. Which slashdot am I looking at again? And when evil twin over at dropco mirrors my networks, how do I know which one I'm looking at?
Right. There _must_ be a root to the domain name tree somewhere; otherwise every computer would have to a unique name. Obviously out of the question. So why the TLDs we have now? Because ICANN stinks, and people knew that a registrar might go stinky; so the (US) military and (US) the government got their own domains, and all the soveriegn nations got their own nation-domain, too. Why are the TLDs limited? Otherwise, I can't tell, when you type slashdot.trolls, if you want the slashdot in the TLD trolls, or (one of) the slashdot.trolls on my local network.
I imagine that the publisher has its own ideas about how the printed books should be formatted, but WYSIWYG seems to the dominant paradigm in word processing today. I remember reading (a while back) about (geez, was it wordstar?) some custom macros you had so you could keep comments in-line with the text, but skip over or locate them easily. Do you do something similar now? Do you do some sort of markup for things like chapter-opening quotes, or whatever? (I suppose that means: can you mark a block as some StarOffice style and the publisher will read that and Do The Right Thing w.r.t. to its formatting in the book?)
Do you have a really nice monitor, or do you get hardcopies to do your revisions?
Reviewer: "However, the release notes say you should not use your Netscape profiles, because you could lose your search settings or become the victim of an ever-growing bookmark file that might freeze your system. I've been using Mozilla 1.0 since the release announcement, with my Netscape profile, and haven't experienced these problems. Yet."
Release notes: "Do not share a profile between Netscape and Mozilla builds."
go to college. You're trying to convince people that you're so smart and so good you don't need the same degree that every other white-collar worker does and you can't spell? Come on.
Aside from this, making a speech interface anyone wants to use isn't about the speech; it's about the natural-language comprehension that most people (naively?) associate with speech recognition; e.g., the Enterprise's computer. Which, you note, the crew interact with on a technical level visually.
As for the specific example of italicizing text, natural language understanding should give rise to accurate _dictation_ systems, where the computer will insert the appropriate puncuation and emphases as you speak. If you're typing, instead, CTRL+I is your friend.:)
My understanding was not mathematical models, per se, but bouncing lasers off of something relatively nearby to measure and correct for the atmospheric distortion. (So-called "adaptive optics".) It's not quite as good as getting beyond the atmosphere entirely, but since the mirrors can be much larger...
The reason isn't because it can't be done, but because it won't make money. The Connection Machine is a perfect example: a thousand-way multiprocessor but wasn't ever used outside of academia. Why? Nobody* could program it, and eventually the academics gave up. Generally, going beyond four processors only continues to speed up your work if you've got more than one time-intensive process. (Hence, IBM's sudden interest in selling virtual Linux servers; they need some reason for people to buy the more expensive processors for their mainframes!)
It's not a hardware problem; it's a software problem. Remember that Intel delayed the itanium not because they couldn't produce silicon that was 6-way (IIRC) superscalar, but because their compiler couldn't find ways to take advantage of that power.
-_Quinn
* OK, so IBM is selling the ASCI guys thousand-node clusters for nuclear simulations, but they've been working on their codes for literally decades.
cvs co -r 2.5.2
# patch mjc-1
cvs tag -b 2.5.2-mjc
cvs tag mjc-1
cvs commit
# elsewhere/when
cvs co -r 2.5.2-mjc
# patch mjc-2
cvs tag mjc-2
cvs commit
cvs co -r 2.4.13
#patch ac1
cvs tag -b 2.4.13-ac
cvs tag ac-1
cvs commit
# elsewhere/when
cvs co -r 2.4.13-ac
# patch 2.4.13-ac2
cvs tag ac-2
cvs commit
# assuming that Rik's VM patches are independent
cvs co 2.5.2
cvs co rvr-VM
# patch rvr-VM
# or, maintain Rik's VM patches as their own
# files:
# cvs co rvr-VM
# cvs update # forces merge
cvs tag -b 2.5.2-rvr-VM
cvs tag rvr-VM-1
cvs commit
# elsewhere
cvs co 2.5.2-rvr-VM
Why wouldn't something like this work? You could even wrap everything up in a nice GUI if you wanted to.:)
-_Quinn
Re:KWord can be a good rival to Framemaker /Publis
on
KOffice 1.1.1 Ships
·
· Score: 1
Hey, stupid question time: is there a 'I'm a doofus' LyX-equivalent for making style files? Something that would, e.g., work like FrameMaker except without any content tools, so one talented designer could take care of formatting automagically?
You will notice, however, that no one has ever written a script to connect khtml to, say, wget. Is this a limitation of scripting? Is it because there's no graphical way (a la the java beanbox) to tie components together? Without being a coder? While it's true that text processing is an ugly hack to handle formatted output, that doesn't mean that the pipe and command-line idea is the wrong one; something like XML-formatted output would help the problem nicely.
I think the posted question more-or-less assumes the component model, because otherwise it doesn't make any sense; the question is, how do we make stitching components together as common as stitching command-line programs together?
And NLP == Strong AI, as you describe it. Doing any/specific/ example falls just barely within the realm of the possible; for a specific domain, just beyond (say, a decade or so); but for any example, any domain, what you describe isn't an interface so much as an enslaved sentience.
I know you're going to say "but I only mean within the specific domain of the computer;" but what isn't within the domain of the computer these days? Finally, as I've mentioned earlier -- and others here -- speech doesn't handle many kinds of data, or a lot of a single kind, very well at all. The key to better interfaces is to make them more specific, not less -- ubiquity. If the whiteboard can duplicate itself to another whiteboard, and vice-versa, you hardly need to dick around with a window manager to do remote collaboration. If you've got smart paper, you don't need to worry about how to send an e-mail; and so on.
I can guess that MFC means 'backported', but I don't understand the acronym. SMPng is probably 'SMP Next Generation', but I can't figure out what KSE is... Kernel Security Enchancements? Any BSDer's out there to help a poor linux-using slob?:)
Many people/do/ have different learning styles, but the purpose of a presentation is almost never teaching. That aside, if you use slides, your audience must choose to pay attention to you or to your slides; PowerPoint encourages the latter to the detriment of any presentation. Finally, if your slides can carry the presentation, why are you bothering with doing a presentation?
I'll also note that I have/never/ seen a presentation use slides to its overall benefit, though the best of them had good reasons for having slides.
It's not/bundled/ software, it's software/that works well together/. Traditionally, the only route to integration was a single (or a few very tightly coupled) binaries. Now there's COM, which MS wrote basically because it was painful to make the office apps work together without it. However, the end-user can't choose what parts of office not to install (changing, with the `don't install until used option'), but certainly don't have the ability to to replace a crappy component that MS supplies with a better one from elsewhere.
The problem is more general than office software, though; the tendency in interfaces with GUIs has been to add complexity to the application and make it nearly impossible to use one part of it over another. KDE and GNOME's object models are working to address this; in fact, KOffice is (or shortly will be) `a skinned collection of KParts'. However, it's still hard -- and requires special tools -- to stitch these components together. There's no GUI equivalent to the command-line pipe/redirect paradigm, except for (rarely) in RAD tools for a specific toolkit/OE (e.g. QtBuilder(?), KDevelop); but these don't really function on the user level.
The most important part is that Linux has succeeded, until now, in replacing UNIX systems, because the cost of migration, especially in skills and time, is low (Linux is-a UNIX, runs basically all your standard UNIX tools, runs on commodity on NT-obsolete boxes, etc). The same is NOT true for migrating desktop boxes; I would argue a substantially lower TCO, but to make people/want/ to switch, you have to do _better_ than MS, not just match it/them (as worked for UNIX, except in price:))
Slashdot Mirror
Or are you advocating lousy design? The Web does not, and the Web should not look the same to everyone. If you want complex graphical presentation, go with PDF: it's much more consistent and it prints better, too. (And usually has better design/production tools!) The problem, of course, is that the boss wants something that's pretty, but the customers want something that works.
- _Quinn
So I type 'slashdot' into my browser. Which slashdot do I mean? I've got one machine, slashdot, on my local network. I've got another machine, slashdot.trolls, in the local network across the router. I've got a third machine, slashdot.trolls.killfile, on the other side of the country. I've got a fourth machine, slashdot.trolls.webby, which is actually a front-end to an SP2, and not a single machine at all. Which slashdot am I looking at again? And when evil twin over at dropco mirrors my networks, how do I know which one I'm looking at?
Right. There _must_ be a root to the domain name tree somewhere; otherwise every computer would have to a unique name. Obviously out of the question. So why the TLDs we have now? Because ICANN stinks, and people knew that a registrar might go stinky; so the (US) military and (US) the government got their own domains, and all the soveriegn nations got their own nation-domain, too. Why are the TLDs limited? Otherwise, I can't tell, when you type slashdot.trolls, if you want the slashdot in the TLD trolls, or (one of) the slashdot.trolls on my local network.
- _Quinn
I imagine that the publisher has its own ideas about how the printed books should be formatted, but WYSIWYG seems to the dominant paradigm in word processing today. I remember reading (a while back) about (geez, was it wordstar?) some custom macros you had so you could keep comments in-line with the text, but skip over or locate them easily. Do you do something similar now? Do you do some sort of markup for things like chapter-opening quotes, or whatever? (I suppose that means: can you mark a block as some StarOffice style and the publisher will read that and Do The Right Thing w.r.t. to its formatting in the book?)
Do you have a really nice monitor, or do you get hardcopies to do your revisions?
-_Quinn
Not _all_ European ideas are bad ones. :)
-_Quinn
Reviewer: "However, the release notes say you should not use your Netscape profiles, because you could lose your search settings or become the victim of an ever-growing bookmark file that might freeze your system. I've been using Mozilla 1.0 since the release announcement, with my Netscape profile, and haven't experienced these problems. Yet."
Release notes: "Do not share a profile between Netscape and Mozilla builds."
e.g., not in the same directly, not import, yes?
-_Quinn
go to college. You're trying to convince people that you're so smart and so good you don't need the same degree that every other white-collar worker does and you can't spell? Come on.
-_Quinn
(Mod the parent up.)
:)
Aside from this, making a speech interface anyone wants to use isn't about the speech; it's about the natural-language comprehension that most people (naively?) associate with speech recognition; e.g., the Enterprise's computer. Which, you note, the crew interact with on a technical level visually.
As for the specific example of italicizing text, natural language understanding should give rise to accurate _dictation_ systems, where the computer will insert the appropriate puncuation and emphases as you speak. If you're typing, instead, CTRL+I is your friend.
-_Quinn
The "Flight Engineer" series can't be any worse -- and thanks to SM Stirling, I'd say it's a lot better -- than Shatner's "Tek" series. Come on! :-)
-_Quinn
My understanding was not mathematical models, per se, but bouncing lasers off of something relatively nearby to measure and correct for the atmospheric distortion. (So-called "adaptive optics".) It's not quite as good as getting beyond the atmosphere entirely, but since the mirrors can be much larger...
-_Quinn
Good thing I only listen to ogg vorbis on my portable, huh?
-_Quinn
Huh? Isn't that the whole /point/?
-_Quinn
For the simplest reason of all: Apple's market cap is $8.5 billion. Microsoft has about $30 billion in _cash_. Game over.
-_Quinn
The reason isn't because it can't be done, but because it won't make money. The Connection Machine is a perfect example: a thousand-way multiprocessor but wasn't ever used outside of academia. Why? Nobody* could program it, and eventually the academics gave up. Generally, going beyond four processors only continues to speed up your work if you've got more than one time-intensive process. (Hence, IBM's sudden interest in selling virtual Linux servers; they need some reason for people to buy the more expensive processors for their mainframes!)
It's not a hardware problem; it's a software problem. Remember that Intel delayed the itanium not because they couldn't produce silicon that was 6-way (IIRC) superscalar, but because their compiler couldn't find ways to take advantage of that power.
-_Quinn
* OK, so IBM is selling the ASCI guys thousand-node clusters for nuclear simulations, but they've been working on their codes for literally decades.
cvs co -r 2.5.2
:)
# patch mjc-1
cvs tag -b 2.5.2-mjc
cvs tag mjc-1
cvs commit
# elsewhere/when
cvs co -r 2.5.2-mjc
# patch mjc-2
cvs tag mjc-2
cvs commit
cvs co -r 2.4.13
#patch ac1
cvs tag -b 2.4.13-ac
cvs tag ac-1
cvs commit
# elsewhere/when
cvs co -r 2.4.13-ac
# patch 2.4.13-ac2
cvs tag ac-2
cvs commit
# assuming that Rik's VM patches are independent
cvs co 2.5.2
cvs co rvr-VM
# patch rvr-VM
# or, maintain Rik's VM patches as their own
# files:
# cvs co rvr-VM
# cvs update # forces merge
cvs tag -b 2.5.2-rvr-VM
cvs tag rvr-VM-1
cvs commit
# elsewhere
cvs co 2.5.2-rvr-VM
Why wouldn't something like this work? You could even wrap everything up in a nice GUI if you wanted to.
-_Quinn
Hey, stupid question time: is there a 'I'm a doofus' LyX-equivalent for making style files? Something that would, e.g., work like FrameMaker except without any content tools, so one talented designer could take care of formatting automagically?
-_Quinn
Stupid question time: how long will it be before I can plug this baby into my PS2? :)
-_Quinn
Er... use the USB ports for a mouse and keyboard. Wire the PS2s together with the iLink/FireWire port.
-_Quinn
One that I stole from http://www.geocities.com/ResearchTriangle/Forum/67 51/,
the LinuXML site. Go look there for some ideas. And good luck!
-_Quinn
You will notice, however, that no one has ever written a script to connect khtml to, say, wget. Is this a limitation of scripting? Is it because there's no graphical way (a la the java beanbox) to tie components together? Without being a coder? While it's true that text processing is an ugly hack to handle formatted output, that doesn't mean that the pipe and command-line idea is the wrong one; something like XML-formatted output would help the problem nicely.
I think the posted question more-or-less assumes the component model, because otherwise it doesn't make any sense; the question is, how do we make stitching components together as common as stitching command-line programs together?
-_Quinn
And NLP == Strong AI, as you describe it. Doing any /specific/ example falls just barely within the realm of the possible; for a specific domain, just beyond (say, a decade or so); but for any example, any domain, what you describe isn't an interface so much as an enslaved sentience.
I know you're going to say "but I only mean within the specific domain of the computer;" but what isn't within the domain of the computer these days? Finally, as I've mentioned earlier -- and others here -- speech doesn't handle many kinds of data, or a lot of a single kind, very well at all. The key to better interfaces is to make them more specific, not less -- ubiquity. If the whiteboard can duplicate itself to another whiteboard, and vice-versa, you hardly need to dick around with a window manager to do remote collaboration. If you've got smart paper, you don't need to worry about how to send an e-mail; and so on.
-_Quinn
Ok, I'm a dumbshit, the interviewer asked about KSE & SMPng. Sorry. :( Still wondering about MFC, though.
-_Quinn
I can guess that MFC means 'backported', but I don't understand the acronym. SMPng is probably 'SMP Next Generation', but I can't figure out what KSE is... Kernel Security Enchancements? Any BSDer's out there to help a poor linux-using slob? :)
-_Quinn
Many people /do/ have different learning styles, but the purpose of a presentation is almost never teaching. That aside, if you use slides, your audience must choose to pay attention to you or to your slides; PowerPoint encourages the latter to the detriment of any presentation. Finally, if your slides can carry the presentation, why are you bothering with doing a presentation?
/never/ seen a presentation use slides to its overall benefit, though the best of them had good reasons for having slides.
I'll also note that I have
-_Quinn
Well, _of course_ they stole the idea from _someone_. :) But I think they stole it to make Office apps integrate well.
-_Quinn
It's not /bundled/ software, it's software /that works well together/. Traditionally, the only route to integration was a single (or a few very tightly coupled) binaries. Now there's COM, which MS wrote basically because it was painful to make the office apps work together without it. However, the end-user can't choose what parts of office not to install (changing, with the `don't install until used option'), but certainly don't have the ability to to replace a crappy component that MS supplies with a better one from elsewhere.
/want/ to switch, you have to do _better_ than MS, not just match it/them (as worked for UNIX, except in price :))
The problem is more general than office software, though; the tendency in interfaces with GUIs has been to add complexity to the application and make it nearly impossible to use one part of it over another. KDE and GNOME's object models are working to address this; in fact, KOffice is (or shortly will be) `a skinned collection of KParts'. However, it's still hard -- and requires special tools -- to stitch these components together. There's no GUI equivalent to the command-line pipe/redirect paradigm, except for (rarely) in RAD tools for a specific toolkit/OE (e.g. QtBuilder(?), KDevelop); but these don't really function on the user level.
The most important part is that Linux has succeeded, until now, in replacing UNIX systems, because the cost of migration, especially in skills and time, is low (Linux is-a UNIX, runs basically all your standard UNIX tools, runs on commodity on NT-obsolete boxes, etc). The same is NOT true for migrating desktop boxes; I would argue a substantially lower TCO, but to make people
-_Quinn