Ah yes, Tab setting the left indent. I remember now; I disabled that so long ago (I use a saved Normal.dot) that I had completely forgotten about it, but you're right, it is one hell of a pain.
Your point about text selection is well-taken, don't worry. I have, on many occasions, wished for something like what you describe when editing chapters etc, and Word is sadly lacking in this area. It seems that there a huge number of features in Word that no one ever uses, but ones that would really come in handy are lacking. Certainly the average person writing letters to his grandma wouldn't take advantage of the kind of features you and I would like, but hey, you and I would, and I'm willing to bet there're a large number of others out there who would too.
Pity Microsoft isn't in the habit of learning from other people, instead of stealing from them. Amipro and Describe sound neet.
I wonder if anyone could give me a couple of pointers, if they even notice this post among the zillion others. I run a dialup server (um, yeah) that I allow my friends access to, and to be honest, I'm getting very sick of Nimda/Code Red attacks, which are literally sucking my bandwidth dry (one particular fellow at 203.167.112.100 is really getting on my nerves); most of these people are on the Asia-Pacific IP range (as am I, since I am in New Zealand) however there seems to be no one I can contact, and I have serious doubts as to whether anyone would do anything about it anyway. To be honest, I have gotten beyond the stage of caring about whether it's right or wrong, and would simply like to stop having my (tiny) bandwidth sucked by stupid/ignorant people.
Since I am running Win2k with Apache 1.3.20 for Win32, and am relatively new to webhosting, I have little idea of how to do anything about the problem. Can the same Apache scripts that are run on Unix be run on Windows? If so, could someone point me to a website with a script that will at least pop up a message to the user of the machine, if not simply shut them down? Help would be much appreciated.
Ianamss (I am not a Microsoft supporter), but it almost sounds like you think easy administration of a server is a bad thing. I'm sure that can't be what you meant...
This is the most ridiculous, blindly patriotic counter-argument that I have heard in a long time. I don't need to reiterate the points in the many posts above, which are largely independent of this particular "America is the largest producer of X in the world" thread. But I can end this silly argument right here. The US, which takes up less than a third the entire land mass of America, is the most powerful country in the world! Considering the resources it has available, and its GDP, I think its humanitarian efforts are shameful. What happened to those billions of dollars of surplus the country seemed to have at the end of the last (or second-last, iirc) fiscal year? It sure wasn't going anywhere near countries that could be transformed from bottom of the pit third-world to top of the pile first-world with that kind of budget (and no I'm not so naive as to think that giving a country a huge heap of money will solve their problems overnight, but it's hardly going to hurt to give them some aid, absolve them of some debts, since it's not like you need to suck any more of their resources anyway...)
Hmm, fair enough; it seems I was somewhat single-minded in my approach to the argument. I was considering my own computer (Athlon 900, 512 MB...doesn't tend to page a lot on menus...) and my own somewhat biased upbringing on Word (first for Mac, then 95, 97, 2000 and now XP so hell, I should have put a disclaimer methinks). However, there were a couple of things in your replies that I either felt needed at least the insertion of another viewpoint, or was confused about.
Tab is bound to something that most people find absolutely irritating.
I'm not sure what you meant here. Tab isn't bound to anything; it's the tab key, which tabulates a document. It isn't used a lot, but it's sure useful (although I'd be the first to volunteer to design a better tab system for Word if I could). I can certainly understand dumb/ignorant (careful to distinguish, not wanting to sound bigotted against non-computer literate types like my dad, who is hardly dumb) people messing stuff up with it though. Maybe I misunderstood what you meant.
Autofix/correct...yes, a double-edged sword if ever there was one. I personally have become immensely lazy with the advent of this feature, because I find that being able to add autocorrections like "Tn" being corrected to "Tennyson" is very handy indeed. On the other hand, as you say, there are a number of instances where it becomes one hell of a pain, and backspace/ctrl-z is your bestest buddy. To be honest, I find autocorrect a lot more useful than a nuisance; there are a large number of typos that you make when you're doing 120 wpm, and if you can automatically cover them, you don't need to worry about breaking rhythm to fix the problem. As for stopping to address red-underlined words, well...I just ignore them and wait till I'm done, so I guess inline spellchecking becomes kinda pointless; I just like to know what words and phrases are considered bad I guess. I tend to spellcheck every few pages, since I discovered a while back that trying to run a spellcheck on a 130,000 word manuscript (ie, killed Windows, reinstalled, reinstalled Word, didn't save custom.dic) takes...well...erm...
Thanks for the hints about the editing function keys like ctrl-c; I never had a problem remembering them, but I'll pass them on to my mum:)
What you say about being able to right-click a red-underlined word is true, however once again, this is moving from the keyboard to the mouse. I also don't find that F7 is the most remarkably easy key to accidentally hit (actually I wish the function keys didn't have a plastic separater from the number keys, because I'd like to be able to hit them without stretching) but I guess it's more a matter of preference than any seriously debatable topic. I've always been grateful for F7, shift-F7 and F12 (as well as F3, F5 and F8 in Opera), because I am a keyboard freak, and consider the mouse an object of scorn until I load Quake;)
Yeah, there're a lot of ways to get around that dir tree problem. I'm very fond of subdirs myself, since I am one of those must-categorise-everything-or-die types, but as you say. It all comes down to a shitty interface.
Btw...how long do you think this conversation could go on for before we're killed due to archiving? I seem to recall from some misty recess in my wee brain that articles are archived after a week, but it may have been two...it would probably be pretty sad if we were still debating by then though...
Yeah, the alt- system can be useful, agreed, and I do occasionally use them; my only gripe is that it requires practise to memorise the combinations (my old boss, a sysadmin for my city council, was the master of alt commands), whereas keyboard shortcuts are a bit easier, as you say.
Yeah, I also learned Win-E from that boss:) Alternatively, you can go into Folder Options and edit the preferences for File/Folder so that "Explore" is set as default, instead of "Open" -- that way, double-clicking defaults to a directory tree.
You hit the nail on the head with file-extensions. That example beats the hell out of my off-the-cuff offerings any day. I can understand it for Win9x, because your average luser is gonna have a cow when he renames a file and it kicks the bucket because he didn't add an extension, but for WinNT/2k, it's an appallingly ill-conceived idea.
Like, who would put a spell checker on a function key (F7), if spell checking is done live anyway. I mean, you either do it live because you have the juice, or you do it from the tools menu because you don't have the resources to run it all the time. Putting it on a function key is silly. Except to bring it up on sales promotions.
While I agree with your other points, and even the spirit of this one, your choice of an example is a bad one. As a writer who sometimes uses Word for up to twelve hours a day, I can tell you that having a core word-processing function like spellchecking bound to a function key that is otherwise unused is an immensely useful thing. "Live" spellchecking, as you put it, doesn't automatically fix errors and poor grammar. It simply underlines words not in the spellchecker's dictionary, and phrases that don't conform to the specifications of the grammar-checking algorithms. To do anything about them, you still need to either go into "Tools >> Spelling and Grammar", or click the spellcheck icon on the toolbar, or hit F7. And when you're typing a lot, having to switch from the keyboard to the mouse to activate a fuction tends to break your concentration more than if you can use the keyboard instead, as well as just being a pain in the arse. There are certain functions in a modern word-processor (ie, Word, StarOffice) that tend to be used a lot. These include spelling and grammar checking (F7), thesaurus (shift-F7), save (ctrl-S), save as (F12), print (ctrl-P), auto-correct menu (which I have bound to alt-A, since it was unbound by default), etc. To suggest that binding F7 to spellcheck is a bad idea is like suggesting that there shouldn't be keys for copy (ctrl-C), cut (ctrl-X) and paste (ctrl-V). I believe you will find that F7 has become the de facto standard for spellcheck activation, and is used in StarOffice too (flame me if I'm wrong), which suggests that functionality, not marketting, was the motivating factor.
On the other hand, I fully agree that most Microsoft products ship badly configured. A better example in the same vein would be that the Word default install pops up Clippit, the Paperclip from Hell(TM), the first time you load the program (another "cute" sales promotions ploy that sane people loath). Or that double-clicking "My Computer" opens a single-pane window without any directory tree (okay, a dir tree would probably confuse most lusers admittedly, but it's laughably more efficient that clicking "Back" and "Forward") and with large icons displayed instead of a list or detail view, which means you can not only see less, but filenames are abbreviated to "Blah blah bla...", which is a complete pain for nearly any media files with an [artist] - [songname].[extension] naming convention, among most other things. But why do they do it? It looks pretty of course. Actually, it scares me how many computer-savvy people navigate like this just because it "looks pretty" and make do with trying to find things (alphabetical order, what?) by hitting "D" for a filename beginning with the letter D and so on. I can even handle the large icons, but trying to look through a number of subdirectories by using Back, double-click, Back, double-click...well, maybe I'm just weird. I'm gonna shut up before this starts looking off-topic.
This article is fairly well-informed and not lacking for details on the actual experiment, but while it does briefly cover certain aspects of generic quantum computing principles, it falls short of any kind of comparisons between the different techniques currently being researched (which is fine, because I didn't expect it to delve into those areas, but I'm curious nonetheless).
Being able to understand the technicals of quantum computing, at best, only moderately well, and being remarkably bad at recalling them as anything more than vague and nebulous concepts, I am in no position to even attempt to compare the alternate approaches I have read about over the past several months, but I am wondering if anyone can either answer my questions here, or point me to an article that does. I'm not looking for immense detail; I'd rather just have an answer with basic supporting facts.
What I'm wondering:
is semi-conductor quantum computing any more viable in the long-term than whatever other vaporous methods are being investigated?
how different is it in terms of the equipment required, and what would this mean for scalability?
which method of quantum computing would require the least power, and could be likely to be miniaturised the best? At the moment it seems the actual computing area is very small, but the equipment required to read output is inhibitively large
alternatively, which method is likely to yield the best results in terms of raw computing performance, or is this ultimately irrelevant since quantum computing, if we can do it effectively using whatever method, is so damn fast anyway?
how fast, really, would a semi-decent quantum processor be, compared to a semi-decent silicon one? (This may seem like an ignorant or even trolling question, so I apologise in advance)
One thing that caught my attention is that the quantum dots they used were 180 nm across. That's 0.18 microns, which is larger than current silicon chip lithography processes, which can etch at 0.13 microns, or 130 nm. I realise we're comparing apples and oranges, and that it is superposition (and entanglement, I think) that yields the real power of quantum processors, but I always imagined that a true quantum processor would have much smaller transistor and subsequently die sizes. I know they talk about going as small as 50 nm (0.05 micron), but iirc, IBM is researching (with some success, can someone pull the article?) similarly small lithography techniques for silicon chips too.
Any informed people in the slashdot community who can address these questions? Since I am writing a science fiction novel that integrates quantum computing, and I'd like it to be as realistic as I can potentially make it with educated guessing (hahaha, I hear you smirking already), I'd appreciate any help.
Erm...there's always the chance I'm missing something, but may I ask why this is modded as flamebait? Moderators on crack, or a personal vendetta? Seems pretty relevant to me, and afaik it's accurate information...naturally, ianal (right?).
I caught the briefs for this article on Three News, much to my bemusement. Apart from wondering why Microsoft chose New Zealand to debut XP, of all places, I couldn't help holding my head and screaming (and getting rolled eyes and exasperated sighs from the rest of my family:P) when poor John Campbell, not knowing any better, announced, "New Zealand today became the first place in the world for Microsoft's long awaited Windows XP program to go on sale..." and went on to say that it was a radical new program, with a number of advances over the previous Microsoft programs, Windows 95 and 98. Don't believe me? Check the website; it's all there at the bottom, although I imagine it won't be for long as the headlines are updated.
In addition to this, "at one minute after midnight it was All Black Doug Howlett who became the first customer." Nice to know our "national heros" (bleh, rugby, I could care less that most New Zealanders worship these people) are so technically savvy...
It occurs to me to wonder if, perhaps, Microsoft cleverly decided to do a test run of WinXP in New Zealand, so that if it bombed no one would notice. I mean, I doubt the average non-New Zealander/Australian even knows where New Zealand is...let alone that it's actually separate from Australia;)
I don't mean to make you sound silly, but if you had only checked a dictionary before posting that Usian-skewed comment, you would have noticed that "orientate" is the original British spelling of what is now spelled, in the US at least, as "orient". What I find is kinda useful, if you can be stuffed (which to be honest I usually can't) is writing your posts in Word or StarOffice, and pasting them in. That way, not only would you have noticed that "orientate" isn't underlined red, but you'd also have realised that you spelled "serviceable" incorrectly.
Btw, sorry if this sounds flamey; I don't mean it that way...I guess being a novelist from South Africa I got a bit peeved that your comment was rated funny;) Keep in mind that the article is on a site with a Russian TLD (.ru).
I feel like I'm taking a big risk posting this, because in all honesty I am neither from the US, nor have I lost any friends or family (full stop, let alone in terrorist attacks), so if you think I'm an arsehole I guess I'll understand.
So, no offence or troll intended, but this is still slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. The terrorist attacks on the US are definitely stuff that matters, but not news for nerds. Maxtor's new drives are both. Just because they don't matter compared to maybe 50,000 people losing their lives doesn't mean they're not important, especially when you consider that, while the attacks on the United States have global implications, they are not affecting the productivity of non-US slashdot readers (except for economic ramifications), and these drives are going to be important next month, when the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon are no longer current.
Don't get me wrong; I do sympathise, and I don't mean to sound callous, but slashdot is about tech news, and a new 160 GB ATA 133 drive is big tech news. You can't allow the entire country, or the entire world, to grind to a halt because of these attacks. That is what the attackers would find the most satisfaction in. Maybe I'll get downmodded and flamed, but I say kudos to the slashdot crew for being business as usual; it's appreciated, and maybe even a necessary distraction to some. I know you don't care, but some people do. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh.
Heh, I can just see that this is going to entail enough new code in webpages running the service that I won't need to worry about them getting hold of any cursor movements; the damn thing will load so slowly on my dialup that I'll get sick of waiting and close it.
I can imagine it now: hundreds of hits a day showing that the only widget the cursor moves to is to close the browser window. Confusion in the corporate ranks as a solution is desperately sought to the mysterious problem causing so much loss of revenue. Complete site redesign at the cost of millions. And hopefully, they'll run out of possibilities and twig to the idea of removing the spyware, and voila, hits increas again. Bleh, yeah right.
Ta, I probably should have thought of that. Btw, when you say you're left-handed, I presume you still use your mouse with your right hand? I'm left-handed and use the mouse in my right, and I tend to be very random about where I move the cursor when I'm reading something, but you're right...mostly it goes somewhere to the right-hand side of the screen. I think it's coz you flick the mouse away from you, and with your right hand that's up and to the right of the screen. Not many people use left-hand mouse config, so it virtually becomes a moot point anyway.
I can't give a logical reason why this particular technology disturbs me more than other types of spyware, but for some reason the idea of my mouse movements being tracked just makes my skin crawl... Does anyone else have that sort of gut-level revulsion?
I know what you mean. I think it's possibly because all the other forms of spyware tend to work by watching more detachedly, so to speak. Afaik, most of what they spy on happens on the servers, but the mouse movement is happening right on your own computer, on the client-side, where people simply shouldn't be able to watch it from some unknown site in some unknown country.
Ie, wtf happened to privacy? IANAU (I am not a Usian) but isn't there some kind of law in the Constitution that would make this illegal? Something about "what you do in your own home..." Seems like if there's one for the USA, there'd be one for most other Western countries.
What browser are you using Smartin? Since moving to Opera and disabling the checkbox saying "Allow documents to create windows" my life has been nearly stress-free. What surprises me is the number of people who complain about popups, so maybe I'm missing something. Disabling popups does occassionally affect the usability of a site, when a link uses Javascript to pop up a window, but it's easy to quickly re-enable for as long as it's needed.
I imagine moving your cursor over to the left of the screen would have the same effect. Indeed, having a static cursor at all would be telltale, especially if your arrow keys, Page Down or whatever, are periodically being used.
The question is, how much of that information can be gleaned from your computer? To be honest, I'm confused as to how they can obtain mouse movement data, which is surely client-side and not something a browser would ordinarily handle. The article is low on technical detail and doesn't mention which browsers are being tested, or if this technology would apply to them all. Thoughts? Links? Remonstrations by the technically gifted?
You make some computers in canade, ship'm to the US, and get arrested as soon as you set foot on US soil??
While this isn't going to happen with this bill (see comments above/below, whatever it's been covered), if the law is passed (god help us all) it starts to look like a trend:
DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act)
SSSCA (Security Systems Standards and Certification Act)
ITCA (Information Transfer Censorship Act)
IACA (Information Access and Control Act)
New United States Constitution incorporating FSRA (Freedom of Speech Revokal Act)
First Amendment to New United States Constitution, featuring the ETCA (Encephalograph Thought Censorship Act)
establishment of Ministry of Love, Ministry of Peace, err, what's the other one again?
All made possible, of course, by the wonderful corporations paying the senators, judges and lawyers. The road to hell isn't paved with good intentions. It's paved with money.
(a) In General -- It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide
or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not
include and utilize certified security technologies that adhere to the
security system standards adopted under section 104.
(b) Exception -- Subsection (a) does not apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously-owned interactive digital device, if such device was legally manufactured or imported, and sold, prior to the effective date of regulations adopted under section 104 and not subsequently modified in violation of subsection (a) or 103(a).
Note section (b). Not that it makes me feel any better.
Btw, why is it people can't take just the smallest trouble to read the articles before shooting off their mouths, so entire threads don't get started based on assumptions?
I'm confused. Are you just trying to troll (in which case, sorry I responded) or are you just insane? How is being able to run Linux a privilege? Does the user not have a right to choose what operating system he uses? Isn't that what the whole deal with Microsoft and abuse of manopoly is about? If computers exist, is it not my right to be able to buy one, to run whatever operating system I choose? And do I not have a right to freedom of speech by writing my congressman? Certainly he has an equal right to simply ignore my letter, but it is not my privilege for me to be able to put a pen to paper; last time I checked, freedom of speech was the hottest human right around, and indirectly that is exactly what the DMCA and proposed SSSCA suppress.
You make out like living at all is a privilege, when a privilege is something that can be revoked, and a right cannot. As long as Linux, computers, paper and pens exist, I have a right to use them within reason, because my ability to do so is a natural extension of life, liberty, freedom, happiness, blah blah. And yes, I did notice that you were writing the letter on your computer, but handwritten letters are more effective.
Methinks you don't understand what a privilege or a right is.
Re:Time for it to die
on
Linux Turns 10
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
Not wanting to get in a flamewar, allow me simply to ask this: how many Windows operating systems have you used, and in particular, how long have you used Windows 2000 for? To date I have had around two real crashes in Windows 2000 (both driver-related), and I have had it installed for nearly eight months. Admittedly all other Windows distributions are unstable and generally slow, but Windows 2000 is very snappy, and very stable. My uptime now? 2wks 2days 23hrs 12mins 28secs. I have no problems with memory management, like some people claim, Quake 3 runs no slower than when I first booted it two weeks ago, and I see no reason to not keep running it another two weeks, or two months, or even two years, without shutting down.
Yes, I'm logged in because I'm not afraid of the truth, and if I get modded down for anti-Linux/pro-Microsoft zealotry, so be it. I hate Microsoft just as much as the next SlashDot user, but unfortunately Windows 2000 really is a good operating system (especially for the home user who wants stability and compatibility, which is what I am). If you don't believe me, please find some benchmarks online comparing Linux and Windows operating systems. I'm not going to that much trouble for a flamer.
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Your point about text selection is well-taken, don't worry. I have, on many occasions, wished for something like what you describe when editing chapters etc, and Word is sadly lacking in this area. It seems that there a huge number of features in Word that no one ever uses, but ones that would really come in handy are lacking. Certainly the average person writing letters to his grandma wouldn't take advantage of the kind of features you and I would like, but hey, you and I would, and I'm willing to bet there're a large number of others out there who would too.
Pity Microsoft isn't in the habit of learning from other people, instead of stealing from them. Amipro and Describe sound neet.
Since I am running Win2k with Apache 1.3.20 for Win32, and am relatively new to webhosting, I have little idea of how to do anything about the problem. Can the same Apache scripts that are run on Unix be run on Windows? If so, could someone point me to a website with a script that will at least pop up a message to the user of the machine, if not simply shut them down? Help would be much appreciated.
Ianamss (I am not a Microsoft supporter), but it almost sounds like you think easy administration of a server is a bad thing. I'm sure that can't be what you meant...
This is the most ridiculous, blindly patriotic counter-argument that I have heard in a long time. I don't need to reiterate the points in the many posts above, which are largely independent of this particular "America is the largest producer of X in the world" thread. But I can end this silly argument right here. The US, which takes up less than a third the entire land mass of America, is the most powerful country in the world! Considering the resources it has available, and its GDP, I think its humanitarian efforts are shameful. What happened to those billions of dollars of surplus the country seemed to have at the end of the last (or second-last, iirc) fiscal year? It sure wasn't going anywhere near countries that could be transformed from bottom of the pit third-world to top of the pile first-world with that kind of budget (and no I'm not so naive as to think that giving a country a huge heap of money will solve their problems overnight, but it's hardly going to hurt to give them some aid, absolve them of some debts, since it's not like you need to suck any more of their resources anyway...)
I'm not sure what you meant here. Tab isn't bound to anything; it's the tab key, which tabulates a document. It isn't used a lot, but it's sure useful (although I'd be the first to volunteer to design a better tab system for Word if I could). I can certainly understand dumb/ignorant (careful to distinguish, not wanting to sound bigotted against non-computer literate types like my dad, who is hardly dumb) people messing stuff up with it though. Maybe I misunderstood what you meant.
Autofix/correct...yes, a double-edged sword if ever there was one. I personally have become immensely lazy with the advent of this feature, because I find that being able to add autocorrections like "Tn" being corrected to "Tennyson" is very handy indeed. On the other hand, as you say, there are a number of instances where it becomes one hell of a pain, and backspace/ctrl-z is your bestest buddy. To be honest, I find autocorrect a lot more useful than a nuisance; there are a large number of typos that you make when you're doing 120 wpm, and if you can automatically cover them, you don't need to worry about breaking rhythm to fix the problem. As for stopping to address red-underlined words, well...I just ignore them and wait till I'm done, so I guess inline spellchecking becomes kinda pointless; I just like to know what words and phrases are considered bad I guess. I tend to spellcheck every few pages, since I discovered a while back that trying to run a spellcheck on a 130,000 word manuscript (ie, killed Windows, reinstalled, reinstalled Word, didn't save custom.dic) takes...well...erm...
Thanks for the hints about the editing function keys like ctrl-c; I never had a problem remembering them, but I'll pass them on to my mum :)
What you say about being able to right-click a red-underlined word is true, however once again, this is moving from the keyboard to the mouse. I also don't find that F7 is the most remarkably easy key to accidentally hit (actually I wish the function keys didn't have a plastic separater from the number keys, because I'd like to be able to hit them without stretching) but I guess it's more a matter of preference than any seriously debatable topic. I've always been grateful for F7, shift-F7 and F12 (as well as F3, F5 and F8 in Opera), because I am a keyboard freak, and consider the mouse an object of scorn until I load Quake ;)
Yeah, there're a lot of ways to get around that dir tree problem. I'm very fond of subdirs myself, since I am one of those must-categorise-everything-or-die types, but as you say. It all comes down to a shitty interface.
Btw...how long do you think this conversation could go on for before we're killed due to archiving? I seem to recall from some misty recess in my wee brain that articles are archived after a week, but it may have been two...it would probably be pretty sad if we were still debating by then though...
Yeah, I also learned Win-E from that boss :) Alternatively, you can go into Folder Options and edit the preferences for File/Folder so that "Explore" is set as default, instead of "Open" -- that way, double-clicking defaults to a directory tree.
You hit the nail on the head with file-extensions. That example beats the hell out of my off-the-cuff offerings any day. I can understand it for Win9x, because your average luser is gonna have a cow when he renames a file and it kicks the bucket because he didn't add an extension, but for WinNT/2k, it's an appallingly ill-conceived idea.
While I agree with your other points, and even the spirit of this one, your choice of an example is a bad one. As a writer who sometimes uses Word for up to twelve hours a day, I can tell you that having a core word-processing function like spellchecking bound to a function key that is otherwise unused is an immensely useful thing. "Live" spellchecking, as you put it, doesn't automatically fix errors and poor grammar. It simply underlines words not in the spellchecker's dictionary, and phrases that don't conform to the specifications of the grammar-checking algorithms. To do anything about them, you still need to either go into "Tools >> Spelling and Grammar", or click the spellcheck icon on the toolbar, or hit F7. And when you're typing a lot, having to switch from the keyboard to the mouse to activate a fuction tends to break your concentration more than if you can use the keyboard instead, as well as just being a pain in the arse. There are certain functions in a modern word-processor (ie, Word, StarOffice) that tend to be used a lot. These include spelling and grammar checking (F7), thesaurus (shift-F7), save (ctrl-S), save as (F12), print (ctrl-P), auto-correct menu (which I have bound to alt-A, since it was unbound by default), etc. To suggest that binding F7 to spellcheck is a bad idea is like suggesting that there shouldn't be keys for copy (ctrl-C), cut (ctrl-X) and paste (ctrl-V). I believe you will find that F7 has become the de facto standard for spellcheck activation, and is used in StarOffice too (flame me if I'm wrong), which suggests that functionality, not marketting, was the motivating factor.
On the other hand, I fully agree that most Microsoft products ship badly configured. A better example in the same vein would be that the Word default install pops up Clippit, the Paperclip from Hell(TM), the first time you load the program (another "cute" sales promotions ploy that sane people loath). Or that double-clicking "My Computer" opens a single-pane window without any directory tree (okay, a dir tree would probably confuse most lusers admittedly, but it's laughably more efficient that clicking "Back" and "Forward") and with large icons displayed instead of a list or detail view, which means you can not only see less, but filenames are abbreviated to "Blah blah bla...", which is a complete pain for nearly any media files with an [artist] - [songname].[extension] naming convention, among most other things. But why do they do it? It looks pretty of course. Actually, it scares me how many computer-savvy people navigate like this just because it "looks pretty" and make do with trying to find things (alphabetical order, what?) by hitting "D" for a filename beginning with the letter D and so on. I can even handle the large icons, but trying to look through a number of subdirectories by using Back, double-click, Back, double-click...well, maybe I'm just weird. I'm gonna shut up before this starts looking off-topic.
Thanks Ominous Coward, David Roundy and especially dido for the time put in to that post; you've all been very helpful.
Being able to understand the technicals of quantum computing, at best, only moderately well, and being remarkably bad at recalling them as anything more than vague and nebulous concepts, I am in no position to even attempt to compare the alternate approaches I have read about over the past several months, but I am wondering if anyone can either answer my questions here, or point me to an article that does. I'm not looking for immense detail; I'd rather just have an answer with basic supporting facts.
What I'm wondering:
One thing that caught my attention is that the quantum dots they used were 180 nm across. That's 0.18 microns, which is larger than current silicon chip lithography processes, which can etch at 0.13 microns, or 130 nm. I realise we're comparing apples and oranges, and that it is superposition (and entanglement, I think) that yields the real power of quantum processors, but I always imagined that a true quantum processor would have much smaller transistor and subsequently die sizes. I know they talk about going as small as 50 nm (0.05 micron), but iirc, IBM is researching (with some success, can someone pull the article?) similarly small lithography techniques for silicon chips too.
Any informed people in the slashdot community who can address these questions? Since I am writing a science fiction novel that integrates quantum computing, and I'd like it to be as realistic as I can potentially make it with educated guessing (hahaha, I hear you smirking already), I'd appreciate any help.
Erm...there's always the chance I'm missing something, but may I ask why this is modded as flamebait? Moderators on crack, or a personal vendetta? Seems pretty relevant to me, and afaik it's accurate information...naturally, ianal (right?).
In addition to this, "at one minute after midnight it was All Black Doug Howlett who became the first customer." Nice to know our "national heros" (bleh, rugby, I could care less that most New Zealanders worship these people) are so technically savvy...
It occurs to me to wonder if, perhaps, Microsoft cleverly decided to do a test run of WinXP in New Zealand, so that if it bombed no one would notice. I mean, I doubt the average non-New Zealander/Australian even knows where New Zealand is...let alone that it's actually separate from Australia ;)
Btw, sorry if this sounds flamey; I don't mean it that way...I guess being a novelist from South Africa I got a bit peeved that your comment was rated funny ;) Keep in mind that the article is on a site with a Russian TLD (.ru).
Oh yeah...sheesh, how did that slip by me? Gnu's Not Linux. That's it...
Erm...I'm no expert but isn't GNU (as in GNU/Linux) not a recursive acronym for Gnu Isn't Unix? Hmm.
So, no offence or troll intended, but this is still slashdot. News for Nerds. Stuff that matters. The terrorist attacks on the US are definitely stuff that matters, but not news for nerds. Maxtor's new drives are both. Just because they don't matter compared to maybe 50,000 people losing their lives doesn't mean they're not important, especially when you consider that, while the attacks on the United States have global implications, they are not affecting the productivity of non-US slashdot readers (except for economic ramifications), and these drives are going to be important next month, when the attacks on the WTC and Pentagon are no longer current.
Don't get me wrong; I do sympathise, and I don't mean to sound callous, but slashdot is about tech news, and a new 160 GB ATA 133 drive is big tech news. You can't allow the entire country, or the entire world, to grind to a halt because of these attacks. That is what the attackers would find the most satisfaction in. Maybe I'll get downmodded and flamed, but I say kudos to the slashdot crew for being business as usual; it's appreciated, and maybe even a necessary distraction to some. I know you don't care, but some people do. I'm sorry if that sounds harsh.
I can imagine it now: hundreds of hits a day showing that the only widget the cursor moves to is to close the browser window. Confusion in the corporate ranks as a solution is desperately sought to the mysterious problem causing so much loss of revenue. Complete site redesign at the cost of millions. And hopefully, they'll run out of possibilities and twig to the idea of removing the spyware, and voila, hits increas again. Bleh, yeah right.
Ta, I probably should have thought of that. Btw, when you say you're left-handed, I presume you still use your mouse with your right hand? I'm left-handed and use the mouse in my right, and I tend to be very random about where I move the cursor when I'm reading something, but you're right...mostly it goes somewhere to the right-hand side of the screen. I think it's coz you flick the mouse away from you, and with your right hand that's up and to the right of the screen. Not many people use left-hand mouse config, so it virtually becomes a moot point anyway.
Now put those cameras in your house, and a couple of secret siblings too, and see if it's still okay.
I can't give a logical reason why this particular technology disturbs me more than other types of spyware, but for some reason the idea of my mouse movements being tracked just makes my skin crawl... Does anyone else have that sort of gut-level revulsion?
I know what you mean. I think it's possibly because all the other forms of spyware tend to work by watching more detachedly, so to speak. Afaik, most of what they spy on happens on the servers, but the mouse movement is happening right on your own computer, on the client-side, where people simply shouldn't be able to watch it from some unknown site in some unknown country.
Ie, wtf happened to privacy? IANAU (I am not a Usian) but isn't there some kind of law in the Constitution that would make this illegal? Something about "what you do in your own home..." Seems like if there's one for the USA, there'd be one for most other Western countries.
What browser are you using Smartin? Since moving to Opera and disabling the checkbox saying "Allow documents to create windows" my life has been nearly stress-free. What surprises me is the number of people who complain about popups, so maybe I'm missing something. Disabling popups does occassionally affect the usability of a site, when a link uses Javascript to pop up a window, but it's easy to quickly re-enable for as long as it's needed.
The question is, how much of that information can be gleaned from your computer? To be honest, I'm confused as to how they can obtain mouse movement data, which is surely client-side and not something a browser would ordinarily handle. The article is low on technical detail and doesn't mention which browsers are being tested, or if this technology would apply to them all. Thoughts? Links? Remonstrations by the technically gifted?
- You make some computers in canade, ship'm to the US, and get arrested as soon as you set foot on US soil??
While this isn't going to happen with this bill (see comments above/below, whatever it's been covered), if the law is passed (god help us all) it starts to look like a trend:- DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act)
- SSSCA (Security Systems Standards and Certification Act)
- ITCA (Information Transfer Censorship Act)
- IACA (Information Access and Control Act)
- New United States Constitution incorporating FSRA (Freedom of Speech Revokal Act)
- First Amendment to New United States Constitution, featuring the ETCA (Encephalograph Thought Censorship Act)
- establishment of Ministry of Love, Ministry of Peace, err, what's the other one again?
All made possible, of course, by the wonderful corporations paying the senators, judges and lawyers. The road to hell isn't paved with good intentions. It's paved with money.- Sec. 101: Prohibition of Certain Devices
Note section (b). Not that it makes me feel any better.(a) In General -- It is unlawful to manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide or otherwise traffic in any interactive digital device that does not include and utilize certified security technologies that adhere to the security system standards adopted under section 104.
(b) Exception -- Subsection (a) does not apply to the offer for sale or provision of, or other trafficking in, any previously-owned interactive digital device, if such device was legally manufactured or imported, and sold, prior to the effective date of regulations adopted under section 104 and not subsequently modified in violation of subsection (a) or 103(a).
Btw, why is it people can't take just the smallest trouble to read the articles before shooting off their mouths, so entire threads don't get started based on assumptions?
You make out like living at all is a privilege, when a privilege is something that can be revoked, and a right cannot. As long as Linux, computers, paper and pens exist, I have a right to use them within reason, because my ability to do so is a natural extension of life, liberty, freedom, happiness, blah blah. And yes, I did notice that you were writing the letter on your computer, but handwritten letters are more effective.
Methinks you don't understand what a privilege or a right is.
Yes, I'm logged in because I'm not afraid of the truth, and if I get modded down for anti-Linux/pro-Microsoft zealotry, so be it. I hate Microsoft just as much as the next SlashDot user, but unfortunately Windows 2000 really is a good operating system (especially for the home user who wants stability and compatibility, which is what I am). If you don't believe me, please find some benchmarks online comparing Linux and Windows operating systems. I'm not going to that much trouble for a flamer.