This still doesn't hold a candle to a good university library site. Finding good academic articles is still all about context context context. You need to know what journals you want, what authors aren't crackpots, etc ec. My own university's library system (U of Minnesota), www.lib.umn.edu, has great research guides to help provide that context.
As an example, A Google Scholar search for Kafka doens't have the sort of literary references I'm looking for until the third page. Is it just that scientific articles are more likely the be available on the web?
One very good thing about Google Scholar is that it specifically searches references. This is an advance, and further work on the engine should be in this direction (I'm thinking a visual web of articles). The first thing you do when you find a halfway decent article is check out its references and then go and grab those, *especially* if more than one article references something. It's often hard to know what the really important watershed articles and books are in a given subject when you're new to it (again with the context). A quick, visual chart or web of articles and the articles they reference would be awesome for figuring that out. Something like their score for web pages but based solely on references. This is already how it works (hits are sorted by the number of articles that have cited them), but it sure would be nice to be able to, say, check articles that fit your search genre and uncheck those that don't. I could then uncheck the scientific articles and watch the literary ones move up on my search.
sigh. Every one of your bullet points stem from your (and other's) personal dislike of certain reasonable design decisions. Show me an internal battery that lasts for more than 2 years. I'd rather spend the $50 (from a third party) to replace the battery in a couple of years than spend three times that on individual AAs. Also, my ipod lasts 8-10, the new Minis last even longer.
But the biggest problem I have it your "ergonomic" claim. That's just patently ridiculous. I want a handgun to be ergonomic, a vacuum cleaner, a ladle. These are things that I use with my hand. My iPod, on the other hand, I use in my pocket or in a case. For that, a simple rectangle with beveled edges is the most *ergonomic* design possible for my pocket.
Don't confuse design that doesn't fit you with problematic design.
The biggest problem with the grammar check in my experience is that people just plain trust it too much. I used to work in a writing center in a large private college. We served a lot of English as a Second Langauge students. Smart people, for the most part. They would come in with papers with the most convoluted and aggravating grammar I'd ever seen. When I ask about why they chose to write in that way, about half said that they had originally wrote it like X (where X is actually human-readable), but the grammar checker told them it was wrong so they just accepted it since it obviously knew English better than they did.
It did make for some nice teaching opportunities when I got to tell them they were smarter than they thought, but it's frustrating to think that people accept that "The computer must be right" even with something as complex and human as grammar.
I must warn the world about Tom Cruise. I feel he is an utterly terrifying Superior Life Form, with the power to melt heads and braid spines. His eyes are as hard, shiny and brutally penetrating as diamond drill-bits. The new braces on his teeth suggest that he is erasing all that remained of his tiny imperfections, and he is now metamorphosing into Ultra Super Perfection Man 3000. I fear his intense, mind-beating politeness, his titanium imperviousness to human weakness, his barking power-laugh.
That, needless to say, is not the man to play the lead role in War of the Worlds.
I certainly wouldn't be suprised if Coleman was in the RIAA's pocket, but I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence of that thus far. Anyway, best to be cautious
Parent is trolling, methinks, but has a couple valid points. Coleman is, in fact, beholden to the administration for helping him to beat Wellstone and there's a general feeling that he's beeing groomed for bigger things.
Case in point is that he is the head of the permanent subcommittee on investigations - which has done precious little investigating that it ought to be.
Anyway, it's far-fetched to say that a MN Senator is in the pocket of the RIAA - I think it's more likely that he's positioning himself for what he knows will eventually happen - the RIAA/MPAA shit will hit the fan & the senate will need an expert to figure it out. For now, it looks like he deserves the benefit of the doubt from us.
shrug. the AC response to this says it pretty well. Dayton might be rich, but he's done plenty to help folks out and to know what joe schmo lives like.
And as for the "limousine socialist" stuff - a few "real" socialists might help the US realize that most of the world practices politics a little differently than we do - Dayton is most certainly not one.
A Minnesotan here, and I like Dayton and all, but he isn't exactly the most compelling public speaker you'll find. I get the feeling when he qualified himself that he isn't dissembling, he just has a nervous habit of qualifying *everything*....which is a politician trick, I know...
Anyway, the point is that this is more "Hey, this might be an idea, or whatever, I really don't know," than it is "I have this secret plot I want to enact, but I'll throw you off the trail by claiming I'm unsure about it."
No, I did read the books, so I know that PJ had some decisions to make regarding Saruman. Now merely by reading headlines in/. I find out what some of those decisions are before I see the movie. It's just plain stunning to me how time after time this kind of shit gets posted.
I am also willing to put up with a little more since I get the added pleasure of not sending money to Qwest, and I do find that once I get a hold of somebody it has been great.
I am using it for residential, so I won't need the fax. Incidentally, the whole "Fax on top of Voice on top of IP" seems a little odd to me, wouldn't you be better served using a more direct method (i.e.a web gateway or fax application on your computer)?
First they lowered their base prices. I think it's a bit early to hate on vonage, it seems to me that they're trying pretty hard to be good to the customers, something the "big PSTN phone companies" have long forgotten how to do.
the unlimited Long Distance plan dropped today from $40 / month to $35 / month, the local plan dropped a buck from $26 to $25. Now I know why
I haven't gotten any emails yet, but I'm not surprised. I'm still waiting for them to get their act together in terms of getting my existing phone number transferred (The fax I sent them magically appeared when I threatened to end my patronage).
They seem to be so severely understaffed it makes my head spin. I have twice now sat on hold for over a half hour - at which point I am allowed to leave a message instead of speak to a real human being.
They clearly know their limitations, though, when I called to complain about how long it was taking to get my service up and running, they credited me a month before I could even launch into my bitch. All I could say was "habidah, whosiwhah, zibit.. I'm buying you a pizza!"
Finally, if their site stands up to the slashdot effect I'll be shocked to the core, as it's slow to begin with. I wonder if their VOIP has to make heavy use of their servers or if its more direct. If Slashdot can interrupt my phone service, I'll be ticked!
I know, I know: math, like so many of the things discussed here on/., is primarily an activity of men.
But it seems to me that we would be much better served if we talked about how to get more women in the field, not how we could keep old men in it. I mean, aren't there enough old men around anyway?
If Apple is starting a subscription service - they ought to seriously consider the US mobile phone model:
Sign up for one year and get a $XXX discount on one of our pieces of hardware
Imagine how many more people will sign up for a $40 monthly fee if it meant they could finally afford an iPod and have access to an easy to use music subscription service.
I always thought that relativity + big bang theory = finitie space/mass of the universe. So that while we may not be able to observe the "edge" (or wrapping, or whatever" of the universe, at a certain point space/time "wraps" about itself (i.e. if you travel in a straight line for a long-ass time, you'll eventually end up where you started).
From the article
So far, however, the evidence is against them. Infinite models fit the data, and strong limits have been placed on the alternatives.
Can someone verify this? I always assumed that this was not the case. If the edge/curve of the universe was just outside of our observable sphere (and continues to be as the universe expands), would we be able to falsify/test this hypothesis.
Methinks something smells here, and I took a shower just yesterday. But I'm not nearly a physicist, so grain of salt, yada yada.
I wonder how long before this can be done real time enough to really make this useful.
Why have to wait until it's realtime? Historical analysis is very useful, and not just to historians. Linguists, anthropologists, social scientists, etc.. Taking such a body of texts is called studying a "corpus," and such studies often yield surprising and interesting results (better than "atomic" showing up in the ocld war). A new method like this would be very useful to nearly every discipline in the humanities I can think of
Not all geeks are computer geeks. Not all nerds care only about the future.
Slashdot Mirror
People writing emails, intentionally trying to convey tone, have only a 50/50 chance of actually succeeding at it.
I used to feel silly having "writing" as one of the skills I put on a resumé. Not anymore. Thank you, internet, for boosting my self-esteem.
Two things:
1) you put the misconceptions in the article instead of the facts. What, do you actually want us to RTFA?
2) The design makes it impossible to hit the left and right mouse buttons at the same time. So much for using it for WoW.
This still doesn't hold a candle to a good university library site. Finding good academic articles is still all about context context context. You need to know what journals you want, what authors aren't crackpots, etc ec. My own university's library system (U of Minnesota), www.lib.umn.edu, has great research guides to help provide that context.
As an example, A Google Scholar search for Kafka doens't have the sort of literary references I'm looking for until the third page. Is it just that scientific articles are more likely the be available on the web?
One very good thing about Google Scholar is that it specifically searches references. This is an advance, and further work on the engine should be in this direction (I'm thinking a visual web of articles). The first thing you do when you find a halfway decent article is check out its references and then go and grab those, *especially* if more than one article references something. It's often hard to know what the really important watershed articles and books are in a given subject when you're new to it (again with the context). A quick, visual chart or web of articles and the articles they reference would be awesome for figuring that out. Something like their score for web pages but based solely on references. This is already how it works (hits are sorted by the number of articles that have cited them), but it sure would be nice to be able to, say, check articles that fit your search genre and uncheck those that don't. I could then uncheck the scientific articles and watch the literary ones move up on my search.
Rambling now. Done now
sigh. Every one of your bullet points stem from your (and other's) personal dislike of certain reasonable design decisions. Show me an internal battery that lasts for more than 2 years. I'd rather spend the $50 (from a third party) to replace the battery in a couple of years than spend three times that on individual AAs. Also, my ipod lasts 8-10, the new Minis last even longer.
But the biggest problem I have it your "ergonomic" claim. That's just patently ridiculous. I want a handgun to be ergonomic, a vacuum cleaner, a ladle. These are things that I use with my hand. My iPod, on the other hand, I use in my pocket or in a case. For that, a simple rectangle with beveled edges is the most *ergonomic* design possible for my pocket.
Don't confuse design that doesn't fit you with problematic design.
The biggest problem with the grammar check in my experience is that people just plain trust it too much. I used to work in a writing center in a large private college. We served a lot of English as a Second Langauge students. Smart people, for the most part. They would come in with papers with the most convoluted and aggravating grammar I'd ever seen. When I ask about why they chose to write in that way, about half said that they had originally wrote it like X (where X is actually human-readable), but the grammar checker told them it was wrong so they just accepted it since it obviously knew English better than they did.
It did make for some nice teaching opportunities when I got to tell them they were smarter than they thought, but it's frustrating to think that people accept that "The computer must be right" even with something as complex and human as grammar.
I certainly wouldn't be suprised if Coleman was in the RIAA's pocket, but I haven't seen a whole lot of evidence of that thus far. Anyway, best to be cautious
Case in point is that he is the head of the permanent subcommittee on investigations - which has done precious little investigating that it ought to be.
Anyway, it's far-fetched to say that a MN Senator is in the pocket of the RIAA - I think it's more likely that he's positioning himself for what he knows will eventually happen - the RIAA/MPAA shit will hit the fan & the senate will need an expert to figure it out. For now, it looks like he deserves the benefit of the doubt from us.
Let NASA bask in Spirit's limelight, that's the real story here.
Metacritic
shrug. the AC response to this says it pretty well. Dayton might be rich, but he's done plenty to help folks out and to know what joe schmo lives like.
And as for the "limousine socialist" stuff - a few "real" socialists might help the US realize that most of the world practices politics a little differently than we do - Dayton is most certainly not one.
A Minnesotan here, and I like Dayton and all, but he isn't exactly the most compelling public speaker you'll find. I get the feeling when he qualified himself that he isn't dissembling, he just has a nervous habit of qualifying *everything*. ...which is a politician trick, I know...
Anyway, the point is that this is more "Hey, this might be an idea, or whatever, I really don't know," than it is "I have this secret plot I want to enact, but I'll throw you off the trail by claiming I'm unsure about it."
No, I did read the books, so I know that PJ had some decisions to make regarding Saruman. Now merely by reading headlines in /. I find out what some of those decisions are before I see the movie. It's just plain stunning to me how time after time this kind of shit gets posted.
What's next: "ROTK to feature the Lone Gunmen, fortunately they're not trapped in a Matrix within a Matrix."
Christ!
going to wait on this one? Just remembering 10.2.8 here..
it's already slashdotted.
I am also willing to put up with a little more since I get the added pleasure of not sending money to Qwest, and I do find that once I get a hold of somebody it has been great.
I am using it for residential, so I won't need the fax. Incidentally, the whole "Fax on top of Voice on top of IP" seems a little odd to me, wouldn't you be better served using a more direct method (i.e.a web gateway or fax application on your computer)?
First they lowered their base prices. I think it's a bit early to hate on vonage, it seems to me that they're trying pretty hard to be good to the customers, something the "big PSTN phone companies" have long forgotten how to do.
the unlimited Long Distance plan dropped today from $40 / month to $35 / month, the local plan dropped a buck from $26 to $25. Now I know why
I haven't gotten any emails yet, but I'm not surprised. I'm still waiting for them to get their act together in terms of getting my existing phone number transferred (The fax I sent them magically appeared when I threatened to end my patronage).
They seem to be so severely understaffed it makes my head spin. I have twice now sat on hold for over a half hour - at which point I am allowed to leave a message instead of speak to a real human being.
They clearly know their limitations, though, when I called to complain about how long it was taking to get my service up and running, they credited me a month before I could even launch into my bitch. All I could say was "habidah, whosiwhah, zibit.. I'm buying you a pizza!"
Finally, if their site stands up to the slashdot effect I'll be shocked to the core, as it's slow to begin with. I wonder if their VOIP has to make heavy use of their servers or if its more direct. If Slashdot can interrupt my phone service, I'll be ticked!
What about young women?
/., is primarily an activity of men.
I know, I know: math, like so many of the things discussed here on
But it seems to me that we would be much better served if we talked about how to get more women in the field, not how we could keep old men in it. I mean, aren't there enough old men around anyway?
(spoken by a future old guy - hopefully)
...is the end of frames on the web a bad thing?
If Apple is starting a subscription service - they ought to seriously consider the US mobile phone model:
Sign up for one year and get a $XXX discount on one of our pieces of hardware
Imagine how many more people will sign up for a $40 monthly fee if it meant they could finally afford an iPod and have access to an easy to use music subscription service.
I always thought that relativity + big bang theory = finitie space/mass of the universe. So that while we may not be able to observe the "edge" (or wrapping, or whatever" of the universe, at a certain point space/time "wraps" about itself (i.e. if you travel in a straight line for a long-ass time, you'll eventually end up where you started).
From the article
So far, however, the evidence is against them. Infinite models fit the data, and strong limits have been placed on the alternatives.
Can someone verify this? I always assumed that this was not the case. If the edge/curve of the universe was just outside of our observable sphere (and continues to be as the universe expands), would we be able to falsify/test this hypothesis.
Methinks something smells here, and I took a shower just yesterday. But I'm not nearly a physicist, so grain of salt, yada yada.
http://dvbackup.sourceforge.net/
It works very well. 5 gigs on a tape, 10 if you don't make it redundant.
Why have to wait until it's realtime? Historical analysis is very useful, and not just to historians. Linguists, anthropologists, social scientists, etc.. Taking such a body of texts is called studying a "corpus," and such studies often yield surprising and interesting results (better than "atomic" showing up in the ocld war). A new method like this would be very useful to nearly every discipline in the humanities I can think of
Not all geeks are computer geeks. Not all nerds care only about the future.