Because, I actually want to have an easy way to empty the recycle bin. It's utilization of disk space wasn't a major concern for many year, but now with the introduction of SSDs, and the fact that huge SSDs are not yet affordable, I find myself running out of space on mine quite often. When I do, I tend to find I've got some large files sitting in the recycle bin.
No, he's not below average. The problem is mostly likely not that he finds the new interface simply difficult to use, but that he probably has a decade or two of experience using the old interface. He's had all that time to learn where each feature was. When each new version came out, the old features were almost always exactly like before, and just a few new menu items and buttons were added each time. Each time he had to learn a few new things, but all of his old knowledge was still relevant. Now suddenly in one version, everything he's spent many years learning has been pulled out from under him, and he's instinctively looking in the wrong places for everything. Habits that are that well ingrained can be incredibly difficult to break.
I've been using the new interface for about 3 years now, and I still instinctively want to look in the wrong (ie: old) locations. What makes it even more difficult is that there are items in the new interface the mislead people accustomed to the old interface. For example, in the old interface of Excel, if you wanted to insert a new row into your spreadsheet, you went to the menu bar and picked Insert -> Rows. With the new interface, you go up to the top, you see a tab on the ribbon named "Insert" and you automatically think "that's where I'm gonna find the option to insert a row". So you click on it and, I'll be damned....you can insert just about everything EXCEPT a row or column.
Well, it's not very realistic (for a number of reasons) to only ban/tax them for people that get their power from coal. However on average for the entire US, an incandescent bulb generates over 3 times as much pollution as a CFL, and almost 5 times as much if you assume the CFL is disposed of properly instead of being dumped into a landfill.
Yes...the incandescent is responsible for over 3 times the mercury emissions (and it is almost 5 times as much if the CFLs are disposed of properly instead of dumped in a landfill)
The tiny bit of mercury in a CFL is nothing compared to the pollution that is released into the atmosphere to generate the extra electricity for incandescent bulbs.
Uhhhh, do you REALLY think that was an actual photo of this particular raid, and not just some stock photo of a police raid? You really think they planned this raid, then brought in a photographer to do an artsy photo with a lensbaby, and then released that photo to the press?
I know exactly what the problem was. As I said in my post, it was using unix timestamps generated using the old tzdata. It wasn't a terribly complex problem to fix. The point was, it's not necessarily as simply as dropping in the new tzdata and being all set. There could be data that needs tweaking to get working properly, too.
That is indeed a possible reason for the change. Tinkering with time conversion algorithms were in the past also attributed to the economy stimulus it would give the IT sector.
Wonderful. So can we count on the next proposal to be sending someone around to bust out everybody's windows, so that we get an economic stimulus in the window industry? And I think the car tire industry could use a stimulus, so what do you think we could do about that?
It's an OS patch which you wouldn't even notice, a new tzdata file or similar.
Well, it's not JUST an OS patch. There could be other things that need to be dealt with, depending on what systems you run. For instance, last time they messed with the DST rules here in the US (shifted the start/end dates by a few weeks) we did discover another problem. The calendar software we run had stored future calendar events as unix timestamps, and those timestamps were generated by the old DST rules. Once the new timezone files had been installed, for events that took place between the old & new start/end dates and which were setup before the new timezone files were in place, all the timestamps were off by 1 hour.
Yeah, it wasn't a huge problem for us to deal with, but the point is that there can be more involved than a simple timezone file patch.
I think the possible argument there would be that she typed it up in her driveway, but apparently forgot to post it (I know I do that sort of thing all the time). Then she left home, got into an accident, grabber her phone to call 911, and then sent the previously typed message (either by accidentally hitting the send button or by choosing to hit send rather than cancel) just before placing the 911 call.
I watched the NOVA special on the design of Watson, and one of the features explicitly added was the parsing of other players' wrong answers.
No, that's wasn't what they said in the Nova documentary. You were mistaken, but I made the same mistake as you in the last slashdot story a few days ago. If you rewatch the documentary, they specifically say that now Watson receives the CORRECT answer electronically. The reason we both made that mistake was because of the way the documentary was edited. They say that Watson can't hear the opponent's responses. Then they show the video of Watson repeating a wrong answer. Then they say that Watson will now receive the correct answer electronically. It did sort of suggest they were addressing the problem just demonstrated, but that was just poor editing.
and why is the 80gb faster than the 40gb version of the otherwise identical product?
The way they double the capacity is by using twice as many of the same chips. Since it writes to all chips in parallel, twice as many chips means it can read/write twice as much data in the same time period. You see that in the fact that the write performance spec is exactly double. The reason the read performance isn't double is because it has been known for a while that Intel puts a performance cap on the non-enterprise versions of their SSDs
Yeah, and you are about 3 hours and 22 minutes late in pointing it out to me. We were obviously editing at the same time, but I took longer because 1) I bothered to provide some description besides just a link, and 2) I bothered to check the schedule to see if it was going to be on again (as not everyone likes watching hour long videos at their computer). But yes, you did get it in 3 minutes earlier. Congratulations! You win..........nothing.
Wow, you are right. I think I misunderstood and inferred it incorrectly from the way the video was put together. I just checked again, and they explain that watson can't hear the opponent, and then they give the example of watson repeating the same incorrect answer that was just given. Then they talk about improving it to receive the correct answer electronically, and I think I must have inferred that this was to deal with the problem they just demonstrated.
Show her the Nova documentary about it (links in posts below). It does a good job of showing just how terrible computers are when it comes to stuff like this, and includes plenty of examples of ways most systems (and even early versions of Watson) fail to interpret questions correctly and just why it's so difficult to do well.
Not totally correct. It actually does do voice recognition, but not for the initial question. In the Nova documentary, they highlighted the fact that one of the initial (amusing) failings was that it would give the same incorrect answer that another player just gave. So they upgraded it to listen to the competitor's answers and take that into account when choosing its own answer.
There was an interesting episode of Nova called "Smartest Machine on Earth" that was pretty interesting. It talked a lot about the challenges they faced, how they addressed them, what adjustments they made along the way, etc. I don't see the episode listed on the schedule for replay any time soon, but you can watch it on the website http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html
The floor mat issue was that the bottom edge of the pedel was touching the mat and getting stuck. The sticky pedal issue was that 2 pieces of metal in the upper linkage (above the part where you put your foot) were becoming wedged together and not releasing.
Do I really have to remind you that correlation does not mean causation ? It can be the other way around - the more incidents are reported the more media attention gets drawn to this issue.
Possible, but consider this. Toyotas from all model lines and from multiple years, some just a few months old, some more than 5 years old, suddenly all started failing at roughly the same time. If each vehicle had started failing when it was 6 months old or something like that related to the age of the vehicle, that would be understandable. The fact that vehicles with such a diverse range of ages suddenly all had problems at the same time indicates a very high probability of some sort of outside influence.
iPad is total overkill, Kindle is way way WAY cheaper and does all the same things that they need to do.
You are probably right. The NFL pays their player multi-million dollar contracts, but I'm sure they'd squirm when they saw the $500-700 price tag on the ipad.
On another note, they would need to get some deal with apple to let them side load the playbook though since I'd imagine not many teams would want to submit their playbook for approval to the app store.
I'm pretty sure the developers license will let you load your own unreleased app directly onto your ipad, without having to submit it to apple.
I do lots of traveling, and almost always by car (longest trip was a 3.5 week, 10k mile road trip). I take my GPS with me on every trip, and it almost never even makes it out of its case. I always take a US atlas with me as my primary means of navigation. If I'm going to be doing extensive travel off the main roads, then I also take one of those state atlases that has 100+ pages of maps dedicated to a single state. Otherwise I do a bunch of printouts on google maps of areas I expect to go. When I use the GPS, it's usually just to give me an idea of what sort of services are around. If the next town is 10 miles off the exit, then I might break out the GPS just to see if they have a restaurant listed, or if I'd just be better off waiting for the town 40 miles down the road but right next to the expressway. Only one time have I used a GPS for navigation, and that' because I was on a very confusing group of dirt backroads. I was able to trace my progress for about 20 miles but then there were a few crossroads that weren't on the detailed maps and no signage saying which road was which, so I used the GPS to confirm that I was actually where I thought.
Slashdot Mirror
Why are we wasting pixels on such a poor metaphor
Because, I actually want to have an easy way to empty the recycle bin. It's utilization of disk space wasn't a major concern for many year, but now with the introduction of SSDs, and the fact that huge SSDs are not yet affordable, I find myself running out of space on mine quite often. When I do, I tend to find I've got some large files sitting in the recycle bin.
No, he's not below average. The problem is mostly likely not that he finds the new interface simply difficult to use, but that he probably has a decade or two of experience using the old interface. He's had all that time to learn where each feature was. When each new version came out, the old features were almost always exactly like before, and just a few new menu items and buttons were added each time. Each time he had to learn a few new things, but all of his old knowledge was still relevant. Now suddenly in one version, everything he's spent many years learning has been pulled out from under him, and he's instinctively looking in the wrong places for everything. Habits that are that well ingrained can be incredibly difficult to break.
I've been using the new interface for about 3 years now, and I still instinctively want to look in the wrong (ie: old) locations. What makes it even more difficult is that there are items in the new interface the mislead people accustomed to the old interface. For example, in the old interface of Excel, if you wanted to insert a new row into your spreadsheet, you went to the menu bar and picked Insert -> Rows. With the new interface, you go up to the top, you see a tab on the ribbon named "Insert" and you automatically think "that's where I'm gonna find the option to insert a row". So you click on it and, I'll be damned....you can insert just about everything EXCEPT a row or column.
Well, it's not very realistic (for a number of reasons) to only ban/tax them for people that get their power from coal. However on average for the entire US, an incandescent bulb generates over 3 times as much pollution as a CFL, and almost 5 times as much if you assume the CFL is disposed of properly instead of being dumped into a landfill.
Yes...the incandescent is responsible for over 3 times the mercury emissions (and it is almost 5 times as much if the CFLs are disposed of properly instead of dumped in a landfill)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compact_fluorescent_lamp#Environmental_issues
The tiny bit of mercury in a CFL is nothing compared to the pollution that is released into the atmosphere to generate the extra electricity for incandescent bulbs.
And your using incandescent bulbs increases energy consumption, which drives up the cost of electricity for everyone else.
Uhhhh, do you REALLY think that was an actual photo of this particular raid, and not just some stock photo of a police raid? You really think they planned this raid, then brought in a photographer to do an artsy photo with a lensbaby, and then released that photo to the press?
I know exactly what the problem was. As I said in my post, it was using unix timestamps generated using the old tzdata. It wasn't a terribly complex problem to fix. The point was, it's not necessarily as simply as dropping in the new tzdata and being all set. There could be data that needs tweaking to get working properly, too.
That is indeed a possible reason for the change. Tinkering with time conversion algorithms were in the past also attributed to the economy stimulus it would give the IT sector.
Wonderful. So can we count on the next proposal to be sending someone around to bust out everybody's windows, so that we get an economic stimulus in the window industry? And I think the car tire industry could use a stimulus, so what do you think we could do about that?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
It's an OS patch which you wouldn't even notice, a new tzdata file or similar.
Well, it's not JUST an OS patch. There could be other things that need to be dealt with, depending on what systems you run. For instance, last time they messed with the DST rules here in the US (shifted the start/end dates by a few weeks) we did discover another problem. The calendar software we run had stored future calendar events as unix timestamps, and those timestamps were generated by the old DST rules. Once the new timezone files had been installed, for events that took place between the old & new start/end dates and which were setup before the new timezone files were in place, all the timestamps were off by 1 hour.
Yeah, it wasn't a huge problem for us to deal with, but the point is that there can be more involved than a simple timezone file patch.
Well, if they actually do start forcing low res output, the old joke name of blur-ray will actually finally be appropriate.
I think the possible argument there would be that she typed it up in her driveway, but apparently forgot to post it (I know I do that sort of thing all the time). Then she left home, got into an accident, grabber her phone to call 911, and then sent the previously typed message (either by accidentally hitting the send button or by choosing to hit send rather than cancel) just before placing the 911 call.
I watched the NOVA special on the design of Watson, and one of the features explicitly added was the parsing of other players' wrong answers.
No, that's wasn't what they said in the Nova documentary. You were mistaken, but I made the same mistake as you in the last slashdot story a few days ago. If you rewatch the documentary, they specifically say that now Watson receives the CORRECT answer electronically. The reason we both made that mistake was because of the way the documentary was edited. They say that Watson can't hear the opponent's responses. Then they show the video of Watson repeating a wrong answer. Then they say that Watson will now receive the correct answer electronically. It did sort of suggest they were addressing the problem just demonstrated, but that was just poor editing.
and why is the 80gb faster than the 40gb version of the otherwise identical product?
The way they double the capacity is by using twice as many of the same chips. Since it writes to all chips in parallel, twice as many chips means it can read/write twice as much data in the same time period. You see that in the fact that the write performance spec is exactly double. The reason the read performance isn't double is because it has been known for a while that Intel puts a performance cap on the non-enterprise versions of their SSDs
Yeah, and you are about 3 hours and 22 minutes late in pointing it out to me. We were obviously editing at the same time, but I took longer because 1) I bothered to provide some description besides just a link, and 2) I bothered to check the schedule to see if it was going to be on again (as not everyone likes watching hour long videos at their computer). But yes, you did get it in 3 minutes earlier. Congratulations! You win..........nothing.
Wow, you are right. I think I misunderstood and inferred it incorrectly from the way the video was put together. I just checked again, and they explain that watson can't hear the opponent, and then they give the example of watson repeating the same incorrect answer that was just given. Then they talk about improving it to receive the correct answer electronically, and I think I must have inferred that this was to deal with the problem they just demonstrated.
Thanks for catching that.
Show her the Nova documentary about it (links in posts below). It does a good job of showing just how terrible computers are when it comes to stuff like this, and includes plenty of examples of ways most systems (and even early versions of Watson) fail to interpret questions correctly and just why it's so difficult to do well.
Not totally correct. It actually does do voice recognition, but not for the initial question. In the Nova documentary, they highlighted the fact that one of the initial (amusing) failings was that it would give the same incorrect answer that another player just gave. So they upgraded it to listen to the competitor's answers and take that into account when choosing its own answer.
There was an interesting episode of Nova called "Smartest Machine on Earth" that was pretty interesting. It talked a lot about the challenges they faced, how they addressed them, what adjustments they made along the way, etc. I don't see the episode listed on the schedule for replay any time soon, but you can watch it on the website
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/smartest-machine-on-earth.html
The floor mat issue was that the bottom edge of the pedel was touching the mat and getting stuck. The sticky pedal issue was that 2 pieces of metal in the upper linkage (above the part where you put your foot) were becoming wedged together and not releasing.
Do I really have to remind you that correlation does not mean causation ? It can be the other way around - the more incidents are reported the more media attention gets drawn to this issue.
Possible, but consider this. Toyotas from all model lines and from multiple years, some just a few months old, some more than 5 years old, suddenly all started failing at roughly the same time. If each vehicle had started failing when it was 6 months old or something like that related to the age of the vehicle, that would be understandable. The fact that vehicles with such a diverse range of ages suddenly all had problems at the same time indicates a very high probability of some sort of outside influence.
Kindle, on the other hand, makes total sense.
iPad is total overkill, Kindle is way way WAY cheaper and does all the same things that they need to do.
You are probably right. The NFL pays their player multi-million dollar contracts, but I'm sure they'd squirm when they saw the $500-700 price tag on the ipad.
On another note, they would need to get some deal with apple to let them side load the playbook though since I'd imagine not many teams would want to submit their playbook for approval to the app store.
I'm pretty sure the developers license will let you load your own unreleased app directly onto your ipad, without having to submit it to apple.
There are actually gloves available that will work with the ipad.
I do lots of traveling, and almost always by car (longest trip was a 3.5 week, 10k mile road trip). I take my GPS with me on every trip, and it almost never even makes it out of its case. I always take a US atlas with me as my primary means of navigation. If I'm going to be doing extensive travel off the main roads, then I also take one of those state atlases that has 100+ pages of maps dedicated to a single state. Otherwise I do a bunch of printouts on google maps of areas I expect to go. When I use the GPS, it's usually just to give me an idea of what sort of services are around. If the next town is 10 miles off the exit, then I might break out the GPS just to see if they have a restaurant listed, or if I'd just be better off waiting for the town 40 miles down the road but right next to the expressway. Only one time have I used a GPS for navigation, and that' because I was on a very confusing group of dirt backroads. I was able to trace my progress for about 20 miles but then there were a few crossroads that weren't on the detailed maps and no signage saying which road was which, so I used the GPS to confirm that I was actually where I thought.