eugene_roux: Building one would indeed be a stunning LUG project.
GLLUG did this a few weeks ago. We didn't have a touch screen, so it's a PII-450 running Ubuntu with X and libgtk2-perl and xscreensaver installed, and a CD-RW and a mouse. The "CDburnbox" thing that I wrote for it apparently works, but I don't know for sure how much use it's getting. It's set up in an Internet cafe in East Lansing right now. The cafe owner likes Linux and lets us meet there every week....
Puff of Logic:I'm coming to understand that setting a schedule for writing appears to be a baseline requirement.
Yep. Schedules are usually useful for any kind of endeavor that requires work. Writing requires work if you're writing anything longer than the average Usenet post....
You said that you wrote a book but didn't publish it. Are you still writing, or was it a one-off event?
I wrote the novel while I was in high school. College ate the free time I was using to write. Work and/or places like/. are now eating the free time I could use to write right now. I've still got the novel on CD-R, but rewriting it to remove its gross deficiencies would take a lot of time. *shrug*. The last story I wrote was... almost a year ago, a 22K entirely true account of a weeklong business trip to Chennai. Lost luggage, bizarre "James Bond on a budget"-style adventures, and bonehead street racing with topless girls going 120mph made it much more interesting than an average business trip. (mail me at danSPAMceswithcrows@gSPAMmail.com for full text; remove SPAM.)
Puff of Logic:During that [two years], how did you maintain your focus? I've heard that some authors treat it like a nine-to-five job [...] Others, I'm told, write because it's the only way they can avoid becoming a giggling serial killer
I can't speak for Wil on this, but I'll recount what worked for me: Write every day, starting at the same time and for the same amount of time every time. After a week or so, I got used to "6pm.. 7:15pm = writing time" and managed to get a lot done over 6 months. Final tally was 330 pages, a complete novel, even though it was never published except for several copies run off on an ImageWriter.
Is an editor really needed for someone who wants to self-publish, or is the criticism of friends and family enough?
You need a real editor if you're serious about your work. Friends and family are really useful for bouncing ideas off of, and they provide motivation--I don't know how long it would've taken me to finish my novel if I hadn't had ~20 people bugging me every day for a new chapter. In the end, you need someone who isn't afraid to say, "Chapter 3 is crap, rewrite it!" to you. Friends and family may hold back on the harsh criticism; editors... won't.
Gilious wrote: [A fork of Slashdot?] Already done.. Isn't it called fark.com?
Not even close. Fark is "weird/funny news, photo manipulation contests, political flamewars, and maybe pictures of women without their clothes." Slashdot is "Free software, tech-geek news." Both sites are worthwhile, but Fark's appeal is broader and the average Fark user may be stupider than the average Slashdot user. I need a larger statistical sample of both sites to draw real conclusions, though. Or the lack of +/- moderation on Fark means I see more "How do yuo use HTML tagz?<//b>" posts there, and the posts from far {left,right}-wing nutballs stick around instead of being consigned to (-1,Flamebait).
Both sites have "pay us money, get special privileges", but there's more "status" attached to a TotalFark membership than there is to a Slashdot subscribership AFAICT. Slashdot doesn't have silly filters; you can write "fuck" here if you really want to.
Fark's "all comments in one huge linear lump" UI is annoying, though. Despite Slashcode's failings,/. works reasonably well for threaded and branched discussions, while Fark doesn't even try to do that.
fimbulvetr wrote: [custom soundtracks for Burnout 3] I was thinking more along the lines of "Offspring: Bad Habit"
"Bad Habit" is pretty cliché now, eh? There are other good "drive fast, F the world" songs out there. A very incomplete list:
White Zombie, "Black Sunshine", "Electric Head Pt. 1"
Rob Zombie, "Demon Speeding", "Two-Lane Blacktop"
Monster Magnet, "Negasonic Teenage Warhead", "Theme from Masterburner"
The Doors, "L.A. Woman"
...Burnout 3 sounds like an interesting game, too bad I probably won't be able to afford the game or a system to play it on since the company I theoretically work for owes me ~4 months of back pay and may be engaged in tax fraud.
Chris Jefferson wrote: Unless you are running a server or pirating 24/7, then you may as well turn the computer off. Those things do use electricity you know!
You are aware, are you not, that most hard disk failures occur at spinup? If you have a system that gets power-cycled once every month, and a system that gets power-cycled once every day, the first system will last longer. Thermal stress caused by power-cycling can cause hardware failures after a few years. Turn off the monitor or do "xset dpms force off"; the monitor draws more current than the computer. If the computer isn't doing anything for more than half a second, it should start executing HLT instructions, which cause the processor to draw less power than normal instructions.
Laptops have to be turned off really (and there are lots of laptops where hibernating doesn't work properly in linux).
Er... why do laptops have to be "turned off really"? My Thinkpad A22p can last for 2.5 days in APM suspend-to-RAM, and it resumes from that in under 10 seconds. Last time I power-cycled the laptop was over a month ago, and it's gone 3 months between power cycles.
If ACPI/APM suspend-to-disk doesn't work thanks to brain-damaged BIOSes, there's always swsusp, which takes slightly longer to restore than "normal" suspend-to-disk but requires no ACPI or APM support at all. I've never tried this because suspend-to-RAM is all I need, but YMMV.
rosy1280: Proquest (a database vendor) has something called historical New York Times, Washington Post, and a few other historical newspapers.
Also the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a few months assuming they can get off their butts. All those materials are scanned from microfilm, split up, OCRed, put through some stuff I can't talk about, then shoveled into Proquest's database. You can search for words in a date range and you'll get a page showing all the articles in that range that matched. Click on the article you want, and you'll see the relevant parts of the original scanned images. Relatively nifty.
The main problem is that OCRing the material is less accurate than anybody'd like, especially for papers older than ~1900 (tiny type, type all packed together, terrible original microfilm.) Too much hand correction is necessary. We hope to decrease the time spent on that, but it might take a while....
Please tell me why: I checked Dec 7 1941 but there was no article on Perl Harbor
Now I can't shake this mental image of Japanese Zeroes dropping extremely large regular expressions on the USS Arizona....
dargaud wrote: We'll be taking with us a prototype recycling system designed by the European Space Agency, able to recyle grey waters [...] only thing that passes through unfiltered is alcohol; so [...] the alcohol content of the water will increase over time. I'm looking forward to the showers after a few months of pissing beer!
You probably know this, but other Slashdot folks might not: Ethanol is metabolized to acetaldehyde and then to a bunch of other stuff fairly rapidly. The filter system almost certainly removes those metabolic byproducts. If there's any appreciable ethanol in your piss, you probably need medical attention. OTOH, you could pour some Everclear down the drain and enjoy "showers plus" if you really wanted to.
Lord_Dweomer wrote: I am wondering if instead of using a player that can read divx, if anybody here knows of a cheap solution to wirelessly display your computer screen on your tv
Um. You understand that current consumer-level wireless gear has some pretty strict bandwidth limitations, right? You also understand that TV sets are pretty brain-dead and require RCA, S-video, or (whatever that 75-ohm connector was called) input, right? So, to do all this crap wirelessly, you'd need a way to transfer 30 640x480 frames/second over an 802.11g channel and convert it from (RFB-equivalent) to a form the TV can decode. The available bandwidth in 802.11g isn't really enough, and the RFB->S-video conversion would take specialized chips. A completely wireless magic box is neither practical nor cheap at the moment.
OTOH, you can get video cards with TV-out for about $70. Put one of these in an older machine (900MHz PIII would work just fine), slap a large hard drive or an RTL8139 or an 802.11b card in there, fire up MythTV/mplayer, and you're set. You can get by with 802.11b here because you're transferring encoded video data from network to set-top box, not decoded video data, and a high-quality DiVX is roughly 700M for 60 minutes. That works out to ~210K/second, well within 802.11b's capabilities.
There's a wire running from the box to the TV. Who cares? Normal DVD players/VCRs/cable boxes have assloads of wires. The older machine you use might have a fan in it. Turn the freakin' volume up on the TV or go buy one of those VIA machines that don't need fans. HTH,
Suidae wrote: I had to read this about 4 times before I caught the error. Do people who quickly catch grammer errors read slower, or fixate on every word or something?
Can't speak for everybody, but I catch 80% of spelling/grammar errors in written work while reading at normal speed. I read faster than most people, too. You're probably lucky if you don't notice spelling or grammar errors. I've noticed that any place on the Net that allows the general public to post comments will be riddled with typos and grammar gaffes, because teaching people how to write and proofread just isn't done these days. Oh well, that makes people who can write and proofread that much more valuable!
Syriloth: From what I've heard, this is pretty common [...] Frequently your average Statue of Isis or whatnot on display at a museum is actually just a high-quality cast of the original.
Colin Smith: It's not like 99.9% of the population are going to be able to tell the difference between a decent copy and an original.
Yep, it's widespread and very useful, because then the original can remain with the professionals while the amateurs get something that's 99% as good. I remember going to the British Museum and seeing one room where they had reproductions of Michelangelo's David, Trajan's Column, and 5 or 6 other famous sculptures. I never would've been able to see the originals. I'm not sure how you'd copy paintings though.
cpaluc wrote: Go to a site that has an input box for doing a search (eg. dictionary.com). Right click in the input box and select "Add a keyword for this search...". Then give it a name and a keyword (eg. dic). Now all you have to do is type 'dic anthropomorphic' in the URL box and Firefox will go to dictionary.com and look up the word for you.
Fsck. Me. This could be really useful for a lot of people. Why hasn't this been advertised more? It's not in the Firefox Help for 0.93 (Help->Help Contents, search for keyword 'smart' returns 0 results) even though the feature is there. Oh well, you learn something new every day.
myc_lykaon wrote: If I look up Novelette it links to the definition of Novella. Is this some way of the Hugo staff giving 2 awards for short stories?
Nope. I can't find an exact cite here, but in terms of length, short story < novelette < novella < novel.
or is it a sideways proof that Sci-Fi as a genre is more suited to 20-30 pages of prose and that when it hits the 300-400 page region it is less saleable to the general public?
Er, what? You're reaching, and reaching really hard. Novellas are, in general terms, less saleable than novels or short stories. When was the last time you saw a novella on the shelves of your local neighborhood MegaBookStore? If you want an interesting take on why that is, take a look at the afterword to Stephen King's Different Seasons, a collection of 4 novellas. (FWIW, the best 3 of those 4 were made into movies, and the best 2 of those movies ("The Shawshank Redemption" and "Stand By Me") made arseloads of money and got lots of critical and viewer acclaim.)
3 of the stories mentioned were in a book called "The Best of Science Fiction 2003". I read that, so here are my tiny capsule reviews:
The Cookie Monster, Vernor Vinge:
This is an interesting and technically complex story. It's plausible and well-told, but it really lacks character development IMHO. Guess the competition was thin in the "novella" category or the tech talk swayed the fans.
"Legions in Time", Michael Swanwick:
This one rocked. The main characters were believable, the time travel was done well, the bad guys were really evil, and the resolution was... interesting. Only real faults are that the ending feels a bit too much like a Deus Ex Machina, and Nadine was never really explained. Read this one if you can.
"A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman: Hmm. Gaiman's a good storyteller, but he bit off more than he could chew here. It's difficult to write a good Sherlock Holmes pastiche, it's difficult to write a good H.P. Lovecraft pastiche, and it's even more difficult to write a story that combines elements of both. Plus, if you haven't read much Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or H.P. Lovecraft, you won't get all the references. Gaiman almost made it work.
Seahawk wrote: And if you had read the rest of the article, you would know that this is just because 99% of all we read is lowercase. People can easily be trained to read text in caps as fast as lowercase text--or mirrored text.
Um. There's a lot more variation in lowercase English text than there is in uppercase English text. All uppercase characters are the same height. Lowercase characters can be half height (x,a), 2/3 height (t,i), full height (l,b), and/or have descenders (g,y). The variations make lowercase text more distinct, so it's easier to read. It's apparently easier for OCR engines to pick up on lowercase text as well; I have plenty of examples where Omnipage completely fails to recognize blocks of text in ALL CAPS.
Variations among the glyphs in writing is crucial for quick reading. For example, it's very difficult to read things written in Tengwar very quickly, even if you've had a lot of practice, since most of the letters look so similar. YMMV as always.
aussie_a wrote: Does anyone know of an open source text-editing program that allows you to easily write maths formula? I installed Linux a couple of years back and it came with it, and I think it'd be great if I could find it again (for Windows this time).
LyX has a Windows/Cygwin port. It requires an X server to run, but Cygwin includes an X server for Windows. The backend is LaTeX, so you can do practically any math typesetting you want by editing the raw TeX code if you need to tweak something that LyX can't handle. Try it out and see what you get? LyX is interesting but I've never used it much since my document-writing is almost all in simple HTML or text--all I need is vim with syntax highlighting turned on. HTH,
I had a bit of free time in Sep. 2000, so I spent an entire day tweaking the following dumb animation of a spaceship flying around. Invader, try 5. I had hardly any POVRay skill, the animation was created without any modeling tools at all, and the stupid thing took all day to render on the 400MHz K6-2 I had at the time. And the source file got deleted in an unrelated accident later on. If I didn't have a Real Job, I'd probably spend a lot of time working on POVRay junk. As it is, I just look at the real artists in the POVRay Hall of Fame and think, "Wow. Nifty!"
Space Soldier wrote: English users should not have to spell check. English must get rid of this crappy writing system, and start writing English phonetically using the true sound of the latin alphabet.
Ha ha! Good one. English is spoken over a huge area and regional pronunciation differences would make phonetic script written by someone from Aberdeen totally incomprehensible to someone who lives in Texas. (This topic is covered in every Linguistics 101 course. Linguistics is fascinating, so pick up a textbook if you want to learn more.) George Bernard Shaw and the editors of the Chicago Tribune from ~1900-1940 tried to reform English spelling by writing more phonetically; they all failed miserably.
Also, there are many different and mutually incomprehensible languages spoken in China, yet they all use the same writing system. This means that if a person from Guangzhou (in the south) wants to talk with a person from Changchun (in the north), they'll use the words they have in common but draw characters in the air or on paper to get around the words and grammatical constructs they don't have in common. Seems to work OK for them. English isn't quite like that yet, but I can tell you it's a lot easier for a Midwest-accented American to communicate with a Mumbai (Bombay) English speaker with text than it is with voice.
And are you going to add a new letter to the English alphabet for the schwa? That'll break every existing installed system and every English-writing person's brains... not a really smart thing to do.
nsayer wrote: This is why the RNC can play "Born in the USA" at their convention
Eh? Why would the Republicans want to play that song? Listen to the lyrics; it isn't a patriotic anthem but a lament that that things are f***ed up for poor folks in the USA.
and all [John] Melloncamp can do about it is sulk.
...'cause they didn't pick "Jack and Diane" instead? (
Bruce Springsteen wrote "Born in the USA", not John Melloncamp.)
Similar thing being done with British hero...
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In 1986 or so, Alan Moore invented a character called John Constantine for his "Swamp Thing" comic. John later got his own comic book, "John Constantine: Hellblazer". Constantine is a chain-smoking, sarcastic, bastardly magician from Liverpool. Think what'd happen if Harry Potter had been a pissed-off British punk teenager in the 1970s and you've got a good first approximation.
Of course, a movie called "Constantine" that's loosely based on this character has a September release in the USA. The character of Constantine has been changed; now he's from California and Keanu Reeves is playing him. Ack. Find out more at a partially official page where they say Alan Moore doesn't like what they've done and doesn't want to be credited. Shrug.
Goo.cc wrote: One of the things that I have been wanting is a console based word processor [...] Editors like Vim do line wraps but they often have problems if you go back and add words to a previously wrapped line.
You'll have to be more specific about the "problems" you refer to in vim. I think you meant, "When I add words to a wrapped line in vim, I end up with lines that don't wrap at 72 chars. Is there a way to make those lines wrap at 72 (or 60, or 120, or...) chars?" The answer is "yes". ESC, v, move cursor over area you wish to re-wrap until it's all highlighted, g, q. This re-wraps all the lines you've highlighted so that all of them wrap at or before textwidth. I forget where I learned this, but it's extremely useful and one of the many reasons why I like vim.
vena wrote: i was also wondering if the concise directory names had anything to do with the smaller hard drives of the past.
No. Directory names (and common commands like ls and rm) were traditionally short on Unix because comm speeds were very slow in the 70's and 80's. When your terminal's running at 110 baud, you don't want to type any more than you have to. Things are a lot faster now, fewer people use the command line, and tab-completion helps those who do--so we could theoretically have/User/Binaries/Games/ instead of/usr/bin/games . The old pathnames persist mostly for tradition's sake and backwards combatability.
Dwonis wrote: Hey, did you ever manage to get Xvideo to work with video-out ('TV-out')on that card? I can get video-out working, but the Xv overlay doesn't seem to get applied to the video output.
Most video cards have exactly 1 video overlay buffer. This video overlay buffer is attached to the primary display device by default. You can force the video overlay buffer to the second display device with a video-card-specific option in your XF86Config. This option is
Option "OverlayOnCRTC2" "true"
for Radeon video cards (man radeon for more info). You can't have the video overlay buffer on 2 display devices at once--sorry. Use "mplayer -vo x11" if you need to play the same movie on 2 display devices at once.
Re:87 octane? Isn't that little?
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vico writes: 87? In sweden our cars runs on 95,96 or 98 octane gas
ISTR that there are a couple of different methods for measuring octane, and they give different results. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Sweden uses one method and the USA uses another.
octane defines how well the fuel can take high temperatures without selfigniting. 98 octane is only here in high performance cars, so I presume higher is better. Does cars that run on 87 octane fuel really suck then?
High octane is not always better, but gas companies would like you to believe that because high-octane gas costs more. High-compression engines found in many performance cars require slower-burning gas to prevent knocking. Low-compression engines can use faster-burning gas, which is cheaper. It's all about engine design. My car (2003 Hyundai Tiburon V6, 170HP, 3000lbs curb weight) takes 87-octane gas, and it has more than enough power for everyday driving. Your Mileage May Vary, as always.
Slashdot Mirror
GLLUG did this a few weeks ago. We didn't have a touch screen, so it's a PII-450 running Ubuntu with X and libgtk2-perl and xscreensaver installed, and a CD-RW and a mouse. The "CDburnbox" thing that I wrote for it apparently works, but I don't know for sure how much use it's getting. It's set up in an Internet cafe in East Lansing right now. The cafe owner likes Linux and lets us meet there every week....
Yep. Schedules are usually useful for any kind of endeavor that requires work. Writing requires work if you're writing anything longer than the average Usenet post....
You said that you wrote a book but didn't publish it. Are you still writing, or was it a one-off event?
I wrote the novel while I was in high school. College ate the free time I was using to write. Work and/or places like /. are now eating the free time I could use to write right now. I've still got the novel on CD-R, but rewriting it to remove its gross deficiencies would take a lot of time. *shrug*. The last story I wrote was... almost a year ago, a 22K entirely true account of a weeklong business trip to Chennai. Lost luggage, bizarre "James Bond on a budget"-style adventures, and bonehead street racing with topless girls going 120mph made it much more interesting than an average business trip. (mail me at danSPAMceswithcrows@gSPAMmail.com for full text; remove SPAM.)
I can't speak for Wil on this, but I'll recount what worked for me: Write every day, starting at the same time and for the same amount of time every time. After a week or so, I got used to "6pm .. 7:15pm = writing time" and managed to get a lot done over 6 months. Final tally was 330 pages, a complete novel, even though it was never published except for several copies run off on an ImageWriter.
Is an editor really needed for someone who wants to self-publish, or is the criticism of friends and family enough?
You need a real editor if you're serious about your work. Friends and family are really useful for bouncing ideas off of, and they provide motivation--I don't know how long it would've taken me to finish my novel if I hadn't had ~20 people bugging me every day for a new chapter. In the end, you need someone who isn't afraid to say, "Chapter 3 is crap, rewrite it!" to you. Friends and family may hold back on the harsh criticism; editors... won't.
Not even close. Fark is "weird/funny news, photo manipulation contests, political flamewars, and maybe pictures of women without their clothes." Slashdot is "Free software, tech-geek news." Both sites are worthwhile, but Fark's appeal is broader and the average Fark user may be stupider than the average Slashdot user. I need a larger statistical sample of both sites to draw real conclusions, though. Or the lack of +/- moderation on Fark means I see more "How do yuo use HTML tagz?<//b>" posts there, and the posts from far {left,right}-wing nutballs stick around instead of being consigned to (-1,Flamebait).
Both sites have "pay us money, get special privileges", but there's more "status" attached to a TotalFark membership than there is to a Slashdot subscribership AFAICT. Slashdot doesn't have silly filters; you can write "fuck" here if you really want to.
Fark's "all comments in one huge linear lump" UI is annoying, though. Despite Slashcode's failings, /. works reasonably well for threaded and branched discussions, while Fark doesn't even try to do that.
"Bad Habit" is pretty cliché now, eh? There are other good "drive fast, F the world" songs out there. A very incomplete list:
White Zombie, "Black Sunshine", "Electric Head Pt. 1"
Rob Zombie, "Demon Speeding", "Two-Lane Blacktop"
Monster Magnet, "Negasonic Teenage Warhead", "Theme from Masterburner"
The Doors, "L.A. Woman"
You are aware, are you not, that most hard disk failures occur at spinup? If you have a system that gets power-cycled once every month, and a system that gets power-cycled once every day, the first system will last longer. Thermal stress caused by power-cycling can cause hardware failures after a few years. Turn off the monitor or do "xset dpms force off"; the monitor draws more current than the computer. If the computer isn't doing anything for more than half a second, it should start executing HLT instructions, which cause the processor to draw less power than normal instructions.
Laptops have to be turned off really (and there are lots of laptops where hibernating doesn't work properly in linux).
Er... why do laptops have to be "turned off really"? My Thinkpad A22p can last for 2.5 days in APM suspend-to-RAM, and it resumes from that in under 10 seconds. Last time I power-cycled the laptop was over a month ago, and it's gone 3 months between power cycles.
If ACPI/APM suspend-to-disk doesn't work thanks to brain-damaged BIOSes, there's always swsusp, which takes slightly longer to restore than "normal" suspend-to-disk but requires no ACPI or APM support at all. I've never tried this because suspend-to-RAM is all I need, but YMMV.
Also the Christian Science Monitor and the Wall Street Journal. Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, and Atlanta Journal-Constitution in a few months assuming they can get off their butts. All those materials are scanned from microfilm, split up, OCRed, put through some stuff I can't talk about, then shoveled into Proquest's database. You can search for words in a date range and you'll get a page showing all the articles in that range that matched. Click on the article you want, and you'll see the relevant parts of the original scanned images. Relatively nifty.
The main problem is that OCRing the material is less accurate than anybody'd like, especially for papers older than ~1900 (tiny type, type all packed together, terrible original microfilm.) Too much hand correction is necessary. We hope to decrease the time spent on that, but it might take a while....
Please tell me why: I checked Dec 7 1941 but there was no article on Perl Harbor Now I can't shake this mental image of Japanese Zeroes dropping extremely large regular expressions on the USS Arizona....
You probably know this, but other Slashdot folks might not: Ethanol is metabolized to acetaldehyde and then to a bunch of other stuff fairly rapidly. The filter system almost certainly removes those metabolic byproducts. If there's any appreciable ethanol in your piss, you probably need medical attention. OTOH, you could pour some Everclear down the drain and enjoy "showers plus" if you really wanted to.
Um. You understand that current consumer-level wireless gear has some pretty strict bandwidth limitations, right? You also understand that TV sets are pretty brain-dead and require RCA, S-video, or (whatever that 75-ohm connector was called) input, right? So, to do all this crap wirelessly, you'd need a way to transfer 30 640x480 frames/second over an 802.11g channel and convert it from (RFB-equivalent) to a form the TV can decode. The available bandwidth in 802.11g isn't really enough, and the RFB->S-video conversion would take specialized chips. A completely wireless magic box is neither practical nor cheap at the moment.
OTOH, you can get video cards with TV-out for about $70. Put one of these in an older machine (900MHz PIII would work just fine), slap a large hard drive or an RTL8139 or an 802.11b card in there, fire up MythTV/mplayer, and you're set. You can get by with 802.11b here because you're transferring encoded video data from network to set-top box, not decoded video data, and a high-quality DiVX is roughly 700M for 60 minutes. That works out to ~210K/second, well within 802.11b's capabilities.
There's a wire running from the box to the TV. Who cares? Normal DVD players/VCRs/cable boxes have assloads of wires. The older machine you use might have a fan in it. Turn the freakin' volume up on the TV or go buy one of those VIA machines that don't need fans. HTH,
Suidae wrote: I had to read this about 4 times before I caught the error. Do people who quickly catch grammer errors read slower, or fixate on every word or something?
Can't speak for everybody, but I catch 80% of spelling/grammar errors in written work while reading at normal speed. I read faster than most people, too. You're probably lucky if you don't notice spelling or grammar errors. I've noticed that any place on the Net that allows the general public to post comments will be riddled with typos and grammar gaffes, because teaching people how to write and proofread just isn't done these days. Oh well, that makes people who can write and proofread that much more valuable!
Colin Smith: It's not like 99.9% of the population are going to be able to tell the difference between a decent copy and an original.
Yep, it's widespread and very useful, because then the original can remain with the professionals while the amateurs get something that's 99% as good. I remember going to the British Museum and seeing one room where they had reproductions of Michelangelo's David, Trajan's Column, and 5 or 6 other famous sculptures. I never would've been able to see the originals. I'm not sure how you'd copy paintings though.
Fsck. Me. This could be really useful for a lot of people. Why hasn't this been advertised more? It's not in the Firefox Help for 0.93 (Help->Help Contents, search for keyword 'smart' returns 0 results) even though the feature is there. Oh well, you learn something new every day.
Nope. I can't find an exact cite here, but in terms of length, short story < novelette < novella < novel.
or is it a sideways proof that Sci-Fi as a genre is more suited to 20-30 pages of prose and that when it hits the 300-400 page region it is less saleable to the general public?
Er, what? You're reaching, and reaching really hard. Novellas are, in general terms, less saleable than novels or short stories. When was the last time you saw a novella on the shelves of your local neighborhood MegaBookStore? If you want an interesting take on why that is, take a look at the afterword to Stephen King's Different Seasons, a collection of 4 novellas. (FWIW, the best 3 of those 4 were made into movies, and the best 2 of those movies ("The Shawshank Redemption" and "Stand By Me") made arseloads of money and got lots of critical and viewer acclaim.)
The Cookie Monster, Vernor Vinge: This is an interesting and technically complex story. It's plausible and well-told, but it really lacks character development IMHO. Guess the competition was thin in the "novella" category or the tech talk swayed the fans.
"Legions in Time", Michael Swanwick: This one rocked. The main characters were believable, the time travel was done well, the bad guys were really evil, and the resolution was... interesting. Only real faults are that the ending feels a bit too much like a Deus Ex Machina, and Nadine was never really explained. Read this one if you can.
"A Study in Emerald", Neil Gaiman: Hmm. Gaiman's a good storyteller, but he bit off more than he could chew here. It's difficult to write a good Sherlock Holmes pastiche, it's difficult to write a good H.P. Lovecraft pastiche, and it's even more difficult to write a story that combines elements of both. Plus, if you haven't read much Sir Arthur Conan Doyle or H.P. Lovecraft, you won't get all the references. Gaiman almost made it work.
Um. There's a lot more variation in lowercase English text than there is in uppercase English text. All uppercase characters are the same height. Lowercase characters can be half height (x,a), 2/3 height (t,i), full height (l,b), and/or have descenders (g,y). The variations make lowercase text more distinct, so it's easier to read. It's apparently easier for OCR engines to pick up on lowercase text as well; I have plenty of examples where Omnipage completely fails to recognize blocks of text in ALL CAPS.
Variations among the glyphs in writing is crucial for quick reading. For example, it's very difficult to read things written in Tengwar very quickly, even if you've had a lot of practice, since most of the letters look so similar. YMMV as always.
LyX has a Windows/Cygwin port. It requires an X server to run, but Cygwin includes an X server for Windows. The backend is LaTeX, so you can do practically any math typesetting you want by editing the raw TeX code if you need to tweak something that LyX can't handle. Try it out and see what you get? LyX is interesting but I've never used it much since my document-writing is almost all in simple HTML or text--all I need is vim with syntax highlighting turned on. HTH,
I had a bit of free time in Sep. 2000, so I spent an entire day tweaking the following dumb animation of a spaceship flying around. Invader, try 5. I had hardly any POVRay skill, the animation was created without any modeling tools at all, and the stupid thing took all day to render on the 400MHz K6-2 I had at the time. And the source file got deleted in an unrelated accident later on. If I didn't have a Real Job, I'd probably spend a lot of time working on POVRay junk. As it is, I just look at the real artists in the POVRay Hall of Fame and think, "Wow. Nifty!"
Ha ha! Good one. English is spoken over a huge area and regional pronunciation differences would make phonetic script written by someone from Aberdeen totally incomprehensible to someone who lives in Texas. (This topic is covered in every Linguistics 101 course. Linguistics is fascinating, so pick up a textbook if you want to learn more.) George Bernard Shaw and the editors of the Chicago Tribune from ~1900-1940 tried to reform English spelling by writing more phonetically; they all failed miserably.
Also, there are many different and mutually incomprehensible languages spoken in China, yet they all use the same writing system. This means that if a person from Guangzhou (in the south) wants to talk with a person from Changchun (in the north), they'll use the words they have in common but draw characters in the air or on paper to get around the words and grammatical constructs they don't have in common. Seems to work OK for them. English isn't quite like that yet, but I can tell you it's a lot easier for a Midwest-accented American to communicate with a Mumbai (Bombay) English speaker with text than it is with voice.
And are you going to add a new letter to the English alphabet for the schwa? That'll break every existing installed system and every English-writing person's brains... not a really smart thing to do.
Eh? Why would the Republicans want to play that song? Listen to the lyrics; it isn't a patriotic anthem but a lament that that things are f***ed up for poor folks in the USA.
and all [John] Melloncamp can do about it is sulk.
Of course, a movie called "Constantine" that's loosely based on this character has a September release in the USA. The character of Constantine has been changed; now he's from California and Keanu Reeves is playing him. Ack. Find out more at a partially official page where they say Alan Moore doesn't like what they've done and doesn't want to be credited. Shrug.
You'll have to be more specific about the "problems" you refer to in vim. I think you meant, "When I add words to a wrapped line in vim, I end up with lines that don't wrap at 72 chars. Is there a way to make those lines wrap at 72 (or 60, or 120, or...) chars?" The answer is "yes". ESC, v, move cursor over area you wish to re-wrap until it's all highlighted, g, q. This re-wraps all the lines you've highlighted so that all of them wrap at or before textwidth. I forget where I learned this, but it's extremely useful and one of the many reasons why I like vim.
No. Directory names (and common commands like ls and rm) were traditionally short on Unix because comm speeds were very slow in the 70's and 80's. When your terminal's running at 110 baud, you don't want to type any more than you have to. Things are a lot faster now, fewer people use the command line, and tab-completion helps those who do--so we could theoretically have /User/Binaries/Games/ instead of /usr/bin/games . The old pathnames persist mostly for tradition's sake and backwards combatability.
Most video cards have exactly 1 video overlay buffer. This video overlay buffer is attached to the primary display device by default. You can force the video overlay buffer to the second display device with a video-card-specific option in your XF86Config. This option is
for Radeon video cards (man radeon for more info). You can't have the video overlay buffer on 2 display devices at once--sorry. Use "mplayer -vo x11" if you need to play the same movie on 2 display devices at once.87? In sweden our cars runs on 95,96 or 98 octane gas
ISTR that there are a couple of different methods for measuring octane, and they give different results. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that Sweden uses one method and the USA uses another.
octane defines how well the fuel can take high temperatures without selfigniting. 98 octane is only here in high performance cars, so I presume higher is better. Does cars that run on 87 octane fuel really suck then?
High octane is not always better, but gas companies would like you to believe that because high-octane gas costs more. High-compression engines found in many performance cars require slower-burning gas to prevent knocking. Low-compression engines can use faster-burning gas, which is cheaper. It's all about engine design. My car (2003 Hyundai Tiburon V6, 170HP, 3000lbs curb weight) takes 87-octane gas, and it has more than enough power for everyday driving. Your Mileage May Vary, as always.