Please don't be surprised if I pull out my computer at dinner and begin handling some of my email. I have difficulty hearing when there is noise; at dinner, when people are speaking to each other, I usually cannot hear their words.
Isn't this a symptom of autistic spectrum disorders? I know it's trendy for everyone in the geek world to claim Asperger's these days... But I know that I personally can have trouble filtering signal from noise in crowded environments, and that such environments make me particularly anxious.
I had great success with Google Desktop Search (on windoze) for a while. It would index my mail, files, and web history (if instructed to) - and the best part was hitting one key to get an instant, minimalist search box with auto-preview. From there, you could jump straight to what you were looking for, or open a further page to narrow the search.
Sadly, it doesn't work with Thunderbird 3.0, and Google doesn't appear to care, or even to be supporting it anymore. So now I'm on a hodgepodge of GDS, Windows built-in search, and the sucky T-bird search bar.
I honestly can't believe that nobody has duplicated this Spotlight-esque functionality yet. I realize there are other desktop search options, but none of the ones I've come across have that one-key mini search that goes away as easily as it is called up. For an operation that I'm performing dozens of times daily, that's pretty crucial. It even replaced the file browser for me - much easier to call up the GDS box & type a couple letters than to grab the mouse and drill down into some directory structure - even if I know exactly where I'm going.
No kidding. Back when he took all the site's content offline to "concentrate on fundraising" (can't find the relevant slashdot story right now), I visited the site to try & donate. Not knowing anything at all about what sort of stuff they'd leaked, I was hoping to get a quick sense of it to make sure it wasn't a scam or conspiracy nut-job site. But of course I couldn't, because all the content was offline. I wrote Assange to (politely) suggest that simply hiding everything was perhaps counter-productive to the goal of raising funds, and that he should at least post an explanation or fundraising goal, to let people know how much they needed to keep operating. His response:
"I understand you wish us to save the world, suffer assassinations, work for free and pay for everything out of our children's heritage, forever, but it is just not possible. If we haven't proved our committment thus far we never will."
I still admire the concept, and the dedication. But the dude seems like a total dickcheese. As noted in other posts, that doesn't mean he's not bettering the world. But I think he'd be serving the purpose (of giving a voice to whistleblowers) a lot better by not trying to be a celebrity, and perhaps acting like less of a douche. For one thing, it diverts attention from the actual content, and funnels it towards "Is Julian Assange a Terrorist?" style fluff media. How many mainstream media reports did you see on the actual content of the recently leaked cables? Me neither.
o.k. - attention-grabbing subject line aside... I can't RTFA b/c it's slashdotted, so I don't know exactly what dynamic range we're talking about. But the much hyped Red Epic camera (sequel to the Red One) has full-motion HDR, and is shipping as of this month. Models with this feature range from around $10k to around $40k - so admittedly more prosumer than consumer.
It stores the extra data in a secondary video stream, so that you can tone-map in post. And apparently, it can be dialed up & down, so that you can trade off dynamic range vs. resolution (up to 5k) vs. framerate vs. compression. Pretty sweet.
Clearly, the people in the article have blocked Facebook messages from themselves. I've done this myself, in fact. It's the only way to keep the dozens of warnings I receive every day about how insecure Facebook is from clogging my inbox.
The expected/. reaction to any story about Facebook, already evident in this thread, is along the lines of "Donotwant", "Lame", "Privacy Fail", "When I want to talk to my friends, I pick up the phone", etc.
Two facts I think slashdotters overlook: 1) "regular people" (i.e. everyone else) *love* the epic load of crap pretend socializing that Facebook provides, and care very little about the security of their information. b) there are a lot more of them than there are of us.
Google spends all of its time trying to mine your info (as a byproduct offering some really useful services - unlike Facebook). So they care very much about the "Social Web". Facebook has a half billion people tripping over themselves to cough up their personal info and build the Social Web basically for free. Honestly, if Facebook had a good search engine & email client, a lot of people would probably never go anywhere else. Sounds like a legitimate threat to me - even if not a single one of them can fix their own computer or speak Klingon.
If anything saves us, I think it'll be the fickleness of the mob. Hopefully, someone else will come up with the next Big Dumb Thing with Extra Farmville!, and Facebook will lose its grip the way MySpace did. But I doubt it'll be because 500,000,000 people suddenly wise up and realize they're not "really" socializing.
Wait - you mean in Sweden, defendants can rest assured that any impartiality, unfairness, or political influence on the part of the justice system will be discovered and corrected before they are railroaded into prison and forgotten about?
I'd heard that all the women there are bisexual and made of nachos, but this truly is incredible news. Can I be Swedish? Please?
Industry standard in my industry (visual effects) is 5 ten-hour days. I guess that's a "10/100"? I would give my left nut for every other friday off.
I am curious, though - for folks who do work 8 hour days (and don't have families or whatever) - does the extra two hours at night make that much of a difference? I imagine I'd be just as defeated, and blow the surplus watching t.v., rather than writing a novel, inventing the Finglonger, or building a robot that would win me the love of Milla Jovovich.
Is there any way to mod this one post up so high that it's the only post in the thread?
I'm pissed off that I was suckered in to reading an entire discussion about something that I'd prefer never existed in the first place, and I'd like to spare others that pain.
"Although there was severe media corruption on this drive, DriveSavers engineers were able to successfully recover the majority of the critical data by utilizing our proprietary software and methodology."
I'm sorry, but that was the most content-free load I've read on/. in a while. And no, I'm not new here - I just usually don't RTFA.;-P
BTW, who is to write all this legislation? Certainly not Joe Sixpack. Lawyers write laws for a reason - it's a complicated undertaking, full of technical language which must be written to survive testing in courts.
It could be argued that "legalese" is (and in the larger sense, all functions of government are) so inaccessible to "Joe Sixpack" is the root of Mr. Pack's disinterest in / alienation from the government that is supposed to represent him.
An example: in some areas, there is apparently a law that all leases be written in Plain English. (Don't know the details, but I've run into a few of these leases myself.) I assume they work equally as well as the ones that are thirty pages of gibberish. Which raises the question: Which is more useful, a law that satisfies the pointy-headed few that have law degrees, or one that is understood by the millions of people who have to obey it?
Obviously, this doesn't work in all cases, and I'm not arguing that it should (so don't bother hitting me with extreme counter-examples). I'm just saying that the "people are idiots" argument doesn't imply that "people have no right to understand their government".
Oh - and btw, I agree with you on your last point as well: The problem isn't with representative democracy, it's with human nature. Give a human a rule, and the first thing he'll do is try to work around it. It's how we're built, and probably explains a lot of the great technology we've got lying around all over the place.
Slashdot Mirror
Legally... You mean like this?
Please don't be surprised if I pull out my computer at dinner and
begin handling some of my email. I have difficulty hearing when there
is noise; at dinner, when people are speaking to each other, I usually
cannot hear their words.
Isn't this a symptom of autistic spectrum disorders? I know it's trendy for everyone in the geek world to claim Asperger's these days... But I know that I personally can have trouble filtering signal from noise in crowded environments, and that such environments make me particularly anxious.
I gotta say, with the exception of this (and of course all things fashion-related), Gaddafi and I don't agree on much.
I had great success with Google Desktop Search (on windoze) for a while. It would index my mail, files, and web history (if instructed to) - and the best part was hitting one key to get an instant, minimalist search box with auto-preview. From there, you could jump straight to what you were looking for, or open a further page to narrow the search.
Sadly, it doesn't work with Thunderbird 3.0, and Google doesn't appear to care, or even to be supporting it anymore. So now I'm on a hodgepodge of GDS, Windows built-in search, and the sucky T-bird search bar.
I honestly can't believe that nobody has duplicated this Spotlight-esque functionality yet. I realize there are other desktop search options, but none of the ones I've come across have that one-key mini search that goes away as easily as it is called up. For an operation that I'm performing dozens of times daily, that's pretty crucial. It even replaced the file browser for me - much easier to call up the GDS box & type a couple letters than to grab the mouse and drill down into some directory structure - even if I know exactly where I'm going.
No kidding. Back when he took all the site's content offline to "concentrate on fundraising" (can't find the relevant slashdot story right now), I visited the site to try & donate. Not knowing anything at all about what sort of stuff they'd leaked, I was hoping to get a quick sense of it to make sure it wasn't a scam or conspiracy nut-job site. But of course I couldn't, because all the content was offline. I wrote Assange to (politely) suggest that simply hiding everything was perhaps counter-productive to the goal of raising funds, and that he should at least post an explanation or fundraising goal, to let people know how much they needed to keep operating. His response:
"I understand you wish us to save the world, suffer assassinations, work for free and pay for everything out of our children's heritage,
forever, but it is just not possible. If we haven't proved our committment thus far we never will."
I still admire the concept, and the dedication. But the dude seems like a total dickcheese. As noted in other posts, that doesn't mean he's not bettering the world. But I think he'd be serving the purpose (of giving a voice to whistleblowers) a lot better by not trying to be a celebrity, and perhaps acting like less of a douche. For one thing, it diverts attention from the actual content, and funnels it towards "Is Julian Assange a Terrorist?" style fluff media. How many mainstream media reports did you see on the actual content of the recently leaked cables? Me neither.
o.k. - attention-grabbing subject line aside... I can't RTFA b/c it's slashdotted, so I don't know exactly what dynamic range we're talking about. But the much hyped Red Epic camera (sequel to the Red One) has full-motion HDR, and is shipping as of this month. Models with this feature range from around $10k to around $40k - so admittedly more prosumer than consumer.
It stores the extra data in a secondary video stream, so that you can tone-map in post. And apparently, it can be dialed up & down, so that you can trade off dynamic range vs. resolution (up to 5k) vs. framerate vs. compression. Pretty sweet.
Clearly, the people in the article have blocked Facebook messages from themselves. I've done this myself, in fact. It's the only way to keep the dozens of warnings I receive every day about how insecure Facebook is from clogging my inbox.
Big deal - I do that all the time! Only I don't normally stop to eat in the middle.
The expected /. reaction to any story about Facebook, already evident in this thread, is along the lines of "Donotwant", "Lame", "Privacy Fail", "When I want to talk to my friends, I pick up the phone", etc.
Two facts I think slashdotters overlook: 1) "regular people" (i.e. everyone else) *love* the epic load of crap pretend socializing that Facebook provides, and care very little about the security of their information. b) there are a lot more of them than there are of us.
Google spends all of its time trying to mine your info (as a byproduct offering some really useful services - unlike Facebook). So they care very much about the "Social Web". Facebook has a half billion people tripping over themselves to cough up their personal info and build the Social Web basically for free. Honestly, if Facebook had a good search engine & email client, a lot of people would probably never go anywhere else. Sounds like a legitimate threat to me - even if not a single one of them can fix their own computer or speak Klingon.
If anything saves us, I think it'll be the fickleness of the mob. Hopefully, someone else will come up with the next Big Dumb Thing with Extra Farmville!, and Facebook will lose its grip the way MySpace did. But I doubt it'll be because 500,000,000 people suddenly wise up and realize they're not "really" socializing.
I wonder if that's at all irritating to users living in places like, you know - China.
So the Umbrella Corporation from Japan is conducting experiments to convert human energy into electricity?
Yeah, this will end well.
(Then again - if we end up with a Milla v. Carrie-Ann Moss girl-on-girl scene, who am I to complain?)
Wait - you mean in Sweden, defendants can rest assured that any impartiality, unfairness, or political influence on the part of the justice system will be discovered and corrected before they are railroaded into prison and forgotten about? I'd heard that all the women there are bisexual and made of nachos, but this truly is incredible news. Can I be Swedish? Please?
'hungry' and 'horny' are identical except for length of gesture, speed, and repetition.
That phenomenon is not exclusive to ASL. (Depending on what you're into, of course.)
Does that mean that the screens will be showing porn whenever I'm in the room? Freaking SWEET!
Wait - I don't get you. Are you saying you *wouldn't* welcome them?
What is this "40 hour week" thing you speak of?
Industry standard in my industry (visual effects) is 5 ten-hour days. I guess that's a "10/100"? I would give my left nut for every other friday off.
I am curious, though - for folks who do work 8 hour days (and don't have families or whatever) - does the extra two hours at night make that much of a difference? I imagine I'd be just as defeated, and blow the surplus watching t.v., rather than writing a novel, inventing the Finglonger, or building a robot that would win me the love of Milla Jovovich.
I'm pissed off that I was suckered in to reading an entire discussion about something that I'd prefer never existed in the first place, and I'd like to spare others that pain.
they cannot be president either, yet
There, fixed that for you.
You must be new here.
But not *that* active.
Shoot, man - I'm really sorry. I didn't mean that. I just - I don't know, I've been under a lot of stress lately. Don't hold it against me, o.k.?
Fuck you, you fucking fuck! What the hell kind of idiotic comment was that, anyway? You're dumber than a rock, and a selfish cunt to boot!
I'm sorry, but that was the most content-free load I've read on /. in a while. And no, I'm not new here - I just usually don't RTFA. ;-P
It could be argued that "legalese" is (and in the larger sense, all functions of government are) so inaccessible to "Joe Sixpack" is the root of Mr. Pack's disinterest in / alienation from the government that is supposed to represent him.
An example: in some areas, there is apparently a law that all leases be written in Plain English. (Don't know the details, but I've run into a few of these leases myself.) I assume they work equally as well as the ones that are thirty pages of gibberish. Which raises the question: Which is more useful, a law that satisfies the pointy-headed few that have law degrees, or one that is understood by the millions of people who have to obey it?
Obviously, this doesn't work in all cases, and I'm not arguing that it should (so don't bother hitting me with extreme counter-examples). I'm just saying that the "people are idiots" argument doesn't imply that "people have no right to understand their government".
Oh - and btw, I agree with you on your last point as well: The problem isn't with representative democracy, it's with human nature. Give a human a rule, and the first thing he'll do is try to work around it. It's how we're built, and probably explains a lot of the great technology we've got lying around all over the place.
But he's against Bubble Sort. In my eyes, that completely invalidates him as an option.