Decision to make an extenal button (that is easily pressed by mistake) start the per-kilobyte billing? Your call on that. I know what I think.
And you're right. I had a SE W880. That little button on the left, second from the top, took you online. There was no way to disable it, even if the phone's other special buttons were programmable.
This is a small phone with small buttons, and the raised Internet button is between 'OK' and 'Back'. I accidentally pressed that button constantly, if this was not intentional it was a usability error of epic proportions. What's more, if you pressed the button again with the home page open, it would *reload*. Yes, seriously. Sony Ericsson wouldn't do anything like that by mistake, and as the handset manufacturers collaborate closely with the service providers, it's very probable that they got a kickback for it.
I finally found that you can hack (yes, it was not trivial) the browser's home page url to point to a local image. The issue was still an annoyance, but no longer a costly one.
So, if you don't agree to the contract, you can keep browsing as it is online for everyone to access, or does it mean that you aren't allowed to keep viewing the site unless you agree to abide by the terms they place on the website (purely from a law point of view)?
Unfortunately I get only 403 errors. I'd love for them to get my ip address and come after me. Norwegian courts wouldn't be amused with people suing a user for accessing freely available web pages, a court-ordered fine might very well be in order.
I believe that "North Country Gazette" has been misguided in this case by some consultant who is not worth his salt, but I'll say this anyway: If you publish your material freely accessible on a website listening on www:80, don't expect to successfully prosecute anyone accessing it.
As for the "contract": If I made a web page saying "Anyone who views this web page legally owes me 100 USD" I think it would be difficult to enforce it in a court of law.
I am totally cool with them having the technical ability as long as they don't actually use the ability, except in a case where it can only benefit me.
Amazon did this without user consent. It's impossible to argue that it was a benefit to the consumer in this case.
I'm very much opposed to buying a device where the manufacturer can alter my library at will. It's mine, dammit. If I want to delete anything from my Reader I'll do it myself. Total remote control also makes them able to do all sorts of obnoxious stuff later on like injecting promotional material into my library. Again, no thanks.
My posts aren't supposed to be public. They are supposed to private, just between me and my 5,000 closest friends.
In Norway there recently was a case about whether it's OK for the media to quote from Facebook postings on a closed profile. The PFU (Norwegian media regulatory commission) concluded that it was fine. Since the guy had 2700 friends, several journalists amongst them, it constituted a public expression.
Another service provided by publishers that can be important is book design. It takes some expertise and talent to make a book attractive and readable. A good designer can make a noticeable improvement in the work of a decent writer, but most important, he or she can prevent the utter disaster that a fair percentage of authors will produce.
Part of my job description is doing layout for books, I work at a small academic publishing house. Your post is spot on, but there is a shortcut that's available for most people: Get a decent template with defined styles and proper layout for all elements of your book. Apply the styles slavishly to every character of your book. If you're going for print you should get someone like me to go through your file before printing (as you point out), but if you've used a template I can do this in as little as an hour, it doesn't need to be expensive.
As other posts mention you'll also need an editor, or at least a proofreader. It's incredible how you can stare yourself blind at your own text and the errors it contains, while even a friend with reasonably good reading comprehension can improve your text immensely.
Thanks for these! I'll send them along to some friends of mine who, while they're not very religious, don't agree with me that God, if he exists, must be a particularly evil bastard.
In short, you're talking about two different sets of people who both get called "chiropractors."
Exactly. My brother got his degree at the University of Southern Denmark, where it is called Clinical Biomechanics. They educate physicians as well, and the three first years are almost identical, except for that the biomechanics students take additional courses in anatomy and practical treatment. After three years you can in fact switch to the MD education if there are vacancies. The classical delutions and philosophy of chiropractics is not touched upon *at all*.
When the soon to be MDs start focusing on diagnostics the biomechanics students continue with anatomy and practical treatment. In fact a modernly educated "chiropractor" knows a lot more about anatomy than the vast majority of MDs. He also knows where his knowledge ends, and a physician is needed. In short, a non-quack chiropractor is "only" an extremely competent physical therapist.
The results my brother achieves might seem like magic in some cases, but they stem from a hard won and insanely detailed knowledge of how your joints, muscles and tendons interact, and how to manipulate them to rectify physical problems and physical problems only.
...and now something to mess with your voice so that The Man cannot listen in too!
Hate to break it to you man, but they've probably done that to you for a long time already. Parabolic mikes are getting better, if not very inconspicuous:)
If you see someone carrying a 1m parabolic reflector aimed at you from a distance of 50m, better hope you didn't give them too much info already.
I suppose this could be used to record an entire game and then go back and track what each player was saying during the game based on their positions on the court.
It can. FTFA:
Audio from all microphones is stored in separate channels, so you can even go back and listen in on any sounds later.
I don't know how they record and store 325 (or 315, 345 - whatever) channels of audio, but their equipment can process stored audio as well as the live feed.
"can pick out the pop of a bubblegum bubble in the middle of a basketball game" whatever that means.
If you'd STFVideo in the article you'd know what it means. You should, the video illustrates the filtering effect well. Assuming that it's not been "improved" in any way it's really quite impressive.
Absolutely not! Space is just 100 km up while earth-based locations can be 20,000 km apart.
Considering that Earth has a diameter of about 12750km, I'd highly doubt that.
<pedant>The circumference of the Earth is between 40,075.16 km (equatorial) and 40,008.00 km (meridional) according to Wikipedia. It is possible that the shortest surface path between two points on Earth is more than 20 000 km:) I'll guess that for any given point on the surface there exists an area which is more than 20 000 km distant.
Finding two such points that you'd actually want to travel between is left as an exercise for the reader.
So, in how many words do I have to add these characters because the layout software won't do it for me?
We use Indesign at our publishing company, its hyphenation is usually quite good. It *will* miss in a few words for each book, especially in other languages than English, in those cases soft hyphens are very practical. It's OK, native English speakers tend to forget that we use other languages in most of the world:)
Software should keep track of hyphenation positions the same way it keeps track of other formatting positions.
Yes, a good hyphenation dictionary for every language would be nice. Along with special characters in the character set that indicate which language we are currently using (quotes, book titles and so on in a separate language from the main text is common in many settings).
Oh wait, that would never work well, it'd complicate the character set, increase application sizes by orders of magnitude in many cases, and we *don't* have good hyphenation dictionary for a great many languages.
In browsers it might be superfluous as you have no idea which words would be broken and needs a hyphen, in many cases you'd be better off dispensing with hyphenation altogether for readability. But for text in fixed formats it seems to me that the soft hyphen is a good solution to this particular problem after all. Part of my job description is laying out books, and the soft hyphen is an elegant solution. Once in a while you need it even with the very best DTP software.
Good god are their business offerings ever horrible. We went out of our way to retire any and all Dell hardware with *extreme* prejudice.
I agree with you about their tiny, cheap "secretary" and home boxes. They're metaphorically a pain in the ass. When it comes to their workstation miditowers, we have three at work, two of which we've had for four years. They are rock solid, powerful, and the cases are among the best I've seen for upgrading.
They are designed for very easy tool-free access to every component, and there is no "semi-PCIe" custom slots or any of that bullshit, everything is standard. Would buy again. We're situated in Norway though, Dell might be offering different machines here compared to the US market.
Dell is still shipping PCs with Ubuntu preloaded. You can find them here [dell.com].
I must try this "Instant Messenging" once... Who proofread that list? I'm partly kidding, it's nice that they offer Ubuntu. But even I could spot several additional typos/bad grammar on the Ubuntu page. This indicates that Dell doesn't put much effort into that section, typos are very rare in their other communication.
I'm a pretty IT-savvy guy, but WHAT IS that bloody character?
Say you're laying out a book. You have the word Sauerkraut at a line wrap, but it is broken into Sauerk-raut because your layout software don't know where to break it. You then put in a soft hyphen between r and k, this indicates to your software that this word should be broken there. It turns into Sauer-kraut which is correct.
Later you get angry with the Sauerkraut and call it "bloody Sauerkraut". Now the whole word will be at the next line, and the soft hyphen won't show because your software doesn't need to break the word. Thus you can insert these freely without fretting about words containing a hyphen later on, they'll only be rendered when used as a hint.
You hear MOB, you get out a floatie gun or two and shoot it off in the person's general direction.
We *always* had three lookouts on duty, including an aft lookout. Of course their instructions was to trow a lifebuoy with an automatic homing light if someone went for a swim. You're right though, they could probably get closer with something like this, especially when we're steaming at 27 knots:)
If you can get it close enough to the victim so they can swim to it and get out of the cold water
Irrelevant to your point and a minor nitpick, but you don't get clear of the cold water... you stay afloat without exhausting yourself. Without a flotation device in rough seas and freezing water you'll not die of exposure, you'll drown when your muscles stop working (probably less than 15 minutes at best, depending on your clothing). If you're not exhausting yourself you might survive more than 45 minutes in water at 0 degrees C.
There's a nice sensitivity rocker button to turn up or down the mouse sensitivity...
Ok, that does it, I'm getting one:) Too many games doesn't allow me to set the sens *exactly* how I want it, or have ridiculous modifications to sensitivity when you switch to scope. This seems to do away with that problem.
That, and that silver wheel just above the thumb? That's a control, it rotates left/right. I have NO idea what to do with it.
As a casual gamer I might find it convenient for lean if that's possible. In my usual setup (tfgh) I need to move one of my left hand fingers to do that.
Hydraulic davits, but they had some kind of clutch and brakes for speedy descent. Our freeboard was about 11 meters, still the descent was *very* quick with a good winch operator, and we launched at speed if necessary. It helped that our "dinghy" was one of these jet-propulsed devil-may-care babies. I called it a dinghy for lack of a better word, its speed and maneuverability is unbelievable even in rough seas (weight is 3000 Kg, not pounds as in the google translation. Why the heck do they translate *only* the unit Kg to pounds anyway?).
And of course we had to be good at it, even four minutes is a very long time indeed if you're immersed in seawater at -1 degrees C:)
I'll bite: Why did the office members use their mice with their left hands?
They might have a peripheral such as a production scanner on the right hand side. I was in that situation, and I quickly learned flipping the book with my right hand and cropping the scanned image with my left.
I'm very close to ambidextrous and don't really care which side the mouse is on or whether the buttons are switched, I just adapt as needed. It's handy when you're the go-to-guy for all kinds of issues with workstations. A colleague of mine absolutely can't do it, I have no idea if this can be learned more or less easily by different people, or what the mechanisms behind it could be.
I was sonar operator on a frigate when in the navy. We sonar guys had a secondary role as crew of the dinghy. In a MOB situation we would get into survival suits and launch immediately, while the ship turned and cut engines after doing 180 degrees, ending up in roughly the same area as the man went overboard. Our target time was four minutes from MOB alarm until the man was safely aboard the dinghy. In realistic unannounced exercises we usually beat that time by a few seconds.
We didn't have a chopper, but we were told that most ships would follow this procedure anyway, simply because more eyeballs is better if the unlucky man isn't found immediately and a search is necessary. In addition the return is shorter for the dinghy, which is good when you have a freezing crew member on board.
On a side note a buddy of mine was stationed on a submarine. A popular prank whenever they got fresh crew on board was to sound a MOB alarm, then command one of the noobs to don a diving suit and exit via a torpedo tube to search for the victim. They got every reaction from "Stop shitting with me" to frantic fumbling with diving suits and tube doors:)
Slashdot Mirror
Decision to make an extenal button (that is easily pressed by mistake) start the per-kilobyte billing? Your call on that. I know what I think.
And you're right. I had a SE W880. That little button on the left, second from the top, took you online. There was no way to disable it, even if the phone's other special buttons were programmable.
This is a small phone with small buttons, and the raised Internet button is between 'OK' and 'Back'. I accidentally pressed that button constantly, if this was not intentional it was a usability error of epic proportions. What's more, if you pressed the button again with the home page open, it would *reload*. Yes, seriously. Sony Ericsson wouldn't do anything like that by mistake, and as the handset manufacturers collaborate closely with the service providers, it's very probable that they got a kickback for it.
I finally found that you can hack (yes, it was not trivial) the browser's home page url to point to a local image. The issue was still an annoyance, but no longer a costly one.
I hope that you find my grammar pedantry helpful.
It's very helpful, small issues like these are difficult to get right. Thanks a lot for your effort!
So, if you don't agree to the contract, you can keep browsing as it is online for everyone to access, or does it mean that you aren't allowed to keep viewing the site unless you agree to abide by the terms they place on the website (purely from a law point of view)?
Unfortunately I get only 403 errors. I'd love for them to get my ip address and come after me. Norwegian courts wouldn't be amused with people suing a user for accessing freely available web pages, a court-ordered fine might very well be in order.
I believe that "North Country Gazette" has been misguided in this case by some consultant who is not worth his salt, but I'll say this anyway: If you publish your material freely accessible on a website listening on www:80, don't expect to successfully prosecute anyone accessing it.
As for the "contract": If I made a web page saying "Anyone who views this web page legally owes me 100 USD" I think it would be difficult to enforce it in a court of law.
I am totally cool with them having the technical ability as long as they don't actually use the ability, except in a case where it can only benefit me.
Amazon did this without user consent. It's impossible to argue that it was a benefit to the consumer in this case.
I'm very much opposed to buying a device where the manufacturer can alter my library at will. It's mine, dammit. If I want to delete anything from my Reader I'll do it myself. Total remote control also makes them able to do all sorts of obnoxious stuff later on like injecting promotional material into my library. Again, no thanks.
My posts aren't supposed to be public. They are supposed to private, just between me and my 5,000 closest friends.
In Norway there recently was a case about whether it's OK for the media to quote from Facebook postings on a closed profile. The PFU (Norwegian media regulatory commission) concluded that it was fine. Since the guy had 2700 friends, several journalists amongst them, it constituted a public expression.
Here is a somewhat strange translation.
Another service provided by publishers that can be important is book design. It takes some expertise and talent to make a book attractive and readable. A good designer can make a noticeable improvement in the work of a decent writer, but most important, he or she can prevent the utter disaster that a fair percentage of authors will produce.
Part of my job description is doing layout for books, I work at a small academic publishing house. Your post is spot on, but there is a shortcut that's available for most people: Get a decent template with defined styles and proper layout for all elements of your book. Apply the styles slavishly to every character of your book. If you're going for print you should get someone like me to go through your file before printing (as you point out), but if you've used a template I can do this in as little as an hour, it doesn't need to be expensive.
As other posts mention you'll also need an editor, or at least a proofreader. It's incredible how you can stare yourself blind at your own text and the errors it contains, while even a friend with reasonably good reading comprehension can improve your text immensely.
what's left again?
A revenue most companies can only dream about. And it'll be quite significant still for a long, long time.
...links to usenet postings...
Thanks for these! I'll send them along to some friends of mine who, while they're not very religious, don't agree with me that God, if he exists, must be a particularly evil bastard.
Why don't we just wheel a wagon with a lead acid battery around?
No need for a wagon. This contraption gives me about 7 chargings of my Desire with a decent car adapter.
In short, you're talking about two different sets of people who both get called "chiropractors."
Exactly. My brother got his degree at the University of Southern Denmark, where it is called Clinical Biomechanics. They educate physicians as well, and the three first years are almost identical, except for that the biomechanics students take additional courses in anatomy and practical treatment. After three years you can in fact switch to the MD education if there are vacancies. The classical delutions and philosophy of chiropractics is not touched upon *at all*.
When the soon to be MDs start focusing on diagnostics the biomechanics students continue with anatomy and practical treatment. In fact a modernly educated "chiropractor" knows a lot more about anatomy than the vast majority of MDs. He also knows where his knowledge ends, and a physician is needed. In short, a non-quack chiropractor is "only" an extremely competent physical therapist.
The results my brother achieves might seem like magic in some cases, but they stem from a hard won and insanely detailed knowledge of how your joints, muscles and tendons interact, and how to manipulate them to rectify physical problems and physical problems only.
...and now something to mess with your voice so that The Man cannot listen in too!
Hate to break it to you man, but they've probably done that to you for a long time already. Parabolic mikes are getting better, if not very inconspicuous :)
If you see someone carrying a 1m parabolic reflector aimed at you from a distance of 50m, better hope you didn't give them too much info already.
I suppose this could be used to record an entire game and then go back and track what each player was saying during the game based on their positions on the court.
It can. FTFA:
Audio from all microphones is stored in separate channels, so you can even go back and listen in on any sounds later.
I don't know how they record and store 325 (or 315, 345 - whatever) channels of audio, but their equipment can process stored audio as well as the live feed.
"can pick out the pop of a bubblegum bubble in the middle of a basketball game"
whatever that means.
If you'd STFVideo in the article you'd know what it means. You should, the video illustrates the filtering effect well. Assuming that it's not been "improved" in any way it's really quite impressive.
Absolutely not! Space is just 100 km up while earth-based locations can be 20,000 km apart.
Considering that Earth has a diameter of about 12750km, I'd highly doubt that.
<pedant>The circumference of the Earth is between 40,075.16 km (equatorial) and 40,008.00 km (meridional) according to Wikipedia. It is possible that the shortest surface path between two points on Earth is more than 20 000 km :)
I'll guess that for any given point on the surface there exists an area which is more than 20 000 km distant.
Finding two such points that you'd actually want to travel between is left as an exercise for the reader.
</pedant>
So, in how many words do I have to add these characters because the layout software won't do it for me?
We use Indesign at our publishing company, its hyphenation is usually quite good. It *will* miss in a few words for each book, especially in other languages than English, in those cases soft hyphens are very practical. It's OK, native English speakers tend to forget that we use other languages in most of the world :)
Software should keep track of hyphenation positions the same way it keeps track of other formatting positions.
Yes, a good hyphenation dictionary for every language would be nice. Along with special characters in the character set that indicate which language we are currently using (quotes, book titles and so on in a separate language from the main text is common in many settings).
Oh wait, that would never work well, it'd complicate the character set, increase application sizes by orders of magnitude in many cases, and we *don't* have good hyphenation dictionary for a great many languages.
In browsers it might be superfluous as you have no idea which words would be broken and needs a hyphen, in many cases you'd be better off dispensing with hyphenation altogether for readability. But for text in fixed formats it seems to me that the soft hyphen is a good solution to this particular problem after all. Part of my job description is laying out books, and the soft hyphen is an elegant solution. Once in a while you need it even with the very best DTP software.
Good god are their business offerings ever horrible. We went out of our way to retire any and all Dell hardware with *extreme* prejudice.
I agree with you about their tiny, cheap "secretary" and home boxes. They're metaphorically a pain in the ass. When it comes to their workstation miditowers, we have three at work, two of which we've had for four years. They are rock solid, powerful, and the cases are among the best I've seen for upgrading.
They are designed for very easy tool-free access to every component, and there is no "semi-PCIe" custom slots or any of that bullshit, everything is standard. Would buy again. We're situated in Norway though, Dell might be offering different machines here compared to the US market.
Dell is still shipping PCs with Ubuntu preloaded. You can find them here [dell.com].
I must try this "Instant Messenging" once... Who proofread that list?
I'm partly kidding, it's nice that they offer Ubuntu. But even I could spot several additional typos/bad grammar on the Ubuntu page. This indicates that Dell doesn't put much effort into that section, typos are very rare in their other communication.
I'm a pretty IT-savvy guy, but WHAT IS that bloody character?
Say you're laying out a book. You have the word Sauerkraut at a line wrap, but it is broken into Sauerk-raut because your layout software don't know where to break it. You then put in a soft hyphen between r and k, this indicates to your software that this word should be broken there. It turns into Sauer-kraut which is correct.
Later you get angry with the Sauerkraut and call it "bloody Sauerkraut". Now the whole word will be at the next line, and the soft hyphen won't show because your software doesn't need to break the word. Thus you can insert these freely without fretting about words containing a hyphen later on, they'll only be rendered when used as a hint.
HTH
You hear MOB, you get out a floatie gun or two and shoot it off in the person's general direction.
We *always* had three lookouts on duty, including an aft lookout. Of course their instructions was to trow a lifebuoy with an automatic homing light if someone went for a swim. You're right though, they could probably get closer with something like this, especially when we're steaming at 27 knots :)
If you can get it close enough to the victim so they can swim to it and get out of the cold water
Irrelevant to your point and a minor nitpick, but you don't get clear of the cold water... you stay afloat without exhausting yourself. Without a flotation device in rough seas and freezing water you'll not die of exposure, you'll drown when your muscles stop working (probably less than 15 minutes at best, depending on your clothing). If you're not exhausting yourself you might survive more than 45 minutes in water at 0 degrees C.
There's a nice sensitivity rocker button to turn up or down the mouse sensitivity...
Ok, that does it, I'm getting one :)
Too many games doesn't allow me to set the sens *exactly* how I want it, or have ridiculous modifications to sensitivity when you switch to scope. This seems to do away with that problem.
That, and that silver wheel just above the thumb? That's a control, it rotates left/right. I have NO idea what to do with it.
As a casual gamer I might find it convenient for lean if that's possible. In my usual setup (tfgh) I need to move one of my left hand fingers to do that.
Were you guys using davits or a chute?
Hydraulic davits, but they had some kind of clutch and brakes for speedy descent. Our freeboard was about 11 meters, still the descent was *very* quick with a good winch operator, and we launched at speed if necessary. It helped that our "dinghy" was one of these jet-propulsed devil-may-care babies. I called it a dinghy for lack of a better word, its speed and maneuverability is unbelievable even in rough seas (weight is 3000 Kg, not pounds as in the google translation. Why the heck do they translate *only* the unit Kg to pounds anyway?).
And of course we had to be good at it, even four minutes is a very long time indeed if you're immersed in seawater at -1 degrees C :)
I'll bite: Why did the office members use their mice with their left hands?
They might have a peripheral such as a production scanner on the right hand side. I was in that situation, and I quickly learned flipping the book with my right hand and cropping the scanned image with my left.
I'm very close to ambidextrous and don't really care which side the mouse is on or whether the buttons are switched, I just adapt as needed. It's handy when you're the go-to-guy for all kinds of issues with workstations. A colleague of mine absolutely can't do it, I have no idea if this can be learned more or less easily by different people, or what the mechanisms behind it could be.
Most ships wouldn't turn.
I was sonar operator on a frigate when in the navy. We sonar guys had a secondary role as crew of the dinghy. In a MOB situation we would get into survival suits and launch immediately, while the ship turned and cut engines after doing 180 degrees, ending up in roughly the same area as the man went overboard. Our target time was four minutes from MOB alarm until the man was safely aboard the dinghy. In realistic unannounced exercises we usually beat that time by a few seconds.
We didn't have a chopper, but we were told that most ships would follow this procedure anyway, simply because more eyeballs is better if the unlucky man isn't found immediately and a search is necessary. In addition the return is shorter for the dinghy, which is good when you have a freezing crew member on board.
On a side note a buddy of mine was stationed on a submarine. A popular prank whenever they got fresh crew on board was to sound a MOB alarm, then command one of the noobs to don a diving suit and exit via a torpedo tube to search for the victim. They got every reaction from "Stop shitting with me" to frantic fumbling with diving suits and tube doors :)