As I wrote in my post, there is no great difference between how Photoshop handles a ton of UI windows and the way Gimp handles them in a normal professional setup for an experienced user. My point was really that I don't get why the GIMP don't just dock everything to an empty window in which you'll open images, and also have the helper windows docked to it by default. Instead they're going for the more advanced config as the default with not even a possibility of using a "simple" interface. A lot of OSS software use dockable window elements, it can't be that hard.
Still, a professional user would probably want to move the tool windows around anyway. That's the only explanation I can imagine why they don't care, even though it must take some effort to ignore the massive outcry for a simpler interface:)
See Gimp, that multi-window interface has been an annoyance for what? A decade? Yet we still don't have that fixed.
Anyone that uses the CS package (Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) for serious work will benefit vastly from a dual-head setup. You keep your document maximised on one screen, and all the tool windows on the other. At work (publishing company) I just got a triple-head setup, it's even better.
The Gimp is not all that different. What might be confusing initially is that there is no "main" window with the toolbars docked by default, but the most comfortable way to work with such software is to separate the interface onto different monitors anyway. For me the problem is more that I spend a lot of time trying to do the most trivial tasks because I don't know the software well, but the UI itself is not a problem.
Sorry, but I've used inDesign to public a monthly 30+ page newsletter, and tried to use Scribus because the organization couldn't really afford CS. There's no comparison whatsoever.
Seconded. I work in a publishing company and use Indesign on a daily basis. Being an OSS fan I have at various times tried to use OSS software for my workflow. Openoffice is commonly used here to style manuscripts, I find it better than Word for certain tasks, but there's nothing in OSS that can touch Indesign for DTP.
If you learn on an automatic, you only get a licence to drive automatics and you are not allowed to drive manuals.
In Norway as well. Here it's seldom an issue, the driving schools all use manuals even though automatics are common. Some people have disabilities which prevents them from using all the pedals, requiring them to drive an automatic. That's pretty much the only reason why anyone would get an automatic-only licence over here.
...my boss (who's 10 years older than me) told me he was taught in school that the Earth's gravity was caused by its rotation.
While I've heard some strange things from my teachers (colliding head on with a car going 60 km/h while your car goes at the same speed is like hitting a rock wall at 120 km/h), what your boss said does not ring true. A quick googling yields nothing. I've never heard it before, and it doesn't even make any sense.
Do you have some reference that this has been a widespread belief at some place? I couldn't even find references to history that anyone has had that misconception. I think that most scientists has been aware of the relation between the mass of an object and its gravitational force since relatively shortly after Principia Mathematica was published.
We need a new instant mirror site for slashdot. Any suggestions?
Coral Cache fits the bill quite well, I have no idea why the editors don't use it. It'll create a mirror of any url you link to and navigate through, and they can take a slashdotting:) Follow this link to check out the CCed version of the article. If you're on Firefox the TADSEE extension provides a handy shortcut to a Coral Cache mirror when you right click a link.
3. single-threaded execution -- which means that as long as a single chunk of code in a Flash / Ajax app is running, it can't report back to the browser to let the browser update itself and do other things, making it appear hung.
I believe the reason why it appears that way is that the browser really DOES freeze and become unresponsive, no matter what the cause:)
I know about the technical difficulties with making Firefox multithreaded, but it's a fairly big issue for the perception of speed. Chrome doesn't have this problem at all, I've used both browsers extensively. IME Firefox feels slow more due to the constant minuscule (0.5 sec) pauses than because of the few seconds of freezing every now and then.
I love Firefox and use it a lot, mainly due to the availability of numerous excellent plugins, but sometimes it is a relief to fire up Chrome after having used Firefox for a period of time. BTW, both my gaming rig at home and my desktop at work has plenty of processing power and memory, resource starvation is not the issue.
Here's the link for the coral cache copy....now let's see if we can get the page loaded into the cache...
I don't understand why the editors don't do this as a standard practice before publishing stories to the front page. I dunno, there might be some legal issues with publishing a cc url. If they at least preloaded the content it would be available, and the original host would stand a better chance of surviving a slashdotting.
@phoenix321: I'm sorry, in my previous post (sibling to this) I thought you were responding to the earlier post about 2600. The article linked to in your real parent still seems pretty well documented, at least at a quick glance. No [citation needed] in the whole article as of the time of my accessing it.
He's not a goddamn encyclopædia, and this is probably not his thesis... Drop the [citation needed], please. What's more, he provided you with a reference to educate yourself about his claims. I'll give you a hint, start here or here.
I would never use a provider which fined me for going over some bandwidth limit, they are only doing that to cheat her out of her money. I have unlimited bandwidth and 40/20 Mbit and I am happy with it, but if I forget to pay the bill they instantly drop it to 128 Kbit. That's what they should do if you go over your limit as well, fines and/or high charges per megabyte is just dishonest, bordering on fraud. If your mother has no alternative I feel sorry for her.
Way OT, but that reminds me of a quote from James Randi about coming out of the closet. From the end of this interview snippet:
And people often will say, "But you named your car Sophia, after Sophia Loren." A little blue Miata, a beautiful little jobbie. And they said, "Well, you keep on talking about Sophia Loren." And I say, "Yes. You see, I'm gay, but I'm not blind."
The reasons for not allowing those things aren't to do with safety.
Absolutely true. I was on a flight with Ryanair, the aircraft had a ridiculously expensive cell tower on board. Suddenly it was not only acceptable to switch on your phone in online mode and make calls, they also ran commercials for it frequently during the flight. On other flights they don't allow you to turn your on phone even in offline mode. I guess they want you to be bored so that you'll buy some of the crap they're peddling except when the crap consists of expensive calls on your own phone. Citation
Fascinating. I knew about the precession, but the other two are new to me. I also can't understand what would cause them, especially the change in the orbit itself. The only thing I can think of would be influence from other planets, but a variance of 5 % sounds like a lot, and I'd guess that the period would vary if that was the case.
Ah, Wikipedia to the rescue. Interesting indeed, thank you! It doesn't explain the variance in axial tilt, but I guess it has the same causes as the precession.
"PC Load Letter" is an error message that certain old HP printers would display when they're out of paper, for instance A4. The entire grandparent post is a quote from the movie "Office Space". We had one of those printers were I worked and we smirked at that message, it was hilarious that they made the same joke in the movie:)
I grew up with a boat, and our "sounder" was sonar. There's a reason why it's called a sounder...
And the reason is not because you'd use a sonar today: "Sounding generally refers to a mechanism of probing the environment by sending out some kind of stimulus. The term derives from the ancient practice of determining the depth of water (making a sounding) by feeding out a line with a weight at the end." From Wikipedia
I was a sonar operator on a frigate in the Navy, and we used a "freesinking" thermometer to measure temperature distribution in the ocean, this was called "sounding". We did it to calculate the range and depth at which we would be able to detect a submarine by sonar, a process which is not called "sounding".
I believe I can safely state there is no dam way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.
Agreed. I'm fairly certain developers choose save points vs free save to bolster the gameplay time. Case in point: The Saboteur. An enjoyable game except for the boring car rides from your base every time you die. The game is capable of saving a fairly complete state, on the few save points that are in the middle of a mission everything is saved. Yourself, your weapon states, the enemies, random pedestrians and even a thrown grenade in mid-air (I tested) will be at the exact same position every time you load. The decision not to save your exact position is clearly not based on technical limitations. It feels like a last-minute decision made after the complete persistence logic was already coded.
However, the save points add ~ 2-10 minutes of gameplay every time you die or fuck up. Nevermind that it's boring, repetitive and annoying to no end, it allows them to claim ~60 hours of gameplay instead of ~30 hours. I can't think of other reasons, and it seriously degrades my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent game. I'm tempted to say that they get away with this because console gamers are used to it from when it actually WAS due to technical limitations, but don't construe this post as flamebait:)
I agree with you, and the most idiotic thing was that the change was submitted literally a minute before gui-freeze so that no-one managed to react in time. Fortunately the fix is quick: Alt+F2 or open terminal, paste in gconftool-2 --set/apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string:minimize,maximize,close It's permanent as well.
In expert-sex-change, you can find the answers just by scrolling down.
Sometimes you'll need to read it from the google cache. Most of the times the "solution" is a workaround however - the question is "how do you do X", which is exactly what I need, but the answer is "do Y instead", which often is not viable for most people. I would feel cheated if I paid for it, especially as they often present the hidden answer as the solution to X.
Despite human beliefs, we still aren't the center of the universe. Never have been. Never will be. We're a speck way out on a spiral arm of an insignificant galaxy, in the backwaters of the universe.
I see what you mean, but we're not even in any backwaters. Backwaters of what? There is no centre of the universe:)
Sonar at sufficiently high power levels is supposed to be bad for marine life (in particular, I think it is generally stated that it is bad for mammals). If the cod were attracted to the sonar, I think it would indicate that the sonar was not powerful enough to actually cause damage to the cod (if in fact cod can be damaged by sonar).
I think the cod would be fine unless they're very close to a powerful long-range sonar. I was a sonar operator on a frigate in the navy. When we went active the sonar would transmit at 210 dB, this is enough to cause injury or death in diving humans at close range, while at 150+ meters it would "just" be extremely uncomfortable.
We were told that fish generally would not be affected unless they were at very close range and was injured by the shock wave. We avoided using the sonar when seals or whales were observed in the vicinity, as it might damage their biosonar organs or confuse them. Fine-grained sonar imaging, like the one used to map this submarine, use very high frequencies to get good resolution. These pulses dissipate quickly with distance. I'd guess that it is also much weaker than our long range unit, probably the only reason they didn't use it when cod were nearby is that it interfered with their imaging results.
But is your bank writing checks for you? I use the billpay feature on my bank's website, but more often than not it sends a physical check to the recipient. Sure I didn't write the check but effectively it is still the same thing.
This is incredible. I had absolutely no idea the U.S. still was this backwards (I assume you're from there). In Norway banks use those fancy mainframe computers, a common payment network, and file transfers to deal with simple transactions. Pushing single transactions around on paper must be horribly inefficient. Before computers became a commodity among the population here the banks OCR'ed invoices or had automated touch-tone phone centrals where the payer entered the transactions into a similar system. It would then deposit it from my account to the recipient's more or less automatically. Once in the bank's systems the transaction would not use the money-over-paper protocol.
This is not meant as flamebait, mod me down if you must, I'm simply flabbergasted by what the PP and others write here. The 'submit a picture of your check' (check by fax?) concept as an improvement of anything-regarding-checks sounds like a bad joke someone would tell about 'fancy technology' in some very poor country with a made-up name.
Similar to another poster, I'm 33 and I've never written a check, I do remember that my parents used them in the mid-eighties though.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I think we agree :)
As I wrote in my post, there is no great difference between how Photoshop handles a ton of UI windows and the way Gimp handles them in a normal professional setup for an experienced user. My point was really that I don't get why the GIMP don't just dock everything to an empty window in which you'll open images, and also have the helper windows docked to it by default. Instead they're going for the more advanced config as the default with not even a possibility of using a "simple" interface. A lot of OSS software use dockable window elements, it can't be that hard.
Still, a professional user would probably want to move the tool windows around anyway. That's the only explanation I can imagine why they don't care, even though it must take some effort to ignore the massive outcry for a simpler interface :)
See Gimp, that multi-window interface has been an annoyance for what? A decade? Yet we still don't have that fixed.
Anyone that uses the CS package (Indesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) for serious work will benefit vastly from a dual-head setup. You keep your document maximised on one screen, and all the tool windows on the other. At work (publishing company) I just got a triple-head setup, it's even better.
The Gimp is not all that different. What might be confusing initially is that there is no "main" window with the toolbars docked by default, but the most comfortable way to work with such software is to separate the interface onto different monitors anyway. For me the problem is more that I spend a lot of time trying to do the most trivial tasks because I don't know the software well, but the UI itself is not a problem.
Sorry, but I've used inDesign to public a monthly 30+ page newsletter, and tried to use Scribus because the organization couldn't really afford CS. There's no comparison whatsoever.
Seconded. I work in a publishing company and use Indesign on a daily basis. Being an OSS fan I have at various times tried to use OSS software for my workflow. Openoffice is commonly used here to style manuscripts, I find it better than Word for certain tasks, but there's nothing in OSS that can touch Indesign for DTP.
If you learn on an automatic, you only get a licence to drive automatics and you are not allowed to drive manuals.
In Norway as well. Here it's seldom an issue, the driving schools all use manuals even though automatics are common. Some people have disabilities which prevents them from using all the pedals, requiring them to drive an automatic. That's pretty much the only reason why anyone would get an automatic-only licence over here.
...my boss (who's 10 years older than me) told me he was taught in school that the Earth's gravity was caused by its rotation.
While I've heard some strange things from my teachers (colliding head on with a car going 60 km/h while your car goes at the same speed is like hitting a rock wall at 120 km/h), what your boss said does not ring true. A quick googling yields nothing. I've never heard it before, and it doesn't even make any sense.
Do you have some reference that this has been a widespread belief at some place? I couldn't even find references to history that anyone has had that misconception. I think that most scientists has been aware of the relation between the mass of an object and its gravitational force since relatively shortly after Principia Mathematica was published.
We need a new instant mirror site for slashdot. Any suggestions?
Coral Cache fits the bill quite well, I have no idea why the editors don't use it. It'll create a mirror of any url you link to and navigate through, and they can take a slashdotting :)
Follow this link to check out the CCed version of the article.
If you're on Firefox the TADSEE extension provides a handy shortcut to a Coral Cache mirror when you right click a link.
3. single-threaded execution -- which means that as long as a single chunk of code in a Flash / Ajax app is running, it can't report back to the browser to let the browser update itself and do other things, making it appear hung.
I believe the reason why it appears that way is that the browser really DOES freeze and become unresponsive, no matter what the cause :)
I know about the technical difficulties with making Firefox multithreaded, but it's a fairly big issue for the perception of speed. Chrome doesn't have this problem at all, I've used both browsers extensively. IME Firefox feels slow more due to the constant minuscule (0.5 sec) pauses than because of the few seconds of freezing every now and then.
I love Firefox and use it a lot, mainly due to the availability of numerous excellent plugins, but sometimes it is a relief to fire up Chrome after having used Firefox for a period of time. BTW, both my gaming rig at home and my desktop at work has plenty of processing power and memory, resource starvation is not the issue.
Here's the link for the coral cache copy....now let's see if we can get the page loaded into the cache...
I don't understand why the editors don't do this as a standard practice before publishing stories to the front page. I dunno, there might be some legal issues with publishing a cc url. If they at least preloaded the content it would be available, and the original host would stand a better chance of surviving a slashdotting.
@phoenix321: I'm sorry, in my previous post (sibling to this) I thought you were responding to the earlier post about 2600. The article linked to in your real parent still seems pretty well documented, at least at a quick glance. No [citation needed] in the whole article as of the time of my accessing it.
[citation needed]
[dubious - discuss]
He's not a goddamn encyclopædia, and this is probably not his thesis... Drop the [citation needed], please.
What's more, he provided you with a reference to educate yourself about his claims.
I'll give you a hint, start here or here.
with hefty fines if she goes over.
I would never use a provider which fined me for going over some bandwidth limit, they are only doing that to cheat her out of her money. I have unlimited bandwidth and 40/20 Mbit and I am happy with it, but if I forget to pay the bill they instantly drop it to 128 Kbit. That's what they should do if you go over your limit as well, fines and/or high charges per megabyte is just dishonest, bordering on fraud. If your mother has no alternative I feel sorry for her.
Way OT, but that reminds me of a quote from James Randi about coming out of the closet. From the end of this interview snippet:
And people often will say, "But you named your car Sophia, after Sophia Loren." A little blue Miata, a beautiful little jobbie. And they said, "Well, you keep on talking about Sophia Loren." And I say, "Yes. You see, I'm gay, but I'm not blind."
The reasons for not allowing those things aren't to do with safety.
Absolutely true. I was on a flight with Ryanair, the aircraft had a ridiculously expensive cell tower on board. Suddenly it was not only acceptable to switch on your phone in online mode and make calls, they also ran commercials for it frequently during the flight. On other flights they don't allow you to turn your on phone even in offline mode. I guess they want you to be bored so that you'll buy some of the crap they're peddling except when the crap consists of expensive calls on your own phone.
Citation
...the earth does in fact change its path...
Fascinating. I knew about the precession, but the other two are new to me. I also can't understand what would cause them, especially the change in the orbit itself. The only thing I can think of would be influence from other planets, but a variance of 5 % sounds like a lot, and I'd guess that the period would vary if that was the case.
Ah, Wikipedia to the rescue.
Interesting indeed, thank you! It doesn't explain the variance in axial tilt, but I guess it has the same causes as the precession.
Nothing really, just thought I'd answer your question :)
Nevermind.
"PC Load Letter" is an error message that certain old HP printers would display when they're out of paper, for instance A4. The entire grandparent post is a quote from the movie "Office Space". We had one of those printers were I worked and we smirked at that message, it was hilarious that they made the same joke in the movie :)
[citation needed]
I grew up with a boat, and our "sounder" was sonar. There's a reason why it's called a sounder...
And the reason is not because you'd use a sonar today: "Sounding generally refers to a mechanism of probing the environment by sending out some kind of stimulus. The term derives from the ancient practice of determining the depth of water (making a sounding) by feeding out a line with a weight at the end." From Wikipedia
I was a sonar operator on a frigate in the Navy, and we used a "freesinking" thermometer to measure temperature distribution in the ocean, this was called "sounding". We did it to calculate the range and depth at which we would be able to detect a submarine by sonar, a process which is not called "sounding".
I believe I can safely state there is no dam way you could ever match their dam skills, their dam resourcefulness, their dam ingenuity, their dam persistence, their dam determination and/or their dam work ethic.
http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/dammed.asp
GET RID OF SAVE POINTS.
Agreed. I'm fairly certain developers choose save points vs free save to bolster the gameplay time. Case in point: The Saboteur. An enjoyable game except for the boring car rides from your base every time you die. The game is capable of saving a fairly complete state, on the few save points that are in the middle of a mission everything is saved. Yourself, your weapon states, the enemies, random pedestrians and even a thrown grenade in mid-air (I tested) will be at the exact same position every time you load. The decision not to save your exact position is clearly not based on technical limitations. It feels like a last-minute decision made after the complete persistence logic was already coded.
However, the save points add ~ 2-10 minutes of gameplay every time you die or fuck up. Nevermind that it's boring, repetitive and annoying to no end, it allows them to claim ~60 hours of gameplay instead of ~30 hours. I can't think of other reasons, and it seriously degrades my enjoyment of an otherwise excellent game. I'm tempted to say that they get away with this because console gamers are used to it from when it actually WAS due to technical limitations, but don't construe this post as flamebait :)
Autopager also works quite well if you have Firefox available :)
I agree with you, and the most idiotic thing was that the change was submitted literally a minute before gui-freeze so that no-one managed to react in time. Fortunately the fix is quick: /apps/metacity/general/button_layout --type string :minimize,maximize,close
Alt+F2 or open terminal, paste in
gconftool-2 --set
It's permanent as well.
Sometimes you'll need to read it from the google cache. Most of the times the "solution" is a workaround however - the question is "how do you do X", which is exactly what I need, but the answer is "do Y instead", which often is not viable for most people. I would feel cheated if I paid for it, especially as they often present the hidden answer as the solution to X.
I see what you mean, but we're not even in any backwaters. Backwaters of what? There is no centre of the universe :)
I think the cod would be fine unless they're very close to a powerful long-range sonar. I was a sonar operator on a frigate in the navy. When we went active the sonar would transmit at 210 dB, this is enough to cause injury or death in diving humans at close range, while at 150+ meters it would "just" be extremely uncomfortable.
We were told that fish generally would not be affected unless they were at very close range and was injured by the shock wave. We avoided using the sonar when seals or whales were observed in the vicinity, as it might damage their biosonar organs or confuse them. Fine-grained sonar imaging, like the one used to map this submarine, use very high frequencies to get good resolution. These pulses dissipate quickly with distance. I'd guess that it is also much weaker than our long range unit, probably the only reason they didn't use it when cod were nearby is that it interfered with their imaging results.
This is incredible. I had absolutely no idea the U.S. still was this backwards (I assume you're from there). In Norway banks use those fancy mainframe computers, a common payment network, and file transfers to deal with simple transactions. Pushing single transactions around on paper must be horribly inefficient. Before computers became a commodity among the population here the banks OCR'ed invoices or had automated touch-tone phone centrals where the payer entered the transactions into a similar system. It would then deposit it from my account to the recipient's more or less automatically. Once in the bank's systems the transaction would not use the money-over-paper protocol.
This is not meant as flamebait, mod me down if you must, I'm simply flabbergasted by what the PP and others write here. The 'submit a picture of your check' (check by fax?) concept as an improvement of anything-regarding-checks sounds like a bad joke someone would tell about 'fancy technology' in some very poor country with a made-up name.
Similar to another poster, I'm 33 and I've never written a check, I do remember that my parents used them in the mid-eighties though.