Couldn't agree more. When I first learned about mouse gestures, I thought "That's interesting but probably pointless." I decited to try it anyway, and after learning a few basic gestures, I was hooked. It is one of those things that don't seem that great until you actually try it.
Oh, there really are web pages that disable the menus, navigation buttons, etc. Usually for an image or something like that. Can't think of any offhand, but it has happened to me before. It really is quite annoying. I definitly will be using this in my prefs file from now on.
No, the total number is much (much! much!) bigger than 650 Billion (6.5E11) the total number is more like 3.4E38. Assuming that there are 10 billion people on earth, this works out to 3.4E28 ip addresses per person. I figured out that there are more than enough ip addresses to assign an address to every penny in a earth sized volume of pennies.
Of course, we will never use up that many IP addresses, but that is exactly the point! IPV6 should also help computer security a little. It is very easy to scan a few IPV4 addresses and eventually find a computer, but in IPV4 the addresses actually used are so sparce, that it would be difficult to find an actual address by just scanning.
If the widget libraries get ported over to DirectFB, who says that those who need X can't still use it? Why should everybody have to switch to DirectFB?
Boy, with that girl in the background, I about forgot to look at the transparency effects!
On a more serious note: this is good. Not that I want X replaced or anything, but a little copetition is always good. (Besides, why can't there be X-Free distro's and DirectFB distro's?)
I agree. Like most readers of slashdot, I have never personally been fooled by one of those ads. However, there are many (most?) internet users that are not expierenced enough to realize the difference between a real window and an ad.
Take my mother for instance. She is new to computers. When the windows GUI gives her an option ("Ok" and "Cancel" buttons for instance) she expects it to do what it says. When presented with an ad that looks like an official dialog box to her, she gets confused and asks me if she should respond to it. Of course I tell her not to click on it because it is an ad. But now she becomes even more confused. How is she supposed to know the difference between an ad and an actual dialog box? (Remember, she is still learning and she will learn with experence.)
Also, they show the user the blots and have the user type in the two characters for each blot. Then they scramble the blots and have the user do it again. The second order is the one that ends up being the password, I think.
I think that they scrambled the pictures just to test how well people remember what they thought the picture was (ie the person they are testing on isn't just making something up, and remembering that). In the actual implementation they wouldn't have to scramble the pictures at all.
Remember, just because Ogg Vorbis is (royalty) free doesn't mean that the player is royalty free. The point of royalty free is that Ogg Vorbis player manufacturers don't have to pay royalties to Xiph. This (hopefully) gives the end user a cheaper product. Of course it also allows OSS developers to create ogg vorbis players without having to worry about having to pay royalties.
Speaking of LaTeX, look at this quote from the AMS (American Mathematical Society) website:
Authors who intend to publish a book or an article with the AMS are
strongly encouraged to use LaTeX as described in the book LaTeX: A Document Preparation System 2nd edition, 1994 by Leslie Lamport.(emphasis mine, here is the source)
LaTeX easily has a monopoly in scientific and mathematical publishing. There just isn't anything else that even comes close to compairing to the quality of LaTeX, especilly when it comes to mathematical documents.
There are no standard libraries for C++, so there's a lot of reinventing the wheel. (Yeah, there's the STL and others, but each one has a huge learning curve associated with it).
Well, there is the STL and the Standard C++ library. These are not really hard to learn; it is just that they are both fairly new. The Standard C++ library and STL didn't become standard until around 1998 when the ISO C++ standard was formed. Because that is only 5 years ago, and C++ is much older than 5 years, there are still a lot of books and courses floating around that don't teach Standard C++. When you learn "Visual C++," or whatever, from an older book (or bad book) then it seems that the STL is hard because you are not use to templates and all that stuff (mostly because many older compilers are broken, ie VC++ 6.0, and don't support the standard).
If you learned STL and the Standard library when you first learned C++ then maybe they wouldn't seem so difficult. Also, many people who first learn programming in a language such as Pascal, like me!:), have difficulties learning generic programming because they are so used to thinking about what types your variables are. Templates and generic programming are very powerful, if you are willing to spend the time learning how to use them.
In other words, the "humans only use 10% of their brains" canard would more correctly be phrased "humans only use 10% of their brains for walking around and smelling things"...
But walking around and smelling things takes a lot of brain power (at least as much as reasoning does). Think about it. When you walk around and smell things your brain is doing a lot of work. Your brian is processing your vision, smells, and balance. Your brain is also regulating your heartbeat, breathing, and other bodily functions. These things all require a lot of processing power. We don't have any computer system that could even come close to doing the things that the human brain does when you are "just walking around and smelling things."
Do you say that because it is true, or because you want it to be true?
As much as you (or I) may not want to admit that people are effected by television, vidio games, etc, the evidence on the contrary needs to be considered. What if what we are is shaped in part by what happens around us? Should we ignore the possibility of any negative (or positive) affect that entertainment has? Maybe we should be more careful about what we are entertained by.
Oh, and by the way, I do play some FPS games, but I am not going to claim that because I don't want those games to have an effect on me, that they don't. The possibility does exist.
I learned Pascal and QBASIC at the same time. I tought myself QBASIC because it was what I had at home, and I learned Pascal in high school (that was back in 1998). Needless to say, the language that helped me learn all of the important stuff was Pascal. Pascal is very a very structured procedural language. QBASIC makes it too easy to write spaghetti code, and VB just, well, sucks. I believe that it would benefit all beginning programmers to learn on a language like Pascal, so moving to a real production language like C/C++, Java, etc is much smoother.
That's a real shame. I thought the zip specification was open to anyone who wanted to use it? I stopped using Zips about three months ago in favor of the 7zip format. 7zips are smaller and more secure. The best part about 7z's is that it's an open source format. Fully documented, and entirely free. They also tend to be a lot smaller than standard.zip archives.
Just an opinion.
Not to be picky, but in this case I think you can be a little more confidant in yourself. 7z's better compression (the compression is better most of the time) is more than just an opinion, it is a fact.
BUT, you wouldnt hold the clerk responsible if the kid looked like a middle aged man
True.
However, it is highly unlikely that an underaged person would look like a middle aged man. When I was in highschool I worked for a small grocery store, and I did various things, running a cash register among them. I was trained to card idividuals up until they looked ~25 for cigarettes and ~30 for alchohol (this was before my state passed a law requiring a checker to be 21 to sell alchohol). This was to make sure that no adult material was sold to minors.
The obvious solution is a special NOspam domain for kids. kids.us or somesuch, where spam would be totally illegal as only children could hold such addresses.
I agree. This is a really good idea, and I wish I would have thought of it.:-)
The alternative is to shield the kid from the 'bad stuff' in the world. At some point, this becomes detrimental to the kid.
So should we throw caution into the wind, and not try to protect our children from seeing certain things? Too much protection can become detrimental, but not enough can be even more detrimental. As other replyers already pointed out, many of the porno spam is not Playboy material, but is much more distructive to young minds.
I mean really, if the corner gas station attendent was selling cigarettes, beer, or pornagraphy to underaged children, would he be held responsible? The obvious answer is yes, he would. So, why would we treat spammers any differently?
And don't even get me started about the utility of spellcheckers. While they have their dangers, for slight dyslexics such as myself they have been a godsend!
I never really did understand why people feel that spell checkers are a danger. I have actually become a better speller since I have been using computers. This has become even more true since various word processors started underlining misspelled words. I really can't stand to have those underlines all over the place, so I check the spelling. After seeing the correct spelling for a word when I am actually paying attention to the spelling helps me to spell the word correctly from that point on. Now that online dictionaries are so easily available, if I don't have a spell checker available and I think that I have spelled a word wrong, I will do a quick search on an online dictionary. This is so much easier and more conveniant than getting out a physical dictionary and looking the word up.
Of course, I really do agree with the above poster that made the statement regarding IM being a danger to grammer, sentance structure, and spelling. I think that being a good writer (grammer, spelling, and sentance structure along with the whole process of puting thoughts down on paper) is very important in the technological age, and is a skill that I need much improvement on.
To get back on topic, people who argue that putting such an emphasas on typing is bad because of penmanship seem to be afraid that the skills that they are good at (writing beautifully in cursive) will become obsolete. Now don't get me wrong, penmanship isn't bad or unneeded. Penmanship is an artform, and just like any other artform it is something that is good for athetics (right brained stuff), but that doesn't mean that we should shun typing.
I never was very good at writing things out in cursive. I am just as fast at printing as writing in cursive. To make me dislike cursive even more, my print is much more legable than my cursive. People have commented me on how well I print. To make my cursive legable, I need to focus a lot more (especially sence I am out of practice, which is my own fault). This tends to make me slower.
From what I understand, when one is talking about penmanship, "to write" usually refers to cursive, and "to print" refers to block letters. For example "I want you to write this out" as opposed to "I want you to print this out."
This, of course, is very confusing, as "to write" generally refers to the process of taking your thoughts and putting them down on some medium, such as paper, or a computer screen, using written language.
I'm still trying to figure out why this is considered so important. Pretty, or interesting, yes, but *important*?
It is important to many web developers. You could make that sort of statement about many technologies, such as web standards. Why are web standards important? Some people may think that website designers only need to think about IE compatibility, and not w3c compatibility. Of course, you and I know that Web standards are important because they alow websites to be easier to maintian, and are ready for the future.
Back to PNG, partial transparency allows for anti-aliasing of images and other interesting graphics on webpages. This makes webpages look more professional. Most people like professional looking web pages. They would rather buy something from a website that is simple but at the same time attractive, than a website that is all plain text. Of course by adhering to web standards a web developer is going to make sure his website is readable to screen readers and text only browsers as well, but by adding professional looking graphis to his/her website, the web developer will make the website attractive to his/her customer.
Another way of looking at it is to consider a store. You could ask a store manager why he/she cleans the parking lot and plants flowers near the entrance, after such behavior isn't *important,* right? Well, of course it is important, because it adds to the proffesionalness (is that a word?) and asthetics of the store.
Slashdot Mirror
Couldn't agree more. When I first learned about mouse gestures, I thought "That's interesting but probably pointless." I decited to try it anyway, and after learning a few basic gestures, I was hooked. It is one of those things that don't seem that great until you actually try it.
Oh, there really are web pages that disable the menus, navigation buttons, etc. Usually for an image or something like that. Can't think of any offhand, but it has happened to me before. It really is quite annoying. I definitly will be using this in my prefs file from now on.
No, the total number is much (much! much!) bigger than 650 Billion (6.5E11) the total number is more like 3.4E38. Assuming that there are 10 billion people on earth, this works out to 3.4E28 ip addresses per person. I figured out that there are more than enough ip addresses to assign an address to every penny in a earth sized volume of pennies.
Of course, we will never use up that many IP addresses, but that is exactly the point! IPV6 should also help computer security a little. It is very easy to scan a few IPV4 addresses and eventually find a computer, but in IPV4 the addresses actually used are so sparce, that it would be difficult to find an actual address by just scanning.
If the widget libraries get ported over to DirectFB, who says that those who need X can't still use it? Why should everybody have to switch to DirectFB?
Boy, with that girl in the background, I about forgot to look at the transparency effects!
On a more serious note: this is good. Not that I want X replaced or anything, but a little copetition is always good. (Besides, why can't there be X-Free distro's and DirectFB distro's?)
I agree. Like most readers of slashdot, I have never personally been fooled by one of those ads. However, there are many (most?) internet users that are not expierenced enough to realize the difference between a real window and an ad.
Take my mother for instance. She is new to computers. When the windows GUI gives her an option ("Ok" and "Cancel" buttons for instance) she expects it to do what it says. When presented with an ad that looks like an official dialog box to her, she gets confused and asks me if she should respond to it. Of course I tell her not to click on it because it is an ad. But now she becomes even more confused. How is she supposed to know the difference between an ad and an actual dialog box? (Remember, she is still learning and she will learn with experence.)
I think that they scrambled the pictures just to test how well people remember what they thought the picture was (ie the person they are testing on isn't just making something up, and remembering that). In the actual implementation they wouldn't have to scramble the pictures at all.
Yes, that is true. I am not saying that Vorbis players will be cheaper, I am hoping that they will be cheaper.
I vote for something more sinister. :) It probably died of old age.
Remember, just because Ogg Vorbis is (royalty) free doesn't mean that the player is royalty free. The point of royalty free is that Ogg Vorbis player manufacturers don't have to pay royalties to Xiph. This (hopefully) gives the end user a cheaper product. Of course it also allows OSS developers to create ogg vorbis players without having to worry about having to pay royalties.
Speaking of LaTeX, look at this quote from the AMS (American Mathematical Society) website:
LaTeX easily has a monopoly in scientific and mathematical publishing. There just isn't anything else that even comes close to compairing to the quality of LaTeX, especilly when it comes to mathematical documents.Well, there is the STL and the Standard C++ library. These are not really hard to learn; it is just that they are both fairly new. The Standard C++ library and STL didn't become standard until around 1998 when the ISO C++ standard was formed. Because that is only 5 years ago, and C++ is much older than 5 years, there are still a lot of books and courses floating around that don't teach Standard C++. When you learn "Visual C++," or whatever, from an older book (or bad book) then it seems that the STL is hard because you are not use to templates and all that stuff (mostly because many older compilers are broken, ie VC++ 6.0, and don't support the standard).
If you learned STL and the Standard library when you first learned C++ then maybe they wouldn't seem so difficult. Also, many people who first learn programming in a language such as Pascal, like me! :), have difficulties learning generic programming because they are so used to thinking about what types your variables are. Templates and generic programming are very powerful, if you are willing to spend the time learning how to use them.
But walking around and smelling things takes a lot of brain power (at least as much as reasoning does). Think about it. When you walk around and smell things your brain is doing a lot of work. Your brian is processing your vision, smells, and balance. Your brain is also regulating your heartbeat, breathing, and other bodily functions. These things all require a lot of processing power. We don't have any computer system that could even come close to doing the things that the human brain does when you are "just walking around and smelling things."
...his hand gets lonely.
Do you say that because it is true, or because you want it to be true?
As much as you (or I) may not want to admit that people are effected by television, vidio games, etc, the evidence on the contrary needs to be considered. What if what we are is shaped in part by what happens around us? Should we ignore the possibility of any negative (or positive) affect that entertainment has? Maybe we should be more careful about what we are entertained by.
Oh, and by the way, I do play some FPS games, but I am not going to claim that because I don't want those games to have an effect on me, that they don't. The possibility does exist.
I learned Pascal and QBASIC at the same time. I tought myself QBASIC because it was what I had at home, and I learned Pascal in high school (that was back in 1998). Needless to say, the language that helped me learn all of the important stuff was Pascal. Pascal is very a very structured procedural language. QBASIC makes it too easy to write spaghetti code, and VB just, well, sucks. I believe that it would benefit all beginning programmers to learn on a language like Pascal, so moving to a real production language like C/C++, Java, etc is much smoother.
Yep, that is not surprising. Note, however, I never claimed to be a good speller, just a better speller than I used to be.
cshark said (emphasas mine):
Not to be picky, but in this case I think you can be a little more confidant in yourself. 7z's better compression (the compression is better most of the time) is more than just an opinion, it is a fact.True.
However, it is highly unlikely that an underaged person would look like a middle aged man. When I was in highschool I worked for a small grocery store, and I did various things, running a cash register among them. I was trained to card idividuals up until they looked ~25 for cigarettes and ~30 for alchohol (this was before my state passed a law requiring a checker to be 21 to sell alchohol). This was to make sure that no adult material was sold to minors.
I agree. This is a really good idea, and I wish I would have thought of it. :-)
So should we throw caution into the wind, and not try to protect our children from seeing certain things? Too much protection can become detrimental, but not enough can be even more detrimental. As other replyers already pointed out, many of the porno spam is not Playboy material, but is much more distructive to young minds.
I agree.
I mean really, if the corner gas station attendent was selling cigarettes, beer, or pornagraphy to underaged children, would he be held responsible? The obvious answer is yes, he would. So, why would we treat spammers any differently?
I never really did understand why people feel that spell checkers are a danger. I have actually become a better speller since I have been using computers. This has become even more true since various word processors started underlining misspelled words. I really can't stand to have those underlines all over the place, so I check the spelling. After seeing the correct spelling for a word when I am actually paying attention to the spelling helps me to spell the word correctly from that point on. Now that online dictionaries are so easily available, if I don't have a spell checker available and I think that I have spelled a word wrong, I will do a quick search on an online dictionary. This is so much easier and more conveniant than getting out a physical dictionary and looking the word up.
Of course, I really do agree with the above poster that made the statement regarding IM being a danger to grammer, sentance structure, and spelling. I think that being a good writer (grammer, spelling, and sentance structure along with the whole process of puting thoughts down on paper) is very important in the technological age, and is a skill that I need much improvement on.
To get back on topic, people who argue that putting such an emphasas on typing is bad because of penmanship seem to be afraid that the skills that they are good at (writing beautifully in cursive) will become obsolete. Now don't get me wrong, penmanship isn't bad or unneeded. Penmanship is an artform, and just like any other artform it is something that is good for athetics (right brained stuff), but that doesn't mean that we should shun typing.
I never was very good at writing things out in cursive. I am just as fast at printing as writing in cursive. To make me dislike cursive even more, my print is much more legable than my cursive. People have commented me on how well I print. To make my cursive legable, I need to focus a lot more (especially sence I am out of practice, which is my own fault). This tends to make me slower.
From what I understand, when one is talking about penmanship, "to write" usually refers to cursive, and "to print" refers to block letters. For example "I want you to write this out" as opposed to "I want you to print this out."
This, of course, is very confusing, as "to write" generally refers to the process of taking your thoughts and putting them down on some medium, such as paper, or a computer screen, using written language.
It is important to many web developers. You could make that sort of statement about many technologies, such as web standards. Why are web standards important? Some people may think that website designers only need to think about IE compatibility, and not w3c compatibility. Of course, you and I know that Web standards are important because they alow websites to be easier to maintian, and are ready for the future.
Back to PNG, partial transparency allows for anti-aliasing of images and other interesting graphics on webpages. This makes webpages look more professional. Most people like professional looking web pages. They would rather buy something from a website that is simple but at the same time attractive, than a website that is all plain text. Of course by adhering to web standards a web developer is going to make sure his website is readable to screen readers and text only browsers as well, but by adding professional looking graphis to his/her website, the web developer will make the website attractive to his/her customer.
Another way of looking at it is to consider a store. You could ask a store manager why he/she cleans the parking lot and plants flowers near the entrance, after such behavior isn't *important,* right? Well, of course it is important, because it adds to the proffesionalness (is that a word?) and asthetics of the store.