We still haven't got a 'standard' image format, so why should we ever expect to see a single document format?
Consider that images are fairly easy to describe - "a grid of pixels, each pixel being a particular colour" - and then consider the plethora of image formats still in use today - bmp, jpeg, tiff, gif
Why is this the case? Because needs change depending on context - for images, format choice depends on: file size, fidelity/lossyness, multiple image support, transparency, and the doozy - backward compatibility.
Documents are much more complicated than images - fonts, content, frames, tables, embedded images etc. We'll never see a document format for the ages. Also, things change - e.g. electronic paper might see the rise of animated text/images in documents.
The best we can hope for is tools that can convert between document formats, the same way we deal with multiple image formats. And this means that the formats themselves needs to be very well defined, publicly available and not encumbered by patents.
I will never forgive Apple for inventing the double click. I think the crappy UIs out there are a result of poor input devices, and the single button mouse that led to the invention of the double-click is the worst offender.
What we SHOULD have is something like
Left Mouse = Activate Item
Right Mouse = Select Item
Middle Mouse = context sensitive operation or menu
Right Mouse+Drag = Move Item
Right mouse+drag from empty area = selection box to select multiple items
Hold Right Mouse+Left Mouse click = Expand selection with each left click - for word processing e.g. select word, sentence, paragraph etc
Double- and triple- clicking should not exist at all. Where the number of mouse buttons is limited (do Macs still only have one button?) modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Left Apple, whatever) can be used in conjunction with the extant mouse buttons to simulate more buttons.
Anyone that has seen their family members routinely triple click hyperlinks will agree with me.
While we are on the topic, rather than adding stupid app-launcher keys to the keyboard, they should add the following:
Prev Field/Next Field - to replace the appalling tab/shift-tab
Submit Form - this one clicks "OK" so users don't confused about the ENTER key when there are rich text fields on the form (Escape can remain the "Cancel Form" key)
Help Key - using F1 as 'help' seems to have single-handedly killed the function keys. Eleven perfectly usable program-specific keys that no-one uses any more. Bring back function key overlays!:-)
(while I'm ranting, even if there were sound economic reasons to have only one mouse button, why oh why didn't Apple learn from the car radio manufacturers and have a 'long click' instead of a double click? At least oldies and the less abled can manage a long click, but double-clicking requires a level of dexterity that many people simply don't have! Not that I like the idea of a long click, but it would have been heaps better than the double-click)
I suppose if you could strip the Rh(D) antigen it would be useful. Also I suppose if you start with AB blood (say) and strip the A & B antigens, then you wouldn't have any Anti-A or Anti-B antibodies in the plasma, which might be useful if graft-vs-host is a risk. I don't know if they ever transfuse whole blood any more, I don't think so. In any case, it doesn't increase the availability of AB Plasma. (Also I am pretty sure the article said they can't strip Rh(D), although maybe stripping AB is the first step - I don't know, I'm a computer guy, not a haematologist).
I still cannot see why you would convert a rare product (AB blood) to a common product (Group O blood).
Converting O Plasma to AB Plasma would be very useful (since in terms of Plasma, AB is the universal donor) but AFAIK antigen stripping isn't going to help you there.
But what about all the other factors like Kell, Kidd, Duffy etc? It would be far better to strip those factors than A/B (where blood without those factors - group O - is readily available).
Blood banks keep stocks of all ABO blood types, not just O.
There is no reason on earth you would want to convert A, B, and AB blood to O for crying out loud. O is readily available, A, B, and AB are the rare ones. It's like saying wow! We've discovered a way to turn diamonds into quartz!
I agree completely. However, what this article is talking about is redesigning the lowest-level workings of the internet and its protocols, not relatively high level stuff like e-mail. IMO what's really broken is the high-level protocols, e-mail in particular. Another thing that, with hindsight, is clearly a mistake is http, XMLHttpRequest, and all that; it's clear now that many people want to be able to run something like a GUI application through something like a web browser, but the protocols were never designed properly to allow that. Rather than putting a bag on the side of http to allow ajax apps, the right thing to do would have been to leave http alone, and create a completely different application and protocol that would do what people are trying, painfully, to do with browsers and http.
Oh thank God I thought I was the only one who thought this. HTML has been perverted to the point where people are designing websites that do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what HTML was intended to do. HTML was meant to deliver (principally textual) content, and allow the client to decide how the content was displayed. Instead we have the whole web design industry trying to make their website render the same on all target devices.
What we need is a sensible GUI-delivery protocol, not filling HTML full of crap. Who the hell thought it was sensible to put executing code into the comment tags in the first place? I blame them, 'coz a hack like that is a great big red flag.
I *think* the article is talking about bandwidth, not volume. In other words, it isn't how many gigs a month you are downloading that worries them, it is how fast you download it. ISPs here in Australia advertise their upload/download speeds though; if they do the same in the US it is hard to see how they can justifiably complain when you use it to capacity.
Computer games are a leisure activity and therefore are a "waste of time" more or less by definition. Whether a particular CRPG is fun or not is a different issue, and to a large extent dependent on the player. For example, I quite like grinding in CoH because I often play late at night just before going to bed and I just want to switch off my brain for a bit.
That said, a CRPG where you start off all powerful and then gradually lose power as the game progresses might be interesting. I doubt anyone would like it though.
>2) The PS2 wasn't "way" less powerful than the GC/Xbox, had hardly any decent software in >the time it had the market to itself, and was the most expensive home console on the market >for most of it's commercial life. People bought into the PS2 in significant numbers because >it played host to most of the games that they wanted to play.
It's easy to forget in this day and age of $50 DVD players, but when the PS2 debuted, a major selling factor was that it played DVDs. Most DVD players at the time were MORE EXPENSIVE than the PS2.
Heh, the first computer in my house was a C/PM machine that had 8" floppies that held about 120KB I think. They were so expensive that you'd keep using them even if they started having errors (run chkdsk or whatever the C/PM version was to lock off the errors).
I remember as an ten-or-so year old sitting in front of the computer playing around with Wordstar for hours on end. The whole "you type things and they turn up in glowing green letters on the screen" was pretty amazing back then:-)
Slashdot Mirror
Word 2007 *can* publish to PDF, folks. Why not use the software first before complaining about it?
...books burn YOU!
>GP=Grand Parent
Ah. Makes sense now. Thanks.
off-topic, but what does "GP" stand for?
I worked it out, coding is still better.
For the example before:
1. A->B: pAB
2. C->B: pBA
3. B->A, B->C: pAB xor pBA
Assume that at time=3 a bird flies between B & C. The sequence becomes:
1. A->B: pAB
2. C->B: pBA
3. B->A, B->C: pAB xor pBA [B->A SUCCESS, B->C ERROR]
4. B->C: pAB xor pBA [retry]
B resends the packet, but addresses it only to C. This is still quicker than routing, which would take 5 time slices.
We still haven't got a 'standard' image format, so why should we ever expect to see a single document format?
Consider that images are fairly easy to describe - "a grid of pixels, each pixel being a particular colour" - and then consider the plethora of image formats still in use today - bmp, jpeg, tiff, gif
Why is this the case? Because needs change depending on context - for images, format choice depends on: file size, fidelity/lossyness, multiple image support, transparency, and the doozy - backward compatibility.
Documents are much more complicated than images - fonts, content, frames, tables, embedded images etc. We'll never see a document format for the ages. Also, things change - e.g. electronic paper might see the rise of animated text/images in documents.
The best we can hope for is tools that can convert between document formats, the same way we deal with multiple image formats. And this means that the formats themselves needs to be very well defined, publicly available and not encumbered by patents.
What about bad packets? Wouldn't error correction stuff the whole thing up? i.e. one re-sent packet and you lose out?
What we SHOULD have is something like
Double- and triple- clicking should not exist at all. Where the number of mouse buttons is limited (do Macs still only have one button?) modifier keys (Ctrl, Alt, Left Apple, whatever) can be used in conjunction with the extant mouse buttons to simulate more buttons.
Anyone that has seen their family members routinely triple click hyperlinks will agree with me.
While we are on the topic, rather than adding stupid app-launcher keys to the keyboard, they should add the following:
(while I'm ranting, even if there were sound economic reasons to have only one mouse button, why oh why didn't Apple learn from the car radio manufacturers and have a 'long click' instead of a double click? At least oldies and the less abled can manage a long click, but double-clicking requires a level of dexterity that many people simply don't have! Not that I like the idea of a long click, but it would have been heaps better than the double-click)
I'm glad they've found another use for vegemite.
For those that aren't from Australia, Vegemite is a foodstuff by-product from brewing. It's chief ingredients are yeast, salt and pain.
If it can scratch diamond, then it must be chucknorrisite.
Still won't be as impressive as the Falkirk Wheel
I suppose if you could strip the Rh(D) antigen it would be useful. Also I suppose if you start with AB blood (say) and strip the A & B antigens, then you wouldn't have any Anti-A or Anti-B antibodies in the plasma, which might be useful if graft-vs-host is a risk. I don't know if they ever transfuse whole blood any more, I don't think so. In any case, it doesn't increase the availability of AB Plasma. (Also I am pretty sure the article said they can't strip Rh(D), although maybe stripping AB is the first step - I don't know, I'm a computer guy, not a haematologist).
I still cannot see why you would convert a rare product (AB blood) to a common product (Group O blood).
Converting O Plasma to AB Plasma would be very useful (since in terms of Plasma, AB is the universal donor) but AFAIK antigen stripping isn't going to help you there.
But what about all the other factors like Kell, Kidd, Duffy etc? It would be far better to strip those factors than A/B (where blood without those factors - group O - is readily available).
Blood banks keep stocks of all ABO blood types, not just O.
There is no reason on earth you would want to convert A, B, and AB blood to O for crying out loud. O is readily available, A, B, and AB are the rare ones. It's like saying wow! We've discovered a way to turn diamonds into quartz!
Oh thank God I thought I was the only one who thought this. HTML has been perverted to the point where people are designing websites that do the EXACT OPPOSITE of what HTML was intended to do. HTML was meant to deliver (principally textual) content, and allow the client to decide how the content was displayed. Instead we have the whole web design industry trying to make their website render the same on all target devices.
What we need is a sensible GUI-delivery protocol, not filling HTML full of crap. Who the hell thought it was sensible to put executing code into the comment tags in the first place? I blame them, 'coz a hack like that is a great big red flag.
mod parent up.
Previously, he just looked crook. Now he really is a crook :-)
developers. developers. developers.
developers. developers. developers.
I *think* the article is talking about bandwidth, not volume. In other words, it isn't how many gigs a month you are downloading that worries them, it is how fast you download it. ISPs here in Australia advertise their upload/download speeds though; if they do the same in the US it is hard to see how they can justifiably complain when you use it to capacity.
I'll bring the cheetos. No way am I getting lumbered with finding a goat again.
Cogitum ergot hatto
Computer games are a leisure activity and therefore are a "waste of time" more or less by definition. Whether a particular CRPG is fun or not is a different issue, and to a large extent dependent on the player. For example, I quite like grinding in CoH because I often play late at night just before going to bed and I just want to switch off my brain for a bit.
That said, a CRPG where you start off all powerful and then gradually lose power as the game progresses might be interesting. I doubt anyone would like it though.
Anything that encourages mistrust of online sources is a great idea in my book. Then again, I sell tinfoil hats.
>2) The PS2 wasn't "way" less powerful than the GC/Xbox, had hardly any decent software in
>the time it had the market to itself, and was the most expensive home console on the market
>for most of it's commercial life. People bought into the PS2 in significant numbers because
>it played host to most of the games that they wanted to play.
It's easy to forget in this day and age of $50 DVD players, but when the PS2 debuted, a major selling factor was that it played DVDs. Most DVD players at the time were MORE EXPENSIVE than the PS2.
Heh, the first computer in my house was a C/PM machine that had 8" floppies that held about 120KB I think. They were so expensive that you'd keep using them even if they started having errors (run chkdsk or whatever the C/PM version was to lock off the errors).
:-)
I remember as an ten-or-so year old sitting in front of the computer playing around with Wordstar for hours on end. The whole "you type things and they turn up in glowing green letters on the screen" was pretty amazing back then