Can't the same questions be asked about the HTML itself? Is there really a difference for the purposes of this conversation? They are both just instructions to the browser. The HTML is essentially "executed" by the browser, albeit much more limited in functionality than the Javascript.
Hmm, I meant more like analyzing by other means that tasting it...
So we really just need his arm to transfer the droplet from the leg to the testing device. We should be able to send a robot capable of that with much less cost and time. If the first 10 attempts fail, we are still ahead...
And if takes another year or 5 years, it's not really time critical. Unless of course you have a human sitting on the planet waiting for a replacement testing device and a sandwich.
Companies of that size tend to accumulate a LOT of dead weight in worthless people because the valuable employees move on and the worthless ones stay put, which drives away more of the valuable employees. I can't say for sure that this is the case for IBM, but I know this happens from personal past experience working for a very large corporation.
IBM might just be seizing the opportunity to clean house when a good excuse is handy and few people will question the motivation.
I mean, gays are such a minority out there, is whether they can marry such a big deal with respect to employment? Won't they, like anyone else...go to where the jobs are? It isn't like they can marry everywhere else in the US, and will leave CA in droves.
But if the state had gay marriage, it would be an added incentive to want to move there for gay people, so it's not so much that they are disadvantaged with respect to the rest of the country, but they could have a substantial advantage if they allowed it. It would definitely be a big plus for me.
I moved to another country (Spain) for gay marriage. Not because I wanted to get married, but because I like living in a country that doesn't allow bigotry to rule.
I purchased something from the Apple store (brick-and-mortar, not online), and after the guy swiped my credit card, he asked if I wanted the receipt emailed to me. I said "sure, do you need my email address", and he said "no, we have it". And sure enough they did, because I got the receipt in my email. I assume they have the information from my iTunes account.
As a programmer I love non-programmers who insist they know what's easy and what's not. It's fun to watch them squirm when they get put on the hook for actually doing it.
Well I am a programmer, and I have been for 25 years. I have written algorithms to layout millions of objects and other similar algorithms, and I'm telling you, this would be a piece of cake in comparison. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean it's difficult. It's flowing text and possibly some photos into predefined columns. It's easy.
To quote: "Fast, cheap, correct. Pick any two.". And it's true. What you're doing, though, is setting up requirements that essentially demand all three.
I'm not sure what you are imagining, but I don't see how correctness is going to affect the price or the speed. Just how difficult do you think it is to layout text on a page? Do you think it is going to require a super computer?
You need a large number of copies. You need them extremely quickly. And you demand that each one be individualized enough that you have to treat this as a large number of single-copy jobs instead of a single large-number-of-copies job. The problem is that if you could solve this problem, your solution would be even more efficient at the job offset presses do. Newspapers aren't the only printers out there, and every magazine publisher, every comic publisher, every catalog publisher would kill for the solution you're wanting. Now, with all that incentive, why has nobody come up with something fitting what you want?
Magazines, comic books, and catalogs are a different story because they demand a higher quality than a newspaper, so that point is irrelevant.
Ever hear of Kinkos? They can do high quality copies for pennies a copy, and that's retail price. The quality can afford to be reduced from what you would get from a copy machine/printer, so it could be even cheaper. They also feed directly from a computer to the copy machine, so they have most of the problem solved. You just need a more specialized version of Kinkos.
Because when it comes down to transferring ink to paper, you're stuck with the physical limitations of ink (in all it's forms) and paper and the mechanics of transferring the former onto the latter.
I think they figured out getting ink onto paper a long time ago.
It just can't be solved in a printed medium.
It absolutely can be solved. It's just a matter of whether the price is worth it, and the price is certainly within range of being doable. It still might not be worth it, but it's not that far off. It's not hard to imagine bringing the price down.
Take away the paper and ink and the solutions become trivial. But then you've transformed the entire newspaper into a Web site, with all it's content distributed electronically with no printing involved. And if the papers can't figure out how to make a Web site pay for itself, what makes you think they're going to be any more successful figuring out how to make a Web site pay for itself?
And yet newspapers exist today, and some even make money, with no customized content. Imagine that.
Automatic layout... isn't quite as automatic as all that, it's rather non-trivial to fit things properly onto a fixed-size page.
I guess it depends on your idea of trivial. It might take more than a day or two to write the software to do it, but it certainly is not difficult.
Once it's done, you then need to create plates for each page. Even using modern polymer-coated sheet-metal plates etched under computer control, it takes an hour or so to get the plates ready for a given edition. So you're going to print one copy, then spend another hour preparing for the next person's copy? Right, you're now at being able to produce maybe 24 copies a day per press.
Then you get a different printing technology. I don't believe for a second that it can't be done cheaply. The printers in use today work the way they do because they satisfy the requirements. Change the requirements, and the designs will change with it.
I admit it might not be cost effective, but I wouldn't be so quick to say it can't be done just because things will have to change to make it work.
But I'm suggesting that the pre-press setup be entirely automated, so there is no manual labor for each customer. The physical layout of a newspaper is very simple, and automatic layout would be very easy. You might suffer a bit in the logical layout, but would that matter so much that it's not practical? With a collection of advertisements of various sizes, you could automatically fill in the unused space very well.
I don't know the details of the printers, but I would like to understand why it is necessary to setup a printer based on what it is about to print (other than making sure it has enough ink of each color). Are things like column layout or photo placement something that takes a manual configuration of the printer?
I'm not sure if any company is doing this, but it seems like newspaper printers should change their model. The printing should become a separate operation from the reporters, and subscribers should be able to get a newspaper specifically taylored to them.
I don't know much about the technology being used today for printing a newspaper, but I'm assuming they don't do manual typesetting anymore and it's all electronic. Basically just a big printer. So why not let each subscriber specify what they want in their newspaper? For instance, maybe I want:
Top AP stories
local news as reported by Reporter X
Local movie listings
Classified ads for automobiles
Then each day, the printer could generate a custom version for me, print it, and deliver it to my home. When I don't care about the classified ads anymore, I go online and uncheck that box in my subscription page and the next day I don't get it anymore. To keep costs down, advertising could be interleaved with the stories, and I should be able to specify my interests to get more targeted advertising. They can still provide newstand versions that are of general interest.
As a software engineer I can tell you that the generation of the pages electronically is not difficult at all. They already have the distribution network and they already print a copy for each customer each night. The challenge is making sure that each customer gets their own personal copy.
Is there a market for this? I'm not sure, but I think I would enjoy getting a newspaper taylored to my interests. Personally, I prefer reading the news from a newspaper as opposed to reading it online, but I don't because a significant portion is stuff I don't care about. There are some good journalists out there, they just don't work for the local newspaper. If I could take pieces of several newspapers around the world along with some local journalism that is worth reading and combine it into one, it would be fantastic.
I think this can work OK if they gave you some way to edit your interests, or to temporarily turn them off. It would be really awful if it got stuck thinking you had some interest based on some odd search (or a misinterpretation of some term).
If I search for "gnome desktop" and "gimp" I would hate for it to start thinking I have a particular interest in men with unusual physical characteristics.
Amazon.com tracks what you search for and buy, and uses it to decide what ads to display. I like it, even though it makes me nervous to have them know too much about me. Amazon also gives you the option to say "I'm not really interested in that", so they can remove it from your list of interests.
Although as a straight man, I won't assert any expertise on what it means to "act gay".
I was referring to everything that you and other straight men avoid doing for fear of being accused of being gay, so you are more of an expert than I am.
As a gay man, I have already done some of this research, and I can tell you without a doubt that gay men are NOT physically more feminine in general than straight men. There are masculine and feminine men in both camps, and I don't see any masculine/feminine bias in either direction. And there is certainly no bias towards a smaller penis size in gay men.
I think the reason gay men act feminine at times has more to do with them letting go of the macho image that straight men try to portray, especially in the United States, which is why European men are often accused of "acting gay"; because they don't worry about acting "macho" as much as American men do. Europeans in general don't have such a deep seated fear of being branded as gay. This hasn't always been the case in the United States either. Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.
I was in a queue here in Barcelona to buy the iPhone when it made its debut in Spain. There were around 80 people in the queue when a man showed up and was stunned by how many people were waiting and was not willing to go to the end of the queue.
When they opened the doors and announced that only the first 20 people would get an iPhone that morning, he offered to pay person #18 to take his spot in the queue. I was #16 so I didn't really care one way or the other, but person #21 did not like it all and they argued about whether it should be considered OK or not.
It got me thinking about the queueing etiquette in this case. Unless the guy that was paid was planning to leave anyway, it doesn't change the position of anyone in the queue, so should it be OK? Should it be OK to hire someone to queue for you, and then step in at the last minute? Or is it necessary to endure the queueing process in order to receive the rewards?
My first computers were 1-bit graphics (B&W), and my favorite computer game was NetHack (www.nethack.org) (although I think it was just called Hack back then). My dreams look something like this:
This story is implying that dreams are like movies that we sit back and watch.
Unless they are specifically about color, dreams are just thoughts that are neither B&W nor color.
It's equivalent to remembering a past experience. Even though we can remember exactly how an event played out, color is not part of it unless it has some significance in the memory.
And don't forget the manual tuning of each channel by the turning of the big knob on the front that had stops at each channel, and then the "fine tuning" ring behind the knob that you turned to get it just right in combination with the best position of the rabbit ears for each channel.
I wonder how many people still say "turn the channel" as opposed to "change the channel", and if it differs by age?
How about the public service announcement that came on at 10pm that said:
"Parents, it's now 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?"
I just bought a Mac mini and I think I still would have if they offered a laptop for the same price. I don't like working on laptops and only do so when I am traveling. The Mac mini shares my keyboard, monitor, mouse, speakers, and USB peripherals with my Linux box using a KVM switch. It's a much better setup than a laptop would be and takes up no additional space on my desk.
I travel in and out of the U.S., the U.K., and Spain every couple of months with my laptop, and sometimes with an additional computer, and I have never been asked to show it to anyone nor have I seen anyone else having their laptop checked. The security in Heathrow doesn't even want the laptop taken out of the carry-on anymore, and the U.S. customs rarely looks at anything from anybody that I have seen.
I like the name GLIMPs (Graphical Layer-based Image Manipulation Program) because the name still sounds and looks a bit like GIMP, and also has a visual meaning.
The Republicans in charge do get it, and get it very well. They know how easy it is to control people through religion, and it's one of the most powerful tools they have. They figured out that you can do pretty much anything you want in the name of God, and you will be supported by a lot of people because they can pretend to be following you in the path of God, whether they actually believe it or not. It comes back to the same question: Is it easier to just continue believing it, or to wake up and do something about it?
The current administration is about as anti-Christian as anyone can get, but all Bush has to do is tell people what a great Christian he is, and they believe it, while he murders innocent people, takes from the poor and gives to the rich, and pins medals on people for NOT helping tragedy victims nearby that are dying from lack of a drink of clean water. What Would Jesus Do? indeed.
Yet if you ask most people which party is more religious, most would say Republican. And one the arguments I hear a lot from Republicans about why the Democrats are so bad is that they spend too much money helping the poor.
I'm not saying Democrats are much better. Just that the Republicans have the religious thing figured out.
Slashdot Mirror
Can't the same questions be asked about the HTML itself? Is there really a difference for the purposes of this conversation? They are both just instructions to the browser. The HTML is essentially "executed" by the browser, albeit much more limited in functionality than the Javascript.
Shouldn't he start with that question?
Hmm, I meant more like analyzing by other means that tasting it...
So we really just need his arm to transfer the droplet from the leg to the testing device. We should be able to send a robot capable of that with much less cost and time. If the first 10 attempts fail, we are still ahead...
And if takes another year or 5 years, it's not really time critical. Unless of course you have a human sitting on the planet waiting for a replacement testing device and a sandwich.
at a distance of 500 miles above the earth, the satellites would be traveling around 27000 km/hr (16700 miles/hr) in order to stay in orbit.
British Airways also has on-demand video in every seat of their 747s. They also have free food and alcohol in every class.
the UNIX epoch 'roll-over' would happen about the time that the sun burnt out.
Perhaps the roll-over will be the cause of the sun burning out.
Companies of that size tend to accumulate a LOT of dead weight in worthless people because the valuable employees move on and the worthless ones stay put, which drives away more of the valuable employees. I can't say for sure that this is the case for IBM, but I know this happens from personal past experience working for a very large corporation.
IBM might just be seizing the opportunity to clean house when a good excuse is handy and few people will question the motivation.
I mean, gays are such a minority out there, is whether they can marry such a big deal with respect to employment? Won't they, like anyone else...go to where the jobs are? It isn't like they can marry everywhere else in the US, and will leave CA in droves.
But if the state had gay marriage, it would be an added incentive to want to move there for gay people, so it's not so much that they are disadvantaged with respect to the rest of the country, but they could have a substantial advantage if they allowed it. It would definitely be a big plus for me.
I moved to another country (Spain) for gay marriage. Not because I wanted to get married, but because I like living in a country that doesn't allow bigotry to rule.
"Take 4 red capsules, in 10 minutes, take 2 more... help is on the way."
-- from George Lucas's first film - THX 1138
I purchased something from the Apple store (brick-and-mortar, not online), and after the guy swiped my credit card, he asked if I wanted the receipt emailed to me. I said "sure, do you need my email address", and he said "no, we have it". And sure enough they did, because I got the receipt in my email. I assume they have the information from my iTunes account.
As a programmer I love non-programmers who insist they know what's easy and what's not. It's fun to watch them squirm when they get put on the hook for actually doing it.
Well I am a programmer, and I have been for 25 years. I have written algorithms to layout millions of objects and other similar algorithms, and I'm telling you, this would be a piece of cake in comparison. Just because you don't know how to do it doesn't mean it's difficult. It's flowing text and possibly some photos into predefined columns. It's easy.
To quote: "Fast, cheap, correct. Pick any two.". And it's true. What you're doing, though, is setting up requirements that essentially demand all three.
I'm not sure what you are imagining, but I don't see how correctness is going to affect the price or the speed. Just how difficult do you think it is to layout text on a page? Do you think it is going to require a super computer?
You need a large number of copies. You need them extremely quickly. And you demand that each one be individualized enough that you have to treat this as a large number of single-copy jobs instead of a single large-number-of-copies job. The problem is that if you could solve this problem, your solution would be even more efficient at the job offset presses do. Newspapers aren't the only printers out there, and every magazine publisher, every comic publisher, every catalog publisher would kill for the solution you're wanting. Now, with all that incentive, why has nobody come up with something fitting what you want?
Magazines, comic books, and catalogs are a different story because they demand a higher quality than a newspaper, so that point is irrelevant.
Ever hear of Kinkos? They can do high quality copies for pennies a copy, and that's retail price. The quality can afford to be reduced from what you would get from a copy machine/printer, so it could be even cheaper. They also feed directly from a computer to the copy machine, so they have most of the problem solved. You just need a more specialized version of Kinkos.
Because when it comes down to transferring ink to paper, you're stuck with the physical limitations of ink (in all it's forms) and paper and the mechanics of transferring the former onto the latter.
I think they figured out getting ink onto paper a long time ago.
It just can't be solved in a printed medium.
It absolutely can be solved. It's just a matter of whether the price is worth it, and the price is certainly within range of being doable. It still might not be worth it, but it's not that far off. It's not hard to imagine bringing the price down.
Take away the paper and ink and the solutions become trivial. But then you've transformed the entire newspaper into a Web site, with all it's content distributed electronically with no printing involved. And if the papers can't figure out how to make a Web site pay for itself, what makes you think they're going to be any more successful figuring out how to make a Web site pay for itself?
And yet newspapers exist today, and some even make money, with no customized content. Imagine that.
Automatic layout... isn't quite as automatic as all that, it's rather non-trivial to fit things properly onto a fixed-size page.
I guess it depends on your idea of trivial. It might take more than a day or two to write the software to do it, but it certainly is not difficult.
Once it's done, you then need to create plates for each page. Even using modern polymer-coated sheet-metal plates etched under computer control, it takes an hour or so to get the plates ready for a given edition. So you're going to print one copy, then spend another hour preparing for the next person's copy? Right, you're now at being able to produce maybe 24 copies a day per press.
Then you get a different printing technology. I don't believe for a second that it can't be done cheaply. The printers in use today work the way they do because they satisfy the requirements. Change the requirements, and the designs will change with it.
I admit it might not be cost effective, but I wouldn't be so quick to say it can't be done just because things will have to change to make it work.
But I'm suggesting that the pre-press setup be entirely automated, so there is no manual labor for each customer. The physical layout of a newspaper is very simple, and automatic layout would be very easy. You might suffer a bit in the logical layout, but would that matter so much that it's not practical? With a collection of advertisements of various sizes, you could automatically fill in the unused space very well.
I don't know the details of the printers, but I would like to understand why it is necessary to setup a printer based on what it is about to print (other than making sure it has enough ink of each color). Are things like column layout or photo placement something that takes a manual configuration of the printer?
I'm not sure if any company is doing this, but it seems like newspaper printers should change their model. The printing should become a separate operation from the reporters, and subscribers should be able to get a newspaper specifically taylored to them.
I don't know much about the technology being used today for printing a newspaper, but I'm assuming they don't do manual typesetting anymore and it's all electronic. Basically just a big printer. So why not let each subscriber specify what they want in their newspaper? For instance, maybe I want:
Top AP stories
local news as reported by Reporter X
Local movie listings
Classified ads for automobiles
Then each day, the printer could generate a custom version for me, print it, and deliver it to my home. When I don't care about the classified ads anymore, I go online and uncheck that box in my subscription page and the next day I don't get it anymore. To keep costs down, advertising could be interleaved with the stories, and I should be able to specify my interests to get more targeted advertising. They can still provide newstand versions that are of general interest.
As a software engineer I can tell you that the generation of the pages electronically is not difficult at all. They already have the distribution network and they already print a copy for each customer each night. The challenge is making sure that each customer gets their own personal copy.
Is there a market for this? I'm not sure, but I think I would enjoy getting a newspaper taylored to my interests. Personally, I prefer reading the news from a newspaper as opposed to reading it online, but I don't because a significant portion is stuff I don't care about. There are some good journalists out there, they just don't work for the local newspaper. If I could take pieces of several newspapers around the world along with some local journalism that is worth reading and combine it into one, it would be fantastic.
I think this can work OK if they gave you some way to edit your interests, or to temporarily turn them off. It would be really awful if it got stuck thinking you had some interest based on some odd search (or a misinterpretation of some term).
If I search for "gnome desktop" and "gimp" I would hate for it to start thinking I have a particular interest in men with unusual physical characteristics.
Amazon.com tracks what you search for and buy, and uses it to decide what ads to display. I like it, even though it makes me nervous to have them know too much about me. Amazon also gives you the option to say "I'm not really interested in that", so they can remove it from your list of interests.
Although as a straight man, I won't assert any expertise on what it means to "act gay".
I was referring to everything that you and other straight men avoid doing for fear of being accused of being gay, so you are more of an expert than I am.
As a gay man, I have already done some of this research, and I can tell you without a doubt that gay men are NOT physically more feminine in general than straight men. There are masculine and feminine men in both camps, and I don't see any masculine/feminine bias in either direction. And there is certainly no bias towards a smaller penis size in gay men.
I think the reason gay men act feminine at times has more to do with them letting go of the macho image that straight men try to portray, especially in the United States, which is why European men are often accused of "acting gay"; because they don't worry about acting "macho" as much as American men do. Europeans in general don't have such a deep seated fear of being branded as gay. This hasn't always been the case in the United States either. Watch some old B&W movies and note how much more "gay" the male actors tend to be than they do today.
I was in a queue here in Barcelona to buy the iPhone when it made its debut in Spain. There were around 80 people in the queue when a man showed up and was stunned by how many people were waiting and was not willing to go to the end of the queue.
When they opened the doors and announced that only the first 20 people would get an iPhone that morning, he offered to pay person #18 to take his spot in the queue. I was #16 so I didn't really care one way or the other, but person #21 did not like it all and they argued about whether it should be considered OK or not.
It got me thinking about the queueing etiquette in this case. Unless the guy that was paid was planning to leave anyway, it doesn't change the position of anyone in the queue, so should it be OK? Should it be OK to hire someone to queue for you, and then step in at the last minute? Or is it necessary to endure the queueing process in order to receive the rewards?
8-bit graphics! You were spoiled!
My first computers were 1-bit graphics (B&W), and my favorite computer game was NetHack (www.nethack.org) (although I think it was just called Hack back then). My dreams look something like this:
|----------|
| @ ! |
| >
|----------|
That's me in the kitchen with my father.
This story is implying that dreams are like movies that we sit back and watch.
Unless they are specifically about color, dreams are just thoughts that are neither B&W nor color.
It's equivalent to remembering a past experience. Even though we can remember exactly how an event played out, color is not part of it unless it has some significance in the memory.
Oh yes, I remember it all so well.
And don't forget the manual tuning of each channel by the turning of the big knob on the front that had stops at each channel, and then the "fine tuning" ring behind the knob that you turned to get it just right in combination with the best position of the rabbit ears for each channel.
I wonder how many people still say "turn the channel" as opposed to "change the channel", and if it differs by age?
How about the public service announcement that came on at 10pm that said:
"Parents, it's now 10 o'clock. Do you know where your children are?"
I just bought a Mac mini and I think I still would have if they offered a laptop for the same price. I don't like working on laptops and only do so when I am traveling. The Mac mini shares my keyboard, monitor, mouse, speakers, and USB peripherals with my Linux box using a KVM switch. It's a much better setup than a laptop would be and takes up no additional space on my desk.
I travel in and out of the U.S., the U.K., and Spain every couple of months with my laptop, and sometimes with an additional computer, and I have never been asked to show it to anyone nor have I seen anyone else having their laptop checked. The security in Heathrow doesn't even want the laptop taken out of the carry-on anymore, and the U.S. customs rarely looks at anything from anybody that I have seen.
I like the name GLIMPs (Graphical Layer-based Image Manipulation Program) because the name still sounds and looks a bit like GIMP, and also has a visual meaning.
The Republicans in charge do get it, and get it very well. They know how easy it is to control people through religion, and it's one of the most powerful tools they have. They figured out that you can do pretty much anything you want in the name of God, and you will be supported by a lot of people because they can pretend to be following you in the path of God, whether they actually believe it or not. It comes back to the same question: Is it easier to just continue believing it, or to wake up and do something about it?
The current administration is about as anti-Christian as anyone can get, but all Bush has to do is tell people what a great Christian he is, and they believe it, while he murders innocent people, takes from the poor and gives to the rich, and pins medals on people for NOT helping tragedy victims nearby that are dying from lack of a drink of clean water. What Would Jesus Do? indeed.
Yet if you ask most people which party is more religious, most would say Republican. And one the arguments I hear a lot from Republicans about why the Democrats are so bad is that they spend too much money helping the poor.
I'm not saying Democrats are much better. Just that the Republicans have the religious thing figured out.
This one has been burning since 1962 and could continue to burn for another 1000 years.