I like preferences. Lots and lots of preferences. There doesn't need to be a GUI for it. A config file would do.
Also, if you read my post you'd see that I am aware that you can turn off the iTunes music organization feature. But I think it would be a useful feature if it let me organize my music the way *I* want. I also demonstrated that such flexibilty is very easy to implement on some level, and that it is not bloat.
I would also dismiss the theory that adding additional preferences would confuse that 'average' user. Just hide things like that in an 'Advanced' menu or something. Also, iTunes is already highly unintuitive for the 'average' user in many areas. Hell, it's unintuitive to me in many areas. It took me forever to get it to sync back episodes of a podcast to my uncle's iPod such that it would remove them when he was done listening.
But what if I'm pedantic (which I am) and I want my music files to be organized a particular way on the file system. iTunes does not do that, and does not let me do that. It just goes ahead and reorganizes stuff the way it wants. I know you can turn that feature off, but it would be a nice feature if I could tell it via some simple rules how I want my files organized.
In the meantime, a simple plugin I wrote for foobar2000 does just what I want.
Programs not doing things my way is something I'm used to. What's annoying about iTunes (and lots of other Apple software as well) it's extremely difficult if not impossible to get it to do things my way.
Are you kidding? Not with IE's dozens of CSS bugs you haven't. Every single time I use CSS it ends up having hacks related to IE's box model, if nothing else. Also, when it comes to JavaScript, most stuff that works the same in FF and Opera does *not* work in IE, though JS can be a dicier matter, and is where most of the difficulty with Opera arises.
Regardless, I've had the opposite experience. Most sites work fine in FF and Opera, and have to be tweaked for IE. How you can even suggest that Opera would be less compliant with standards than IE can't even imagine.
Anyways, most of the sites I come across that don't work in Opera are either designed for IE (in which case they usually don't work right in FF either) or may support FF, but only through the use of the "-moz-" CSS extensions. Take alpha blending for example. IE has 'filter:alpha()'. FF has '-moz-opacity-filter'. But Opera only supports the CSS3 standard 'opacity' (FF probably supports it too, but I haven't checked). I've seen websites that only try to use the first two to achieve an opacity effect, and ignore the third even though it's the W3 standard.
A slight correction: Those websites are compatible only with certain browsers, not the other way around. *Especially* if someone went through the trouble of making a complex website work in both IE and FF, you know that they're designing for browser-specific features and bugs. Just because they ignore Opera doesn't mean Opera doesn't display pages properly (not that it doesn't have rendering bugs either).
...is anyone having trouble with GMail this morning? It just keeps timing out (at least, over https which I have to use at work). I'd ask one of my friends, but they're all on Google Talk, heheh.
Anyways, in order to make this post slight ON topic:
Before anyone starts bitching about how stupid it is to add PVR functionality to what is supposedly a game system, just remember the PSX (not the be confused with the original PlayStation). It was a PS2/PVR released in Japan a few years ago that sold surprisingly well, in spite of being in the range of $600-$800. Now, why they're releasing this in Europe but not Japan I'm not sure, but I'm sure they've done their research and recognized the existence of a market.
I for one would rather keep my PVR separate from my game console. But on the other hand, I've been planning to build a MythTV box for a while, and it will also have MAME on it, so maybe it's not such a far-fetched idea for some people.
That's all well and good in principle. It's true that there's a terrible consistency, especially among people don't understand it, to confuse Evolution as a theory of how life came about in the first place (not to mention the universe and everything).
And there are people, scientists even, who believe that while a god created the universe, Evolution is responsible for the diversity of species on Earth. Some even believe that the process of evolution is guided by a deity. I personally think that's silly, but they're entitled to their beliefs--as long as they know that evolution does in fact occur they should be capable of doing their jobs.
The problem is that in practice, the vast majority of those who favor creationism over evolution as an explanation for human origins tend to also just reject Evolution altogether.
Yeah, I used to have a Comcast cable modem, as it was pretty much the only choice in the area at the time.
Now I have Speakeasy DSL, and while one could make an argument that Speakeasy is not like other DSL providers, regarless it's just as fast as my Comcast was if not faster, and far, far more reliable. Also no ridiculous, arbitrary restrictions on how I use it.
There are very few albums I like that I would consider "even efforts from track to track". Some, but not many. Like I said, I don't expect everything to be 100% pure gold. But every album I like has well more than 2 good songs, and is listenable and enjoyable (and coherent) as a whole.
I don't think that an artist who's incapable of producing more than one or two "hits" at a time is worth listening to to begin with. Now, I'm not saying there's a music artist in existence who produces pure, 100% musical gold. But I, for one, still buy albums. That I listen to in their entirety and mostly enjoy. I have very few albums on which I only like one or two songs. And of those, I hardly even listen to those singles. Most of them aren't worth it.
You just don't hear about the good stuff as much, since it's a lot easier to push one crappy single over FM radio and MTV than it is to push an entire album.
...is not that H. habilis and H. erectus may have coexisted. It's been believed for some time that the direct lineage of H. habilis -> H. erectus may be naive. To quote the Scientific American article on the finding:
"Many of us have already abandoned this simple scheme" of habilis begetting erectus, says paleoanthropologist Philip Rightmire of Binghamton University in New York State and Harvard University, who was not involved in the study. "For me, it seems increasingly reasonable to suppose that a habilislike creature managed to disperse from Africa into Eurasia, sometime prior to 1.8 [million] to 1.7 [million years ago]."
Anyways, the real story here is the incredibly poor coverage of this finding by the mainstream press. The BBC article linked to here isn't so bad, but just go to Google News and look at some of the headlines, in what I would consider increasing order of ridiculousness:
"Fossil find casts doubt on origins of man" "new theory on the dawn of humanity" "Fossils Paint Messy Picture of Evolution" "Fossil Discoveries Challenge Theory of Human Evolution" "Darwin's rolling over"
They make it look like this is somehow a CHALLENGE to THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION ITSELF. In other words, "let's take some story we don't really understand, but it hey it has the word 'evolution' in it, so we can manipulate this to stir up that ol' hornet's nest and sell papers!"
I think this is the most disappointing example in a while of the sorry state of science journalism.
The difference being that I'm happy to have the money I pay for insurance go to cancer patients who didn't bring it upon themselves. But I don't like the idea of paying more because of people getting lung cancer from smoking (note: I still think they should get insurance coverage like anyone else, but they should definitely have higher premiums if they brought it on themselves).
This is definitely a cool idea. But it's just a myth. Take a look at that site--lots of wonky pseudo-science to be had. And I especially knew something was wrong when they started talking about the Mayan calendar and global warming.
I don't have any mod points, so I'm replying to this AC to bump his comment up.
As he says, this is a fallacy. Even if there were an infinite number of galaxies, that does not mean that each galaxy is necessarily larger than any other. You could, in fact, have an infinite number of galaxies that are all the exact same size.
Just because there isn't a law for it doesn't mean it isn't already there. We *do* have net neutrality whether it's legally supported or not, and it *can* be done away with by enacting new legislation. You're saying it might be just fine to enact new legislation (and a new type of government interference in a system that already works fine--quite the opposite of your suggestion). And why would big telecoms need new government interference to 'protect their business models'. If their business models can't grow up around a neutral internet (which they already seem to be doing just fine) then they don't deserve to succeed.
He was screwing up more than just the jargon. He was screwing up the entire explanation of how the internet works. At any rate, that little rant of his is just what made him funny. That doesn't change the fact that, in spite of having now idea what he was talking about, he was the one spearheading legislation capitualiting to big telecoms on getting rid of net neutrality. I think that's what has most slashdotters angry at him, and given the audience it's pretty expected and reasonable.
Not to mention, there's a scene in the trailer for the movie that made me burst into laughter.
Bart and Flanders are climbing to the top of some mountain, and Flanders says something like "From up here you can see the four states that border Springfield: Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky."
(Though, the real deal-maker would be if they made it possible to play through the game as either Nova (the ghost) or a Protoss hero, and possibly some hyper-intelligent Hydralisk or something.)
Slashdot Mirror
I like preferences. Lots and lots of preferences. There doesn't need to be a GUI for it. A config file would do.
Also, if you read my post you'd see that I am aware that you can turn off the iTunes music organization feature. But I think it would be a useful feature if it let me organize my music the way *I* want. I also demonstrated that such flexibilty is very easy to implement on some level, and that it is not bloat.
I would also dismiss the theory that adding additional preferences would confuse that 'average' user. Just hide things like that in an 'Advanced' menu or something. Also, iTunes is already highly unintuitive for the 'average' user in many areas. Hell, it's unintuitive to me in many areas. It took me forever to get it to sync back episodes of a podcast to my uncle's iPod such that it would remove them when he was done listening.
But what if I'm pedantic (which I am) and I want my music files to be organized a particular way on the file system. iTunes does not do that, and does not let me do that. It just goes ahead and reorganizes stuff the way it wants. I know you can turn that feature off, but it would be a nice feature if I could tell it via some simple rules how I want my files organized.
In the meantime, a simple plugin I wrote for foobar2000 does just what I want.
Programs not doing things my way is something I'm used to. What's annoying about iTunes (and lots of other Apple software as well) it's extremely difficult if not impossible to get it to do things my way.
Are you kidding? Not with IE's dozens of CSS bugs you haven't. Every single time I use CSS it ends up having hacks related to IE's box model, if nothing else. Also, when it comes to JavaScript, most stuff that works the same in FF and Opera does *not* work in IE, though JS can be a dicier matter, and is where most of the difficulty with Opera arises.
Regardless, I've had the opposite experience. Most sites work fine in FF and Opera, and have to be tweaked for IE. How you can even suggest that Opera would be less compliant with standards than IE can't even imagine.
Anyways, most of the sites I come across that don't work in Opera are either designed for IE (in which case they usually don't work right in FF either) or may support FF, but only through the use of the "-moz-" CSS extensions. Take alpha blending for example. IE has 'filter:alpha()'. FF has '-moz-opacity-filter'. But Opera only supports the CSS3 standard 'opacity' (FF probably supports it too, but I haven't checked). I've seen websites that only try to use the first two to achieve an opacity effect, and ignore the third even though it's the W3 standard.
A slight correction: Those websites are compatible only with certain browsers, not the other way around. *Especially* if someone went through the trouble of making a complex website work in both IE and FF, you know that they're designing for browser-specific features and bugs. Just because they ignore Opera doesn't mean Opera doesn't display pages properly (not that it doesn't have rendering bugs either).
...is anyone having trouble with GMail this morning? It just keeps timing out (at least, over https which I have to use at work). I'd ask one of my friends, but they're all on Google Talk, heheh.
Anyways, in order to make this post slight ON topic:
Before anyone starts bitching about how stupid it is to add PVR functionality to what is supposedly a game system, just remember the PSX (not the be confused with the original PlayStation). It was a PS2/PVR released in Japan a few years ago that sold surprisingly well, in spite of being in the range of $600-$800. Now, why they're releasing this in Europe but not Japan I'm not sure, but I'm sure they've done their research and recognized the existence of a market.
I for one would rather keep my PVR separate from my game console. But on the other hand, I've been planning to build a MythTV box for a while, and it will also have MAME on it, so maybe it's not such a far-fetched idea for some people.
That's all well and good in principle. It's true that there's a terrible consistency, especially among people don't understand it, to confuse Evolution as a theory of how life came about in the first place (not to mention the universe and everything).
And there are people, scientists even, who believe that while a god created the universe, Evolution is responsible for the diversity of species on Earth. Some even believe that the process of evolution is guided by a deity. I personally think that's silly, but they're entitled to their beliefs--as long as they know that evolution does in fact occur they should be capable of doing their jobs.
The problem is that in practice, the vast majority of those who favor creationism over evolution as an explanation for human origins tend to also just reject Evolution altogether.
Yeah, I used to have a Comcast cable modem, as it was pretty much the only choice in the area at the time.
Now I have Speakeasy DSL, and while one could make an argument that Speakeasy is not like other DSL providers, regarless it's just as fast as my Comcast was if not faster, and far, far more reliable. Also no ridiculous, arbitrary restrictions on how I use it.
There are very few albums I like that I would consider "even efforts from track to track". Some, but not many. Like I said, I don't expect everything to be 100% pure gold. But every album I like has well more than 2 good songs, and is listenable and enjoyable (and coherent) as a whole.
I don't think that an artist who's incapable of producing more than one or two "hits" at a time is worth listening to to begin with. Now, I'm not saying there's a music artist in existence who produces pure, 100% musical gold. But I, for one, still buy albums. That I listen to in their entirety and mostly enjoy. I have very few albums on which I only like one or two songs. And of those, I hardly even listen to those singles. Most of them aren't worth it.
You just don't hear about the good stuff as much, since it's a lot easier to push one crappy single over FM radio and MTV than it is to push an entire album.
Nevermind, now it's working. I was getting server errors at first.
Damn. 5 comments and it's already slashdotted.
This looked cool too. Any mirrors (no pun intended)?
Anyways, the real story here is the incredibly poor coverage of this finding by the mainstream press. The BBC article linked to here isn't so bad, but just go to Google News and look at some of the headlines, in what I would consider increasing order of ridiculousness:
"Fossil find casts doubt on origins of man"
"new theory on the dawn of humanity"
"Fossils Paint Messy Picture of Evolution"
"Fossil Discoveries Challenge Theory of Human Evolution"
"Darwin's rolling over"
They make it look like this is somehow a CHALLENGE to THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION ITSELF. In other words, "let's take some story we don't really understand, but it hey it has the word 'evolution' in it, so we can manipulate this to stir up that ol' hornet's nest and sell papers!"
I think this is the most disappointing example in a while of the sorry state of science journalism.
The difference being that I'm happy to have the money I pay for insurance go to cancer patients who didn't bring it upon themselves. But I don't like the idea of paying more because of people getting lung cancer from smoking (note: I still think they should get insurance coverage like anyone else, but they should definitely have higher premiums if they brought it on themselves).
Heheh, *holds out user ID* Yeah, it's a bit smaller.
5 &threshold=2&commentsort=0&mode=thread&pid=2014101 7#20141521
Also, I beat you by 10 minutes here: http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26311
This is definitely a cool idea. But it's just a myth. Take a look at that site--lots of wonky pseudo-science to be had. And I especially knew something was wrong when they started talking about the Mayan calendar and global warming.
t he-sun-from-another-galaxy
At any rate, take a look at the original press release that was misinterpreted to come up with this theory here: http://astsun.astro.virginia.edu/~mfs4n/sgr/
And take a look at a debunking here: http://www.badastronomy.com/bablog/2007/06/27/is-
And the wonkiness about the angle we see the Milky Way at from Earth is just plain bad math.
Well, as a programmer, the way I see it is that it should be 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 = 100, so that should *really* blow your mind.
I don't have any mod points, so I'm replying to this AC to bump his comment up.
As he says, this is a fallacy. Even if there were an infinite number of galaxies, that does not mean that each galaxy is necessarily larger than any other. You could, in fact, have an infinite number of galaxies that are all the exact same size.
Right. The "it's not a big truck that you can just dump something on" is really the icing on the cake.
I think that the very fact that slashdotters *do* understand what he's saying is why they don't like him, unfortunately.
Just because there isn't a law for it doesn't mean it isn't already there. We *do* have net neutrality whether it's legally supported or not, and it *can* be done away with by enacting new legislation. You're saying it might be just fine to enact new legislation (and a new type of government interference in a system that already works fine--quite the opposite of your suggestion). And why would big telecoms need new government interference to 'protect their business models'. If their business models can't grow up around a neutral internet (which they already seem to be doing just fine) then they don't deserve to succeed.
He was screwing up more than just the jargon. He was screwing up the entire explanation of how the internet works. At any rate, that little rant of his is just what made him funny. That doesn't change the fact that, in spite of having now idea what he was talking about, he was the one spearheading legislation capitualiting to big telecoms on getting rid of net neutrality. I think that's what has most slashdotters angry at him, and given the audience it's pretty expected and reasonable.
I liked how they actually bleeped out the Harry Potter spoiler. It's not like the FCC could fine them for that. Or could they? :P
Not to mention, there's a scene in the trailer for the movie that made me burst into laughter.
Bart and Flanders are climbing to the top of some mountain, and Flanders says something like "From up here you can see the four states that border Springfield: Ohio, Nevada, Maine, and Kentucky."
I think that pretty much closes the issue.
In other words, Alien vs Predator 3.