There was an article in a recent wired magazine about the new voyages episode starring Sulu and they address the apparant dichotomy. It seems that they don't care what happened after the series went off the air. They are trying to make the rest of that origional series episodes. If I recall correctly the original was on for 3 seasons out of a planned 5. This fan group is on the 3rd or 4th episode of season 4 in their mind.
Because they are working on the episodes that should have happened before the current movies they have chosen to ignore any current information about the show and, instead, are filling in the gaps as they imagine they would have been filled in back in the day.
Or they would freak out and walk away from the computer in fear.
All the linux fanboys here are happy to say how easy Linux is for everyone everywhere - but it isn't.
I installed Ubuntu 5.10 a couple weeks ago and had to screw around with the partition screen but it was never obvious there was a "default" option. I clicked and resized and attempted to get the partitions to work out just right - finally I got lucky and things started to fall in place but for anyone to say the partition screen is intuitive or obvious or unthreatening os lying to the community, and worse, themselves.
I hear SUSE doesn't even have a partition screen (unless you hit the advanced or expert button) - all Linux distro's should be like that.
In the initial bet scenario it just said DIY linux -vs- Windows and who would get their installed "properly" first. I'm not sure what his definition of "properly" is. But I think most non-computer people would get Windows running before Linux and would be able to use it first.
Now, Linux might have better driver support and thus the Linux user would end up with more functionality and a better end experience - I don't know. I don't know a single non-computer person who would be willing to go through the crappy process of installing either OS - let alone comparing the two experiences.
Finally, just the look of the Ubuntu installer (particularly the partion portion) had my younger brother thinking I was installing some archaic program.... He doesn't even know what Linux is (a typical non-computer person) and just calls it a program.
It seems many linuxites forget how little about computers most normal people know.
Of course,the study is kind of dated and I realize the source is the NCAA but if you read the results you will see they weren't seemingly biased to make the sports look good.
The study released Thursday paints a sobering picture, noting that only 6% of Division I-A programs operate in the black without school or state subsidies. Brand [the NCAA president, Myles Brand] counts "a dozen or less" of more than 1,000 overall in the NCAA making money.
Based on these articles you can see that NCAA-1AA, NCAA-II, and NCAA-III almost all lose money on every sport on average as do many NCAA-1A teams.
However, when all is said and done college sports are often more about the money. I live in a small city (apx 40,000 people) that is home to an NCAA-1A university. The athletics departments provide a major source of entertainment and pride to the city. Our teams have accomplished alot in the past ten years (both men's and women') with the Mens football team winning 4 bowl games, 4 conference championships in a row, sent a bunch (16 i think) of players to the NFL, and had 2 heisman finalists, and when they were in NCAA-1AA a couple national championship appearances with at least one championship. The mens soccer team has won its conference a couple times and the ladies soccer team has been a strong force in conference play. The womens tennis team has won the conference and sent players to the national tournament. The womens basketball team has also sent a squad to the NCAA "march madness" tournament. All of this has given the city and school a little bit of national attention at times and given the people who live here an added reason to hold their head high when they talk about their home to outsiders. I have only lived here since 1996 and the level of passion the people of this city have for the college sports has been impressive. The school does a service for the people of the community and the students of the University by having sports; to the folks here it is about more than money.
you don't really live on a farm, do you? I mean, come-on betting the farm? How do we know your not related to the first guy who was vcr shopping? Maybe your in cahoots with him to give his post a modicrum of credibility; which consquently was lost with the "bet the farm" comment.
feedDemon has customizable layouts so you can have an outlook style layout or one just like you showed in the screenshot.
feedDemon, however, costs $$ - it's not expensive but it isn't free. It also synchornizes with bloglines (I think) so you can have feedDemon installed at home and work and know that your info will be synchronized between the two.
I tried feedDemon out during one of its earlier beta's and it was really nice. Very easy to use and peppy. However, I wasn't willing to spend any $$ for something like a feedreader.
It's why I use Sage (a firefox plugin) that loads as a sidebar (feeds on the left) and uses the main browsing area on the right to show me the content of the feeds. So Sage+Firefox might be perfect for you.
I didn't realize any form of peapod survied the dot.com burst. PeaPad was one of those companies that grew fast, really fast, and died even faster. It's main site is http://peapod.com/ and I am suprised to see it still there. I can't remember it's only other main competitor at the time but I doubt they are still around.
Many how many MILLIONS were spent building those companies up just so folks wouldn't have to buy their groceries anymore?
Peapod Currently delivers in: Chicago(land) Milwaukee SE Wisconsin
plus with deals with stop-n-shop Connecticut Massachusetts Rhode Island New York New Jersey
--- I can't help but wonder how much of each of those states they deliver too. I doubt my mom in Esperance NY can get her groceries delivered. Nope, I checked her Zip and it isn't available there. Figures.
and as oc255 mentioned Giant Food partners with PeaPod in the following areas: Washington, DC Maryland Virginia
--- again I doubt the entire state is available Most of MD and Va are pretty rural.
I can only hope you are being as sarcastic as the parent. You are aren't you?
I mean you can't possibly be saying their govts are unconstrained by ideological constipation? If you are I pity your naievete.
Have you read anything about the ongoing reproductive laws there (Italy) - heavilly influenced by the Catholic Church. http://www.lucacoscioni.it/node/5294
I applaud the Italian Govts efforts to stand independant from the secular influence that comes from the vatican but there is only so much they can do considering the nation is predominantly Catholic.
scored insightful. so basically the poster and the moderator both are clueless as to what RSS actually is. how can you not know what RSS is - i mean, fine, dont RTFA, but at least know what the blurb is talking about before you saying something so completely wrong.
RSS is syndicated content so folks can republish it all they want. credit still goes to the initial author and pretty much EVERY RSS aggregator in existence does exactly what Googles does. Just not all of them have the google name attached and not all of them are accessible via web interface.
i tried out a few wallpaper programs but I didn't like them staying resident and hogging memory. I also didn't really need any features other than random wallpaper selection. I can put it in my startup menu to get a random one on startup if i want. Or I can just quickly change my wallpaper with the hotkey.
I'll take a look at your recommendation. But in general I'm after the lightest weight solution as possible
I actually have IrvanView installed but have never launced it manually. I do however have a simple windows script that uses it to grab a random image from a directory, convert it, and make it my wallpaper - all hooked up to a hotkey sequence (win+w) so I can change my wallpaper on a whim without much effort.
I should probably put the script up on the web somewhere for others to use.
I work for a great company (http://www.sbcs.com/ and have turned down much higher paying jobs in other locations in order to stay here. This is the only company I have ever actually enjoyed working for. I like everyone at the company (we are pretty small) and I think the company is really concerned with both the bottom line and their employees well being.
I was pretty cynical all of my prior employment - but I couldn't be happier with the way SBCS treats it's employees.
The company does hire on occassion and you can learn more about it and the work we do at our website: http://www.sbcs.com/
I wish I could say the same. After installing xp sp2 it takes apx ten of second for a second IE window to open. If i right click and say open link in a new window it takes even longer.
The first IE window opens fast - but that is it.
I'm close to doing a complete reinstall it is so tedious. Especially since ESPN fantasy football doesn't work quite right in FF.
Your high school required every student to take Trig?
I don't believe it. Hell, we had plenty of students who never took a second year of algebra. And I went to four high schools in four states (each year my family moved).
Not every school district I lived in even supported AP courses so Trig and "pre calc" were the highest level math the school taught. Needless to say, not everyone was capable of taking those classes and not everyone did.
The only people who took them were folk who wanted too. They didn't necessarilly like taking them once they were in it, but they took them regardless.
I agree with you in general. I have tried to use Eclipse. But it just doesn't have the "pep" i need. Its too darn slow.
I primarilly use EditPlus (on windows) it is an excellent text editor with almost every feature I could want (columnar select being a biggie for me, word wrap is nice too) the only thing it is missing is code folding
code folding is what brings me back to Eclipse. Sometimes code folding is incredibly useful. So, if I'm working on a file that would benefit from code folding I use Eclipse (but keep EditPlus open in the back ground for copy/paste columnar select, repositioning)
I've tried JEdit (too slow to startup; but not as bad as Eclipse) and it has some features that can't be beat as well. For instance it's ability to handle MASSIVE amounts of buffers doing a regEX search and replace (to get rid of ugly MS smart quote symbols) is pretty darn slick. So, I have keep it installed to.
I tried out SlickEdit this year and was unimpressed. It's code folding setup was kind of clunky. And seemed somewhat counter intuitive to use at this point after having used so many other editors.
CodeWright is pretty nice. But it is kind of pricey and it didn't do anything extra for me over EditPlus and EditPlus is only $30.
Overall, if you're on Windows you should give EditPlus a try. Its pretty darn extensible. Loads up super fast. Is a perfect notepad/wordpad replacement. Can handle huge buffers. Has a tabbed interface. Is easy to integrate external tools.
If anyone has tips on how to get Eclipse to run faster (other than buying a better computer) I'd love to hear them. The CVS and SVN integration is pretty nice (though using Tortoise for either pretty much gives me integration in any program, just open the "open file" dialog.)
Oh, and to answer the grandparent question (i think) there is an XML plugin available from xmlspy for Eclipse I believe.
you seem a little defensive. Oh, if you're getting charged $15 for a 24 pack you're still getting ripped off.
I regularly buy cases of name brand soda's for my office (i'm a nice guy) and they cost roughly $6/case.. each case holds 24 drinks.
Sometimes I get an even better deal (particularly if they are cans) and I can get a case for $3-$5 (still name brand, none of that generic grocery store branded stuff).
I don't think people missed the point of your post. They were just shocked to see you spending $15. I know it caught my eye. I mean, for the average home shopper, a $15 bottle/case for pop is pretty high.
I guess that's the beauty of an XML you can always just define your own extension - in the RSS case so long as you don't break basic standard compatiability then your extension will work (most likely often ignored, but will still work).
I really don't know if you can say an 80-90% rating a FLOP. If it doesn't sell well then sure it will be a flop. But they will probably still sell their 10 million copies.
I was tasked to build an application that did not use Flash or Java Applets in 2000 that contained two very complex forms.
These forms had dependant selector fields, and a variety of rules that are rather complex. Changing one field could cause four to ten other fields to change making some required, others not, the values available in those fields to change etc.
The first option presented to the customer was to refresh the screen each time one of these form fields changed so that the business logic could be stored in the business layer - and not in the presentation layer.
Another option would have been to pull down all of the conditional rules etc into the browser upon initial page load; load up a ton of hashtables and go at it - making the client end do all the work and thus mixing all the business logic with presentation.
A third option was this cool thing IE had come up with called DataIslands using xmlHttpRequest.
Now, remember, this was 2000. So only IE had xmlHttpRequest functionality. It was being developed for a local government agency and they were adamant that they didn't want the usability nightmare of having the screen refresh all the time.
So I was left with an option. Stick with the government mandated IE only development platform and separate my business and presentation layers - or say screw it and totally kludge the app together on the client side in the presentation layer.
Now, by your definition the REAL developer would have made the whole app run clientside via javascript - aiming for interoperability. Oh, by the way, NN 4.7 was the netscape browser at the time.
I guess I'm not a real developer as I choose to develop the site as an IE only one. And it still works prefectly well.
What's even better? It took me about five lines of code to update the site this past year when a work order came through - and now it works in both IE and FF (who knows about Opera and their weak xmlHttpRequest support).
The customer has been happy, the people they serve have been happy, and the app is pretty darn maintainable. Glad I'm not a real developer.
In WW2 there was a large rate of "no-fire" where a soldier in combat never fired a round. Weapons training then consisted of shooting at a stationary round target. Soldiers who were excellent shots were often very hesitant to shoot at an actual person. It is estimated the rate of soldiers not engaging the enemy was as high as 75% http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/armies/c hapter2.aspx
Between WW2 and Korea the military switched the targets to human silouhettes. These new targets didn't improve anyone's aim - but they did acclimate the soldies to shooting at a more human like target. The end result was a much lower rate of "no-fire" during the Korean war. However, the rate was still too high. (50%)
After Korea the military moved to "pop-up" targets that would spring up from the ground - simulating movement by the enemy and giving a more "life-like" feel to the exercise of going to the Range. It is estimated that between 90-95% of all soldiers in combat fired at the enemy.
While there is no absolute correlation between these different types of targets there is a pretty obvious conclusion. Better training has led to more effective soldiers. Video games, which are often very realistic looking, still lack the kick, smell, and feel of being on the range firing a rifle.
I don't believe Video Games have had that much impact on the willingness of soldiers to shoot. We didn't have DOOM in 1964.
The problem is a bit deeper though. It seems many soldiers might "posture" or just fire in the direction of the enemy without a real intent to kill due to their natural repugnance towards killing another person.
Alot of studying is being done, and needs to be done, to understand it all. Playing a game though isn't desensitizing anyone, at least it isn't proven to, though, perhaps, as games get more and more realistic they will (particulary if the physical effects of the field of combat can be simulated as well).
Unfortunately, I can't find the research article I read that detailed the correlation between target shapes and soldier efficacy. So you'll have to take my post with a grain of salt since I can't provide the supporting documentation. My Apologies.
Slashdot Mirror
There was an article in a recent wired magazine about the new voyages episode starring Sulu and they address the apparant dichotomy. It seems that they don't care what happened after the series went off the air. They are trying to make the rest of that origional series episodes. If I recall correctly the original was on for 3 seasons out of a planned 5. This fan group is on the 3rd or 4th episode of season 4 in their mind.
a rtrek.html
Because they are working on the episodes that should have happened before the current movies they have chosen to ignore any current information about the show and, instead, are filling in the gaps as they imagine they would have been filled in back in the day.
The article is online (though I'm not sure if it is complete) at http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.12/st
Or they would freak out and walk away from the computer in fear.
All the linux fanboys here are happy to say how easy Linux is for everyone everywhere - but it isn't.
I installed Ubuntu 5.10 a couple weeks ago and had to screw around with the partition screen but it was never obvious there was a "default" option. I clicked and resized and attempted to get the partitions to work out just right - finally I got lucky and things started to fall in place but for anyone to say the partition screen is intuitive or obvious or unthreatening os lying to the community, and worse, themselves.
I hear SUSE doesn't even have a partition screen (unless you hit the advanced or expert button) - all Linux distro's should be like that.
In the initial bet scenario it just said DIY linux -vs- Windows and who would get their installed "properly" first. I'm not sure what his definition of "properly" is. But I think most non-computer people would get Windows running before Linux and would be able to use it first.
Now, Linux might have better driver support and thus the Linux user would end up with more functionality and a better end experience - I don't know. I don't know a single non-computer person who would be willing to go through the crappy process of installing either OS - let alone comparing the two experiences.
Finally, just the look of the Ubuntu installer (particularly the partion portion) had my younger brother thinking I was installing some archaic program.... He doesn't even know what Linux is (a typical non-computer person) and just calls it a program.
It seems many linuxites forget how little about computers most normal people know.
OP Said:You can't beat longer battery life and better performance."
Well, except with even longer battery life and even better preformance for even less money. I think that would beat it.
Can you post a link to the times article you cite?
According to this study the average NCAA-1A football program makes money. http://www.ncaa.org/releases/miscellaneous/1996/19 96111901ms.htm
Of course,the study is kind of dated and I realize the source is the NCAA but if you read the results you will see they weren't seemingly biased to make the sports look good.
A slight newer study seems to support these findings: http://www.ncaa.org/releases/research/2000110601re .htm
Another interesting article detailing how schools tend to lose money on athletics: http://www.usatoday.com/sports/college/other/2003- 08-14-brand-finances_x.htm with an interesting quote:
Based on these articles you can see that NCAA-1AA, NCAA-II, and NCAA-III almost all lose money on every sport on average as do many NCAA-1A teams.
However, when all is said and done college sports are often more about the money. I live in a small city (apx 40,000 people) that is home to an NCAA-1A university. The athletics departments provide a major source of entertainment and pride to the city. Our teams have accomplished alot in the past ten years (both men's and women') with the Mens football team winning 4 bowl games, 4 conference championships in a row, sent a bunch (16 i think) of players to the NFL, and had 2 heisman finalists, and when they were in NCAA-1AA a couple national championship appearances with at least one championship. The mens soccer team has won its conference a couple times and the ladies soccer team has been a strong force in conference play. The womens tennis team has won the conference and sent players to the national tournament. The womens basketball team has also sent a squad to the NCAA "march madness" tournament. All of this has given the city and school a little bit of national attention at times and given the people who live here an added reason to hold their head high when they talk about their home to outsiders. I have only lived here since 1996 and the level of passion the people of this city have for the college sports has been impressive. The school does a service for the people of the community and the students of the University by having sports; to the folks here it is about more than money.
you don't really live on a farm, do you? I mean, come-on betting the farm? How do we know your not related to the first guy who was vcr shopping? Maybe your in cahoots with him to give his post a modicrum of credibility; which consquently was lost with the "bet the farm" comment.
feedDemon has customizable layouts so you can have an outlook style layout or one just like you showed in the screenshot.
feedDemon, however, costs $$ - it's not expensive but it isn't free. It also synchornizes with bloglines (I think) so you can have feedDemon installed at home and work and know that your info will be synchronized between the two.
I tried feedDemon out during one of its earlier beta's and it was really nice. Very easy to use and peppy. However, I wasn't willing to spend any $$ for something like a feedreader.
It's why I use Sage (a firefox plugin) that loads as a sidebar (feeds on the left) and uses the main browsing area on the right to show me the content of the feeds. So Sage+Firefox might be perfect for you.
I didn't realize any form of peapod survied the dot.com burst. PeaPad was one of those companies that grew fast, really fast, and died even faster. It's main site is http://peapod.com/ and I am suprised to see it still there. I can't remember it's only other main competitor at the time but I doubt they are still around.
Many how many MILLIONS were spent building those companies up just so folks wouldn't have to buy their groceries anymore?
Peapod Currently delivers in:
Chicago(land)
Milwaukee
SE Wisconsin
plus with deals with stop-n-shop
Connecticut
Massachusetts
Rhode Island
New York
New Jersey
--- I can't help but wonder how much of each of those states they deliver too. I doubt my mom in Esperance NY can get her groceries delivered. Nope, I checked her Zip and it isn't available there. Figures.
and as oc255 mentioned Giant Food partners with PeaPod in the following areas:
Washington, DC
Maryland
Virginia
--- again I doubt the entire state is available Most of MD and Va are pretty rural.
I can only hope you are being as sarcastic as the parent. You are aren't you?
I mean you can't possibly be saying their govts are unconstrained by ideological constipation? If you are I pity your naievete.
Have you read anything about the ongoing reproductive laws there (Italy) - heavilly influenced by the Catholic Church. http://www.lucacoscioni.it/node/5294
I applaud the Italian Govts efforts to stand independant from the secular influence that comes from the vatican but there is only so much they can do considering the nation is predominantly Catholic.
scored insightful. so basically the poster and the moderator both are clueless as to what RSS actually is.
how can you not know what RSS is - i mean, fine, dont RTFA, but at least know what the blurb is talking about before you saying something so completely wrong.
RSS is syndicated content so folks can republish it all they want. credit still goes to the initial author and pretty much EVERY RSS aggregator in existence does exactly what Googles does. Just not all of them have the google name attached and not all of them are accessible via web interface.
i tried out a few wallpaper programs but I didn't like them staying resident and hogging memory. I also didn't really need any features other than random wallpaper selection. I can put it in my startup menu to get a random one on startup if i want. Or I can just quickly change my wallpaper with the hotkey.
I'll take a look at your recommendation. But in general I'm after the lightest weight solution as possible
I actually have IrvanView installed but have never launced it manually. I do however have a simple windows script that uses it to grab a random image from a directory, convert it, and make it my wallpaper - all hooked up to a hotkey sequence (win+w) so I can change my wallpaper on a whim without much effort.
I should probably put the script up on the web somewhere for others to use.
I work for a great company (http://www.sbcs.com/ and have turned down much higher paying jobs in other locations in order to stay here. This is the only company I have ever actually enjoyed working for. I like everyone at the company (we are pretty small) and I think the company is really concerned with both the bottom line and their employees well being.
I was pretty cynical all of my prior employment - but I couldn't be happier with the way SBCS treats it's employees.
The company does hire on occassion and you can learn more about it and the work we do at our website: http://www.sbcs.com/
I wish I could say the same. After installing xp sp2 it takes apx ten of second for a second IE window to open. If i right click and say open link in a new window it takes even longer.
The first IE window opens fast - but that is it.
I'm close to doing a complete reinstall it is so tedious. Especially since ESPN fantasy football doesn't work quite right in FF.
Your high school required every student to take Trig?
I don't believe it. Hell, we had plenty of students who never took a second year of algebra. And I went to four high schools in four states (each year my family moved).
Not every school district I lived in even supported AP courses so Trig and "pre calc" were the highest level math the school taught. Needless to say, not everyone was capable of taking those classes and not everyone did.
The only people who took them were folk who wanted too. They didn't necessarilly like taking them once they were in it, but they took them regardless.
I agree with you in general. I have tried to use Eclipse. But it just doesn't have the "pep" i need. Its too darn slow.
I primarilly use EditPlus (on windows) it is an excellent text editor with almost every feature I could want (columnar select being a biggie for me, word wrap is nice too) the only thing it is missing is code folding
code folding is what brings me back to Eclipse. Sometimes code folding is incredibly useful. So, if I'm working on a file that would benefit from code folding I use Eclipse (but keep EditPlus open in the back ground for copy/paste columnar select, repositioning)
I've tried JEdit (too slow to startup; but not as bad as Eclipse) and it has some features that can't be beat as well. For instance it's ability to handle MASSIVE amounts of buffers doing a regEX search and replace (to get rid of ugly MS smart quote symbols) is pretty darn slick. So, I have keep it installed to.
I tried out SlickEdit this year and was unimpressed. It's code folding setup was kind of clunky. And seemed somewhat counter intuitive to use at this point after having used so many other editors.
CodeWright is pretty nice. But it is kind of pricey and it didn't do anything extra for me over EditPlus and EditPlus is only $30.
Overall, if you're on Windows you should give EditPlus a try. Its pretty darn extensible. Loads up super fast. Is a perfect notepad/wordpad replacement. Can handle huge buffers. Has a tabbed interface. Is easy to integrate external tools.
If anyone has tips on how to get Eclipse to run faster (other than buying a better computer) I'd love to hear them. The CVS and SVN integration is pretty nice (though using Tortoise for either pretty much gives me integration in any program, just open the "open file" dialog.)
Oh, and to answer the grandparent question (i think) there is an XML plugin available from xmlspy for Eclipse I believe.
you seem a little defensive. Oh, if you're getting charged $15 for a 24 pack you're still getting ripped off.
I regularly buy cases of name brand soda's for my office (i'm a nice guy) and they cost roughly $6/case.. each case holds 24 drinks.
Sometimes I get an even better deal (particularly if they are cans) and I can get a case for $3-$5 (still name brand, none of that generic grocery store branded stuff).
I don't think people missed the point of your post. They were just shocked to see you spending $15. I know it caught my eye. I mean, for the average home shopper, a $15 bottle/case for pop is pretty high.
nice of you to share, but even if he did RTFA it would have helped, unless the A in your's is advisory.
He would have had to read the article and the advisory so what is that.. RTFALA - read the F article's linked advisory?
Lets not forget that Yahoo also embraced and extended RSS with Media RSS
http://search.yahoo.com/mrss
I guess that's the beauty of an XML you can always just define your own extension - in the RSS case so long as you don't break basic standard compatiability then your extension will work (most likely often ignored, but will still work).
I really don't know if you can say an 80-90% rating a FLOP. If it doesn't sell well then sure it will be a flop. But they will probably still sell their 10 million copies.
uhm. let's see - it was a Calvin and Hobbes reference. A comic; hence a JOKE.
sheesh.
Spaceman Spiff has much work to do.
ahh great, a post event rationalizer
One of my favorite lines to see in a patent:
..."
"As known to those skilled in the art,
This was used in the aforementioned patent to say that a word processor is a tool for electronically editing documents.
Are you "skilled in the art"?
Let me tell you a little story...
I was tasked to build an application that did not use Flash or Java Applets in 2000 that contained two very complex forms.
These forms had dependant selector fields, and a variety of rules that are rather complex. Changing one field could cause four to ten other fields to change making some required, others not, the values available in those fields to change etc.
The first option presented to the customer was to refresh the screen each time one of these form fields changed so that the business logic could be stored in the business layer - and not in the presentation layer.
Another option would have been to pull down all of the conditional rules etc into the browser upon initial page load; load up a ton of hashtables and go at it - making the client end do all the work and thus mixing all the business logic with presentation.
A third option was this cool thing IE had come up with called DataIslands using xmlHttpRequest.
Now, remember, this was 2000. So only IE had xmlHttpRequest functionality. It was being developed for a local government agency and they were adamant that they didn't want the usability nightmare of having the screen refresh all the time.
So I was left with an option. Stick with the government mandated IE only development platform and separate my business and presentation layers - or say screw it and totally kludge the app together on the client side in the presentation layer.
Now, by your definition the REAL developer would have made the whole app run clientside via javascript - aiming for interoperability. Oh, by the way, NN 4.7 was the netscape browser at the time.
I guess I'm not a real developer as I choose to develop the site as an IE only one. And it still works prefectly well.
What's even better? It took me about five lines of code to update the site this past year when a work order came through - and now it works in both IE and FF (who knows about Opera and their weak xmlHttpRequest support).
The customer has been happy, the people they serve have been happy, and the app is pretty darn maintainable. Glad I'm not a real developer.
Your statement isn't exactly accurate.
c hapter2.aspx
In WW2 there was a large rate of "no-fire" where a soldier in combat never fired a round. Weapons training then consisted of shooting at a stationary round target. Soldiers who were excellent shots were often very hesitant to shoot at an actual person. It is estimated the rate of soldiers not engaging the enemy was as high as 75%
http://www.militaryhistoryonline.com/wwii/armies/
Between WW2 and Korea the military switched the targets to human silouhettes. These new targets didn't improve anyone's aim - but they did acclimate the soldies to shooting at a more human like target. The end result was a much lower rate of "no-fire" during the Korean war. However, the rate was still too high. (50%)
After Korea the military moved to "pop-up" targets that would spring up from the ground - simulating movement by the enemy and giving a more "life-like" feel to the exercise of going to the Range. It is estimated that between 90-95% of all soldiers in combat fired at the enemy.
While there is no absolute correlation between these different types of targets there is a pretty obvious conclusion. Better training has led to more effective soldiers. Video games, which are often very realistic looking, still lack the kick, smell, and feel of being on the range firing a rifle.
I don't believe Video Games have had that much impact on the willingness of soldiers to shoot. We didn't have DOOM in 1964.
The problem is a bit deeper though. It seems many soldiers might "posture" or just fire in the direction of the enemy without a real intent to kill due to their natural repugnance towards killing another person.
Alot of studying is being done, and needs to be done, to understand it all. Playing a game though isn't desensitizing anyone, at least it isn't proven to, though, perhaps, as games get more and more realistic they will (particulary if the physical effects of the field of combat can be simulated as well).
Unfortunately, I can't find the research article I read that detailed the correlation between target shapes and soldier efficacy. So you'll have to take my post with a grain of salt since I can't provide the supporting documentation. My Apologies.
While I doubt if many people will see this post; I am able to read PDF files just fine without Acrobat Reader.
No, I don't have the pdf extension for firefox turning into HTML either. Instead I installed an app I saw mentioned on someones blog:
Foxit Reader available at http://www.foxitsoftware.com/
It's free, fast, and lightweight. Plus there was no installation. Just unzip it, then launch it (tell it to be the default pdf reader) and enjoy.
I'm not affiliated with the product at all but I am happy with it. I uninstalled Acrobat Reader almost immediately after trying it out.