Honestpuck, ignore the bitter libertarians. I like the writing in this review. UF is a great strip and, if this is the book with the nuclear silo sequence, it is certainly worth your money.:)
Lets see, they moved the programs section of the start menu from the top to the bottom, this is a lot closer to where the mouse alredy is after clicking the start menu.
I agree. This is good change.
Next on the start menu, at the top they have which ever your default webbrowser and email client? (what? it not just IE and outlook? nope its whatever you have set for your default).
I am pretty sure you had to patch Windows XP for the selection to become properly populated or something. Meh.
Now then theres the meaningless programs between the default email client and the programs menu. If you actually used this config for a bit you'd realize that it adds your most used programs to this list.
I have it set to about twenty small icons and like it a lot.:)
So why is My Computer and My Documents there and not on the desktop? Well because most the time you cant see the desktop you'll have windows covering it up.
/me spits at the My Documents folder
One thing I don't like about Microsoft is that it's possible to open folder windows that lack a tree by default. That's why I always use [Window Key]+E instead of opening My Computer. Of course, I did remove it from the Start Menu and restore it to the desktop.:)
Currently I don't have the "always show extensions" checked but I see a.pdf and a.txt on my desktop. While earlier today, while one of the windows labs, in an attempt to open up a source file to print I opened my hw.f with textpad, after wards the icon change and the extension disappeared. Slightly different way of doing things.
The Windows setting is called "Always hide extensions for known file types" and is located under (Global) Folder Options. Since you told Windows that *.f is to be always opened with textpad, *.f become a known file type and its extension became hidden.
Oh, also, *.lnk files (shortcuts) and *.url files (Microsoft bookmarks) always have their extension hidden no matter what the setting is.
An HTML iteration mandating CSS use -- I have to admit I'm not up to date on where w3c is with many of their standards, but it is time to clean up HTML
How would that be different from XHTML 1.1 Strict? Well, besides the fact that none of the browsers are particularly strict about the strictness...;)
I'll tell you what I think is true innovation: making the product more efficient, more capable, but reducing the complexity of the interface and reducing the number of 'features' needed to achieve the same goals.
I've removed back and forward buttons from my Opera toolbar. They are effectively obsolete;)
It is better known than mozilla, opera, and clones.
Obscurity is an evil now?
The only way to stop the cycle is to enforce the ruling to have Microsoft remove the browser from the OS.
Alternatively, the OEMs could start placing icons for Firebird and the free version of Opera on the desktops. Unfortunately, Microsoft would make their lives difficult if they tried the way things stand.
IMHO, Futurama is the one that needs to be dethroned. Family Guy does have plenty of cheap laughs, but Futurama is the one that has sublime plots and sublimer references.
Unfortunately for it, Simpsons is being diluted by a lot of really bad episodes. A lot of the wonderful character traits built-up in the early seasons have been thrown away.
There are other good cartoons out there, but they don't run on Fox.
Uh, do you have any idea of how incredible the LotR movies could have been if there was actual blood and gore in them? The battles in ToT felt incredibly sterile. I like my movies to be bloodbaths and you can't do that without an R rating.:(
I like Alien Resurrection. Really, it is a fun movie with good action and amazing acting. It may not resemble its antecedents as much as you like or have a bullet-proof plot for that matter, but compared to a lot of the shlock out there it rocks.:)
I hereby move that we rename the "Global Village" to the "Global Home". Once Mars is colonised, we can rename it to the "Solar System Home" and, with Alpha Centauri in our control, to the "Universal Home". Vive la metaphorution!;)
Which part of Slashdot's client-server model screams peer-to-peer to you again? It's really very simple. In a peer-to-peer model, your browser would be directly connecting to other browsers. In a client-server model, you make content available through a common centralized server. Very simple.;)
When did Intel get around to releasing Pentium 1000 and why didn't I see the commercials? I thought that Pentium 4 was still their top-of-the-line model.
Anyways, is Pentium 1000 marketingese for yet another 686 processor or have they gotten to 786 by now?:P
Isn't that exactly what he proposes? Quite radical, but a welfare system still...
Not quite. He says "Expanding welfare wouldn't work, so let's rent advertising space on dollar bills and give everyone $25,000". That doesn't make any sense to me even in the "have welfare, but don't call it welfare because Reagan and Co have demonised welfare" context.
I am just stating the obvious. The capitalist model is heading towards a few uberrich individuals with control of the robots, so let's tax them and use the money to fund the rest of humanity.
(Excerpt from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Page 634784, Section 5a, Entry: Magrathea)
Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free.
Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward amongst the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged.
Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor - at least no one worth speaking of. And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on - none of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.
And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home of this industry was the planet Magrathea, where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's richest men naturally came to expect.
But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured into the night over smug little treaties on the value of a planned political economy.
Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into the obscurity of legend.
In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of it.
I was agreeing with the article up until the author started making nonsensical schemes.
Yes, robotization will approach 100%. Yes, the resources available to humanity will approach infinity. However, the obvious solution to this, contrary to the article, is a welfare system.
That's exactly what the welfare system was invented for. I am not in a position to comment on the quality of the US implementation, but, suffice it to say, other countries have made it work.
Unquenchable demand for farm hands and coal workers just isn't there anymore. Hell, the US cheats on its unemployment numbers by only reporting those people who are "looking for work".
With robotic exploitation of earth, the solar system, and beyond, there is no reason why welfare rates cannot be increased to a point where one can actually live on them. The future belongs to scientists, artists, elected officials, and *sigh* management.
In the 1.4 release of Mozilla, the previously complete support for the open MNG image format was removed in order to shave a 100-300 kilobytes from the Mozilla download.
MNG is an extension to PNG, a W3C-backed standard, that adds animation capabilities equal or superior to those in GIF. For example, the Phoenix MNG throbber was about 30 kilobytes smaller and looked far better than any GIF alternative due to alpha transparency and 24-bit colour.
Despite a great reduction in size and optimization of the main library, the authorities have only agreed to put in the MNG-VLC subset back into the 1.5 release.
MNG-VLC is basically useless because it doesn't even support offsets. Putting it back in does not help any of the early MNG adopters at all because their images won't display.
I highly encourage Mozilla maintainers to put the full MNG back in. The code is being actively supported and the feature is something that cutting-edge web developers are eyeing with great enthusiam for eventual adoption.
Note: Further discussion of that particular bug in Bugzilla is discouraged, but every vote helps.;)
The fact that people tend to stay in a certain gaming ghetto is probably the main problem. FPS people end up reinventing RPGs, RPG people end up reinventing TBSes, and TBS people end up reinventing FPS.
That's probably not the best way to crosspolinate ideas between the genres.;)
Slashdot Mirror
Honestpuck, ignore the bitter libertarians. I like the writing in this review. UF is a great strip and, if this is the book with the nuclear silo sequence, it is certainly worth your money.:)
Mkay. That's not necessarily the historical definition, but it is the currently popular one.
"The service is currently only available to Apple Macintosh users, who represent 3 percent of the world's microcomputer users"
Is that clearer?:)
Lets see, they moved the programs section of the start menu from the top to the bottom, this is a lot closer to where the mouse alredy is after clicking the start menu.
/me spits at the My Documents folder
I agree. This is good change.
Next on the start menu, at the top they have which ever your default webbrowser and email client? (what? it not just IE and outlook? nope its whatever you have set for your default).
I am pretty sure you had to patch Windows XP for the selection to become properly populated or something. Meh.
Now then theres the meaningless programs between the default email client and the programs menu. If you actually used this config for a bit you'd realize that it adds your most used programs to this list.
I have it set to about twenty small icons and like it a lot.:)
So why is My Computer and My Documents there and not on the desktop? Well because most the time you cant see the desktop you'll have windows covering it up.
One thing I don't like about Microsoft is that it's possible to open folder windows that lack a tree by default. That's why I always use [Window Key]+E instead of opening My Computer. Of course, I did remove it from the Start Menu and restore it to the desktop.:)
Currently I don't have the "always show extensions" checked but I see a .pdf and a .txt on my desktop. While earlier today, while one of the windows labs, in an attempt to open up a source file to print I opened my hw.f with textpad, after wards the icon change and the extension disappeared. Slightly different way of doing things.
The Windows setting is called "Always hide extensions for known file types" and is located under (Global) Folder Options. Since you told Windows that *.f is to be always opened with textpad, *.f become a known file type and its extension became hidden.
Oh, also, *.lnk files (shortcuts) and *.url files (Microsoft bookmarks) always have their extension hidden no matter what the setting is.
I agree. This is an abomination unto Cthulhu.
An HTML iteration mandating CSS use -- I have to admit I'm not up to date on where w3c is with many of their standards, but it is time to clean up HTML
How would that be different from XHTML 1.1 Strict? Well, besides the fact that none of the browsers are particularly strict about the strictness...;)
I'll tell you what I think is true innovation: making the product more efficient, more capable, but reducing the complexity of the interface and reducing the number of 'features' needed to achieve the same goals.
I've removed back and forward buttons from my Opera toolbar. They are effectively obsolete;)
It is better known than mozilla, opera, and clones.
Obscurity is an evil now?
The only way to stop the cycle is to enforce the ruling to have Microsoft remove the browser from the OS.
Alternatively, the OEMs could start placing icons for Firebird and the free version of Opera on the desktops. Unfortunately, Microsoft would make their lives difficult if they tried the way things stand.
"I call it a Hawking ball." - Steven Hawking
;)
Presumably, some client-side functionality currently implemented with plugins could be moved to the serverside.;)
You are confused. Verisign is always bad. ICANN is the one that's only bad on wednesdays.;)
IMHO, Futurama is the one that needs to be dethroned. Family Guy does have plenty of cheap laughs, but Futurama is the one that has sublime plots and sublimer references.
Unfortunately for it, Simpsons is being diluted by a lot of really bad episodes. A lot of the wonderful character traits built-up in the early seasons have been thrown away.
There are other good cartoons out there, but they don't run on Fox.
No more pretty interface!
Have you looked at Google lately?.;)
Uh, do you have any idea of how incredible the LotR movies could have been if there was actual blood and gore in them? The battles in ToT felt incredibly sterile. I like my movies to be bloodbaths and you can't do that without an R rating.:(
I like Alien Resurrection. Really, it is a fun movie with good action and amazing acting. It may not resemble its antecedents as much as you like or have a bullet-proof plot for that matter, but compared to a lot of the shlock out there it rocks.:)
I hereby move that we rename the "Global Village" to the "Global Home". Once Mars is colonised, we can rename it to the "Solar System Home" and, with Alpha Centauri in our control, to the "Universal Home". Vive la metaphorution!;)
Slashdot is a P2P network.
Which part of Slashdot's client-server model screams peer-to-peer to you again? It's really very simple. In a peer-to-peer model, your browser would be directly connecting to other browsers. In a client-server model, you make content available through a common centralized server. Very simple.;)
When did Intel get around to releasing Pentium 1000 and why didn't I see the commercials? I thought that Pentium 4 was still their top-of-the-line model.
Anyways, is Pentium 1000 marketingese for yet another 686 processor or have they gotten to 786 by now?:P
Usually these groups are less-educated, less informed, tend toward radicalisms, and cultural isolation. This it seems is the threat of high welfare.
Properly funded elementary and secondary schools and free post-secondary institutions seem like a good approach to take.
Isn't that exactly what he proposes? Quite radical, but a welfare system still...
Not quite. He says "Expanding welfare wouldn't work, so let's rent advertising space on dollar bills and give everyone $25,000". That doesn't make any sense to me even in the "have welfare, but don't call it welfare because Reagan and Co have demonised welfare" context.
I am just stating the obvious. The capitalist model is heading towards a few uberrich individuals with control of the robots, so let's tax them and use the money to fund the rest of humanity.
Not robots, but the effect is similar.:P
(Excerpt from The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Page 634784, Section 5a, Entry: Magrathea)
Far back in the mists of ancient time, in the great and glorious days of the former Galactic Empire, life was wild, rich and largely tax free.
Mighty starships plied their way between exotic suns, seeking adventure and reward amongst the furthest reaches of Galactic space. In those days spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women, and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. And all dared to brave unknown terrors, to do mighty deeds, to boldly split infinitives that no man had split before - and thus was the Empire forged.
Many men of course became extremely rich, but this was perfectly natural and nothing to be ashamed of because no one was really poor - at least no one worth speaking of. And for all the richest and most successful merchants life inevitably became rather dull and niggly, and they began to imagine that this was therefore the fault of the worlds they'd settled on - none of them was entirely satisfactory: either the climate wasn't quite right in the later part of the afternoon, or the day was half an hour too long, or the sea was exactly the wrong shade of pink.
And thus were created the conditions for a staggering new form of specialist industry: custom-made luxury planet building. The home of this industry was the planet Magrathea, where hyperspatial engineers sucked matter through white holes in space to form it into dream planets - gold planets, platinum planets, soft rubber planets with lots of earthquakes - all lovingly made to meet the exacting standards that the Galaxy's richest men naturally came to expect.
But so successful was this venture that Magrathea itself soon became the richest planet of all time and the rest of the Galaxy was reduced to abject poverty. And so the system broke down, the Empire collapsed, and a long sullen silence settled over a billion worlds, disturbed only by the pen scratchings of scholars as they laboured into the night over smug little treaties on the value of a planned political economy.
Magrathea itself disappeared and its memory soon passed into the obscurity of legend.
In these enlightened days of course, no one believes a word of it.
I was agreeing with the article up until the author started making nonsensical schemes.
Yes, robotization will approach 100%. Yes, the resources available to humanity will approach infinity. However, the obvious solution to this, contrary to the article, is a welfare system.
That's exactly what the welfare system was invented for. I am not in a position to comment on the quality of the US implementation, but, suffice it to say, other countries have made it work.
Unquenchable demand for farm hands and coal workers just isn't there anymore. Hell, the US cheats on its unemployment numbers by only reporting those people who are "looking for work".
With robotic exploitation of earth, the solar system, and beyond, there is no reason why welfare rates cannot be increased to a point where one can actually live on them. The future belongs to scientists, artists, elected officials, and *sigh* management.
/me waves you good bye
Yay, the playground bullies are gone.:)
I think everyone here should know about the most voted for bug in Bugzilla.
In the 1.4 release of Mozilla, the previously complete support for the open MNG image format was removed in order to shave a 100-300 kilobytes from the Mozilla download.
MNG is an extension to PNG, a W3C-backed standard, that adds animation capabilities equal or superior to those in GIF. For example, the Phoenix MNG throbber was about 30 kilobytes smaller and looked far better than any GIF alternative due to alpha transparency and 24-bit colour.
Despite a great reduction in size and optimization of the main library, the authorities have only agreed to put in the MNG-VLC subset back into the 1.5 release.
MNG-VLC is basically useless because it doesn't even support offsets. Putting it back in does not help any of the early MNG adopters at all because their images won't display.
I highly encourage Mozilla maintainers to put the full MNG back in. The code is being actively supported and the feature is something that cutting-edge web developers are eyeing with great enthusiam for eventual adoption.
Note: Further discussion of that particular bug in Bugzilla is discouraged, but every vote helps.;)
The fact that people tend to stay in a certain gaming ghetto is probably the main problem. FPS people end up reinventing RPGs, RPG people end up reinventing TBSes, and TBS people end up reinventing FPS.
That's probably not the best way to crosspolinate ideas between the genres.;)
Wouldn't domestic violence require a domicile? Or do they mean the number of times they're kicked while sleeping on a grating?
Either that, or some homeless are homeless because they had to get away from their abusive life partner. Gee, I wonder which one makes more sense...