Well, there's a pressing need to buy a new OS. I have been disliking that brushed metal look since it was introduced in the Quicktime player, and that was a long time ago. Huuuraaah!!
These so-called midges are a marketing ploy. Ever noticed they are only around when the pubs are open? As long as you stay inside and drink beer you're ok - and who's benefiting from that? The brewers! My guess is they grow them in these huge containers you see at breweries and distribute them with their delivery trucks, pouring them out all over city's villages and countryside through the exhaust pipe, masking as diesel fumes.
The article is about allergies in specific, but is very relavant. A few researchers are claiming that because our environments are so sterile as children these days, more adults have allergies (and illness) as a result of not being exposed to certain elements (good or bad organisms, etc) as a child. Compelling read, I highly recommend it.
There is a difficulty with proving the theory that cleaner houses in your youth make you more suspectible to develop allergies later in your life. Fact is that there is a big genetic factor in allergies, so the reverse theory is just as likely to be true: people who develop allergies have a large likelyhood of having allergic parents who where very keen on keeping the house clean.
Most of the studies that try to find a correlation between growing up in a hygienic environment and developing allergies do just that: finding a correlation. They do not find any evidence for either the first or the second theory, because the research was not set up to look for it. For that you will have to do studies with growing up children whose genetic compound is known, i.e. test the parents before you test the kids.
Another problem is that the correlation between our cleaner environment (in general) and the amount of allergies (in the population) doesn't prove anything either. Lots of sicknesses are on the rise, for instance here in the Netherlands the amount of physical therapy treatments has doubled in ten years. Yet nobody in their right mind will make a connection between the need for these treatments and the cleanliness of our houses. Secondly, I am not so sure that our hygienic conditions are better now than 20 years ago. I know for sure my parents house was cleaner than mine is, and the same goes for most of my friends. And lots, lots of other things in our environment have changed over that last 20 years: hardly any insecticide residue on our vegetables anymore, no more CFC's in spray cans, more and more cars, more and more overweight people, no more Iodide in the bread... and endless list of correlations can be made, and a lot of these could in theory affect our natural defense system and our suspectibility to allergies.
Man, haven't you read the the freakin'/. summary: spreadsheets have critical errors in one percent of their cells, !!!
In other words, if you increase the size of the spreadsheet, you will increase the number of cells with critical errors as well. Since the sheets you added are non-functional, they can't have critical errors, so all those new critical errors will be in your existing code. Way to go.
Only by inserting more than 1% of critical errors in certain well-known pieces of your spreadsheet, you can lower the amount of errors in other places of the sheet. Would have explained this better if I had the time, but I just have to talk to some financial people around here. The salary administration needs debugging, and they don't even know it yet.
Imagine it at work @ Slashdot though: 5+ Funny == 5+ bucks.
Unfortunately the current rating of your post is 1. No dinner for you tonight. You'd better get cooking on some funny answers, if you don't want to skip breakfast too.
Secondly, who said anything about leaking tcp/ip packets. or even udp packets. Wouldn't that just be i dont know OBVIOUS! If your going to spy on a national government- that is the LAST protocol that I would use.
Using Lenovo would also be too OBVIOUS, because they OWN the brand. Better to insert MAGIC INGREDIENT X into PC's that are MANUFACTURED for US brands in the PRC (me looks at back of this computer - 'Assembled in CHINA' - I am DOOMED !).
'Yes' and 'No' buttons are better avoided. 'Yes' and 'No' answers are only answered correctly when both the question and the answers are understood by the user. Which sounds totally silly, but believe me, we humans are totally silly (we are just in a state of denial about that). No to mention that the questions can be silly too.
It is lots better to have answers that have actions in them, like 'Install' and 'Skip', because people understand the implications of these even without understanding the questions. That is what Apple does with Mac OSX. And to be honest, I am kind of shocked that gnome and KDE did not pick this one up. To identify a problem with users brainlessly clicking 'Yes' without bothering to read the questions, and then to 'solve' this problem by switching the position of the buttons, is really bad GUI design. Come on guys, pick up a book on psychology, there's plenty of them around.
So if you want to test, test different GUI schemes. 'Install virus?' with 'Yes' and 'No' options, 'Install virus?' with 'No' and 'Yes' options, 'Install virus?' with 'Install' and 'Cancel' (or maybe 'Skip') options, or maybe even just two buttons, 'Install virus' and 'Keep system clean'. I'm sure neither of these will score 100%, but there sure will be relevant differences between the schemes.
I don't believe in Windows backdoors any more that I believe that the Lenovo people are able to pull this off without anyone detecting it.
If they seriously belief anyone could pull this off - use internal computers to send sensitive data unnoticed to an enemy outside - they should fire their network administrators and hire someone with a clue.
IIRC, you can follow the spread of one seagull species eastwards from northern Europe, and it can (and does) interbreed all along the way.
Yes, you recall correctly. Unfortunately, that example has just been proven wrong by DNA analysis: The European and American species are not related at all. See my other comment.
Google a bit further and you will find that a lot of those studies are flawed: their ring species are not true ring species at all.
Ernst Mayr was the scientist who conceived the idea of ring species, in the 1940's. His example was a continuous variation in seagulls on the northerh hemisphere. This example has been in the biology textbooks for decades. So it came as a bit of shock when Peter de Knijff of the University of Leiden together with Dorit Liebers en Andreas Helbig of the University of Greifswald analyzed the DNA structure of the actual birds and found the American and European populations were not related at all. When they contacted Ernst Mayr - who was in hist late nineties at the time - with their findings, he found it all quite amusing: the University of Greifswald was the same one where he had started his scientific studies.
But, even though the schoolbook example has fallen, the theory of ring species still exists. And some species - a lot less then the textbooks make you believe - are ring species indeed. Check Darren Irwin of the University of British Columbia for details.
I did find an article on the subject in Dutch, for translations please google around.
No 200 MB to be gained here by ditching FF for Opera. Besides, every time I try to switch browsers to avoid some clunky operation in FF, I return crying within 15 minutes. How can people even try to surf without Adblock?
In fact, Anheuser-Busch sued Budéjovický Budvar over the Budweiser trademark here in Finland. The case was not very clear, as Budvar had registered "Budweiser" earlier than A-B, but had lost the trademark because of not using it. Also, for Budvar the name refers to the brewery, while for Anheuser-Busch it's the beer.
AB also sued BB in Portugal. In 2001 AB lost its case at the Portugues high court, and brought the case to the European court in Strassbourg. The European court also decided in favor of BB. Recently AB lodged an appeal against that decision. Since the EU is a very strong proponent of regional products with regional naming, they really have something to fear: The Dutch brewer Bavaria (a small name, but a big brewery - they brew the Islamic beer for troops in the Middle East) might have to change its name too, since they are not based in Bavaria at all.
but, if you want to calculate the required screen size, you can use trig and the following fact: Humans can resoluve 1.5 minutes of arc...
I did exactly that for a report on digital signage, over a year ago. The 1.5 minutes of arc you are referring to is a very questionable number. It is highly dependent on lighting conditions, contrast, age, etc. It is also about the minutes of arc you need to see seperate items, not about the minutes of arc you need to see a single item: else we would not be able to see stars at night.
A disk notcher? You silly man, you could have achieved the same effect with three cuts with a sharp knife. That's what I did anyway
And yes, they were hideously expensive. The cheapest floppies I could get in 1984 were 100 Dutch guilders (45 EURO) for a box of 10 good quality 3M disks. A real bargain compared to buying them a piece (as most shops did). Then you also had the Verbatim floppies, that eh, were not verbatim at all. Half of them failed within a 2 month period. I still refuse to buy anything made by Verbatim, even after all those years.
By the way: did anyone ever manage to play Monty Mole with success? I never found out wath the goal was!!! Or Mission Impossible (with the buildings where you had to search lockers), I think I never finished that one
I finished Mission Impossible. Was a student at the time, so had plenty of time. Never finished my studies though.
It is a good thing I took my kids to this theatre installation today:
De Hoofdenfabriek (The Head Factory )
Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden / Aart Jan van der Linden / Dr. Hackmesch
Perhaps you've also grown a bit tired of your own head and are ready for a new model? Then simply go quickly to the Head Factory and have your head remodelled! Just figure out who you would rather be, and tell it to the doctor! The world-famous specialist Dr. Hackmesch has come over from Germany especially for the Tweetakt festival to carry out these very specialized operations. Dr. Hackmesch: "From now on, you can finally become whoever you wish. Just wave your old head goodbye while you still can.
Most of the operations are a great success, much to the satisfaction of the clients. Of course, there are always a small percentage of people who are never satisfied anyway, and after all we have to work with an unbelievably small budget. Fantastic, wouldn't you agree?"
I just had to do the accounting of an EC project in PM. That's person month - of course, there's no clear definition anywhere of how many PH there are in one PM.
It is this artificially created threat that is BUSH's masterplan
Sorry to disappoint you, but it is Osama's masterplan. His organization wasn't as attractive anymore to youngsters as it was when then were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. He needed some western armies around, to have an enemy to fight, to attract new blood.
So, one of his goals with the planes flying into these buildings, was to engage the west in a war in Afghanistan (which they did, and a lot more successfull then Osama would have guessed - that must have given him a couple of bad nights sleep). He must have fallen of his chair when the US also invaded Irak - better than his wildest dreams. Instant muslim freedom fighter/terrorist incubator.
For all those that are seriously interested in the mathematical implications of music / musical implications of mathematics, may I advise the book Music and Mathematics From Pythagoras to Fractals?
I'm sorry it is so ridiculously expensive, but it is a really nice collection of essays of all the different roles mathematics has played in music, from the ancient Greeks to modern composition. Since it is a bundle, not every essay is a masterpiece, but most are really good.
\. readers will love the story on Daniel Strähle (duh, only a couple of lines in Wikepedia, 14 pages in the book) a Swedish craftsman who, in 1743, found a simple method for approximating the 12th root of 2. Only to te be dismissed and cast into oblivion by the mathematician John Faggot - because of an error on John Faggot's part.
Other essays I really liked were on Helmholtz' work on combinational tones and consonance, and on the patterns used in 'Ringing the changes' - the British way of ringing church bells. Be warned however that most of the composition pieces are hard to understand if you aren't into reading compositions from paper.
Slashdot Mirror
But I would venture to guess that most everyone takes mass transit for air travel.
Most everyone but Steve Jobs.
Good-bye brushed metal
Well, there's a pressing need to buy a new OS. I have been disliking that brushed metal look since it was introduced in the Quicktime player, and that was a long time ago. Huuuraaah!!
These so-called midges are a marketing ploy. Ever noticed they are only around when the pubs are open? As long as you stay inside and drink beer you're ok - and who's benefiting from that? The brewers! My guess is they grow them in these huge containers you see at breweries and distribute them with their delivery trucks, pouring them out all over city's villages and countryside through the exhaust pipe, masking as diesel fumes.
The article is about allergies in specific, but is very relavant. A few researchers are claiming that because our environments are so sterile as children these days, more adults have allergies (and illness) as a result of not being exposed to certain elements (good or bad organisms, etc) as a child. Compelling read, I highly recommend it.
There is a difficulty with proving the theory that cleaner houses in your youth make you more suspectible to develop allergies later in your life. Fact is that there is a big genetic factor in allergies, so the reverse theory is just as likely to be true: people who develop allergies have a large likelyhood of having allergic parents who where very keen on keeping the house clean.
Most of the studies that try to find a correlation between growing up in a hygienic environment and developing allergies do just that: finding a correlation. They do not find any evidence for either the first or the second theory, because the research was not set up to look for it. For that you will have to do studies with growing up children whose genetic compound is known, i.e. test the parents before you test the kids.
Another problem is that the correlation between our cleaner environment (in general) and the amount of allergies (in the population) doesn't prove anything either. Lots of sicknesses are on the rise, for instance here in the Netherlands the amount of physical therapy treatments has doubled in ten years. Yet nobody in their right mind will make a connection between the need for these treatments and the cleanliness of our houses.
Secondly, I am not so sure that our hygienic conditions are better now than 20 years ago. I know for sure my parents house was cleaner than mine is, and the same goes for most of my friends. And lots, lots of other things in our environment have changed over that last 20 years: hardly any insecticide residue on our vegetables anymore, no more CFC's in spray cans, more and more cars, more and more overweight people, no more Iodide in the bread... and endless list of correlations can be made, and a lot of these could in theory affect our natural defense system and our suspectibility to allergies.
Until you posted it on slashdot. You will be queueing up with Birnam forest next time.
Man, haven't you read the the freakin' /. summary: spreadsheets have critical errors in one percent of their cells, !!!
In other words, if you increase the size of the spreadsheet, you will increase the number of cells with critical errors as well. Since the sheets you added are non-functional, they can't have critical errors, so all those new critical errors will be in your existing code. Way to go.
Only by inserting more than 1% of critical errors in certain well-known pieces of your spreadsheet, you can lower the amount of errors in other places of the sheet. Would have explained this better if I had the time, but I just have to talk to some financial people around here. The salary administration needs debugging, and they don't even know it yet.
Imagine it at work @ Slashdot though: 5+ Funny == 5+ bucks.
Unfortunately the current rating of your post is 1. No dinner for you tonight. You'd better get cooking on some funny answers, if you don't want to skip breakfast too.
Secondly, who said anything about leaking tcp/ip packets. or even udp packets. Wouldn't that just be i dont know OBVIOUS! If your going to spy on a national government- that is the LAST protocol that I would use.
Using Lenovo would also be too OBVIOUS, because they OWN the brand. Better to insert MAGIC INGREDIENT X into PC's that are MANUFACTURED for US brands in the PRC (me looks at back of this computer - 'Assembled in CHINA' - I am DOOMED !).
'Yes' and 'No' buttons are better avoided. 'Yes' and 'No' answers are only answered correctly when both the question and the answers are understood by the user. Which sounds totally silly, but believe me, we humans are totally silly (we are just in a state of denial about that). No to mention that the questions can be silly too.
It is lots better to have answers that have actions in them, like 'Install' and 'Skip', because people understand the implications of these even without understanding the questions. That is what Apple does with Mac OSX. And to be honest, I am kind of shocked that gnome and KDE did not pick this one up. To identify a problem with users brainlessly clicking 'Yes' without bothering to read the questions, and then to 'solve' this problem by switching the position of the buttons, is really bad GUI design. Come on guys, pick up a book on psychology, there's plenty of them around.
So if you want to test, test different GUI schemes. 'Install virus?' with 'Yes' and 'No' options, 'Install virus?' with 'No' and 'Yes' options, 'Install virus?' with 'Install' and 'Cancel' (or maybe 'Skip') options, or maybe even just two buttons, 'Install virus' and 'Keep system clean'. I'm sure neither of these will score 100%, but there sure will be relevant differences between the schemes.
It's just a joke and I'm not trolling
Yes, but I will use any excuse to postpone work.
I don't believe in Windows backdoors any more that I believe that the Lenovo people are able to pull this off without anyone detecting it.
If they seriously belief anyone could pull this off - use internal computers to send sensitive data unnoticed to an enemy outside - they should fire their network administrators and hire someone with a clue.
IIRC, you can follow the spread of one seagull species eastwards from northern Europe, and it can (and does) interbreed all along the way.
Yes, you recall correctly. Unfortunately, that example has just been proven wrong by DNA analysis: The European and American species are not related at all. See my other comment.
Google a bit further and you will find that a lot of those studies are flawed: their ring species are not true ring species at all.
Ernst Mayr was the scientist who conceived the idea of ring species, in the 1940's. His example was a continuous variation in seagulls on the northerh hemisphere. This example has been in the biology textbooks for decades. So it came as a bit of shock when Peter de Knijff of the University of Leiden together with Dorit Liebers en Andreas Helbig of the University of Greifswald analyzed the DNA structure of the actual birds and found the American and European populations were not related at all. When they contacted Ernst Mayr - who was in hist late nineties at the time - with their findings, he found it all quite amusing: the University of Greifswald was the same one where he had started his scientific studies.
But, even though the schoolbook example has fallen, the theory of ring species still exists. And some species - a lot less then the textbooks make you believe - are ring species indeed. Check Darren Irwin of the University of British Columbia for details.
I did find an article on the subject in Dutch, for translations please google around.
and memory use is something like 200 megs lower than my FF installation
Weird, I got 3 browsers open here, all with exactly the same three pages:
No 200 MB to be gained here by ditching FF for Opera. Besides, every time I try to switch browsers to avoid some clunky operation in FF, I return crying within 15 minutes. How can people even try to surf without Adblock?
Thanks for the linked PDF. That's real nice report.
In fact, Anheuser-Busch sued Budéjovický Budvar over the Budweiser trademark here in Finland. The case was not very clear, as Budvar had registered "Budweiser" earlier than A-B, but had lost the trademark because of not using it. Also, for Budvar the name refers to the brewery, while for Anheuser-Busch it's the beer.
AB also sued BB in Portugal. In 2001 AB lost its case at the Portugues high court, and brought the case to the European court in Strassbourg. The European court also decided in favor of BB. Recently AB lodged an appeal against that decision. Since the EU is a very strong proponent of regional products with regional naming, they really have something to fear: The Dutch brewer Bavaria (a small name, but a big brewery - they brew the Islamic beer for troops in the Middle East) might have to change its name too, since they are not based in Bavaria at all.
but, if you want to calculate the required screen size, you can use trig and the following fact: Humans can resoluve 1.5 minutes of arc...
I did exactly that for a report on digital signage, over a year ago. The 1.5 minutes of arc you are referring to is a very questionable number. It is highly dependent on lighting conditions, contrast, age, etc. It is also about the minutes of arc you need to see seperate items, not about the minutes of arc you need to see a single item: else we would not be able to see stars at night.
A disk notcher? You silly man, you could have achieved the same effect with three cuts with a sharp knife. That's what I did anyway
And yes, they were hideously expensive. The cheapest floppies I could get in 1984 were 100 Dutch guilders (45 EURO) for a box of 10 good quality 3M disks. A real bargain compared to buying them a piece (as most shops did). Then you also had the Verbatim floppies, that eh, were not verbatim at all. Half of them failed within a 2 month period. I still refuse to buy anything made by Verbatim, even after all those years.
By the way: did anyone ever manage to play Monty Mole with success? I never found out wath the goal was!!! Or Mission Impossible (with the buildings where you had to search lockers), I think I never finished that one
I finished Mission Impossible. Was a student at the time, so had plenty of time. Never finished my studies though.
Yeah, really makes you believe the claims for all their other super duper cables.
It is a good thing I took my kids to this theatre installation today:
De Hoofdenfabriek (The Head Factory ) Anneke de Lind van Wijngaarden / Aart Jan van der Linden / Dr. Hackmesch
Perhaps you've also grown a bit tired of your own head and are ready for a new model? Then simply go quickly to the Head Factory and have your head remodelled! Just figure out who you would rather be, and tell it to the doctor! The world-famous specialist Dr. Hackmesch has come over from Germany especially for the Tweetakt festival to carry out these very specialized operations. Dr. Hackmesch: "From now on, you can finally become whoever you wish. Just wave your old head goodbye while you still can.
Most of the operations are a great success, much to the satisfaction of the clients. Of course, there are always a small percentage of people who are never satisfied anyway, and after all we have to work with an unbelievably small budget. Fantastic, wouldn't you agree?"
I just had to do the accounting of an EC project in PM. That's person month - of course, there's no clear definition anywhere of how many PH there are in one PM.
It is this artificially created threat that is BUSH's masterplan
Sorry to disappoint you, but it is Osama's masterplan. His organization wasn't as attractive anymore to youngsters as it was when then were fighting the Russians in Afghanistan. He needed some western armies around, to have an enemy to fight, to attract new blood.
So, one of his goals with the planes flying into these buildings, was to engage the west in a war in Afghanistan (which they did, and a lot more successfull then Osama would have guessed - that must have given him a couple of bad nights sleep). He must have fallen of his chair when the US also invaded Irak - better than his wildest dreams. Instant muslim freedom fighter/terrorist incubator.
Eventually it will be Christmas again, so why not put up a Christmas tree?
Eventually the sun will burn out, so why not buy these flashlights from me?
Eventually we're all going to die, so why not have your funeral today?
For all those that are seriously interested in the mathematical implications of music / musical implications of mathematics, may I advise the book Music and Mathematics From Pythagoras to Fractals?
I'm sorry it is so ridiculously expensive, but it is a really nice collection of essays of all the different roles mathematics has played in music, from the ancient Greeks to modern composition. Since it is a bundle, not every essay is a masterpiece, but most are really good.
\. readers will love the story on Daniel Strähle (duh, only a couple of lines in Wikepedia, 14 pages in the book) a Swedish craftsman who, in 1743, found a simple method for approximating the 12th root of 2. Only to te be dismissed and cast into oblivion by the mathematician John Faggot - because of an error on John Faggot's part.
Other essays I really liked were on Helmholtz' work on combinational tones and consonance, and on the patterns used in 'Ringing the changes' - the British way of ringing church bells. Be warned however that most of the composition pieces are hard to understand if you aren't into reading compositions from paper.
No, it sounds like this. Those darned scientists!