our studies over the last decade have found that a great many people have the belief that the laws of attention do not apply to them...
Often this is coupled with a correlation between cost of vehicle and attitude of driver. This is definitely borne out here (Perth, Western Australia), where we see a disproportionate number of expensive BMW 4WDs ploughing through roundabouts and traffic-lights with complete disregard for everybody else, while their cashed-up owners gasbag on their phones, not giving a fuck.
Yep. A few months ago I saw a guy driving while tootling away on a trumpet with his knees on the wheel. But I guess at least he wasn't attending to his bikini line.
...because it will confuse the scientific literature. That is, the biologists are upset at the zoologists who classify the species.
Actually, it's unlikely to confuse it by very much. From a biologist's point of view, one kind of fruit fly is (broadly speaking) pretty much the same as the next. It might throw some of the molecular biology research into doubt, but molecular biologists are quite familiar with the ramifications of using DNA profiles for taxonomy, since that's part of what they do.
I would agree, except that nobody gained anything from this action. I would surmise that this is another case of the Chinese fucking something up because they don't really know how it works.
However, there's a good argument for not accepting any routing information from China at all: if they don't want to play along with the rest of the world's rules, then they don't get to play with our toys. A kick in the pants of that sort of magnitude is long overdue, but it would require our governments and corporations growing some balls.
...seems to be some kind of Holy Grail for a lot of developers who assume users will love it...
Unfortunately, too much of Gnome development has been driven by a craniorectal chasing of holy grails and other mythological phenomena. Which is not to say I'm knocking Gnome particularly: I have been a user of it since about 1997, when it was very rough around the edges. KDE was then a bit ahead of Gnome in terms of stability and features, but I never got to like it much, and forays into experimenting with that and other desktop environments always led to me returning to Gnome.
Version 2.0, when it came out was a mixed blessing: the eye-candy was prettier than 1.x, but it came with a swath of features that were broken or removed outright "for our own good" (read someone doesn't think it's trendy to work that way any more). And it was an absolute bastard to build, with its labyrinthine freight of circular dependencies. The Dropline Gnome distribution for Slackware saved my sanity with a series of well-maintained builds.
Nowadays I use a mongrel setup with Compiz-Fusion with Gnome, along with a few screenlets to help productivity along.
But isn't the goal of Ubuntu to be a GNU/Linux distro for everyone?
Any distro can be for "everyone". A few years ago, I had my wife running Slackware perfectly happily until she decided she needed to be able to use EndNote to handle the bibliographic stuff in her PhD thesis, so she went over to Mac.
With a bit of thought put into the setup, I could have set her up with a version of Linux From Scratch, and she would (a) have been none the wiser and (b) been able to get on perfectly well with her work.
The first time Firefox is started up, it should display several popular search engines in a random order, and then let the user select the one to use as a default.
Or you could just let people find out for themselves. After all, if they've never heard of Google, let alone any of the other search engines, then they probably have little business being on the net. In my case, I don't bother with FF's search box at all. I just use a local homepage with a simple table of links for a whole bunch of my most-frequented sites, the most prominent of which leads directly to a Google advanced search.
Click on the first link in TFA, read approximately 1.5 lines of text and you have your answer.
It doesn't cost you anything to elaborate:
"Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, revealed today that it has established a revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo. As part of the deal, the Firefox Web browser that is shipped in Ubuntu will be configured to use Yahoo as the default search engine . . . "
The real story behind this article is the 'lateral gene transfer between strictly aquatic bacteria and human intestinal bacteria'.
And that's not much of a story. Bacteria are very good at picking up bits of DNA kicking around in their environment or from each other, which is why they mutate so quickly. It's also the mechanism behind the evolution of so-called "superbugs" like methicillin resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA).
By far the majority of the bugs in our tummies are home-grown over many generations (theirs, of course). We pick them up everywhere we go, and whatever flora we might inherit from our mothers would become probably well and truly outnumbered by whatever species proliferate most according to their varying environmental conditions, i.e. nutrients, pH, temperature etc.
Except almost everything I use windows for comes down to gaming. The one thing a VM fails at.
The only thing I would keep a VM for is to occasionally use those crappy pieces of proprietary software we often get to interface with mobile phones. But every such attempt I've made has been frustrated by the fact that none of the VMs I've used seem to play nice with the USB connection to these devices. They're pretty much limited to dragging and dropping files, which I can do directly from Linux, without needing a VM at all.
An interesting aspect of the submission is the claim that Fedora has double the number of installations. I find that a bit hard to believe, given what I've read in so many forum posts over the last few years. Just to be clear, I am not self-selecting here: my preferred distro is Arch Linux, but by far the majority of posts I have seen come from users claiming to be using *buntu.
Re:Like Woz didn't move on a LONG time ago?
on
The Apple Two
·
· Score: 1
As anyone who has ever watched Max Headroom in the 80's knows these things need to be kept separate by separate companies.
You might be interested to know that Max is apparently finally being released on DVD. I have a bootleg set of DVDs which are obviously (quite reasonable) copies of tape from some commercial station in Kansas made in the '90s, but I'm very tempted to stump up for better copies.
But to return to the topic, Apple's current "walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers" (as Tim Bray so succinctly put it) approach is going to come back to bite them on the ass at some point. Apple won over a lot of support when OS X was first introduced, opening up the platform to developers and users of FOSS projects built on other Unices. In fact, I was one of those thus attracted.
However, Apple seems now to be doing everything in its power to drive independent developers away, and this is leaving a sour taste in the mouths of many who have never written a line of code in their lives.
What makes it dubious - rather, I should say formerly made it so - is the fact that the word has only comparatively recently become commonly used in English. There is that little rule that says (IIRC) that "Generally speaking in an English-language game of Scrabble, foreign words cannot be placed on the Scrabble board".
There is that huge grey area that generally accepts foreign words that have been absorbed (like chagrin or kowtow) but others (Insha'Allah!) are definitely out of bounds.
Probably me. But I don't always bother, so I tend to lose at least as many points as I use. Oh, and although I am a part-time Apple user (when not on Linux), I'm not a fanboy. Contary to popular belief, some of us are actually capable of exercising our brains.
Re:No thanks - I'm waiting for the next gen
on
iPad Progress Report
·
· Score: 1
Resolution aside (since that seems to be pretty much common knowledge), what was more interesting to me was this somewhat scary sentence in the article:
The first thing you should know is that the iWork apps have no Save command.
Auto-saving is OK as far as it goes, but I would have thought it would be a good idea to encourage users to keep a known-good (or at least known-state) version of their work at appropriate points. Relying on the vagaries of auto-save history reminds me of that old adage that "computers are very good at forgetting important things, while remembering things that are best long forgotten".
And why, if this really is "part of the PDF spec", has every single PDF reader implemented this crazy functionality ?
I don't know, but according to TFA, there's an easy way to turn it off in the Adobe reader:
Edit > Preferences > Categories > Trust Manager > PDF File Attachments and clearing the box 'Allow opening of non-PDF file attachments with external applications'.
nouveau riche is a French phrase imported into English. Webster's has it listed, but my spellchecker cries bloody murder when it sees me type it.
Under my house rules, if you could somehow succeed in getting "nouveau riche" on the board legitimately, that would be awarded a bonus "coolness" point. Yes, it is not an English phrase, but it has been adopted for long enough to make it into the English language and who knows how many dictionaries. If we were to insist on only words of anglo-saxon origin, that would take a lot of the fun out of both the game and the English language. After all, I have never seen "kowtow" disqualified.
Putting cromulent words to one side and getting back to the topic, I still prefer "house" rules where the player is awarded bonus points for cool or non-trivial words, and deducted for cases where blatant two-letter high-scorers like the highly dubious "QI" are used. Not easily enforceable at any "serious competition" level, but from the point of view of a game played for entertainment (which is what Scrabble is for), it works.
But allowing proper nouns can only lead to abuses like an old Luck & Flaw sketch I remember where Colonel Gaddafi wins the game using different spellings of his own name. And Shakespeare also comes to mind...
Slashdot Mirror
our studies over the last decade have found that a great many people have the belief that the laws of attention do not apply to them...
Often this is coupled with a correlation between cost of vehicle and attitude of driver. This is definitely borne out here (Perth, Western Australia), where we see a disproportionate number of expensive BMW 4WDs ploughing through roundabouts and traffic-lights with complete disregard for everybody else, while their cashed-up owners gasbag on their phones, not giving a fuck.
That's what your knees are for.
Yep. A few months ago I saw a guy driving while tootling away on a trumpet with his knees on the wheel. But I guess at least he wasn't attending to his bikini line.
To follow up to myself, and to apply this to myself, please don't call me "a person of size"
I'm fat.
I'm not fat, I'm waist-enhanced!
...because it will confuse the scientific literature. That is, the biologists are upset at the zoologists who classify the species.
Actually, it's unlikely to confuse it by very much. From a biologist's point of view, one kind of fruit fly is (broadly speaking) pretty much the same as the next. It might throw some of the molecular biology research into doubt, but molecular biologists are quite familiar with the ramifications of using DNA profiles for taxonomy, since that's part of what they do.
Yeah slashdot is broken :-/
Again.
Three times is enemy action.
I would agree, except that nobody gained anything from this action. I would surmise that this is another case of the Chinese fucking something up because they don't really know how it works.
However, there's a good argument for not accepting any routing information from China at all: if they don't want to play along with the rest of the world's rules, then they don't get to play with our toys. A kick in the pants of that sort of magnitude is long overdue, but it would require our governments and corporations growing some balls.
Link comes up with a blank page. I think Auntie Steve has already had it censored... :-{
...seems to be some kind of Holy Grail for a lot of developers who assume users will love it...
Unfortunately, too much of Gnome development has been driven by a craniorectal chasing of holy grails and other mythological phenomena. Which is not to say I'm knocking Gnome particularly: I have been a user of it since about 1997, when it was very rough around the edges. KDE was then a bit ahead of Gnome in terms of stability and features, but I never got to like it much, and forays into experimenting with that and other desktop environments always led to me returning to Gnome.
Version 2.0, when it came out was a mixed blessing: the eye-candy was prettier than 1.x, but it came with a swath of features that were broken or removed outright "for our own good" (read someone doesn't think it's trendy to work that way any more). And it was an absolute bastard to build, with its labyrinthine freight of circular dependencies. The Dropline Gnome distribution for Slackware saved my sanity with a series of well-maintained builds. Nowadays I use a mongrel setup with Compiz-Fusion with Gnome, along with a few screenlets to help productivity along.
But isn't the goal of Ubuntu to be a GNU/Linux distro for everyone?
Any distro can be for "everyone". A few years ago, I had my wife running Slackware perfectly happily until she decided she needed to be able to use EndNote to handle the bibliographic stuff in her PhD thesis, so she went over to Mac.
With a bit of thought put into the setup, I could have set her up with a version of Linux From Scratch, and she would (a) have been none the wiser and (b) been able to get on perfectly well with her work.
The first time Firefox is started up, it should display several popular search engines in a random order, and then let the user select the one to use as a default.
Or you could just let people find out for themselves. After all, if they've never heard of Google, let alone any of the other search engines, then they probably have little business being on the net. In my case, I don't bother with FF's search box at all. I just use a local homepage with a simple table of links for a whole bunch of my most-frequented sites, the most prominent of which leads directly to a Google advanced search.
Click on the first link in TFA, read approximately 1.5 lines of text and you have your answer.
It doesn't cost you anything to elaborate:
"Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, revealed today that it has established a revenue sharing agreement with Yahoo. As part of the deal, the Firefox Web browser that is shipped in Ubuntu will be configured to use Yahoo as the default search engine . . . "
Sorry guys, it was a facetious comment which didn't merit any reply - except maybe a Score: -1 Flamebait. ;-S
...claiming that Americans were specially built to eat hamburgers.
;-)
Aren't they?
The real story behind this article is the 'lateral gene transfer between strictly aquatic bacteria and human intestinal bacteria'.
And that's not much of a story. Bacteria are very good at picking up bits of DNA kicking around in their environment or from each other, which is why they mutate so quickly. It's also the mechanism behind the evolution of so-called "superbugs" like methicillin resistant Staphylococcus Aureus (MRSA).
maybe the body will start producing enzymes when they're needed, in some cases. Is there a microbiologist/nutritionist in the house?
Yes, and yes.
By far the majority of the bugs in our tummies are home-grown over many generations (theirs, of course). We pick them up everywhere we go, and whatever flora we might inherit from our mothers would become probably well and truly outnumbered by whatever species proliferate most according to their varying environmental conditions, i.e. nutrients, pH, temperature etc.
Except almost everything I use windows for comes down to gaming. The one thing a VM fails at.
The only thing I would keep a VM for is to occasionally use those crappy pieces of proprietary software we often get to interface with mobile phones. But every such attempt I've made has been frustrated by the fact that none of the VMs I've used seem to play nice with the USB connection to these devices. They're pretty much limited to dragging and dropping files, which I can do directly from Linux, without needing a VM at all.
An interesting aspect of the submission is the claim that Fedora has double the number of installations. I find that a bit hard to believe, given what I've read in so many forum posts over the last few years. Just to be clear, I am not self-selecting here: my preferred distro is Arch Linux, but by far the majority of posts I have seen come from users claiming to be using *buntu.
As anyone who has ever watched Max Headroom in the 80's knows these things need to be kept separate by separate companies.
You might be interested to know that Max is apparently finally being released on DVD. I have a bootleg set of DVDs which are obviously (quite reasonable) copies of tape from some commercial station in Kansas made in the '90s, but I'm very tempted to stump up for better copies.
But to return to the topic, Apple's current "walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers" (as Tim Bray so succinctly put it) approach is going to come back to bite them on the ass at some point. Apple won over a lot of support when OS X was first introduced, opening up the platform to developers and users of FOSS projects built on other Unices. In fact, I was one of those thus attracted.
However, Apple seems now to be doing everything in its power to drive independent developers away, and this is leaving a sour taste in the mouths of many who have never written a line of code in their lives.
What makes it dubious - rather, I should say formerly made it so - is the fact that the word has only comparatively recently become commonly used in English. There is that little rule that says (IIRC) that "Generally speaking in an English-language game of Scrabble, foreign words cannot be placed on the Scrabble board".
There is that huge grey area that generally accepts foreign words that have been absorbed (like chagrin or kowtow) but others (Insha'Allah!) are definitely out of bounds.
Who's getting all the mod points these days?
Probably me. But I don't always bother, so I tend to lose at least as many points as I use. Oh, and although I am a part-time Apple user (when not on Linux), I'm not a fanboy. Contary to popular belief, some of us are actually capable of exercising our brains.
Resolution aside (since that seems to be pretty much common knowledge), what was more interesting to me was this somewhat scary sentence in the article:
The first thing you should know is that the iWork apps have no Save command.
Auto-saving is OK as far as it goes, but I would have thought it would be a good idea to encourage users to keep a known-good (or at least known-state) version of their work at appropriate points. Relying on the vagaries of auto-save history reminds me of that old adage that "computers are very good at forgetting important things, while remembering things that are best long forgotten".
And why, if this really is "part of the PDF spec", has every single PDF reader implemented this crazy functionality ?
I don't know, but according to TFA, there's an easy way to turn it off in the Adobe reader:
Edit > Preferences > Categories > Trust Manager > PDF File Attachments and clearing the box 'Allow opening of non-PDF file attachments with external applications'.
nouveau riche is a French phrase imported into English. Webster's has it listed, but my spellchecker cries bloody murder when it sees me type it.
Under my house rules, if you could somehow succeed in getting "nouveau riche" on the board legitimately, that would be awarded a bonus "coolness" point. Yes, it is not an English phrase, but it has been adopted for long enough to make it into the English language and who knows how many dictionaries. If we were to insist on only words of anglo-saxon origin, that would take a lot of the fun out of both the game and the English language. After all, I have never seen "kowtow" disqualified.
Putting cromulent words to one side and getting back to the topic, I still prefer "house" rules where the player is awarded bonus points for cool or non-trivial words, and deducted for cases where blatant two-letter high-scorers like the highly dubious "QI" are used. Not easily enforceable at any "serious competition" level, but from the point of view of a game played for entertainment (which is what Scrabble is for), it works.
But allowing proper nouns can only lead to abuses like an old Luck & Flaw sketch I remember where Colonel Gaddafi wins the game using different spellings of his own name. And Shakespeare also comes to mind...