The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done.
All this "intuitive" BS is nonsense. What is "intuitive" about seeing a bunch of conversations in your GMail inbox over a bunch of individual emails? There's nothing in human instinctual behavior that would guide that. We know to do something like that because we have learned how to do it.
And there is just no reason to have to learn a new email system like GMail when we have all already learned how to use mail clients that show individual emails. I still can't get anything done beyond the most basic tasks in GMail because of the stupid conversations and labels, and I've basically given up on the whole service because of it. I used to use email for everything, now I use it as a last resort - I use Outlook Express for most other things that I can't use Outlook for. (My version of Outlook Express still shows individual emails; I didn't realize there was a version with conversational view. Now I know to avoid it.)
You know what I wish people would stop doing? Assuming I'm too dumb to read individual emails, but smart enough to learn a whole new system of GMail conversations that I've never seen before. And I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.
I've been doing some thinking about tinyurl-like services lately, and I've since implemented WhenGuard, one such service with a time twist. WhenGuard is a content timing service that automatically publishes and unpublishes any Internet content using a time-sensitive URL alias. This alias is known as a just-in-time link, or a jitlink.
Bloggers, music bands, educators and anyone who wants to hold time-sensitive information until a certain time, or to invalidate it after a certain time has passed, can create jitlinks to alias that content and distribute the jitlinks ahead of time to anyone who might be interested. Jitlinks can be used for RSS content as well. If you create a jitlink that publishes and unpublishes around an RSS feed, such as a Twitter feed, you've essentially spliced a 'show' out of an RSS 'channel'. If you combine this with a perpetually caching RSS reader like Google Reader, you've in effect created TiVo for RSS.
Please check out WhenGuard and send some feedback my way from here. I'd be very grateful indeed!
Q: How many days between this all-quiet alert and Sun changing its ticker symbol to JAVA?
A: 42!
It cannot be a coincidence that this magical number popped up here as well. The Sun needs some time to find itself before it decides what to do for the next quart^H^H^H^H^H solar cycle.
Not all may have been well with Google's Carolinas operation. Take a look at what Nick Carr wrote a couple of months ago about some alleged strong-arming tactics the company used. He actually did multiple posts on this subject, which are all linked to from the bottom of the post. I don't know how to answer BusinessWeek's question, "Is Google too powerful?", but by the looks of it the company allegedly acted like it is.
First, there is the computational urinal from the MIT Media Lab, called You're In Control (Urine Control). More information at the project's web site. The urinal has a screen above it, and you can play video games by appropriately directing your urine stream.
Then, less high tech, but still very useful is the p-mate, which is a device that permits women to pee standing up. Now, if only there could be a device for men to get multiple orgasms.
This is an example of how a decision in an OSS project can sometimes be made for entirely non-technical reasons. I've written a post on my blog about how it's a fallacy to think that these decisions always have well-thought out technical motivations. Four other myths are also dispelled in this post. I'd be curious to hear the/. community's feedback.
It is true that XP was the first OS to have a Home Edition. However, several home users were still misled by Windows 2000, if only because it seemed the natural next step from Windows 95 and Windows 98. Somehow, Windows 95->Windows 98->Windows 2000 seems like a more compelling sequence than Windows 95->Windows 98->Windows Me. Moreover, Windows Me was such a disaster that many people switched to Windows 2000, tired of Me's instability. The grandparent of this post overestimates the number of home users of Win2K, buts the parent underestimates it.
The latest election in the world's largest democracy went mostly without glitches. The catch? The election relied heavily on electronic voting machines. To the tune of 380 million people voted on electronic voting machines in India.
The machines aren't too fancy -- certainly not fancy enough to run bloatware like Windows. However, they follow a simple low-tech protocol that works and shut down if tampered with. And, as with all things India, they cost $200 a pop, compared to $3000 per machines in the U.S.
The U.S. election authorities can learn a lot from India's last election. Read all about it here.
I'd suggest 'avernacular'. Vernacular is a straightforward enough word for the local language. Negating that with an a- prefix would arrive at a meaning similar to the one you propose.
Bollocks! Americans have as much of a right to work in India as Indians in the United States. You may think the U.S. offers free citizenship to several Indians and flies them over here at taxpayer's expense to work. Far from it, Indians, just like everybody else, have to go through an arduous process to get a work permit to work in the U.S.
Don't subject the rest of the Slashdot crowd to the talking out of your ass. Employment visas for India are available to Americans as well. It's the companies who don't want to employ Americans in India because they sure as hell will end up raising the wages in India and reducing the cost advantage of offshoring jobs.
It's a fairly well known fact (see some studies for examples) that the human circadian free rhythm has a period of 24.5 hours. A free rhythm is when the human body clock does not take any cues from environmental stimuli. If coming to work 39 minutes later everyday is messing with these people's heads, why not consign them into a facility with constant artificial lighting and have their wives and kids visit them there regularly? Their resulting 24.5 hour free rhythm cycles should match well with the 24 hour 39 minute Martian day.
Heck -- humans colonizing Mars could work out really well for the same reason.
Well, India has different missile defense needs than the U.S because of different geopolitical situations. The U.S. has the entire Western Hemisphere in its backpocket. No country in the Western Hemisphere would dare to stand up to American power and influence for too long and get away with it. The closest enemies of the U.S. are 1100 to 2500 km away from the lower 48 states.
On the other hand, India is in the midst of a minefield. Immediately bordering on India's west is Pakistan, its sworn enemy. Immediately bordering on the northeast is China, another country that does not want Indian influence to grow. These are the only two countries with whom India has had military conflicts. It's not worth expending plenty of resources on developing Tomahawk-range missiles when the countries Brahmos intends to deter are at such close range.
Arrogant tech support personnel aren't just limited to Indian call centers. I've had occasion to speak to plenty of red-blooded Americans back in the days of on-shore tech support, where they thought I (with a CS background and a few tech support jobs under my belt) was a lower life form. Moreover, call center operators aren't shrinks. They face pressures of reducing the amount of time spent on each call and solving the problem systematically. The script that is given to them compels them to plough forward anyway. Ever tried the Windows Help troubleshooter? That's the idea...
As for the Indian caste system, please don't talk about stuff about which you obviously don't have a clue. Did you even know what caste your operator belonged to? Did you know that caste and economic class are fairly orthogonal in Indian urban centers? While the definition of untouchables you mention is passable, you somehow neglected to mention that untouchables are people who belong to none of the four castes and are part of Indian society and cultural context. Non-Indians are not untouchables. Their caste is 'N/A'.
As a thought exercise, think of a social system where women were assigned different social strata based on the length of their monthly cycle, with untouchables being defined as post-menopausal women. Where would a man stand in that system? Note that the caste system and the Manusmrti are for all intents and purposes irrelevant among the urban English-speaking elite who staff call centers.
When the divisive issue du jour of the 60s and 70s was race in the U.S., it was language in India. Sure, there have been instances in India's history when Tamils in the south have felt threatened by the contiguous block of Hindi-speaking territories. You are definitely overgeneralizing when you take one anecdote and conveniently plaster the label of arrogance on ALL Indians.
It's much more likely that your support representative was arrogant because these jobs go to the top-notch -- people who are used to being at the top of their classes all the time. Not unexpectedly, just like in the case of U.S. geeks, some arrogance creeps in. I'm sorry to hear that your 'interesting social interaction' didn't go too well, but please quit calling all Indians arrogant just because you had a clueless and arrogant rep on the other end. Clearly, India doesn't have a monopoly on the clueless and arrogant.
Academics wouldn't have touched legacy MS-platform programming products (COM, DCOM, MFC) with a ten-foot pole, because they were so complex and ugly. However, the new.NET Framework actually serves as a really good example of compiler and runtime design. It incorporates some of the best ideas in the industry (ripped off Java in many cases) and adds a lot of cool stuff, like metadata, single object-rooted design and automatic memory management. All of these are great topics for study in a classic compiler/OS class. Google for SSCLI (Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure) and browse the source -- it's an interesting study. Adoption of.NET in academia is a lot more than in industry, because the industry is still suspicious of this latest and greatest Microsoft venture.
Is it possible that Windows was never designed with security from the start because it was not designed for a network from the start? MS entered the networking and Internet game pretty late and with it came all the worms, trojans and other stuff. Of course, this assumes that the constituents of present-day Windows have a lot in common with the pre-TCP/IP Windows of old. Still, I think it could be one way of looking at the fundamentally insecure design of Windows.
If SCO says all Linux 2.4 users are in violation, why not switch back to kernel 2.2? As it is, Debian uses that as its default kernel, and I have heard that it's rock-solid, compared to the 2.4 series.
How would a virtual machine based approach to Trusted Computing such as this be different from a JVM/CLR/equivalent virtual machine executing code signed only by a certain party?
Short but interesting...
on
Satellite Imagery
·
· Score: -1, Offtopic
[story]
The NYT has a piece on the history and future of satellite imagery. Short but interesting.
[/story]
Damn - that story is also short, but uninteresting!
I think the mathematician productivity rule applies to musicians too. A lot of Western classical musicians have been most prolific in their early years. Of course, it's not that they stop writing good music after a certain age.
Notable counterexamples are Haydn of the Classical period, who started writing his best symphonies after 50. Also, there's Beethoven, who wrote the 9th Symphony when fairly old and stone deaf.
A quote attributed to Marvin Minsky: "Ever notice that mathematicians tend to be good at music, but musicians tend to be bad at math?"
From the site:
The Pebbles project is exploring how Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), such as a device running PalmOS, or a device running the Microsoft Windows CE or Pocket PC operating systems, can be used when they are communicating with a "regular" personal computer (PC), with other PDAs, and with computerized devices such as telephones, radios, microwave ovens and factory equipment.
Computational Origami and protein folding
on
Origami and Math
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Don't dismiss origami immediately - it could have implications for things like protein folding. As it stands, computing and examining the number of ways a protein can fold is an NP-complete problem. Imagine the insights into molecular biology we might get with further research into the computational complexity of origami.
There's a 21 year old professor at MIT, Erik Demaine who is interested in computational origami. Check out his page for some interesting papers and a story of some very untraditional education.
In my college, MIT, a number of professors record their lectures and post them on the class website for student use. In fact, one of the most famous introductory computer science courses, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is now completely based on Powerpoint presentations viewed online, with notes and the professor's voiceover. I agree - it's often valuable to have a lecture recording, but if the professor does that already, then there is no additional value in having students each record their own copy. Unless, of course, one could *annotate* the lectures one records. Now that would be smart and useful.
According to this post on March 5, AOL canned a billion spams. Today, two months later, they canned two billion. In four more months, they will have canned more than one spam for every single human being on earth. Is that fascinating or just a little fucked up?
Slashdot Mirror
The way things "should be done" is the way people want them to be done and are used to them being done.
All this "intuitive" BS is nonsense. What is "intuitive" about seeing a bunch of conversations in your GMail inbox over a bunch of individual emails? There's nothing in human instinctual behavior that would guide that. We know to do something like that because we have learned how to do it.
And there is just no reason to have to learn a new email system like GMail when we have all already learned how to use mail clients that show individual emails. I still can't get anything done beyond the most basic tasks in GMail because of the stupid conversations and labels, and I've basically given up on the whole service because of it. I used to use email for everything, now I use it as a last resort - I use Outlook Express for most other things that I can't use Outlook for. (My version of Outlook Express still shows individual emails; I didn't realize there was a version with conversational view. Now I know to avoid it.)
You know what I wish people would stop doing? Assuming I'm too dumb to read individual emails, but smart enough to learn a whole new system of GMail conversations that I've never seen before. And I'm sure a lot of other people feel the same way.
I've been doing some thinking about tinyurl-like services lately, and I've since implemented WhenGuard, one such service with a time twist. WhenGuard is a content timing service that automatically publishes and unpublishes any Internet content using a time-sensitive URL alias. This alias is known as a just-in-time link, or a jitlink.
Bloggers, music bands, educators and anyone who wants to hold time-sensitive information until a certain time, or to invalidate it after a certain time has passed, can create jitlinks to alias that content and distribute the jitlinks ahead of time to anyone who might be interested. Jitlinks can be used for RSS content as well. If you create a jitlink that publishes and unpublishes around an RSS feed, such as a Twitter feed, you've essentially spliced a 'show' out of an RSS 'channel'. If you combine this with a perpetually caching RSS reader like Google Reader, you've in effect created TiVo for RSS.
Please check out WhenGuard and send some feedback my way from here. I'd be very grateful indeed!
Q: How many days between this all-quiet alert and Sun changing its ticker symbol to JAVA?
A: 42!
It cannot be a coincidence that this magical number popped up here as well. The Sun needs some time to find itself before it decides what to do for the next quart^H^H^H^H^H solar cycle.
Not all may have been well with Google's Carolinas operation. Take a look at what Nick Carr wrote a couple of months ago about some alleged strong-arming tactics the company used. He actually did multiple posts on this subject, which are all linked to from the bottom of the post. I don't know how to answer BusinessWeek's question, "Is Google too powerful?", but by the looks of it the company allegedly acted like it is.
First, there is the computational urinal from the MIT Media Lab, called You're In Control (Urine Control). More information at the project's web site. The urinal has a screen above it, and you can play video games by appropriately directing your urine stream.
Then, less high tech, but still very useful is the p-mate, which is a device that permits women to pee standing up. Now, if only there could be a device for men to get multiple orgasms.
This is an example of how a decision in an OSS project can sometimes be made for entirely non-technical reasons. I've written a post on my blog about how it's a fallacy to think that these decisions always have well-thought out technical motivations. Four other myths are also dispelled in this post. I'd be curious to hear the /. community's feedback.
It is true that XP was the first OS to have a Home Edition. However, several home users were still misled by Windows 2000, if only because it seemed the natural next step from Windows 95 and Windows 98. Somehow, Windows 95->Windows 98->Windows 2000 seems like a more compelling sequence than Windows 95->Windows 98->Windows Me. Moreover, Windows Me was such a disaster that many people switched to Windows 2000, tired of Me's instability. The grandparent of this post overestimates the number of home users of Win2K, buts the parent underestimates it.
The machines aren't too fancy -- certainly not fancy enough to run bloatware like Windows. However, they follow a simple low-tech protocol that works and shut down if tampered with. And, as with all things India, they cost $200 a pop, compared to $3000 per machines in the U.S.
The U.S. election authorities can learn a lot from India's last election. Read all about it here.
I'd suggest 'avernacular'. Vernacular is a straightforward enough word for the local language. Negating that with an a- prefix would arrive at a meaning similar to the one you propose.
Don't subject the rest of the Slashdot crowd to the talking out of your ass. Employment visas for India are available to Americans as well. It's the companies who don't want to employ Americans in India because they sure as hell will end up raising the wages in India and reducing the cost advantage of offshoring jobs.
Heck -- humans colonizing Mars could work out really well for the same reason.
On the other hand, India is in the midst of a minefield. Immediately bordering on India's west is Pakistan, its sworn enemy. Immediately bordering on the northeast is China, another country that does not want Indian influence to grow. These are the only two countries with whom India has had military conflicts. It's not worth expending plenty of resources on developing Tomahawk-range missiles when the countries Brahmos intends to deter are at such close range.
As for the Indian caste system, please don't talk about stuff about which you obviously don't have a clue. Did you even know what caste your operator belonged to? Did you know that caste and economic class are fairly orthogonal in Indian urban centers? While the definition of untouchables you mention is passable, you somehow neglected to mention that untouchables are people who belong to none of the four castes and are part of Indian society and cultural context. Non-Indians are not untouchables. Their caste is 'N/A'.
As a thought exercise, think of a social system where women were assigned different social strata based on the length of their monthly cycle, with untouchables being defined as post-menopausal women. Where would a man stand in that system? Note that the caste system and the Manusmrti are for all intents and purposes irrelevant among the urban English-speaking elite who staff call centers.
When the divisive issue du jour of the 60s and 70s was race in the U.S., it was language in India. Sure, there have been instances in India's history when Tamils in the south have felt threatened by the contiguous block of Hindi-speaking territories. You are definitely overgeneralizing when you take one anecdote and conveniently plaster the label of arrogance on ALL Indians.
It's much more likely that your support representative was arrogant because these jobs go to the top-notch -- people who are used to being at the top of their classes all the time. Not unexpectedly, just like in the case of U.S. geeks, some arrogance creeps in. I'm sorry to hear that your 'interesting social interaction' didn't go too well, but please quit calling all Indians arrogant just because you had a clueless and arrogant rep on the other end. Clearly, India doesn't have a monopoly on the clueless and arrogant.
Academics wouldn't have touched legacy MS-platform programming products (COM, DCOM, MFC) with a ten-foot pole, because they were so complex and ugly. However, the new .NET Framework actually serves as a really good example of compiler and runtime design. It incorporates some of the best ideas in the industry (ripped off Java in many cases) and adds a lot of cool stuff, like metadata, single object-rooted design and automatic memory management. All of these are great topics for study in a classic compiler/OS class. Google for SSCLI (Shared Source Common Language Infrastructure) and browse the source -- it's an interesting study. Adoption of .NET in academia is a lot more than in industry, because the industry is still suspicious of this latest and greatest Microsoft venture.
Is it possible that Windows was never designed with security from the start because it was not designed for a network from the start? MS entered the networking and Internet game pretty late and with it came all the worms, trojans and other stuff. Of course, this assumes that the constituents of present-day Windows have a lot in common with the pre-TCP/IP Windows of old. Still, I think it could be one way of looking at the fundamentally insecure design of Windows.
If SCO says all Linux 2.4 users are in violation, why not switch back to kernel 2.2? As it is, Debian uses that as its default kernel, and I have heard that it's rock-solid, compared to the 2.4 series.
I bet RMS intimidated the makers of GNOME into calling it GNO/ME.
How would a virtual machine based approach to Trusted Computing such as this be different from a JVM/CLR/equivalent virtual machine executing code signed only by a certain party?
Damn - that story is also short, but uninteresting!
Notable counterexamples are Haydn of the Classical period, who started writing his best symphonies after 50. Also, there's Beethoven, who wrote the 9th Symphony when fairly old and stone deaf.
A quote attributed to Marvin Minsky: "Ever notice that mathematicians tend to be good at music, but musicians tend to be bad at math?"
From the site: The Pebbles project is exploring how Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), such as a device running PalmOS, or a device running the Microsoft Windows CE or Pocket PC operating systems, can be used when they are communicating with a "regular" personal computer (PC), with other PDAs, and with computerized devices such as telephones, radios, microwave ovens and factory equipment.
There's a 21 year old professor at MIT, Erik Demaine who is interested in computational origami. Check out his page for some interesting papers and a story of some very untraditional education.
In my college, MIT, a number of professors record their lectures and post them on the class website for student use. In fact, one of the most famous introductory computer science courses, Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, is now completely based on Powerpoint presentations viewed online, with notes and the professor's voiceover. I agree - it's often valuable to have a lecture recording, but if the professor does that already, then there is no additional value in having students each record their own copy. Unless, of course, one could *annotate* the lectures one records. Now that would be smart and useful.
According to this post on March 5, AOL canned a billion spams. Today, two months later, they canned two billion. In four more months, they will have canned more than one spam for every single human being on earth. Is that fascinating or just a little fucked up?
Why make them when the all-time classic has already been made in ASCII? Okay, stop salivating. Presenting... 3... 2... 1...
Deep Throat in ASCII