Honestly, using a mac for a couple of years must have rotted my brain. I had no idea what had happened to/. when I looked at it today. Surely, I thought, this was some sort of mistake. So I reloaded a couple of times, thinking that I was getting html generated by a broken program. Then I tried using FireFox instead of Safari. Nothing worked. Slashdot was still broken.
Still, despite the deep fog, I tried to navigate. Eventually I came across this thread. A light went off. This UI change was intentional. And, shock of shocks, I saw that many folks like this -- that they actually "get" the new interface and understand what it's all about.
So I guess I'm just braindead. Something happened to me, and I cannot recall the event. I wonder... should I contact Elections Canada and tell them not to count my vote in today's federal election, owing to my evident lack of neural capacity?
The citation for the research paper is
Ramesh Sharda and Dursun Delen, Predicting box-office success of motion pictures with neural networks, Expert Systems with Applications, Volume 30, Issue 2, February 2006, Pages 243-254.
(http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/B6V0 3-4GV2PCH-1/2/35524bc2ff6fd852c98d8c9f3c3dc8c9). This is not a free journal, but if you're at a university it is quite likely that you have a library subscription. The paper is an interesting read, whether you're keen on film or on neural nets.
The main result is that the method (neural net) works a little better than other methods on the same data (Table 4 of paper). It scores 75% in a test; conventional regression scores 71%. As they say in the statistical literature, "big woop"; the fancy new thing is marginally better than the simple old thing.
As for the practical side of things, the main predictive variable is the number of screens on which the film was initially shown. The next-highest predictive variables are a variable representing the use of technical effects and a variable represengint the actors' reputation. Well, none of these indicates that this tool (or others discussed in the paper) is of any real use to the industry. The suggested use of the tool is to predict movie success. But the main predictive variables all represent things the industry already knew, when the film was being made and promoted. It's like asking a patient if they have a cold, and then charging them to tell them they have a cold.
The poster is right. Back when I used linux, I liked this feature.
Today I browse with Safari on OSX, and I have javascript turned off by default. This is seldom problematic, since it's easy to turn javascript on for a moment once a week when it provides more than annoying eye candy.
This is a good idea. It could be done easily within your own system. FireFox could do it. I've thought about this, too, but in a more limited way. I would like to have MY brower let me make MY own judgements about sites.
If clicking a link takes me to a site that I don't want to visit again, I'd like to have a button I can click to register this within my own browsing setup. Then, if I click again, FF could resist loading the site. The resistance could be indicated in various ways (a beep? changed cursor? A popup window?). Some aesthetic considerations apply there. And the strength of the resistance could be handled in different ways, e.g. I could perhaps click something indicating that I never want to see that site again, ever, or that I don't want to see it again until some elapsed time, or that I'm willing to see it a few more times. It shouldn't be difficult to invent a clever scheme for both the interface and the functioning.
If this were stored in a file, then FF could export the file so I could tell friends what I think sucks. Perhaps a peer-ranked opinion database could be developed over time.
How about it, FF authors? Can you do this? Folks might like it, a lot.
This seems to be something that would be a natural for a non-commercial product such as FF. With commercial products, we run into issues. I doubt that M$oft wants users of its browser to "sucks-list" a M$oft site.
After reading some docs and viewing a few of the presentations, I'm convinced. ZFS is well-planned and well-executed. It will solve lots of problems. Sometimes, smart people do smart things. I'm glad to see good ideas coming out of Sun Microsystems, and I'm not just saying that because of the money I threw away buying their stock.
For this former solaris user, the real question is when Apple will pick it up so that I can use it easily.
From what Zonker writes, it seems that Screen is a good thing. I had a look at its info page and it looks like the sort of thing that will require some study before use. Scanning this/. page, I saw nothing discussing Screen.
Hence, I pose a direct question to/.ers. Is Screen a "good thing" (TM)? If so, would you be so kind as to provide an example to supplement the one Zonker noted? On this list we have lots of clear examples of the usefulness of other tools. If Zonker is right, then it would be great to see examples of Screen, also.
Yup, I use OSX also [1]. I was presuming that many reading/. are on other platforms, hence my (studied) attempt to express things neutrally.
[1] I left solaris for linux, and now that I'm finding OSX so productive, there's no looking back.
The poster is right. There's no reason for a PIM to be part of an office suite. What we need is connectability between many applications, as users request. This connectability should provided as part of the "system" (loosely defined). I should be able to drag an email message (or an attachment thereto) and drop it onto the icon representing my scheduling software, and have the latter extract and store the appointment. This does not imply that the scheduler and the mailer be in a "suite", or that the mailer restrict it's connectability to a particular scheduling app. What's required is the combination of a mechanism for sending and receiving the signals and the will to make software that people enjoy using.
I needn't by my nails from the same company that sold me my hammer. Maybe you and I like the same nails, but my hammer is different to yours. No worries.
The implication of this is that there's no need for an office "suite", at all. In creating a suite, OO is doing no more than copying a tired idea from the M$ "suite". It's an idea that, for M$, may have been partly motivated by commercial concerns. (Buy MSWord in the suite, and there's no need to buy our competitor's spreadsheet.) Why copy the idea, in it's entirety? Why not decide what users need, and provide it? The advantage is that it may work better in an open-source environment, which will have difficulty accumulating huge teams to create deeply integrated apps. All of this requires, of course, standards upon which to base the interconnections, including code standards and a user interface that will appeal to users.
Vanderlaan, A.S.M., Hay, A.E., and Taggart, C.T., 2003. Characterization of North Atlantic right whale Eubalaena glacialis sounds in the Bay of Fundy. IEEE J. Oceanic Eng., 28(2), 164-173.
Laurinolli, M.H., Hay, A.E., Descharnais, F., and Taggart, C.T., 2003. Localization of North Atlantic right whale sounds in the Bay of Fundy using a sonobuoy array. Marine Mammal Science, 19(4), 708-723.
These papers (and others that are not yet published) come from a Physics-Biology interdisciplinary collaboration at Dalhousie University in Canada; for more see http://oceanography.dal.ca/index.html and follow links to get to Hay's (Physics) page or Taggart's (Biology) page.
This work has already led to policy changes, e.g the shipping lanes in the Bay of Fundy have been shifted, to try to reduce the probability of ships striking whales.
More work is needed, and not just on the acoustics. For example, we have no clear understanding of what happens when a ship strikes a whale at a given angle and closing speed, so it is impossible to make policy recommendations on the speed of ships in key areas. (It is undesirable to build up statistics by observing nature, because the right-whale population is on a path of extinction, so every individual matters.)
Why is it "astonishing" that the article does a decent job of providing hard-hitting information without spin? That's what we are supposed to expect of journalists. The Wall Street Journal is supposed to be (and often is) an example of real journalism. That makes it distinct from computer magazines that rely on advertising revenue from the computer industry, and from discussion forums whose course is steered by peeves and submission sequencing.
The 'evince' app looks useful, letting you see PDF or some other formats, sort of like the 'preview' app in OSX. But, wait, there's more! As I read the webpage, Evince will now (or will one day) also handle presentation formats (openoffice "impress" and Powerpoint).
This last thing is more than just a copy of non-free software, and that in itself is notable. But I think it's more important than that... I think it would be very helpful to have just one interface for viewing many types of files. Of course, they will have had to make a comfortable and powerful interface; once this gets into Ubuntu or Fedora, I'll have to check it out!
It's almost as if posting to/. increases the traffic on a site, making that site useless for a while. I wonder if anyone has invented a name for this effect?
I'm looking for a CMS and I'd like to compare. As folks are saying here, it's not easy keeping the names of various alternatives in mind. I went to the site of this CMS, looking for screenshots, but saw none. Anybody care to post some?
Confession: I wrote the site of this CMS above, since I had forgotten the name of the site in the time it took to come back to/. to post this. So that's a sign that either (a) this new name has little sticking power or (b) um, what was I talking about?
Hey, look. Sun has a new idea. Hm, if they get 9 more, maybe their stock price will reach the price I paid for a nanosecond, so I can dump it:-)
Seriously, I like the sound of this. One can argue about costs, etc., but at least they have something other than inertia that might encourage a scientific user to choose Sun.
I guess I could google it, and find out. Maybe a reference to the new Dukes of Hazzard movie? Perhaps something in Ms Simpson's dialogue?
Seriously, there was once a day that I used their search engine. Long ago, in the days when people actually thought about which search engine to use.
There was once a day when I got email from yahoo accounts. Long ago, in the days that my university's spam filter permitted incoming messages containing the word "yahoo".
Slashdot Mirror
Signatures are often the best part about reading /. so I wonder why I don't have one?
I think I might give this article a pass, based on that quote
They say that first-rate people hire first-rate people, but that second-raters hire third-raters.
Still, despite the deep fog, I tried to navigate. Eventually I came across this thread. A light went off. This UI change was intentional. And, shock of shocks, I saw that many folks like this -- that they actually "get" the new interface and understand what it's all about.
So I guess I'm just braindead. Something happened to me, and I cannot recall the event. I wonder... should I contact Elections Canada and tell them not to count my vote in today's federal election, owing to my evident lack of neural capacity?
Who is this Michael Dell guy?
The main result is that the method (neural net) works a little better than other methods on the same data (Table 4 of paper). It scores 75% in a test; conventional regression scores 71%. As they say in the statistical literature, "big woop"; the fancy new thing is marginally better than the simple old thing.
As for the practical side of things, the main predictive variable is the number of screens on which the film was initially shown. The next-highest predictive variables are a variable representing the use of technical effects and a variable represengint the actors' reputation. Well, none of these indicates that this tool (or others discussed in the paper) is of any real use to the industry. The suggested use of the tool is to predict movie success. But the main predictive variables all represent things the industry already knew, when the film was being made and promoted. It's like asking a patient if they have a cold, and then charging them to tell them they have a cold.
Today I browse with Safari on OSX, and I have javascript turned off by default. This is seldom problematic, since it's easy to turn javascript on for a moment once a week when it provides more than annoying eye candy.
If clicking a link takes me to a site that I don't want to visit again, I'd like to have a button I can click to register this within my own browsing setup. Then, if I click again, FF could resist loading the site. The resistance could be indicated in various ways (a beep? changed cursor? A popup window?). Some aesthetic considerations apply there. And the strength of the resistance could be handled in different ways, e.g. I could perhaps click something indicating that I never want to see that site again, ever, or that I don't want to see it again until some elapsed time, or that I'm willing to see it a few more times. It shouldn't be difficult to invent a clever scheme for both the interface and the functioning.
If this were stored in a file, then FF could export the file so I could tell friends what I think sucks. Perhaps a peer-ranked opinion database could be developed over time.
How about it, FF authors? Can you do this? Folks might like it, a lot.
This seems to be something that would be a natural for a non-commercial product such as FF. With commercial products, we run into issues. I doubt that M$oft wants users of its browser to "sucks-list" a M$oft site.
For this former solaris user, the real question is when Apple will pick it up so that I can use it easily.
Damn him, for buying a car not made by US workers.
Hence, I pose a direct question to /.ers. Is Screen a "good thing" (TM)? If so, would you be so kind as to provide an example to supplement the one Zonker noted? On this list we have lots of clear examples of the usefulness of other tools. If Zonker is right, then it would be great to see examples of Screen, also.
Yup, I use OSX also [1]. I was presuming that many reading /. are on other platforms, hence my (studied) attempt to express things neutrally.
[1] I left solaris for linux, and now that I'm finding OSX so productive, there's no looking back.
I needn't by my nails from the same company that sold me my hammer. Maybe you and I like the same nails, but my hammer is different to yours. No worries.
The implication of this is that there's no need for an office "suite", at all. In creating a suite, OO is doing no more than copying a tired idea from the M$ "suite". It's an idea that, for M$, may have been partly motivated by commercial concerns. (Buy MSWord in the suite, and there's no need to buy our competitor's spreadsheet.) Why copy the idea, in it's entirety? Why not decide what users need, and provide it? The advantage is that it may work better in an open-source environment, which will have difficulty accumulating huge teams to create deeply integrated apps. All of this requires, of course, standards upon which to base the interconnections, including code standards and a user interface that will appeal to users.
Vanderlaan, A.S.M., Hay, A.E., and Taggart, C.T., 2003. Characterization of North Atlantic right whale Eubalaena glacialis sounds in the Bay of Fundy. IEEE J. Oceanic Eng., 28(2), 164-173.
Laurinolli, M.H., Hay, A.E., Descharnais, F., and Taggart, C.T., 2003. Localization of North Atlantic right whale sounds in the Bay of Fundy using a sonobuoy array. Marine Mammal Science, 19(4), 708-723.
These papers (and others that are not yet published) come from a Physics-Biology interdisciplinary collaboration at Dalhousie University in Canada; for more see http://oceanography.dal.ca/index.html and follow links to get to Hay's (Physics) page or Taggart's (Biology) page.
This work has already led to policy changes, e.g the shipping lanes in the Bay of Fundy have been shifted, to try to reduce the probability of ships striking whales.
More work is needed, and not just on the acoustics. For example, we have no clear understanding of what happens when a ship strikes a whale at a given angle and closing speed, so it is impossible to make policy recommendations on the speed of ships in key areas. (It is undesirable to build up statistics by observing nature, because the right-whale population is on a path of extinction, so every individual matters.)
period
Why is it "astonishing" that the article does a decent job of providing hard-hitting information without spin? That's what we are supposed to expect of journalists. The Wall Street Journal is supposed to be (and often is) an example of real journalism. That makes it distinct from computer magazines that rely on advertising revenue from the computer industry, and from discussion forums whose course is steered by peeves and submission sequencing.
The 'evince' app looks useful, letting you see PDF or some other formats, sort of like the 'preview' app in OSX. But, wait, there's more! As I read the webpage, Evince will now (or will one day) also handle presentation formats (openoffice "impress" and Powerpoint). This last thing is more than just a copy of non-free software, and that in itself is notable. But I think it's more important than that ... I think it would be very helpful to have just one interface for viewing many types of files. Of course, they will have had to make a comfortable and powerful interface; once this gets into Ubuntu or Fedora, I'll have to check it out!
It's almost as if posting to /. increases the traffic on a site, making that site useless for a while. I wonder if anyone has invented a name for this effect?
Thanks very much for this. It will help me a great deal.
Confession: I wrote the site of this CMS above, since I had forgotten the name of the site in the time it took to come back to /. to post this. So that's a sign that either (a) this new name has little sticking power or (b) um, what was I talking about?
Mine, or the one worshipped by evil people?
Seriously, I like the sound of this. One can argue about costs, etc., but at least they have something other than inertia that might encourage a scientific user to choose Sun.
Yeah, right. And there's this swamp land you might want to buy.
Oh jeeze, just wait until the "intelligent design" knuckle draggers find out that the kids may be using evolution on these systems.
Seriously, there was once a day that I used their search engine. Long ago, in the days when people actually thought about which search engine to use.
There was once a day when I got email from yahoo accounts. Long ago, in the days that my university's spam filter permitted incoming messages containing the word "yahoo".