Wire wrap. I just loved the beautiful helix the wire made on the posts. It was fun stripping the insulation off and doing a clean wrap by hand. (I never liked the power wrap tool.) I also like the craft of laying the lines neatly from pin to pin.
There was a real skill involved in a wire wrap project, from the first step of deciding where to put components on the board, to planning the pin connections, to doing the actual wrapping.
Batch jobsThis, of course, was from a long-ago age, when technicians and programmers routinely had things work the first time. You had to, pretty much, when you were submitting batch jobs that just got done a few times per day, and your assignment was due the next day. Do I submit this job and lose my card stack for 2 hours, thereby getting two more tries today, or do I use the two hours to make sure my code is correct...
If you thought the versions were confusing, check out the names. On http://www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/roadmap.ht ml we see that version 1.1a1 is also known as "Deer Park Alpha 1 Strippenkaart". Uh, ok, fine. And then we'll get a 1.1a2 (well, that's fine, no worries). Then we we jump past 1.2 or 1.3 up to 1.4, which, amazingly, will also known as "Firefox 1.5 beta". (WHAT? 1.4 and 1.5???) Later it will be 1.5 aka "Firefox 1.5 Deer Park", so back to Deer Park.
They also plan a branding exercise. So "Firefox 2.0" will also be called "Mozilla Firefox 2".
So we have three confusing and only weakly linked naming schemes. All this for a browser? Come on, folks, this is a browser, not rocket science. Will there be any significant new features? "Improvements to bookmarks and history", one of four goals stated at the end of the aforementioned page, isn't exactly a radical new thing, is it? Sure, Firefox has that extension scheme, and that's nice, but all the bluster about versions strikes me as being like a wheel spinning in mud.
Tacked-on solutions to email seem a little like new circles in ancient astronomical models. At some stage, it might be time for a new approach.
Unlike others posting here, I have no bright ideas. But I do hae worries and I do have hopes. Worry: a commercial solution will become standard and force me to use software not of my own choice. Hope: a non-commercial solution will surface, proving that GNU (*) has new ideas.
--
* or FSF or OSS or foo or bar or whatever the heck is the politically correct way of saying this without starting a flame war.
I've started using this, and there is a problem for close-up work. The satellite view is distorted by a kilometre or two in the rural region in which I am interested. It seems to be good to about 0.1 km in the city in which I live. I have not done enough testing to know what causes the problem, but it is not difficult to imagine that it's simply a lack of control points in rural areas.
The upshot of this is that if you want to put location balloons on a satellite image, you may need to do some ad hoc adjustments to the latitude and longitude... which I would guess you'll have to keep changing as google gradually improves the satellite presentation.
I've started a thread on the topic on the google map api discussion group, and at least one other person has noticed the same problem.
Thanks for the advice. I appreciate it. By the way, I know what widows and orphans are (I've read the TeX book cover to cover) and I only use MSWord when I am forced to; that's why I don't know all the settings. Therefore, your comment about MSWord (et alias) having a feature on this is very helpful to me, and I appreciate it.
Also, your words on font metrics are informative and may prove useful to me at some later time. So, I appreciate them as well.
I hope that by replying to this, your helpful comment will be highlighted in the/. system, so that others can benefit from your advice.
This week I tried a test with OO.o (1.1.2) and Neo (1.1 release candidate, patch 8), opening a document created with MS Word 2004 for Mac (version 11.1).
I think these are the latest versions of OO.o and Neo for macintosh.
My test was simple. The document has no tables. It has only one font family, Times New Roman (at 11 point normal, at 12 point normal, italic, and bold, and 14 point bold). No text is in colour. There are 3 inset figures. The document is 10 pages long. I cannot supply it the document for verification, because it is contains confidential information.
I had done a lot of work on the document to get clean line/paragraph/page breaks. For example, to prevent the last line of a page being the first line of a paragraph, I would insert a page break. (I know, I know, this sort of thing is handled automatically with TeX and its variants, but I had to use MSWord for collaboration. Even my test with OO.o and Neo was just a test -- my colleagues have neither.)
I think it is common to care about precise page breaks, etc., and therefore I think a "compatible" program should obey these, at the very least. Otherwise it's impossible to actually use the document. Mail it to someone and ask a question about page 8, and they will have a different page 8.
In OO.o, the document view had the right page breaks. Further tests would be useful, but at least OO.o is worth considering for collaborative work.
In Neo, the page breaks were wrong. Thus Neo fails the test.
PS. please, let's not get into the matter of one version of MSOffice being incompatible with another. That's true but irrelevant since the granting agency to which I am sending the document has a compatible version, as do my colleagues with whom I am working on the project. And, please, let's not get into the matter that the agency should accept OO.o files. They don't, and they make the rules, not me.
Conclusion: OO.o may be worth considering for collaborative use. Neo is not.
It's generated artificially. There is no visible signal of these deep-sea features; light penetrates only 10s to 100s of metres, and the images show features several kilometres deep.
if a disto rises in the forest will anybody hear?
on
Fedora Core 4 Quick Tour
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Hm. it's 7:11PM and I see
24 posts regarding FC4 release posting 7 hours ago
375 posts regarding No threat to linux with apple and intel deal posting dated 4 hours ago
An apple thread thus attracts comment at 30 times the rate of a Fedora thread.
Does this say something about
interest in Fedora?
OO.o is fast and quite nice. Just not 100% compatible, and thus not an option for some of us poor suckers who don't get to decide what software we must use in collaborative frameworks.
Sorry, by 'original' I meant the folks who wrote the article on which all these items are commenting, not on you. I guess I don't understand/. parlance, and I should have been clearer.
What/you/ said is right. That's why I was/trying/ to say.
Actually, it makes sense to calculate temperature anomalies relative to the ambient because a device using NO power would BE at the ambient temperature.
The original post made no sense. The Brooklynoid followup does. However, such calculations are very sensitive to the background temperature used. (Try putting 26.9C as the background!) Such experiments must always involve measuring the ambient condition.
Do folks normally browse with javascript activated?
I usually do not, since I don't want silly animations chewing up cycles, or annoying floating thingees obscuring content.
Sure, it's annoying to have to click through menus to turn javascript or java back on for those few pages where I need it, but that's less annoying than having it turned on by default.
As a scientist who has used pretty much all the languages, I started by reading the thread. Much of it is keyed to the "java and C" phrase, but this does little to inform about Fortress itself, so I hopped to the webpage
http://research.sun.com/sunlabsday/talks.php?id=55
and skimmed the PDF and then listened to the talk. Hm. Night and day. The/. thread tells me this is junk (I'm a java hater), and the actual docs tell me that this is really quite promising.
And, as to why anyone would switch, well of course the answer is that fortress may be, for some things, more expressive or faster. It's a few years out, but I suspect folks in my research community (fluid-flow simulation of ocean and atmosphere) might take a long and hard look at this. The big projects (e.g. weather modelling at national labs) might benefit from the maintainability aspects.
But the big win will be small projects, e.g. individual work of graduate students.
As a prof who sometimes has to work with grad students on their code, I look forward to a more conventional mathematical notation and to a less error-prone language than we have today. Other nuances also appeal, related to scoping, inheritance and so on. I also like the idea of a unit library (which I assume will incur no runtime cost) to catch silly mistakes of adding apples and oranges.
I suspect that the technologies being considered will lead to faster code, partly because it can discover good things at run time as well as compile time. Providing good (read "natural") language support for parallelism will be a welcome feature; in my community we use MPI and that adds a whole ugly layer that is of no interest to the scientist at the head of the team, so a sort of curtain develops between the coder, who worries about such things, and the scientist who prefers to think in more abstract terms. (Here again, the ability to code in a mathematical way will be very welcome, indeed.)
We all have a long time to think about this proposed new language. There are commercial as well as technical concerns. As a sun investor, I may as well just say it: my guess is that Sun may vanish before this project is completed in 5 to 10 years. l sure hope the developers can keep up this work. (Licensing, a favourite/. topic, is not irrelevant here.)
I encourage folks to read the docs and listen to the talk. The Java:C issue is a red herring.
you want some of the things that are better than in OS X, such as... Mozilla Firefo
So Firefox is better than Safari? Is that the same firefox that doesn't display its menus until I click outside of its window, and then click again inside it? Your point about not having to pay for new versions of the OS is valid, but I can't agree on the application quality.
They should call the elements something like moz-mail, moz-address, moz-cal, etc. The problem with Fire-whatsit and Thunder-the-other-thing is that the names call nothing to mind. (Truthfully, "mozilla" also calls nothing to mind, but at least it's been around a while.)
I've never understood why such weird names were chosen for these things. It seems to have started early. Netscape is a sensible name, evoking a view to the internet. As for Mozilla, this is a word that evokes... nothing. And the names went from bad to worse, with Firefox or Firebird or Thunderbird or Thunderfox or whatever all these things are.
And people complain that the unix CLI is confusing. Just try telling someone what browser you use. Um, some weird name, not sure which one though. Even for icon clickers, there's no help, since the icons are just weird shapes that have nothing to do with the function.
Want to find out more about this software? Visit the website named mozilla and see that it's all about these other things, not about mozilla at all. It's like visiting the grocery store and finding the food hidden behind a lot of displays of rubber boots.
For calculations, give the kids slide rules and they will learn about logarithms, etc., as well as about significant digits.
For non-calculations, give the kids books, which require no batteries and last for a long time. (Books can also hold bookmarks and margin notes, and it's easy to find material in books because the brain remembers the "look" of where it was, e.g. it has a smart bookmark that reads something like "open halfway, then flip pages until a figure appears at the top left, then skip a few pages until some bold-faced text... there's the item I wanted!")
Schools in the rich world turn over textbooks at an alarmingly high rate, motivated not by new content but rather by the publishing industry. Every year the same stuff is reprinted with different formatting and slight rewording. This is a trick to make students and schools fork over money. Well, the flip side is that the old books could be shipped off to folks who could use them, and who don't care that the number beside the (c) is the present year.
Tiger is due out in a few months, so this book would be a bad buy if AppleScript changes a lot in Tiger.
Like probably everyone reading/. I've made lots of bad purchases of computing books. I don't mind it if I have to chuck the book after a couple of years, but a couple of months...
Slashdot Mirror
... ya think?
Wire wrap. I just loved the beautiful helix the wire made on the posts. It was fun stripping the insulation off and doing a clean wrap by hand. (I never liked the power wrap tool.) I also like the craft of laying the lines neatly from pin to pin.
There was a real skill involved in a wire wrap project, from the first step of deciding where to put components on the board, to planning the pin connections, to doing the actual wrapping.
Batch jobsThis, of course, was from a long-ago age, when technicians and programmers routinely had things work the first time. You had to, pretty much, when you were submitting batch jobs that just got done a few times per day, and your assignment was due the next day. Do I submit this job and lose my card stack for 2 hours, thereby getting two more tries today, or do I use the two hours to make sure my code is correct...
I thought you threw "their tea" away because you didn't want to pay "your taxes".
They also plan a branding exercise. So "Firefox 2.0" will also be called "Mozilla Firefox 2".
So we have three confusing and only weakly linked naming schemes. All this for a browser? Come on, folks, this is a browser, not rocket science. Will there be any significant new features? "Improvements to bookmarks and history", one of four goals stated at the end of the aforementioned page, isn't exactly a radical new thing, is it? Sure, Firefox has that extension scheme, and that's nice, but all the bluster about versions strikes me as being like a wheel spinning in mud.
Unlike others posting here, I have no bright ideas. But I do hae worries and I do have hopes. Worry: a commercial solution will become standard and force me to use software not of my own choice. Hope: a non-commercial solution will surface, proving that GNU (*) has new ideas.
--
* or FSF or OSS or foo or bar or whatever the heck is the politically correct way of saying this without starting a flame war.
The upshot of this is that if you want to put location balloons on a satellite image, you may need to do some ad hoc adjustments to the latitude and longitude ... which I would guess you'll have to keep changing as google gradually improves the satellite presentation.
I've started a thread on the topic on the google map api discussion group, and at least one other person has noticed the same problem.
Now maybe he could make a movie worth watching. - And just watch the modders hit me on the head -
Also, your words on font metrics are informative and may prove useful to me at some later time. So, I appreciate them as well.
I hope that by replying to this, your helpful comment will be highlighted in the /. system, so that others can benefit from your advice.
I think these are the latest versions of OO.o and Neo for macintosh.
My test was simple. The document has no tables. It has only one font family, Times New Roman (at 11 point normal, at 12 point normal, italic, and bold, and 14 point bold). No text is in colour. There are 3 inset figures. The document is 10 pages long. I cannot supply it the document for verification, because it is contains confidential information.
I had done a lot of work on the document to get clean line/paragraph/page breaks. For example, to prevent the last line of a page being the first line of a paragraph, I would insert a page break. (I know, I know, this sort of thing is handled automatically with TeX and its variants, but I had to use MSWord for collaboration. Even my test with OO.o and Neo was just a test -- my colleagues have neither.)
I think it is common to care about precise page breaks, etc., and therefore I think a "compatible" program should obey these, at the very least. Otherwise it's impossible to actually use the document. Mail it to someone and ask a question about page 8, and they will have a different page 8.
In OO.o, the document view had the right page breaks. Further tests would be useful, but at least OO.o is worth considering for collaborative work.
In Neo, the page breaks were wrong. Thus Neo fails the test.
PS. please, let's not get into the matter of one version of MSOffice being incompatible with another. That's true but irrelevant since the granting agency to which I am sending the document has a compatible version, as do my colleagues with whom I am working on the project. And, please, let's not get into the matter that the agency should accept OO.o files. They don't, and they make the rules, not me.
Conclusion: OO.o may be worth considering for collaborative use. Neo is not.
It's generated artificially. There is no visible signal of these deep-sea features; light penetrates only 10s to 100s of metres, and the images show features several kilometres deep.
- 24 posts regarding FC4 release posting 7 hours ago
- 375 posts regarding No threat to linux with apple and intel deal posting dated 4 hours ago
An apple thread thus attracts comment at 30 times the rate of a Fedora thread. Does this say something about interest in Fedora?OO.o is fast and quite nice. Just not 100% compatible, and thus not an option for some of us poor suckers who don't get to decide what software we must use in collaborative frameworks.
Why doesn't the word "Macintosh" appear on this page? Oh wait, now it does.
What /you/ said is right. That's why I was /trying/ to say.
Now I'm going outside where it is 24C (finally).
Actually, it makes sense to calculate temperature anomalies relative to the ambient because a device using NO power would BE at the ambient temperature. The original post made no sense. The Brooklynoid followup does. However, such calculations are very sensitive to the background temperature used. (Try putting 26.9C as the background!) Such experiments must always involve measuring the ambient condition.
I usually do not, since I don't want silly animations chewing up cycles, or annoying floating thingees obscuring content.
Sure, it's annoying to have to click through menus to turn javascript or java back on for those few pages where I need it, but that's less annoying than having it turned on by default.
And, as to why anyone would switch, well of course the answer is that fortress may be, for some things, more expressive or faster. It's a few years out, but I suspect folks in my research community (fluid-flow simulation of ocean and atmosphere) might take a long and hard look at this. The big projects (e.g. weather modelling at national labs) might benefit from the maintainability aspects.
But the big win will be small projects, e.g. individual work of graduate students. As a prof who sometimes has to work with grad students on their code, I look forward to a more conventional mathematical notation and to a less error-prone language than we have today. Other nuances also appeal, related to scoping, inheritance and so on. I also like the idea of a unit library (which I assume will incur no runtime cost) to catch silly mistakes of adding apples and oranges.
I suspect that the technologies being considered will lead to faster code, partly because it can discover good things at run time as well as compile time. Providing good (read "natural") language support for parallelism will be a welcome feature; in my community we use MPI and that adds a whole ugly layer that is of no interest to the scientist at the head of the team, so a sort of curtain develops between the coder, who worries about such things, and the scientist who prefers to think in more abstract terms. (Here again, the ability to code in a mathematical way will be very welcome, indeed.)
We all have a long time to think about this proposed new language. There are commercial as well as technical concerns. As a sun investor, I may as well just say it: my guess is that Sun may vanish before this project is completed in 5 to 10 years. l sure hope the developers can keep up this work. (Licensing, a favourite /. topic, is not irrelevant here.)
I encourage folks to read the docs and listen to the talk. The Java:C issue is a red herring.
Are these guys married? This sort of behaviour almost always stems from the wives of the great men. Often the widows, sadly.
you want some of the things that are better than in OS X, such as ... Mozilla Firefo
So Firefox is better than Safari? Is that the same firefox that doesn't display its menus until I click outside of its window, and then click again inside it? Your point about not having to pay for new versions of the OS is valid, but I can't agree on the application quality.
I've never understood why such weird names were chosen for these things. It seems to have started early. Netscape is a sensible name, evoking a view to the internet. As for Mozilla, this is a word that evokes ... nothing. And the names went from bad to worse, with Firefox or Firebird or Thunderbird or Thunderfox or whatever all these things are.
And people complain that the unix CLI is confusing. Just try telling someone what browser you use. Um, some weird name, not sure which one though. Even for icon clickers, there's no help, since the icons are just weird shapes that have nothing to do with the function.
Want to find out more about this software? Visit the website named mozilla and see that it's all about these other things, not about mozilla at all. It's like visiting the grocery store and finding the food hidden behind a lot of displays of rubber boots.
For non-calculations, give the kids books, which require no batteries and last for a long time. (Books can also hold bookmarks and margin notes, and it's easy to find material in books because the brain remembers the "look" of where it was, e.g. it has a smart bookmark that reads something like "open halfway, then flip pages until a figure appears at the top left, then skip a few pages until some bold-faced text ... there's the item I wanted!")
Schools in the rich world turn over textbooks at an alarmingly high rate, motivated not by new content but rather by the publishing industry. Every year the same stuff is reprinted with different formatting and slight rewording. This is a trick to make students and schools fork over money. Well, the flip side is that the old books could be shipped off to folks who could use them, and who don't care that the number beside the (c) is the present year.
Guess I'll google it to find out what it is :-)
Jealous because so few books are dedicated to Anonymous Coward?
I thought teachers failed kids who didn't put scales on their maps. Oh, wait, kids aren't allowed to fail anymore. I must be an old fart. Nevermind.
Like probably everyone reading /. I've made lots of bad purchases of computing books. I don't mind it if I have to chuck the book after a couple of years, but a couple of months...