> I have tried to convince the agents to move to 1024x768. They refuse. > "It makes it too small."
Don't pester them. If stuff looks to small to them at that resolution, then they *shouldn't* use that resolution; it'll only strain their eyes, give them headaches, and make them need to take more breaks away from the screen to recover. If you want them to use a higher res, try requisitioning larger monitors for them; otherwise, leave them be.
And no, increasing the font size is NOT a solution. There are just too many things it doesn't help with. For starters, entirely too large a portion of the web these days consists of.gif and.jpeg images of text.
> I doubt much of anyone is using a 600x800 resolution.
At my estimates, 800x600 just overtook 640x480 as the most common individual resolution circa 2001 (a few months after XP shipped with no support for 640x480, probably not a coincidence), and the latter resolution is still (albeit a bit distantly now) in second place. Quite a lot of people use resolutions higher than 800x600, but no *single* higher resolution is very common, as near as I can determine, perhaps due to the plethora of resolutions availble. Probably if you put 1024x768 and 1280x1024 together they would be almost as common as 800x600. The resolutions in between those two are not terribly common, and resolutions between 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 are not very common, and, except among professional graphics artists and extreme geeks, resolutions over 1600x1200 are utterly rare.
One of the reasons the lowest-supported-resolution sees a lot of use is that there are huge numbers of computer users out there over the age of fourty, with bad eyes and worse glasses, and they don't like squinting. There are two major ways to make things on the screen easier to see: get a bigger screen, or cut back the resolution. People with good eyes usually crank the resolution as high as it will go, but that varies so much from one graphics card and/or monitor to another that they don't all end up with the same resolution. OTOH, the people with bad eyes all set the res as low as it will go (unless they're using an LCD display, in which case that just makes matters worse), and because Windows does not support arbitrarily low resolutions, they all land on the same one.
Users with bifocals skew things even more, because they deliberately purchase small monitors, 16" viewable or even smaller, not because it's cheaper, but because the screen is smaller, and they don't want to be tipping their heads all the time forward and back. Then they definitely need the lowest-possible resolution, so they can read the print. If I could find a 13"-viewable monitor and get windows to support 320x200 resolution, my bifocal-wearing mother would think it was the best thing since 16-point fonts.
Of course, if you lump all the resolutions higher than 800x600 together, then it's very common to have a resolution higher than 800x600. (There are, on the whole, more people with decent eyes than not.) But as far as specific settings go, 800x600 is the most common one.
Also, resolutions smaller than 640x480, while still a tiny percentage, are now on the rise. This is due to various tiny devices (cellphones and junk) now becomming cheaper and being more likely to have internet connectivity.
There's also the it-came-from-the-factory-this-way factor; several major manufacturers ship with the minimum-supported resolution as default (except for LCD displays, where the native res is default for obvious reasons). Users with bad eyes are probably most of the reason; I don't think it's down to laziness in changing settings, because they seem to do trainloads of that, adding all sorts of goofy dross and hokey malarke to their standard image, so I'm sure they'd change the resolution if they thought their users would on average prefer a different one.
[merging the titlebar with the menubar] > Is there such plug-in for FireFox?
In the general case, that's not possible, since some window managers will not allow it. Apparently, Win32 does (not surprising; the window manager there is more interested as a general rule in letting apps do whatevertheheck they want than in providing a usable interface), and they've apparently (assuming the screenshot is real, which seems likely) worked up something platform-specific for that. It wouldn't work under any window manager that handles the window decorations itself unconditionally (i.e., any window manager that puts the same border/titlebar/etc around xmms as it does around Mozilla -- ion, for instance), and it might also not work even under some that do allow these schenanighans, due to differences in the way such things are handled.
Apple doesn't want nearly-native software. They don't want software that looks like GTK with an Aqua theme. Their users might whine about even the most minor differences in how things are arranged, such as if the Preferences option is under the wrong menu. No, they don't want software that is ported by an automatic process using a toolkit compatibility layer. It's one thing if the user goes out of his way to install a compatibility layer (such as the X Server) to run non-native applications, because then the applications are clearly non-native and so the ability to run them at all is a feature. But if the applications were to pitch themselves as native, that would be quite another something else entirely.
Personally, I'd like to see Apple put a few programmer years into getting a native Aqua port of OOo fully integrated into the main tree. For a while I thought they might do that, but it seems they chose to do their own whole new office suite (iWork) instead, and it seems unlikely they'll do both.
One supposes the X11 version will take theming from Qt or GTK2, if you have either of those installed. As far as the native Aqua version, I get the impression that is still very much under construction and not really ready for finicky end users yet.
This is a gross oversimplification. English is *partly* a Germanic language, but it is also partly a number of other things. In brief, the history of the English language goes something like this: People who spoke a Germanic language (Angles and Saxons and Danes and Jutes so on and so forth) moved into an area where there were also other people who spoke Celtic and Gaelic. Note that the Germanic language was already using a Latin alphabet, and the Celtic and Gaelic folks had had significant contact with the Romans also. Mixing of these languages was initially rather limited due to cultural factors, but over time both languages did take quite a few constructs on loan from the other. Meanwhile, these folks called Normans introduced a lot of French into the language, while simultaneously the Roman Catholic Church introduced copious amounts of Latin. These bits of French and Latin were mostly Anglicised -- i.e., the spelling and pronunciation were adjusted to more closely match those of the Germanic language. Then along came this Gutenberg dude with a thingy called a printing press, and a thing called the Renaissance, which introduced positively enormous amounts of French, Greek, and Latin into the language, increasing the total available vocabulary more than tenfold over the space of a couple hundred years. These new additions were not anglicised to nearly the same extent as the earlier ones. Meanwhile, all along, the grammar has been changing: while most Germanic languages are fairly inflected, carrying sentence semantics in word features, English has almost entirely abandoned that and adopted sentence semantics based very heavily on word order. In the modern era, additional features (both grammatical and vocabulary) have been introduced into the language from a wide variety of languages and other sources.
Something you'll notice is that the language that comes up most frequently in any history of English is -- look for it -- Latin. Germanic languages had a very important role in the early formation of the language, but Latin has shaped its development at every stage along the way, to a much greater extent than German. Greek has contributed next to nothing to the _grammar_ of English, but it has contributed an enormous amount of vocabulary, perhaps more than Latin and _certainly_ far more words than all Germanic languages combined. If you ever study the Greek language, you will discover that most common Greek words have numerous English words that derive from them; going the other direction, if you browse through a dictionary looking at where it says different words come from, you'll see Greek, French, and Latin origins overwhelmingly more often than Germanic and Old English ones.
Old English (the language of Beowulf, which is totally unreadable for the English-speaking modern world) is a Germanic language. Modern English, however, is best thought of as only distantly related to Old English. Even Middle English (the language of Chaucer) has almost as much French as it does Old English, and Modern English has, from a vocabulary perspective, quite a bit more Latin and Greek in it than it does Middle English.
See, *this* is the kind of added value that could make commercial software really worth the money, at least potentially. (I'm assuming here that the blurb accurately reflects what's actually being done... which is probably assuming too much, but there's always that, isn't there?) This is the sort of thing Microsoft should be talking about when they talk about the value they can provide. Assuming they're willing to actually do it.
> I plan on installing an administrative workstation from which to grab these > hotfixes and service packs, but I can't legitimately put it on the network > until all the hotfixes and service packs are installed! Firewalls help, but > have had nasty little problems in the past. For example, in Win2k, the > interface is live before the firewalls kick in to protect them.
If possible, you should use an external firewall or NAT solution, either one of those $50 hardware firewall thingies, or an OpenBSD or Linux or cetera box. An external firewall is more secure than an interal one, because it does not share the vulnerabilities of the protected system, and even if the firewall becomes compromised, the protected system is not automatically compromised; that becomes an additional step for the attacker to perform. In other words, it's better defense in depth.
Theoretically, the best practice, security-wise, would be to always protect any system that matters (i.e., anything that needs to be relyable or that contains data that needs to be protected) with a firewall that's based on a different operating system from the one being protected. In practice, this is *especially* important when the system being protected runs a Microsoft OS.
Also note that a firewall will usually not (and NAT will certainly not) protect you from client vulnerabilities, e.g., holes in Outlook Express. If you use vulnerable client software, you need something additional to protect you from that.
Yes, well, I've lived in eight homes (not counting college dorms) in three states since I was old enough to remember, and four of them had occasional water in the basement. Two of the others had *frequent* water in the basement, and one didn't *have* a basement. The other one was an appartment building, and I don't know whether the basement had flooding or not.
One person's experience can be skewed. My point is that it's an issue that needs to be considered -- which is what the OP asked for.
The age of the home does make a significant difference as to the likelihood of water. If some of the wiring has cloth insulation, it's a good bet there will be water in the basement occasionally.
> Where do the Storm Troopers in episode 4+ come from? > Are they clones turned bad? And outfitted differently?
Episodes 1-2 already made it pretty clear that the clones army was designed, genetically engineered, and conditioned to take orders. So all it takes for them to "turn bad" is for the person giving the orders to give bad ones. They were taking orders from representatives of the Republic -- from the Jedi Council, as long as the Jedi Council still represented the republic, and from the Chancellor, the Senate, and so on. When the Senate voted supreme powers to the Chancellor (so that he could create this army) in Episode 2, that put the Chancellor in a position to basically do whatever he thinks best or, if it comes to it, whatever he wants. So if Chancellor Palpatine were to disband the Jedi in Episode 3 and further disband the Senate later, that would make him, effectively, Emperor. (He does not disband the Senate in Episode 3, but later. Vader announces this to Leia when she is captive on the Death Star, in Episode 4, although one gets the impression he's telling her about something that had already been done, and she just didn't know about it yet, so it probably is an event that takes place shortly before the start of Episode 4.)
> How come the Episode 1-3 droids and battle droids are never seen again in 4+?
The droids were produced, maintained, and used by the Trade Federation. The Trade Federation seems to lose most or all of its significance somewhere between Episode 2 and Episode 4, because you never hear much about it in Episodes 4-6. One hopes Episode 3 will explain this point, but you can see foreshadowing in Episode 1, where the Sith lord is obviously using the Viceroy of the Trade Federation as a puppet.
But in any case, the droid armies were always Trade Federation armies, and the Clone Army (later called Storm Troopers or Emperial Trooms) is the army of the Republic, which then becomes the Empire.
Unless you are in a fairly unusual location, your basement WILL get some water in it occasionally -- not every year, maybe, but often enough that you need to take it into consideration. The flooding may not achieve any significant depth, but even a house on top of a hill can get an inch of water in the basement on occasion when it rains very hard and fast.
Another thing about basements is that they often have exposed rafters, which makes overhead wiring significantly more convenient than it would be in a main floor scenerio. Drill a few one-inch holes at intervals along each rafter, put in a few cross-bars, and overhead wiring is easy to run, easy to change, easy to manage. If you have exposed rafters, I would suggest considering maybe taking advantage of that, instead of doing raised flooring in a basement scenerio.
An upper floor scenerio would of course be a different thing entirely.
> it would be very rash to conclude that our understanding of gravity, > which has worked extremely well for us for hundreds of years
You exaggerage -- significantly. Until Newton, one of the prevailing ideas was that gravity drew everything in the universe toward one central point. (This goes back to Aristotle, if not further...) I _suppose_ you could call Newton "hundreds of years ago", but it's not very many hundreds. Quite aside from that, our understanding of gravity has been revised significantly in the last hundred years; Newton's basic equation is still more-or-less correct, but it doesn't explain everything or cover all of the edge cases; furthermore, it doesn't work at all at the particle level.
Our _basic_ understanding of gravity is _basically_ correct, but there is definitely still stuff about gravity that we don't know or understand.
As for "dark matter", there's dark matter and then there's dark matter. This particular discovery is far enough away that it's not terribly hard to explain; we'd only be able to "see" it if it were radiating light, so it could _potentially_ be perfectly ordinary matter that just doesn't happen to be doing that. Perhaps it's not grouped up into stars the way the matter here is, for instance -- a ring of roughly uniform density, or something along those lines.
Or it could be something else. Point is, we don't know.
How about working on enormous multilayer images in Gimp that are ultimately destined to be printed as large, high-gloss posters? That'll eat some RAM. The piddly little images I have worked with (you know, 600dpi for 8.5x11 letter-size, tiny little things) can use up more than a gigabyte each, with only four layers; a complex image can easily have over fifty layers...
Video editing springs to mind.
Databases perform better if they can fit all the data in RAM, especially if the data are read far more often than written. It's easy to imagine a DB that goes past 4GB.
I'm sure there are other applications where you could want that much RAM.
> Languages get more complex over time, not less complicated.
English is getting more complicated, but in other ways. For example, our vocabulary is ever heading in the general direction of hyperagglutinativity, to say nothing of the sheer vast impressive array of available words, far more words than any other human language; most of these words have been added to the language within the last three hundred years, some by importation from other languages, some by recombination of extant roots and affixes, and of course some by new coinage. For example, a hundred years ago, the phrase "synergistic remediation" would never have been uttered.
Also, word order has increased in importance and to some extent changed its meaning. Punctuation has also gained much importance and complexity. The case inflection system, however, is (quite gradually) going away. Already most people who speak English don't understand the difference between "thou" and "thee" or "you" and "ye", for instance, or "dost" and "doth", or cetera.
> there are good reasons for pop-ups in an application context
I have two very solid answers to this. 1: Web pages are not applications. 2: There are also very good reasons for NO pop-ups in an application context. I don't want my word processing application popping up extra windows while I am editing a document. Emacs somehow manages to do EVERYTHING (and, if you know anything about Emacs, you know that I do mean everything) without ever popping up an extra window, unless the user specifically chooses the New Window command from the file menu (or otherwise executes the lisp command it's bound to.) This is good user-interface design. Popping up tons of extra windows and dialog boxes and junk is *poor* UI design.
But I like reason 1 best: web pages are not applications. The web browser is the application. The web page is data.
Let the user decide. If the user _wants_ an new window or tab, he can always middle click, instead of left clicking, on the link. Voila, new tab (or new window, depending on how the user's prefs are set up).
I never open new windows for links, and I use the SingleWindow extension to keep annoying websites from foisting them on me. Occasionally I do open a second browser window, but always for something unrelated to anything in the original window; e.g., sometimes I use one window for Wikipedia and another window for other stuff, but if I follow a link from a wikipedia article that goes off-site, I'd want it in the Wikipedia window, because it's related to that topic.
Opening a new window was never any of the website's business in the first place. *I* am not surrendering any functionality; *I* can get a new window any time *I* want, by going File->New Window. Far from surrendering functionality, by blocking all popups, I am _taking functionality back_. Oh, you meant the "functionality" of letting the website make that decision for me? That's not functionality I ever wanted. If I want to open your link in a new window, I can right click it and choose "New Window". I haven't done that since tabbed browsing landed in the nightly builds shortly before 0.9.5, but that's my decision. How many windows I have open is none of the website's business.
The SingleWindow extension for Firefox is a Good Thing(TM).
Yes, fundamentally, blocking popups is a *lot* easier than filtering spam. Filtering spam is both NP-Hard and AI-Complete; whereas, blocking popups is something computers are smart enough and fast enough to actually do. This is because popup blocking requires much less awareness of contextual and semantic information -- we don't have to concern ourselves with whether the contents of the popup are an advertisement; we only have to determine whether the action of opening it is user-initiated. Furthermore, with spam, determining whether the email is user-initiated is impossibly hard in many cases, because not all of the legitimate email you get is a reply to a message that you have sent -- it may be as a result of something you have done in a web browser, for example, or it may come from a person whom you have given your address IRL, on a scrap of paper, or a person who has wandered across your website and has a question, or cetera.
Personally, I have Firefox setup to not allow popup windows period, EVER (i.e., not even user-initiated ones), so that makes blocking them even easier. (I think the extension for this is called Single Window.) The only way I ever get a new window is if I go to the file menu and choose New Window.
I do sometimes get new tabs, but that's WAY less annoying for several reasons: * The window stays the size and shape I made it. Always. * I never get a window that's missing important pieces of chrome, such as
the status bar. (Script are also not allowed to change the content of
the status bar, hide the toolbars, or otherwise mess with my environment;
they can change the content of the page canvas area only.) * New tabs never steal focus; they are queued at the end of the list, and
the current tab retains its focus until I close it or switch manually. * I can always see what tabs are open, because they're listed on the tab bar.
> Uh, this depends on the monitor you're using as well.
It's a pretty decent quality nineteen-inch CRT, and I don't have any trouble seeing the colors on it.
> most people just ignore the differences
When I said they can't see it, I didn't mean that they didn't mention noticing a difference; I was pointing out how one object on the screen was a different color from the other, and they couldn't see it, not even when I put them side by side.
I've also done a little checking within my family, and I'm pretty sure I see *significantly* better color depth than either of my parents or my first sister. (My second sister, I haven't asked. She doesn't like being asked silly questions and can be grumpy at times, so I've left her out of this.) My parents can by handwaved because they're over 50, but Sarah's four years younger than I am -- what's that make her now, 26? Granted, she can't see jack without her glasses or contacts, but still... you'd think color depth would be a different issue from focus.
> You've got to be kidding. Are they perhaps blind?
That was my immediate reaction when I discovered this, but it appears to be fairly common.
> That's a brightness difference of 3 in the green channel (the channel to > which humans are most sensitive).
I don't think all humans are quite equally sensitive to the respective channels.
The one coworker, who couldn't see a difference of less than about 30 on the V channel (using an HSV color model), even when watching it change, is abnormal, as far as I'm concerned, but the others appear to be fairly ordinary, albeit, not graphics artists, and all over 40. (But, I'm 30, a programmer/sysadmin/math geek, not a graphics artist, yet I see the colors.)
One even has pretty good visual/color/decorating sense, usually, but she doesn't see as much color depth as I do, apparently -- at least, not in the darker ranges. (She might see better in brighter colors than I do, however; I tend to go snowblind pretty quickly if there's too much white.)
> I need to be able to have a bunch of users see the same color on any monitor?
If you wanted to have the _same_ user see the same color the same way on different monitors, that is theoretically achievable with good quality CRTs, assuming you can put them in identical settings and so on.
But with different users, there is going to be a difference in perception. Some people see *significantly* more color depth than others, for instance. Also, some people's retinas are more sensitive to light than others, so they have most of their color resolution in the darker ranges; other people have eyes less sensitive to light and distinguish brighter colors better.
I've discovered that most of my coworkers can't tell #305050 from #294D4A, even when they're side by side. To me, they're noticeably different in character, and if you show me one of them by itself, I know which of the two it is. (This is probably attributable more to the difference in blue/green balance than the slight variation in brightness, but anyway, I can tell.) One time I asked for a coworker's opinion on the brightness of a certain background, and she said it was too dark, so I grabbed the V slider (in Inkscape) and lightened it up a bit, then looked at her; she obviously didn't realize I'd changed it at all. So I dragged the slider over a bit more, and a bit more... after a bit I asked her how that was, and her response clearly indicated she still didn't see a difference. I'd changed it by probably 20 or 30 units per channel. (I quit asking for her opinion on colors after that.) She's an extreme case, obviously, but the basic phenomenon is universal: people don't all have the same eyes.
> "Me and my friend went to the store" will never be proper because it makes > no logical sense.
You clearly have not been paying close attention to the direction the English language has been headed. Noun inflection has been in the process of dropping out of the language for several hundred years now, because, frankly, we mostly don't need it; we have word-order mechanisms for indicating case, so the inflection is redundant. We've already lost the distinction between the subjective and objective (not to mention singular and plural) in the second person pronouns; we're now beginning to lose the distinction between subjective and objective in the first person singular and are already well on our way to losing the inflections for gender and number in the third person. Chart follows... 1650: 1st I, me, my/mine we, us, our/ours 2nd thou, thee, thy/thine ye, you, your/yours 3rd m he, him, his they, them, their/theirs 3rd f she, her, her/hers they, them, their/theirs 3rd n it, it, its they, them, their/theirs 1950: 1st I, me, my/mine we, us, our/ours 2nd you, you/ you/yours you, you, your/yours 3rd m he, him, his they, them, their/theirs 3rd f she, her, her/hers they, them, their/theirs 3rd n it, it, its they, them, their/theirs 2150 (projected): 1st me, me, my/mine we/us, us, our/ours 2nd you, you/ you/yours you, you, your/yours 3rd they, them, their/theirs they, them, their/theirs
We might also lose the attributive possessive and keep only the predicate form of it, reusing the same form as the subjective and objective for the attributive possessive. You can already see that starting to happen colloquially; for now it still sounds very wrong to most of us, but the change has already begun, albeit gradually.
FWIW, I agree with most of your points in principle, including the one about begging the question, but I felt the need to point out that the distinction between the subjective and the objective is more and more carried only by position in the sentence, rather than by form. The days when you can say "Him I like" or "Him like I" or "Like him do I" are rapidly passing; it already sounds pretty odd and Yoda-esque -- but if we don't do that any more, then we don't need distinct forms for the subjective and objective case any longer; they are archaisms and will pass out of use.
> I am really looking forward to emulating an Opteron at near native speed > on my good old 386sx processor...
Actually, this is very similar to one of the features that the original RAIF-POOL implementation boasted. It worked by using your internet connection to co-opt available cycles that would otherwise go unused on other computers on the internet. However, the software stuck in beta and was never officially released, due to some minor process control glitches that were never fully worked out, and then the Pentium III was released, and the prices on Celeron processors dropped, and nobody seemed to need any extra processing power any more, so the project was just dropped. There are still a couple of copies of the beta floating around on the net, I think, but they're hard to find.
Slashdot Mirror
> I have tried to convince the agents to move to 1024x768. They refuse.
.gif and .jpeg images of text.
> "It makes it too small."
Don't pester them. If stuff looks to small to them at that resolution, then
they *shouldn't* use that resolution; it'll only strain their eyes, give them
headaches, and make them need to take more breaks away from the screen to
recover. If you want them to use a higher res, try requisitioning larger
monitors for them; otherwise, leave them be.
And no, increasing the font size is NOT a solution. There are just too many
things it doesn't help with. For starters, entirely too large a portion of
the web these days consists of
> I doubt much of anyone is using a 600x800 resolution.
At my estimates, 800x600 just overtook 640x480 as the most common individual
resolution circa 2001 (a few months after XP shipped with no support for
640x480, probably not a coincidence), and the latter resolution is still
(albeit a bit distantly now) in second place. Quite a lot of people use
resolutions higher than 800x600, but no *single* higher resolution is very
common, as near as I can determine, perhaps due to the plethora of resolutions
availble. Probably if you put 1024x768 and 1280x1024 together they would be
almost as common as 800x600. The resolutions in between those two are not
terribly common, and resolutions between 1280x1024 and 1600x1200 are not
very common, and, except among professional graphics artists and extreme
geeks, resolutions over 1600x1200 are utterly rare.
One of the reasons the lowest-supported-resolution sees a lot of use is
that there are huge numbers of computer users out there over the age of
fourty, with bad eyes and worse glasses, and they don't like squinting.
There are two major ways to make things on the screen easier to see:
get a bigger screen, or cut back the resolution. People with good eyes
usually crank the resolution as high as it will go, but that varies so
much from one graphics card and/or monitor to another that they don't all
end up with the same resolution. OTOH, the people with bad eyes all set
the res as low as it will go (unless they're using an LCD display, in
which case that just makes matters worse), and because Windows does not
support arbitrarily low resolutions, they all land on the same one.
Users with bifocals skew things even more, because they deliberately purchase
small monitors, 16" viewable or even smaller, not because it's cheaper, but
because the screen is smaller, and they don't want to be tipping their heads
all the time forward and back. Then they definitely need the lowest-possible
resolution, so they can read the print. If I could find a 13"-viewable
monitor and get windows to support 320x200 resolution, my bifocal-wearing
mother would think it was the best thing since 16-point fonts.
Of course, if you lump all the resolutions higher than 800x600 together,
then it's very common to have a resolution higher than 800x600. (There are,
on the whole, more people with decent eyes than not.) But as far as specific
settings go, 800x600 is the most common one.
Also, resolutions smaller than 640x480, while still a tiny percentage, are
now on the rise. This is due to various tiny devices (cellphones and junk)
now becomming cheaper and being more likely to have internet connectivity.
There's also the it-came-from-the-factory-this-way factor; several major
manufacturers ship with the minimum-supported resolution as default (except
for LCD displays, where the native res is default for obvious reasons).
Users with bad eyes are probably most of the reason; I don't think it's
down to laziness in changing settings, because they seem to do trainloads
of that, adding all sorts of goofy dross and hokey malarke to their standard
image, so I'm sure they'd change the resolution if they thought their users
would on average prefer a different one.
[merging the titlebar with the menubar]
> Is there such plug-in for FireFox?
In the general case, that's not possible, since some window managers will not
allow it. Apparently, Win32 does (not surprising; the window manager there is
more interested as a general rule in letting apps do whatevertheheck they want
than in providing a usable interface), and they've apparently (assuming the
screenshot is real, which seems likely) worked up something platform-specific
for that. It wouldn't work under any window manager that handles the window
decorations itself unconditionally (i.e., any window manager that puts the
same border/titlebar/etc around xmms as it does around Mozilla -- ion, for
instance), and it might also not work even under some that do allow these
schenanighans, due to differences in the way such things are handled.
Can't be any worse than letting a television set fill the same function.
Apple doesn't want nearly-native software. They don't want software that
looks like GTK with an Aqua theme. Their users might whine about even the
most minor differences in how things are arranged, such as if the Preferences
option is under the wrong menu. No, they don't want software that is ported
by an automatic process using a toolkit compatibility layer. It's one thing
if the user goes out of his way to install a compatibility layer (such as the
X Server) to run non-native applications, because then the applications are
clearly non-native and so the ability to run them at all is a feature. But
if the applications were to pitch themselves as native, that would be quite
another something else entirely.
Personally, I'd like to see Apple put a few programmer years into getting a
native Aqua port of OOo fully integrated into the main tree. For a while I
thought they might do that, but it seems they chose to do their own whole
new office suite (iWork) instead, and it seems unlikely they'll do both.
One supposes the X11 version will take theming from Qt or GTK2, if you have
either of those installed. As far as the native Aqua version, I get the
impression that is still very much under construction and not really ready
for finicky end users yet.
> Since English is a Germanic lanaguage
This is a gross oversimplification. English is *partly* a Germanic language,
but it is also partly a number of other things. In brief, the history of the
English language goes something like this: People who spoke a Germanic
language (Angles and Saxons and Danes and Jutes so on and so forth) moved into
an area where there were also other people who spoke Celtic and Gaelic. Note
that the Germanic language was already using a Latin alphabet, and the Celtic
and Gaelic folks had had significant contact with the Romans also. Mixing of
these languages was initially rather limited due to cultural factors, but over
time both languages did take quite a few constructs on loan from the other.
Meanwhile, these folks called Normans introduced a lot of French into the
language, while simultaneously the Roman Catholic Church introduced copious
amounts of Latin. These bits of French and Latin were mostly Anglicised --
i.e., the spelling and pronunciation were adjusted to more closely match those
of the Germanic language. Then along came this Gutenberg dude with a thingy
called a printing press, and a thing called the Renaissance, which introduced
positively enormous amounts of French, Greek, and Latin into the language,
increasing the total available vocabulary more than tenfold over the space
of a couple hundred years. These new additions were not anglicised to nearly
the same extent as the earlier ones. Meanwhile, all along, the grammar has
been changing: while most Germanic languages are fairly inflected, carrying
sentence semantics in word features, English has almost entirely abandoned
that and adopted sentence semantics based very heavily on word order. In
the modern era, additional features (both grammatical and vocabulary) have
been introduced into the language from a wide variety of languages and other
sources.
Something you'll notice is that the language that comes up most frequently
in any history of English is -- look for it -- Latin. Germanic languages
had a very important role in the early formation of the language, but Latin
has shaped its development at every stage along the way, to a much greater
extent than German. Greek has contributed next to nothing to the _grammar_
of English, but it has contributed an enormous amount of vocabulary, perhaps
more than Latin and _certainly_ far more words than all Germanic languages
combined. If you ever study the Greek language, you will discover that most
common Greek words have numerous English words that derive from them; going
the other direction, if you browse through a dictionary looking at where it
says different words come from, you'll see Greek, French, and Latin origins
overwhelmingly more often than Germanic and Old English ones.
Old English (the language of Beowulf, which is totally unreadable for the
English-speaking modern world) is a Germanic language. Modern English,
however, is best thought of as only distantly related to Old English.
Even Middle English (the language of Chaucer) has almost as much French as
it does Old English, and Modern English has, from a vocabulary perspective,
quite a bit more Latin and Greek in it than it does Middle English.
See, *this* is the kind of added value that could make commercial software
really worth the money, at least potentially. (I'm assuming here that the
blurb accurately reflects what's actually being done... which is probably
assuming too much, but there's always that, isn't there?) This is the sort
of thing Microsoft should be talking about when they talk about the value
they can provide. Assuming they're willing to actually do it.
> I plan on installing an administrative workstation from which to grab these
> hotfixes and service packs, but I can't legitimately put it on the network
> until all the hotfixes and service packs are installed! Firewalls help, but
> have had nasty little problems in the past. For example, in Win2k, the
> interface is live before the firewalls kick in to protect them.
If possible, you should use an external firewall or NAT solution, either one
of those $50 hardware firewall thingies, or an OpenBSD or Linux or cetera box.
An external firewall is more secure than an interal one, because it does not
share the vulnerabilities of the protected system, and even if the firewall
becomes compromised, the protected system is not automatically compromised;
that becomes an additional step for the attacker to perform. In other words,
it's better defense in depth.
Theoretically, the best practice, security-wise, would be to always protect
any system that matters (i.e., anything that needs to be relyable or that
contains data that needs to be protected) with a firewall that's based on
a different operating system from the one being protected. In practice, this
is *especially* important when the system being protected runs a Microsoft OS.
Also note that a firewall will usually not (and NAT will certainly not)
protect you from client vulnerabilities, e.g., holes in Outlook Express.
If you use vulnerable client software, you need something additional to
protect you from that.
Yes, well, I've lived in eight homes (not counting college dorms) in three
states since I was old enough to remember, and four of them had occasional
water in the basement. Two of the others had *frequent* water in the
basement, and one didn't *have* a basement. The other one was an appartment
building, and I don't know whether the basement had flooding or not.
One person's experience can be skewed. My point is that it's an issue that
needs to be considered -- which is what the OP asked for.
The age of the home does make a significant difference as to the likelihood
of water. If some of the wiring has cloth insulation, it's a good bet there
will be water in the basement occasionally.
> Where do the Storm Troopers in episode 4+ come from?
> Are they clones turned bad? And outfitted differently?
Episodes 1-2 already made it pretty clear that the clones army was designed,
genetically engineered, and conditioned to take orders. So all it takes for
them to "turn bad" is for the person giving the orders to give bad ones. They
were taking orders from representatives of the Republic -- from the Jedi
Council, as long as the Jedi Council still represented the republic, and from
the Chancellor, the Senate, and so on. When the Senate voted supreme powers
to the Chancellor (so that he could create this army) in Episode 2, that put
the Chancellor in a position to basically do whatever he thinks best or, if
it comes to it, whatever he wants. So if Chancellor Palpatine were to disband
the Jedi in Episode 3 and further disband the Senate later, that would make
him, effectively, Emperor. (He does not disband the Senate in Episode 3, but
later. Vader announces this to Leia when she is captive on the Death Star, in
Episode 4, although one gets the impression he's telling her about something
that had already been done, and she just didn't know about it yet, so it
probably is an event that takes place shortly before the start of Episode 4.)
> How come the Episode 1-3 droids and battle droids are never seen again in 4+?
The droids were produced, maintained, and used by the Trade Federation. The
Trade Federation seems to lose most or all of its significance somewhere
between Episode 2 and Episode 4, because you never hear much about it in
Episodes 4-6. One hopes Episode 3 will explain this point, but you can
see foreshadowing in Episode 1, where the Sith lord is obviously using
the Viceroy of the Trade Federation as a puppet.
But in any case, the droid armies were always Trade Federation armies, and
the Clone Army (later called Storm Troopers or Emperial Trooms) is the army
of the Republic, which then becomes the Empire.
Unless you are in a fairly unusual location, your basement WILL get some water
in it occasionally -- not every year, maybe, but often enough that you need to
take it into consideration. The flooding may not achieve any significant
depth, but even a house on top of a hill can get an inch of water in the
basement on occasion when it rains very hard and fast.
Another thing about basements is that they often have exposed rafters, which
makes overhead wiring significantly more convenient than it would be in a
main floor scenerio. Drill a few one-inch holes at intervals along each
rafter, put in a few cross-bars, and overhead wiring is easy to run, easy
to change, easy to manage. If you have exposed rafters, I would suggest
considering maybe taking advantage of that, instead of doing raised flooring
in a basement scenerio.
An upper floor scenerio would of course be a different thing entirely.
> it would be very rash to conclude that our understanding of gravity,
> which has worked extremely well for us for hundreds of years
You exaggerage -- significantly. Until Newton, one of the prevailing ideas
was that gravity drew everything in the universe toward one central point.
(This goes back to Aristotle, if not further...) I _suppose_ you could call
Newton "hundreds of years ago", but it's not very many hundreds. Quite aside
from that, our understanding of gravity has been revised significantly in the
last hundred years; Newton's basic equation is still more-or-less correct, but
it doesn't explain everything or cover all of the edge cases; furthermore, it
doesn't work at all at the particle level.
Our _basic_ understanding of gravity is _basically_ correct, but there is
definitely still stuff about gravity that we don't know or understand.
As for "dark matter", there's dark matter and then there's dark matter. This
particular discovery is far enough away that it's not terribly hard to explain;
we'd only be able to "see" it if it were radiating light, so it could
_potentially_ be perfectly ordinary matter that just doesn't happen to
be doing that. Perhaps it's not grouped up into stars the way the matter
here is, for instance -- a ring of roughly uniform density, or something
along those lines.
Or it could be something else. Point is, we don't know.
I can think of a couple of things...
How about working on enormous multilayer images in Gimp that are ultimately
destined to be printed as large, high-gloss posters? That'll eat some RAM.
The piddly little images I have worked with (you know, 600dpi for 8.5x11
letter-size, tiny little things) can use up more than a gigabyte each, with
only four layers; a complex image can easily have over fifty layers...
Video editing springs to mind.
Databases perform better if they can fit all the data in RAM, especially if
the data are read far more often than written. It's easy to imagine a DB
that goes past 4GB.
I'm sure there are other applications where you could want that much RAM.
> Languages get more complex over time, not less complicated.
English is getting more complicated, but in other ways. For example, our
vocabulary is ever heading in the general direction of hyperagglutinativity,
to say nothing of the sheer vast impressive array of available words, far
more words than any other human language; most of these words have been
added to the language within the last three hundred years, some by importation
from other languages, some by recombination of extant roots and affixes, and
of course some by new coinage. For example, a hundred years ago, the phrase
"synergistic remediation" would never have been uttered.
Also, word order has increased in importance and to some extent changed its
meaning. Punctuation has also gained much importance and complexity. The
case inflection system, however, is (quite gradually) going away. Already
most people who speak English don't understand the difference between "thou"
and "thee" or "you" and "ye", for instance, or "dost" and "doth", or cetera.
I rather doubt I'm a tetrachromat, because tetrachromacy, from what I have read, requires two X chromosomes.
> there are good reasons for pop-ups in an application context
I have two very solid answers to this. 1: Web pages are not applications.
2: There are also very good reasons for NO pop-ups in an application context.
I don't want my word processing application popping up extra windows while
I am editing a document. Emacs somehow manages to do EVERYTHING (and, if you
know anything about Emacs, you know that I do mean everything) without ever
popping up an extra window, unless the user specifically chooses the New
Window command from the file menu (or otherwise executes the lisp command
it's bound to.) This is good user-interface design. Popping up tons of
extra windows and dialog boxes and junk is *poor* UI design.
But I like reason 1 best: web pages are not applications. The web browser
is the application. The web page is data.
Let the user decide. If the user _wants_ an new window or tab, he can always
middle click, instead of left clicking, on the link. Voila, new tab (or new
window, depending on how the user's prefs are set up).
I never open new windows for links, and I use the SingleWindow extension to
keep annoying websites from foisting them on me. Occasionally I do open a
second browser window, but always for something unrelated to anything in the
original window; e.g., sometimes I use one window for Wikipedia and another
window for other stuff, but if I follow a link from a wikipedia article that
goes off-site, I'd want it in the Wikipedia window, because it's related to
that topic.
> Why do we want to surrender functionality?
Opening a new window was never any of the website's business in the first
place. *I* am not surrendering any functionality; *I* can get a new window any
time *I* want, by going File->New Window. Far from surrendering functionality,
by blocking all popups, I am _taking functionality back_. Oh, you meant the
"functionality" of letting the website make that decision for me? That's
not functionality I ever wanted. If I want to open your link in a new window,
I can right click it and choose "New Window". I haven't done that since
tabbed browsing landed in the nightly builds shortly before 0.9.5, but that's
my decision. How many windows I have open is none of the website's business.
The SingleWindow extension for Firefox is a Good Thing(TM).
Yes, fundamentally, blocking popups is a *lot* easier than filtering spam.
Filtering spam is both NP-Hard and AI-Complete; whereas, blocking popups
is something computers are smart enough and fast enough to actually do.
This is because popup blocking requires much less awareness of contextual
and semantic information -- we don't have to concern ourselves with whether
the contents of the popup are an advertisement; we only have to determine
whether the action of opening it is user-initiated. Furthermore, with spam,
determining whether the email is user-initiated is impossibly hard in many
cases, because not all of the legitimate email you get is a reply to a
message that you have sent -- it may be as a result of something you have
done in a web browser, for example, or it may come from a person whom you
have given your address IRL, on a scrap of paper, or a person who has wandered
across your website and has a question, or cetera.
Personally, I have Firefox setup to not allow popup windows period, EVER
(i.e., not even user-initiated ones), so that makes blocking them even easier.
(I think the extension for this is called Single Window.) The only way I
ever get a new window is if I go to the file menu and choose New Window.
I do sometimes get new tabs, but that's WAY less annoying for several reasons:
* The window stays the size and shape I made it. Always.
* I never get a window that's missing important pieces of chrome, such as
the status bar. (Script are also not allowed to change the content of
the status bar, hide the toolbars, or otherwise mess with my environment;
they can change the content of the page canvas area only.)
* New tabs never steal focus; they are queued at the end of the list, and
the current tab retains its focus until I close it or switch manually.
* I can always see what tabs are open, because they're listed on the tab bar.
> Uh, this depends on the monitor you're using as well.
It's a pretty decent quality nineteen-inch CRT, and I don't have any trouble
seeing the colors on it.
> most people just ignore the differences
When I said they can't see it, I didn't mean that they didn't mention noticing
a difference; I was pointing out how one object on the screen was a different
color from the other, and they couldn't see it, not even when I put them side
by side.
I've also done a little checking within my family, and I'm pretty sure I see
*significantly* better color depth than either of my parents or my first
sister. (My second sister, I haven't asked. She doesn't like being
asked silly questions and can be grumpy at times, so I've left her out of
this.) My parents can by handwaved because they're over 50, but Sarah's
four years younger than I am -- what's that make her now, 26? Granted,
she can't see jack without her glasses or contacts, but still... you'd
think color depth would be a different issue from focus.
> You've got to be kidding. Are they perhaps blind?
That was my immediate reaction when I discovered this, but it appears to be
fairly common.
> That's a brightness difference of 3 in the green channel (the channel to
> which humans are most sensitive).
I don't think all humans are quite equally sensitive to the respective channels.
The one coworker, who couldn't see a difference of less than about 30 on the
V channel (using an HSV color model), even when watching it change, is
abnormal, as far as I'm concerned, but the others appear to be fairly
ordinary, albeit, not graphics artists, and all over 40. (But, I'm 30, a
programmer/sysadmin/math geek, not a graphics artist, yet I see the colors.)
One even has pretty good visual/color/decorating sense, usually, but she
doesn't see as much color depth as I do, apparently -- at least, not in the
darker ranges. (She might see better in brighter colors than I do, however;
I tend to go snowblind pretty quickly if there's too much white.)
> I need to be able to have a bunch of users see the same color on any monitor?
If you wanted to have the _same_ user see the same color the same way on
different monitors, that is theoretically achievable with good quality CRTs,
assuming you can put them in identical settings and so on.
But with different users, there is going to be a difference in perception.
Some people see *significantly* more color depth than others, for instance.
Also, some people's retinas are more sensitive to light than others, so they
have most of their color resolution in the darker ranges; other people have
eyes less sensitive to light and distinguish brighter colors better.
I've discovered that most of my coworkers can't tell #305050 from #294D4A,
even when they're side by side. To me, they're noticeably different in
character, and if you show me one of them by itself, I know which of the
two it is. (This is probably attributable more to the difference in
blue/green balance than the slight variation in brightness, but anyway, I
can tell.) One time I asked for a coworker's opinion on the brightness of
a certain background, and she said it was too dark, so I grabbed the V
slider (in Inkscape) and lightened it up a bit, then looked at her; she
obviously didn't realize I'd changed it at all. So I dragged the slider
over a bit more, and a bit more... after a bit I asked her how that was,
and her response clearly indicated she still didn't see a difference. I'd
changed it by probably 20 or 30 units per channel. (I quit asking for her
opinion on colors after that.) She's an extreme case, obviously, but the
basic phenomenon is universal: people don't all have the same eyes.
> "Me and my friend went to the store" will never be proper because it makes
> no logical sense.
You clearly have not been paying close attention to the direction the English
language has been headed. Noun inflection has been in the process of dropping
out of the language for several hundred years now, because, frankly, we
mostly don't need it; we have word-order mechanisms for indicating case, so
the inflection is redundant. We've already lost the distinction between the
subjective and objective (not to mention singular and plural) in the second
person pronouns; we're now beginning to lose the distinction between
subjective and objective in the first person singular and are already well
on our way to losing the inflections for gender and number in the third
person. Chart follows...
1650:
1st I, me, my/mine we, us, our/ours
2nd thou, thee, thy/thine ye, you, your/yours
3rd m he, him, his they, them, their/theirs
3rd f she, her, her/hers they, them, their/theirs
3rd n it, it, its they, them, their/theirs
1950:
1st I, me, my/mine we, us, our/ours
2nd you, you/ you/yours you, you, your/yours
3rd m he, him, his they, them, their/theirs
3rd f she, her, her/hers they, them, their/theirs
3rd n it, it, its they, them, their/theirs
2150 (projected):
1st me, me, my/mine we/us, us, our/ours
2nd you, you/ you/yours you, you, your/yours
3rd they, them, their/theirs they, them, their/theirs
We might also lose the attributive possessive and keep only the predicate
form of it, reusing the same form as the subjective and objective for the
attributive possessive. You can already see that starting to happen
colloquially; for now it still sounds very wrong to most of us, but the
change has already begun, albeit gradually.
FWIW, I agree with most of your points in principle, including the one
about begging the question, but I felt the need to point out that the
distinction between the subjective and the objective is more and more
carried only by position in the sentence, rather than by form. The days
when you can say "Him I like" or "Him like I" or "Like him do I" are
rapidly passing; it already sounds pretty odd and Yoda-esque -- but if
we don't do that any more, then we don't need distinct forms for the
subjective and objective case any longer; they are archaisms and will pass
out of use.
> I am really looking forward to emulating an Opteron at near native speed
> on my good old 386sx processor...
Actually, this is very similar to one of the features that the original
RAIF-POOL implementation boasted. It worked by using your internet connection
to co-opt available cycles that would otherwise go unused on other computers
on the internet. However, the software stuck in beta and was never officially
released, due to some minor process control glitches that were never fully
worked out, and then the Pentium III was released, and the prices on Celeron
processors dropped, and nobody seemed to need any extra processing power any
more, so the project was just dropped. There are still a couple of copies of
the beta floating around on the net, I think, but they're hard to find.