The real answer is these "tablet PCs" probably aren't all that useful to "true geeks", as we're far too keyboard dependent.
I'm a "true-enough geek" (why am I begging to be labelled with what originated as the description of the carnival freak who bit the heads off live chickens??). Well, I write code anyway.
But I don't type well at all. I do a two finger hunt and peck, and I doubt I'll ever train myself to do better.
But I can scrawl a nearly unreadable scrawl maybe just a bit faster than I can type.
If these tablets really can recognize handwriting, even words not in its dictionary, e.g, "int foo = functionReturningFoo( bar );", it may be just what I want.
Or maybe I just need a Powerglove or a Twiddler or a USB jack in my left temporal lobe.
The point is that is you're the kind of person who could benefit from being with people more often, you're also more likely to NOT spend all your extra time with people, but rather sitting at home alone watching a 24 anime channel.
Wait a sec! Do you mean to imply that the social interaction depicted in anime cartoons isn't realistic?
Oh my god! So that's why I can't get dates with girls whose eyes are as big as saucers!
Check out washingtonpost.com: animated ads, including one from Mervis Diamonds that "breaks out" of the ad banner to obscure the article you're reading, when it first loads. Or the furniture ad that plays link a movie, making it annoyingly hard to read the article.
Get Proxomitron, and filter it out. Find or write a filter to replace it with a link.
However, the authors usually will look into the bugs if you mail them directly as "URGENT," though it may take a few tries.
Ugh. Bad idea (tm).
The bug may be urgent for you (although in most cases you can find a work-around); it's almost certainly NOT urgent for the author. Don't construe your emergency as my priority.
And definitely don't email more than once: the author will attend to your problem as soon as he can, and no sooner. Probably later if you're pestering him.
That said, I've been lucky enough to have had really great response when I've submitted bugs in open source software. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but let me suggest a few reasons for that luck:
I've always made a point of thanking the author for his work (that is, the software, buggy or not, that I'm running for free and with full source), and telling him how useful it is to me (if it wasn't useful, why'd I care about a bug?).
I acknowledge, before I ask him to do more work for me, that I am asking him to work for free to solve my problem, and I appreciate it and realize what an undertaking it might be.
I try to make it easy for the author to figure out just what I'm talking about, by providing version numbers; descriptions of -- or better -- actual buggy output; my OS and its version(s); program state that appears to trigger the bug; etc.
I take a (cursory, at least) look at the source code, enough to possibly suggest where the problem might lie, attempt some diagnostic if possible, and note that if need be, I'll fix the bug myself (if the source is C, C++, or java). (In other words, I implicitly note that I'm willing to bear the burden I'm asking of him, and also that I'm not completely ignorant about coding.)
So far, this has gotten good response -- as in emails answered within hours, even from authors on other continents, and resolutions in hours or days.
The author of Scintilla/SciTE (an excellent GUI source editor), Neil Hodgson, even went so far as to download updated mouse-drivers to his own box, to better diagnose my problem, and probably spent at minimum four hours on my issue the first night I emailed him. On my part, I looked up some API calls and scanned his code to suggest where the fix might go, and suggested what the fix might be.
With his help, I was able to recompile (his makefile worked right out of the box to my great joy!) my own fix by the next day; he had the fix in with his next regular release.
Albert Faber, author of CDex, was similarly helpful, even though my "bug" hardly was a show-stopper: full song-lyric annotations to playlist text weren't being saved correcly in the local cddb. Herr Faber got back to me in at most a day, acknowledged the bug, and had a fix out in his next release -- and I did little more than make some poor suggestions about what might be causing the error.
I go on at such length, and I apologize for it, to convince you that the best way to get bugs fixed is to step up to the plate and be willing to do your part, while letting the author know that you know how much he has done for you, and how much more he'll be doing if he fixes your bug.
This course[' sic]s introduction should be "Here is what real software engineers do (insert com[p]lex UML diagram here), and this course won't prepare you to even get there."
[PEDANTIC][IRONY] Apparently your English course did something similar when came to use of apostrophes to indicate possession? [/IRONY][/PEDANTIC]
Maybe you should...
on
Nosy Vendors?
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
When the sales rep. at Dell was told of our decision, he became upset and began demanding explanations as to why we wanted to use a 'desktop' as a server, what version of GNU/Linux we had intended to use and other things that were not any of Dell's concern.
Then demand of him
his name,
his supervisor's name and phone number, and
the phone number of a DELL competitor which doesn't presume to tell customers how to use their machines.
We're cheating because some 133t script-kiddie beamed a message to your solar system, some 50,000 of your years ago.
Only by perverting your Seti@home results will we prevent you from discovering our advanced, trans-lightspeed, galaxy-spanning civilization -- and from discovering that despite our accomplishments, our civilization will fall unless we conquer your planet for water/slaves/Kentucky-Fried-Human (please pick one).
Naturally, as an Alien Commader, I must gloatingly reveal our plans, with the excuse that you puny humans are too primitive to stop us even if you do know.
PS: That Orson Welles broadcast 64 years ago today wasn't a hoax. We got to him just in time.
Is the whole world having to show its database developers how to use a copying machine?
What is this thing you call a "copying machine"?
I have never heard of this ActiveX control, and I can't find it in the Visual.Net Basic IDE drag & drop list.
It's probably "open source" or "command-line" or something else only used by Pirates and Terrorists. I think we should probably censor this guy's post. I think the RIAA has every right^H^H^H^H^H write to hack his machine to protect its^H^H^H it's legitimate business model.
-- I gots my MSCE and now I are a Solution Preventer
I don't do this, but you could use a proxy (Proxomitron under Windows, or a unix alternative), to modify the javascript entirely"
function isBrowserOK() { return true ; }
The problem with this is having the proxy make the SSL connection. Proxomitron cn do this, but so far I've preferred to have SSL simply pass through the proxy unaltered.
Please look at this persons [sic] past posts, she is a troll that [sic] always gets modded up. She has an inflamatory opinion on everything. A not so obvoius [sic] troll, because she is a good one.
Yes, and also note that nearly anyone who had anything bad to say about her got modded down.
Now I'm not about to suggest that the paucity of ladies on/. results in modders currying favor anytime a young lady happens by, by modding her up and her critics down. No, I'm not going to say that.
Well, maybe it is a terrible point, but it's not mine. Or I should say, you missed my point.
I wasn't addressing the Canadian plan per se; I was addressing another poster's contention that pointless legislation isn't inherently bad, by explaining that any pointless legislation is bad, because it diverts resources from meaningful legislation.
I understand this is an emotional issue for you, but if you plan to contribute to the discussion, you need to read at least closely enough to discern the arguements being made.
Try FLAC, it's open source and just as good, or maybe better.
But that's exactly my point. With a lossless copy, I have exactly what's on the CD. So I can convert it, at any later time, if a better format comes along. I can't do this with a lossy format.
I'd rather have Monkey (a lossless compression). Storage is going to kepp getting smaller and cheaper; let me have a lossless source so I can change formats with the storage space available to me.
By itself licensing ISP's is not a bad idea. It is a pointless idea, but not bad.
Pointless is bad, when:
it costs tax money to enact and to enforce
it costs individuals and companies money to ensure they're in compliance
it gives lawyers something else to ligitigate about
it takes away government resources, like police time, from legitimate problems
Just figuring out what laws apply, and what taxes accrue, given the mammoth complexity of federal law (in any Western nation), requires anyone doing business to pay far too much to a lawyer and to an accountant.
Pointless costs money and time without producing any individual or societal good. Pointless is bad.
Why does everyone have to take something fun (a game) and try to assign real life value to it?
"Value" is simply what somebody is willing to pay for something.
Obviously, people are willing to pay to play the game. They value the enjoyment they get from playing more than they enjoy spending that money on something else (or holding on to it). So they purchase a game subscription, trading real money for access to the game.
Some people value the status (or the ease, or whatever) that comes with a more capable "avatar", more than they value having real money, so they're willing to trade real money for game money (or experience points, or "lore" or "fungi tunics")
Recently a forty year old can of an artist's excrement was bought for several thousand dollars by a museum. It was "valuable" not for its potential use as fertilizer, but as "art".
A original copy ("original copy"? An oxymoron or not?) of the American Declaration of Independence was sold for over eight million dollars, despite the fact that anyone can download the exact text -- or a photo reproduction -- for free. Are the words valuable then? Not, apparently, as much as the context they are in.
Even real money is simply a social convention: its utililty for any use other than trade (its "intrinsic value") is virtually (pun intended?) nil. Real money is useful only insofar as people will trade goods and services for it. When real money is perceived as not being as useful for trade, its value collapses, and we have the super inflation exemplified by Weimar Germany or present-day Argentina.
Which is more valuable to you, a dollar or a month of game play? What if it's your only dollar, and you're hungry? Which is more valuable, a million dollars or a month of game play? What if you could only buy cans of artists' excrement with that million? What if you know you'll be dead in a month? What is more valuable, a million dollars or the Declaration of Independence? What if it's an electronic copy? What if it's the only remaining copy (electronic or not) remaining in existance? What is more valuable, the single remaining copy of the Declaration, the single remaining copy of the Bible, the single remaining copy of Moby Dick, the single remaining sequencing of the human genome?
What's the value, to me, of the last letter you even got from your high-school sweetheart? How much money would you charge me (i.e., what's the value of it to you) to sell me that letter, if I told you I planned to burn it?
"Value" changes with circumstances, with the surplus or scarcity of what you have and what can trade for, and with your, uh, "values". "Value" is what you can get for something, less what it's worth to you not to part with something.
The problem is that this is likely to identify as a group any set of sites devoted to a single but obscure subject where most of the people involved know about each other.
Why is this a problem at all? If the subject is sufficiently obscure, then most pages referencing the term will be in one or a few groups. In this case, you just do what Google currently does: find the most linked-to pages for this obscure subject, and rank them at the top. The top-ranked pages will likely be within the group of sites, but it's not a problem -- these are not link farmers, these are some real group.
If the subject is not obscure, that is if the self-referential subset of linked pages is only one of many pages or groups of pages concerned with this subject, and the possibility of link farming exists, treat too-closely related pages as fractional pages or as a single (weighted?) node. (The trick is reasonably define "too-closely", of course.)
This is probably useful even if link farming isn't an issue, to disambiguate syntacticly similar but sematically different terms: pages about Apache servers probably cluster, and pages about Apache Indians probably cluster to a less degree, but the two clusters probably interact only slightly ("Welcome to my web site! My name is Bob Flies like a Hawk, and I'm proud to say I'm a full-blooded Apache and a webmaster too. Naturally, my web server of choice is....")
Pinko is a term that is most often joined with the new-world definition of communist.
Originally from the phrase, "parlor pink", connoting someone, who at his ease in his petit bourgeois home, inclines to the belief that socialist revolution is a fundamental right of Mankind, so long as it doesn't interrupt his cocktail hour.
In other words, someone (significantly) less radical than a "red"; an ineffectual dilettante.
The term "pinko" diverges from this meaning, but not by too much: it still suggests someone who moans loudly about revolution, the brotherhood of all Mankind, and being held down by "The Man", while scoring a lid of Thai Stick with Daddy's money.
Slashdot Mirror
The real answer is these "tablet PCs" probably aren't all that useful to "true geeks", as we're far too keyboard dependent.
;", it may be just what I want.
I'm a "true-enough geek" (why am I begging to be labelled with what originated as the description of the carnival freak who bit the heads off live chickens??). Well, I write code anyway.
But I don't type well at all. I do a two finger hunt and peck, and I doubt I'll ever train myself to do better.
But I can scrawl a nearly unreadable scrawl maybe just a bit faster than I can type.
If these tablets really can recognize handwriting, even words not in its dictionary, e.g, "int foo = functionReturningFoo( bar )
Or maybe I just need a Powerglove or a Twiddler or a USB jack in my left temporal lobe.
What has not been settled is the debate over the pronounciation of SQL.
It's pronounced, sqqqqqueeeealllllllll, like a pig.
It's the sound Ned Beatty made in that memorable scene in Deliverance.
The point is that is you're the kind of person who could benefit from being with people more often, you're also more likely to NOT spend all your extra time with people, but rather sitting at home alone watching a 24 anime channel.
Wait a sec! Do you mean to imply that the social interaction depicted in anime cartoons isn't realistic?
Oh my god! So that's why I can't get dates with girls whose eyes are as big as saucers!
Who the hell is "Sendo"
/., so you can assume it's from Star Wars, Star Trek, The Lord of the Rings, The Simpsons, or some anime cartoon.
I think Sendo was a character in Star Wars. You know, the black dude who sold Hands Soloing out.
This is
Didn't somebody post the other day that Knuth was a Simpsons character, and Turing was an Elf? Or something?
why do you guys hate flash?
Check out washingtonpost.com: animated ads, including one from Mervis Diamonds that "breaks out" of the ad banner to obscure the article you're reading, when it first loads. Or the furniture ad that plays link a movie, making it annoyingly hard to read the article.
Get Proxomitron, and filter it out. Find or write a filter to replace it with a link.
That is because you crazy! It has no feelings. And the new one is much better.
IKEA's selling space probes now??
Are the instructions in English or metric?
Ugh. Bad idea (tm).
The bug may be urgent for you (although in most cases you can find a work-around); it's almost certainly NOT urgent for the author. Don't construe your emergency as my priority.
And definitely don't email more than once: the author will attend to your problem as soon as he can, and no sooner. Probably later if you're pestering him.
That said, I've been lucky enough to have had really great response when I've submitted bugs in open source software. Perhaps I'm just lucky, but let me suggest a few reasons for that luck:
I've always made a point of thanking the author for his work (that is, the software, buggy or not, that I'm running for free and with full source), and telling him how useful it is to me (if it wasn't useful, why'd I care about a bug?).
I acknowledge, before I ask him to do more work for me, that I am asking him to work for free to solve my problem, and I appreciate it and realize what an undertaking it might be.
I try to make it easy for the author to figure out just what I'm talking about, by providing version numbers; descriptions of -- or better -- actual buggy output; my OS and its version(s); program state that appears to trigger the bug; etc.
I take a (cursory, at least) look at the source code, enough to possibly suggest where the problem might lie, attempt some diagnostic if possible, and note that if need be, I'll fix the bug myself (if the source is C, C++, or java). (In other words, I implicitly note that I'm willing to bear the burden I'm asking of him, and also that I'm not completely ignorant about coding.)
So far, this has gotten good response -- as in emails answered within hours, even from authors on other continents, and resolutions in hours or days.
The author of Scintilla/SciTE (an excellent GUI source editor), Neil Hodgson, even went so far as to download updated mouse-drivers to his own box, to better diagnose my problem, and probably spent at minimum four hours on my issue the first night I emailed him. On my part, I looked up some API calls and scanned his code to suggest where the fix might go, and suggested what the fix might be.
With his help, I was able to recompile (his makefile worked right out of the box to my great joy!) my own fix by the next day; he had the fix in with his next regular release.
Albert Faber, author of CDex, was similarly helpful, even though my "bug" hardly was a show-stopper: full song-lyric annotations to playlist text weren't being saved correcly in the local cddb. Herr Faber got back to me in at most a day, acknowledged the bug, and had a fix out in his next release -- and I did little more than make some poor suggestions about what might be causing the error.
I go on at such length, and I apologize for it, to convince you that the best way to get bugs fixed is to step up to the plate and be willing to do your part, while letting the author know that you know how much he has done for you, and how much more he'll be doing if he fixes your bug.
This course[' sic]s introduction should be "Here is what real software engineers do (insert com[p]lex UML diagram here), and this course won't prepare you to even get there."
[PEDANTIC][IRONY]
Apparently your English course did something similar when came to use of apostrophes to indicate possession?
[/IRONY][/PEDANTIC]
Then demand of him
his name,
his supervisor's name and phone number, and
the phone number of a DELL competitor which doesn't presume to tell customers how to use their machines.
Then tell him good-bye.
We're cheating because some 133t script-kiddie beamed a message to your solar system, some 50,000 of your years ago.
Only by perverting your Seti@home results will we prevent you from discovering our advanced, trans-lightspeed, galaxy-spanning civilization -- and from discovering that despite our accomplishments, our civilization will fall unless we conquer your planet for water/slaves/Kentucky-Fried-Human (please pick one).
Naturally, as an Alien Commader, I must gloatingly reveal our plans, with the excuse that you puny humans are too primitive to stop us even if you do know.
PS: That Orson Welles broadcast 64 years ago today wasn't a hoax. We got to him just in time.
I like how this guy backspaces over the correct ussage, then intentionaly makes errors.
I was too uptight, even in a joke post, to let anyone assume the "errors" were unintentional.
Is the whole world having to show its database developers how to use a copying machine?
.Net Basic IDE drag & drop list.
What is this thing you call a "copying machine"?
I have never heard of this ActiveX control, and I can't find it in the Visual
It's probably "open source" or "command-line" or something else only used by Pirates and Terrorists. I think we should probably censor this guy's post. I think the RIAA has every right^H^H^H^H^H write to hack his machine to protect its^H^H^H it's legitimate business model.
--
I gots my MSCE and now I are a Solution Preventer
I don't do this, but you could use a proxy (Proxomitron under Windows, or a unix alternative), to modify the javascript entirely"
function isBrowserOK() { return true ; }
The problem with this is having the proxy make the SSL connection. Proxomitron cn do this, but so far I've preferred to have SSL simply pass through the proxy unaltered.
Please look at this persons [sic] past posts, she is a troll that [sic] always gets modded up. She has an inflamatory opinion on everything. A not so obvoius [sic] troll, because she is a good one.
/. results in modders currying favor anytime a young lady happens by, by modding her up and her critics down. No, I'm not going to say that.
Yes, and also note that nearly anyone who had anything bad to say about her got modded down.
Now I'm not about to suggest that the paucity of ladies on
# it costs tax money to enact and to enforce
That is such a terrible point.
Well, maybe it is a terrible point, but it's not mine. Or I should say, you missed my point.
I wasn't addressing the Canadian plan per se; I was addressing another poster's contention that pointless legislation isn't inherently bad, by explaining that any pointless legislation is bad, because it diverts resources from meaningful legislation.
I understand this is an emotional issue for you, but if you plan to contribute to the discussion, you need to read at least closely enough to discern the arguements being made.
Try FLAC, it's open source and just as good, or maybe better.
But that's exactly my point. With a lossless copy, I have exactly what's on the CD. So I can convert it, at any later time, if a better format comes along. I can't do this with a lossy format.
You'd rather have ogg than wav?
I'd rather have Monkey (a lossless compression). Storage is going to kepp getting smaller and cheaper; let me have a lossless source so I can change formats with the storage space available to me.
Pointless is bad, when:
it costs tax money to enact and to enforce
it costs individuals and companies money to ensure they're in compliance
it gives lawyers something else to ligitigate about
it takes away government resources, like police time, from legitimate problems
Just figuring out what laws apply, and what taxes accrue, given the mammoth complexity of federal law (in any Western nation), requires anyone doing business to pay far too much to a lawyer and to an accountant.
Pointless costs money and time without producing any individual or societal good. Pointless is bad.
Why does everyone have to take something fun (a game) and try to assign real life value to it?
"Value" is simply what somebody is willing to pay for something.
Obviously, people are willing to pay to play the game. They value the enjoyment they get from playing more than they enjoy spending that money on something else (or holding on to it). So they purchase a game subscription, trading real money for access to the game.
Some people value the status (or the ease, or whatever) that comes with a more capable "avatar", more than they value having real money, so they're willing to trade real money for game money (or experience points, or "lore" or "fungi tunics")
Recently a forty year old can of an artist's excrement was bought for several thousand dollars by a museum. It was "valuable" not for its potential use as fertilizer, but as "art".
A original copy ("original copy"? An oxymoron or not?) of the American Declaration of Independence was sold for over eight million dollars, despite the fact that anyone can download the exact text -- or a photo reproduction -- for free. Are the words valuable then? Not, apparently, as much as the context they are in.
Even real money is simply a social convention: its utililty for any use other than trade (its "intrinsic value") is virtually (pun intended?) nil. Real money is useful only insofar as people will trade goods and services for it. When real money is perceived as not being as useful for trade, its value collapses, and we have the super inflation exemplified by Weimar Germany or present-day Argentina.
Which is more valuable to you, a dollar or a month of game play? What if it's your only dollar, and you're hungry? Which is more valuable, a million dollars or a month of game play? What if you could only buy cans of artists' excrement with that million? What if you know you'll be dead in a month? What is more valuable, a million dollars or the Declaration of Independence? What if it's an electronic copy? What if it's the only remaining copy (electronic or not) remaining in existance? What is more valuable, the single remaining copy of the Declaration, the single remaining copy of the Bible, the single remaining copy of Moby Dick, the single remaining sequencing of the human genome?
What's the value, to me, of the last letter you even got from your high-school sweetheart? How much money would you charge me (i.e., what's the value of it to you) to sell me that letter, if I told you I planned to burn it?
"Value" changes with circumstances, with the surplus or scarcity of what you have and what can trade for, and with your, uh, "values". "Value" is what you can get for something, less what it's worth to you not to part with something.
Yum! GOOD EATING!
Pete's Pig Roast is now seating Donner Party of five... er, four!
The problem is that this is likely to identify as a group any set of sites devoted to a single but obscure subject where most of the people involved know about each other.
Why is this a problem at all? If the subject is sufficiently obscure, then most pages referencing the term will be in one or a few groups. In this case, you just do what Google currently does: find the most linked-to pages for this obscure subject, and rank them at the top. The top-ranked pages will likely be within the group of sites, but it's not a problem -- these are not link farmers, these are some real group.
If the subject is not obscure, that is if the self-referential subset of linked pages is only one of many pages or groups of pages concerned with this subject, and the possibility of link farming exists, treat too-closely related pages as fractional pages or as a single (weighted?) node. (The trick is reasonably define "too-closely", of course.)
This is probably useful even if link farming isn't an issue, to disambiguate syntacticly similar but sematically different terms: pages about Apache servers probably cluster, and pages about Apache Indians probably cluster to a less degree, but the two clusters probably interact only slightly ("Welcome to my web site! My name is Bob Flies like a Hawk, and I'm proud to say I'm a full-blooded Apache and a webmaster too. Naturally, my web server of choice is....")
Pinko is a term that is most often joined with the new-world definition of communist.
Originally from the phrase, "parlor pink", connoting someone, who at his ease in his petit bourgeois home, inclines to the belief that socialist revolution is a fundamental right of Mankind, so long as it doesn't interrupt his cocktail hour.
In other words, someone (significantly) less radical than a "red"; an ineffectual dilettante.
The term "pinko" diverges from this meaning, but not by too much: it still suggests someone who moans loudly about revolution, the brotherhood of all Mankind, and being held down by "The Man", while scoring a lid of Thai Stick with Daddy's money.
Time to cancel that order for the body-sized freezer and uninterruptible power source.
Is it just me or does it look like she is getting ready to be "taken" from behind?
That's how she earned the 12000 kroner it costs to buy the Trilobite.
A robot to cut the lawn?
It's called a "goat" (or in some places, a "sheep").