Tableau should follow the example and make their own name for themselves.
The marketers behind Tableau would probably market their product and not their affiliation with Google, if the product was any damn good.
Spinning their mediocre product this way makes me want to look away with pity and disgust, the same way I do when I see the remains of a squirrel that had been squished by a car's tire.
Killer app? Only until Microsoft includes this feature into Excel.
The screenshots are really early betas for Excel 2005, right?
I've been using Excel for the last decade or so as my numeric scratchpad when I am manipulating small sets. (Those are sets with less than 2^16 records, Excel's stupidly arbitrary 2-byte length limit per worksheet.)
For years, I have been grumbling that the data manipulation features in Excel are just not strong enough.
I've considered writing a graphical tool that shakes Excel through its VBA interface, but have never really got around to it. I guess I could always buy this.
Of course, this supposedly revolutionary software will probably be priced out of the market for dabblers like me. Too bad.
Surely you wont be spending "real" money on these things
Even if this virtual nonsense was free, I couldn't imagine wasting my time on one of these things.
If you want a good imaginary date, I say go read Diesel Sweeties instead. Maura and her Lil Sis have more depth and personality to them than girls I've dated.
Every girl I have dated long enough has shown the amazing ability to be angry at one person and joyous around another at the same time. It's even stranger to behold when these two people are in the same room.
In contrast, I find that when I'm angry or frustrated, I'm angry or frustrated at everyone, all day, in all circumstances, until whatever bothering me has been resolved.
For some reason, I prefer having emotions come from me, instead of being provisional on who is in the room at me at the time.
The key to creating a successful 2x2 matrix for decision making is choosing two meaningful qualities or attributes you wish to quantify in opposition to one another.
I actually don't even have to put a price tag on it or wait until dark. I just haul it into the front yard or near the curb and it's gone within 2 hours. I'm amazed at the crap I've gotten rid of that way. The funny thing is that the people who take it are *always* grinning ear to ear, like they just won the freaking lottery. I figure if I can make someone's day and get rid of it, it's a 2 way win.
You know, people will take these things even when you're honest with them.
My parents moved a few years ago from a 3000 sq.ft. house into an 800 sq. ft. condominium. Needless to say, not all their belongings would make the move with them.
My mother sold the best, yard-saled what she could, and then started making a habit of putting things out on the lawn every Tuesday afternoon with a big sign marked "FREE!". By evening, the lawn was empty, except for the sign -- and sometimes that was taken too.
After three months of her Tuesday give-aways, my mother had ridden herself of all the things she wasn't going to take with her. So, the Tuesday before the movers were scheduled to arrive, there came a knock on the door at 3:00 p.m. A shy, sheepish man with a wrinkled, stained shirt asked her if anything was available that day. My mother said no, wished him a good day, and closed the door.
She was surprized that he had the nerve to ask. She was ever more surprized when people came knocking all that afternoon and evening.
Creating a robotic lawnmower is just asking for trouble. Even with the best intentions, I would worry that a homebrew design would harm the public.
Frankly, it is the manufacturers of medical devices that I think would be most capable of designing such a product.
Sure, engineers in the medical field may not pick the best motor, or they may not have the flashiest or most configurable robot, but it would more than likely stop its blades from spinning before even coming close to making contact with a dog's paw or an inquisitive child's hand.
If he ever wanted to, I think Dean Kamen's DEKA would make an excellent robot mower.
I find the BOINC client to be far from user friendly. I could figure it out and get it working but I have my doubts that the average Joe could.
I have to agree. It was with some sadness that I uninstalled the old SETI@home client before installing BOINC. The old client was compact, quick, and friendly. In contrast, the BOINC interface seems cheerless and industrial.
If tonight had been my first experience with the SETI@home project, I would have uninstalled it completely and told all my friends to avoid it. I refuse to keep any program that crashes my system when I try to use its basic functions.
That said, I really like SETI@home, and I'm willing to stick it out with the new BOINC client. I only hope the most egregious bugs are removed. Ever since I was a kid, I have wanted to contribute to the search for extraterrestrial life. Since I didn't grow up to be a professional astronomer, I would continue to gladly contribute my spare clock cycles even if the SETI client was much worse than it is now.
I think that SETI@home does important work, but I worry that BOINC might become a classic second system, with plenty of new functionality and configurability, yet big, cumbersome, and bloated in comparison to the original version.
In the hopes that someone working on the SETI@home client reads Slashdot, I am posting my bug report about the new BOINC SETI@home client here.
I tried to post a bug report on their Windows Client Forum, but the authentication routine failed to recognize my account ID when I copied and pasted it from the e-mail message I had just received. (If you don't yet have a BOINC account, it looks something like 213ed9ba2da1696f77b0d0fa3165a3ab, but no, this is NOT my real user account.)
Anyway, enough preamble. Here's the problem:
In the Work tab, when I right-click on the currently-running work unit, the context-sensitive menu displays one option, Show Graphics.
When I select Show Graphics, a window pops up, the entire contents of which is black. At this point, my Windows 2000 SP4 computer freezes. CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't bring up the Windows Security window. CTRL-SHIFT-ESC doesn't bring up the Task Manager. I can't move the mouse. The keyboard is completely unresponsive.
Being a sucker for punishment, I sent a non-maskable interrupt to my CPU, and rebooted the machine. Then I tried the exact same steps, and got the same results. Yup, this bug is repeatable.
So is the new client ready for prime time? Um, not really. Add the insult of the website not recognizing the account ID that it gave me to begin with and I'd say this program should stay in beta a while longer.
A final note: If you happen to be one of the programmers for the client, and know why this problem is happening, reply here. I'd appreciate a reply.
To install run "wd55_ben -d" after downloading, then run setup.exe
Do you have any advice for my Win2K SP4 machine with 30.1GB free on my 34.4GB NTFS-formatted SATA hard drive?
When I run the setup.exe file, I get this far:
<ENTER> <ENTER> "Set up hard disk" <ENTER> "Install a new version of Word" <ENTER> "Hard Drive C" <ENTER>
At this point, I get the following error message:
Your hard disk does not have enough free space for all the Word files. [...] Delete files or programs to provide an additional 28019 K of disk space and run Setup again.
Hmmm, by my guess, Word 5.5 can't count as high as my free space, and I've probably looped some counter a few times. Sadly, once that counter stopped spinning, I landed on "too little space" instead of "full steam ahead".
I wonder if they did that before or after they invented the automobile and the airplane?
Pardon, Comrade? Obviously, you've forgotten to pick up those old books of yours and toss them down the memory hole. I am sure the Ministry of Love would be very interested to talk to you about your crackpot theories.
As you know, Big Bill himself created the first programming language. That was long after he created the first automobile and aeroplane. Why, every child know this to be true. Just look at your neighbour, Parsons' boy. His multimedia website in Flash tells him this is so.
Personally, I am looking forward to the Eleventh Edition of Windows. It's going to be the definitive one. The Eleventh Edition is going to be feature complete: There won't be one computer operation that isn't included in the operating system itself. Oh, what a glorious day this will be. It will be doubleplusgood.
I would love to stay and talk with you, but I really must hurry to my local Community Centre, or I will be late for the Two Minutes Hate. Oh that Richard Stallman's clever face, his venomous attacks on Microsoft. We must shout him down! We must not surrender!
I was a geek and even I was amazed at how cool it was to be able to run 2 programs at once.
No way. Windows 3.0 gave the appearance of running two programs at once, but it co-operatively multitasked, instead of pre-emptively multitasking, and so, by definition, sucked.
I remember starting a file transfer from my local BBS, then switching to play that rocking good Windows game Pipes. Can you guess what happens?
Yes, that's right. Windows 3.0 drops my BBS connection because it can't run both programs.
The first time this happened to me, I was deeply unimpressed. I had been transferring files and playing games at the same time for years without fail with my Commodore Amiga.
I refused to touch a Windows machine again until Windows 95. The first time I tried a friend's Windows 95 machine I remember exclaiming out loud: "What? This is Microsoft Windows?! But.. it doesn't suck."
Most of the/. community is a bunch of Windows users, running IE 6, who have thought about running Linux because they heard it was cool and/or they want to put it on their resume, but have yet to really do much other than boot up Knoppix once or twice.
I'd like to put this to the test. Are the http logs for Slashdot available? Can we see what platforms and what browsers people are using?
I'll own a computer that runs at 3PHz CPU speed, has a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of memory, half an exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of hard disk-equivalent storage and connects to the Internet with a bandwidth of a quarter terabit (a trillion binary digits) per second.
That's great. I guess we'll all have enough hardware to be able to use Windows Longhorn after all.
The market may not be big enough to justify geeky action figures of each and every hero we have.
Instead, I propose that we create a set of trading cards with a piece of bubble gum inside it. These would be something like the cards that suck.com made a few years ago, only with people that weren't all 15-minute famers.
The production costs would be less for cards than figures, they are more easily packed and shipped, and their cost will be less, letting even the independently impoverished (as opposed to wealthy) geek collect them.
I'd gladly trade one of my five copies of Charles Babbage for one of your obscure Teilhard de Chardin trading cards!
I would also recommend we create action figures for:
Douglas Engelbart for the oNLine System. Alan Kay for smalltalk. J.C.R. Licklidder for decades of foresight. Bob Taylor for Xerox PARC's computers. Claude Shannon for the bit.
Us modern-day knowledge workers owe our very livelihoods to these pioneers of computation. What better tribute is there than to immortalize them in plastic?
Why on earth would you trust the statistic on some static web page?
I would be more inclined to believe Google's statistics on the popularity of web browsers. (Look for the section marked "Web Browsers Used to Access Google" or follow this link if you are really helpless.)
Considering that the most clueless Windows users are probably using the address bar in Explorer to automatically use MSN, the Google figure for all non-IE browsers may actually be higher due to the self-selection of Google users.
This announcement is to help you prepare for the real possibility that your DSL connection may fail and thus be out of service during the possible labor dispute.
Yes, you did see this on Slashdot before. I too have been visitng this site for years, and obvious repeats like this one disappoint me. Am I the only one here paying attention?
The original is here if you're interested in reading the original comments.
The mod is still cool. It reminds both of the movie Brazil as well as Theora Jones' terminal in the TV show Max Headroom. Ah, wonderful!
Slashdot Mirror
The marketers behind Tableau would probably market their product and not their affiliation with Google, if the product was any damn good.
Spinning their mediocre product this way makes me want to look away with pity and disgust, the same way I do when I see the remains of a squirrel that had been squished by a car's tire.
The screenshots are really early betas for Excel 2005, right?
I've been using Excel for the last decade or so as my numeric scratchpad when I am manipulating small sets. (Those are sets with less than 2^16 records, Excel's stupidly arbitrary 2-byte length limit per worksheet.)
For years, I have been grumbling that the data manipulation features in Excel are just not strong enough.
I've considered writing a graphical tool that shakes Excel through its VBA interface, but have never really got around to it. I guess I could always buy this.
Of course, this supposedly revolutionary software will probably be priced out of the market for dabblers like me. Too bad.
Even if this virtual nonsense was free, I couldn't imagine wasting my time on one of these things.
If you want a good imaginary date, I say go read Diesel Sweeties instead. Maura and her Lil Sis have more depth and personality to them than girls I've dated.
Every girl I have dated long enough has shown the amazing ability to be angry at one person and joyous around another at the same time. It's even stranger to behold when these two people are in the same room.
In contrast, I find that when I'm angry or frustrated, I'm angry or frustrated at everyone, all day, in all circumstances, until whatever bothering me has been resolved.
For some reason, I prefer having emotions come from me, instead of being provisional on who is in the room at me at the time.
Excellent examples would include the following:
- Pessimism/Hope vs. Ignorance/Information
- Mistake/Deliberate vs. Dishonest/Honest
- Impractical/Practical vs. Difficult/Easy
- Not Salty/Salty vs. Inexpensive/Expensive
- Unemotional/Emotional vs. Unpleasant/Enjoyable
After such inspirational examples, the book is largely redundant.The difference is that hers were funny, and lacked any sense of self-importance. Take a look at the archive sometime.
You know, people will take these things even when you're honest with them.
My parents moved a few years ago from a 3000 sq.ft. house into an 800 sq. ft. condominium. Needless to say, not all their belongings would make the move with them.
My mother sold the best, yard-saled what she could, and then started making a habit of putting things out on the lawn every Tuesday afternoon with a big sign marked "FREE!". By evening, the lawn was empty, except for the sign -- and sometimes that was taken too.
After three months of her Tuesday give-aways, my mother had ridden herself of all the things she wasn't going to take with her. So, the Tuesday before the movers were scheduled to arrive, there came a knock on the door at 3:00 p.m. A shy, sheepish man with a wrinkled, stained shirt asked her if anything was available that day. My mother said no, wished him a good day, and closed the door.
She was surprized that he had the nerve to ask. She was ever more surprized when people came knocking all that afternoon and evening.
Well, at least one page's title gets pretty close.
Frankly, it is the manufacturers of medical devices that I think would be most capable of designing such a product.
Sure, engineers in the medical field may not pick the best motor, or they may not have the flashiest or most configurable robot, but it would more than likely stop its blades from spinning before even coming close to making contact with a dog's paw or an inquisitive child's hand.
If he ever wanted to, I think Dean Kamen's DEKA would make an excellent robot mower.
I have to agree. It was with some sadness that I uninstalled the old SETI@home client before installing BOINC. The old client was compact, quick, and friendly. In contrast, the BOINC interface seems cheerless and industrial.
If tonight had been my first experience with the SETI@home project, I would have uninstalled it completely and told all my friends to avoid it. I refuse to keep any program that crashes my system when I try to use its basic functions.
That said, I really like SETI@home, and I'm willing to stick it out with the new BOINC client. I only hope the most egregious bugs are removed. Ever since I was a kid, I have wanted to contribute to the search for extraterrestrial life. Since I didn't grow up to be a professional astronomer, I would continue to gladly contribute my spare clock cycles even if the SETI client was much worse than it is now.
I think that SETI@home does important work, but I worry that BOINC might become a classic second system, with plenty of new functionality and configurability, yet big, cumbersome, and bloated in comparison to the original version.
Anyway, enough preamble. Here's the problem:
In the Work tab, when I right-click on the currently-running work unit, the context-sensitive menu displays one option, Show Graphics.
When I select Show Graphics, a window pops up, the entire contents of which is black. At this point, my Windows 2000 SP4 computer freezes. CTRL-ALT-DEL doesn't bring up the Windows Security window. CTRL-SHIFT-ESC doesn't bring up the Task Manager. I can't move the mouse. The keyboard is completely unresponsive.
Being a sucker for punishment, I sent a non-maskable interrupt to my CPU, and rebooted the machine. Then I tried the exact same steps, and got the same results. Yup, this bug is repeatable.
So is the new client ready for prime time? Um, not really. Add the insult of the website not recognizing the account ID that it gave me to begin with and I'd say this program should stay in beta a while longer.
A final note: If you happen to be one of the programmers for the client, and know why this problem is happening, reply here. I'd appreciate a reply.
Do you have any advice for my Win2K SP4 machine with 30.1GB free on my 34.4GB NTFS-formatted SATA hard drive?
When I run the setup.exe file, I get this far:
At this point, I get the following error message: Your hard disk does not have enough free space for all the Word files. [...] Delete files or programs to provide an additional 28019 K of disk space and run Setup again.
Hmmm, by my guess, Word 5.5 can't count as high as my free space, and I've probably looped some counter a few times. Sadly, once that counter stopped spinning, I landed on "too little space" instead of "full steam ahead".
Bummer.
My biggest annoyance
Is the autocapitalization
Feature that assumes that
If you are starting a new
Line, then you must be
Starting a new sentence.
Pardon, Comrade? Obviously, you've forgotten to pick up those old books of yours and toss them down the memory hole. I am sure the Ministry of Love would be very interested to talk to you about your crackpot theories.
As you know, Big Bill himself created the first programming language. That was long after he created the first automobile and aeroplane. Why, every child know this to be true. Just look at your neighbour, Parsons' boy. His multimedia website in Flash tells him this is so.
Personally, I am looking forward to the Eleventh Edition of Windows. It's going to be the definitive one. The Eleventh Edition is going to be feature complete: There won't be one computer operation that isn't included in the operating system itself. Oh, what a glorious day this will be. It will be doubleplusgood.
I would love to stay and talk with you, but I really must hurry to my local Community Centre, or I will be late for the Two Minutes Hate. Oh that Richard Stallman's clever face, his venomous attacks on Microsoft. We must shout him down! We must not surrender!
Big Bill! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B! B-B!
No way. Windows 3.0 gave the appearance of running two programs at once, but it co-operatively multitasked, instead of pre-emptively multitasking, and so, by definition, sucked.
I remember starting a file transfer from my local BBS, then switching to play that rocking good Windows game Pipes. Can you guess what happens?
Yes, that's right. Windows 3.0 drops my BBS connection because it can't run both programs.
The first time this happened to me, I was deeply unimpressed. I had been transferring files and playing games at the same time for years without fail with my Commodore Amiga.
I refused to touch a Windows machine again until Windows 95. The first time I tried a friend's Windows 95 machine I remember exclaiming out loud: "What? This is Microsoft Windows?! But.. it doesn't suck."
Most of the /. community is a bunch of Windows users, running IE 6, who have thought about running Linux because they heard it was cool and/or they want to put it on their resume, but have yet to really do much other than boot up Knoppix once or twice.
I'd like to put this to the test. Are the http logs for Slashdot available? Can we see what platforms and what browsers people are using?
I'll own a computer that runs at 3PHz CPU speed, has a petabyte (a thousand terabytes) of memory, half an exabyte (a billion gigabytes) of hard disk-equivalent storage and connects to the Internet with a bandwidth of a quarter terabit (a trillion binary digits) per second.
That's great. I guess we'll all have enough hardware to be able to use Windows Longhorn after all.
the big-wigs would never authorize the use of their likeness
Yes, I could imagine a few of them might lose sleep over the new images that would combine goatse.cx with their action figure.
And who could blame them?
The market may not be big enough to justify geeky action figures of each and every hero we have.
Instead, I propose that we create a set of trading cards with a piece of bubble gum inside it. These would be something like the cards that suck.com made a few years ago, only with people that weren't all 15-minute famers.
The production costs would be less for cards than figures, they are more easily packed and shipped, and their cost will be less, letting even the independently impoverished (as opposed to wealthy) geek collect them.
I'd gladly trade one of my five copies of Charles Babbage for one of your obscure Teilhard de Chardin trading cards!
I would also recommend we create action figures for:
Douglas Engelbart for the oNLine System.
Alan Kay for smalltalk.
J.C.R. Licklidder for decades of foresight.
Bob Taylor for Xerox PARC's computers.
Claude Shannon for the bit.
Us modern-day knowledge workers owe our very livelihoods to these pioneers of computation. What better tribute is there than to immortalize them in plastic?
Why on earth would you trust the statistic on some static web page?
I would be more inclined to believe Google's statistics on the popularity of web browsers. (Look for the section marked "Web Browsers Used to Access Google" or follow this link if you are really helpless.)
Considering that the most clueless Windows users are probably using the address bar in Explorer to automatically use MSN, the Google figure for all non-IE browsers may actually be higher due to the self-selection of Google users.
Dear SBC Customer,
This announcement is to help you prepare for the real possibility that your DSL connection may fail and thus be out of service during the possible labor dispute.
We recommend that you review What Should I Do If The Internet Goes Down? and make the necessary preparations.
Sincerely,
Management
Yes, the Shaftoes' are not really Black Adders. They really are more akin to very muscular Baldricks.
I am most attracted to
Ah the Stellar Patrol, going where angels fear to tread!
Yes, you did see this on Slashdot before. I too have been visitng this site for years, and obvious repeats like this one disappoint me. Am I the only one here paying attention?
The original is here if you're interested in reading the original comments.
The mod is still cool. It reminds both of the movie Brazil as well as Theora Jones' terminal in the TV show Max Headroom. Ah, wonderful!