Almost any point made in this article is a good, very sensible one; there's hope the other/. editors will regard this as a style guide and try to make equally good decisions. But as others have said before: don't short shrift grammar and spelling! But before I launch into my boring, nitpicking rant about proper writing, two other points I care about:
Now that we're talking about article formatting, let's talk about the visual formatting for a moment. Please find another markup for the quotes. Not for blockquotes, not for one-liners, but for the submitted text that makes up 90% of almost every story. The way it is now, the majority of the front page is in italics, and italics are simply not designed for large blocks of text. The way it is,/. is a tad more cumbersome to read and the reading takes a tad longer. It's not perceptible to an individual who isn't conducting a scientific study on this, but over all the stories and readers the lost time adds up to a lifetime. Now, do you want to practically murder a poor/. reader with your CSS?
Secondly: Yes, the linked text ought to be "sticky widget". "A sticky widget", if you will, or even "article about a sticky widget". Obviously, linking just the word 'article' to an article is rather unhelpful, and linking the abbreviation 'CNN' to a specific article that is somewhere on the CNN site but not about CNN at all, now that's totally idiotic.
As far as the promised rant is concerned, here's what matters most for me, and judging from how many people mostly just read the front page, hardly ever opening a single article page with the comments and never posting a comment themselves, it also matters a lot for a huge number of other people:
I want to read through the stories quickly and find the links I'll want to click on. I won't even notice most typos and mistakes where letters were dropped, added or swapped around. But where the meaning of a sentence is changed or a sentence becomes nonsensical, where whole words are randomly changed to totally different words with completely different meanings (to too), where one word even becomes two other words or vice versa (it's its), I'm tripped.
Thus, an appeal to my dear fellow story submitters: Even the most active of you (with a few solitary exceptions I suspect) read/skim more than a thousand of other people's stories for every one you submit. And we all lose a second or so when we have to mentally correct a nonsensical phrase. So if we all take that extra minute to make sure our story reads well, we get back that investment of time when reading other people's submissions and in the end, everyone wins.
Dear/. editors, you can also help here, of course. If you just fix what needs to be fixed and leave the rest well alone, you are not taking any personality away from the posts. If a submitters sole defining personality trait was his/her lack in writing skills, no one cares if that is lost!
Of course to many people this doesn't matter; maybe they're even in the majority. Some of them have plenty of time to determine the originally intended meaning of every garbled word ont he fly because they're reading so slowly anyway. Others simply are more verbal thinking types and to them, written words are just a notation for the sounds you make/hear when speaking/listening. This is for you: I know that pedantically distinguishing between 'to' and 'too' means nothing to you. I know that even in your weirdest dreams you wouldn't be writing a silly rant like this here. I know that a misplaced apostrophe will never make you want to punch someone in the face. I envy you for that. But I'm different. It's a gift... and a curse. And there are millions like me, a fair share of which reads Slashdot. We don't deserve your respect, but we desire a little more understanding. If proper spelling and grammar mean not
[Disabling ports] would be far better than the legal approach, which is inefficient and expensive for all parties involved, and would prevent many viruses along with piracy.
I agree that the cost effectiveness of suing file sharers is debatable and that ISPs could do more to reduce the effects of malware, spam etc., but I'm sure that crippling internet services (whether through a silly approach like disabling ports or privacy-invasive and expensive measures like SPI) won't do anything to reduce file sharing, a certain short-term effect notwithstanding. I would actually welcome such a move, as it would put more selective pressure on file sharing software and accelerate the evolution of solutions with better security, stealth, and anonymity.
Off topic, just in case your.sig is not a joke:
Grammer tip: 'Effect' is used as a noun. 'Affect' is used as a verb.
Effect is also a (transitive) verb, affect is also a noun, and it's spelled 'grammar'. If it is in fact meant to be a joke: I didn't find it funny;-)
Most kids learn about gravity. 99.9% of people have seen astronauts in space floating around. Tons of people have at least seen space-flicks such as Apollo 13, with a high G launch.
As for the great ruck of ordinary Americans, they are merely uninterested in, or perhaps bored by, science. Only one in five has bothered to take a physics course. Three out of four haven't heard that the universe is expanding. Nearly half, according to a recent survey, seem to believe that God created man in his present form within the last 10,000 years. Less than 10 percent of adult Americans, it is estimated, are in possession of basic scientific literacy.
And the list goes on and on... the situation could be much better in Britain and you'd still find people that believe in the healing powers of magnets, the effectiveness of dowsing rods, or the importance of having speaker cables of equal length. Your estimate of the general public's critical thinking skills is way too optimistic.
i'm not saying its utterly implausible that none of the journalists reporting on this did proper fact-checking; in fact it would be great if they were outed and ridiculed for mindlessly propagating press releases and passing them off as facts. but on the other hand, consider this: the producers were looking for people who are suggestible, not interested in physics (and avionics, space flight etc.), like to be on TV, haven't got anything better to do (like a full time job), and don't mind doing embarrassing things with strangers watching. some of the people they got were amateurish actors who've been on TV one or two times before. there is not necessarily a contradiction there; for a 'reality show', that's par for the course.
this would mean none of the journalists reporting on this have cared to do basic fact checking. or anyone who would be in a position to confirm your theory is also an actor. of course it would be neat if the production team was able to pull that off, but how likely is that? surely it's not true that the audience _couldn't_ know they're being duped.
Sure proof that those onboard deserve to be laughed at, assuming that they aren't paid actors.
Some of them are, in order to make the scam more believable for the rest. Which where not explicitly cast for their stupidity by the way, but, as you'd expect, for their boundless gullibility. Of course, people who have the slightest comprehension of physics were also ruled out. The production team also interviewed family members or close friends to rule out people who are likely to be exceedingly pissed when they find out the truth. So the victims are actually treated much better than those in a show that plays pranks on random people who aren't even aware of the cameras. Of course, what all of this means is: yes indeed, they absolutely deserve to be laughed at.
sorry for replying late, but in case you notice the reply, ebyrob:
you may have something here, it's just I don't see all the details laid out in plain view.
what you missed is that i didn't suggest to use complete pictures as such, but only the least significant bit of every pixel (in every colour channel if you will). doing this with a RAW format is trivial, as the specified data already is completely random from a statistical viewpoint. in a JPEG you'd need to hide your data somewhere else, and you'd have much less space for data.
Yes, it'd be nice if everyone used 100 character passwords, but is there a suggestion for us mortals?
passwords are for websites. good passwords are for your netbanking or PC account; any system that keeps track of failed login attempts and has the means to slow them down and eventually block them completely. but if you want strong cryptography (not authentication), you want a passphrase. your 512 bit symmetric key protecting your file, which is in turn protected by a 2048 bit asymmetric key, won't do you much good if someone is already reading your harddrive and can retrieve it by using your 100 bit password. if you want to keep something so secret that no one can even know that it exists, you have to make sure that every link in the chain is strong enough. however, maybe it's not necessary to implement such stringent security requirements for mere mortals. what would they need them for?
Hiding encrypted data on a computer is actually very difficult - Encrypted data looks like random bytes.
If you take the least significant bits of the 100 gigabytes of RAW images extracted from my 12MP digital camera, that data also looks like random bytes. OK, so your nifty tool found that very quickly. But finding out which two of the 5.000 pictures to select and which 100 character pass phrase to use to decrypt them into the binary files that have to be XORed to retrieve my secret document, now that's a different story. And all the software I needed to pull that off, which includes shredding all traces, came with the innocent standard distribution of my operating system. Hiding encrypted data on a computer is actually very easy.
Actually I'd seen that other anwer a while ago and I'd already found out about my mistake, just didn't get around to reply until now; so, thanks for adding a more visible correction in the meantime. I think what made this difficult for me (aside from ignoring the proper solution ^_^) is the fact that the required information measures a non-integer number of bits. Of course this makes the riddle all the more interesting.
thanks for the correction; once i had carefully read the solution and thought it through, it became obvious that it must work and that it's silly to think otherwise. i hadn't tried that before because i was convinced there can be no solution; now i have discovered where the flaw in my 'proof' is.
Ask person 1 if person 2 is more likely to lie than person 3.
Your 'solution' to your riddle must be wrong, because it can be proved that there is no solution: Firstly, the merchant will give you zero information, because essentially he randomly chooses between yes and no. Secondly, you need more than two bits of information in order to tell who's who, since there are 6 different ways to assign 3 labels to 3 persons, but only 4 different ways to assign 2 boolean values to 2 boolean variables. Therefore, you need to gain useful information from more than 2 yes/no quesions (since 2 useful yes/no answers give you only 2 bits of information). Therefore, you need to gain information from all three of your questions. Therefore, you need a useful answer to your first question. Therefore, must not ask the merchant first, because he never gives you any information. Therefore, you must know how to avoid the merchant before you started collecting any information. Therefore, solving the problem is impossible. QED.
It took me an hour to phrase this so concicely. Thanks for the nice riddle.
i tried it out with bits on wheels and only got an error message from the tracker. maybe some clients have compatibility issues, or it's slashdotted by now and only working for you because you already have direct connections to peers going on?
oh, and what's up with that site that offers the torrent link? it looks like a pretty official site, or at least a site made by dedicated fans of the movie (or ff in general), but if it really is, why do they provide the link?
the promises it makes look really nice (as opposed to the current user interface, i hope they fix that), but does it a promise a single feature that gizmo doesn't already have? (i mean, modulo linux support; gizmo project promise to add that soon.)
Please excuse the length of this post, I didn't have the time to make it shorter, and it's my very last one in this thread anyway. It's pointless actually, but now that I have written it, I might as well submit it.
There was far more variety in the computers that people owned in 1985 than there is now. BBC Micro, C64, ZX Spectrum, Amiga, Macintosh etc.
Non-geeks/hobbyists didn't have to do much with these machines, let alone own one, and thus wouldn't use the phrase 'personal computer' so often they'd feel the need to abbreviate it. The IBM PC/PC AT/PC XT, on the other hand, gained a much larger market share, so they were able to hijack the term 'PC', which is since ignorantly misused to mean 'IBM PC compatible' by people who know no better. (I can prove this statement at least as well as you proved yours saying that all dictionaries are wrong.)
Do you see it as a country specific distinction?
Yes; in German speaking countries, for example, the term 'PC' is widely used both in its long and short form, but due to the language it is impossible to make a distinction between 'Personal Computer' and 'personal computer'.
Anyway, you keep picking on minor details and missing the actual point that I was trying to make and will repeat one last time now: OP says "Their [Apple's] PC's are notorously hard (if not impossible) to upgrade". Someone feels like arguing, can't do any better than smugly pointing out that Apple never made PCs (a statement which you may interpret to be true, but only when you regard it out of the context of the OP, which makes it irrelevant to the discussion and thus doesn't prove anything), and is therefore a bean-counting smart-ass and a stupid flamebaiter ('troll' being too kind a term).
Whereas the point you were trying to make seems to be: IBM marketing department pwned term 'PC' in ancient times, so Apple marketing department consistently avoids this term even now (not wanting to evoke a 'boring beige box' image), thus it is wrong to abbreviate 'personal computer' to 'PC'. After all, when it comes to the English language, commercials and press releases are a much better source of information than dictionaries and common sense. In the face of this logic, I give up. If you really believe this, I won't try to stop you any longer; go ahead, I don't care.
written by people that don't know their computing history. PC stands for "Personal Computer", not "personal computer".
It can really mean both. You're supposed to glark the appropriate meaning from context. Ancient definfitions don't stay pertpetually valid, terminology changes. IBM themselves don't even make PCs any longer; the term 'IBM PC compatible' is obsolete. I don't know too much about language usage in the US apart from what American dictionaries say, but I'm sure in the US, just like over here, non-geeks (i.e. the vast majority) don't really care about distinctions between proper and common nouns when both are excactly the same, save capitalisation. Case in point: people don't bother to capitalise 'internet' any longer in cases where this would be correct. The objection that 20 years ago, people who said 'PC' were almost exclusively thinking of IMB PCs, isn't saying much once you realise they mostly didn't know any other kind anyway.
Context is everything. 'PC' on a computer game box nearly always means 'computer with an Intel or compatible chip, running Windows', whereas in other contexts it isn't as restrictive.
Anyway, thanks for bringing the issue to my attention, I'll meet an American friend tomorrow and ask her about her POV.
The fact that they [Apple] have never made any [PCs] is kind of important
But wrong. According to the Oxford dictionary, Webster's dictionary, dictionary.com, and the Wikipedia, 'PC' means 'personal computer', period. Some of the sources that go into more detail add that the term usually refers to an 'IBM PC compatible' device, which downright implies that there also are other types. As I already said, in many contexts saying 'PC' and expecting it to be understood as 'IBM PC compatible' is not wrong. But insisting that 'PC' does not mean 'personal computer' is. Even the Webopedia article, which you cited yourself, doesn't contradict my opinion, and more authoritative sources absolutely agree with it. I'd say it's safe to deem it correct.
the term PC came to mean IBM or IBM-compatible personal computers, to the exclusion of other types of personal computers, such as Macintoshes.
Apple calls their products 'personal computers' all the time, for which PC is an abbreviation, nothing more, nothing less (according to every dictionary I use); and of course I'm familiar with the popular meaning of 'PC', but the term is usually used referring to this meaning in a context like "Mac versus PC", where it's perfectly clear what you mean anyway. But now that you mention it, Apple really seem to be using the long form of 'personal computer' and avoiding the abbreviation 'PC' pretty consistently; so thanks for your post, I never noticed that. So, I'd say my point is: If you say 'PC' and mean it to exclude 'other types of personal computers', that's perfectly OK, but if you say 'PC' and just mean 'personal computer' that surely is OK too, and any bean counter picking on your choice of terms is just being a flamebaiting smart-ass. If you're looking for some fault with the statement "Their PC's are notorously hard (if not impossible) to upgrade", and the best you can do is insisting they aren't actually making PCs, that's just idiotic. Apart from the fact that insisting on a distinction between a term and its canonical abbreviation is in itself rather silly.
Hillary Clinton alrady spread FUD about GTA* being a 'murder simulator'; either she is an idiot for critisising a game she never played, or if she played it and still gives the public this biased view, she's a liar. As i previously said, it's just an arcade game about driving from A to B and then maybe to C, and shooting some targets every now and then. There's no real death, no real sex. Not even virtually real. Just Pac-Man-like game mechanics (but quite entertaining). The player is rewarded for helping people, punished for harming innocents, and taught how to be a better driver.
Now she has found another lump of coal to throw on her fire and pretends that San Andreas has pornographic content, which is like saying Quake 3 Arena has a brutally realistic damage model (you just need to install this little mod, but most of the code is allready in there!). Again, that's either idiotic or an outright lie. And the large majority of the population (read: voters) isn't all that familiar with this matter and just believes her.
Dear moderators: parent does not demonstrate/explain an over-reliance on instanceof operator, nor a harmful use of MethodNotSupportedException, thus parent post is utterly wrong and not '5, insightful'.
Writing OO programs is pretty much all Java is any good for, to the point that people will even make an OO design where it is counter-productive (e.g. a small programm that would be under 200 lines if done the procedural way). But OOP it does well, and even the minor flaw that was bickered about for 10 paragraphs doesn't exist in reality.
Of course you can always 'trick' a user of your API by overwriting some known method with another one that does nothing, crashes the machine or formats the harddisk. You don't need a MethodNotSupportedException for that. This exception is not meant to break something that worked in the superclass, and in the standard libs it's never used in that way; so if you do that, it's your fault alone. It's meant to be used when you implement an interface, or subclass an abstract class, that says about one of its methods, "this may be implemented, depending on wheter that makes sense at all." So, by implementing it maybe, all promises are perfectly kept and no one is tricked.
Maybe you don't understand why one would do that, instead of just defining a method only for those subclasses that really implement it. I can assure you that in about 99,99% of all cases, it's done the latter way anyway, but in some rare cases using MethodNotSupportedException does make some sense, and you can use it without any reflection code. If you need the instanceof operator to deal with it, that's not an indication of a flaw with this particular exception, but the flaw is your dumb design.
I'll give you an unrealistic (no one implements TV sets), but easy to grasp example: A subclass of AbstractTvSet will only support the setColourTemperature method if it is a colour TV. The idea is that your code will only try to call this method where it's known that you're dealing with a colour TV; if you call it for a monochrome one, you made a mistake; this should never have happened, hence there is an exception.
And finally, parent's claim that commonly used collections (Java lingo for 'container class') make use of this exception? Wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
Almost any point made in this article is a good, very sensible one; there's hope the other /. editors will regard this as a style guide and try to make equally good decisions. But as others have said before: don't short shrift grammar and spelling! But before I launch into my boring, nitpicking rant about proper writing, two other points I care about:
/. is a tad more cumbersome to read and the reading takes a tad longer. It's not perceptible to an individual who isn't conducting a scientific study on this, but over all the stories and readers the lost time adds up to a lifetime. Now, do you want to practically murder a poor /. reader with your CSS?
/. editors, you can also help here, of course. If you just fix what needs to be fixed and leave the rest well alone, you are not taking any personality away from the posts. If a submitters sole defining personality trait was his/her lack in writing skills, no one cares if that is lost!
... and a curse. And there are millions like me, a fair share of which reads Slashdot. We don't deserve your respect, but we desire a little more understanding. If proper spelling and grammar mean not
Now that we're talking about article formatting, let's talk about the visual formatting for a moment. Please find another markup for the quotes. Not for blockquotes, not for one-liners, but for the submitted text that makes up 90% of almost every story. The way it is now, the majority of the front page is in italics, and italics are simply not designed for large blocks of text. The way it is,
Secondly: Yes, the linked text ought to be "sticky widget". "A sticky widget", if you will, or even "article about a sticky widget". Obviously, linking just the word 'article' to an article is rather unhelpful, and linking the abbreviation 'CNN' to a specific article that is somewhere on the CNN site but not about CNN at all, now that's totally idiotic.
As far as the promised rant is concerned, here's what matters most for me, and judging from how many people mostly just read the front page, hardly ever opening a single article page with the comments and never posting a comment themselves, it also matters a lot for a huge number of other people:
I want to read through the stories quickly and find the links I'll want to click on. I won't even notice most typos and mistakes where letters were dropped, added or swapped around. But where the meaning of a sentence is changed or a sentence becomes nonsensical, where whole words are randomly changed to totally different words with completely different meanings (to too), where one word even becomes two other words or vice versa (it's its), I'm tripped.
Thus, an appeal to my dear fellow story submitters: Even the most active of you (with a few solitary exceptions I suspect) read/skim more than a thousand of other people's stories for every one you submit. And we all lose a second or so when we have to mentally correct a nonsensical phrase. So if we all take that extra minute to make sure our story reads well, we get back that investment of time when reading other people's submissions and in the end, everyone wins.
Dear
Of course to many people this doesn't matter; maybe they're even in the majority. Some of them have plenty of time to determine the originally intended meaning of every garbled word ont he fly because they're reading so slowly anyway. Others simply are more verbal thinking types and to them, written words are just a notation for the sounds you make/hear when speaking/listening. This is for you: I know that pedantically distinguishing between 'to' and 'too' means nothing to you. I know that even in your weirdest dreams you wouldn't be writing a silly rant like this here. I know that a misplaced apostrophe will never make you want to punch someone in the face. I envy you for that. But I'm different. It's a gift
Off topic, just in case your
i'm not saying its utterly implausible that none of the journalists reporting on this did proper fact-checking; in fact it would be great if they were outed and ridiculed for mindlessly propagating press releases and passing them off as facts. but on the other hand, consider this: the producers were looking for people who are suggestible, not interested in physics (and avionics, space flight etc.), like to be on TV, haven't got anything better to do (like a full time job), and don't mind doing embarrassing things with strangers watching. some of the people they got were amateurish actors who've been on TV one or two times before. there is not necessarily a contradiction there; for a 'reality show', that's par for the course.
this would mean none of the journalists reporting on this have cared to do basic fact checking. or anyone who would be in a position to confirm your theory is also an actor. of course it would be neat if the production team was able to pull that off, but how likely is that? surely it's not true that the audience _couldn't_ know they're being duped.
Actually I'd seen that other anwer a while ago and I'd already found out about my mistake, just didn't get around to reply until now; so, thanks for adding a more visible correction in the meantime. I think what made this difficult for me (aside from ignoring the proper solution ^_^) is the fact that the required information measures a non-integer number of bits. Of course this makes the riddle all the more interesting.
thanks for the correction; once i had carefully read the solution and thought it through, it became obvious that it must work and that it's silly to think otherwise. i hadn't tried that before because i was convinced there can be no solution; now i have discovered where the flaw in my 'proof' is.
It took me an hour to phrase this so concicely. Thanks for the nice riddle.
i tried it out with bits on wheels and only got an error message from the tracker. maybe some clients have compatibility issues, or it's slashdotted by now and only working for you because you already have direct connections to peers going on? oh, and what's up with that site that offers the torrent link? it looks like a pretty official site, or at least a site made by dedicated fans of the movie (or ff in general), but if it really is, why do they provide the link?
thanks for the info, very interesting.
the promises it makes look really nice (as opposed to the current user interface, i hope they fix that), but does it a promise a single feature that gizmo doesn't already have? (i mean, modulo linux support; gizmo project promise to add that soon.)
Anyway, you keep picking on minor details and missing the actual point that I was trying to make and will repeat one last time now: OP says "Their [Apple's] PC's are notorously hard (if not impossible) to upgrade". Someone feels like arguing, can't do any better than smugly pointing out that Apple never made PCs (a statement which you may interpret to be true, but only when you regard it out of the context of the OP, which makes it irrelevant to the discussion and thus doesn't prove anything), and is therefore a bean-counting smart-ass and a stupid flamebaiter ('troll' being too kind a term).
Whereas the point you were trying to make seems to be: IBM marketing department pwned term 'PC' in ancient times, so Apple marketing department consistently avoids this term even now (not wanting to evoke a 'boring beige box' image), thus it is wrong to abbreviate 'personal computer' to 'PC'. After all, when it comes to the English language, commercials and press releases are a much better source of information than dictionaries and common sense. In the face of this logic, I give up. If you really believe this, I won't try to stop you any longer; go ahead, I don't care.
Context is everything. 'PC' on a computer game box nearly always means 'computer with an Intel or compatible chip, running Windows', whereas in other contexts it isn't as restrictive.
Anyway, thanks for bringing the issue to my attention, I'll meet an American friend tomorrow and ask her about her POV.
Hillary Clinton alrady spread FUD about GTA* being a 'murder simulator'; either she is an idiot for critisising a game she never played, or if she played it and still gives the public this biased view, she's a liar. As i previously said, it's just an arcade game about driving from A to B and then maybe to C, and shooting some targets every now and then. There's no real death, no real sex. Not even virtually real. Just Pac-Man-like game mechanics (but quite entertaining). The player is rewarded for helping people, punished for harming innocents, and taught how to be a better driver.
Now she has found another lump of coal to throw on her fire and pretends that San Andreas has pornographic content, which is like saying Quake 3 Arena has a brutally realistic damage model (you just need to install this little mod, but most of the code is allready in there!). Again, that's either idiotic or an outright lie. And the large majority of the population (read: voters) isn't all that familiar with this matter and just believes her.
Dear moderators: parent does not demonstrate/explain an over-reliance on instanceof operator, nor a harmful use of MethodNotSupportedException, thus parent post is utterly wrong and not '5, insightful'.
Writing OO programs is pretty much all Java is any good for, to the point that people will even make an OO design where it is counter-productive (e.g. a small programm that would be under 200 lines if done the procedural way). But OOP it does well, and even the minor flaw that was bickered about for 10 paragraphs doesn't exist in reality.
Of course you can always 'trick' a user of your API by overwriting some known method with another one that does nothing, crashes the machine or formats the harddisk. You don't need a MethodNotSupportedException for that. This exception is not meant to break something that worked in the superclass, and in the standard libs it's never used in that way; so if you do that, it's your fault alone. It's meant to be used when you implement an interface, or subclass an abstract class, that says about one of its methods, "this may be implemented, depending on wheter that makes sense at all." So, by implementing it maybe, all promises are perfectly kept and no one is tricked.
Maybe you don't understand why one would do that, instead of just defining a method only for those subclasses that really implement it. I can assure you that in about 99,99% of all cases, it's done the latter way anyway, but in some rare cases using MethodNotSupportedException does make some sense, and you can use it without any reflection code. If you need the instanceof operator to deal with it, that's not an indication of a flaw with this particular exception, but the flaw is your dumb design.
I'll give you an unrealistic (no one implements TV sets), but easy to grasp example: A subclass of AbstractTvSet will only support the setColourTemperature method if it is a colour TV. The idea is that your code will only try to call this method where it's known that you're dealing with a colour TV; if you call it for a monochrome one, you made a mistake; this should never have happened, hence there is an exception.
And finally, parent's claim that commonly used collections (Java lingo for 'container class') make use of this exception? Wrong.