Oh me, oh my, why'd this guy have to have the same name as I?
I'm guessing there are a heckuva lot of other "Chris Jones"es out there who'd rather not have their acquaintances surprised by the possibility that they're suddenly Windows executives....
For what it's worth, William, I'm almost exclusively a free software user, avoid Windows like the plague, and agree with nearly everything you've said. Generally, the trouble is that evangelism doesn't work, but is significantly easier than making a product that makes people want to use it.
This isn't a critique of Linux or F/OSS. I'm happy to use it instead of Microsoft products, but I don't expect my friends, family, or colleagues to unless I can actually show them something compelling. Saying "I don't have to reboot for months" or "I can use really powerful command-line scripts" only makes them think (more) that I'm a geek; showing them Firefox's tabs and a few extensions fitting in (relatively) nicely into their already-available Windows or OS X installation switches them as quickly as giving them a URL.
As I said, I agree with you, and I'm certainly not criticizing the software--but it would help if a few more people (there are one or two out there) would concentrate on the product instead of the selling. Done right, it will sell itself.
The reasons users are "ignoring" it are at least twofold.
There's the old standby of making it harder to do some things (which is the point) as an unprivileged user. To be honest, I'm okay with that; it's the reason for being unprivileged in the first place. My significant other's Windows XP account is set up as a "Limited Account", and she has no problems using it to check email, run Firefox and MS Money, and so forth.
The biggest issue, however, is that's it's not the default for new accounts, and that it's actually difficult to make some accounts "Limited". I'd be perfectly happy running my own account as a "Limited account" everyday and using a tool like those mentioned in the FA for installing or doing other tasks as a "Computer administrator". When I try to change my account in the Windows XP User Accounts tool, however, the option of a "Limited account" is unavailable, and instead I get the message:
You must assign another user on this computer with a computer administrator account before you can change this user's account type. This ensures that there is always at least one user with a computer administrator account on this computer.
That's all well and good, but I haven't changed the default Administrator account. There are ways around this, but I've lost interest---perhaps Microsoft can see why people are "ignoring" this option?
I don't have the time (anymore) to read up on games or even go out to the store to pick up a copy of something that looks interesting. I don't have the inclination (anymore) to download pirated games. It wouldn't do much good if I did, as I'm most interested in playing games like the original Myst or Warcraft. Some open-source games (The Battle for Wesnoth comes to mind) temporarily satisfy my need.
I'm lucky to have an hour a week to play games, and there are precious few games that seem to interest me anymore. I tend to lurk on Freshmeat, waiting for something nice and new, or (as I did this afternoon), spend far too much time just looking for old demos to download (no luck finding Black & White, which looks interesting; only Myst III---we'll see how that is).
When more of my time is spent looking for a game than actually playing it, I think less of my money will end up going to the gaming companies. My guess, though, is that they don't really care, since one "hardcore" gamer will make up for the loss of about 20 people like me.
These results, as far as I can tell, have little if anything to do with "addiction". Do people check their email often? Yup. Do they do so to the detriment of other activities? Who knows?
How about this as an interesting survey:
Do you check your email when you know you're supposed to be doing other things? (Yeah, most people would answer this one positively.)
Have you ever tried to cut back on how often you check your email? (Why?)
Do you get annoyed when others suggest you check your email too much?
Do you ever feel guilty about checking your email?
Do you ever need an eye-opener, checking your email first thing in the morning? (Okay, this one's covered.)
And the all important: have you ever willingly had sex with someone so that they would allow you to check your email?
Unless the answers to several of those questions are "yes", I'd have a little trouble suggesting someone's addicted....
Actually, it's not NP, it's most certainly polynomial. Turns out that this "scheduling problem" can be arranged into a matroid, and therefore a simple greedy algorithm will work. Basically, this will *always* just end up with the next "highest priority" item that fits into the current time slot.
(For a final note, I'm not in any way affiliated with mathworld.wolfram.com, but it is a useful reference.);-)
Cederqvist, the "official" manual, is surprisingly well-written, and worked wonders teaching me about CVS. Highly recommended, and available for free in a variety of formats at the CVS web site.
You can prove mathematically that the best strategy is to look at (approximately) the first 36.787944117144235 people (rounding it to, say, 37 people) and then you should choose the first person from that point on that is 'better' then the previous 37 people.
is the Interactive Way To Go. It's where I learned. I'm far from any mastery, but I'm quite comfortable playing now.
It's easy to spread out over several sessions, and actually teaches what things are (properly) and what to do about them, instead of simply referring to past games or showing pictures.
That's very interesting---I'd never have thought of it, and it makes complete sense. Just out of curiosity, are the pics you take (say, of store opening hours) legible on the phone's screen, or do you have to upload them somewhere to read them accurately? If such a thing is easily readable, you may have just sold me.
You're absolutely right about finding a phone without a camera---it's another bane to me. (But then, I'm still annoyed I can't find one without "multitone" rings.) Trouble is, this isn't (for a long time at least) going to be an entry-level phone. Will camera phones in general get rid of entry-level cameras? I still don't think so, but I can see your point. Will this camera phone? Unlikely.
Some people still want the entry-level cameras
on
7 Megapixel Camera Phone
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
I know very little about digital cameras. I've never been much of a picture-taker, and the last camera I bought (a fairly nice, though entirely unprofessional, one) has sat in a closet for years, if I still even have it. I'd never buy a phone for the camera feature.
However, with the typical day-after-Thanksgiving sales tomorrow, one of the local superstores has HP's entry-level model, the Photosmart 435 3.1 megapixel, for less than $50. I'm going to pick one up. It's certainly not the best, but it's a camera, and it'll shoot 4x6's just fine.
The point is, I don't care about a feature, and I don't look for a phone that'll minimize the number of gadgets I have---especially since I don't even know if I'll use a digital camera. This won't be the beginning of the end of entry-level digital cameras, because the entry-level ones are the ones people get when they don't even know if they want one. This could be the end of gadget-lovers buying them. This could even be the end of the "high-end entry-level" position.
But some people will just want an entry-level camera, without paying for a cell phone.
This isn't just related to IT, of course; most professions require a standard of continuing self-education to get through it. As a medical student, one of my advisors finally explained his methods for dealing with the mad chaos of journal articles, world events, and so forth: quick scanning.
No, not OCR (though that might help in certain cases), but skimming headlines/abstracts/conclusions, etc. Journals typically present a table of contents; read it and pick out the relevant/interesting ones. Of those, read the conclusions or abstracts and decide if it warrants more reading or a "mental note" for reference later---as someone above suggested, just enough to Google later if necessary. The essence of the trick is reading from end to beginning instead of the usual way. (This also assumes the article isn't written with a punchline at the end---most aren't.) It sounds quite simple, but actually takes a lot of practice to convince yourself your not wasting time and subscription fees. Works nicely, though.
Unfortunately, most of us here spend plenty of time on things that don't work so well for this---pleasure reading, watching TV and movies, reading articles that are interesting but don't have a lot of professional relevance, and so forth.
Personally, I'm surprised I had time to write this.
Just out of curiosity, who considers NetBSD to be the "cleanest" of the BSDs, and why? I'm not trolling, just wondering---I don't think I've ever heard that (specifically).
CDJ
XviD and Ogg Theora (website seems to be down) are free (AIS) video compressor/decompressors that are designed to be comparable to DivX. The still-early-experimental Ogg Tarkin is a whole different kind of bird, but with the same general aim. For lossless video compression, there's Huffyuv (do a search). All these are open source, but the last review I read still had DivX as better quality per bitrate than the others.
Is it quality, marketing, or what that make DivX the perennial favorite, among Hollywood, consumers, or anyone else? Sure, I've got several movies encoded in DivX, but would prefer to have them in some format that I'm certain can have encoders and decoders that are legally copylefted. As always, don't think that I'm being overzealous---I'm more just curious why DivX has come closest to "hitting the big time."
Slashdot Mirror
Oh me, oh my, why'd this guy have to have the same name as I?
I'm guessing there are a heckuva lot of other "Chris Jones"es out there who'd rather not have their acquaintances surprised by the possibility that they're suddenly Windows executives....
For what it's worth, William, I'm almost exclusively a free software user, avoid Windows like the plague, and agree with nearly everything you've said. Generally, the trouble is that evangelism doesn't work, but is significantly easier than making a product that makes people want to use it.
This isn't a critique of Linux or F/OSS. I'm happy to use it instead of Microsoft products, but I don't expect my friends, family, or colleagues to unless I can actually show them something compelling. Saying "I don't have to reboot for months" or "I can use really powerful command-line scripts" only makes them think (more) that I'm a geek; showing them Firefox's tabs and a few extensions fitting in (relatively) nicely into their already-available Windows or OS X installation switches them as quickly as giving them a URL.
As I said, I agree with you, and I'm certainly not criticizing the software--but it would help if a few more people (there are one or two out there) would concentrate on the product instead of the selling. Done right, it will sell itself.
The reasons users are "ignoring" it are at least twofold.
There's the old standby of making it harder to do some things (which is the point) as an unprivileged user. To be honest, I'm okay with that; it's the reason for being unprivileged in the first place. My significant other's Windows XP account is set up as a "Limited Account", and she has no problems using it to check email, run Firefox and MS Money, and so forth.
The biggest issue, however, is that's it's not the default for new accounts, and that it's actually difficult to make some accounts "Limited". I'd be perfectly happy running my own account as a "Limited account" everyday and using a tool like those mentioned in the FA for installing or doing other tasks as a "Computer administrator". When I try to change my account in the Windows XP User Accounts tool, however, the option of a "Limited account" is unavailable, and instead I get the message:
That's all well and good, but I haven't changed the default Administrator account. There are ways around this, but I've lost interest---perhaps Microsoft can see why people are "ignoring" this option?
I don't have the time (anymore) to read up on games or even go out to the store to pick up a copy of something that looks interesting. I don't have the inclination (anymore) to download pirated games. It wouldn't do much good if I did, as I'm most interested in playing games like the original Myst or Warcraft. Some open-source games (The Battle for Wesnoth comes to mind) temporarily satisfy my need.
I'm lucky to have an hour a week to play games, and there are precious few games that seem to interest me anymore. I tend to lurk on Freshmeat, waiting for something nice and new, or (as I did this afternoon), spend far too much time just looking for old demos to download (no luck finding Black & White, which looks interesting; only Myst III---we'll see how that is).
When more of my time is spent looking for a game than actually playing it, I think less of my money will end up going to the gaming companies. My guess, though, is that they don't really care, since one "hardcore" gamer will make up for the loss of about 20 people like me.
These results, as far as I can tell, have little if anything to do with "addiction". Do people check their email often? Yup. Do they do so to the detriment of other activities? Who knows?
How about this as an interesting survey:
Unless the answers to several of those questions are "yes", I'd have a little trouble suggesting someone's addicted....
Actually, it's not NP, it's most certainly polynomial. Turns out that this "scheduling problem" can be arranged into a matroid, and therefore a simple greedy algorithm will work. Basically, this will *always* just end up with the next "highest priority" item that fits into the current time slot.
(For a final note, I'm not in any way affiliated with mathworld.wolfram.com, but it is a useful reference.) ;-)
Cederqvist, the "official" manual, is surprisingly well-written, and worked wonders teaching me about CVS. Highly recommended, and available for free in a variety of formats at the CVS web site.
Nice. Finally, a post with math puns! ;-)
Waddya know, Kevin Smith was onto something.
Yeah, I remember living in a crappy apartment where the porewater pressure in the shower just made everything more difficult....
lightning sand?
(Oh, right, that pesky reality again.)
is the Interactive Way To Go. It's where I learned. I'm far from any mastery, but I'm quite comfortable playing now.
It's easy to spread out over several sessions, and actually teaches what things are (properly) and what to do about them, instead of simply referring to past games or showing pictures.
Good luck!
That's very interesting---I'd never have thought of it, and it makes complete sense. Just out of curiosity, are the pics you take (say, of store opening hours) legible on the phone's screen, or do you have to upload them somewhere to read them accurately? If such a thing is easily readable, you may have just sold me.
You're absolutely right about finding a phone without a camera---it's another bane to me. (But then, I'm still annoyed I can't find one without "multitone" rings.) Trouble is, this isn't (for a long time at least) going to be an entry-level phone. Will camera phones in general get rid of entry-level cameras? I still don't think so, but I can see your point. Will this camera phone? Unlikely.
I know very little about digital cameras. I've never been much of a picture-taker, and the last camera I bought (a fairly nice, though entirely unprofessional, one) has sat in a closet for years, if I still even have it. I'd never buy a phone for the camera feature.
However, with the typical day-after-Thanksgiving sales tomorrow, one of the local superstores has HP's entry-level model, the Photosmart 435 3.1 megapixel, for less than $50. I'm going to pick one up. It's certainly not the best, but it's a camera, and it'll shoot 4x6's just fine.
The point is, I don't care about a feature, and I don't look for a phone that'll minimize the number of gadgets I have---especially since I don't even know if I'll use a digital camera. This won't be the beginning of the end of entry-level digital cameras, because the entry-level ones are the ones people get when they don't even know if they want one. This could be the end of gadget-lovers buying them. This could even be the end of the "high-end entry-level" position.
But some people will just want an entry-level camera, without paying for a cell phone.
This isn't just related to IT, of course; most professions require a standard of continuing self-education to get through it. As a medical student, one of my advisors finally explained his methods for dealing with the mad chaos of journal articles, world events, and so forth: quick scanning.
No, not OCR (though that might help in certain cases), but skimming headlines/abstracts/conclusions, etc. Journals typically present a table of contents; read it and pick out the relevant/interesting ones. Of those, read the conclusions or abstracts and decide if it warrants more reading or a "mental note" for reference later---as someone above suggested, just enough to Google later if necessary. The essence of the trick is reading from end to beginning instead of the usual way. (This also assumes the article isn't written with a punchline at the end---most aren't.) It sounds quite simple, but actually takes a lot of practice to convince yourself your not wasting time and subscription fees. Works nicely, though.
Unfortunately, most of us here spend plenty of time on things that don't work so well for this---pleasure reading, watching TV and movies, reading articles that are interesting but don't have a lot of professional relevance, and so forth.
Personally, I'm surprised I had time to write this.
I use Lynx, you insensitive clod!
CDJJust out of curiosity, who considers NetBSD to be the "cleanest" of the BSDs, and why? I'm not trolling, just wondering---I don't think I've ever heard that (specifically). CDJ
Haven't actually tried it out (everything I write seems to be text or TeX), but I remembered reading this article a while back: "How to Index Anything", Linux J., July 1 2003.
Shouldn't that be 'a publicity-grabbing coupe'?
Or maybe using 'head -n6' counts as reverse engineering...
but when the first few lines looked like this:
I was afraid that using a piece of software designed to circumvent the "encryption" of the file would find me breaking the law under the DMCA....
XviD and Ogg Theora (website seems to be down) are free (AIS) video compressor/decompressors that are designed to be comparable to DivX. The still-early-experimental Ogg Tarkin is a whole different kind of bird, but with the same general aim. For lossless video compression, there's Huffyuv (do a search). All these are open source, but the last review I read still had DivX as better quality per bitrate than the others.
Is it quality, marketing, or what that make DivX the perennial favorite, among Hollywood, consumers, or anyone else? Sure, I've got several movies encoded in DivX, but would prefer to have them in some format that I'm certain can have encoders and decoders that are legally copylefted. As always, don't think that I'm being overzealous---I'm more just curious why DivX has come closest to "hitting the big time."
As part of O'Reilly's Open Books Project, this book is also available (without the shiny binding) for free. You can also pickup PDF's and the like the Linux Documentation Project's guides section.