Wow, what a big number. But even with all of those downloads the logs from our server shows that only 17% of visitors are actually using it. Over 80% are IE variants.
Congratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.
Well, actually...
According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are currently about 1,173 million people using the internet. (God knows whether this is an accurate number or not, but they seem to think they know what they're doing, and for the purposes of this unscientific/. discussion I'll assume it's roughly correct.)
Therefore, 400 million downloads, assuming one download per person, would give a usage base of about 34%.
If Firefox usage is actually 17%, that suggests that about one in every two people that download it, stick with it. And that's pretty impressive if you ask me.
Sleep/Wake vs. Power Off for iPhone I think the big problem is calling a button "sleep/wake" when it does nothing of the sort. "Sleep" on a laptop means the device is dead, but keeping the memory powered so as to be able to restore instantly. That sounds like "Off" to me, and if I hadn't scanned the manual in depth and just saw a button entitled "sleep/wake", which turned the screen off when I pressed it, I'd figure that the device was off. The fact that to actually turn the device off requires pressing not another button, but holding down the "sleep/wake" button for several seconds, before sliding a finger, makes it even less obvious that you're not powering the device off.
Stories like this come about because the mode you get if you press "sleep/wake" isn't a sleep mode at all, but a lock mode. The iPhone manual actually states that you use the sleep/wake button to lock the phone, which shows you how badly that button was named - at no point in the manual does it actually talk about putting the device to sleep. Here's what the manual says about this feature, p.14:
Sleep/Wake button Lock iPhone: Press the Sleep/Wake button. Unlock iPhone: Press the Home button or the Sleep/Wake button, then drag the slider. Turn iPhone completely off: Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button for a few seconds until the red slider appears, then drag the slider. When iPhone is off, incoming calls go straight to voicemail. Turn iPhone on: Press and hold the Sleep/Wake button until the Apple logo appears.
People are always yelling give me opensource software, as if 99,99% of them are actually going to look at or change the source. It's the philosophy behind the thing, for a start - freedom is important to some of us.
But anyway, I think your assumptions are wrong. I've contributed patches back to several OSS projects and privately hacked the source of numerous others, as well as having two OSS projects that I run myself. And I'm just a hobbyist who codes for fun when I've got a bit of spare time.
On/., the people asking for OSS are generally the people who will get under the hood and get their hands dirty.
The so-called "die-hard" Palm fans over at Palminfocenter (or "Palm-faithful" as some of them like to call themselves). Have hated every Palm device since the Palm m-series back in 2001. With very few exceptions, they've proclaimed every single device Palm has brought out in the last five years to be dud. It looks like Palm has finally agreed with them for a change. Geez, I didn't think anyone ever liked the m-series! And the T3 is a revered machine amongst most Palm users, even over at PIC - I still regret not buying one at the time. But apart from that... Palm hasn't really produced much impressive hardware recently, have they? And then there's the disaster that is FrankenGarnet, the failure to support Cobalt, the splitting of the company and then buying back the Palm trademark from PalmSource... you couldn't really do worse if you tried!
I think that's what really gets to people - Palm had so much going for it back in 2000, and yet from a massive user base with an astonishing wide range of software they threw it all away. Now it's Apple who's making all the innovation with the PDA market in the form of iPodTouches and the like, whilst Palm fiddles with foleos...
Remember why the Glasshouse got axed? You can't be critical of the Liberal party's ridiculous actions! Especially when [click] Yeah, but curiously the ABC brought on "The Sideshow" this year, in which Paul McDermott is openly anti-Howard (it's wonderful to watch just for his little stand-up routines during the show)...
Personally, I think the Glasshouse was simply rating too well for the ABC to cope with. They axed it when the panic of being popular set in...
You don't have to vote for anyone No, the donkey vote is actually voting for the candidate who's first on the voting paper (as you number the boxes sequentially down the page). It is an incredibly stupid thing to do, as you give your vote randomly to someone without considering the consequences of your action.
If you don't want to vote, merely fold the ballot paper over and place it in the voting box without writing anything. Or you can scrawl some doggerel of your choice over the ballot paper first to make you feel better if you like. But please, leave the electing of representatives to people who've at least given some thought to the matter!
You are. There were more than a few die-hard palm fans that looked at the Foleo, and though "hey, that's worth $600." Most of those that didn't did not as much ridicule the concept (a Palm OS pseudo-Laptop!) as mock its lack of media capability. Well, that's certainly not true over at palminfocenter - most people there mocked the general design of something that was larger than a PDA and had less functionality (e.g. no touch screen, not as portable, lacking applications, etc, etc). A big criticism was that Palm had created the solution to a problem that didn't exist. Even those that did like the concept had to fall over backwards to justify some use for the thing.
If the Foleo could manage a plug-in USB 2.0 DVD drive, had a full PCMCIA slot, and out-of-the-box could be used to watch YouTube, it'd be on shelves right now. I'd expect the last one to be fixed, and then the Foleo launched in six months or so with the single "Palm Linux" OS. In other words, if the Foleo was actually a sub-notebook, rather than an oversized, feature-reduced PDA for which the principle use was to sync with your smart phone? Sure, you might sell them as well as an EeePC... but there still isn't the market for these things that Palm thought there was. A business user will already have, and need, a smart phone and a laptop: there's simply no call for some halfway house that has the worst of both items! Really, these things are just toys - very, very few people actually need something like this.
Remember, Palm initially hyped the Foleo as the "most exciting project" they'd ever designed. It was supposed to be revolutionary, the next big thing. Palm fans (myself included) were speculating for months what it could be. Hawkins was pushing this to the hilt. The reality is that he cocked up big time, and Palm has finally realised it.
You can't seriously tell me you believe this is all down to platform compatibility, can you? That problem hasn't just arisen in the last few weeks, and you don't hype a product, announce it with fanfare... and then pull it a month before its due to hit the shelves unless something went seriously wrong. And the thing that went seriously wrong, I would guess, is that nobody was going to buy it.
Perhaps they are referring to the occasional exception of "you must pay"? I've seen articles in major journals that are tagged as "free for all to read" even when it is normally the case that articles newer than, say, a year have to be paid for.
I think I've seen it in PNAS and Science, but I haven't kept a running tally. Usually it's articles of massive public interest that have seen wide coverage in the "lay press". Well, PNAS seems open access: I can download a paper from the latest edition easily enough...
2) If publishers are really contributing nothing to academic publishing, and just charge high prices and force you to sign away your rights (which I think is a fair characterization), here's a crazy idea: stop publishing through them! Set up your own journals and charge nothing or a token amount for access. If scientists are so bigoted they only deign to acknowledge work published in overpriced, unnecessary, exploitative publishers' journals, the problem is on the scientists' end. *laughs*... you've clearly never worked in academia if you're serious about that idea. You need high-impact publications to survive these days - it's not the acknowledgement from your peers that matters, it's the acknowledgement from the granting bodies that provide the research funding!
But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access.
It all is a routine, until they are caught, in which case they say "oops". They better try this not on legal students who care. I can't read TFA at the moment as it's been apparently/.ed, but I'm calling bullshit on this one. In the field I work in (molecular biology), there are a number of open access journals, and I've never been asked to pay for an article from any of them.
Unless I'm very much mistaken, there will never be a Foleo II. The press release is merely a cover for the fact that the product concept was DOA. Nobody was interested in the Foleo apart from a few geeks who wanted a cheap sub-notebook that ran linux. For business users there just wasn't a market for that thing and there most likely never will be.
Even die-hard Palm fans hated it, renaming it the Flopeo or Fooleo. Palm seriously screwed up with this one, but at least they had the courage to axe it before making complete fooleos of themselves...
This sounded especially insane to me...if NASA loses another shuttle because of this same tile-damage problem, and because they couldn't be bothered to take the time to fix the problem when they could have, it will be the end of NASA. Oh, come on, don't you remember what the letters in NASA actually stand for?
density r = m (assuming unit volume, as you are), acceleration a = F/r, therefore a = F/m; impact velocity v = 2as, therefore v = 2FVs / m; impact energy E = 1/2 m v^2, therefore E = 2 F^2 s^2 V^2 m^-1. F, s and V are all constant, as you point out, which makes the only factor the inverse of the mass. Which makes intuitive sense; energy scales with the square of the velocity, and a light object will be moving faster than a heavy object. I'm not sure whether adding in the 3g shuttle launch acceleration would make a difference to this. Can we please just go back to the snowball fight? At least it was funny...
Switching to another SO is hard for anyone. But for my mom who barely know how to write a email imposible. If your mother can barely write an email in Windows, chances are she'll find linux no more daunting.
Seriously, I hear this all the time: "I can't switch to Linux, I don't even understand Windows!"... to which my response is, "If you don't understand Windows, what have you got to lose??"
Note that the link for the Javascript launched method is broken. You have to add the l to html. Here's a direct link. Remember, alt tab to close. Huh, doesn't work for me under linux - the page just opens in a firefox tab, which is easy to close.
If this only causes problems with Windows users, that suits me just fine!:)
And furthermore, if you use google via a customised google page (http://www.google.com/ig) then even if you redirect that to https://.../ then the link to GMail is still regular http. If you're using a customised google page (and thus allowing google to store your search history, etc, etc) chances are you don't care too much about privacy anyway...
If all citizens were allowed to carry guns on a plane 911 would not have happened. That's true. Nothing terrorists could do could make for a worse society than the one you're envisioning...
Let me put it this way: if these things continue, soon we'll be only allowed to hear music on earphones. Because if you listen too loud in your house and SOMEONE can hear it from the street, then you're doing a public playback of your music, and you will certainly go to jail for that! Finally, some evidence that the RIAA is a force for good!
There is just no right answer to "Does this dress make me look fat?" If you say yes, you are being mean. She is mad, and you are in the doghouse. If you say no, you are lying to her. She is mad, and you are in the doghouse. You might as well go for the real zinger and tell her "It's not the dress." No, the right answer is to go out with a thin girl...
I have never seen any instance where Cairo made something faster. Well, Inkscape seems to think that Cairo makes their rendering faster:
"In this version, Inkscape starts using the cairo library for rendering. It is now used for outline mode display which, thanks to using cairo and other optimizations, redraws faster by about 25%. More impressive are memory savings: thanks to cairo, in outline mode Inkscape now takes only about 50% of the memory used by 0.45 for the same file."
People keep posting on other sites about how brilliant this is and how amazing Google's programmers are. Although I do really like it myself, all it does is make add another trip location where you click, and it's just a matter of calculating the route from the start to your point and from your point to the end, using the same stuff they've allready programmed. There's almost nothing new here. The difference between a user-hostile application and a user-friendly application is most often not the skill of the programmer, but the intuitive ui design of the programmer. The fact that this functionality was simple to implement merely makes the solution more elegant.
Your faith is remarkable but misguided. How many people do you think read the 10,000 line auto generated shell scripts we call "configure"? Not many. Probably none. Heh, I don't know about you, but I read them all the time when something in the configure process fcsks up.
I guess that gets filed under "security by screwed up customised systems"...
To quote George Carlin, "Give me ONE reason why a human being is better than a chicken. Just ONE....See? Nobody can do it! Why? Because chickens are honest, living creatures!" Heh, well, how about this...
A human can argue about whether they're better not, a chicken can't. And that's a fundamental difference between humans and all other animals, as far as we are aware.
See, it's simple to argue that a human is better than a chicken - the fact that the chicken can't disagree says it all.:)
But having said that, the entire argument is spurious as there are also ways in which a chicken is better than a human. It all depends on your perspective - what you define as "better".
And what any of this has to do with intelligent design, and why you got modded up to +5, is a complete mystery. But one thing is certain -/. mods are inarguable proof that intelligent design is a myth...:)
They make hard plastic and fiberglass knives now, too. Not sure what the metal detectors are supposed to do about them. That's all well and good, but where can I find the true terrorist's weapon of choice - the fibreglass nail-clipper?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, actuallyCongratulations Firefox, you've managed to get a boat load of people to download your browser, but somehow most people reject it after trying it.
According to http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm there are currently about 1,173 million people using the internet. (God knows whether this is an accurate number or not, but they seem to think they know what they're doing, and for the purposes of this unscientific
Therefore, 400 million downloads, assuming one download per person, would give a usage base of about 34%.
If Firefox usage is actually 17%, that suggests that about one in every two people that download it, stick with it. And that's pretty impressive if you ask me.
Stories like this come about because the mode you get if you press "sleep/wake" isn't a sleep mode at all, but a lock mode. The iPhone manual actually states that you use the sleep/wake button to lock the phone, which shows you how badly that button was named - at no point in the manual does it actually talk about putting the device to sleep. Here's what the manual says about this feature, p.14:
Talk about counter-intuitive!
as if 99,99% of them are actually going to look at or change the source. It's the philosophy behind the thing, for a start - freedom is important to some of us.
But anyway, I think your assumptions are wrong. I've contributed patches back to several OSS projects and privately hacked the source of numerous others, as well as having two OSS projects that I run myself. And I'm just a hobbyist who codes for fun when I've got a bit of spare time.
On
I think that's what really gets to people - Palm had so much going for it back in 2000, and yet from a massive user base with an astonishing wide range of software they threw it all away. Now it's Apple who's making all the innovation with the PDA market in the form of iPodTouches and the like, whilst Palm fiddles with foleos
Personally, I think the Glasshouse was simply rating too well for the ABC to cope with. They axed it when the panic of being popular set in
If you don't want to vote, merely fold the ballot paper over and place it in the voting box without writing anything. Or you can scrawl some doggerel of your choice over the ballot paper first to make you feel better if you like. But please, leave the electing of representatives to people who've at least given some thought to the matter!
Remember, Palm initially hyped the Foleo as the "most exciting project" they'd ever designed. It was supposed to be revolutionary, the next big thing. Palm fans (myself included) were speculating for months what it could be. Hawkins was pushing this to the hilt. The reality is that he cocked up big time, and Palm has finally realised it.
You can't seriously tell me you believe this is all down to platform compatibility, can you? That problem hasn't just arisen in the last few weeks, and you don't hype a product, announce it with fanfare
I think I've seen it in PNAS and Science, but I haven't kept a running tally. Usually it's articles of massive public interest that have seen wide coverage in the "lay press". Well, PNAS seems open access: I can download a paper from the latest edition easily enough
http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0703707104v1
But it is actually part of the systemic failure of the industry to promote Open Access.
It all is a routine, until they are caught, in which case they say "oops". They better try this not on legal students who care. I can't read TFA at the moment as it's been apparently
... it's called "saving face".
...
Unless I'm very much mistaken, there will never be a Foleo II. The press release is merely a cover for the fact that the product concept was DOA. Nobody was interested in the Foleo apart from a few geeks who wanted a cheap sub-notebook that ran linux. For business users there just wasn't a market for that thing and there most likely never will be.
Even die-hard Palm fans hated it, renaming it the Flopeo or Fooleo. Palm seriously screwed up with this one, but at least they had the courage to axe it before making complete fooleos of themselves
impact velocity v = 2as, therefore v = 2FVs / m;
impact energy E = 1/2 m v^2, therefore E = 2 F^2 s^2 V^2 m^-1.
F, s and V are all constant, as you point out, which makes the only factor the inverse of the mass. Which makes intuitive sense; energy scales with the square of the velocity, and a light object will be moving faster than a heavy object.
I'm not sure whether adding in the 3g shuttle launch acceleration would make a difference to this. Can we please just go back to the snowball fight? At least it was funny
Seriously, I hear this all the time: "I can't switch to Linux, I don't even understand Windows!"
If this only causes problems with Windows users, that suits me just fine!
"In this version, Inkscape starts using the cairo library for rendering. It is now used for outline mode display which, thanks to using cairo and other optimizations, redraws faster by about 25%. More impressive are memory savings: thanks to cairo, in outline mode Inkscape now takes only about 50% of the memory used by 0.45 for the same file."
I guess that gets filed under "security by screwed up customised systems"
A human can argue about whether they're better not, a chicken can't. And that's a fundamental difference between humans and all other animals, as far as we are aware.
See, it's simple to argue that a human is better than a chicken - the fact that the chicken can't disagree says it all.
But having said that, the entire argument is spurious as there are also ways in which a chicken is better than a human. It all depends on your perspective - what you define as "better".
And what any of this has to do with intelligent design, and why you got modded up to +5, is a complete mystery. But one thing is certain -