For most of the desktop apps I use, the MAN pages and Web documentation offered to users by the apps' developers seem to lag a couple of versions behind the code.
However, using Google brings its own problems: as other posters here have commented, you tend to find more people asking the same question than you find answers.
Even on forums that do have the answers, they're often buried on the tenth page of "me too" comments responding to the question.
Those forums would be a lot more helpful if, from time to time, someone went through and deleted the cruft, or edited every posting of a question to include a link to the answer, so that the useful information would get a better pagerank.
Better yet would be if someone were to paste the useful answers into a Wiki page, editing them to include some context, and make clear which versions of the app and which distros the answer applies to.
But who would that someone be? Where would we keep the Wiki page? And how would we credit the poster of the original helpful information, and the owner or operator of the forum where they posted it? (If you don't think that's important, then you haven't understood the psychology of a lot of these forums and their users....)
The article on the Scientific American site is three years old and has just been republished, as they explain at the very top of the story:
> Editor's Note: This story was originally printed in the
> December 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine.
> What may be of more importance is that the venerable 'Economist' > (although I believe its always been seen as left leaning)
Maybe your political parties swing different ways to the ones in li'l old England, but The Economist, to me, has always seemed right-leaning.
In British terms, right-leaning means favouring unfettered free enterprise, low taxes and free markets. Right-leaners liked Thatcher and her Conservative Party (whose colour is blue.)
Left-leaning publications favor high taxes, socialism, market regulation and nationalisation. They support the Labour Party (whose colour is red.)
And don't get me started on "liberal". Just be aware that to an American, a Frenchman, an Englishman in politics, and an Englishman serving you alcohol, "liberal" means four very different things, respectively Clinton, Bush, a centrist party and a generous serving.
It also seems that obviously they don't want "free" stuff, because there's "no such thing as a free lunch" down-under.
Of course Australians love "free" stuff. That's why a lot of their ancestors were transported there by the British government! Or perhaps this sudden reticence is a reaction to the painful folk memory of what happened when one of their ancestors didn't pay for something....
Of course, we'd be more competitive if we copied China's lead and forced some farmers to produce food for our country for near-slave wages.
Your farming industry (I'm assuming you live in the U.S. because of your "south of the border" remark) already owes much of its competitivity to near-slave wages paid to migrant workers on your own soil.
In my native Europe, things are scarcely better. Spanish strawberries are often harvested by migrants from North Africa who, because of their immigration status, have little economic power. In England, they employ Poles to pick potatoes and Chinese to collect cockles (a kind of shellfish). The Poles are at least paid enough to afford housing and food, but the Chinese work for little money in dangerous conditions on treacherous tidal sands. They can't complain to the authorities about their working conditions because they're illegal immigrants, and their situation only came to light in February when twenty drowned and police investigated.
I will readily admit that I haven't really gotten into the resistance side of the game, so it may be that all the rest is to try to force the player into becoming a rebel.
Looks like you may have been playing it wrong -- or, if that seems too prescriptive a verdict for a free-form roleplaying game, then at the very least I'd say you've been missing out on a lot of the fun. Isn't trying to hide your activities on 'the resistance side of the game' the whole point of it for players?
Just out of interest, in which language did you write to tell them all this?
It's a little-known (in the U.S.) fact that people in other countries speak languages other than English.
For instance, I live in France, and my mail provider in the U.S. uses a whole bunch of these predominantly U.S.-based blacklists. Much of the mail sent via French ISPs by my friends is blocked because just once, perhaps seven or eight months ago, someone managed to send some spam from an account with those ISPs before having their account closed. Those ISPs are doomed to remain on the blacklists forever because, although the problem has been solved (open relays closed, AUP tightened up and closely followed) their technical staff can't get off the black hole lists because the lists' documentation and (in the case of one list) ransom demands are in American English. To a non-U.S. ISP, email from a black hole list operator looks very much like Korean or Brazilian spam must do to you: gibberish.
I've written to a few of these ISPs, explaining the problem and translating some of the information for them, but I don't have time to compensate for the weaknesses of two countries' education systems single-handedly.
If you want someone to do something for you (whether it be to fix the leak in a hotel room or to secure an open mail relay in a network) then it helps to talk to them in their language, rather than shouting at them louder and louder in your own.
Google is recruiting engineers for a research facility called GCHEESE due to open on the moon in 2007, according to the company's recruitment pages.
Surely they wouldn't run TWO April Fools in one year?
Despite all the childish sniggering, there is a very good reason why there is demand for one-handed keyboards. In fact, it seems insane that the vast majority of keyboards can only be operated by people with MORE THAN THE AVERAGE NUMBER OF HANDS.
Worked it out yet?
Yes, that's right: the average number of hands is less than two, because not everyone has two hands.
Two friends of mine would be delighted to get hold of a one-handed keyboard: one lost the use of his hand in an industrial accident, the other in a car accident.
This has always irritated me: in the U.K., a gallon is 80 fluid ounces, a quart 40 and a pint 20. So when we visit the U.S., we really get short-changed. And no, there are no warning notices "Gallon used to mean 64 oz" at the gas station.
(As an aside, this is why Americans visitors should take extra care when drinking British beer: not only will they find it disgustingly warm, but the higher alcohol content and 25% larger pints can have unexpected effects....)
Perhaps so that you can pick it up and peek around the corners of the object you're modelling? Beats having to get up and walk around your desk, and it's a lot easier than lifting a 50kg HDTV and moving that around....
A lot of people here seem to be missing the way these tags are going to be used in retailing.
The tag would not inform the washing machine what temperature the garment needed to be washed on.
Rather, it would tell the washing machine its unique identity number, and the washing machine would search a database to find out what type and color of garment that item related to, and how it needed to be washed.
That being the case, the machine would be able to describe to you the items that need to be removed in order to resolve the problem.
Depending on the washing machine's own memory capacity, and on how much information is accessible to the public in the global database of tagged products, the machine might also warn you when the load you're about to wash is mostly white but also contains one brightly colored item that has only just been bought, or that it has never washed before, and is therefore likely to lose its color....
Switching is pretty easy, even on an hour-by-hour or day-by-day basis. I was trained as a touch-typist using English keyboards, but for the last three years have worked (in French and English) with a French keyboard (on which I am writing this).
It generally takes me about two minutes of typing (and hitting delete a lot!) to adapt to the "other" keyboard. The differences between the layouts are not as major as between qwerty and Dvorak, but significant nonetheless:
- the first line of a French keyboard is azerty
- you use the shift key to get numbers; without shift, you get &é"'(-è_çà
- most other punctuation marks have moved
Now, I can write in either language on either keyboard with equal fluency, but it took me a couple of months of regular use to get to that stage.
What confuses me the most is switching from the PC I use at work to the Macintosh I use at home, where the @ - and _ keys are in different places....
Slashdot Mirror
For most of the desktop apps I use, the MAN pages and Web documentation offered to users by the apps' developers seem to lag a couple of versions behind the code.
However, using Google brings its own problems: as other posters here have commented, you tend to find more people asking the same question than you find answers.
Even on forums that do have the answers, they're often buried on the tenth page of "me too" comments responding to the question.
Those forums would be a lot more helpful if, from time to time, someone went through and deleted the cruft, or edited every posting of a question to include a link to the answer, so that the useful information would get a better pagerank.
Better yet would be if someone were to paste the useful answers into a Wiki page, editing them to include some context, and make clear which versions of the app and which distros the answer applies to.
But who would that someone be? Where would we keep the Wiki page? And how would we credit the poster of the original helpful information, and the owner or operator of the forum where they posted it? (If you don't think that's important, then you haven't understood the psychology of a lot of these forums and their users....)
The article on the Scientific American site is three years old and has just been republished, as they explain at the very top of the story: > Editor's Note: This story was originally printed in the > December 2005 issue of Scientific American magazine.
> What may be of more importance is that the venerable 'Economist'
> (although I believe its always been seen as left leaning)
Maybe your political parties swing different ways to the ones in li'l old England, but The Economist, to me, has always seemed right-leaning.
In British terms, right-leaning means favouring unfettered free enterprise, low taxes and free markets. Right-leaners liked Thatcher and her Conservative Party (whose colour is blue.)
Left-leaning publications favor high taxes, socialism, market regulation and nationalisation. They support the Labour Party (whose colour is red.)
And don't get me started on "liberal". Just be aware that to an American, a Frenchman, an Englishman in politics, and an Englishman serving you alcohol, "liberal" means four very different things, respectively Clinton, Bush, a centrist party and a generous serving.
Divided by a common language....
Of course Australians love "free" stuff. That's why a lot of their ancestors were transported there by the British government! Or perhaps this sudden reticence is a reaction to the painful folk memory of what happened when one of their ancestors didn't pay for something....
At first I thought this was going to be something about voter registration fraud.
... Oh, wait! get OUT the vote?
Then I thought maybe it was an add-on for The Sims.
And then
Your farming industry (I'm assuming you live in the U.S. because of your "south of the border" remark) already owes much of its competitivity to near-slave wages paid to migrant workers on your own soil.
Eric Schlosser wrote an interesting essay on the economic situation of laborers in the Californian strawberry fields in his book Reefer Madness : Sex, Drugs, and Cheap Labor in the American Black Market.
In my native Europe, things are scarcely better. Spanish strawberries are often harvested by migrants from North Africa who, because of their immigration status, have little economic power. In England, they employ Poles to pick potatoes and Chinese to collect cockles (a kind of shellfish). The Poles are at least paid enough to afford housing and food, but the Chinese work for little money in dangerous conditions on treacherous tidal sands. They can't complain to the authorities about their working conditions because they're illegal immigrants, and their situation only came to light in February when twenty drowned and police investigated.
Looks like you may have been playing it wrong -- or, if that seems too prescriptive a verdict for a free-form roleplaying game, then at the very least I'd say you've been missing out on a lot of the fun. Isn't trying to hide your activities on 'the resistance side of the game' the whole point of it for players?
It's a little-known (in the U.S.) fact that people in other countries speak languages other than English.
For instance, I live in France, and my mail provider in the U.S. uses a whole bunch of these predominantly U.S.-based blacklists. Much of the mail sent via French ISPs by my friends is blocked because just once, perhaps seven or eight months ago, someone managed to send some spam from an account with those ISPs before having their account closed. Those ISPs are doomed to remain on the blacklists forever because, although the problem has been solved (open relays closed, AUP tightened up and closely followed) their technical staff can't get off the black hole lists because the lists' documentation and (in the case of one list) ransom demands are in American English. To a non-U.S. ISP, email from a black hole list operator looks very much like Korean or Brazilian spam must do to you: gibberish.
I've written to a few of these ISPs, explaining the problem and translating some of the information for them, but I don't have time to compensate for the weaknesses of two countries' education systems single-handedly.
If you want someone to do something for you (whether it be to fix the leak in a hotel room or to secure an open mail relay in a network) then it helps to talk to them in their language, rather than shouting at them louder and louder in your own.
You started saying random command lines to a sleeping person, and you claim you were still coherent?
Great story, though.
Sorry, hadn't noticed that Ulky had this news six hours ago.
Google is recruiting engineers for a research facility called GCHEESE due to open on the moon in 2007, according to the company's recruitment pages. Surely they wouldn't run TWO April Fools in one year?
Despite all the childish sniggering, there is a very good reason why there is demand for one-handed keyboards. In fact, it seems insane that the vast majority of keyboards can only be operated by people with MORE THAN THE AVERAGE NUMBER OF HANDS.
Worked it out yet?
Yes, that's right: the average number of hands is less than two, because not everyone has two hands.
Two friends of mine would be delighted to get hold of a one-handed keyboard: one lost the use of his hand in an industrial accident, the other in a car accident.
Lots of people die from being too hot.
15,000 died as a result of a heatwave in France this summer, and 2,000 died in the U.K..
This has always irritated me: in the U.K., a gallon is 80 fluid ounces, a quart 40 and a pint 20. So when we visit the U.S., we really get short-changed. And no, there are no warning notices "Gallon used to mean 64 oz" at the gas station.
(As an aside, this is why Americans visitors should take extra care when drinking British beer: not only will they find it disgustingly warm, but the higher alcohol content and 25% larger pints can have unexpected effects....)
Perhaps so that you can pick it up and peek around the corners of the object you're modelling? Beats having to get up and walk around your desk, and it's a lot easier than lifting a 50kg HDTV and moving that around....
A lot of people here seem to be missing the way these tags are going to be used in retailing.
The tag would not inform the washing machine what temperature the garment needed to be washed on.
Rather, it would tell the washing machine its unique identity number, and the washing machine would search a database to find out what type and color of garment that item related to, and how it needed to be washed.
That being the case, the machine would be able to describe to you the items that need to be removed in order to resolve the problem.
Depending on the washing machine's own memory capacity, and on how much information is accessible to the public in the global database of tagged products, the machine might also warn you when the load you're about to wash is mostly white but also contains one brightly colored item that has only just been bought, or that it has never washed before, and is therefore likely to lose its color....
Switching is pretty easy, even on an hour-by-hour or day-by-day basis. I was trained as a touch-typist using English keyboards, but for the last three years have worked (in French and English) with a French keyboard (on which I am writing this). It generally takes me about two minutes of typing (and hitting delete a lot!) to adapt to the "other" keyboard. The differences between the layouts are not as major as between qwerty and Dvorak, but significant nonetheless: - the first line of a French keyboard is azerty - you use the shift key to get numbers; without shift, you get &é"'(-è_çà - most other punctuation marks have moved Now, I can write in either language on either keyboard with equal fluency, but it took me a couple of months of regular use to get to that stage. What confuses me the most is switching from the PC I use at work to the Macintosh I use at home, where the @ - and _ keys are in different places....