I've watched various people start to learn to use a computer (Mac or windows) for 20 years now. The general non-technical public can't learn nuthin' right! Whether it's a one-button or two-button mouse, an incredible number of folk can't understand that not every darn thing needs to be double-clicked. I try showing them that various stuff (like formatting buttons in toolbars) require only one click, but no luck. If they can't figure out one vs. two clicks, they'll never grasp the concept of a "contextual menu."
A number of magazines do this -- give you web access to most or all of previous issues but not the one currently on newstands. Given that yesterday's newspaper (hard copy) is only useful for wrapping fish, why not charge for access to today's issue but make all else free?
Of course, there is the prisoner's-dilemma-like difficulty if one newspaper does this but the competitors give away today's news.
No, it's a posessive. "The group at IBM which belongs to him apparently created this stuff". Ok technically it should perhaps be whom's, but that would sound really odd.
Do I get to be the first humor-impaired person to point out that the correct word is "whose" ? There is no "whom's" in the English language, and "who's" can only be a contraction. P.S. you also mispeled possesssssive
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition >9.0 already removes spyware if you choose to enable that feature. Didn't I read a story (or rumor) on/. a year or two ago which claimed Symantec and other AV houses had contract agreements w/ M$oft promising that the AV software would specifically ignore any stuff tagged as being installed by M$oft? IIRC the agreement further promised that the AV tools would not even provide any notification to the user that said spyware existed. Anyway, my tin-foil-hat point is that you have to trust the software to do its job, but you've got no way to verify this fact.
Many posts so far have rightfully complained about the slow performance of OO.o under X11. But if you install NeoOffice/J instead, it boots and runs rather smoothly. This is still a wrapper of sorts around OpenOffice, so the actual window, toolbars, and so on are the same. But I think you'll find NeoOffice/J to be quite good enough for freeware.
BTW, regardless of platform, OpenOffice has just GOT to implement "Normal View" for its word processing module. This has been on their wish/bug list for a couple years now. What's the holdup?
>>Stop being a sore winner... unprecedented tax cuts for which the 10% most wealthy americans are getting 80% of the dollars!
>Stop being a sore liberal; the top bracket is 35% and the lowest bracket is 0%.
Stop being just plain wrong. The top bracket applied to AGI may be 35%, but the actual marginal tax rate varies like crazy. Above certain thresholds (somewhere around $150,000 for a family) your personal deductions as well as your Schedule A deductions start getting phased out. This leads to a "hump" in the true marginal rate which doesn't flatten out until somewhere around $250,000 or $300,000. And by the time you get that high, your accountant has a bunch of other tricks to cut your effective rate (sigh).
Wasn't the hubble telescope just an adaptation of the Keyhole series of spysats anyway? More or less: the contract wasn't given to a certain very experienced optics house in upstate NY but instead to Perkin-Elmer, whose program manager promptly screwed up.
But I always grudgingly go back to Microsoft Word for only one reason - the grammar checker. It really does make a difference. I'm not convinced. The grammar rules that Word comes up with are pretty lame. They don't like technical journal - style text, and they aren't really much good at comprehending or commenting on well-written material in general. The grammar checker may catch some singular-plural mismatches but not much beyond that.
and the robots would NEVER have attacked a human (at least until 'robots and empire'). Nitpick: one of the stories in I, Robot does in fact involve a renegade robot who comes very close to harming a human. His Second Law had been modified, removing the phrase "or through inaction" from the directive not to harm humans.
>>In the 1950's a lot of aerospace journals were talking about antigravity research (specifically, electro-gravitics).
>I bet you can't give 'a lot' of references to back up that statement.
More to the point: as Feynmann and others have explained, an antigravity machine is an infinite energy source. Take a Ferris Wheel (or equivalent) and place one-half of it in the anti-gravity beam; the other half remaining in a gravity field.
One word: robo-lanes. Highways would have a special lane for autonomous cars only. Funny: The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry had an exhibit on the "car/highway of the future" with exactly this concept, including an embedded guidewire in the pavement. The exhibit went up around 1960 IIRC.
Negative numbers are pretty abstract in themselves. Heck, so are nonnegative numbers. Can you show me a "two"? No. You can show me a numeral "2," or two of some object. I'll grant it's easier to demonstrate a quantity associated with two than a quantity associated with -2 or 2i, but there are plenty of mathematicians who have the ability to comprehend the latter quantities just as easily as plain old 2.
>>>If it wasn't for this equation, your cell phone wouldn't work.
>>If it wasn't for the laws of nature things wouldn't work. The mathematical formulas are our way of expressing them.
>>Mathematical formulas indicate an understanding of such laws, so without that understanding, your cell phone wouldn't work.
So far so good: nobody has started posting postmodern philosophical claims that in fact the laws of nature only exist after we decide they do.:-) I think I might phrase the quoted comments as: "Without our ability to form mathematical models we would be unable to design complicated hardware that actually performed the functions we desired."
I wondered about that too, sort of. WHether or not Brazil thinks they could build a nuclear ICBM, what's the chance that they would accept a contract to launch someone else's payload?
Re:Doppler shifting radio waves?
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 2, Informative
Forgive my ingorance, but don't you have to me going *really fucking fast* if you want to make any noticeable doppler shift in light? Well, you could RTFA:-), but here's the answer: Doppler shifts occur parallel to the direction of motion. If you view at an angle to that motion, the shift reduces by the cosine. Cassini will drop Huygens and then run like hell to the side, so to speak, to be in position by the time Huygens reaches the atmosphere.
Re:Lots of amazing stuff
on
Saving Huygens
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
They were supposed to run a simulation, as one of three safety nets to catch such problems, but decided not to because of the cost. Which doesn't make sense: did nobody at NASA have the brainpower to conceive of sending an emulated signal just like the one they actually ended up using? How much could it have cost to run a few hours' testing of Cassini's commlink prior to assembly of the craft? It's *always* a good thing to check system components in a full emulation environment. I think there were many problems, and one of them was that the system (or system test) engineers didn't stop to think of the Q&D way to get some proper failsafe testing done.
Having never tried any VNC stuff whatsoever, I put UltraVNC (server) on my WinXP box and ChickenOfTheVNC (client) on my iMac (10.3.5), and in 30 seconds was connected and running just fine. There was noticeable lag in video updating, which I expected given a) wireless network, and b) trying to run VPinMAME:-). The only thing in the whole procedure that surprised me (never RTFM of course) was that UltraVNC got its own IP address, not the one belonging to the WinXP machine itself.
Are you really trying to equate the two types of research?
When you learn how to cure a disease, you learn how to cure it for all the people of the world. Forever.
When you fix some computer security issue. You fix it on a subset of computers that OS/app runs on, which will last maybe 5-10 years till the next generation of equipment/OS's comes out making that fix obsolete. I know you meant well, but your analogy fails. Once we thought we'd "cured" TB and polio, but they are making major comebacks due primarily to worldwide failures of public health systems. We thought we'd "cured" any number of bacteriological illnesses, but the darn critters learned to be immune to all our cute antibiotics. Heck, even our eradication of smallpox may be at risk, if not from some wacko terrorist, from the idiots who insisted on restarting vaccination programs. It'll only take a couple bad vaccine outcomes to release live pox into the environment. Not to mention that we're not too sure just how long those vaccines us old folk got in the 60's really last.
with the exception of the coloration and the stone paddles, these "new" primates seem to resemble the grey gorillas in Michael Crichton's (sp?) Congo quite well.
Guess that means we're due for an updated version of This hardware soon.:-)
Antibiotic resistance was noted in hospitals in the 50's and 60's, spurring the few physicians who observed it to advise restrictions on antibiotic prescriptions. Few, however, heeded this advice and decades later, antibiotics are still prescribed readily throughout the world I don't have the figures available, but I do know that rather massive amounts of antibiotics are mixed into animal feed for various food herds (that is, any animal raised to be eaten). This is, or was, a major contributor to MDR strains in the wild.
Wonder if the typical slashdotter is starting to get the picture of why the NRA gets wigged out when gun registration is mentioned???
Can someone please explain to me why this got modded +5 Interesting? Are there still/.-ers who dont' understand that anything with "gun" "abortion" or "Microsoft" is a Troll?
Slashdot Mirror
The Declaration of Independence is the mission statement on which the country was founded. It contains a rejection of the divine right of kings,
Hey! My first troll! To wit: In that case, nobody told GWBush about this part.
I've watched various people start to learn to use a computer (Mac or windows) for 20 years now. The general non-technical public can't learn nuthin' right! Whether it's a one-button or two-button mouse, an incredible number of folk can't understand that not every darn thing needs to be double-clicked. I try showing them that various stuff (like formatting buttons in toolbars) require only one click, but no luck.
If they can't figure out one vs. two clicks, they'll never grasp the concept of a "contextual menu."
A number of magazines do this -- give you web access to most or all of previous issues but not the one currently on newstands. Given that yesterday's newspaper (hard copy) is only useful for wrapping fish, why not charge for access to today's issue but make all else free?
Of course, there is the prisoner's-dilemma-like difficulty if one newspaper does this but the competitors give away today's news.
No, it's a posessive. "The group at IBM which belongs to him apparently created this stuff". Ok technically it should perhaps be whom's, but that would sound really odd.
Do I get to be the first humor-impaired person to point out that the correct word is "whose" ? There is no "whom's" in the English language, and "who's" can only be a contraction.
P.S. you also mispeled possesssssive
Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition >9.0 already removes spyware if you choose to enable that feature. /. a year or two ago which claimed Symantec and other AV houses had contract agreements w/ M$oft promising that the AV software would specifically ignore any stuff tagged as being installed by M$oft?
Didn't I read a story (or rumor) on
IIRC the agreement further promised that the AV tools would not even provide any notification to the user that said spyware existed.
Anyway, my tin-foil-hat point is that you have to trust the software to do its job, but you've got no way to verify this fact.
Hmm... try
stty erase "^H" to get rid of those pesky ^H's when you hit backspace/del
Jeepers. Another n00by l@m3r who doesn't know squat about Unix editors. Learn from us Masters!
ZZ
.
^C
Q!
[ESC]
dammit.... oh, never mind
In case you missed the WSJ today, P&G is giving them 58 billion in stock and promising to lay off 6000 after the merger.
Many posts so far have rightfully complained about the slow performance of OO.o under X11. But if you install NeoOffice/J instead, it boots and runs rather smoothly. This is still a wrapper of sorts around OpenOffice, so the actual window, toolbars, and so on are the same. But I think you'll find NeoOffice/J to be quite good enough for freeware.
BTW, regardless of platform, OpenOffice has just GOT to implement "Normal View" for its word processing module. This has been on their wish/bug list for a couple years now. What's the holdup?
>>Stop being a sore winner ... unprecedented tax cuts for which the 10% most wealthy americans are getting 80% of the dollars!
.
>Stop being a sore liberal; the top bracket is 35% and the lowest bracket is 0%.
Stop being just plain wrong. The top bracket applied to AGI may be 35%, but the actual marginal tax rate varies like crazy. Above certain thresholds (somewhere around $150,000 for a family) your personal deductions as well as your Schedule A deductions start getting phased out. This leads to a "hump" in the true marginal rate which doesn't flatten out until somewhere around $250,000 or $300,000
And by the time you get that high, your accountant has a bunch of other tricks to cut your effective rate (sigh).
Wasn't the hubble telescope just an adaptation of the Keyhole series of spysats anyway?
More or less: the contract wasn't given to a certain very experienced optics house in upstate NY but instead to Perkin-Elmer, whose program manager promptly screwed up.
But I always grudgingly go back to Microsoft Word for only one reason - the grammar checker. It really does make a difference.
I'm not convinced. The grammar rules that Word comes up with are pretty lame. They don't like technical journal - style text, and they aren't really much good at comprehending or commenting on well-written material in general. The grammar checker may catch some singular-plural mismatches but not much beyond that.
and the robots would NEVER have attacked a human (at least until 'robots and empire').
Nitpick: one of the stories in I, Robot does in fact involve a renegade robot who comes very close to harming a human. His Second Law had been modified, removing the phrase "or through inaction" from the directive not to harm humans.
>>In the 1950's a lot of aerospace journals were talking about antigravity research (specifically, electro-gravitics).
>I bet you can't give 'a lot' of references to back up that statement.
More to the point: as Feynmann and others have explained, an antigravity machine is an infinite energy source. Take a Ferris Wheel (or equivalent) and place one-half of it in the anti-gravity beam; the other half remaining in a gravity field.
One word: robo-lanes. Highways would have a special lane for autonomous cars only.
Funny: The Chicago Museum of Science and Industry had an exhibit on the "car/highway of the future" with exactly this concept, including an embedded guidewire in the pavement. The exhibit went up around 1960 IIRC.
Thursday? You mean the Red Sox' Series win is just another implanted memory from before time?
Figures....
Negative numbers are pretty abstract in themselves.
Heck, so are nonnegative numbers. Can you show me a "two"? No. You can show me a numeral "2," or two of some object. I'll grant it's easier to demonstrate a quantity associated with two than a quantity associated with -2 or 2i, but there are plenty of mathematicians who have the ability to comprehend the latter quantities just as easily as plain old 2.
>>>If it wasn't for this equation, your cell phone wouldn't work.
:-)
>>If it wasn't for the laws of nature things wouldn't work. The mathematical formulas are our way of expressing them.
>>Mathematical formulas indicate an understanding of such laws, so without that understanding, your cell phone wouldn't work.
So far so good: nobody has started posting postmodern philosophical claims that in fact the laws of nature only exist after we decide they do.
I think I might phrase the quoted comments as: "Without our ability to form mathematical models we would be unable to design complicated hardware that actually performed the functions we desired."
I wondered about that too, sort of. WHether or not Brazil thinks they could build a nuclear ICBM, what's the chance that they would accept a contract to launch someone else's payload?
Forgive my ingorance, but don't you have to me going *really fucking fast* if you want to make any noticeable doppler shift in light? :-), but here's the answer: Doppler shifts occur parallel to the direction of motion. If you view at an angle to that motion, the shift reduces by the cosine. Cassini will drop Huygens and then run like hell to the side, so to speak, to be in position by the time Huygens reaches the atmosphere.
Well, you could RTFA
They were supposed to run a simulation, as one of three safety nets to catch such problems, but decided not to because of the cost.
Which doesn't make sense: did nobody at NASA have the brainpower to conceive of sending an emulated signal just like the one they actually ended up using? How much could it have cost to run a few hours' testing of Cassini's commlink prior to assembly of the craft? It's *always* a good thing to check system components in a full emulation environment.
I think there were many problems, and one of them was that the system (or system test) engineers didn't stop to think of the Q&D way to get some proper failsafe testing done.
Having never tried any VNC stuff whatsoever, I put UltraVNC (server) on my WinXP box and ChickenOfTheVNC (client) on my iMac (10.3.5), and in 30 seconds was connected and running just fine. There was noticeable lag in video updating, which I expected given a) wireless network, and b) trying to run VPinMAME :-) .
The only thing in the whole procedure that surprised me (never RTFM of course) was that UltraVNC got its own IP address, not the one belonging to the WinXP machine itself.
Are you really trying to equate the two types of research?
When you learn how to cure a disease, you learn how to cure it for all the people of the world. Forever.
When you fix some computer security issue. You fix it on a subset of computers that OS/app runs on, which will last maybe 5-10 years till the next generation of equipment/OS's comes out making that fix obsolete.
I know you meant well, but your analogy fails. Once we thought we'd "cured" TB and polio, but they are making major comebacks due primarily to worldwide failures of public health systems.
We thought we'd "cured" any number of bacteriological illnesses, but the darn critters learned to be immune to all our cute antibiotics.
Heck, even our eradication of smallpox may be at risk, if not from some wacko terrorist, from the idiots who insisted on restarting vaccination programs. It'll only take a couple bad vaccine outcomes to release live pox into the environment. Not to mention that we're not too sure just how long those vaccines us old folk got in the 60's really last.
with the exception of the coloration and the stone paddles, these "new" primates seem to resemble the grey gorillas in Michael Crichton's (sp?) Congo quite well.
:-)
Guess that means we're due for an updated version of This hardware soon.
Antibiotic resistance was noted in hospitals in the 50's and 60's, spurring the few physicians who observed it to advise restrictions on antibiotic prescriptions. Few, however, heeded this advice and decades later, antibiotics are still prescribed readily throughout the world
I don't have the figures available, but I do know that rather massive amounts of antibiotics are mixed into animal feed for various food herds (that is, any animal raised to be eaten). This is, or was, a major contributor to MDR strains in the wild.
Wonder if the typical slashdotter is starting to get the picture of why the NRA gets wigged out when gun registration is mentioned???
/.-ers who dont' understand that anything with "gun" "abortion" or "Microsoft" is a Troll?
Can someone please explain to me why this got modded +5 Interesting? Are there still