I saw an automated warehouse at Kodak in Rochester, New York, in 1975. What am I missing? Why is it so difficult now when it was done in 1975? The computers remembered where stuff was stored and the pickers just went to the spot and got the item. Some details omitted here, of course, but that was a long time ago when the relevant technology was relatively primitive.
About 15 years ago I found a bug that affected all Fourier-like transforms in Mathematica. (It was related to how the constants can be “allocated” between the exponent and an overall scale factor—someone had tried to generalize this concept by being too clever by half, and made a mistake.) I did a sanity check with comp.lang.mathematica or whatever the group is called and then filed a bug report. I understand that the error was not corrected until a later major release of Mathematica.
A few months ago I returned to Mathematica with a medium-sized project which involves some probabability calculations (PDFs, characteristic functions, etc.) I quickly found that Mathematica failed to crack an integral because it did not do a simple, trivial, second-semester substitution. I also found an error in the way a special function (MeijerG) is calculated numerically. In all, after only about three weeks of returning to using Mathematica, I filed five bug reports (one of which was UI-related) and have two or three saved up for when I get more time. I have watched the Mathematica release cycle for some years including the “dot” releases, and I am not encouraged that any of my reported bugs will be addressed before the next major release. (I believe that would be version 11.)
I have finally drank enough Kook-Aide to appreciate Mathematica and indeed have rather quickly (after my recent return) found it indespensible in my work; I am no longer even tussling with whether to use Octave/Matlab or Python/NumPy/SciPy for numerical work.
So: Why does Wolfram respond so slowly to bug reports? There seem to be only one x.1 or x.0.1 release after each major release, if that. Why not release more-frequent bug fixes like most other software houses, rather than let bugs exist for years in some cases?
I’m going to be as brief as I can. I could write pages on this topic. Buying progressive lenses twice over a few years has been the worst retail experience of my life. The dispensers are like clothes salespeople and other retail stores: get the customer out the door as fast as possible. Unfortunately that didn’t suit my style and so I had to become my own expert. I won’t write generally but will try to address your specific problem.
I have scanned the earlier comments and didn’t see all that much that is useful to you. (Sorry, other posters, I said _scanned_.)
First: There are _hundreds_ of progressive lens designs, and probably thousands of patents. Most dispensers have found that they have a decent success rate with a particular design; for all I know, they might have a bulk rate from a manufacturer. If the lens does not suit you, take them back and ask for another design. Any respectable dispenser will tolerate this—they won’t love you, but they will tolerate it. On my first go-round, I had four different designs, but then the lab screwed up at least one or two.
Some designs are quite crappy. There has been a lot of progress in lens design in the last 10 years. Some lenses are still designed by an old buy who remembers Zernike polynomials and does his work with a pencil and paper. You don’t want these. Get a modern lens design known as digital progressive lenses, high definition, HD, or more commonly, free-form. These designs are made using a computer and divide the lens up into “pixels” where a performance goal is met subject to an overall cost function. The in-between-points are probably interpolated with a cubic spline. You see, the problem with lens design is, if you try to make it better in one place, it gets worse in another place. This is why it is an interesting design problem. The modern, free-form designs are _far_ better than the old designs. Some designs actually allow precise measurments to be made on your frame _before_ the lens is made; this information is sent to the lab and incorporated into the lens design, essentially a custom-made design. Shamir comes to mind, but there are others. At least one company has a slick jig for an iPad and an optical splitter that fits over the iPad’s camera so that even a monkey could set this up without screwing things up. (FYI, be prepared to deal with monkeys.) The free-form designs can trade off near, intermediate, and distance regions that you can select depending on your lifestyle. Many new free-form designs excel at getting a wide channel, which is to say, the intermediate, which is great for most computer work. Free-form designs are much better at getting the near vision wider. My current lens is a free-form design and it is _far_ better in both intermediate width and near width than my old conventionally designed lenses. (FWIW, my current lens is the best Seiko lens, and I recommend them.) And you will also find that there are “computer glasses” which you should consider; these have giant intermediate and near regions and pretty much punt on distance.
Many dispensers will bitch and moan if you get a short lens (frame); these became fashionable 10+ years ago and still are. That’s bullshit. They will try to put you in an “old fart” frame because they claim that it forces fewer compromises on the design. Then they will take your prescription and increase it so that it is more powerful at the bottom of the giant lens so that it is correct at the near vision region that you actually use. You simply can’t rotate your eyeballs far enough to see to the bottom edge of a giant lens.
Getting the frame adjusted (bent) is critical for progressives. The optical axis has to be aligned with the optical axis of your eyeballs. The lenses come from the lab with a fitting cross or dot on the lens. If you get your new lenses and do not see the fitting cross, your dispenser has removed it. Ask them to put it back on. They have a simple tool to do this. The
Why are you such a Linux retard? You're killing yourself creatively by asking for this kind of of software for Linux. If you really want to explore your musical creativity you need to get the hell off such a limited platform. OS X and probably Windows platforms are far, far better as far as choices in this field. Yea, there is Adaucity which you're already found is a piece of crap, or would have discovered had you not limited your world to Linux. And Ardour—nice work, but that's about it. Do yourself a favor and let your creativity flow by looking outside the extremely limited options offered by Linux.
The Calligra web site is incredibly bad—there is almost no information about any of the programs, just a few superficial paragraphs. Just awful, an embarrassment to the development team, I'm sure.
This is an example of the "airport signs" problem: The people who build the airport already know how to get around the airport and so the signs that they put up are not helpful to those who rarely visit the airport.
On another crappy note, the link to the OS X installer just goes 404.
Right. Then the person gets back from his/her happy little camping trip and back into his/her normal life and three days later he/she is back on the same stupid schedule. I've done this many times and camping is not necessary—any outside influence that causes one to rise earlier will do. I didn't read the article but it sounds really stupid to me, so I won't.
Well, this does look interesting. I played with it for 15 minutes and: I can't think of anything worse than writing anything of any significant length inside a browser. This bypasses all of the hard work that my OS provider (Apple) has spent for decades polishing a decent user interface. As far as I can tell, everything has to be done using the mouse/trackpad—no keystroke shortcuts.
Also, compiling even the short sample document is excruciatingly slow. There is an option to use my local TeXLive installation but the radio button to select it was disabled. If one really wants an easier-to-use LaTeX editor, there are free ones that also provide one with menu-selectable math items.
The screen shots from https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Tour show that this interface is not using sub-pixel font rendering. I have noticed this on most if not all other Linux-type screen shots. Apparently the favored font rendering method on Linux is the old-fashioned "treat every pixel as some shade between the font color and the background color". The characters so rendered are substantially less well-formed and harder to read. And this surely isn't a matter of intellectual property: https://www.grc.com/cleartype.htm.
It's my understanding that tracking is done by cookies. I delete all cookies 2-3 times a day, and always after logging out of Google (which I rarely log in to) and Facebook. The only downside is that I have to log in to again to certain sites but that is easy because of OS X's built-in password manager.
Calling Microsoft Office "productivity software" is hilarious. I know we've all spent hours trying to do the simplest things with Office. I recently spent nine hours including querying a forum and Googling trying to figure out how to get Word to number equations. Nine hours, and all I got was a clumsy work-around. And I know this is the "right answer" and that I didn't miss something.
Slashdot Mirror
I saw an automated warehouse at Kodak in Rochester, New York, in 1975. What am I missing? Why is it so difficult now when it was done in 1975? The computers remembered where stuff was stored and the pickers just went to the spot and got the item. Some details omitted here, of course, but that was a long time ago when the relevant technology was relatively primitive.
About 15 years ago I found a bug that affected all Fourier-like transforms in Mathematica. (It was related to how the constants can be “allocated” between the exponent and an overall scale factor—someone had tried to generalize this concept by being too clever by half, and made a mistake.) I did a sanity check with comp.lang.mathematica or whatever the group is called and then filed a bug report. I understand that the error was not corrected until a later major release of Mathematica.
A few months ago I returned to Mathematica with a medium-sized project which involves some probabability calculations (PDFs, characteristic functions, etc.) I quickly found that Mathematica failed to crack an integral because it did not do a simple, trivial, second-semester substitution. I also found an error in the way a special function (MeijerG) is calculated numerically. In all, after only about three weeks of returning to using Mathematica, I filed five bug reports (one of which was UI-related) and have two or three saved up for when I get more time. I have watched the Mathematica release cycle for some years including the “dot” releases, and I am not encouraged that any of my reported bugs will be addressed before the next major release. (I believe that would be version 11.)
I have finally drank enough Kook-Aide to appreciate Mathematica and indeed have rather quickly (after my recent return) found it indespensible in my work; I am no longer even tussling with whether to use Octave/Matlab or Python/NumPy/SciPy for numerical work.
So: Why does Wolfram respond so slowly to bug reports? There seem to be only one x.1 or x.0.1 release after each major release, if that. Why not release more-frequent bug fixes like most other software houses, rather than let bugs exist for years in some cases?
Erim Radcliff
I’m going to be as brief as I can. I could write pages on this topic. Buying progressive lenses twice over a few years has been the worst retail experience of my life. The dispensers are like clothes salespeople and other retail stores: get the customer out the door as fast as possible. Unfortunately that didn’t suit my style and so I had to become my own expert. I won’t write generally but will try to address your specific problem.
I have scanned the earlier comments and didn’t see all that much that is useful to you. (Sorry, other posters, I said _scanned_.)
First: There are _hundreds_ of progressive lens designs, and probably thousands of patents. Most dispensers have found that they have a decent success rate with a particular design; for all I know, they might have a bulk rate from a manufacturer. If the lens does not suit you, take them back and ask for another design. Any respectable dispenser will tolerate this—they won’t love you, but they will tolerate it. On my first go-round, I had four different designs, but then the lab screwed up at least one or two.
Some designs are quite crappy. There has been a lot of progress in lens design in the last 10 years. Some lenses are still designed by an old buy who remembers Zernike polynomials and does his work with a pencil and paper. You don’t want these. Get a modern lens design known as digital progressive lenses, high definition, HD, or more commonly, free-form. These designs are made using a computer and divide the lens up into “pixels” where a performance goal is met subject to an overall cost function. The in-between-points are probably interpolated with a cubic spline. You see, the problem with lens design is, if you try to make it better in one place, it gets worse in another place. This is why it is an interesting design problem. The modern, free-form designs are _far_ better than the old designs. Some designs actually allow precise measurments to be made on your frame _before_ the lens is made; this information is sent to the lab and incorporated into the lens design, essentially a custom-made design. Shamir comes to mind, but there are others. At least one company has a slick jig for an iPad and an optical splitter that fits over the iPad’s camera so that even a monkey could set this up without screwing things up. (FYI, be prepared to deal with monkeys.) The free-form designs can trade off near, intermediate, and distance regions that you can select depending on your lifestyle. Many new free-form designs excel at getting a wide channel, which is to say, the intermediate, which is great for most computer work. Free-form designs are much better at getting the near vision wider. My current lens is a free-form design and it is _far_ better in both intermediate width and near width than my old conventionally designed lenses. (FWIW, my current lens is the best Seiko lens, and I recommend them.) And you will also find that there are “computer glasses” which you should consider; these have giant intermediate and near regions and pretty much punt on distance.
Many dispensers will bitch and moan if you get a short lens (frame); these became fashionable 10+ years ago and still are. That’s bullshit. They will try to put you in an “old fart” frame because they claim that it forces fewer compromises on the design. Then they will take your prescription and increase it so that it is more powerful at the bottom of the giant lens so that it is correct at the near vision region that you actually use. You simply can’t rotate your eyeballs far enough to see to the bottom edge of a giant lens.
Getting the frame adjusted (bent) is critical for progressives. The optical axis has to be aligned with the optical axis of your eyeballs. The lenses come from the lab with a fitting cross or dot on the lens. If you get your new lenses and do not see the fitting cross, your dispenser has removed it. Ask them to put it back on. They have a simple tool to do this. The
"How can users protect themselves from sometimes life endangering software bugs?"
Use Ada.
Do any Slashdot readers use this spyware, and if so, why?
Yet Another Brace Language
Why are you such a Linux retard? You're killing yourself creatively by asking for this kind of of software for Linux. If you really want to explore your musical creativity you need to get the hell off such a limited platform. OS X and probably Windows platforms are far, far better as far as choices in this field. Yea, there is Adaucity which you're already found is a piece of crap, or would have discovered had you not limited your world to Linux. And Ardour—nice work, but that's about it. Do yourself a favor and let your creativity flow by looking outside the extremely limited options offered by Linux.
The Calligra web site is incredibly bad—there is almost no information about any of the programs, just a few superficial paragraphs. Just awful, an embarrassment to the development team, I'm sure.
This is an example of the "airport signs" problem: The people who build the airport already know how to get around the airport and so the signs that they put up are not helpful to those who rarely visit the airport.
On another crappy note, the link to the OS X installer just goes 404.
Oh well.
Right. Then the person gets back from his/her happy little camping trip and back into his/her normal life and three days later he/she is back on the same stupid schedule. I've done this many times and camping is not necessary—any outside influence that causes one to rise earlier will do. I didn't read the article but it sounds really stupid to me, so I won't.
Well, this does look interesting. I played with it for 15 minutes and: I can't think of anything worse than writing anything of any significant length inside a browser. This bypasses all of the hard work that my OS provider (Apple) has spent for decades polishing a decent user interface. As far as I can tell, everything has to be done using the mouse/trackpad—no keystroke shortcuts.
Also, compiling even the short sample document is excruciatingly slow. There is an option to use my local TeXLive installation but the radio button to select it was disabled. If one really wants an easier-to-use LaTeX editor, there are free ones that also provide one with menu-selectable math items.
"What's your biggest fear?"
C
"Scientists created the web"
No—_engineers_ created the web.
Thanks. That's helpful.
The screen shots from https://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Tour show that this interface is not using sub-pixel font rendering. I have noticed this on most if not all other Linux-type screen shots. Apparently the favored font rendering method on Linux is the old-fashioned "treat every pixel as some shade between the font color and the background color". The characters so rendered are substantially less well-formed and harder to read. And this surely isn't a matter of intellectual property: https://www.grc.com/cleartype.htm.
"It'll also be possible to have multiple windows from a single app so that, for example, two browser windows can be opened side-by-side."
WFT? Is this for real? Was this not possible before? Surely the implication of this statement that this was not possible before is wrong.
YABL. Come on, people, really?
Unsafe arrays.
Forced-indexing into arrays.
Not interested.
This is the best comment on this entire page. LOL.
It's my understanding that tracking is done by cookies. I delete all cookies 2-3 times a day, and always after logging out of Google (which I rarely log in to) and Facebook. The only downside is that I have to log in to again to certain sites but that is easy because of OS X's built-in password manager.
Al Gore may be a politician, but after all, he did invent coding.
The United States government tramples property rights yet again. Slashdotters love it.
Calling Microsoft Office "productivity software" is hilarious. I know we've all spent hours trying to do the simplest things with Office. I recently spent nine hours including querying a forum and Googling trying to figure out how to get Word to number equations. Nine hours, and all I got was a clumsy work-around. And I know this is the "right answer" and that I didn't miss something.
Strong typing. LOL
OK--this is probably the stupidest and worst-informed /. post I have ever seen.
This, too, will fail.
I should have mentioned that the word processor that placed graphics intelligently was Fullwrite Professional.