I've read or skimmed most of the posted comments on this posting and one amazing thing strikes me: virtually nobody is defending C++ or even saying good things about it! The readership of/. is obviously strongly oriented towards the sophisticated programmer, many presumably employed as programmers, and many who actually use C++. So there is a fairly obvious question: Why do people who apparently hate C++ use it?
"The winner, Charlie Miller, gets to keep the laptop and $10,000."
You mean like when your airplane flight is cancelled and the airline offers you a free ticket. Or when the food at a restaurant is crappy and they give you a coupon to eat there again.
TFA says that on OS X the new look is so fine that Camino users may switch. Not to denigrate the fine work of the Firefox team, but at least part of the new look is "faux" and is not really OS X goodness--in particular, the toolbar and its associated sheet doesn't behave like a real Mac app, pop-up menus look weird, and the tabs in the Advanced section of the preferences window look like tabs did several years ago. Also, scrolling is still jerky when using the trackpad on a Powerbook (but smooth when using the thumb bar--go figure) and there is still no integration with Keychain, OS X's password manager, and text copied from a web page looses its style and formatting when pasting into another program.
I suppose there is a plug-in somewhere to create thumbnail tabs and another one to make per-site preferences and another to save workspaces and another to make resizable text entry boxes, but for me, I get all that and much more in Omniweb (www.omnigroup.com), still the gold standard for browsers.
I am encouraged by the promise of better memory use. I've never seen a browser that didn't leak memory like a sieve.
This isn't the "English language" per se. It is technical language (the "C" language in "1984, if you like). Technical fields often borrow words from the common lexicon and re-use them with different and specific meanings. Engineering texts are not likely to change the definitions of words just because lay people misuse them.
Once again, BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL CAPACITY. BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL BITS. Bandwidth is a measure of a channel's range of frequencies over which it is effective. A bit is an amount of information. Capacity is the rate at which a channel can transfer information. Channel capacity is a function of bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1949.
Once again, BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL CAPACITY. BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL BITS. Bandwidth is a measure of a channel's range of frequencies over which it is effective. A bit is an amount of information. Capacity is the rate at which a channel can transfer information. Channel capacity is a function of bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1949.
Does LyX handle mathematical equations? Specifically, placement in-line, placement between lines, and most of all, numbering and cross-referencing and re-numbering?
There is no tyranny of Microsoft Word
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
·
· Score: 1
...the tyranny of Microsoft Word...
There is no "tyranny of Microsoft Word," only the feeling to need to follow the mindless masses. There have been many excellent "alternatives" to Microsoft Word ever since it debuted on the Macintosh in 1985. Yes, once Microsoft gained its massive market share, there were reasons for many to use it (file compatibility, because, you know, all simple memos _must_ be saved in.doc rather than as text or the much simpler.rtf), but those reasons do not exist for independent writers.
I seem to recollect that there was a famous spy case in the late 1980s or early 1990s wherein highly secret designs for quiet propeller designs were given to the Chinese. Does anyone else remember this?
"device for capturing waste heat from car engines to increase efficiency up to 40%"
TFA says that the invention involves spraying water into the combustion chamber. This reminds me of a farm tractor that my father told me about. He had used such a tractor as a kid or young man in Western Kansas, probably in the 1920s or 1930s. I can't remember if it was a diesel or not (I think it was). But in addition to having a fuel tank, it also had a smaller water tank (in addition, I suppose, to another water tank for radiative cooling). When the tractor hit a "tough spot," as will happen for example when a place where the soil is somewhat more moist than the surround soil, the tractor driver would pull a lever which would cause a small amount of water to be injected with the fuel into the cylinder, causing a burst of extra power.
I don't know if this is relevant prior art with respect to patenting, but it probably doesn't matter since patent examiners never look out the window anyway.
"If the Mac machine's browser is set to to open 'Safe' files after downloading, the.dmg gets mounted and the Installer is launched."
"...the installer is launched."
The use of passive voice makes this sentence incorrect. The user must click on the installer icon to launch the installer; the bad program will not install itself without user interaction.
Right. Making a presentation in a web browser is a supremely bad idea.
So how is that fundamentally different than doing word processing or spreadsheets or anything else except surfing the web in a browser. It's not. It all sucks in oh so many ways. So many ways.
Maybe someone can explain to me all the excitement about moving everything inside a browser. The only advantage I can see is that it makes things OS-independent. But that is one high price to pay for a sucky experience. And whose to say that Microsoft or somebody else won't exploit users' ignorance and make a monopoly of _that_.
Why to discussions about the technical aspects of audio always devolve into stupidity when it's just a branch of electrical engineering?
The lead/. piece is full of errors and misconceptions that keep propagating. I'm not going bother to read TFA because I can already guess where it goes.
I'm going to address only one issue here. TFA (/.-redacted) says "Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound." Who makes this crap up? The compression is done in electronics before it is committed to a distribution medium. If vinyl really does regain popularity, the same marketing assholes who are forcing the mastering engineers to overcompress CDs will force them to overcompress vinyl.
On a side note, try to find the LPs made in the 1970s by Sheffield Labs. Stunning (except for the usual noise floor of vinyl). Recorded direct-to-disk with the only intervening electronics being the microphone preamps and the amplifiers that drive the cutting head. They did issue them on CD (eventually) but I can't find any, myself.
Unsanity's Application Enhancer uses the debugger framework to access and modify an application's memory space. Since Leopard randomizes memory, one might expect that trouble would ensue.
The Unsanity hacks have been a source of trouble for many users for several years. Unsanity has vehemently denied that their products are the trouble, and by a twisted piece of logic, it is the application itself which is misbehaving when things go wrong. It's not hard to find heated discussions of these things on message boards and sites like versiontracker.com and macupgrade.com. The source of the disagreements might be related to how long a person leaves an application open, with the probability of mayhem increasing with time since launch. These remarks relate to pre-Leopard versions of the OS; it seems that Unsanity is finally caught with their pants down and no place to crap.
It's always IMHO great to hear that someone has discovered this fact about relative costs of similarly equipped Macs and non-Macs, but the situation has been pretty much unchanged since the Mac was introduced in 1984. When it is possible to comparable similarly-equipped machines, Macs traditionally fare well. However, it isn't always possible to find non-Macs that are equipped similarly to Macs, since Macs tend to have certain features years in advance of non-Macs. (I'm sure the opposite is true, too.) For example, every Mac ever made has had built-in networking, including the 128 Mac of early 1984. In the same era, Macs had GUI's and bit-mapped displays. The same 1984 model had a four-channel sound synthesizer built-in, allowing the simultaneous creation of four arbitrary sounds--PCs of the day could only beep. More recently, Macs lead the pack with USB, Firewire, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth EDR. I'm sure others can add to this list.
"We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP."
Cochran Freund & Young LLP is the inventor's law firm, not the examiner. The inventor's attorney is not responsible for examining the patent but rather for representing the inventor in the prosecution of the patent application. The examination is handled by government employees, in this case employees of the United States Trademark and Patent Office, and are known as patent examiners; their name or names are listed next to the word "Examiner" on the front matter of the published patent.
Also, the poster referenced the application number rather than the patent number which is more appropriate since the patent has been allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Use Ada.
"Is Linux ready for the masses?"
/. every few months is some sort of indicator.
I think that the fact that this question keeps coming up on
Why the hell are these computers connected to the internet? (Ditto for computers controlling power plants and the power grid.)
I've read or skimmed most of the posted comments on this posting and one amazing thing strikes me: virtually nobody is defending C++ or even saying good things about it! The readership of /. is obviously strongly oriented towards the sophisticated programmer, many presumably employed as programmers, and many who actually use C++. So there is a fairly obvious question: Why do people who apparently hate C++ use it?
"The winner, Charlie Miller, gets to keep the laptop and $10,000."
You mean like when your airplane flight is cancelled and the airline offers you a free ticket. Or when the food at a restaurant is crappy and they give you a coupon to eat there again.
"I'm a software developer but have not had any formal training in UI design or look and feel."
That would make you the perfect Microsoft employee.
TFA says that on OS X the new look is so fine that Camino users may switch. Not to denigrate the fine work of the Firefox team, but at least part of the new look is "faux" and is not really OS X goodness--in particular, the toolbar and its associated sheet doesn't behave like a real Mac app, pop-up menus look weird, and the tabs in the Advanced section of the preferences window look like tabs did several years ago. Also, scrolling is still jerky when using the trackpad on a Powerbook (but smooth when using the thumb bar--go figure) and there is still no integration with Keychain, OS X's password manager, and text copied from a web page looses its style and formatting when pasting into another program.
I suppose there is a plug-in somewhere to create thumbnail tabs and another one to make per-site preferences and another to save workspaces and another to make resizable text entry boxes, but for me, I get all that and much more in Omniweb (www.omnigroup.com), still the gold standard for browsers.
I am encouraged by the promise of better memory use. I've never seen a browser that didn't leak memory like a sieve.
This isn't the "English language" per se. It is technical language (the "C" language in "1984, if you like). Technical fields often borrow words from the common lexicon and re-use them with different and specific meanings. Engineering texts are not likely to change the definitions of words just because lay people misuse them.
Once again, BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL CAPACITY. BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL BITS. Bandwidth is a measure of a channel's range of frequencies over which it is effective. A bit is an amount of information. Capacity is the rate at which a channel can transfer information. Channel capacity is a function of bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1949.
Once again, BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL CAPACITY. BANDWIDTH DOES NOT EQUAL BITS. Bandwidth is a measure of a channel's range of frequencies over which it is effective. A bit is an amount of information. Capacity is the rate at which a channel can transfer information. Channel capacity is a function of bandwidth and signal to noise ratio.
Claude Shannon, The Mathematical Theory of Communication, University of Illinois Press, 1949.
Does LyX handle mathematical equations? Specifically, placement in-line, placement between lines, and most of all, numbering and cross-referencing and re-numbering?
There is no "tyranny of Microsoft Word," only the feeling to need to follow the mindless masses. There have been many excellent "alternatives" to Microsoft Word ever since it debuted on the Macintosh in 1985. Yes, once Microsoft gained its massive market share, there were reasons for many to use it (file compatibility, because, you know, all simple memos _must_ be saved in .doc rather than as text or the much simpler .rtf), but those reasons do not exist for independent writers.
This nonsense of describing downloaded music as "digital" to distinguish it from that on CDs needs to stop.
I seem to recollect that there was a famous spy case in the late 1980s or early 1990s wherein highly secret designs for quiet propeller designs were given to the Chinese. Does anyone else remember this?
"device for capturing waste heat from car engines to increase efficiency up to 40%"
TFA says that the invention involves spraying water into the combustion chamber. This reminds me of a farm tractor that my father told me about. He had used such a tractor as a kid or young man in Western Kansas, probably in the 1920s or 1930s. I can't remember if it was a diesel or not (I think it was). But in addition to having a fuel tank, it also had a smaller water tank (in addition, I suppose, to another water tank for radiative cooling). When the tractor hit a "tough spot," as will happen for example when a place where the soil is somewhat more moist than the surround soil, the tractor driver would pull a lever which would cause a small amount of water to be injected with the fuel into the cylinder, causing a burst of extra power.
I don't know if this is relevant prior art with respect to patenting, but it probably doesn't matter since patent examiners never look out the window anyway.
"If the Mac machine's browser is set to to open 'Safe' files after downloading, the .dmg gets mounted and the Installer is launched."
"...the installer is launched."
The use of passive voice makes this sentence incorrect. The user must click on the installer icon to launch the installer; the bad program will not install itself without user interaction.
Right. Making a presentation in a web browser is a supremely bad idea.
So how is that fundamentally different than doing word processing or spreadsheets or anything else except surfing the web in a browser. It's not. It all sucks in oh so many ways. So many ways.
Maybe someone can explain to me all the excitement about moving everything inside a browser. The only advantage I can see is that it makes things OS-independent. But that is one high price to pay for a sucky experience. And whose to say that Microsoft or somebody else won't exploit users' ignorance and make a monopoly of _that_.
Why to discussions about the technical aspects of audio always devolve into stupidity when it's just a branch of electrical engineering?
/. piece is full of errors and misconceptions that keep propagating. I'm not going bother to read TFA because I can already guess where it goes.
The lead
I'm going to address only one issue here. TFA (/.-redacted) says "Since the audio on vinyl can't be compressed to such extremes, records generally offer a more nuanced sound." Who makes this crap up? The compression is done in electronics before it is committed to a distribution medium. If vinyl really does regain popularity, the same marketing assholes who are forcing the mastering engineers to overcompress CDs will force them to overcompress vinyl.
On a side note, try to find the LPs made in the 1970s by Sheffield Labs. Stunning (except for the usual noise floor of vinyl). Recorded direct-to-disk with the only intervening electronics being the microphone preamps and the amplifiers that drive the cutting head. They did issue them on CD (eventually) but I can't find any, myself.
Unsanity's Application Enhancer uses the debugger framework to access and modify an application's memory space. Since Leopard randomizes memory, one might expect that trouble would ensue.
The Unsanity hacks have been a source of trouble for many users for several years. Unsanity has vehemently denied that their products are the trouble, and by a twisted piece of logic, it is the application itself which is misbehaving when things go wrong. It's not hard to find heated discussions of these things on message boards and sites like versiontracker.com and macupgrade.com. The source of the disagreements might be related to how long a person leaves an application open, with the probability of mayhem increasing with time since launch. These remarks relate to pre-Leopard versions of the OS; it seems that Unsanity is finally caught with their pants down and no place to crap.
Hmmm.... Could Ross Perot have been right after all?
Great. Now we need someone to define Slashdot addiction.
It's always IMHO great to hear that someone has discovered this fact about relative costs of similarly equipped Macs and non-Macs, but the situation has been pretty much unchanged since the Mac was introduced in 1984. When it is possible to comparable similarly-equipped machines, Macs traditionally fare well. However, it isn't always possible to find non-Macs that are equipped similarly to Macs, since Macs tend to have certain features years in advance of non-Macs. (I'm sure the opposite is true, too.) For example, every Mac ever made has had built-in networking, including the 128 Mac of early 1984. In the same era, Macs had GUI's and bit-mapped displays. The same 1984 model had a four-channel sound synthesizer built-in, allowing the simultaneous creation of four arbitrary sounds--PCs of the day could only beep. More recently, Macs lead the pack with USB, Firewire, WiFi, Bluetooth, and Bluetooth EDR. I'm sure others can add to this list.
"We should also give praise to the extensive patent review performed by Cochran Freund & Young LLP."
Cochran Freund & Young LLP is the inventor's law firm, not the examiner. The inventor's attorney is not responsible for examining the patent but rather for representing the inventor in the prosecution of the patent application. The examination is handled by government employees, in this case employees of the United States Trademark and Patent Office, and are known as patent examiners; their name or names are listed next to the word "Examiner" on the front matter of the published patent.
Also, the poster referenced the application number rather than the patent number which is more appropriate since the patent has been allowed.
This brings a whole new meaning to a "disk crash."
As a Macintosh user, I have to ask, what's a driver?