At least a few MS products are superior to all competitors. If nothing else, you can hold up Excel as a shining example of excellence in software.
In some ways, maybe yes. In other ways, definitely no. Annoyance one: can't open multiple documents with the same name (as in, "project1/checklist.xls" and "project2/checklist.xls"). Annoyance two: can't use multiple top-level windows (almost-sorta possible by opening multiple instances, but there's no way to control which instance a clicked link opens in... although trial and error suggests that it generally goes round-robbin).
I don't know about where you live, but in Scotland, there are certainly many farms in remote parts of the country. I know of several farms and houses near me which are over 5-10 minutes drive from the nearest house, let alone the nearest town or polling station.
I find your idea of "remote" amusing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
Quote pidgin.im: "Also, we have chosen to go with monotone for our revision control".
That's a clear notice to me that they do not want anyone checking out their source code and having people hack on it.
How so? I see it more as an indication that SVN just doesn't cut it sometimes (why would anyone go to the extreme bother of switching if they didn't have a good reason?).
The law here is more about patents, and less about copyrights.
if in creating a product you knowingly violate a patent, thats a lot different from copying some movie.
You're making your living based upon work that someone else did and you are not paying for. It is much more analogous to a theater showing a pirated movie.
Analogous how? You patent $foo, I independently make something based on $foo, and then discover your patent while bringing it to market (Or, everyone knows $foo, you patent $foo, and then I choose to knowingly disregard your patent). Very different from, I see your patent and duplicate what it says (which is more analogous to your theater example).
Patents are a great idea, they allows knowledge to be put out into public domain.
They're *supposed* to, but then so it copyright. The question is whether and how well this actually works.
In today's world, every time you create something you have to check if someone has already patented it, thats the way it should be.
No, that's really ***ing stupid. If I invent/discover something, I *should not* have to make sure nobody's ever thought of it before. Patents are supposed to be for original, non-obvious inventions only, which would not be duplicated without this kind of publication... the thing is, even the existence of "check the patent office to make sure you're clear" (or, "don't check the patent office because you could get sued worse if you know") demonstrates that this is not the case. (It's also useful to note the "idea whose time has come" phenomenon, which leads to even insanely complex things like the integrated circuit being independently invented (and patented) by multiple teams at almost exactly the same time.)
As an end-user why can't I extend applications by simply dragging and dropping features from one application to another? i.e. Dragging a search box from one app to another.
Very much impossible to do as an end-user, but doable by a programmer with sufficient skill (dependent on how different the applications are, and how well they're coded) and free time (and source code access).
I have 1000s of photographs. How can these images be automatically categorized and displayed most effectively without having to manually add meta-data. It should be sorting images by looking at similarities between pictures, date taken and other automatically generated information
I have 1000s of mp3s. How can these songs be automatically categorized by mood, tempo, etc without manually entering in meta-data? Think of it as Pandora with your own music collection.
I recently saw a news bit about some "AI" system that can learn to recognize simple pictures in approximately this fashion, and I'd imaging categorizing sounds would follow similar principles. So, these two are probably half-way doable by someone who takes enough interest in such things to follow current research (and has obscene amounts of free time).
No, I'm New Here I was going to complain about the down modding of your comment, but then I realised that you probably chose that name for the purpose of making endless bad jokes like that....:-)
If you check its user page, that seems to be the *only* thing it ever posts.
Computers have *always* been used for "real engineering" as you call it. It's only recently that they've gotten cheap enough to use as toys.
we could get away with "k" sometimes meaning 1024 (like in memory addresses) and sometimes meaning 1000 (like in network speeds). Those days are past.
WTF? It's like any other part of language, things have different meanings in different contexts. What does "cat" mean?
Now that computers are part of real engineering work, even the slightest amount of ambiguity is not acceptable.
Ok, so do we rename cat-the-program or cat-the-heavy-machinery (and what about cat-the-animal)? Computers and heavy machinery are both used for "real engineering work", so we can't have any ambiguity in which we're talking about. That would be not acceptable.
Differentiating between "k" (=1000) and "ki" (=1024) is a sign that the computer industry is finally maturing. It's called progress.
No, it's a sign that too many people have sticks up their butts and can't accept that language can be context-dependent. The world is not binary, and failing to recognize this is likely one reason that software sucks so much.
Also, it's a sign that disks (as opposed to ram) are sized by cost, rather than efficient use of address lines. Ram is sold in power-of-2 sizes for technical reasons. Disks are different enough that those technical reasons aren't there, so marketing dictates that the prefixes used be chosen to give the largest numbers.
To me, this indicates that people who use AOL to search do not know the difference between a search box and a URL bar.
"Don't know", or "don't care"? About the only time I actually type something into the URL bar (as opposed to using it for copypasta from IRC/email) is when I've already been there so it'll pop up in the drop-down box after a couple characters (of course, if I visit the site *too* often, it'll already be in my bookmarks somewhere, so I can just go to it that way). Otherwise, using the search box a picking one of the top couple results is just easier than trying to remember an exact URL.
/me wonders about having the URL bar autocomplete look at bookmarks (by name and address, or maybe even keywords?) as well as recently visited sites
That's the way it should be IMHO. Avoid confusing the less technical users by putting only the essential configuration options in the GUI, but leave the more advanced configuration options available for advanced users who are capable of using GConf.
Why? An "advanced" tab, or one of those hide/unhide widgets would work just as well to not confuse people, and would make the options easier to find and use than burying them in GConf somewhere. (It would also allow for a "reset" button, to set these options back to the defaults. Thereby making them significantly safer to learn.)
If I have to use gconf-editor to make things work how I want, then something is broken.
"apt" upgrades are... never an issue if done from the console so that when upgrading libs the X server doens't crash on you.
...as long as you stay within some fairly generous sanity rules: (1) if you're running unstable, keep it moderately up-to-date (say, monthly), and (2) switching distros (Ubuntu -> Debian, but also probably the reverse) *will* fail and/or break things.
If you were to take half the money of the richest 10% of Americans and spread it out among the poorest 40%, you'd probably take one of the biggest steps in history towards eliminating poverty.
No, you'd actually make things worse. Because being "poor" here in the US, where even "poor" people generally have their basic needs met, isn't usually so much a financial issue as a mental issue (which is probably made worse by all the feel-good crap I hear about being taught in the public schools these days...).
You would teach people that they deserve / are entitled to handouts and freebies. And teaching people that they're entitled to take things like this would lead to (1) much greater dissatisfaction / sense of 'poorness', and (2) a correspondingly higher crime rate.
I've met (online) a number of people (in the US) who are below the poverty line and think that it's way to high, because they don't consider themselves poor. And then there are the "vocal poor", who are pissed off about not being able to buy whatever latest thing they want (because they're entitled to it). And then there are other societies where the richest people have less than either these "vocal poor" or the below-poverty-line-but-happy people, and everyone gets along just fine.
Using that money to provide specific *basic public services* instead of handouts unfortunately would also probably have much the same effects, although probably limited to the areas the services were in. Basically, if the services aren't up to whatever standards (say, what richer people pay for for themselves), then people receiving the services can complain and be upset about this because they don't bear the cost of providing said services. Perhaps providing subsidized (but not free) basic public services would work...
Here in the US we don't reprocess our spent fuel, because it costs more to reprocess that to just make new..... Personally, I think that would be worthwhile just to reduce the storage requirement.
Do you know whether or not the "costs more" counts the money saved by not having to pay for eternal storage for what's wasted? (And are the people that use the fuel in the first place even the same people that have to pay for the storage, or is it a taxpayer thing?)
Ok, I'll start with taking my old CRT TV apart... I've read somewhere in a forum that you can learn a lot about capacitors by prodding around at the insides. I'll let you know how it went...;)
There should be a fairly thick wire going into the side of the tube. If you cut that (you probably want to use something with an insulated handle) then the end that's not attached to the tube can be used as a high-voltage source, a few tens of kV at low current.
*nix is a highly modular component-based software system with a standard interface (flat byte streams) between components, and a basic set of standard components (given in the POSIX standard) that can be relied upon to always be present.
What would be more useful would be things like "have your prompt include the current path" and "use a text editor to write small scripts instead of trying to type really long lines". Also perhaps "diff -u <(command 1) <(command 2)" for comparing command output, although this goes more in the "useful tricks" category (along with most of the things from the article...) rather than the "good habits" category.
1) "Emotiflags" is a brand new term. A search on Google only showed 5 hits, all of which were emoticon flags (as in country flags), not emotional flags like:) and:(
2) One of the biggest problems people have with email is that it doesn't convey emotion. If the use of this concept becomes commonplace, it could mean good things for email. Being able to look at the emotion prior to opening the message will mean a lot less miscommunication.
3) While message forums have been doing this for ages, this is the first time I've seen it applied to email as some kind of header deta along with the to, from, subject, importance, etc.
And for what it's worth, the patent was filed almost a year and a half ago.
AIUI, patents aren't for "I want to do cool new thing X", but for "I have a cool new way to do X". Given the goal here (let emails have icons like some forum software has), at least the how-to-encode-it part is obvious (new header + an attachment for the image). The how-to-handle-it I can't comment on, since that part of the description relies heavily on some pictures that I didn't see in the linked application.
2) Using kernel interfaces makes the module itself a derivative work of the kernel.
Either 2) or 1a) (or both) might be accepted by a court, but they'd be an absolute disaster if they were. If 2) were accepted, then by the same taken, any software written for Windows would be considered a derivative work of Windows (and subject to Microsoft's terms and conditions)..... Neither of those is something anyone who supports free software should want, support, or rely on as a basis for copyright violation claims.
Ubuntu does funny things with doing final linking for the nvidia module at boot time (the linked module ends up in a ramdisk at/lib/modules/*/volatile). I'd say that this seems to indicate that 2 is accepted, except that Debian (which I hear tell is much more picky about such things) doesn't do this.
Why do you want to use Linux instead of Windows? If you are going to run closed, proprietary, unaudited code in ring 0, what benefits do you think you are going to get from running a Free/Open OS?
A very complete software system (OS + office + dev environment +...) without having to pay several hundred (or thousand) dollars. And I even get free upgrades, instead of having to pay again for the next version every couple years.
Also, that little bit of closed code doesn't make the rest of the code any less open. I can (and have) still change the rest of the system. So I get very nearly all the benefits I'd have without that driver (the only one missing is the ability to send kernel oops messages to lkml and have them taken seriously), plus the ability to use whatever piece of hardware it drives.
I'm sorry if this sounds like a troll, but it's a serious question.
Er, no, it's a troll. But I don't have mod points today, so...
If you install X.org / Cygwin, then you can pretty much run the same software on Windows that you would on Linux, so do you gain from running Linux? Worse driver support?
Stuff runs like crap under cygwin, and there's still the issue of that overpriced Windows layer under it.
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In some ways, maybe yes. In other ways, definitely no. Annoyance one: can't open multiple documents with the same name (as in, "project1/checklist.xls" and "project2/checklist.xls"). Annoyance two: can't use multiple top-level windows (almost-sorta possible by opening multiple instances, but there's no way to control which instance a clicked link opens in... although trial and error suggests that it generally goes round-robbin).
Notepad.
I find your idea of "remote" amusing, and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
That's a clear notice to me that they do not want anyone checking out their source code and having people hack on it.
How so? I see it more as an indication that SVN just doesn't cut it sometimes (why would anyone go to the extreme bother of switching if they didn't have a good reason?).
if in creating a product you knowingly violate a patent, thats a lot different from copying some movie. You're making your living based upon work that someone else did and you are not paying for. It is much more analogous to a theater showing a pirated movie.
Analogous how? You patent $foo, I independently make something based on $foo, and then discover your patent while bringing it to market (Or, everyone knows $foo, you patent $foo, and then I choose to knowingly disregard your patent). Very different from, I see your patent and duplicate what it says (which is more analogous to your theater example).
Patents are a great idea, they allows knowledge to be put out into public domain.They're *supposed* to, but then so it copyright. The question is whether and how well this actually works.
In today's world, every time you create something you have to check if someone has already patented it, thats the way it should be.No, that's really ***ing stupid. If I invent/discover something, I *should not* have to make sure nobody's ever thought of it before. Patents are supposed to be for original, non-obvious inventions only, which would not be duplicated without this kind of publication... the thing is, even the existence of "check the patent office to make sure you're clear" (or, "don't check the patent office because you could get sued worse if you know") demonstrates that this is not the case. (It's also useful to note the "idea whose time has come" phenomenon, which leads to even insanely complex things like the integrated circuit being independently invented (and patented) by multiple teams at almost exactly the same time.)
Very much impossible to do as an end-user, but doable by a programmer with sufficient skill (dependent on how different the applications are, and how well they're coded) and free time (and source code access).
I have 1000s of photographs. How can these images be automatically categorized and displayed most effectively without having to manually add meta-data. It should be sorting images by looking at similarities between pictures, date taken and other automatically generated information I have 1000s of mp3s. How can these songs be automatically categorized by mood, tempo, etc without manually entering in meta-data? Think of it as Pandora with your own music collection.I recently saw a news bit about some "AI" system that can learn to recognize simple pictures in approximately this fashion, and I'd imaging categorizing sounds would follow similar principles. So, these two are probably half-way doable by someone who takes enough interest in such things to follow current research (and has obscene amounts of free time).
If you check its user page, that seems to be the *only* thing it ever posts.
No, 3 extra as in 1027 = 1024 + 3 . They came so close to having a nice round number, and missed it by 3.
The court instructed Intel to retain all email for 1027 case-specific individuals from the data of case initiation ie 2005.
...where did the 3 extra people come from?
But wasabi isn't oil, so why would there be a problem?
Hmm, "MiB"... perhaps there is some good come from all this nonsense.
Computers have *always* been used for "real engineering" as you call it. It's only recently that they've gotten cheap enough to use as toys.
we could get away with "k" sometimes meaning 1024 (like in memory addresses) and sometimes meaning 1000 (like in network speeds). Those days are past.WTF? It's like any other part of language, things have different meanings in different contexts. What does "cat" mean?
Now that computers are part of real engineering work, even the slightest amount of ambiguity is not acceptableOk, so do we rename cat-the-program or cat-the-heavy-machinery (and what about cat-the-animal)? Computers and heavy machinery are both used for "real engineering work", so we can't have any ambiguity in which we're talking about. That would be not acceptable .
Differentiating between "k" (=1000) and "ki" (=1024) is a sign that the computer industry is finally maturing. It's called progress.No, it's a sign that too many people have sticks up their butts and can't accept that language can be context-dependent. The world is not binary, and failing to recognize this is likely one reason that software sucks so much.
Also, it's a sign that disks (as opposed to ram) are sized by cost, rather than efficient use of address lines. Ram is sold in power-of-2 sizes for technical reasons. Disks are different enough that those technical reasons aren't there, so marketing dictates that the prefixes used be chosen to give the largest numbers.
"Don't know", or "don't care"? About the only time I actually type something into the URL bar (as opposed to using it for copypasta from IRC/email) is when I've already been there so it'll pop up in the drop-down box after a couple characters (of course, if I visit the site *too* often, it'll already be in my bookmarks somewhere, so I can just go to it that way). Otherwise, using the search box a picking one of the top couple results is just easier than trying to remember an exact URL.
/me wonders about having the URL bar autocomplete look at bookmarks (by name and address, or maybe even keywords?) as well as recently visited sites
Why? An "advanced" tab, or one of those hide/unhide widgets would work just as well to not confuse people, and would make the options easier to find and use than burying them in GConf somewhere. (It would also allow for a "reset" button, to set these options back to the defaults. Thereby making them significantly safer to learn.)
If I have to use gconf-editor to make things work how I want, then something is broken.
No, you'd actually make things worse. Because being "poor" here in the US, where even "poor" people generally have their basic needs met, isn't usually so much a financial issue as a mental issue (which is probably made worse by all the feel-good crap I hear about being taught in the public schools these days...).
You would teach people that they deserve / are entitled to handouts and freebies. And teaching people that they're entitled to take things like this would lead to (1) much greater dissatisfaction / sense of 'poorness', and (2) a correspondingly higher crime rate.
I've met (online) a number of people (in the US) who are below the poverty line and think that it's way to high, because they don't consider themselves poor. And then there are the "vocal poor", who are pissed off about not being able to buy whatever latest thing they want (because they're entitled to it). And then there are other societies where the richest people have less than either these "vocal poor" or the below-poverty-line-but-happy people, and everyone gets along just fine.
Using that money to provide specific *basic public services* instead of handouts unfortunately would also probably have much the same effects, although probably limited to the areas the services were in. Basically, if the services aren't up to whatever standards (say, what richer people pay for for themselves), then people receiving the services can complain and be upset about this because they don't bear the cost of providing said services. Perhaps providing subsidized (but not free) basic public services would work...
Do you know whether or not the "costs more" counts the money saved by not having to pay for eternal storage for what's wasted? (And are the people that use the fuel in the first place even the same people that have to pay for the storage, or is it a taxpayer thing?)
There should be a fairly thick wire going into the side of the tube. If you cut that (you probably want to use something with an insulated handle) then the end that's not attached to the tube can be used as a high-voltage source, a few tens of kV at low current.
*nix is a highly modular component-based software system with a standard interface (flat byte streams) between components, and a basic set of standard components (given in the POSIX standard) that can be relied upon to always be present.
What would be more useful would be things like "have your prompt include the current path" and "use a text editor to write small scripts instead of trying to type really long lines". Also perhaps "diff -u <(command 1) <(command 2)" for comparing command output, although this goes more in the "useful tricks" category (along with most of the things from the article...) rather than the "good habits" category.
1) "Emotiflags" is a brand new term. A search on Google only showed 5 hits, all of which were emoticon flags (as in country flags), not emotional flags like
2) One of the biggest problems people have with email is that it doesn't convey emotion. If the use of this concept becomes commonplace, it could mean good things for email. Being able to look at the emotion prior to opening the message will mean a lot less miscommunication.
3) While message forums have been doing this for ages, this is the first time I've seen it applied to email as some kind of header deta along with the to, from, subject, importance, etc.
And for what it's worth, the patent was filed almost a year and a half ago.
AIUI, patents aren't for "I want to do cool new thing X", but for "I have a cool new way to do X". Given the goal here (let emails have icons like some forum software has), at least the how-to-encode-it part is obvious (new header + an attachment for the image). The how-to-handle-it I can't comment on, since that part of the description relies heavily on some pictures that I didn't see in the linked application.
"I'm sorry sir, but you're not permitted to work in this country. You'll have to go live on the streets."
Ubuntu does funny things with doing final linking for the nvidia module at boot time (the linked module ends up in a ramdisk at /lib/modules/*/volatile). I'd say that this seems to indicate that 2 is accepted, except that Debian (which I hear tell is much more picky about such things) doesn't do this.
A very complete software system (OS + office + dev environment + ...) without having to pay several hundred (or thousand) dollars. And I even get free upgrades, instead of having to pay again for the next version every couple years.
Also, that little bit of closed code doesn't make the rest of the code any less open. I can (and have) still change the rest of the system. So I get very nearly all the benefits I'd have without that driver (the only one missing is the ability to send kernel oops messages to lkml and have them taken seriously), plus the ability to use whatever piece of hardware it drives.
Er, no, it's a troll. But I don't have mod points today, so...
Stuff runs like crap under cygwin, and there's still the issue of that overpriced Windows layer under it.
...that would be the (yuppie) nuremberg defense, yes?
/window seat please