Or even a field on the book record saying, "This book is located in N building".
If the catalog was smart enough, it could know what building you were searching from, and flag those records in your building and another building differently.
I used to be not-a-geek. I was browsing my library's selection of humor books (nonfiction), and my eye was caught by the word "hacker" on a big yellow book nearby. One of my friends was a hacker... what was it all about, anyway?
I wound up checking out and reading the dead-tree version of the Jargon File, cover-to-cover. Despite knowing how to use computers, and despite my father's being a programmer, that was what got me interested in computers, because I realized that computers were what People Like Me were interested in. Without having read that, I wouldn't have taken that programming class in high school...
I'm now headed after my first bachelor's degree in computer information systems.
Also, there's very little substitute for being able to open all the interesting-looking books in a subject and skim the table of contents and index, as well as flip through the pages. So an Ideal Library System would have ToC and Index searchable as well...
A roommate of mine seems to negate all cellphone key-locking measures short of him turning it off and putting it down somewhere that he can't touch it. I've recieved accidental calls from him several times. I can hear what's going on around him, but the phone's clipped to his belt and he's not aware it's transmitting...
We didn't have reliable caller ID at the time, so I had to guess who it was based on what I could hear, which sometimes wasn't very enlightening, and was sometimes quite interesting.
I'm sure he does this to other random people in his address book.
I hope one wouldn't be able to dial the isophone accidentally.
Reading Grumbles from the Grave, it seemed that he in part regarded himself as a hack. I see a lot of him in Jubal Harshaw, based on his published letters.
After the third or so Dune book, I noticed the quality of the books declining, to the point where I got a headache reading one of them, and quit it partway through.
The only thing that stuck in my head about the book as memorable was that these two people were stuck in some sort of shielded spacecraft and hated each other and somehow wound up having a lot of sex. I was fifteen, what can I say. But it says something about the vitality of a series if the author manages to make sex tedious.
Do all prolific F/SF authors have a point where they just keep writing when they haven't anything more to say? Or rather, keep writing when they've got an axe to grind, but rather than griding the axe couched in some good story, they choose to have a flimsy story and bludgeon the reader over the head with the axe.
(Credit is due to the person on the dendarii.com list who came up with the axe analogy many years ago...)
I liked Number of the Beast up until it devolved into HeinleinCon 5007 (or whatever year it was supposed to be; I stopped paying attention...)
It read like Heinlein was writing the first half, and then a rabid fan who wanted to tie all of his works together more than they were already finished it.
I thought the movie was a great satire of modern war. We don't ever really learn why they're fighting, just that the bugs are the bad guys, and it's as slick as a modern US commercial for the military. If I were designing an ad for a future military, based on how they're recruiting now, it would look like that movie.
Unfortunately, the greatest similarity I saw between the book and the movie was the title. I thought it was a decent movie, but only if you didn't pretend it was Heinlein...
Also, it's not out of date in all places. My family lives in Alaska. Cellular service has made it to some of the larger cities, but it's only been in the last ten years or so that places even 20 miles away from Fairbanks (2nd largest city) have gotten hooked into the electrical grid.
They're also easier tech than cellphones. My mother, who is my shining example of someone completely non-technical, can operate one of my father's handheld radios with minimal coaching. Cellphones, especially as they're coming to resemble tiny computers, intimidate her; I'm not sure she'd even know how to turn one on to dial 911, if it requires anything more than pressing a button clearly marked 'ON' in large print.
If the battery in a simple handheld ham radio runs out and the power is not on, I can pop in household batteries, and not worry. If my cellphone runs out of juice and the power is off, I have to hope that I thought of purchasing a spare battery or a car charger.
...and, coincidentally, she thought the site was hilarious. (My roommate, who has far too much time on his hands, found that site and shared it with me about two weeks ago, and I spread the joy.)
Now I know why so few of us female slashdotters are single -- we're all dating each other!
Or take my mother. She's 52 by now, she's timid with computers, and it's been a bit of a struggle to convince her to deal with real system messages without running to us and panicking.
If she doesn't have written instructions on the exact steps to take to perform an operation on the computer, she can't do it. (After the first month of doing it regularly, she usually can do without the instructions. Until then, we have to walk her through it again and again.)
Things on the internet are even less clear to her. It took me an hour to convince her that it was okay for me to sign up for a free e-mail address, and that I would not be charged because Hotmail paid for itself by showing me banner ads. She's not stupid; she has a bachelor's degree in biology. (Her specialty was pond scum, which ought to make her understand the minds of the doubleclick advertisers perfectly, but I digress).
It's not a matter of intelligence. She just doesn't know computers.
Yes. Checking for false positives is always in order. False positives should not automatically mean the same consequences as true positives where the penalty for having a true positive is enormous.
(I can understand the need for having a false positive on, say, a HIV screening for a blood donor meaning that the blood donor gets permanently rejected, because a false positive in that situation means that someone can't donate anymore, and a false negative means that someone gets a deadly disease. But a case where a false positive loses an innocent person their job is not cool.)
Otherwise, if touching the record accidentally for a legitimate reason gets you canned, the technique should really be named "honey bucket" rather than "honey token"...
I took a look at the parent website and saw a lot of Plausible Deniability in action -- they outsourced their advertising to contractors, who were supposed to send the adverts only to e-mail addresses who were open to receiving commercial e-mail. Shyeah, right. As if any of them were really doing that...
She didn't say that it was her own experience, though if it had been, I doubt she would have owned up to it.
Your mention of oil of wintergreen as a substance to avoid applying there sounds like something the brother of an ex of mine experienced.
My ex had discovered that just a teeny tiny dab of Flexall 454 on his hand for when he was performing "personal attentions" enhanced the experience. He shared this intelligence with his younger brother, who decided that if a little was good, more must be better.
I don't think that anyone who is familiar with the properties of menthol, and the sensitivity of certain male body parts, would be at all surprised at the scene that followed, which, I was assured, was legendary.
No lasting physical harm was done, but my ex's little brother was not in the least happy about the proceedings, and my ex has a cherished, if somewhat wince-inducing, example of his little brother's sheer cluelessness.
Wonderful, as long as no genius decides that if a condom can be patched with duct tape, the entire process would go a little smoother with some WD-40.
My high school sex-ed class got strictly and specifically lectured that WD-40 was never to be used as a sexual lubricant unless we really really wanted to court chemical burns in places that would be really fun to explain in the emergency room.
Marathon LAN party? Though the user might crash before the laptop ran out of juice.
And if it'll run 40 hours without a recharge, if you use it for 10 hours a day, that's 4 days you don't have to come out of the closet in the guest room at your mother-in-law's house.
As a former employee of a survey company, I am not fond of surveys being exempt from this list. People who sign up for Do Not Call lists are accustomed to any call that even sounds like it is going to waste their time as being a call that is banned, and get what is professionally called "irate", causing hearing damage and paperwork for the hapless college student on the being-screamed-at end of the call.
I got sick and tired of having to explain that I was a survey, not a telemarketer, I would not attempt to sell them anything, I would not use personally identifiable information about them for anything, their data was only to be looked at in large clumps, and I would not have phone sex with them!
As the person who got screamed at and otherwise abused, I would like nothing better than to NOT call people who are going to do that. It wastes their time, and wastes my time, and damages my hearing.
If you sign up for a Do Not Call List and fail to read the documentation closely, you may be under the impression that all mass calls to you are illegal, and no amount of explaination by the front-line flunky, or their manager, or the person at the company's 800 number, is going to convince this person differently, because, dammit, they have the Law on Their Side, and that was Illegal and Immoral and They Oughtta Pay For This... and they wind up wasting more of their time on righteous indignation caused by them not properly understanding the terms of the list than they would by quietly saying, "Put me on your do-not-call list" and hanging up.
I would far rather lose some accuracy in the survey, not call these people, and not waste everyone's time. If you don't want some phone company to call you to ask you if you want their service, you will NOT want the hired representative of that phone company to call you to ask you what you think of that service, another nationally known service, and the third service that you actually use for forty minutes.
I do think that certain surveys, such as the youth antismoking survey I had the pleasure of administering, should be exempt from Do Not Call lists, as those will actually be used to figure out ways that kids can be convinced that not only is smoking bad for their health, they should not try it (at least until they are of legal age).
(Amusingly, one man who happened to be employed by the cigarette company who was in fact sponsoring the study politely refused to have his kids take the survey, as he was afraid it would give him a bad rep with them for working for a cigarette company.)
However, surveys that don't have a purpose as noble as that one, such as a survey on burger preferences, should not be exempted from the national Do Not Call list.
Slashdot Mirror
If the catalog was smart enough, it could know what building you were searching from, and flag those records in your building and another building differently.
All bets are off when a geek has written the recipe. "Hold on, let me compile a shopping list!" is a common phrase in this household.
I used to be not-a-geek. I was browsing my library's selection of humor books (nonfiction), and my eye was caught by the word "hacker" on a big yellow book nearby. One of my friends was a hacker... what was it all about, anyway?
I wound up checking out and reading the dead-tree version of the Jargon File, cover-to-cover. Despite knowing how to use computers, and despite my father's being a programmer, that was what got me interested in computers, because I realized that computers were what People Like Me were interested in. Without having read that, I wouldn't have taken that programming class in high school...
I'm now headed after my first bachelor's degree in computer information systems.
Also, there's very little substitute for being able to open all the interesting-looking books in a subject and skim the table of contents and index, as well as flip through the pages. So an Ideal Library System would have ToC and Index searchable as well...
We didn't have reliable caller ID at the time, so I had to guess who it was based on what I could hear, which sometimes wasn't very enlightening, and was sometimes quite interesting.
I'm sure he does this to other random people in his address book.
I hope one wouldn't be able to dial the isophone accidentally.
Reading Grumbles from the Grave, it seemed that he in part regarded himself as a hack. I see a lot of him in Jubal Harshaw, based on his published letters.
Though nearly as genetically close as a clone.
The only thing that stuck in my head about the book as memorable was that these two people were stuck in some sort of shielded spacecraft and hated each other and somehow wound up having a lot of sex. I was fifteen, what can I say. But it says something about the vitality of a series if the author manages to make sex tedious.
Do all prolific F/SF authors have a point where they just keep writing when they haven't anything more to say? Or rather, keep writing when they've got an axe to grind, but rather than griding the axe couched in some good story, they choose to have a flimsy story and bludgeon the reader over the head with the axe.
(Credit is due to the person on the dendarii.com list who came up with the axe analogy many years ago...)
It read like Heinlein was writing the first half, and then a rabid fan who wanted to tie all of his works together more than they were already finished it.
Unfortunately, the greatest similarity I saw between the book and the movie was the title. I thought it was a decent movie, but only if you didn't pretend it was Heinlein...
They're also easier tech than cellphones. My mother, who is my shining example of someone completely non-technical, can operate one of my father's handheld radios with minimal coaching. Cellphones, especially as they're coming to resemble tiny computers, intimidate her; I'm not sure she'd even know how to turn one on to dial 911, if it requires anything more than pressing a button clearly marked 'ON' in large print.
If the battery in a simple handheld ham radio runs out and the power is not on, I can pop in household batteries, and not worry. If my cellphone runs out of juice and the power is off, I have to hope that I thought of purchasing a spare battery or a car charger.
Excellent karma is great. Am, however, not sure if above link counts as 'excellent'.
Now I know why so few of us female slashdotters are single -- we're all dating each other!
...they'd detect the OS, and serve up an appropriately-themed banner ad.
If she doesn't have written instructions on the exact steps to take to perform an operation on the computer, she can't do it. (After the first month of doing it regularly, she usually can do without the instructions. Until then, we have to walk her through it again and again.)
Things on the internet are even less clear to her. It took me an hour to convince her that it was okay for me to sign up for a free e-mail address, and that I would not be charged because Hotmail paid for itself by showing me banner ads. She's not stupid; she has a bachelor's degree in biology. (Her specialty was pond scum, which ought to make her understand the minds of the doubleclick advertisers perfectly, but I digress).
It's not a matter of intelligence. She just doesn't know computers.
Even if I had to only roll above a 1 on a sanity check to avoid clicking on it, I still had to roll that sanity check, and thus I was inconvenienced.
(I can understand the need for having a false positive on, say, a HIV screening for a blood donor meaning that the blood donor gets permanently rejected, because a false positive in that situation means that someone can't donate anymore, and a false negative means that someone gets a deadly disease. But a case where a false positive loses an innocent person their job is not cool.)
Otherwise, if touching the record accidentally for a legitimate reason gets you canned, the technique should really be named "honey bucket" rather than "honey token"...
I took a look at the parent website and saw a lot of Plausible Deniability in action -- they outsourced their advertising to contractors, who were supposed to send the adverts only to e-mail addresses who were open to receiving commercial e-mail. Shyeah, right. As if any of them were really doing that...
Your mention of oil of wintergreen as a substance to avoid applying there sounds like something the brother of an ex of mine experienced.
My ex had discovered that just a teeny tiny dab of Flexall 454 on his hand for when he was performing "personal attentions" enhanced the experience. He shared this intelligence with his younger brother, who decided that if a little was good, more must be better.
I don't think that anyone who is familiar with the properties of menthol, and the sensitivity of certain male body parts, would be at all surprised at the scene that followed, which, I was assured, was legendary.
No lasting physical harm was done, but my ex's little brother was not in the least happy about the proceedings, and my ex has a cherished, if somewhat wince-inducing, example of his little brother's sheer cluelessness.
My high school sex-ed class got strictly and specifically lectured that WD-40 was never to be used as a sexual lubricant unless we really really wanted to court chemical burns in places that would be really fun to explain in the emergency room.
Hammer? Screwdriver? Yeah, I can just see someone constructing those out of duct tape and/or WD-40.
Marathon LAN party? Though the user might crash before the laptop ran out of juice. And if it'll run 40 hours without a recharge, if you use it for 10 hours a day, that's 4 days you don't have to come out of the closet in the guest room at your mother-in-law's house.
The action figures alone would have spoiled the surprise. Action figures for a movie marketed this big come out how soon?
Store consumer clubs, anyone? Get $0.XX off the price the 'normal' people have to pay, in return for letting us track your spending habits!
'Who's to judge' point conceded.
I got sick and tired of having to explain that I was a survey, not a telemarketer, I would not attempt to sell them anything, I would not use personally identifiable information about them for anything, their data was only to be looked at in large clumps, and I would not have phone sex with them!
As the person who got screamed at and otherwise abused, I would like nothing better than to NOT call people who are going to do that. It wastes their time, and wastes my time, and damages my hearing.
If you sign up for a Do Not Call List and fail to read the documentation closely, you may be under the impression that all mass calls to you are illegal, and no amount of explaination by the front-line flunky, or their manager, or the person at the company's 800 number, is going to convince this person differently, because, dammit, they have the Law on Their Side, and that was Illegal and Immoral and They Oughtta Pay For This... and they wind up wasting more of their time on righteous indignation caused by them not properly understanding the terms of the list than they would by quietly saying, "Put me on your do-not-call list" and hanging up.
I would far rather lose some accuracy in the survey, not call these people, and not waste everyone's time. If you don't want some phone company to call you to ask you if you want their service, you will NOT want the hired representative of that phone company to call you to ask you what you think of that service, another nationally known service, and the third service that you actually use for forty minutes.
I do think that certain surveys, such as the youth antismoking survey I had the pleasure of administering, should be exempt from Do Not Call lists, as those will actually be used to figure out ways that kids can be convinced that not only is smoking bad for their health, they should not try it (at least until they are of legal age).
(Amusingly, one man who happened to be employed by the cigarette company who was in fact sponsoring the study politely refused to have his kids take the survey, as he was afraid it would give him a bad rep with them for working for a cigarette company.)
However, surveys that don't have a purpose as noble as that one, such as a survey on burger preferences, should not be exempted from the national Do Not Call list.