Bull: Right. In terms of usage, Apple got it intuitively right. People use (the iPod) as an alarm clock, and when they listen to it at night, they like the fact it can turn itself off...
My God, those Apple engineers are geniuses!
Let's see, I don't have an iPod, but my portable MD player can turn itself off. My $30 cassette player can turn itself off. The Sony radio-cassette player we had in our house thirty years ago could turn itself off.
In fact, that old Sony could even turn the radio off. With a tape playing, you could turn the radio on (which would override the sound from the tape), and when it got to the end of the tape, both the tape and the radio would shut off.
Yes, it would be racist to make a Hitler joke to a German-American. I am part German, and my great-great-grandfather got chased out of Germany because he was a Prussian Army officer who tried to overthrow Bismark.
Yeah? Well, my great-grandfather (only one "great") immigrated to the U.S. from Germany, so I guess that makes me more German than you!:)
Your definition of "race" must be different from mine. I don't consider German or American or German-American or Swedish or Vietnamese to be races. Racism would be making a Viet Cong joke about someone solely because he has black hair, thin eyes, a flat nose, and whatever physical attributes associated with people from East Asia. The connection between a Vietnamese and communist guerillas, or between a German and Hitler is historical, not ethnic. That's the point I'm trying to make. And the reason I'm doing so is that "racism" has become the politically-correct catch-all blanket condemnatory term for any sort of discrimination, and used inaccurately.
Yes, it would be both ignorant and racist to make a Hitler joke about a Swede. The Swedes have been non-aligned for a long time.
It would be ignorant certainly, because a Swede has no unique connection, ethnically or historically, with Hitler. For it to be racist, the teller would have to draw a link from blond hair and blue eyes, to Germany, to Hitler. That's beyond ignorant, it's simply stupid. And Sweden's policitical history is totally irrelevant to anything at ll.
I stated clearly in my previous post that the joke can indeed be characterized as offensive, in its use of stereotypes about Vietnamese. That's why I wouldn't tell it to a Vietnamese. As for "hatefulness", that's another glib assertion. I thought the joke was funny, yet I know I am not hateful towards Vietnamese.
That post is ignorant at best, but more likely just racist.
Offensive, possibly. But racist, no. Racist would be that joke applied to a someone of Korean descent, as Koreans have little to do with the Viet Cong but happen to be ethnically related (very broadly) to Vietnamese. Would it be racist to make a "Heil Hitler" joke about a German? And if so, how about a Swede? I realize it's a lost cause, but I just wish the word "racism" were used more accurately rather than as a blanket term for "based on stereotypes".
And to characterize the joke as "ignorant" is also an absurd misuse of the term. I can't imagine that anyone who knows the signifance of the term "Charlie" in relation to Vietnam (and thus understands the joke) would confuse a 35-year-old first-generation immigrant Vietnamese American with a communist guerilla.
It was a silly, offensive joke based on cultural stereotypes. Just leave it at that. And just for the record, I'm a bit of an aficionado of Vietnamese culture, I'm part Asian, and I thought it was funny. (Though I would never repeat it in front of a Vietnamese person.)
Sometimes, people who fled totalitarian countries are the most ardent supporters of American freedoms. I can't read into the heart and mind of Viet Dinh, but your post is contemptible.
Unfortunately, such people aren't immune to engaging in the same mindset they sought to flee:
Little Saigon, 1999
And the Cuban refuguee community in Florida isn't much better behaved, in my opinion.
Assume you live in the typical suburban neighborhood. Now assume your 10 year old son and 2 of his 10 year old friends went on a ride to the local park to play on the swings on Sunday afternoon.
Would be OK for a cop to arrest these 12 year old for not producing an ID?
It's certainly not a crime, but I think that any child that ages from 10 to 12 years old within the span of one Sunday afternoon would arouse some suspicion!
Ah, the scramjet, and scramjet was also considered for Aerospaceplane. It is literally the taking a drink from a fire hose.
No, it is not. Unless said scramjet is equipped with a fire hose, and the pilot of said scramjet drinks water flowing out of the fire hose. Presumably through the oxygen mask.
It's not so much an issue of 'correctness' as an absolute measure, as much as plain practicality and utility through standardization. As human culture grew in the past few centuries to depend more and more on the technology of printing, there arose more value in standardizing culture to become more efficiently expressed by technology. Spelling became more important because writing did.
Is there any utility at all in bad spelling, other than laziness? With, for example, computer protocols, violating the standards is commonly done because it ostensibly provides a technical advantage, but does bad spelling give you any advantage? Why would you want to be understood less clearly?
And no one had the academic snobbishness to say one was particularly better than the other: the written word followed the spoken, as best it could.
That was then, this is now. The written word now stands on its own. How do you get more information on your average day, the spoken word or the printed one? The modern technological society is not transmitted by oral history any more, it relies on the written word.
From the page:
Structured Exception Handling. This new object-oriented construct in Visual Basic.NET enables a highly robust way to handle run-time errors in your code.
Hey, I don't want to catch() anything this Donkey throw()s!
The reduction of mouse buttons to one makes such things as "Press the right-click... " a thing of the past. Who would have thought that a seemingly backwards step as the single mouse button would be such a revolutionary step forward for computing?
Although for most users at the time, who had never before seen any mouse, let alone a three-button Xerox Alto or two-button Microsoft mouse, the Mac one-button was the first and original. Let's just say it was Microsoft's seemingly revolutionary two-button mouse (or more to the point, windowing environment,) that turned out to be a backwards step.
Nonetheless, could you live without the scroll-wheel? You must admit that's a worthwhile innovation, and it's astounding that Apple still hasn't appropriated it.
The concept of only a single window frame with a single menu bar at the top of the screen is easy for new users to grok.
Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design. It's a relic of single-tasking from the original Mac OS. The problem is that it's not just a single window frame. In the original Mac with single-tasking, the desktop was monopolized by a single app, even though that app might have multiple windows. But with multitasking, all the windows from different programs are on the desktop, yet there is no visual mapping from the menubar to its associated windows in the foreground program.
Fitt's law be damned, in a windowing GUI, a window defines the territory of a program, and that's where everything should fit.
I've already posted my Trabant story, so here's a story about East German trucks and buses, such as the IFA W50. Seven years ago, I toured Vietnam by bicycle, following Route 1 from Hanoi to Saigon. Back then, and even now, Vietnam had a lot of East German and Russian vehicles on the road, and the huge, snarling, soot-spewing IFA truck was king of the road. IFA also made buses, and the W50 was the most common, featuring a phony Mercedes-like star emblem.
In addition to the Eastern bloc vehicles, there are a lot of used buses and trucks from Japan.
On my second day on the road, I saw a bus, obviously of Japanese make, with an interesting destination posted: Sannomiya Jinja, written in kanji. I knew that Sannomiya Jinja was a location in Kobe, so I figured that this bus was brought over from Kobe. The next day, I saw another bus, and once again, on the front, it said Sannomiya Jinja. But there was something strange about the kanji characters. It just didn't look like real Japanese. Over the following days, I'd occasionally see buses with Japanese characters on them, some of them authentic-looking, some not. But some of the buses weren't even Japanese - they were East German! What was going on?
I quickly figured out that in Vietnam (as anywhere else), Japanese vehicles have a good reputation, and East German vehicles don't. Even 30-year-old Japanese buses are considered better. So local bus operators will slap Japanese text (or a Japanese make name) onto any old vehicle just to fool customers into thinking that they're riding a safe, reliable Japanese bus instead of an East German rustbucket.
Example. I'll be damned if that's a Nissan Diesel!
I guess that having ridden or even owned a Trabant is no longer as exotic (to the average Western reader) as it was in a decade and a half ago, but I still treasure my brief encounter with the "Trabi".
In May 1990, while hitch-hiking from Berlin to Hannover, I got a ride with two scruffy middle-aged guys, who even on first sight I figured to be East Germans.
The led me to their vehicle, which to my delight was a Trabant. I had spent several days in East Berlin and was fascinated by the Trabis, Wartburg 353s, and other cars I had never seen before. I got in the back seat and we put-putted out onto the Autobahn. I immediately noticed two things: the rickety roof seemed to be made of canvas over a steel tube frame, and the column-mounted gear shift was missing. But in its place, fitted onto the stub, was a beer bottle! Talk about ingenuity!
I didn't talk much on the drive, given my minimal German, but I did let the driver know that he could let me off anywhere in the city, perhaps near the train station. The driver must have suddenly realized that he was near the station, but missed the off-ramp. So he slowed down, took a sharp turn, and then proceeded to drive down the on-ramp, with VW Golfs and BMWs coming head-on at 50km/h!!!
We proceeded into town, and as soon as I saw the train station I told the driver to just let me off right there!
The commercial is loaded in the background while the normal page is displayed, and in fact loads only when the system is idle. When the commercial is completely loaded into memory, it then starts playing.
If an asteroid wiped out all life on this planet, I don't think anyone would give a fuck about absolutely anything. I surely wouldn't. If the killer asteroid were discovered today, it wouldn't matter if we started building space colonies -- with today's most advanced technology -- today, or if we had that technology ten years ago, or even five hundred years ago.
Contemplating something of this scale and then judging the opinions and actions of a few thousand people within a few years' time frame based on such extrapolations seems kind of like worrying that one grammatical mistake made by a five-year-old is going to prevent him from becoming a great lawyer forty years later.
Don't worry, we have started working on it now. I just define now as "within the next 500 years".
By the time sunspot activity is detected, wouldn't it be too late? Harmful radiation, visual images of sunspots, and radio warnings to the crew to hide all travel at the same speed.
And you can't tell me whether this coin I flip is going to come up heads or tails, but claim that in if I do it 1000 times, I will get very close to 500 heads? Bah!
>>I have a picture of hundreds of 10,000 yen >>bills since I'll probably never have that >>much in cash in hand again. What's wrong >>with me taking that picture and using it?"
What, were you holding up the bills, all tautly stretched out, perfectly parallel to the camera's image plane, under even lighting?
Slashdot Mirror
The fact that the iPod is so damn small also adds to the personal space effect - its physically unobtrusive
Funny, every time I see an iPod, I'm struck by how big and bulky they are, compared to an MD player.
Bull: Right. In terms of usage, Apple got it intuitively right. People use (the iPod) as an alarm clock, and when they listen to it at night, they like the fact it can turn itself off...
My God, those Apple engineers are geniuses!
Let's see, I don't have an iPod, but my portable MD player can turn itself off. My $30 cassette player can turn itself off. The Sony radio-cassette player we had in our house thirty years ago could turn itself off.
In fact, that old Sony could even turn the radio off. With a tape playing, you could turn the radio on (which would override the sound from the tape), and when it got to the end of the tape, both the tape and the radio would shut off.
cowanalexpander
Yes, it would be racist to make a Hitler joke to a German-American. I am part German, and my great-great-grandfather got chased out of Germany because he was a Prussian Army officer who tried to overthrow Bismark.
Yeah? Well, my great-grandfather (only one "great") immigrated to the U.S. from Germany, so I guess that makes me more German than you! :)
Your definition of "race" must be different from mine. I don't consider German or American or German-American or Swedish or Vietnamese to be races. Racism would be making a Viet Cong joke about someone solely because he has black hair, thin eyes, a flat nose, and whatever physical attributes associated with people from East Asia. The connection between a Vietnamese and communist guerillas, or between a German and Hitler is historical, not ethnic. That's the point I'm trying to make. And the reason I'm doing so is that "racism" has become the politically-correct catch-all blanket condemnatory term for any sort of discrimination, and used inaccurately.
Yes, it would be both ignorant and racist to make a Hitler joke about a Swede. The Swedes have been non-aligned for a long time.
It would be ignorant certainly, because a Swede has no unique connection, ethnically or historically, with Hitler. For it to be racist, the teller would have to draw a link from blond hair and blue eyes, to Germany, to Hitler. That's beyond ignorant, it's simply stupid. And Sweden's policitical history is totally irrelevant to anything at ll.
I stated clearly in my previous post that the joke can indeed be characterized as offensive, in its use of stereotypes about Vietnamese. That's why I wouldn't tell it to a Vietnamese. As for "hatefulness", that's another glib assertion. I thought the joke was funny, yet I know I am not hateful towards Vietnamese.
That post is ignorant at best, but more likely just racist.
Offensive, possibly. But racist, no. Racist would be that joke applied to a someone of Korean descent, as Koreans have little to do with the Viet Cong but happen to be ethnically related (very broadly) to Vietnamese. Would it be racist to make a "Heil Hitler" joke about a German? And if so, how about a Swede? I realize it's a lost cause, but I just wish the word "racism" were used more accurately rather than as a blanket term for "based on stereotypes".
And to characterize the joke as "ignorant" is also an absurd misuse of the term. I can't imagine that anyone who knows the signifance of the term "Charlie" in relation to Vietnam (and thus understands the joke) would confuse a 35-year-old first-generation immigrant Vietnamese American with a communist guerilla.
It was a silly, offensive joke based on cultural stereotypes. Just leave it at that. And just for the record, I'm a bit of an aficionado of Vietnamese culture, I'm part Asian, and I thought it was funny. (Though I would never repeat it in front of a Vietnamese person.)
Sometimes, people who fled totalitarian countries are the most ardent supporters of American freedoms. I can't read into the heart and mind of Viet Dinh, but your post is contemptible.
Unfortunately, such people aren't immune to engaging in the same mindset they sought to flee: Little Saigon, 1999 And the Cuban refuguee community in Florida isn't much better behaved, in my opinion.
GNOME - Pre-teen midgets gone wild XXX?
More likely, widgets gone mild.
Assume you live in the typical suburban neighborhood. Now assume your 10 year old son and 2 of his 10 year old friends went on a ride to the local park to play on the swings on Sunday afternoon.
Would be OK for a cop to arrest these 12 year old for not producing an ID?
It's certainly not a crime, but I think that any child that ages from 10 to 12 years old within the span of one Sunday afternoon would arouse some suspicion!
Don't forget that quick sorting is only part of the problem, not the whole thing
Besides, in a deep-sea environment, bubble-sorting is pretty efficient.
Ah, the scramjet, and scramjet was also considered for Aerospaceplane. It is literally the taking a drink from a fire hose.
No, it is not. Unless said scramjet is equipped with a fire hose, and the pilot of said scramjet drinks water flowing out of the fire hose. Presumably through the oxygen mask.
OT, but since when was Europe considered the "East"?
It's not so much an issue of 'correctness' as an absolute measure, as much as plain practicality and utility through standardization. As human culture grew in the past few centuries to depend more and more on the technology of printing, there arose more value in standardizing culture to become more efficiently expressed by technology. Spelling became more important because writing did.
Is there any utility at all in bad spelling, other than laziness? With, for example, computer protocols, violating the standards is commonly done because it ostensibly provides a technical advantage, but does bad spelling give you any advantage? Why would you want to be understood less clearly?
And no one had the academic snobbishness to say one was particularly better than the other: the written word followed the spoken, as best it could.
That was then, this is now. The written word now stands on its own. How do you get more information on your average day, the spoken word or the printed one? The modern technological society is not transmitted by oral history any more, it relies on the written word.
Hey, I don't want to catch() anything this Donkey throw()s!
The reduction of mouse buttons to one makes such things as "Press the right-click... " a thing of the past. Who would have thought that a seemingly backwards step as the single mouse button would be such a revolutionary step forward for computing?
Although for most users at the time, who had never before seen any mouse, let alone a three-button Xerox Alto or two-button Microsoft mouse, the Mac one-button was the first and original. Let's just say it was Microsoft's seemingly revolutionary two-button mouse (or more to the point, windowing environment,) that turned out to be a backwards step.
Nonetheless, could you live without the scroll-wheel? You must admit that's a worthwhile innovation, and it's astounding that Apple still hasn't appropriated it.
The concept of only a single window frame with a single menu bar at the top of the screen is easy for new users to grok.
Sorry, I have always considered this a confusing, bad design. It's a relic of single-tasking from the original Mac OS. The problem is that it's not just a single window frame. In the original Mac with single-tasking, the desktop was monopolized by a single app, even though that app might have multiple windows. But with multitasking, all the windows from different programs are on the desktop, yet there is no visual mapping from the menubar to its associated windows in the foreground program.
Fitt's law be damned, in a windowing GUI, a window defines the territory of a program, and that's where everything should fit.
I've already posted my Trabant story, so here's a story about East German trucks and buses, such as the IFA W50. Seven years ago, I toured Vietnam by bicycle, following Route 1 from Hanoi to Saigon. Back then, and even now, Vietnam had a lot of East German and Russian vehicles on the road, and the huge, snarling, soot-spewing IFA truck was king of the road. IFA also made buses, and the W50 was the most common, featuring a phony Mercedes-like star emblem.
In addition to the Eastern bloc vehicles, there are a lot of used buses and trucks from Japan.
On my second day on the road, I saw a bus, obviously of Japanese make, with an interesting destination posted: Sannomiya Jinja, written in kanji. I knew that Sannomiya Jinja was a location in Kobe, so I figured that this bus was brought over from Kobe. The next day, I saw another bus, and once again, on the front, it said Sannomiya Jinja. But there was something strange about the kanji characters. It just didn't look like real Japanese. Over the following days, I'd occasionally see buses with Japanese characters on them, some of them authentic-looking, some not. But some of the buses weren't even Japanese - they were East German! What was going on?
I quickly figured out that in Vietnam (as anywhere else), Japanese vehicles have a good reputation, and East German vehicles don't. Even 30-year-old Japanese buses are considered better. So local bus operators will slap Japanese text (or a Japanese make name) onto any old vehicle just to fool customers into thinking that they're riding a safe, reliable Japanese bus instead of an East German rustbucket.
Example. I'll be damned if that's a Nissan Diesel!
I guess that having ridden or even owned a Trabant is no longer as exotic (to the average Western reader) as it was in a decade and a half ago, but I still treasure my brief encounter with the "Trabi".
In May 1990, while hitch-hiking from Berlin to Hannover, I got a ride with two scruffy middle-aged guys, who even on first sight I figured to be East Germans.
The led me to their vehicle, which to my delight was a Trabant. I had spent several days in East Berlin and was fascinated by the Trabis, Wartburg 353s, and other cars I had never seen before. I got in the back seat and we put-putted out onto the Autobahn. I immediately noticed two things: the rickety roof seemed to be made of canvas over a steel tube frame, and the column-mounted gear shift was missing. But in its place, fitted onto the stub, was a beer bottle! Talk about ingenuity!
I didn't talk much on the drive, given my minimal German, but I did let the driver know that he could let me off anywhere in the city, perhaps near the train station. The driver must have suddenly realized that he was near the station, but missed the off-ramp. So he slowed down, took a sharp turn, and then proceeded to drive down the on-ramp, with VW Golfs and BMWs coming head-on at 50km/h!!!
We proceeded into town, and as soon as I saw the train station I told the driver to just let me off right there!
It uses Windows Media Player.
The commercial is loaded in the background while the normal page is displayed, and in fact loads only when the system is idle.
When the commercial is completely loaded into memory, it then starts playing.
If an asteroid wiped out all life on this planet, I don't think anyone would give a fuck about absolutely anything. I surely wouldn't. If the killer asteroid were discovered today, it wouldn't matter if we started building space colonies -- with today's most advanced technology -- today, or if we had that technology ten years ago, or even five hundred years ago.
Contemplating something of this scale and then judging the opinions and actions of a few thousand people within a few years' time frame based on such extrapolations seems kind of like worrying that one grammatical mistake made by a five-year-old is going to prevent him from becoming a great lawyer forty years later.
Don't worry, we have started working on it now. I just define now as "within the next 500 years".
By the time sunspot activity is detected, wouldn't it be too late? Harmful radiation, visual images of sunspots, and radio warnings to the crew to hide all travel at the same speed.
They have robotic bees in their mouth and when they bark they shoot robotic bees at you...
>>> ... Tech jobs at home.
- There's nothing to gain from going to Mars
>>>
Yeah, at first. But you know those jobs will eventually get oursourced to THE MARTIANS!!
And you can't tell me whether this coin I flip is going to come up heads or tails, but claim that in if I do it 1000 times, I will get very close to 500 heads? Bah!
So going back to one of your examples:
>>I have a picture of hundreds of 10,000 yen
>>bills since I'll probably never have that
>>much in cash in hand again. What's wrong
>>with me taking that picture and using it?"
What, were you holding up the bills, all tautly stretched out, perfectly parallel to the camera's image plane, under even lighting?
Just don't put RMS' pic on the box ... I'm trying to eat, ferchrissakes....