Not really - it's one of the small Kindles, so the screen is about the size of a page of a paperback book. It doesn't refresh fast enough to do proper scrolling, so that's out. The CPU is not nearly fast enough to do any sort of PDF re-pagination in a reasonable time, so it can't do that (and even then, re-paginating a PDF that's full of figures and charts is a non-trivial task, even if you run it through a real computer). It's basically screwed
Basically, the Kindle is useful for reading novels or other text-only things, but that's about it.
The two party system will never be broken in this country until we change the way voting works. Our current winner-take-all system makes third parties a losing proposition.
Consider: You have parties A and B. People like them roughly equally; in a general election, party A gets 51% of the vote, and party B gets 49%. Party A generally wins.
Now let's assume some idealistic people split off from party A and create party A'. A' is like A, but better! So much better that, well, 4% of the people who normally vote for A will vote for A'. 1% of the people who normally vote for B will vote for A', but the rest hate the idea of "A but better".
Now there's a general election. A' gets 5% of the vote. A gets 47% of the vote. B gets 48% of the vote. B wins, and because we have a winner take all system, that means they win the vote and can basically do whatever they want until the next election.
So what does A do? They make concessions to A', bring them back into the fold, and next election we're back at A vs B - because any third party will necessarily cannibalize votes from the major party that is most like them, so it is in the major party's best interest to keep them close.
Look: it doesn't matter if we vote against Republicans and Democrats. We could vote out all the incumbents and vote in a new congressional constellation that includes people from all sorts of parties - but eventually, given enough time, the parties that consolidate down into one of two parties will win more often than the parties that don't consolidate. This is an inevitable result of the rules of the game.
What you're saying is equivalent to saying "We can only win at tic-tac-toe if we refuse to put a cross in the middle!". It doesn't matter where you start the game - the end result will always be the same, unless we change the rules of the game.
The only problem is that all our current politicians (even the independents) are masters of tic-tac-toe, and absolutely refuse to start playing chess.
My wife is a "real graduate student" (she's doing her doctorate work in radiocarbon calibration), and although she got a Kindle for reading scientific papers, she says it sucks way too much at that. These papers usually only come in PDFs, which the Kindle has a hard time displaying properly - the best her small Kindle can do is display one quadrant at a time, which is basically useless. Sometimes you can get the papers as an HTML page, but the Kindle's HTML parser isn't that great and you have to remember to download all the figures individually too - and even then, they're kinda hard to make out since it's rendering them in black and white.
She basically needs something that just works - you load up a PDF and it's readable, you save (somehow) or browse to a web page and it's readable. The Kindle is not that thing, especially when it comes to scientific papers. It just can't handle the formats she needs it to, at least not easily enough (and unlike me, she hates fucking around with computers; the MythWeb interface is about the extent of what she's willing to put up with)
Eventually she's going to get an iPad, which should be able to do all the things she needs it to; I'll get the Kindle then, since I read more novels than she does and it rocks at that (except it lacks its own reading light, which seems like the stupidest of oversights).
I would imagine that it's because when you click on an image after doing an image search, it shows you the image in a top frame with actual result page in a bottom frame. Most web browsers will whine about showing mixed content like that (since the top frame will still be secure, but the bottom frame won't), and Google probably hasn't had the time to rejigger the way image search works yet.
Makes sense - every person-hour of normal work generates at least one bitch-hour of whining, which has to be vented before it builds up to a critical mass with the help of friends, spouses, beer or Slashdot.
Left on its own, a bitch-hour generally has a half-life of thirty minutes; however, lack of proper venting leads to the breakdown of bitch-hours into heavy feelings, and is to be avoided.
So yeah boss, that's why I have to spend ten minutes posting on Slashdot every hour!
Yeah exactly! The living need to be advertised to -
"Look at us! We're the new Catholic Church, we're no longer pro-heliocentrism! Give us a couple more centuries and we might even stop being anti-feminist* enough to allow contraception** or female priests***!"
Because that's exactly what it is, unless you think that Copernicus still has a close, living relative somewhere who needs closure after 500 years.
*not a guarantee **not very likely ***you're kidding, right?
Maybe next year they will find out the importance of electricity, birth control, or logic.
Impossible. As soon as they find out about the importance of birth control, the Catholic Church will stop growing.
Consider: 90% of all people believe in the religion that their parents taught them. If your parents had less children, your parent's religion would have fewer members. If your parents religion is Catholicism, that means fewer little Catholics running around, growing up to be tithe-paying adults.
There's a reason why "no birth control" is one thing all fundamental religions can agree on. (well a couple of reasons actually; taking away control of reproduction from women and giving it (in essence) to men is a pretty strong patriarchal lever, too).
Catholics care. They care because they believe in the sacrament of forgiveness. They care because they believe that people have immortal souls that can last more than 500 years after someone's death.
And they would be empirically wrong about that. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that such a thing as a "soul" exists; mind-body dualism is a theory with no substance.
This is an especially interesting case because, unlike most wishy-washy religious words that don't actually mean anything, you can actively disprove the existence of a soul as defined by most religions.
For instance: if you have an immortal soul that controls the way you act (and thus is ultimately responsible to God for your sins), why is it possible for head trauma to change your behavior? Why can brain cancer change the way you think? How can psychoactive drugs interact with this metaphysical soul? How can a lobotomy change your behavior, unless it somehow affects your soul? If you (like Phineas Gage) have a metal bar shoved through your brain and suddenly turn from a sober, hard-working man to a filthy-mouthed vile-tempered drunkard, what exactly does that say about your soul? When you die, which person will be judged? Or will the hard worker be held accountable for the drunkard's behavior, even though it seems he had no say in the matter?
The theory is simply incoherent, especially when contrasted against modern neuroscience; the only theory that works is that your mind resides in your brain. There is literally no room in what we know about the mind for such a thing as a "soul".
(also, I wouldn't be talking about Catholic "forgiveness" so much, when it seems like that bureaucracy is far more intent on forgiving pedophiles who have molested children than homosexuals who have performed no illegal actions)
On one hand I would like to believe you since my company will be rolling out a Dynamics deployment at some point in the future; on the other hand, you guys used a substitution cipher and called it "encryption". The fact that you're an MVP and you say some stuff is kind of meaningless in the face of such a gigantic failure.
You know, I thought that at first - I had a frantic co-worker at my desk asking "why is my computer making pac-man noises!" this morning (it had loaded up and started playing in the background).
Then I went over to her desk, looked around for a little bit, figured out it was the Google banner, ate a couple of ghosts, and it was fine.
Seriously, we all need to learn to laugh a bit more. You can't be all srs bizness all the time, a silly little temporary Google banner will not kill you.
Moving away from an oil economy would allow the US to tell the Arabs, Persians and Israelis to go away, and take their blood vendettas with them.
Unfortunately, we're never going to tell the Israelis to go away - there's a surprisingly large contingent of Americans (and therefore American politicians) who think we should do everything we can to support Israel, in order to bring about the Rapture.
If you're sane, you're not really playing the same game as they are. To them, it's totally okay to burn as much oil as you need to assure Israel's dominance in the Middle East - the consequences don't matter, because most of them think the Rapture will come in their lifetime (or at worst, their children's). The future doesn't matter, because there won't be any.
Those are some scary statistics you have. Fortunately for us, they are entirely without merit; we're not going to have another Chernobyl. That disaster was caused by morons working in a badly built reactor doing everything exactly wrong. As long as we don't do that again, we're fine; modern nuclear safety techniques will keep that sort of shit from happening, and even if a reactor ends up manned by a bunch of monkeys, it will be designed so that there are no Chernobyl-like failure modes.
A braindead monkey with an abacus could replace Sharepoint, and at least when the monkey poops all over your documents you can scrape some of them off.
Seriously, there are literally no upsides to Sharepoint. Your users won't be empowered, they'll just be confused; your administrators won't have a smaller workload, they'll have a greater one - they'll need to do whatever tasks they normally have, plus clean up after the confused users, and figure out ways to work around the features Sharepoint just doesn't have, like column or row level security. Need to make it so that only one group can modify a column? Tough luck. You'll need to buy someone else's solution for that, it's not built in to Sharepoint. Need to secure a document dropoff area so users can only see their own documents, but you must allow multiple document uploads? There no way to do that; you can only half-ass it.
Where can I get an AdBlock equivalent for another browser? As far as I can tell, the ones for Opera and Chrome are not equivalent - half the frustration of ads comes from the occasional horribly slow ad server that delays the entire page load, so downloading but hiding doesn't really fix that problem. I don't want to waste the bandwidth on that junk at all; what's the equivalent?
... seriously, I expect people to not RTFA, but you didn't even read the next sentence. Here it is, because I specifically mentioned exactly what you said:
Windows is kind of retarded in that there are significant configuration options that are difficult if not impossible to change via the command line (and that's if you can find out how to change them like that in the first place!), which means that you basically have to run the GUI stack - but that's okay, because it's almost impossible to uninstall.
Basically, the registry is a piece of junk. It provides no benefit over config files except for sometimes it provides you with a fun-filled night of everyone's favorite activity, "Fixing Windows' Shit", because it's corrupted itself and died.
This is really Windows' modus operandi - here's a feature that might make your life a little bit easier, but has these downsides that just barely make it less than useful, except nobody notices those downsides until your entire company has standardized on the feature and now you have to pay out the nose to support it and oh god why didn't you just get an abortion in the first place?
That sentence kinda got away from me, but the fact remains - Windows doesn't Just Work, it Just Doesn't Work and you'll never know why. I mean fuck, even Mark Russinovich himself didn't realize that you don't have to change the machine SID for years, and he wrote a program to do it!
CLI does have its uses. There are things it offers that no GUI can, and vice versa.
Can you provide an example that is applicable to the configuration and maintenance of a server? The only thing I can think of are graphical representations of server usage logs, and honestly those aren't useful enough to warrant having a full graphical desktop installed (and you can just expose them on an internal web page).
The argument is not that the GUI is useless. The argument is that the extra complexity of installing a GUI stack is not worth the minimal benefits it brings. Every single piece of software you install on a computer increases its attack surface, so as a matter of policy you should keep it to a minimum. Windows is kind of retarded in that there are significant configuration options that are difficult if not impossible to change via the command line (and that's if you can find out how to change them like that in the first place!), which means that you basically have to run the GUI stack - but that's okay, because it's almost impossible to uninstall.
Look: humans are fallible. If your goal is uptime, you need to remove as much of the human element as you can. This is simply not possible with a GUI; you must have a person manning the computer if you need to interact with one. The command line, on the other hand, is something computers can handle quite well if you tell them how. That's why you use the command line when you want to get "real" work done - "real" work is work that you do once or twice, then write a script for and never do again. If your ongoing solution is to press the same ten buttons once a month, that is not a solution at all.
Uhm, everything we know about the universe is in fundamental conflict with the Biblical creation story. Seriously, there are maybe one or two things that could be considered factually accurate in the whole thing, and that's entirely by accident. The Earth existed before there there was light? There was light on Earth before there were stars in the sky? The Sun was created before the rest of the stars? The sky and the waters were the same thing and had to be separated? Are you going to say that none of these fundamentally contradict what we know?
It makes no sense and is completely inconsistent with reality. It is a prehistoric myth, and is exactly as useful as the story of how the stars were created when Coyote scattered Cloud Woman's fire across the sky.
Retaining VB and VB.net suggest a hefty Microsoft contribution. At least to me.... "Who's going to write the next OS, or even the next decent compiler, if we stop teaching languages that get us closer to the hardware?" From our administration, the answer's been a bit quiet, but seems to be either, "who cares?", or "why?"... In an OS class I taught recently, 3 of 5 students had not been exposed to any assembly language over the course of 4 years of CompSci... None had any class requirement to be familiar with Linux or Unix... In the comments at the end of the class, several were very unhappy that all my class examples required a command line and didn't show them a flashy GUI to look at registers or other output.... because I tended to focus on technologies that weren't relevant to our students, like web programming and SAAS... she said I could have integrated more web programming into the content...
Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw from this is that you teach at a school with a shitty Computer Science degree. In the course of my degree (University of California, starting in 2004) I had to learn to use the Linux command line (we were given our choice of Vim or Emacs), write a compiler from a tiny c-like language to a stack-based Forth-like virtual machine in Haskell, configure a Cisco router over a serial port using Kermit and sit through (and be tested on) lectures about the principle issues you encounter when trying to run an operating system on multiple processors, and parse out some MIPS binaries by hand to figure out what the program did.
Just because your school sucks doesn't mean that you can't get a good CS education anywhere.
Also, AFAIK, standard Pascal does not have function pointers, although I believe many versions, including Delphi, have implemented their non-standard extensions for this.
Honestly, by the time you get to the point where you can see the need for and want to pass function pointers you're probably capable of learning a language that supports that feature on your own.
I wonder if they can get "fired" for screwing up their data entry, or if they just get moved from the "entering banking data" group to the "entering climate change data" group?
That's what graduate students are for - sometimes, they'll actually pay you for the privilege!
Slashdot Mirror
Not really - it's one of the small Kindles, so the screen is about the size of a page of a paperback book. It doesn't refresh fast enough to do proper scrolling, so that's out. The CPU is not nearly fast enough to do any sort of PDF re-pagination in a reasonable time, so it can't do that (and even then, re-paginating a PDF that's full of figures and charts is a non-trivial task, even if you run it through a real computer). It's basically screwed
Basically, the Kindle is useful for reading novels or other text-only things, but that's about it.
The two party system will never be broken in this country until we change the way voting works. Our current winner-take-all system makes third parties a losing proposition.
Consider: You have parties A and B. People like them roughly equally; in a general election, party A gets 51% of the vote, and party B gets 49%. Party A generally wins.
Now let's assume some idealistic people split off from party A and create party A'. A' is like A, but better! So much better that, well, 4% of the people who normally vote for A will vote for A'. 1% of the people who normally vote for B will vote for A', but the rest hate the idea of "A but better".
Now there's a general election. A' gets 5% of the vote. A gets 47% of the vote. B gets 48% of the vote. B wins, and because we have a winner take all system, that means they win the vote and can basically do whatever they want until the next election.
So what does A do? They make concessions to A', bring them back into the fold, and next election we're back at A vs B - because any third party will necessarily cannibalize votes from the major party that is most like them, so it is in the major party's best interest to keep them close.
Look: it doesn't matter if we vote against Republicans and Democrats. We could vote out all the incumbents and vote in a new congressional constellation that includes people from all sorts of parties - but eventually, given enough time, the parties that consolidate down into one of two parties will win more often than the parties that don't consolidate. This is an inevitable result of the rules of the game.
What you're saying is equivalent to saying "We can only win at tic-tac-toe if we refuse to put a cross in the middle!". It doesn't matter where you start the game - the end result will always be the same, unless we change the rules of the game.
The only problem is that all our current politicians (even the independents) are masters of tic-tac-toe, and absolutely refuse to start playing chess.
My wife is a "real graduate student" (she's doing her doctorate work in radiocarbon calibration), and although she got a Kindle for reading scientific papers, she says it sucks way too much at that. These papers usually only come in PDFs, which the Kindle has a hard time displaying properly - the best her small Kindle can do is display one quadrant at a time, which is basically useless. Sometimes you can get the papers as an HTML page, but the Kindle's HTML parser isn't that great and you have to remember to download all the figures individually too - and even then, they're kinda hard to make out since it's rendering them in black and white.
She basically needs something that just works - you load up a PDF and it's readable, you save (somehow) or browse to a web page and it's readable. The Kindle is not that thing, especially when it comes to scientific papers. It just can't handle the formats she needs it to, at least not easily enough (and unlike me, she hates fucking around with computers; the MythWeb interface is about the extent of what she's willing to put up with)
Eventually she's going to get an iPad, which should be able to do all the things she needs it to; I'll get the Kindle then, since I read more novels than she does and it rocks at that (except it lacks its own reading light, which seems like the stupidest of oversights).
I would imagine that it's because when you click on an image after doing an image search, it shows you the image in a top frame with actual result page in a bottom frame. Most web browsers will whine about showing mixed content like that (since the top frame will still be secure, but the bottom frame won't), and Google probably hasn't had the time to rejigger the way image search works yet.
Makes sense - every person-hour of normal work generates at least one bitch-hour of whining, which has to be vented before it builds up to a critical mass with the help of friends, spouses, beer or Slashdot.
Left on its own, a bitch-hour generally has a half-life of thirty minutes; however, lack of proper venting leads to the breakdown of bitch-hours into heavy feelings, and is to be avoided.
So yeah boss, that's why I have to spend ten minutes posting on Slashdot every hour!
Yeah exactly! The living need to be advertised to -
"Look at us! We're the new Catholic Church, we're no longer pro-heliocentrism! Give us a couple more centuries and we might even stop being anti-feminist* enough to allow contraception** or female priests***!"
Because that's exactly what it is, unless you think that Copernicus still has a close, living relative somewhere who needs closure after 500 years.
*not a guarantee
**not very likely
***you're kidding, right?
Impossible. As soon as they find out about the importance of birth control, the Catholic Church will stop growing.
Consider: 90% of all people believe in the religion that their parents taught them. If your parents had less children, your parent's religion would have fewer members. If your parents religion is Catholicism, that means fewer little Catholics running around, growing up to be tithe-paying adults.
There's a reason why "no birth control" is one thing all fundamental religions can agree on. (well a couple of reasons actually; taking away control of reproduction from women and giving it (in essence) to men is a pretty strong patriarchal lever, too).
And they would be empirically wrong about that. There is absolutely no evidence whatsoever that such a thing as a "soul" exists; mind-body dualism is a theory with no substance.
This is an especially interesting case because, unlike most wishy-washy religious words that don't actually mean anything, you can actively disprove the existence of a soul as defined by most religions.
For instance: if you have an immortal soul that controls the way you act (and thus is ultimately responsible to God for your sins), why is it possible for head trauma to change your behavior? Why can brain cancer change the way you think? How can psychoactive drugs interact with this metaphysical soul? How can a lobotomy change your behavior, unless it somehow affects your soul? If you (like Phineas Gage) have a metal bar shoved through your brain and suddenly turn from a sober, hard-working man to a filthy-mouthed vile-tempered drunkard, what exactly does that say about your soul? When you die, which person will be judged? Or will the hard worker be held accountable for the drunkard's behavior, even though it seems he had no say in the matter?
The theory is simply incoherent, especially when contrasted against modern neuroscience; the only theory that works is that your mind resides in your brain. There is literally no room in what we know about the mind for such a thing as a "soul".
(also, I wouldn't be talking about Catholic "forgiveness" so much, when it seems like that bureaucracy is far more intent on forgiving pedophiles who have molested children than homosexuals who have performed no illegal actions)
Here's Duke Nukem 3D running on a Nokia N900.
On one hand I would like to believe you since my company will be rolling out a Dynamics deployment at some point in the future; on the other hand, you guys used a substitution cipher and called it "encryption". The fact that you're an MVP and you say some stuff is kind of meaningless in the face of such a gigantic failure.
If you can't be silly while posting to Slashdot from work, when can you be silly?
You know, I thought that at first - I had a frantic co-worker at my desk asking "why is my computer making pac-man noises!" this morning (it had loaded up and started playing in the background).
Then I went over to her desk, looked around for a little bit, figured out it was the Google banner, ate a couple of ghosts, and it was fine.
Seriously, we all need to learn to laugh a bit more. You can't be all srs bizness all the time, a silly little temporary Google banner will not kill you.
Unfortunately, we're never going to tell the Israelis to go away - there's a surprisingly large contingent of Americans (and therefore American politicians) who think we should do everything we can to support Israel, in order to bring about the Rapture.
If you're sane, you're not really playing the same game as they are. To them, it's totally okay to burn as much oil as you need to assure Israel's dominance in the Middle East - the consequences don't matter, because most of them think the Rapture will come in their lifetime (or at worst, their children's). The future doesn't matter, because there won't be any.
Those are some scary statistics you have. Fortunately for us, they are entirely without merit; we're not going to have another Chernobyl. That disaster was caused by morons working in a badly built reactor doing everything exactly wrong. As long as we don't do that again, we're fine; modern nuclear safety techniques will keep that sort of shit from happening, and even if a reactor ends up manned by a bunch of monkeys, it will be designed so that there are no Chernobyl-like failure modes.
A braindead monkey with an abacus could replace Sharepoint, and at least when the monkey poops all over your documents you can scrape some of them off.
Seriously, there are literally no upsides to Sharepoint. Your users won't be empowered, they'll just be confused; your administrators won't have a smaller workload, they'll have a greater one - they'll need to do whatever tasks they normally have, plus clean up after the confused users, and figure out ways to work around the features Sharepoint just doesn't have, like column or row level security. Need to make it so that only one group can modify a column? Tough luck. You'll need to buy someone else's solution for that, it's not built in to Sharepoint. Need to secure a document dropoff area so users can only see their own documents, but you must allow multiple document uploads? There no way to do that; you can only half-ass it.
Where can I get an AdBlock equivalent for another browser? As far as I can tell, the ones for Opera and Chrome are not equivalent - half the frustration of ads comes from the occasional horribly slow ad server that delays the entire page load, so downloading but hiding doesn't really fix that problem. I don't want to waste the bandwidth on that junk at all; what's the equivalent?
Key line from the review, when talking about VP8's encoder and decoder:
Further, certain aspects of VP8 were directly ripped from h.264 - not a good sign at all, especially since Google says this spec is final.
... seriously, I expect people to not RTFA, but you didn't even read the next sentence. Here it is, because I specifically mentioned exactly what you said:
Basically, the registry is a piece of junk. It provides no benefit over config files except for sometimes it provides you with a fun-filled night of everyone's favorite activity, "Fixing Windows' Shit", because it's corrupted itself and died.
This is really Windows' modus operandi - here's a feature that might make your life a little bit easier, but has these downsides that just barely make it less than useful, except nobody notices those downsides until your entire company has standardized on the feature and now you have to pay out the nose to support it and oh god why didn't you just get an abortion in the first place?
That sentence kinda got away from me, but the fact remains - Windows doesn't Just Work, it Just Doesn't Work and you'll never know why. I mean fuck, even Mark Russinovich himself didn't realize that you don't have to change the machine SID for years, and he wrote a program to do it!
Can you provide an example that is applicable to the configuration and maintenance of a server? The only thing I can think of are graphical representations of server usage logs, and honestly those aren't useful enough to warrant having a full graphical desktop installed (and you can just expose them on an internal web page).
The argument is not that the GUI is useless. The argument is that the extra complexity of installing a GUI stack is not worth the minimal benefits it brings. Every single piece of software you install on a computer increases its attack surface, so as a matter of policy you should keep it to a minimum. Windows is kind of retarded in that there are significant configuration options that are difficult if not impossible to change via the command line (and that's if you can find out how to change them like that in the first place!), which means that you basically have to run the GUI stack - but that's okay, because it's almost impossible to uninstall.
Look: humans are fallible. If your goal is uptime, you need to remove as much of the human element as you can. This is simply not possible with a GUI; you must have a person manning the computer if you need to interact with one. The command line, on the other hand, is something computers can handle quite well if you tell them how. That's why you use the command line when you want to get "real" work done - "real" work is work that you do once or twice, then write a script for and never do again. If your ongoing solution is to press the same ten buttons once a month, that is not a solution at all.
Uhm, everything we know about the universe is in fundamental conflict with the Biblical creation story. Seriously, there are maybe one or two things that could be considered factually accurate in the whole thing, and that's entirely by accident. The Earth existed before there there was light? There was light on Earth before there were stars in the sky? The Sun was created before the rest of the stars? The sky and the waters were the same thing and had to be separated? Are you going to say that none of these fundamentally contradict what we know?
It makes no sense and is completely inconsistent with reality. It is a prehistoric myth, and is exactly as useful as the story of how the stars were created when Coyote scattered Cloud Woman's fire across the sky.
Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw from this is that you teach at a school with a shitty Computer Science degree. In the course of my degree (University of California, starting in 2004) I had to learn to use the Linux command line (we were given our choice of Vim or Emacs), write a compiler from a tiny c-like language to a stack-based Forth-like virtual machine in Haskell, configure a Cisco router over a serial port using Kermit and sit through (and be tested on) lectures about the principle issues you encounter when trying to run an operating system on multiple processors, and parse out some MIPS binaries by hand to figure out what the program did.
Just because your school sucks doesn't mean that you can't get a good CS education anywhere.
Honestly, by the time you get to the point where you can see the need for and want to pass function pointers you're probably capable of learning a language that supports that feature on your own.
Sooo... Logo, then?
That's what graduate students are for - sometimes, they'll actually pay you for the privilege!