The principal drawback of the Bourbaki school is not that its output is "boring", but that it presents the final results of a theorem in a pristine format while removing all references to the messy drudgework and dead ends it took to get there. As such, it's pleasingly elegant for practicing mathematicians, but terrible for students. Students need to see examples of math as a process, not just as a finished product.
Say there's going to be a huge tragedy and someone's family is going to die. If you could chose whether your family dies or someone other family dies, which would you choose?
It's just before Xmas - I'm not sure that example is going to reliably elicit the response you're looking for.
...don't get me wrong. They could call it "Magic Happy Leprosy Spreading Bad Smell Maker" and I'd buy it.
Thing is, that's still a better name than Wii. You have to hand it to the Nintendo marketing department - it takes serious work to come up with something worse than what they did.
Actually (and I'm far too lazy to look up corroborating evidence), my recollection is that the catalyst was the US DOJ anti-trust suit. Pre-anti-trust suit charitable donations = $0, during-anti-trust suit donations > $0. To their credit, they've continued to donate (often w/ packages that hinge on the distribution of M$ software, though) even after the suit became irrelevant.
I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, though - living in a world that conforms to my cynical assumptions is a tedious affair.
I'm using Flashblock in FireFox, because I run an OS X box. The Flash plug-in for OS X is such a massive resource hog that if I have three or four windows w/ Flash ads in them, I'm likely to crash the browser (happens in Safari, too). If the plug-in worked better (and I've heard the forthcoming one is a huge improvement), I'd never have bothered w/ Flashblock - I'm perfectly capable of filtering out ads w/ what I laughingly refer to as my brain.
Wake me up when there is something happening the US which doesn't upset a minority group which goes in search for media attention or takes it to court.
When it gets media attention, it's the opposite of a problem. The problem is when it doesn't get media attention, and people are unaware of what's been quashed because it might offend a dogmatic unlistening minority. Like when teachers don't teach evolution--despite the fact that it's on the curriculum--because public schools have enough problems w/o dealing w/ fundamentalists who believe the Bible is the only Biology textbook you need.
Upon clarification, I now completely agree with you. I navigate Windows menus via Alt-abbreviations 95% of the time, but I never turn on Full Keyboard Access in OS X, because, as you say, it's too much of a hassle and it's not as necessary because of the cross-application shortcut consistency encouraged by the Cult Of Mac.
She can install anything she wants to - they didn't arrest her for illegally installing a program. They just said she couldn't use the logs as evidence in the case.
Huh. I was about to suggest the major text adventure languages (Inform, TADS, or Hugo), but Flash is a much, much better solution. Easier to learn and (though, as an interactive-fiction fetishist, it pains me to say this) a less esoteric end product.
On the other hand, this is Slashdot - what the hell do you think you're doing posting useful information?
The task of the "artist" themselves varies depending on the particular group, but as a general rule, they are more replaceable than a highly-trained engineer, and each has unique value mainly because of their public image, which is itself crafted by record company marketing departments.
You and I listen to very different kinds of music.
There really is no better survey of jazz up 'til the 70s than The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz. It's 5 CDs of extraordinary choices, and it took the editors a long time to work out the permissions from the various record companies to include them all. And it's got 46 pps of liner notes (that's w/ the LP set - I assume the CD set has the same notes on more pages) that will clue you in to further listening. When it was in print, it cost $175, and it was a bargain; currently it's (shamefully) out of print, but you can pick up a copy for as low as $10 on eBay. Hie thee hence, anonce!
What you should really listen to, though, rather than anyone else's opinions, is the musicians. Pay attention to who plays what instrument on the recordings you really like, and keep an eye out for them on other recordings. Google them and you're bound to come up with discographies for almost anyone that catches your ear. A nice survey book like Jazz: The Rough Guide will highlight the cream of the crop for any particular musician, and will point out any particularly fertile collaborations they may have had. Survey books, like anthologies and textbooks, tend to be expensive, though - see what you can find at your local used book store, or take advantage of the local MegaBookBarn's liberal browsing policies.
If you get into jazz pianists, a great book is Len Lyons's The Great Jazz Pianists, a collection of interviews with keyboard players ranging from Mary Lou Williams to Horace Silver to Dave Brubeck to Bill Evans to Chick Corea to Sun Ra and even further out. Find out who they like to listen to, how they approach music, and who they like to play with. And find out that almost every single one of them is a fan of the French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel (yes, the Bolero guy), and now you've got two genres of music to spend the rest of your life listening to.;)
I would list some of my favorite recordings, but some of them have already shown up here, and what I like isn't really relevant - it's what you like, and only your ears can tell you that. Oh, and, as others have said, hit the library - in the age of Instant Internet Information Gratificationâ, I think a lot of us have forgotten what a fabulous and improbable institution the local lending library is. Plus, you can telnet into my local library, for an old-skool thrill!
1) Fire up Key Caps, in your Utilities folder. Select the font you're using in the Font menu, and it will display all the default characters of a virtual keyboard. Try hitting the Shift key - you'll see the Shift key depress on the virtual keyboard, and the lowercase letters will change to uppercase, and numbers will change to the symbols that are universally recognized as cuss words for comic strip characters. Now try hitting the far more interesting Option (alt) key. Gaze in awe upon the alternate characters you can produce by typing Option-[character]. Also, notice the Option-[character]s with a light box around them? They're all diacritical marks - accents, umlaut, circumflex, etc. - that can be added to other letters. So, for example, if you want to put an umlaut (you know, the "Deathtöunge" dots) above an "o", you need to type Option-u, then an "o".
2) Use the Character Palette. From Apple's godawful-slow Help System:
To make the Character Palette available, open International preferences and click Input Menu. Select Character Palette in the list.
To open the palette, choose Show Character Palette from the input menu (the one with the Character Palette symbol or the flag).
To enter a character, choose the items you want to see from the View pop-up menu. Select the category of characters in the left column and double-click the character or symbol you want to enter in the right column.
I could have sworn this is a dupe of a story about Tim Hartnell's book, but a cursory search isn't turning up anything. Maybe it was on ArsTechnica...
Anyway, if someone gets a hankering to write an adventure game in a (somewhat) more contemporary language, there's always Inform, the reverse-engineneered language that compiles down to the same z-code files that Infocom's games came in. The Inform Beginner's Guide, 2nd ed. is a great and free start, and the Inform Designer's Manual will answer any questions that are more advanced.
Slashdot Mirror
The principal drawback of the Bourbaki school is not that its output is "boring", but that it presents the final results of a theorem in a pristine format while removing all references to the messy drudgework and dead ends it took to get there. As such, it's pleasingly elegant for practicing mathematicians, but terrible for students. Students need to see examples of math as a process, not just as a finished product.
Posted by PopeOptimusPrime:
<physicsWonk>Um, unless you're living in theoretical string-theory-land, you've only got three degrees of freedom to play in.
.
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18) In 1988, Charlie Babbitt squeezed and pulled and hurt my neck in 1988.
Kohath writes:
It's just before Xmas - I'm not sure that example is going to reliably elicit the response you're looking for.
You seem to be reading /.'s slogan as "History For Nerds. Stuff That Mattered."
If by "better" you mean "more racist", then, yes, you're right.
Thing is, that's still a better name than Wii. You have to hand it to the Nintendo marketing department - it takes serious work to come up with something worse than what they did.
Actually (and I'm far too lazy to look up corroborating evidence), my recollection is that the catalyst was the US DOJ anti-trust suit. Pre-anti-trust suit charitable donations = $0, during-anti-trust suit donations > $0. To their credit, they've continued to donate (often w/ packages that hinge on the distribution of M$ software, though) even after the suit became irrelevant.
I'd be delighted to be proven wrong, though - living in a world that conforms to my cynical assumptions is a tedious affair.
I'm using Flashblock in FireFox, because I run an OS X box. The Flash plug-in for OS X is such a massive resource hog that if I have three or four windows w/ Flash ads in them, I'm likely to crash the browser (happens in Safari, too). If the plug-in worked better (and I've heard the forthcoming one is a huge improvement), I'd never have bothered w/ Flashblock - I'm perfectly capable of filtering out ads w/ what I laughingly refer to as my brain.
Ha ha! Get it? Da Vinci...handwriting...mirrored? Ah ha ha! I kill myself!
Wake me up when there is something happening the US which doesn't upset a minority group which goes in search for media attention or takes it to court.
When it gets media attention, it's the opposite of a problem. The problem is when it doesn't get media attention, and people are unaware of what's been quashed because it might offend a dogmatic unlistening minority. Like when teachers don't teach evolution--despite the fact that it's on the curriculum--because public schools have enough problems w/o dealing w/ fundamentalists who believe the Bible is the only Biology textbook you need.
Upon clarification, I now completely agree with you. I navigate Windows menus via Alt-abbreviations 95% of the time, but I never turn on Full Keyboard Access in OS X, because, as you say, it's too much of a hassle and it's not as necessary because of the cross-application shortcut consistency encouraged by the Cult Of Mac.
That would be Cmd-S. Any Mac program that doesn't use that as the "Save" command is coming in from way, way, wa-hay the hell out of left field.
No, I don't know anything about sports, but I'm pretty sure that metaphor's correct.She can install anything she wants to - they didn't arrest her for illegally installing a program. They just said she couldn't use the logs as evidence in the case.
Huh. I was about to suggest the major text adventure languages (Inform, TADS, or Hugo), but Flash is a much, much better solution. Easier to learn and (though, as an interactive-fiction fetishist, it pains me to say this) a less esoteric end product.
On the other hand, this is Slashdot - what the hell do you think you're doing posting useful information?
I, for one, wel...oh, the hell with it.
Evan Evanson
Oh great, now I have to figure out how to mod myself down...
Evan Evanson
It is not native, it uses QT...
I'm not all that knowledgeable about Qt (because I'm a longtime Mac user), but the fact that on the link for the OS X package it says:
leads me to believe that you're wrong.
Evan Evanson
The task of the "artist" themselves varies depending on the particular group, but as a general rule, they are more replaceable than a highly-trained engineer, and each has unique value mainly because of their public image, which is itself crafted by record company marketing departments.
You and I listen to very different kinds of music.
There really is no better survey of jazz up 'til the 70s than The Smithsonian Collection of Classic Jazz . It's 5 CDs of extraordinary choices, and it took the editors a long time to work out the permissions from the various record companies to include them all. And it's got 46 pps of liner notes (that's w/ the LP set - I assume the CD set has the same notes on more pages) that will clue you in to further listening. When it was in print, it cost $175, and it was a bargain; currently it's (shamefully) out of print, but you can pick up a copy for as low as $10 on eBay. Hie thee hence, anonce!
What you should really listen to, though, rather than anyone else's opinions, is the musicians. Pay attention to who plays what instrument on the recordings you really like, and keep an eye out for them on other recordings. Google them and you're bound to come up with discographies for almost anyone that catches your ear. A nice survey book like Jazz: The Rough Guide will highlight the cream of the crop for any particular musician, and will point out any particularly fertile collaborations they may have had. Survey books, like anthologies and textbooks, tend to be expensive, though - see what you can find at your local used book store, or take advantage of the local MegaBookBarn's liberal browsing policies.
If you get into jazz pianists, a great book is Len Lyons's The Great Jazz Pianists , a collection of interviews with keyboard players ranging from Mary Lou Williams to Horace Silver to Dave Brubeck to Bill Evans to Chick Corea to Sun Ra and even further out. Find out who they like to listen to, how they approach music, and who they like to play with. And find out that almost every single one of them is a fan of the French Impressionist composer Maurice Ravel (yes, the Bolero guy), and now you've got two genres of music to spend the rest of your life listening to. ;)
I would list some of my favorite recordings, but some of them have already shown up here, and what I like isn't really relevant - it's what you like, and only your ears can tell you that. Oh, and, as others have said, hit the library - in the age of Instant Internet Information Gratificationâ, I think a lot of us have forgotten what a fabulous and improbable institution the local lending library is. Plus, you can telnet into my local library, for an old-skool thrill!
Evan Evanson
Extraordinary claim: I saw an alien spacecraft over my house last night [...] and it used marshmallow Easter peeps for power.
Well, at least that explains the existence of Peeps.
Evan Evanson
1) Fire up Key Caps, in your Utilities folder. Select the font you're using in the Font menu, and it will display all the default characters of a virtual keyboard. Try hitting the Shift key - you'll see the Shift key depress on the virtual keyboard, and the lowercase letters will change to uppercase, and numbers will change to the symbols that are universally recognized as cuss words for comic strip characters. Now try hitting the far more interesting Option (alt) key. Gaze in awe upon the alternate characters you can produce by typing Option-[character]. Also, notice the Option-[character]s with a light box around them? They're all diacritical marks - accents, umlaut, circumflex, etc. - that can be added to other letters. So, for example, if you want to put an umlaut (you know, the "Deathtöunge" dots) above an "o", you need to type Option-u, then an "o".
2) Use the Character Palette. From Apple's godawful-slow Help System:
Evan EvansonI could have sworn this is a dupe of a story about Tim Hartnell's book, but a cursory search isn't turning up anything. Maybe it was on ArsTechnica...
Anyway, if someone gets a hankering to write an adventure game in a (somewhat) more contemporary language, there's always Inform, the reverse-engineneered language that compiles down to the same z-code files that Infocom's games came in. The Inform Beginner's Guide, 2nd ed. is a great and free start, and the Inform Designer's Manual will answer any questions that are more advanced.