I understand how geeks get excited about big brains, but in the absence of tool-using or any evidence of actual utility, the Boskops brain == Mensa minimum is a phony conclusion. What did these big brained apes do all day? Sit around and sing complex rhythms with bad lyrics while their females died of childbirth?
Seriously. What does your experience of management decisions teach you about probables like that? Be glad you have a job, and never, ever, under any circumstances, dare to even THINK about unionizing.
Nautilus? What's Nautilus? Doesn't it have something to do with my Ubuntu desktop? I never noticed it, and wouldn't know how to change it to "bowser mode" on a dare. Poking around, here... Desktop file viewer? Why should I care? Won't Canonical make it user-friendly before turning it loose on us oozers?
Caroline Rose edited Apple's Inside Macintosh, a set of books that let me support my family for several years. Other than that, I can't recall seeing any documentation that wasn't a simple port of GUI menu structure into linear text. The dearth of answers to the questions "why?" and "wherefore?" is stunning in its Bauhaus minimalisticalisation.
On the other hand, having written code nobody fresh out of college could understand (the guys, i.e., who write versions greater than 2...), I can understand the desperate need to ship before documenting before plunging into the next vat of we-need-it-yesterday.
You'd think, with all the time in the world, and no pressures but the self-imposed, Linux documentation could exceed the need to spew surface and delve never.
On the OTHER other hand, why does a manual have to exist between the pages of a book? Why can't it be Google? It frequently is already. But I would second the motion made elsewhere, to at least append dates and version numbers to your how-tos. Knowledge has a half-life of less than 50 million seconds these days.
Jaunty was a beta, in my opinion, so I considered myself warned off Karmic. It took me six weeks to bring everything I had running in Intrepid (mostly sound and non-YouTube video on a Dell Inspiron 1525) back into Jaunty. I don't intend to try another release from Canonical until the q.a. institutional issues are resolved. Not Karmic Koala, and certainly not Lucid Lunatic at this stage of the game. On the other hand, that's only 9.4 feet. The ten foot pole is reserved for W7.
Thanks for the heads up. I've finally got 9.04 working, sort of (sound acceptable to my daughter, plus DVD, plus fully functional non-YouTube videos again - esp. Vimeo and Rachel.MSNBC.com) and so feel very disinclined to dork with it. My family hated me for three days after I "upgraded" from 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04. Getting it all right again took weeks.
My only question is, who's out of a job where because Canonical has decided to pinch off a few budding livelihoods? You could ship the whole operation to Nauru and give 15,000 dead broke former potash farmers something to live for.
Canonical had lots of competition, including Red Hat and Slackware, that I've used and enjoyed. I went with Canonical's Ubuntu because of the mystical, up-with-people vibe. Disappointing news.
So. Higgs-Boson, testable. Chicago Cubs, detestable. Makes sense to me, but only if you simultaneously answer the seemingly unentangled questions "testable by what" and "detestable to whom" since if there IS a God particle it seems likely that it plays some other game. We posit, then, that if Death plays chess, God must play solitaire.
The last headhunter I had to contend with called me (at work!) on spec, tried to pretend he was scouting for Microsoft and asked me if I was a "hands on kind of guy." No, I was a code with Notepad kind of guy. He didn't get the joke. Who needs 'em?
Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, James H. Schmitz (just Karres, no Telzey or Trigger), J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, D. J. McHale, to name just a few of the modern heavy hitters.
Isaac Asimov should be proactively expunged from libraries, not for being controversial, but for being a pompous ass who actually expected The Three Laws of Robotics (*gag* *retch*) to be implemented on the battlefield, indicating a serious misfire of imagination. Most of the Dirty Dozen or so potboiling hacks from the sixties through the nineties can ignored -- all of Heinlein, all of Sturgeon, all of LeGuin, all of Haldeman or Norton, Zelazney or Foster, Cherryh or McAffrey, nearly all of Bradbury, and absolutely none of Rottenberry and his running dogs, certainly nothing written by politicians or "serious" writers. I'd make an exception for Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn (the team), some of their titles were outstanding, such as Star Bridge.
I'd wait a bit on Twilight and Eragon, in the fantasy genre; they may not weather the times. C. S. Lewis' Narnia series, the Pooh books of our generation, are like Barney something of a purple monstrosity -- the overt Christian symbology (especially in Dawn Treader) strikes most modern readers as downright twee, if not medieval -- except for those benighted souls who are living in the Middle Ages anyway.
But the genre should be expanded to include manga and anime, in particular Hayao Miyazaki, Yumi Hotta and Mamoru Oishii, and it would not be remiss to include a few unexpected serial thrillers from the dim and distant past -- Charles Dickens (Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers), Edmond Rostand (Cyrano's flight to the Moon), and one William Shakespeare (the obvious). Casting a wider net, fantasy has been rich and rife in China and Japan for centuries -- I'd mention "Dream of the Red Chamber" and some ghost stories in "Genji Monogatari".
A few items from magico-realism, maybe: Carlos Castaneda in moderation, or Laura Esquivel.
Iowa's increasingly senile... err.. senior U.S. Senator Charles "I've Already Got Health Care" Grassley got a Kindle from his staff and is seen everywhere with it, according to an article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette last week. No word whether he's figured out how to tweet with it, yet, but hey, as long it can't do stickies...
A bit expensive, but an accurate pdf (jpg, etc.) to text OCR. Urban legend has it, this is old Russian software developed by the KGB, and back in the Yeltsin era there was a free loss-leader demo making the rounds for Macintosh. I doubt that's still available, but even at $400 a pop, ABBYY FineReader is pretty good stuff, IMHO.
I've scored English essays for professional testing services, and I've seen the results of robot scoring. It's pretty shoddy. No, computers are not able to distinguish between a paragraph of As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner) and a gallon of sophomoric babble by say, yours truly. However, within the confines of a particular exam, where the topic is known, responses are predictable, and all the supplicants hew to the general line, the 'bots can detect subpar, adequate, above average and (sometimes!) abnormally brilliant expository prose, thereby ranking papers reasonably well on the usual six point scale.
It's worth pointing out that certain types of exams are designed to elicit extraordinary prose from respondents, that which yields a sense of competence or even brilliance, say. In these cases, the idea is not so much to detect the high end of the bell curve, but to identify the tiny pool of applicants who may be capable of Nobel Prize work in future realms of science or service. No 'bot can do that job, just as no 'bot except Deep Blue can beat Gary Kasparov, and no 'bot at all deserves the monicker Fujiwara no Sai (although Go-playing 'bots are approaching the mid-levels of highly ranked amateur players).
That's the objective part. My personal opinion is that using robots to sort the hopes and aspirations of college-bound men and women is just begging for lawsuits. It's an approach in which differences of opinion quickly escalate to class action against universities as well as test administrators, and would not be an approach I could comfortably recommend.
If gravity waves distort space-time, then how can you extricate the observer from her own deformable frame of reference long enough to make a measurement? Shouldn't there be a quantum effect, like teleportation, if a distortion is detected? Since the effect would probably be small, it would probably show up as weird stuff like unexplained cold or miniscule loss of mass in a reference object.
So oral tradition gets kicked up a notch on the veracity scale because some big monkey-eating bird "actually existed"? Is the surprise the bird, or the fact that the Maoris got it right, or the obvious alacrity with which Westerners can stick two unrelated facts together with their private brand of crazy glue? I should probably read TFA but I'm not getting the tattoo, tyvm.
I started with Linux by trying out Slackware a decade ago, but always went back to Mac OS (X) and Windows XP since that was what we were using at work. I installed Linux on my own boxen every couple of years, but it was never a practical alternative until Firefox, Gimp and Open Office.org came along.
Gnome finally got good enough to be a desktop, Ubuntu finally recognized most of my hardware out of the box, and Canonical started their insane giveaway program of free install CD's, but I looked at Feisty and Gutsy before I finally installed Hardy -- which promptly killed my wireless, since it didn't include Dell's proprietary Broadcom STA wireless driver. But Hardy was nice, almost everything worked including YouTube, Vimeo and whatever video it is that MSNBC uses. Good enough. I upgraded to Jaunty. Dell Inspiron 1525 wireless works again, and now — everything but YouTube is busted in the video department!
What boils my cheese about Ubuntu, arguably the best free consumer Linux out there, is the lack of cross-sandbox QA. Yes, Apple has been a scurvy scumbag in the broken features department, and Microsoft is no slouch at the game of making users pay for bug fixes (but the bugs ARE fixed), but Linux is a green beacon of broken promises kept painfully slow. Linux is no child growing up, but Frankenstein's monster gradually accumulating bits and pieces, all individually cool but collectively alive only in someone else's paradigm of what a consumer computer should look like.
Bottom line? I can't turn Grandma loose on Ubuntu. It's high maintenance. Way too high maintenance, almost as bad as Microsoft. If I charge myself for my time on this chore, how free is free? I will never go back to Vista, but Mac OS X...? That's in the realm. But I do sorely wish Ubuntu was up to snuff, and frankly it's gotten good enough to pay for, in the under $200 per major version range.
The best T-shirt I ever saw was "I can't tell where the hardware stops and the software begins." As the only guy in America who ever debugged the Kaypro II internal modem (one of the UART pins was documented improperly at the factory!), I've always had a special admiration for geeks who debug software by ripping apart hardware. So cool!
Microsoft has forgotten much, including its roots.
I love it when the boys and girls at NCIS "crack" a password in 7 seconds flat. Turing? Who eez zis "Turing?"
On the plus side, most good guy fictional hackers have ethics, so they would never, ever turn up the gain on Mom's favorite cable channel (dimming out the sound on 288 other channels for everyone else...!) Hey, troo story. I had to share the same fabric walls with this slackaroon. Oh, fondly do I remember the wails when the Powers That Be punished me even further ("bad attitude") by putting him on my project: "Hey, wtf! This is rocket science!" He was good to his wife and kids, IIRC.
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I understand how geeks get excited about big brains, but in the absence of tool-using or any evidence of actual utility, the Boskops brain == Mensa minimum is a phony conclusion. What did these big brained apes do all day? Sit around and sing complex rhythms with bad lyrics while their females died of childbirth?
Seriously. What does your experience of management decisions teach you about probables like that? Be glad you have a job, and never, ever, under any circumstances, dare to even THINK about unionizing.
But if you do, I recommend the Teamsters.
Nautilus? What's Nautilus? Doesn't it have something to do with my Ubuntu desktop? I never noticed it, and wouldn't know how to change it to "bowser mode" on a dare. Poking around, here... Desktop file viewer? Why should I care? Won't Canonical make it user-friendly before turning it loose on us oozers?
Jerusalem as a scarce resource... Hmmm. God is into real estate? Next time, goes the memo from Mother Nature to herself, no brains for apes.
Caroline Rose edited Apple's Inside Macintosh, a set of books that let me support my family for several years. Other than that, I can't recall seeing any documentation that wasn't a simple port of GUI menu structure into linear text. The dearth of answers to the questions "why?" and "wherefore?" is stunning in its Bauhaus minimalisticalisation.
On the other hand, having written code nobody fresh out of college could understand (the guys, i.e., who write versions greater than 2...), I can understand the desperate need to ship before documenting before plunging into the next vat of we-need-it-yesterday.
You'd think, with all the time in the world, and no pressures but the self-imposed, Linux documentation could exceed the need to spew surface and delve never.
On the OTHER other hand, why does a manual have to exist between the pages of a book? Why can't it be Google? It frequently is already. But I would second the motion made elsewhere, to at least append dates and version numbers to your how-tos. Knowledge has a half-life of less than 50 million seconds these days.
Starve. People without food can't get fat. Doh, America. Doh!
Jaunty was a beta, in my opinion, so I considered myself warned off Karmic. It took me six weeks to bring everything I had running in Intrepid (mostly sound and non-YouTube video on a Dell Inspiron 1525) back into Jaunty. I don't intend to try another release from Canonical until the q.a. institutional issues are resolved. Not Karmic Koala, and certainly not Lucid Lunatic at this stage of the game. On the other hand, that's only 9.4 feet. The ten foot pole is reserved for W7.
Thanks for the heads up. I've finally got 9.04 working, sort of (sound acceptable to my daughter, plus DVD, plus fully functional non-YouTube videos again - esp. Vimeo and Rachel.MSNBC.com) and so feel very disinclined to dork with it. My family hated me for three days after I "upgraded" from 8.04 -> 8.10 -> 9.04. Getting it all right again took weeks.
http://www.ubuntu.com/getubuntu/download
http://releases.ubuntu.com/
My only question is, who's out of a job where because Canonical has decided to pinch off a few budding livelihoods? You could ship the whole operation to Nauru and give 15,000 dead broke former potash farmers something to live for.
Canonical had lots of competition, including Red Hat and Slackware, that I've used and enjoyed. I went with Canonical's Ubuntu because of the mystical, up-with-people vibe. Disappointing news.
Maybe. Let's see how W7 handles over the long haul. The fact that we have to compare it to XP is beyond morbidly interesting.
So. Higgs-Boson, testable. Chicago Cubs, detestable. Makes sense to me, but only if you simultaneously answer the seemingly unentangled questions "testable by what" and "detestable to whom" since if there IS a God particle it seems likely that it plays some other game. We posit, then, that if Death plays chess, God must play solitaire.
The last headhunter I had to contend with called me (at work!) on spec, tried to pretend he was scouting for Microsoft and asked me if I was a "hands on kind of guy." No, I was a code with Notepad kind of guy. He didn't get the joke. Who needs 'em?
I left out Lewis Carroll because you can't Google Alice or Wonderland without wandering into paedophilia-land and hentai before you know it.
Douglas Adams, Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman, James H. Schmitz (just Karres, no Telzey or Trigger), J. R. R. Tolkien, J. K. Rowling, D. J. McHale, to name just a few of the modern heavy hitters.
Isaac Asimov should be proactively expunged from libraries, not for being controversial, but for being a pompous ass who actually expected The Three Laws of Robotics (*gag* *retch*) to be implemented on the battlefield, indicating a serious misfire of imagination. Most of the Dirty Dozen or so potboiling hacks from the sixties through the nineties can ignored -- all of Heinlein, all of Sturgeon, all of LeGuin, all of Haldeman or Norton, Zelazney or Foster, Cherryh or McAffrey, nearly all of Bradbury, and absolutely none of Rottenberry and his running dogs, certainly nothing written by politicians or "serious" writers. I'd make an exception for Jack Williamson and James E. Gunn (the team), some of their titles were outstanding, such as Star Bridge.
I'd wait a bit on Twilight and Eragon, in the fantasy genre; they may not weather the times. C. S. Lewis' Narnia series, the Pooh books of our generation, are like Barney something of a purple monstrosity -- the overt Christian symbology (especially in Dawn Treader) strikes most modern readers as downright twee, if not medieval -- except for those benighted souls who are living in the Middle Ages anyway.
But the genre should be expanded to include manga and anime, in particular Hayao Miyazaki, Yumi Hotta and Mamoru Oishii, and it would not be remiss to include a few unexpected serial thrillers from the dim and distant past -- Charles Dickens (Christmas Carol and Pickwick Papers), Edmond Rostand (Cyrano's flight to the Moon), and one William Shakespeare (the obvious). Casting a wider net, fantasy has been rich and rife in China and Japan for centuries -- I'd mention "Dream of the Red Chamber" and some ghost stories in "Genji Monogatari".
A few items from magico-realism, maybe: Carlos Castaneda in moderation, or Laura Esquivel.
I have no mod points to mod this up. But I would. Most archaeologists prefer to avoid clairvoyant claims about evidence.
Iowa's increasingly senile... err.. senior U.S. Senator Charles "I've Already Got Health Care" Grassley got a Kindle from his staff and is seen everywhere with it, according to an article in the Cedar Rapids Gazette last week. No word whether he's figured out how to tweet with it, yet, but hey, as long it can't do stickies...
A bit expensive, but an accurate pdf (jpg, etc.) to text OCR. Urban legend has it, this is old Russian software developed by the KGB, and back in the Yeltsin era there was a free loss-leader demo making the rounds for Macintosh. I doubt that's still available, but even at $400 a pop, ABBYY FineReader is pretty good stuff, IMHO.
I've scored English essays for professional testing services, and I've seen the results of robot scoring. It's pretty shoddy. No, computers are not able to distinguish between a paragraph of As I Lay Dying (William Faulkner) and a gallon of sophomoric babble by say, yours truly. However, within the confines of a particular exam, where the topic is known, responses are predictable, and all the supplicants hew to the general line, the 'bots can detect subpar, adequate, above average and (sometimes!) abnormally brilliant expository prose, thereby ranking papers reasonably well on the usual six point scale.
It's worth pointing out that certain types of exams are designed to elicit extraordinary prose from respondents, that which yields a sense of competence or even brilliance, say. In these cases, the idea is not so much to detect the high end of the bell curve, but to identify the tiny pool of applicants who may be capable of Nobel Prize work in future realms of science or service. No 'bot can do that job, just as no 'bot except Deep Blue can beat Gary Kasparov, and no 'bot at all deserves the monicker Fujiwara no Sai (although Go-playing 'bots are approaching the mid-levels of highly ranked amateur players).
That's the objective part. My personal opinion is that using robots to sort the hopes and aspirations of college-bound men and women is just begging for lawsuits. It's an approach in which differences of opinion quickly escalate to class action against universities as well as test administrators, and would not be an approach I could comfortably recommend.
Show, don't tell.
If gravity waves distort space-time, then how can you extricate the observer from her own deformable frame of reference long enough to make a measurement? Shouldn't there be a quantum effect, like teleportation, if a distortion is detected? Since the effect would probably be small, it would probably show up as weird stuff like unexplained cold or miniscule loss of mass in a reference object.
So oral tradition gets kicked up a notch on the veracity scale because some big monkey-eating bird "actually existed"? Is the surprise the bird, or the fact that the Maoris got it right, or the obvious alacrity with which Westerners can stick two unrelated facts together with their private brand of crazy glue? I should probably read TFA but I'm not getting the tattoo, tyvm.
Today healthcare, tomorrow tax-supported wifi preferably on the backs of propertied non-individuals. AT&T surcharge, anyone?
I started with Linux by trying out Slackware a decade ago, but always went back to Mac OS (X) and Windows XP since that was what we were using at work. I installed Linux on my own boxen every couple of years, but it was never a practical alternative until Firefox, Gimp and Open Office.org came along.
Gnome finally got good enough to be a desktop, Ubuntu finally recognized most of my hardware out of the box, and Canonical started their insane giveaway program of free install CD's, but I looked at Feisty and Gutsy before I finally installed Hardy -- which promptly killed my wireless, since it didn't include Dell's proprietary Broadcom STA wireless driver. But Hardy was nice, almost everything worked including YouTube, Vimeo and whatever video it is that MSNBC uses. Good enough. I upgraded to Jaunty. Dell Inspiron 1525 wireless works again, and now — everything but YouTube is busted in the video department!
What boils my cheese about Ubuntu, arguably the best free consumer Linux out there, is the lack of cross-sandbox QA. Yes, Apple has been a scurvy scumbag in the broken features department, and Microsoft is no slouch at the game of making users pay for bug fixes (but the bugs ARE fixed), but Linux is a green beacon of broken promises kept painfully slow. Linux is no child growing up, but Frankenstein's monster gradually accumulating bits and pieces, all individually cool but collectively alive only in someone else's paradigm of what a consumer computer should look like.
Bottom line? I can't turn Grandma loose on Ubuntu. It's high maintenance. Way too high maintenance, almost as bad as Microsoft. If I charge myself for my time on this chore, how free is free? I will never go back to Vista, but Mac OS X...? That's in the realm. But I do sorely wish Ubuntu was up to snuff, and frankly it's gotten good enough to pay for, in the under $200 per major version range.
The best T-shirt I ever saw was "I can't tell where the hardware stops and the software begins." As the only guy in America who ever debugged the Kaypro II internal modem (one of the UART pins was documented improperly at the factory!), I've always had a special admiration for geeks who debug software by ripping apart hardware. So cool!
Microsoft has forgotten much, including its roots.
I love it when the boys and girls at NCIS "crack" a password in 7 seconds flat. Turing? Who eez zis "Turing?"
On the plus side, most good guy fictional hackers have ethics, so they would never, ever turn up the gain on Mom's favorite cable channel (dimming out the sound on 288 other channels for everyone else...!) Hey, troo story. I had to share the same fabric walls with this slackaroon. Oh, fondly do I remember the wails when the Powers That Be punished me even further ("bad attitude") by putting him on my project: "Hey, wtf! This is rocket science!" He was good to his wife and kids, IIRC.