I know you should Never Burn Money, but I think I'll get a bucket full of these and put it in my living room (I know a place where I can get Two for the Price of One. It's in A Converted Church in Venice, Italy). Then I can go Couch Fishing, although I will probably fail at first - but who cares, I can always Try Again; it's not like I Ain't Got Time Pfhor This. I will probably also take them to Waterloo Waterpark and show them Carrol Street Station and then we'll storm The Big House. Nobody will be able to escape our single-celled assault because We're Everywhere. Then I'll take them back home, turn on the stereo and make them Feel The Noise.
That's what I'm going to do with My Own Private Thermophilae.
Not that the USA is blame free, far from it. But I am amazed at what they get blamed for these days.
Well, during the last couple years they have really gone out of their way to destroy their reputation, both politically and socially. During the 90s many people in Germany used to look up to the States (and the image of the States as a better place was not unheard of), nowadays many people look down on them. The USA is becoming the catch-all for blame that the USSR was during the Cold War - and much of it comes from the fact that during the past few years a lot of bullshit has come from over there.
People like easy targets. The USA have made themselves a very easy one.
That's why everyone is so concerned. The huge amount of pure hydrogen there in combination with the oxygen from the athmosphere could cause a gigantic explosion that'd easily wipe out Oregon. All it'd take is some idiot with a box of matches.
DHS has already identified this as a perfect opportunity for terrorists and has ordered the Navy to scatter the hydrogen into the rest of the Pacific by deploying high-yield torpedoes.
In that case you can still leave a message and/or refill the fridge with compensation food when you have time. There's a difference between someone who is forced to to use someone else's resources but does so in a polite way and someone who just takes stuff.
At my university's IT department there's no theft I know of. We do make sure not to leave stuff unattended, but I don't know of a case where someone's stufff really was stolen. Also, most people get their fix of old hardware from when old desktops are put out into the hallway of the main computer lab. Except for the antique SPARCStations they threw out recently. Nobody wanted those.
No way. I learned from the RIAA that theft is when you violate someone's copyright. Physically taking away something from someone, that's... well, that's something different. Someone should really find a name for it. Maybe "Property right infringement". Yeah, that sounds right.
Well, one of these new virii could leave the laboratory and get into the wild. With a bit of bad luck, that virus could be a dangerous mutation - I'm not talking Melissa dangerous, I'm talking H5N1 dangerous. Just one tiny mutation and the virus could jump over to humans, creating a worldwide pandemia as people's immune sytem collapse, unable of keeping up with polymorphic virii that inject their own code into the header of the genetic sequence so that they're uncleanable without working from known-clean marrow. And you know what could be even worse? Worms. If they add a self-propagation mechanism to their new killer virus it would infect random bystanders without the need for a regular infection vector! Those people aren't developing weapons of mass destruction, they're creating doomsday devices! Somebody must put an end to this before it's too late!
The point is that the U.S. government is increasingly concerned with regulating its constituency while relaxing regulation on corporations. The market is increasingly free for large corporations--which I'm willing to accept as a possibly good direction!--but decreasingly free for consumers and new business models. The imbalance is unacceptable if not outright dangerous.
You know, we're getting to a point where some parts of the Shadowrun background story appear less as Cyberpunk fiction than realistic predictions of the future...
Someone should develop a copy protection system that is defeated by the hardware error correction of as many next-gen game consoles as possible while stil falling unter the DMCA - if one does not even need a liberal interpretation of the DMCA, so much the better. Then sue Sony to stop rolling out the Playstation 3 in its current form as it infringes on the DMCA (with the right timing that'd mean delaying the release of the console for a couple months while Sony has to redesign at least the Blu-Ray drive and/or wage a lengthy legal fight). If the copy protection system is protected even under a very narrow interpretation of the DMCA (and the plaintiff has deep enough pockets) Sony might be very interested in settling outside of court as well as calling up the senators on their payroll to order a revision of the DMCA.
The same could be done with Microsoft, but they don't have as much to lose when their next-gen console runs into trouble (as they already made money off it) - of course, nailing Microsoft as well as Sony might be a good idea if your pockets are infinitely deep.
The general concept is to abuse the DMCA to create the threat of damages in the ten-figure range to those companies who both love it and have the means of buying a revised version.
OTOH, they could buy a revised version that effectively excludes non-megacorps from using it...
Actually, how is it even going to know what each window contains? Or how you want them to be positioned? I think it's going to be decades until a computer can look at the open windows, understand what they're showing, infer what and how the user wants to see and position the windows accordingly.
How about a pressure sensitive scroll button, the harder I press the faster it scrolls and scrolling both starts instantly when I press and stops when I depress. Or how about a scroll wheel that actually scrolls smoothly instead of just sending up/down events on every click?
The problem with that is that it'd either require an analof keyboard (= extremely expensive and probably not very durable) or an external analog input (either something like a PowerMate or an analog joystick as the sibling said) and software support for that.
Actually, the second one might be possible - however, analog input would have to be supported on the GUI toolkit level. You might want to submit patches to the GTK folks and Trolltech - maybe they'd include the stuff and make their toolkits analog capable. That might be a nice Summer of Code project...
You should be able to tell the computer what you want to see. If its more important for you to see the first image in full than to see the second image at all, then just tell the computer "this part is important", "this is not" (with about 2 gestures), rather than clicking and dragging about 5 times to tell the computer the same information more redundantly.
Actually, your two gestures are what's redundant, at least if there's frequent switching involved. If I want to bring the second window to the front make a single click at the small non-overlapped area of the second image and it's there. I click on the non-overlapped area of the first image and it comes back. Also, the way I arrange my windows uually has some sort of plan to it, which might be hard to express to the computer. Bringing Firefox to the top, then bringing the GIMP to the top and arranging the windows so I can still read that part of the website (and have the tools where I want them) I need to see while working on the image is a matter of a couple clicks and some drags - it requires neither thinking nor much time. Telling the computer that this specific area of Firefox has to be visible but I still want to see all GIMP windows and the main GIMP window has to be on the left of the current image, which has to be on the left of the layer browser is a lot more work.
Autopositioning might be a nice idea for some people but everyone who spends a lot of time with a program tends to develop a need for some elements to be at just the right position. When these elements have their own windows (like in the GIMP) autopositioning tends to get in the way. While it's not impossible to tell the computer how the windows should be positioned just putting them there is more intuitive and takes less time.
Localized software often uses Ctrl-[random key here] for save, because that random key, in that particular localized language, happens to be the first letter of the word "save" in that particular language. I want uniform, non-language-dependent shortcut keys. I want ctrl-s to work in all programs and no matter what language I'm in now.
So essentially you want all languages to use English shortcuts because that would be easier for you, ignoring the non-english-speaking users? Yeah, it's sure going to be fun explaining to a German user where the D in "löschen" is. And don't try to tell me that all users smart enough to use a computer without assistance speak English. We have quite a lot of smart middle-school kids over here who are much more comfortable with German than with English. Heck, nowadays we have elementary school kids commonly using PCs (as well as the elderly and people who just aren't good with foreign languages). I don't think they should be expected to learn seemingly-random keystrokes just because that's more comfortable to you.
Additionally, many programs offer customizable shortcuts. So please set up things how you like them and don't try to change the default settings for everyone just to accomodate for your tastes.
Again, smooth scrolling can be fast. See kpdf's search as an example.
Yeah, there smooth scrolling does make sense. However, it does not make sense everywhere - if it was applied to PgDn, however, it would cost unnecessary time and actually make the feature harder to use as, when you press the key multiple times, you don't immediately know how far it's going to scroll.
What's gray space? (
a) You make each of the windows small enough to tile them. That makes editing harder as you see less of the image.
b) You let the windows overlap as you can only edit one image at a time.
I don't know about you but b) sounds a lot more attractive to me...
...What? I have no idea what you're talking about, honestly. And yes, I do use both localized and non-localized software. Very few programs (usually older games) assume that 'z' always is next to 'y'.
Qué? I know, list boxes and comboboxes are similar, but they're distinctive enough to each have merit. I don't know what else you could be talking about.
You make your GUI smoothscroll everywhere, but leave mine in peace. When I use PageDn I want to get somewhere quickly. Smoothscrolling yould be decidedly counterproductive. In most other cases the same thing applies.
There are many trivial things to "fix". However, they're usually not fixed because they aren't broken.
The German "BILD" (Europe's most-read tabloid) gets slapped on a wrist for something like this on a regular basis. Often their online version has whole blocks (or even pages) of advertisements unlabeled or labeled in such a way that it appears as if some of the links go to journalistic content. In our case it's not the evil government but a newspaper with a massive case of megalomania, but yes, major news outlets are becoming less and less reliable (although the "BILD" always has been the antithesis to proper journalism).
But Java would be so much better if it was more like $MY_FAVOURITE_LANGUAGE! For example, it's lacking some features found in PHP like being mixable with HTML code and not using namespaces! And it should have the syntactic goodness of both Ruby and Haskell! Speaking of Haskell, why doesn't Java use type inference everywhere? Forcing the user to give a type only makes things complicated. Also, function declarations should not look like String foobar(int blah, int fhqwhgads) - foobar::Integer -> Integer -> String is much better for a completely nonspecific reason that everyone with two brain cells to rub together could see (just as he could see that such declarations should be optional since they could be inferred by the compiler). Also, Java should run on Dotnet and use FLTK as the main GUI toolkit.
And Javadoc should translate all source code comments into Esperanto.
(As a matter of fact, I like this kind of advertisement. It has a value of its own, is somewhat entertaining and shows the capabilities of the product by letting people play with it. I won't buy the software as I don't need it, but the advertisement gets two thumbs up.)
A key question, though, is whether this kind of detection system can realistically block terrorists from bringing seemingly innocuous liquids past security and combining them later to deadly effect.
Step 1: Set up a database.
Step 2: Log detected chemicals in database, periodically checking whether there is a combination of chemicals that might form a weapon if combined.
Step 3: If such a combination is found note persons holding the chemicals in question and investigate further. In case of suspicion, search hand luggage to confirm readings.
That way people can attempt to hijack the plane using acetone all they want (assuming that acetone is okay to bring) but if someone brings peroxide as well security can react - and if it wasn't peroxide at all we still have just inconvenienced a few passengers (of course if "investigate" means "perform a cavity search while yelling at them what stinky little terorists they are" we create an entirely new problem). If investigation is done sensibly this could be an area where false postives are accepted even by the people they inconvenience.
Take for instance Kleenex, Jell-O, Frisbee & Hoover. You know what all these are and there's a fairly good chance you've called an imposter brand the same name.
Note that generic brand names tend to be region-specific. Here's how a German reads that list:
Kleenex: An american brand of cellulose tissues that never quite became popular in Germany. The German equivalent would be "Tempo".
Jell-O: I have no idea what that is, but from what I've heard so far it's either a soft drink or (looks up the translation of "Götterspeise") jello. No German equivalent.
Frisbee: Yup, that one works over here.
Hoover: An American politician and a dam. We have no generic brand name for politicians and dams. (Okay, I know about the vacuum cleaner thing. No generic brand name there, either.)
"Google", however, is already frequently used as a verb.
Nice example of varying values of "good". Both *BSD and Solaris have some advantages over Linux, but the same holds true in opposite. Likewise with Opera - some people consider it better than Firefox and some consider it not even worth considering. Some people want a browser that does everything out of the box and some want one that they can customize to how they like it. Some like BSD-type licenses and some like the GPL.
"Good" and "bad" are utterly subjective and the things we call "the best" today are often "the best" because the people who wrote history called them that.
Slashdot Mirror
Ironically, it's probably the thing he was best at.
I know you should Never Burn Money, but I think I'll get a bucket full of these and put it in my living room (I know a place where I can get Two for the Price of One. It's in A Converted Church in Venice, Italy). Then I can go Couch Fishing, although I will probably fail at first - but who cares, I can always Try Again; it's not like I Ain't Got Time Pfhor This. I will probably also take them to Waterloo Waterpark and show them Carrol Street Station and then we'll storm The Big House. Nobody will be able to escape our single-celled assault because We're Everywhere. Then I'll take them back home, turn on the stereo and make them Feel The Noise.
That's what I'm going to do with My Own Private Thermophilae.
Not that the USA is blame free, far from it. But I am amazed at what they get blamed for these days.
Well, during the last couple years they have really gone out of their way to destroy their reputation, both politically and socially. During the 90s many people in Germany used to look up to the States (and the image of the States as a better place was not unheard of), nowadays many people look down on them. The USA is becoming the catch-all for blame that the USSR was during the Cold War - and much of it comes from the fact that during the past few years a lot of bullshit has come from over there.
People like easy targets. The USA have made themselves a very easy one.
That's why everyone is so concerned. The huge amount of pure hydrogen there in combination with the oxygen from the athmosphere could cause a gigantic explosion that'd easily wipe out Oregon. All it'd take is some idiot with a box of matches.
DHS has already identified this as a perfect opportunity for terrorists and has ordered the Navy to scatter the hydrogen into the rest of the Pacific by deploying high-yield torpedoes.
In that case you can still leave a message and/or refill the fridge with compensation food when you have time. There's a difference between someone who is forced to to use someone else's resources but does so in a polite way and someone who just takes stuff.
So your point is that bullying builds character?
At my university's IT department there's no theft I know of. We do make sure not to leave stuff unattended, but I don't know of a case where someone's stufff really was stolen. Also, most people get their fix of old hardware from when old desktops are put out into the hallway of the main computer lab. Except for the antique SPARCStations they threw out recently. Nobody wanted those.
Microsoft doesn't steal lunches, it innovates them. ;)
No way. I learned from the RIAA that theft is when you violate someone's copyright. Physically taking away something from someone, that's... well, that's something different. Someone should really find a name for it. Maybe "Property right infringement". Yeah, that sounds right.
Well, one of these new virii could leave the laboratory and get into the wild. With a bit of bad luck, that virus could be a dangerous mutation - I'm not talking Melissa dangerous, I'm talking H5N1 dangerous. Just one tiny mutation and the virus could jump over to humans, creating a worldwide pandemia as people's immune sytem collapse, unable of keeping up with polymorphic virii that inject their own code into the header of the genetic sequence so that they're uncleanable without working from known-clean marrow. And you know what could be even worse? Worms. If they add a self-propagation mechanism to their new killer virus it would infect random bystanders without the need for a regular infection vector! Those people aren't developing weapons of mass destruction, they're creating doomsday devices! Somebody must put an end to this before it's too late!
The point is that the U.S. government is increasingly concerned with regulating its constituency while relaxing regulation on corporations. The market is increasingly free for large corporations--which I'm willing to accept as a possibly good direction!--but decreasingly free for consumers and new business models. The imbalance is unacceptable if not outright dangerous.
You know, we're getting to a point where some parts of the Shadowrun background story appear less as Cyberpunk fiction than realistic predictions of the future...
Someone should develop a copy protection system that is defeated by the hardware error correction of as many next-gen game consoles as possible while stil falling unter the DMCA - if one does not even need a liberal interpretation of the DMCA, so much the better. Then sue Sony to stop rolling out the Playstation 3 in its current form as it infringes on the DMCA (with the right timing that'd mean delaying the release of the console for a couple months while Sony has to redesign at least the Blu-Ray drive and/or wage a lengthy legal fight). If the copy protection system is protected even under a very narrow interpretation of the DMCA (and the plaintiff has deep enough pockets) Sony might be very interested in settling outside of court as well as calling up the senators on their payroll to order a revision of the DMCA.
The same could be done with Microsoft, but they don't have as much to lose when their next-gen console runs into trouble (as they already made money off it) - of course, nailing Microsoft as well as Sony might be a good idea if your pockets are infinitely deep.
The general concept is to abuse the DMCA to create the threat of damages in the ten-figure range to those companies who both love it and have the means of buying a revised version.
OTOH, they could buy a revised version that effectively excludes non-megacorps from using it...
Actually, how is it even going to know what each window contains? Or how you want them to be positioned? I think it's going to be decades until a computer can look at the open windows, understand what they're showing, infer what and how the user wants to see and position the windows accordingly.
How about a pressure sensitive scroll button, the harder I press the faster it scrolls and scrolling both starts instantly when I press and stops when I depress. Or how about a scroll wheel that actually scrolls smoothly instead of just sending up/down events on every click?
The problem with that is that it'd either require an analof keyboard (= extremely expensive and probably not very durable) or an external analog input (either something like a PowerMate or an analog joystick as the sibling said) and software support for that.
Actually, the second one might be possible - however, analog input would have to be supported on the GUI toolkit level. You might want to submit patches to the GTK folks and Trolltech - maybe they'd include the stuff and make their toolkits analog capable. That might be a nice Summer of Code project...
You should be able to tell the computer what you want to see. If its more important for you to see the first image in full than to see the second image at all, then just tell the computer "this part is important", "this is not" (with about 2 gestures), rather than clicking and dragging about 5 times to tell the computer the same information more redundantly.
Actually, your two gestures are what's redundant, at least if there's frequent switching involved. If I want to bring the second window to the front make a single click at the small non-overlapped area of the second image and it's there. I click on the non-overlapped area of the first image and it comes back. Also, the way I arrange my windows uually has some sort of plan to it, which might be hard to express to the computer. Bringing Firefox to the top, then bringing the GIMP to the top and arranging the windows so I can still read that part of the website (and have the tools where I want them) I need to see while working on the image is a matter of a couple clicks and some drags - it requires neither thinking nor much time. Telling the computer that this specific area of Firefox has to be visible but I still want to see all GIMP windows and the main GIMP window has to be on the left of the current image, which has to be on the left of the layer browser is a lot more work.
Autopositioning might be a nice idea for some people but everyone who spends a lot of time with a program tends to develop a need for some elements to be at just the right position. When these elements have their own windows (like in the GIMP) autopositioning tends to get in the way. While it's not impossible to tell the computer how the windows should be positioned just putting them there is more intuitive and takes less time.
Localized software often uses Ctrl-[random key here] for save, because that random key, in that particular localized language, happens to be the first letter of the word "save" in that particular language.
I want uniform, non-language-dependent shortcut keys. I want ctrl-s to work in all programs and no matter what language I'm in now.
So essentially you want all languages to use English shortcuts because that would be easier for you, ignoring the non-english-speaking users? Yeah, it's sure going to be fun explaining to a German user where the D in "löschen" is. And don't try to tell me that all users smart enough to use a computer without assistance speak English. We have quite a lot of smart middle-school kids over here who are much more comfortable with German than with English. Heck, nowadays we have elementary school kids commonly using PCs (as well as the elderly and people who just aren't good with foreign languages). I don't think they should be expected to learn seemingly-random keystrokes just because that's more comfortable to you.
Additionally, many programs offer customizable shortcuts. So please set up things how you like them and don't try to change the default settings for everyone just to accomodate for your tastes.
Again, smooth scrolling can be fast. See kpdf's search as an example.
Yeah, there smooth scrolling does make sense. However, it does not make sense everywhere - if it was applied to PgDn, however, it would cost unnecessary time and actually make the feature harder to use as, when you press the key multiple times, you don't immediately know how far it's going to scroll.
- What's gray space? (
a) You make each of the windows small enough to tile them. That makes editing harder as you see less of the image.
- ...What? I have no idea what you're talking about, honestly. And yes, I do use both localized and non-localized software. Very few programs (usually older games) assume that 'z' always is next to 'y'.
- Qué? I know, list boxes and comboboxes are similar, but they're distinctive enough to each have merit. I don't know what else you could be talking about.
- You make your GUI smoothscroll everywhere, but leave mine in peace. When I use PageDn I want to get somewhere quickly. Smoothscrolling yould be decidedly counterproductive. In most other cases the same thing applies.
There are many trivial things to "fix". However, they're usually not fixed because they aren't broken.b) You let the windows overlap as you can only edit one image at a time.
I don't know about you but b) sounds a lot more attractive to me...
The German "BILD" (Europe's most-read tabloid) gets slapped on a wrist for something like this on a regular basis. Often their online version has whole blocks (or even pages) of advertisements unlabeled or labeled in such a way that it appears as if some of the links go to journalistic content. In our case it's not the evil government but a newspaper with a massive case of megalomania, but yes, major news outlets are becoming less and less reliable (although the "BILD" always has been the antithesis to proper journalism).
But Java would be so much better if it was more like $MY_FAVOURITE_LANGUAGE! For example, it's lacking some features found in PHP like being mixable with HTML code and not using namespaces! And it should have the syntactic goodness of both Ruby and Haskell! Speaking of Haskell, why doesn't Java use type inference everywhere? Forcing the user to give a type only makes things complicated. Also, function declarations should not look like String foobar(int blah, int fhqwhgads) - foobar::Integer -> Integer -> String is much better for a completely nonspecific reason that everyone with two brain cells to rub together could see (just as he could see that such declarations should be optional since they could be inferred by the compiler). Also, Java should run on Dotnet and use FLTK as the main GUI toolkit.
And Javadoc should translate all source code comments into Esperanto.
Also, great advertisement for Splunk...
(As a matter of fact, I like this kind of advertisement. It has a value of its own, is somewhat entertaining and shows the capabilities of the product by letting people play with it. I won't buy the software as I don't need it, but the advertisement gets two thumbs up.)
A key question, though, is whether this kind of detection system can realistically block terrorists from bringing seemingly innocuous liquids past security and combining them later to deadly effect.
Step 1: Set up a database.
Step 2: Log detected chemicals in database, periodically checking whether there is a combination of chemicals that might form a weapon if combined.
Step 3: If such a combination is found note persons holding the chemicals in question and investigate further. In case of suspicion, search hand luggage to confirm readings.
That way people can attempt to hijack the plane using acetone all they want (assuming that acetone is okay to bring) but if someone brings peroxide as well security can react - and if it wasn't peroxide at all we still have just inconvenienced a few passengers (of course if "investigate" means "perform a cavity search while yelling at them what stinky little terorists they are" we create an entirely new problem). If investigation is done sensibly this could be an area where false postives are accepted even by the people they inconvenience.
Come on, the tubes are already congested as it is...
Well, over here (northern Germany) the term I hear most commonly is "Lego" (the term is uncountable).
Take for instance Kleenex, Jell-O, Frisbee & Hoover. You know what all these are and there's a fairly good chance you've called an imposter brand the same name.
Note that generic brand names tend to be region-specific. Here's how a German reads that list:
Kleenex: An american brand of cellulose tissues that never quite became popular in Germany. The German equivalent would be "Tempo".
Jell-O: I have no idea what that is, but from what I've heard so far it's either a soft drink or (looks up the translation of "Götterspeise") jello. No German equivalent.
Frisbee: Yup, that one works over here.
Hoover: An American politician and a dam. We have no generic brand name for politicians and dams. (Okay, I know about the vacuum cleaner thing. No generic brand name there, either.)
"Google", however, is already frequently used as a verb.
Cue Netcraft joke... now.
Nice example of varying values of "good". Both *BSD and Solaris have some advantages over Linux, but the same holds true in opposite. Likewise with Opera - some people consider it better than Firefox and some consider it not even worth considering. Some people want a browser that does everything out of the box and some want one that they can customize to how they like it. Some like BSD-type licenses and some like the GPL.
"Good" and "bad" are utterly subjective and the things we call "the best" today are often "the best" because the people who wrote history called them that.