Disclaimer: I was the sort of kid that brought home two bags full of books from the library each week. I've always read a lot.
I bought a Kindle Keyboard as soon as they were available for the simple reason that a small apartment can only hold that many bookshelves chock full of small paperbacks. Last year I read over a 100 books on it, which rather surprised me as I haven't read that many paper books a year since before high school. The reason is that the kindle is so light and convenient that I now can read anywhere: waiting in line, while shopping, while walking, while in the tub (plastic ziplock baggie!), while on the bus, while on the plane, while whenever really.
I didn't buy all those books from Amazon. I've read ebooks from Baen since the late nineties, and there's Smashwords, Gutenberg, Mobileread, authors selling directly, and author coops like Bookview Cafe. With Calibre, it doesn't really matter where you get the books from. Unfortunately, since I would like a steady supply of books from well-nourished, creative authors, I do pay for my books. Even at an average of 5 dollars a pop, it adds up, especially when you've run out of your favorite authors and desperately need more to read and therefore start buying anything with a half way decent blurb and not too fawning reviews in hope of finding a new favorite author.
There are rumors going around that new Kindles will be announced in time for Christmas this year. I might just get one. Eink, mind, and it really needs the paging-buttons on the sides as that makes one-handed reading with any hand in any situation possible. With wifi off I only need to charge it every three weeks or so (unless I'm caught by a fat, impossible-to-take-a-break-from page turner, then I read with the power cable plugged in...). I was opposed to touch but now that I have a phone with touch I can see it would be nice for moving about menus. Not for the actual paging though.
I would also say, definitely eink if you're serious about reading. I've read books on VT220s, big CRTs, Sharp Zaurus, DS (homebrew), android, print outs, iPad (borrowed), projectors, glossy magazine paper, grey mass market paperback paper, extra cheap self-destructing school book paper, expensive non-acidic archive quality hardcover paper, yellowed copy paper, newspaper, toilet paper (I hope it was a gimmick), the lot: eink (pearl) beats them all. Much better in sunlight than paper since the background isn't bright white.
If you do get a tablet, read with the colors reversed: white on black. You won't feel like you've stared into the sun for hours after just.. one.. more.. page.. hey, is that the sunrise?
Ah, yes, invading other nations "to take their oil" isn't a "desperation measure", but investing in domestic industry is. What world are you living in?
The abbreviation SF is often used to stand for speculative fiction (which is science fiction+fantasy+horror+alternate history++) and not just science fiction, so maybe the scifi-channel should change its name.
And my worry is that these hundreds (linguistics-departments aren't exactly the golden goose) of students and academics spend their time wanking over abstractions instead of finding out what is in fact possible and not possible in language, by studying specimens. Or in English: go forth and study unstudied languages to see what features they have and what features they don't have, in order to later build abstractions that aren't blown out of the water each time an actual field-linguist comes back from the bush with a "... but this language does it this way and your framework can't account for it".
The fact-collectors haven't finished their part of the job, and the abstraction-lovers are actively hindering the fact-collectors from doing their job, as (per Chomsky) all languages are equally complex, therefore all languages can be studied by only studying English...
Funny that... those AI-types come up with a new algorithm, heuristic or idea (compilers, parsers, A*, lisp...) and ten years later it is mainstream and no longer considered AI. Face it, AI is the 'basic research'-wing of CS.
Here's an idea for free... dying makes you play in a "netherworld" together with other dead. Meanwhile, your actions in the netherworld affects the "real world" in various random ways, do X and you have a ghost etc. The right actions in the netherworld might "reincarnate" you (but with some weird changes), or living world avvies can "raise" you... oh and there ought to be a "death-counter" visible to others, so you'd have unlucky-Tom and deadite-Jane and 4Clover-Harry... furthermore, death could turn you into an undead in the living world instead, with the next death meaning winding up in the Netherworld...
/me doesn't play MMORPGs with leveling though, or games with levels for that matter. Prevents you from seeing what's just behind the corner, or how to get to the unreachable ledge, but then I've always preferred tactics/strategy to mindless shooting in all directions... I'm primarily an Explorer I guess: Bartle-test (same bartle, yeah).
"Spamhunters" the tv-show. I'm serious! Think about it, several episodes of pretty ppl running around with wifi-gear and blinkenboxes and having lovelife-problems while hunting down spammers, crackers, 419ers, identity thieves, pedos, virus writers, whatever. It seems to be the only way of educating the public these days. CSI: Internet, you know it makes sense!
If it was, and was recessive, it wouldn't matter whether the homosexuals procreated or not, the gene would be furthered by their heterosexual relatives.
> I have read that in Norway it is possible to be taxed at a rate that is higher than > your income, so I suspect that their median tax rate is hgiher than Canada's.
Uhm I live in Norway... max income tax is 50% (progressive tax), but in addition there's VAT, 24% on everything but food, which gets 12%. In addition there are levies on luxuries like cars, all things nicotine and alcohol, chocolate, fizzy drinks like Pepsi and Coke, in general stuff that is "bad" for you. Property-tax is low though, with the expected outcome: people spend their money on property instead of investments, which is IMHO definitely bad.
As for health, the state pays for everything above (I think this year it is) approximately 200 dollars; that is: as soon as your health has cost you more than that one year, the state takes care of the rest that year. Furthermore, some medicines are heavily subsidized, especially medicines for chronic diseases like asthma, rheumatitis, hiv/aids... and of course cancer.
Per dollar, Norway had the most effcient health-system in the world in 2002, and according to the UN it's the best country to currently live in, for the third year in a row or something (weather and especially temperature is obviously not factors in those calculations).
I wouldn't recommend the weather though and you need to be able to tolerate queuing up, footie, and the usual western contempt for anything resembling intelligence.
As others have already said; the highlight/middleclick-clipboard *does* handle other things than text, but the programs only implement text-copying. A reason for this is that it is easy to decide what to do with text, but what you do with for instance a picture depends on the program you're copying to. It is always easier not to have to make the decision:)
It's a circle, or spiral if you will. Complex -> Simple -> Complex -> Simple... Complexity lost in one area is regained somewhere else. Egyptian is the standard example of this, it is documented that it had time to go through three such cycles before it was killed off by Arabic. Examples from English is "y'all" and "let(')s", new words born of previously separate words. Multiply with thousands of words over thousands of years.
The real sad thing about URU being killed off was that it offered a different style of gameplay: dice-less, rule-less rpg instead of yet another rehash of Dungeons & Dragons. No leveling, no so and so many points for killing this or that monster, no PKing, cooperation instead of competition. This might not attract the 14-year old brigands of other MMORPGs, but it was attracting a lot of people that only play cooperative, non-violent games. Instead of leeching off of the customer-base of already existing games it might have picked up hordes of people (grandmothers, for instance. Hi Granny!) that had never even touched an online game before or maybe not even touched that many offline games before. That is a very impressively large potential customerbase... But it is over, and it is pointless to discuss could-have-beens:(
Agree about starting mozilla and openoffice, but then I use galeon and firebird, and latex for writing things.
As for the rest: haven't been troubled by it since I used Enlightenment (13?) on a P200. Furthermore I've dropped Gnome and KDE. Those have a rather impressive footprint.
Lets see... if it had a good language guesser that could be fit into a plugin then we could toss all messages in languages we can't read (or see no use for), for instance all messages I get that are in English are either from some mailinglist, or spam. I've actually been working on a "spot English"-plugin to use on the mail that isn't automatically shunted into the mailinglist-folders, but if the work is already done, yay!
You might think that looking at the charset used would be enough but 'taint so! Frequency of letters isn't good enough either, two good ways is checking for the most frequent words or the most frequent letter trigrams. If you want to know more, see if you can find the paper "Comparing two language identification schemes" by Gregory Grefenstette. It used to be openly hosted at xerox but now the server is gone.
The thousands of little fiefdoms with differing systems is a good thing, as due to the diversity, what knocks out one system won't necessarily knock out the one next door. Mono-culture is always a bad idea security and stability-wise.
Heh, so by opting not to use the inbuilt gc all the time, you're automatically "promoted" to programmer? Guess I'm a programmer then, out of sheer laziness:) (Who can remember to turn the bloody cycle-checker *on* anyway?)
Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?
on
FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
You forgot one rather important thing...
Documentation! That is: MANPAGES. Lots of 'em, updated and well written. In fact, you can (should) expect to find a manpage or nine for just about every single file/program/function/device in core. That means a lot less hunting around on the net when something isn't quite right or when you're programming.
The handbook is nice too, but the thing I miss the most when on a linux-system (any linux-system) is good manpages.
(Btw, does anyone know what the regexp-engine in gnu-sed 3.02 can do? I'm trying to port my favorite $display_filter...)
Slashdot Mirror
Disclaimer: I was the sort of kid that brought home two bags full of books from the library each week. I've always read a lot.
I bought a Kindle Keyboard as soon as they were available for the simple reason that a small apartment can only hold that many bookshelves chock full of small paperbacks. Last year I read over a 100 books on it, which rather surprised me as I haven't read that many paper books a year since before high school. The reason is that the kindle is so light and convenient that I now can read anywhere: waiting in line, while shopping, while walking, while in the tub (plastic ziplock baggie!), while on the bus, while on the plane, while whenever really.
I didn't buy all those books from Amazon. I've read ebooks from Baen since the late nineties, and there's Smashwords, Gutenberg, Mobileread, authors selling directly, and author coops like Bookview Cafe. With Calibre, it doesn't really matter where you get the books from. Unfortunately, since I would like a steady supply of books from well-nourished, creative authors, I do pay for my books. Even at an average of 5 dollars a pop, it adds up, especially when you've run out of your favorite authors and desperately need more to read and therefore start buying anything with a half way decent blurb and not too fawning reviews in hope of finding a new favorite author.
There are rumors going around that new Kindles will be announced in time for Christmas this year. I might just get one. Eink, mind, and it really needs the paging-buttons on the sides as that makes one-handed reading with any hand in any situation possible. With wifi off I only need to charge it every three weeks or so (unless I'm caught by a fat, impossible-to-take-a-break-from page turner, then I read with the power cable plugged in...). I was opposed to touch but now that I have a phone with touch I can see it would be nice for moving about menus. Not for the actual paging though.
I would also say, definitely eink if you're serious about reading. I've read books on VT220s, big CRTs, Sharp Zaurus, DS (homebrew), android, print outs, iPad (borrowed), projectors, glossy magazine paper, grey mass market paperback paper, extra cheap self-destructing school book paper, expensive non-acidic archive quality hardcover paper, yellowed copy paper, newspaper, toilet paper (I hope it was a gimmick), the lot: eink (pearl) beats them all. Much better in sunlight than paper since the background isn't bright white.
If you do get a tablet, read with the colors reversed: white on black. You won't feel like you've stared into the sun for hours after just.. one.. more.. page.. hey, is that the sunrise?
If you meant *medical* tricorder, why didn't you say *medical* tricorder? There's a difference, ya'know.
Ah, yes, invading other nations "to take their oil" isn't a "desperation measure", but investing in domestic industry is. What world are you living in?
Wait, I thought it was all about Unobtainium?
The abbreviation SF is often used to stand for speculative fiction (which is science fiction+fantasy+horror+alternate history++) and not just science fiction, so maybe the scifi-channel should change its name.
The fact-collectors haven't finished their part of the job, and the abstraction-lovers are actively hindering the fact-collectors from doing their job, as (per Chomsky) all languages are equally complex, therefore all languages can be studied by only studying English...
What about when the user doesn't know what to do? Do remember that we neither have telepathic machines nor genuine AI...
Tried Stumbleupon? It has a plugin for firefix iirc.
Funny that... those AI-types come up with a new algorithm, heuristic or idea (compilers, parsers, A*, lisp...) and ten years later it is mainstream and no longer considered AI. Face it, AI is the 'basic research'-wing of CS.
Here's an idea for free... dying makes you play in a "netherworld" together with other dead. Meanwhile, your actions in the netherworld affects the "real world" in various random ways, do X and you have a ghost etc. The right actions in the netherworld might "reincarnate" you (but with some weird changes), or living world avvies can "raise" you... oh and there ought to be a "death-counter" visible to others, so you'd have unlucky-Tom and deadite-Jane and 4Clover-Harry... furthermore, death could turn you into an undead in the living world instead, with the next death meaning winding up in the Netherworld...
/me doesn't play MMORPGs with leveling though, or games with levels for that matter. Prevents you from seeing what's just behind the corner, or how to get to the unreachable ledge, but then I've always preferred tactics/strategy to mindless shooting in all directions... I'm primarily an Explorer I guess: Bartle-test (same bartle, yeah).
"Spamhunters" the tv-show. I'm serious! Think about it, several episodes of pretty ppl running around with wifi-gear and blinkenboxes and having lovelife-problems while hunting down spammers, crackers, 419ers, identity thieves, pedos, virus writers, whatever. It seems to be the only way of educating the public these days. CSI: Internet, you know it makes sense!
If it was, and was recessive, it wouldn't matter whether the homosexuals procreated or not, the gene would be furthered by their heterosexual relatives.
Tell that to the millions of African women who have gotten it from their less-than faithful husbands.
You're saying you *don't* specifically only shop for hardware that you *know* will work in your favorite opensource OS? Can one even do that? :)
Grim Fandango. Nuff said.
(Though some would say it is a 2D/3D hybrid, pshaaw I say)
> I have read that in Norway it is possible to be taxed at a rate that is higher than
> your income, so I suspect that their median tax rate is hgiher than Canada's.
Uhm I live in Norway... max income tax is 50% (progressive tax), but in addition there's VAT, 24% on everything but food, which gets 12%. In addition there are levies on luxuries like cars, all things nicotine and alcohol, chocolate, fizzy drinks like Pepsi and Coke, in general stuff that is "bad" for you. Property-tax is low though, with the expected outcome: people spend their money on property instead of investments, which is IMHO definitely bad.
As for health, the state pays for everything above (I think this year it is) approximately 200 dollars; that is: as soon as your health has cost you more than that one year, the state takes care of the rest that year. Furthermore, some medicines are heavily subsidized, especially medicines for chronic diseases like asthma, rheumatitis, hiv/aids... and of course cancer.
Per dollar, Norway had the most effcient health-system in the world in 2002, and according to the UN it's the best country to currently live in, for the third year in a row or something (weather and especially temperature is obviously not factors in those calculations).
I wouldn't recommend the weather though and you need to be able to tolerate queuing up, footie, and the usual western contempt for anything resembling intelligence.
As others have already said; the highlight/middleclick-clipboard *does* handle other things than text, but the programs only implement text-copying. A reason for this is that it is easy to decide what to do with text, but what you do with for instance a picture depends on the program you're copying to. It is always easier not to have to make the decision :)
Why not the other way around? I only use select/middleclick, except in vim :)
It's a circle, or spiral if you will. Complex -> Simple -> Complex -> Simple... Complexity lost in one area is regained somewhere else. Egyptian is the standard example of this, it is documented that it had time to go through three such cycles before it was killed off by Arabic. Examples from English is "y'all" and "let(')s", new words born of previously separate words. Multiply with thousands of words over thousands of years.
The real sad thing about URU being killed off was that it offered a different style of gameplay: dice-less, rule-less rpg instead of yet another rehash of Dungeons & Dragons. No leveling, no so and so many points for killing this or that monster, no PKing, cooperation instead of competition. This might not attract the 14-year old brigands of other MMORPGs, but it was attracting a lot of people that only play cooperative, non-violent games. Instead of leeching off of the customer-base of already existing games it might have picked up hordes of people (grandmothers, for instance. Hi Granny!) that had never even touched an online game before or maybe not even touched that many offline games before. That is a very impressively large potential customerbase... But it is over, and it is pointless to discuss could-have-beens :(
Agree about starting mozilla and openoffice, but then I use galeon and firebird, and latex for writing things.
As for the rest: haven't been troubled by it since I used Enlightenment (13?) on a P200. Furthermore I've dropped Gnome and KDE. Those have a rather impressive footprint.
Lets see... if it had a good language guesser that could be fit into a plugin then we could toss all messages in languages we can't read (or see no use for), for instance all messages I get that are in English are either from some mailinglist, or spam. I've actually been working on a "spot English"-plugin to use on the mail that isn't automatically shunted into the mailinglist-folders, but if the work is already done, yay!
You might think that looking at the charset used would be enough but 'taint so! Frequency of letters isn't good enough either, two good ways is checking for the most frequent words or the most frequent letter trigrams. If you want to know more, see if you can find the paper "Comparing two language identification schemes" by Gregory Grefenstette. It used to be openly hosted at xerox but now the server is gone.
Zope.
And that's written in python, monsieur.
The thousands of little fiefdoms with differing systems is a good thing, as due to the diversity, what knocks out one system won't necessarily knock out the one next door. Mono-culture is always a bad idea security and stability-wise.
Heh, so by opting not to use the inbuilt gc all the time, you're automatically "promoted" to programmer? Guess I'm a programmer then, out of sheer laziness :) (Who can remember to turn the bloody cycle-checker *on* anyway?)
- Documentation! That is: MANPAGES. Lots of 'em, updated and well written. In fact, you can (should) expect to find a manpage or nine for just about every single file/program/function/device in core. That means a lot less hunting around on the net when something isn't quite right or when you're programming.
The handbook is nice too, but the thing I miss the most when on a linux-system (any linux-system) is good manpages.(Btw, does anyone know what the regexp-engine in gnu-sed 3.02 can do? I'm trying to port my favorite $display_filter...)