I agree (well, mostly). I enjoy Digg, but only visit it when I have exhausted all the rest of my news-reading for the day and still want to see some interesting links. However, Digg has a few weak points:
1. You can only reply to comments of depth 1 -- nothing below that. Thus, if you post some insanely stupid comment in response to someone else, no one can directly respond to you. They have to post lower down on the page with something like, "@dipshitdigger: Here is why you are wrong: [yadda yadda]," or whatever.
2. There are too many idiots with power (meaning: everyone can moderate all the time). You can go check out my comment history. One time have I made an incorrect statement on Digg, and I got modded down for it (rightfully so). However, the rest of the time, I have made accurate and informative posts. Now, on Slashdot, I have gained friends, fans, and good karma. However, on Digg I have merely been ignored. Now, for the most part, I'm "above all that karma shit." However, it is indicative of a problem in that it shows that not many people value certain types of intelligent, well-thought-out input. For primarily this reason have I stayed with Slashdot and not moved to Digg; no one seems to know the good from the crap. The idiocy of the masses is all-powerful there. There seems to be a "too long, didn't read"-type mentality among the users when modding comments.
3. There is too much information to read it all. I don't even have Digg on my RSS reader because there are just too many items that get added to the feed. I'm not 14 years old. I don't have time to read every page on the internet that other people find interesting.
Of course, Digg is useful when I want to be surprised with random interesting pages (a good crib sheet of Linux commands made it to the front page the other day).
Oh yeah, and there are no HTML tags allowed. I'm sorry, but when I think of linking people to information, I think of it like a web developer: with anchor tags (see link in previous paragraph).
I don't harbor any hatred towards Digg, just a little disappointment that a great idea can be ruined by so many Kevin Rose worshippers. Seriously, you can't make a constructive criticism about him or Digg without having your comments dugg out of existence (their anniversary Diggnation episode was like some huge circle jerk or concert backstage party as far as I am concerned -- absolutely disgusting and I'm sorry I wasted my bandwidth on it).
Maybe the Firefox developers should do a build that has every (non-conflicting) extension that exists just so the comparison will really show the power of Firefox.
And then when browser comparisons are done, Firefox will have more features, sure, but it's RAM usage will be even higher in the reviews. It's a double-edged sword.
Tools>Appearance>Toolbars will hide almost everything. To hide the scrollbar, press Ctrl+F7. There exists a key combination to hide the "File Edit View Bookmarks..." menu, but I cannot remember what it is. It used to be Ctrl+F11 I believe, but in Opera 9, many of the shortcut keys are different than they used to be (made similar to Firefox, perhaps? Ctrl+N now opens a window instead of a tab in MDI mode, for example).
Or you can hit F11 to have nothing but a fullscreen window with nothing but the webpage you are currently on. This is literally the largest you can have any browser window for any browser, by definition.
I am not offended in the slightest by this ad. However, I do recognize the idiocy of Sony in creating such an ad with full knowledge that there are people around who will be offended.
Would it be more or less racist to deny the brown woman her right to choose to be paid to appear in the ad?
Wow. That's just about as idiotic an argument as I can think of. It's similar to saying how it would have been more racist to deny German Jews in the 40s the opportunity to ride on trains to scenic countryside.
And I've heard that recently the kidlets are having trouble keeping up with the kanji, as they become as lazy as Western students.
It's the cellphones and computers. no longer do students have to write so much by hand once they are in college; now they only have to type it phonetically and hit the spacebar a few times to cycle through until they right kanji comes up. Sure, they can still read the kanji, but there are a lot of daily-use (jouyou) kanji that they cannot write. I lived in Japan for a year, and could write many kanji after four years of study that the natives could not write, simply because the University of Texas required me to write many kanji by hand, but Obirin University (in Tokyo) did not require their students to hand-write any of their native tongue.
For example, when you speak, what do you do to separate words form one another? The surprising answer is, nothing. Take a tape of ordinary conversation. Run it through an oscilloscope. Look for the breaks. You won't find them.
Actually, to clarify, you will find them. They don't occur between words, however, but they are consonants. That's right -- consonant sounds are actually silences, stoppages of sound.
Actually, you are wrong (and a more gifted linguist will probably correct me). The stops are just that: stops. I'd bet that "voiceless stops" are where you'd see the breaks. In English, the voiceless stops are "t", "k", "ch", and "p". There is probably another one I'm forgetting, but those are the ones that come to mind. The rest of the time our voicebox continues to vibrate (put your finger on your throat and say "dad tad" and feel how your voicebox vibrates for the "d" in "dad" but not the "t" in "tad".
...to think there is only one pronunciation of each word! What are we going to do, have different spellings in different regions? You buy a "hot dwog" in NYC, "pak ya caa" in Boston, "pok you coh" in the UK, "park yer car" in Texas, etc.? The Chinese do it right, in my opinion: the dialects are all different, but the writing is the same (except for in the same instances an author would choose to spell an accent out in a novel in English -- think Huck Finn).
In any case, we do have a system like that: it is called International Phonetic Alphabet, and it'd be a bitch to have English speakers learn it; English has so many different vowel sounds, and so many are so very close to the same sound for most people, that it's much simpler to keep things the way they are. Now, if English was a language with only five vowels (all of them pure) such as in Italian, Spanish or Japanese, then we'd be OK. As it stands, the idea to use "simplified spelling" (which would be anything but) is just idiotic.
Actually, it seems that in the context of law, "judgment" is preferred in the UK, and "judgement" is considered incorrect by style guides in America. Only in a non-legal sense has "judgement" become accepted, and then only in the UK.
But you are correct that both are used; it is just that in a legal sense, one is more correct than the other.
If Cory "Self-Promoting Trendoid is my Middle Name" Doctorow is doing it, it's guaranteed to be a fad.
No, not that Cory. He means Cory "fought-for-our-electronic-freedoms-in-Europe-whil e-you-did-nothing-exerts-enormous-influence-by-bei ng-one-of-the-five-who-work-on-the-blog-that-gets- over-two-million-unique-visitors-a-month-all-while -winning-Hugo-Awards-for-his-prose" Doctorow.
Yes, I am a fanboy; however, this is one deserving individual. I cannot think of a more important website on the internet than Boingboing, and the EFF is one of the most important organizations on the net.
My legitimate downloads or VoIP should get priority over your illegal download
What happens when your ISP decides that your VoIP is not legitimate because it directly interferes with their phone business? Congress just decided that they needed to tax VoIP that connects to the PSTN. How much longer until you think they rule it illegal as it interferes with current business models: What? Skype is free? Luxembourgeoisie?!? Fucking Communists!!! What? It was created by a company that speaks French?!? Freedom fries! Freedom phone! Oh, praise Jeeeesus!
See why net neutrality is important now? Besides, packets are neutral and none should be preferred over others.
I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o'clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday.
Holy shit. Sen. Stevens is a 4channer! The phrase, "Sir, you win [numeric value] internets," is a quite common compliment there. I wonder how the Republican Party would feel knowing that their beloved senator from Alaska frequents a site populated by image postings of fecal matter, sexually explicit photos, and Raptor Jesus...
I understand that whenever a free resource dies, it is a time of lamentation. However, what I do not understand is why this is such a big deal. Are people really that lazy that they cannot be bothered to type in song titles when ripping CDs? I've ripped hundreds and have found most of freedb's responses to be wrong (using CDex). Granted, I own a lot of non-English CDs, but even when I rip English CDs, I prefer to input my own metainformation in. It's just one more minute of time, guys!
But for the unwashed masses out there, having a PC that comes with IE7, or being forced to upgrade as part of Windows Update is a good thing. Sure, I could install Windows from scratch, open up Write, and begin my novel.
Wrong. Your analogy would only be accurate if Write took random (but not all!) letters you typed and converted them to leet. Then it would do font sizes wrong so that if you opened it up in OpenOffice or even Word the font sizes would be different, and the layout would be completely screwed up. However, because the average user has a great baseline, they wouldn't feel the need to upgrade to Word. Then, when they passed on the documents to other people who opened them with standards-compliant word processors (observing accurate measurements and font sizes) the documents would be screwed up, and decide it must be their word processor's fault, since "my coworker would never do something that stupid as type in leet in a too-large font size".
No, having IE come on a system at all is bad, as it encourages developers to continue to use Microsoft-only hacks that blocks users of other browsers from enjoying the sites. Take for example, me: I work for the University of Texas at Austin Liberal Arts IT department developing websites. Last year, I spent a semester building a website for learning American Sign Language for the students and for anyone in the general public who wished to use the video resources as a study guide. Unfortunately, I spent more time making the site work on IE because of its failed standards compliance than I did on actually building the standards-compliant site. To top it off, all the work I put into making it work in IE only made it work in IE 6! It will still fail in IE 7, so when users upgrade, I'll have to make updates to a static site! This has wasted my time, taxpayers' money, students' chances at education; and has harmed the ASL community because it is one less resource (and boy, is it a good one!) for ASL-as-a-second-language people to use in their studies. A standards-compliant page is necessary in order to support alternative browsers and provide a common page that, in theory, all browsers (hopefully IE one day) will display correctly. I can't just code to IE because, as we are seeing, IE changes; standards remain the same (margins are margins are margins, not padding).
In short, the existence of IE on users' computers hurts society economically and educationally.
Slashdot Mirror
I think 3D fording of rivers would be very exciting.
I agree (well, mostly). I enjoy Digg, but only visit it when I have exhausted all the rest of my news-reading for the day and still want to see some interesting links. However, Digg has a few weak points:
1. You can only reply to comments of depth 1 -- nothing below that. Thus, if you post some insanely stupid comment in response to someone else, no one can directly respond to you. They have to post lower down on the page with something like, "@dipshitdigger: Here is why you are wrong: [yadda yadda]," or whatever.
2. There are too many idiots with power (meaning: everyone can moderate all the time). You can go check out my comment history. One time have I made an incorrect statement on Digg, and I got modded down for it (rightfully so). However, the rest of the time, I have made accurate and informative posts. Now, on Slashdot, I have gained friends, fans, and good karma. However, on Digg I have merely been ignored. Now, for the most part, I'm "above all that karma shit." However, it is indicative of a problem in that it shows that not many people value certain types of intelligent, well-thought-out input. For primarily this reason have I stayed with Slashdot and not moved to Digg; no one seems to know the good from the crap. The idiocy of the masses is all-powerful there. There seems to be a "too long, didn't read"-type mentality among the users when modding comments.
3. There is too much information to read it all. I don't even have Digg on my RSS reader because there are just too many items that get added to the feed. I'm not 14 years old. I don't have time to read every page on the internet that other people find interesting.
Of course, Digg is useful when I want to be surprised with random interesting pages (a good crib sheet of Linux commands made it to the front page the other day).
Oh yeah, and there are no HTML tags allowed. I'm sorry, but when I think of linking people to information, I think of it like a web developer: with anchor tags (see link in previous paragraph).
I don't harbor any hatred towards Digg, just a little disappointment that a great idea can be ruined by so many Kevin Rose worshippers. Seriously, you can't make a constructive criticism about him or Digg without having your comments dugg out of existence (their anniversary Diggnation episode was like some huge circle jerk or concert backstage party as far as I am concerned -- absolutely disgusting and I'm sorry I wasted my bandwidth on it).
2. Tools>Preferences>Shortcuts
The default has, since at least Opera 8.0, been to Ctrl+Shift+Click to open under the current window.
Tools>Appearance>Toolbars will hide almost everything. To hide the scrollbar, press Ctrl+F7. There exists a key combination to hide the "File Edit View Bookmarks ..." menu, but I cannot remember what it is. It used to be Ctrl+F11 I believe, but in Opera 9, many of the shortcut keys are different than they used to be (made similar to Firefox, perhaps? Ctrl+N now opens a window instead of a tab in MDI mode, for example).
Or you can hit F11 to have nothing but a fullscreen window with nothing but the webpage you are currently on. This is literally the largest you can have any browser window for any browser, by definition.
This should solve your "real estate" problems.
Unfortunately, he now lives in the United States, and as such would be subject to its laws and mafias were he to crack the *VD encryptions.
No, because the widely-recognized codicile to Godwin's Law (see your own link for this) states that the deliberate invocation will be unsuccessful.
I am not offended in the slightest by this ad. However, I do recognize the idiocy of Sony in creating such an ad with full knowledge that there are people around who will be offended.
This looks shopped...I can tell by the pixels and by seeing a few shops in my day ;)
...to think there is only one pronunciation of each word! What are we going to do, have different spellings in different regions? You buy a "hot dwog" in NYC, "pak ya caa" in Boston, "pok you coh" in the UK, "park yer car" in Texas, etc.? The Chinese do it right, in my opinion: the dialects are all different, but the writing is the same (except for in the same instances an author would choose to spell an accent out in a novel in English -- think Huck Finn).
In any case, we do have a system like that: it is called International Phonetic Alphabet, and it'd be a bitch to have English speakers learn it; English has so many different vowel sounds, and so many are so very close to the same sound for most people, that it's much simpler to keep things the way they are. Now, if English was a language with only five vowels (all of them pure) such as in Italian, Spanish or Japanese, then we'd be OK. As it stands, the idea to use "simplified spelling" (which would be anything but) is just idiotic.
Actually, it seems that in the context of law, "judgment" is preferred in the UK, and "judgement" is considered incorrect by style guides in America. Only in a non-legal sense has "judgement" become accepted, and then only in the UK.
But you are correct that both are used; it is just that in a legal sense, one is more correct than the other.
Yes, I am a fanboy; however, this is one deserving individual. I cannot think of a more important website on the internet than Boingboing, and the EFF is one of the most important organizations on the net.
See why net neutrality is important now? Besides, packets are neutral and none should be preferred over others.
I understand that whenever a free resource dies, it is a time of lamentation. However, what I do not understand is why this is such a big deal. Are people really that lazy that they cannot be bothered to type in song titles when ripping CDs? I've ripped hundreds and have found most of freedb's responses to be wrong (using CDex). Granted, I own a lot of non-English CDs, but even when I rip English CDs, I prefer to input my own metainformation in. It's just one more minute of time, guys!
No, having IE come on a system at all is bad, as it encourages developers to continue to use Microsoft-only hacks that blocks users of other browsers from enjoying the sites. Take for example, me: I work for the University of Texas at Austin Liberal Arts IT department developing websites. Last year, I spent a semester building a website for learning American Sign Language for the students and for anyone in the general public who wished to use the video resources as a study guide. Unfortunately, I spent more time making the site work on IE because of its failed standards compliance than I did on actually building the standards-compliant site. To top it off, all the work I put into making it work in IE only made it work in IE 6! It will still fail in IE 7, so when users upgrade, I'll have to make updates to a static site! This has wasted my time, taxpayers' money, students' chances at education; and has harmed the ASL community because it is one less resource (and boy, is it a good one!) for ASL-as-a-second-language people to use in their studies. A standards-compliant page is necessary in order to support alternative browsers and provide a common page that, in theory, all browsers (hopefully IE one day) will display correctly. I can't just code to IE because, as we are seeing, IE changes; standards remain the same (margins are margins are margins, not padding).
In short, the existence of IE on users' computers hurts society economically and educationally.
Oh, you silly Firefox users: http://www.opera.com/ ;)