If more people contributed an improvement instead of complaining, there would be less money flowing into the stockpiles of corps like MS and more money spent hiring people to solve NEW problems instead of paying a for a proprietary solution OVER and OVER and OVER...
Check out the get involved page linked in my sig. Fire up Chatzilla or your favorite IRC client and lurk on moznet in #mozillazine or #mozilla. Dig into bugzilla and you will be amazed at how open the process is, and you will start to see how regular people like you and me are making a difference.
You, too can make a difference. Even if it's something as simple as finding duplicate bug reports, it saves precious time for the busy folks at mozilla.org (and elsewhere) who are doing to hard coding and bug fixing.
<minor rant>
I don't want to be locked into an MS-controlled web, and involvement in Moz is a great way to help build a viable alternative. On top of that, I think Moz has the potential to help dislodge Outlook. I think Outlook is a 'thin-edge' app for MS, since I see non-tech types being sucked in by it and gradually converting to an entire MS office environment.
</rant>
Except if you use mozilla, you get the middle click opens new window functionality.
The real benefit becomes obvious when you start using tabbed browsing. You can set middle click to open in new tab instead of open in new window. Now you save the huge penalty of opening a new browser window, since tabs are relatively fast to open. On top of that, you can set links to load in the background, so the link loads silently behind the page (and tab) that you're looking at, without interrupting what you're reading. When you're ready to go and look at the new page, it's loaded and ready.
This feature alone has nearly sealed my conversion to Moz (although there are several other features I could say the same thing about, like cookie management, or mouse gestures). IE6 irritates me quite severly now that I'm used to Moz's extra features. Yes, I know there are bugs, but I'm happy to live with them. Of course YMMV...
As if the subject of the story posting himself to confirm the parent post isn't enough...
For those who didn't read the link, the parent comment very accurately summarizes the viewpoint of the guy this story is about.
He's not a free software zealot with and agenda, nor is he an idiot, and he knows exactly what he is doing. Read the story. He makes perfect sense. Let him do what he wants. If you don't want to read his emails, then don't. Use outlook (or not) and be content.
Dry volume? How about cubic metres? That makes sense to me, but if you want hectolitres, knock yourself out at the many conversion websites.
Seriously, though. Your complaint about metric measurements assumes an American audience.
I'm either 5'11" (say, roughly 6') tall or 180.34cm. Now, which of those gives you a better mental picture of how tall I am? For scientific things, yes, powers of 10 work out real nice and all, but for everyday things, who the heck cares if you have to remember there's 12 inches in a foot... not that hard! The English units make a LOT more sense in everyday sorts of things.
I'm convinced that the ONLY reason "English" units make sense to you is because of your environment. I was always told my height in feet and weight in pounds, but my brother started through the Canadian school system 8 years after me, now that metric has become more pervasive. To him, measuring common distances in metres makes sense.
The only way to make a standard system of weights and measures intuitive to the common person is to make it ubiquitous. Scientific agencies like NASA should be leading the way. So, yes, it really should be dollars per kilogram.
And why the HECK have Star Trek producers ALWAYS used the incorrect pronunciation of kilometre?!? The same as any metric prefix like KILO-gram: it's KILO-metre, NOT kuh-LOM-etre!!! ARGH! That's one of my biggest pet peeves. Imagine saying kuh-LO-gram or cen-TIMI-tre!
Maybe I'm missing exactly what you're talking about, but Moz on Windows has had a taskbar applet for months now. Right-click(or secondary-click) on that applet in the taskbar and you can exit Mozilla entirely, and/or disable quicklaunch.
Since I live in Newfoundland and Labrador I think I know what I'm talking about.
The maritime provinces are New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The only islands are PEI and Newfoundland. PEI is quite close to NB. It is, in fact, connected to the mainland by a prettyspectacularbridge.
Newfoundland is really the only bit of the maritimes substantially separated from the mainland. The location is something we're quite proud of actually. St. John's, Newfoundland bills itself as the oldest and most easterly city in North America. Yes, it is quicker and easier for me to fly direct to London than to most major cities in North America (which makes me wonder why I don't do it more often!)
Some maps: Newfoundland and Labrador - my home province. All of Canada. Nova Scotia is the peninsula above New England. New Brunswick is the mainland area directly above Maine. PEI is the little island next to NB and NS. Newfoundland and Labrador should be obvious. For context here's all of North America.
I live in St. John's, Newfoundland, and the commemoration of Dec 12 1901 is an annual event here.
The provincial government has an official site for the 100th celebrations. The local section of the IEEE is also involved in organizing the celebrations.
Here are some more websites relating to the celebrations:
A little history of the annual commemorations of the first transatlantic wireless transmission. The very bottom of the page has information on recent years.
Dr. Zedel taught me Ocean Acoustics last semester...
The Italian site already linked elsewhere in the comments.
By the way, despite being way out in the Atlantic ocean, Newfoundland is a beautiful province and a wonderful place to get away if you like the outdoors, hiking, game hunting, sport fishing, whale-watching, and lots of other things.
The show is about a guy, named Mike Nelson, who is stuck up in space with his robot companions, and they have to endure bad movie after bad movie. That's all that you have to know to get started. The whole plot is confusing if I try to get you up to speed in the next few lines, but trust me, this is a show you cannot afford to miss.
and on the same site by Joe Pranevich {knight@wave.lm.com}
In the not too distant future (next Sunday, A.D.) Joel Robinson was under the employ of one Dr. Clayton Forrester. By trapping Joel in space and sending him bad movies, Dr. Forrester and his assistants (such as TV's Frank) attempted to determine the movie that, when inflicted on the masses, would cause insanity and he could control the world. To combat this, Joel invented several robots to keep him company and to heckle the movies mercilessly to ensure his sanity. After several years, Joel escaped to be replaced by Mike Neslon, a temp worker without a clue. After Mike and the bots were turned into omniscient energy beings, they returned to the Satellite of Love (their ship) in the future and were confronted with new adversaries including Pearl Forrester (Dr. Forrester's cryo-frozen mother), Professor Bobo (an ape), and Observer (a super-intelligent alien that carries his brain in a bowl).
If you want more detail read the basics about MST3k. An excerpt: Although the details of its premise have changed radically over its 11-year history, Mystery Science Theater 3000 has always been about one thing: making fun of bad movies.
The official show website is http://www.scifi.com/mst3000/ and here is a huge page of links from ibiblio.org. Apparently there are several tape trading sites, loads of fan sites, quotes pages, episode guides and so on.
I don't know where Gates gets his figures, but Google tells me that Canada is up there with South Korea with penetrations of around 40-50%. This neat page of summary stats shows Denmark and Sweden at around 14% and I suspect many Scandinavian and other European countries are on par with the US's 11% broadband penetration rate. Sounds to me like the US is fighting for fifth at best. Articles at Newsbytes, and Broadband week both refer to a study by eMarketer that seems to says similar things.
An older report by the Strategis Group referred to in this CNN article names Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, Singapore, and Sweden as likely to lead broadband penetration.
QUESTION: Hi. You talked about broadband and that it was at about 10 percent of households, and that brings to mind streaming media, and I would appreciate it if one of you could address the various aspects of streaming media with regard to where Microsoft is right now compared to its competitor, and where it's expected to be with respect to its competitor in, say, nine months, and then how streaming media plays out in terms of the lawsuit, what kinds of ramifications might be expected.
MR. GATES:...The second area, the video area, is the tougher of the two, because that really does require this high speed connection. And most people at work have high speed connections. So you can take a little news clip or video conference, and use that quite easily. In the U.S., as I mentioned, only 10 percent of homes have broadband. Actually, in Korea it's 40 percent of homes, but the U.S. is close to being second among broadband penetration. We'd like to see that go up. Of course, the key element of that is that the price has to come down somewhat from the $50 a month in order to see the wider spread usage.
Since everybody's posting juicy bits, here's one I like.
When asked what members of the Freedom to innovate network can do to help Microsoft now that the trial is winding down. Did that sound like a planted question or what?! And they didn't answer the question at all. They just said the FTIN is a lobby organization that's been useful to us, so join the FTIN!
I had a good laugh anyway...
QUESTION: Thank you. My name is Bonnie Johnson, and my question to you is, you started the Freedom to Innovate Network, and now that we've gotten quite far with the lawsuit, how are you going to bring that forward, and how can we, the people that belong to that network, help?
MR. NEUKOM: Yes. The network is a very vital organization, it's open for new members and we invite more activity from existing members. We are constantly supplying information and it is designed to be a grassroots organization of people of open-minded goodwill who are interested in bringing to the attention of public decision makers useful information and help them make sensible decisions in a way that would be constructive for high-technology industries, particularly information technology. So, we thank all of you who are members, we invite you all to consider being members, and that network provides a vital source of information that helps bring about decisions that help us as an industry innovate and grow and serve our customers.
The fourth search result is actually quite good. It's related to the math assignment I mentioned in my first post. The course in Engineering 9100 - Numerical Analysis, and joy of joys, we're doing Perturbation methods. The assignment has a dumb cubic polynomial that I'm supposed to solve approximately. I'd rather be anywhere else but in school working on this assignment right now...
Sorry about the bad HTML formatting. I guess I can't have separate paragraphs inside a BLOCKQUOTE in a comment posted as Plain Old Text. It formatted fine in preview.
this is what I saw in the comment preview. I'm too lazy to find the proper place to submit bugs to slashcode, hence the horribly off-topic post.
MS's culture is anti-bureaucratic and developers are been given large amounts of freedom
MS is a company where titles often don't mean as much as credibility, and thus, being blunt is a way to establish dominance. The company is rife with pecking-order gamesmanship, such as not answering e-mail or chronically arriving late to meetings" and in all, politics reign (at software development) in MS. [...] Survival of the fittest is systemic -internecine backstabbing did not evaporate in the presence of great intelligence and wealth, it became more brutal". Insiders argue that Gates himself is responsible for this culture of conflict in two ways: by being arrogant ("Gates is famous for ridiculing someone's idea just to see how he or she defends a position") and by employing the brightest people and inducing them to grow arrogant and assertive
On learning:
Fresh employees do not go through a formal training programme but they learn on the job. [...] MS takes advantage of the knowledge it has accumulated by exploiting emerging mass markets and establishing its products as standards. But at an organisational level, learning is restricted. "Communication frequently suffers as a result of the inner corporate politics and even privileged employees have trouble getting information from inside Microsoft, a reflection of the long-standing schism between the company's marketing staff and its legion of programmers". MS even blocks widespread sharing (of their own source code) within the company (Valloppillil, 1998; Nadeau, 1999a, 1999b, 1999c).
Learning from customers is also limited since there is not effective two-way communication between developers and customers. Lots of people who have used MS' 'help/support services' found it problematic and of limited help.
And on innovation:
Analysts claim that MS finds it difficult to balance being technology-driven with being consumer-driven and this results to great difficulty to move from incremental innovation to truly radical innovation or invention.
After all, MS's competitive strategy is to design products for mass markets and then improve them incrementally by enhancing existing features or adding new ones. Perhaps it this 'incremental evolution' product approach that impedes radical innovation: "The company has a very dramatic focus on its profitable business. I'm not saying that's bad. But it does preclude you from doing any dramatic thinking, doing any dramatic innovation"... "to the extent that several employees manipulate their inferiors to be given a chance to create something really novel".
There's also a neat diagram of MS's corporate partnerships.
Christopher
(Just karma-whoring today - math assignment prevents me from engaging brain).
In addition to what other posters have said in reply, I'll add a rebuttal to the silly "replace all |'s with e's" example Tog cites:
This does not prove the keyboard to be less efficient than the mouse at all. It only proves that the keyboard interface he used was slower than the mouse interface he used.
I can easily believe that somebody scrolling with cursor keys (even with word and sentence skip commands) will be slower than somebody with a mouse. Even if the keys 'felt' faster.
In today's world that would be like giving an average user the same editing task in MS Word. Personally, I would opt for a different keyboard interface, say, vim. Now with gvim somebody can use the mouse (just as in Tog's example) to select the |'s and type e to replace them. But I guarantee that I'll be faster than anybody you pit against me (in real time, not 'subjective' time) for anything more than a trivial case. The keystrokes are thus:
/| re n. (repeat n. for each |)
/| searches for the next |. re replaces the character with an e. n searches for the next |. '.' repeats the last editing action.
If the paragraph is large, I can do it even faster:
qq/|reqN@q
where N is the approximate number of |'s in the paragraph. This is a little slower to set up, but allows you to replace N+1 |'s with (13 + N mod 10) keystrokes. The break-even point I'd guess is around 8-10 replacements, compared to the first method.
My point? Saying the mouse is always better than the keyboard is overgeneralizing. Use the best interface available to you. If you get some choice of interfaces, I believe the more refined keyboard interfaces around are generally faster than the mouse interfaces, especially for tasks like text editing.
When I first installed Mozilla I noticed that the Macromedia installer looks for Netscape.exe. It only does this after it has already installed the plugin itself, though. You can give the installer your Mozilla directory instead of Netscape, and the plug in will work fine. The installer might crash or ask for a reboot, but you can ingnore that once the NPSWF32.DLL file is in the Mozilla/Plugin directory.
It only needs to know where Netscape.exe is to launch a browser and send you to the Macromedia website for some promotional junk.
Once you've got a Mozilla installation working with Flash, just copy the plug-in directory to any future Mozilla installations. I haven't had to install any plugins since 0.8.3 or something.
In St. John's Newfoundland (a city of 170,000 that is over 1000km (600 miles) from the nearest city of the same size) there is no hint of problems with the business plans of the telco (CDN$40 DSL) or cable company (CDN$40 cable modem service). I know 3 non-techie girls who have thought about putting DSL into their apartment, and that's not unusual around here.
My old high school has had a cable modem for nearly 10 years now, and I've had one in my bedroom for well over 3 years. What can I say, I'm a late adopter...:P
My university has at least 5 major public access PC labs configured with to dualboot linux and Win98. I'd say roughly 180 desktops on linux, not counting the dozens of CS and engineering faculty PCs and servers running linux.
These labs are managed by the CS department and user accounts are actually shell accounts on the CS linux/unix server cluster, so you can log in at any station and your desktop travels with you. Each machine has a linux login screen with an option to reboot into Win98 after logging in.
The engineering department has a similar system using MS networking (with no dual boot linux desktop option), but I'm pretty sure the ENGRNT domain controller is actually a Samba box.
The thing is, the US can't win. If we don't act, then we are accused of "not caring about anything that doesn't happen in the US". If we do act, then we are accused of imperialism.
Perhaps the rest of the world perceives the US to only act internationally for its own interests. This would explain the "can't win" situation. In other words, if the US only intervenes internationally when it will protect US economic or other interests, then the "they don't care, damn imperialists!" attitude may be justified.
Think Afganistan, Kuwait, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Central America and all the other self-serving and sometimes less-than-successful US actions internationally.
I, personally, am not anti-US, but I think many of you Americans are quite blind to the justice of your actions around the world, at times. Kudos to the many posters who argue reasonably and encourage us all to see the many sides to this issue.
Man, I don't think Slashdot can claim responsibility for most of online America and a good bit of the rest of the online world simultaneously hitting every news site.
The washington post is still responding and has updated their front page with a picture of the collapsed tower. I think they're hosted on Akamai.
I got the NYT login page for the article, but I didn't log in. Globe and Mail and Canoe are two Canadian news site still reachable from where I am.
CNN seems to have a stripped-down front page that's now struggling to stay up.
The LA Times is now reachable again from where I am, and has a different angle pic before the tower collapse.
My university is a long way from NYC (I'm in Canada) but some of my friends are leaving to go home and watch the news. I know that in the context of pain and suffering world-wide, this is a small event, but it is still a horrible tragedy and a sad, sad day for those whose loved ones are victims.
Christopher
This post is a little stale by now, since Slashdot's database seemed to take a hit too for a while, and I went home to watch the tv coverage myself, but I'm posting anyway just for posterity.
High School kids (It may have been Jr High) that were on a Chess team "The Raging Rooks" Did better on tests and got better grades than average
Could it just be that smart kids like chess more than average kids?
All the same I think that board games would be great to include in the list. If chess fits the bill, then be sure to look at Go. I personally like games like Risk and Axis&Allies.
Slashdot Mirror
file a RRE.
If more people contributed an improvement instead of complaining, there would be less money flowing into the stockpiles of corps like MS and more money spent hiring people to solve NEW problems instead of paying a for a proprietary solution OVER and OVER and OVER...
Check out the get involved page linked in my sig. Fire up Chatzilla or your favorite IRC client and lurk on moznet in #mozillazine or #mozilla. Dig into bugzilla and you will be amazed at how open the process is, and you will start to see how regular people like you and me are making a difference.
You, too can make a difference. Even if it's something as simple as finding duplicate bug reports, it saves precious time for the busy folks at mozilla.org (and elsewhere) who are doing to hard coding and bug fixing.
<minor rant>
I don't want to be locked into an MS-controlled web, and involvement in Moz is a great way to help build a viable alternative. On top of that, I think Moz has the potential to help dislodge Outlook. I think Outlook is a 'thin-edge' app for MS, since I see non-tech types being sucked in by it and gradually converting to an entire MS office environment.
</rant>
But I've rambled enough already...
Except if you use mozilla, you get the middle click opens new window functionality.
The real benefit becomes obvious when you start using tabbed browsing. You can set middle click to open in new tab instead of open in new window. Now you save the huge penalty of opening a new browser window, since tabs are relatively fast to open. On top of that, you can set links to load in the background, so the link loads silently behind the page (and tab) that you're looking at, without interrupting what you're reading. When you're ready to go and look at the new page, it's loaded and ready.
This feature alone has nearly sealed my conversion to Moz (although there are several other features I could say the same thing about, like cookie management, or mouse gestures). IE6 irritates me quite severly now that I'm used to Moz's extra features. Yes, I know there are bugs, but I'm happy to live with them. Of course YMMV...
Christopher
As if the subject of the story posting himself to confirm the parent post isn't enough...
For those who didn't read the link, the parent comment very accurately summarizes the viewpoint of the guy this story is about.
He's not a free software zealot with and agenda, nor is he an idiot, and he knows exactly what he is doing. Read the story. He makes perfect sense. Let him do what he wants. If you don't want to read his emails, then don't. Use outlook (or not) and be content.
Dry volume? How about cubic metres? That makes sense to me, but if you want hectolitres, knock yourself out at the many conversion websites.
Seriously, though. Your complaint about metric measurements assumes an American audience.
I'm either 5'11" (say, roughly 6') tall or 180.34cm. Now, which of those gives you a better mental picture of how tall I am? For scientific things, yes, powers of 10 work out real nice and all, but for everyday things, who the heck cares if you have to remember there's 12 inches in a foot... not that hard! The English units make a LOT more sense in everyday sorts of things.
I'm convinced that the ONLY reason "English" units make sense to you is because of your environment. I was always told my height in feet and weight in pounds, but my brother started through the Canadian school system 8 years after me, now that metric has become more pervasive. To him, measuring common distances in metres makes sense.
The only way to make a standard system of weights and measures intuitive to the common person is to make it ubiquitous. Scientific agencies like NASA should be leading the way. So, yes, it really should be dollars per kilogram.
And why the HECK have Star Trek producers ALWAYS used the incorrect pronunciation of kilometre?!? The same as any metric prefix like KILO-gram: it's KILO-metre, NOT kuh-LOM-etre!!! ARGH! That's one of my biggest pet peeves. Imagine saying kuh-LO-gram or cen-TIMI-tre!
Next time you could check out Quiet PC Canada instead of the buying from the UK website? That might save you a bit on the shipping...
Their order page says that they gladly process US orders by telephone even though the online ordering system is not set up for US customers.
I don't know if it would actually be cheaper in the end, but it's probably worth checking out.
Christopher
Maybe I'm missing exactly what you're talking about, but Moz on Windows has had a taskbar applet for months now. Right-click(or secondary-click) on that applet in the taskbar and you can exit Mozilla entirely, and/or disable quicklaunch.
Christopher
You're right. I thought about making that distinction, too, but I wanted to keep it simple (not saying that I succeeded).
I guess if I want to correct somebody, I should do it all the way...
Christopher
Since I live in Newfoundland and Labrador I think I know what I'm talking about.
The maritime provinces are New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, and Newfoundland and Labrador. The only islands are PEI and Newfoundland. PEI is quite close to NB. It is, in fact, connected to the mainland by a pretty spectacular bridge.
Newfoundland is really the only bit of the maritimes substantially separated from the mainland. The location is something we're quite proud of actually. St. John's, Newfoundland bills itself as the oldest and most easterly city in North America. Yes, it is quicker and easier for me to fly direct to London than to most major cities in North America (which makes me wonder why I don't do it more often!)
Some maps: Newfoundland and Labrador - my home province. All of Canada. Nova Scotia is the peninsula above New England. New Brunswick is the mainland area directly above Maine. PEI is the little island next to NB and NS. Newfoundland and Labrador should be obvious. For context here's all of North America.
Christopher
The provincial government has an official site for the 100th celebrations. The local section of the IEEE is also involved in organizing the celebrations.
Here are some more websites relating to the celebrations:
Dr. Zedel taught me Ocean Acoustics last semester...
By the way, despite being way out in the Atlantic ocean, Newfoundland is a beautiful province and a wonderful place to get away if you like the outdoors, hiking, game hunting, sport fishing, whale-watching, and lots of other things.
From IMdB's MST3k page, by
and on the same site by Joe Pranevich {knight@wave.lm.com}
If you want more detail read the basics about MST3k. An excerpt: Although the details of its premise have changed radically over its 11-year history, Mystery Science Theater 3000 has always been about one thing: making fun of bad movies.
The official show website is http://www.scifi.com/mst3000/ and here is a huge page of links from ibiblio.org. Apparently there are several tape trading sites, loads of fan sites, quotes pages, episode guides and so on.
There is an Official FAQ on the official Mystery Science Theater 3000 Information Club website, and another page of interesting looking MST3k-related junk at John's Mystery Science Theater 3000 WWW Page which makes the cut for this post because of course it's hosted on linuxsavvy.com (I think it's a private consulting company but I'm not associated with it).
Have fun!
Oh, yeah, I'd second the suggestion about the Geek's wishlist for 2002.
Christopher
I don't know where Gates gets his figures, but Google tells me that Canada is up there with South Korea with penetrations of around 40-50%. This neat page of summary stats shows Denmark and Sweden at around 14% and I suspect many Scandinavian and other European countries are on par with the US's 11% broadband penetration rate. Sounds to me like the US is fighting for fifth at best. Articles at Newsbytes, and Broadband week both refer to a study by eMarketer that seems to says similar things.
An older report by the Strategis Group referred to in this CNN article names Australia, Canada, The Netherlands, Singapore, and Sweden as likely to lead broadband penetration.
When asked what members of the Freedom to innovate network can do to help Microsoft now that the trial is winding down. Did that sound like a planted question or what?! And they didn't answer the question at all. They just said the FTIN is a lobby organization that's been useful to us, so join the FTIN!
I had a good laugh anyway...
Nice catch!
Now here's a lot more than you needed to know.
The fourth search result is actually quite good. It's related to the math assignment I mentioned in my first post. The course in Engineering 9100 - Numerical Analysis, and joy of joys, we're doing Perturbation methods. The assignment has a dumb cubic polynomial that I'm supposed to solve approximately. I'd rather be anywhere else but in school working on this assignment right now...
Christopher
Sorry about the bad HTML formatting. I guess I can't have separate paragraphs inside a BLOCKQUOTE in a comment posted as Plain Old Text. It formatted fine in preview.
this is what I saw in the comment preview. I'm too lazy to find the proper place to submit bugs to slashcode, hence the horribly off-topic post.
Some interesting snippets:
On MS Culture and Management
In addition to what other posters have said in reply, I'll add a rebuttal to the silly "replace all |'s with e's" example Tog cites:
This does not prove the keyboard to be less efficient than the mouse at all. It only proves that the keyboard interface he used was slower than the mouse interface he used.
I can easily believe that somebody scrolling with cursor keys (even with word and sentence skip commands) will be slower than somebody with a mouse. Even if the keys 'felt' faster.
In today's world that would be like giving an average user the same editing task in MS Word. Personally, I would opt for a different keyboard interface, say, vim. Now with gvim somebody can use the mouse (just as in Tog's example) to select the |'s and type e to replace them. But I guarantee that I'll be faster than anybody you pit against me (in real time, not 'subjective' time) for anything more than a trivial case. The keystrokes are thus:
/| re n. (repeat n. for each |)
/| searches for the next |. re replaces the character with an e. n searches for the next |. '.' repeats the last editing action.
If the paragraph is large, I can do it even faster:
qq/|reqN@q
where N is the approximate number of |'s in the paragraph. This is a little slower to set up, but allows you to replace N+1 |'s with (13 + N mod 10) keystrokes. The break-even point I'd guess is around 8-10 replacements, compared to the first method.
My point? Saying the mouse is always better than the keyboard is overgeneralizing. Use the best interface available to you. If you get some choice of interfaces, I believe the more refined keyboard interfaces around are generally faster than the mouse interfaces, especially for tasks like text editing.
By the way, nice troll.
Christopher
When I first installed Mozilla I noticed that the Macromedia installer looks for Netscape.exe. It only does this after it has already installed the plugin itself, though. You can give the installer your Mozilla directory instead of Netscape, and the plug in will work fine. The installer might crash or ask for a reboot, but you can ingnore that once the NPSWF32.DLL file is in the Mozilla/Plugin directory.
It only needs to know where Netscape.exe is to launch a browser and send you to the Macromedia website for some promotional junk.
Once you've got a Mozilla installation working with Flash, just copy the plug-in directory to any future Mozilla installations. I haven't had to install any plugins since 0.8.3 or something.
Christopher
Yeah, gotta love Canada.
:P
In St. John's Newfoundland (a city of 170,000 that is over 1000km (600 miles) from the nearest city of the same size) there is no hint of problems with the business plans of the telco (CDN$40 DSL) or cable company (CDN$40 cable modem service). I know 3 non-techie girls who have thought about putting DSL into their apartment, and that's not unusual around here.
My old high school has had a cable modem for nearly 10 years now, and I've had one in my bedroom for well over 3 years. What can I say, I'm a late adopter...
Christopher
My university has at least 5 major public access PC labs configured with to dualboot linux and Win98. I'd say roughly 180 desktops on linux, not counting the dozens of CS and engineering faculty PCs and servers running linux.
These labs are managed by the CS department and user accounts are actually shell accounts on the CS linux/unix server cluster, so you can log in at any station and your desktop travels with you. Each machine has a linux login screen with an option to reboot into Win98 after logging in.
The engineering department has a similar system using MS networking (with no dual boot linux desktop option), but I'm pretty sure the ENGRNT domain controller is actually a Samba box.
Christopher
Sorry for the non-post. I can't say it any better than rfayre.
The thing is, the US can't win. If we don't act, then we are accused of "not caring about anything that doesn't happen in the US". If we do act, then we are accused of imperialism.
Perhaps the rest of the world perceives the US to only act internationally for its own interests. This would explain the "can't win" situation. In other words, if the US only intervenes internationally when it will protect US economic or other interests, then the "they don't care, damn imperialists!" attitude may be justified.
Think Afganistan, Kuwait, Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Central America and all the other self-serving and sometimes less-than-successful US actions internationally.
I, personally, am not anti-US, but I think many of you Americans are quite blind to the justice of your actions around the world, at times. Kudos to the many posters who argue reasonably and encourage us all to see the many sides to this issue.
Christopher
Man, I don't think Slashdot can claim responsibility for most of online America and a good bit of the rest of the online world simultaneously hitting every news site.
The washington post is still responding and has updated their front page with a picture of the collapsed tower. I think they're hosted on Akamai.
I got the NYT login page for the article, but I didn't log in. Globe and Mail and Canoe are two Canadian news site still reachable from where I am.
CNN seems to have a stripped-down front page that's now struggling to stay up.
The LA Times is now reachable again from where I am, and has a different angle pic before the tower collapse.
My university is a long way from NYC (I'm in Canada) but some of my friends are leaving to go home and watch the news. I know that in the context of pain and suffering world-wide, this is a small event, but it is still a horrible tragedy and a sad, sad day for those whose loved ones are victims.
Christopher
This post is a little stale by now, since Slashdot's database seemed to take a hit too for a while, and I went home to watch the tv coverage myself, but I'm posting anyway just for posterity.
Correlation does not indicate causality!
Could it just be that smart kids like chess more than average kids?
All the same I think that board games would be great to include in the list. If chess fits the bill, then be sure to look at Go. I personally like games like Risk and Axis&Allies.
Christopher