Fer fuck's sake, it was a joke! I know Slashdotters are renowned for their sense of humour failure, but c'mon, get a life.
However, there is a serious point. Saying "publish" is all very well, but in this age of online everything, how are they going to do that exactly? I'm not interested in buying a 400-volume dead tree version, which is what it would take, if Britannica took on WP's content and put it into its traditional form. Even cutting out the 90% rubbish it would still be a pretty hefty tome. And publishing online requires a business model that is going to generate step 3, and I don't see one around that anyone has really made work well yet. WP may be of questionable accuracy in some areas, but its "good enough" especially to just get oriented to a subject, and above all it's free.
The fact that this is not so easy as just saying "publish" is what those question marks in step 2 are all about - however the efficiency and elegance of using humour to illustrate a serious point is clearly lost on you morons.
Just to correct a couple of things - AAC is already an open standard - you can download the specs right now and get started making an encoder/decoder as you wish, royalty free. It was not created by Fraunhofer but Dolby Laboratories. It is analogous to the situation with PDF - it was created by Adobe but the spec is open and Adobe get no royalties from anyone who implements PDF. Fairplay is an additional encryption wrapper around AAC, which is Apple's proprietary thing, and it's this they won't license. Personally I think they should, but that's another issue.
The operative phrase was human-caused. That global warming exists is now generally accepted, but its causes are still wide open to debate, since we just don't know enough about how our atmosphere interacts with our local star. When we crack that problem, and factor into it all the pollution and other activities, we might be able to state for sure one way or the other. The question is should we err on the side of caution and cut back our polluting activities in case these do in fact turn out to be the problem? I'd say we should, since it would have additional benefits - but it might not "fix" global warming.
While we are slowly sleepwalking into a surveillance society along with the rest of the world, the process is well behind where it's at in the UK or the US. My local city centre isn't festooned with CCTV cameras; you can still rent a PO Box anonymously, etc. You need ID to mail parcels though. In most respects it's as free a country as you can find on the planet that still has a first-world standard of living (maybe Canada similarly qualifies) but it is a concern that even Australia is starting to follow in Orwell's footsteps....
It's two years old, but interestingly, the TCO advantage of Mac OS X over Windows is... 36%! perhaps this magic 36% is some sort of universal "Windows lameness" constant that these studies are revealing...
This happened in the 70s and the 80s in the UK. Mary Whitehouse, a housewife with very old fashioned and reactionary views, set up the "Viewers and Listeners Association", which was a very very tiny group who nevertheless managed to be extremely vocal - and this was before the net. The did have a fair bit of influence for a while, but eventually became so out of touch and out of date that they were openly ridiculed and often the target of jokes. In the end, while the VLA still exists (despite the death of Whitehouse), humour did for them what no amount of handwringing and argument could. I suggest the US follow this example - point and laugh at them, repeat until they go away.
Sydney Morning Herald's long-term hostility to the iPod.
I didn't think they were THAT bad, though I only ever read the Saturday edition. What did annoy me recently though was a) the iPod battery story was very one-sided and b) in a somewhat frivolous comparison of analogue/digital technologies (of all types) they preferred the original Walkman over the iPod - right, I'm really likely to carry around 250 or more cassettes, never mind the complete lack of random access to them, and the noisy distorted quality when I finally find the track I want. What were they thinking? I can think of no virtues that the Walkman had over an iPod, except that the iPod wasn't available in 1979, about the only compelling reason to buy a Walkman. They almost managed to kill parallel imports
He he, I have a UK bank account, so I use iTMS UK to download songs quite legally direct onto my lappie here in Oz.
while Pro-Am computer programmers are providing the only serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance of personal computing."
I'm sure the employees of Apple, Inc. will be so pleased to hear that they have now been officially discounted as "not serious". Bah.
TSFA says :
The software "knows" why it has dimmed the item. Some decision or decisions led to the flag being set. At the same time as the flag is set, the reason why should be made available. If the user clicks on a grayed-out option, the reason or reasons should be made known. And none of those, "Gosh, Oh, Gee, it could be any one of these 14 reasons or maybe something else" messages. The message needs to be intelligent, responsive, and accurate. This one is important. This one needs to be done right.
Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
I have to agree with you, In fact a menu being greyed out is usually not the result of a flag being set, but the result of a flag NOT being set (to enable it). In most OOP based applications, what happens is that a "chain of command" is given an opportunity to enable the menu item if it has anything for the item to do - if not, it passes it on to the next object in the chain and so on. If the chain terminates with nothing set then BY DEFAULT the menu remains greyed out. So all that could be supplied as a reason at that point is "nothing in the command chain has anything for this command to do right now". Well duh, that's what a greyed menu item MEANS! It may or may not be intuitive (a moot point I don't wish to argue), but it's the work of three seconds to explain it to someone and learn it. Users don't necessarily need to know about chains of command and so on, though in practice this concept is fairly pervasive in a GUI app, so personally I find explaining it to novice users does actually help give them a clue about just how the computer works and why things are the way they are. Even my Mum(TM) gets it.
1) Power Failure Crash
-- A "Continuous Save" is unpractical. Committing every action to permanent storage, aka a hard drive, would both kill performance and shorten the drive life. It would also increase the risk of hard drive failure during the crash by increasing the likelihood that the drive would be in use.
Completely unlike modern VM schemes, say.
The computer would refuse to do anything at all
until you supplied the (unavailable) missing disk. The only solution I
knew of to this was a reboot.
Actually there was a quick way out, if you knew it - type command-escape (or something, I forget). While not intuitive, once learned it made life so much easier it became second nature (though not so much that I can recall it exactly now - luckily such pains are a thing of the distant past).
Or do what Mac OS X does, and discretely request your attention by bouncing the app's icon in the dock - sort of the computer equivalent of politely putting its hand up. You can switch focus when it suits YOU, leavin gyou free to get on with finishing whatever you're doing in the active app.
Solar energy can be used to make electric power with solar cells and large mirror arrays could heat water through which the the electric current from the solar cells would pass to make hydrogen. This technology exists now, but it is not likely to be cost effective as long as fossil fuel is still as cheap as it is now.
I think direct solar cells are probably a dead end, but the idea of heating water using solar is much more worthwhile. A simple solar water heater is easily made more than 90% efficient, and water is an efficient thermal storage/transport medium. There needs only then to be a reasonable way of converting that heat into electricity. This is where the Stirling Engine might finally find its application - obviously there are mechanical inefficiencies but the overall system would still knock direct solar cells into a cocked hat for efficiency. A back of the envelope calculation shows this idea to be quite workable in theory - why has no-one put much effort into researching it? have I missed something?
Most cars designed in the far east are, to my mind, ugly. In a way that most European cars are not. So maybe it's a cultural thing. Compare a Lexus to the equivalent Merc and superficially they are very similar, but the Merc is subtly different in a way that adds up to being infinitely more aesthetically pleasing. That said, I can't understand why some of these Japanese manufacturers don't just employ European styling houses - they spend billions developing new models, but often appear to leave the styling to the intern.
FM transmitters are just as bad - the maximum frequency is limited to 15 kHz, and the stereo seperation is poor due to the multiplexing of the L-R signal onto the 38kHz pilot tone.
Yes, these things are vitally important when you're inside a thin metal box full of bits of odd furniture and strange surfaces, with speakers wedged into odd corners wherever they can be fitted, the whole thing being moved by a powerplant putting out many dBs of noise and vibration, with other similar ones going past every few seconds, plus the variable levels of white noise caused by the airflow. Hmmm, I'm sure you can pick out the difference between 40 and 50 dB of stereo separation, or the fact that the high frequencies are rolling off a few kHz early.
Personally, I find the iTrip more than adequate for car use. The quality isn't bad at all once you get the right levels and an appropriate equalizer setting dialled in (I found it needed quite a bit of treble boost for my car). Yes, on my home hifi the iTrip's drawbacks are fairly obvious, but in the car it's fine.
...it wasn't so damn buggy. For the two or three weeks I had it installed, it was mostly locked up or crashed. After a while I realised I simply didn't need a bunch of buggy clocks so I trashed it. Had it been more reliable (and, to be blunt., more useful) it might have stayed around and I might have cared a lot more about the Dashboard/Konfabulator bun fight.
Slashdot Mirror
Fer fuck's sake, it was a joke! I know Slashdotters are renowned for their sense of humour failure, but c'mon, get a life.
However, there is a serious point. Saying "publish" is all very well, but in this age of online everything, how are they going to do that exactly? I'm not interested in buying a 400-volume dead tree version, which is what it would take, if Britannica took on WP's content and put it into its traditional form. Even cutting out the 90% rubbish it would still be a pretty hefty tome. And publishing online requires a business model that is going to generate step 3, and I don't see one around that anyone has really made work well yet. WP may be of questionable accuracy in some areas, but its "good enough" especially to just get oriented to a subject, and above all it's free.
The fact that this is not so easy as just saying "publish" is what those question marks in step 2 are all about - however the efficiency and elegance of using humour to illustrate a serious point is clearly lost on you morons.
1. Peer review 450,000 Wikipedia articles, checking for accuracy, style, citations, consistency and integrity.
2. ?????
3. Profit!!
I think it might be step 2 that's stopping them....
Just to correct a couple of things - AAC is already an open standard - you can download the specs right now and get started making an encoder/decoder as you wish, royalty free. It was not created by Fraunhofer but Dolby Laboratories. It is analogous to the situation with PDF - it was created by Adobe but the spec is open and Adobe get no royalties from anyone who implements PDF. Fairplay is an additional encryption wrapper around AAC, which is Apple's proprietary thing, and it's this they won't license. Personally I think they should, but that's another issue.
Miles per watt indeed! What tosh.
Other orders exist with similar classes eg KCB Honour for DIS-service to the state? The KGB...
My three year old iPod just got killed - thanks a lot iRiver!!!
The operative phrase was human-caused. That global warming exists is now generally accepted, but its causes are still wide open to debate, since we just don't know enough about how our atmosphere interacts with our local star. When we crack that problem, and factor into it all the pollution and other activities, we might be able to state for sure one way or the other. The question is should we err on the side of caution and cut back our polluting activities in case these do in fact turn out to be the problem? I'd say we should, since it would have additional benefits - but it might not "fix" global warming.
While we are slowly sleepwalking into a surveillance society along with the rest of the world, the process is well behind where it's at in the UK or the US. My local city centre isn't festooned with CCTV cameras; you can still rent a PO Box anonymously, etc. You need ID to mail parcels though. In most respects it's as free a country as you can find on the planet that still has a first-world standard of living (maybe Canada similarly qualifies) but it is a concern that even Australia is starting to follow in Orwell's footsteps....
It's two years old, but interestingly, the TCO advantage of Mac OS X over Windows is... 36%! perhaps this magic 36% is some sort of universal "Windows lameness" constant that these studies are revealing...
Mac OS X Gartner study (via archintosh)
This happened in the 70s and the 80s in the UK. Mary Whitehouse, a housewife with very old fashioned and reactionary views, set up the "Viewers and Listeners Association", which was a very very tiny group who nevertheless managed to be extremely vocal - and this was before the net. The did have a fair bit of influence for a while, but eventually became so out of touch and out of date that they were openly ridiculed and often the target of jokes. In the end, while the VLA still exists (despite the death of Whitehouse), humour did for them what no amount of handwringing and argument could. I suggest the US follow this example - point and laugh at them, repeat until they go away.
Sydney Morning Herald's long-term hostility to the iPod.
I didn't think they were THAT bad, though I only ever read the Saturday edition. What did annoy me recently though was a) the iPod battery story was very one-sided and b) in a somewhat frivolous comparison of analogue/digital technologies (of all types) they preferred the original Walkman over the iPod - right, I'm really likely to carry around 250 or more cassettes, never mind the complete lack of random access to them, and the noisy distorted quality when I finally find the track I want. What were they thinking? I can think of no virtues that the Walkman had over an iPod, except that the iPod wasn't available in 1979, about the only compelling reason to buy a Walkman.
They almost managed to kill parallel imports
He he, I have a UK bank account, so I use iTMS UK to download songs quite legally direct onto my lappie here in Oz.
Yes, lots. However, the wording of the article.... oh, never mind.
while Pro-Am computer programmers are providing the only serious challenge to Microsoft's dominance of personal computing."
I'm sure the employees of Apple, Inc. will be so pleased to hear that they have now been officially discounted as "not serious". Bah.
TSFA says : The software "knows" why it has dimmed the item. Some decision or decisions led to the flag being set. At the same time as the flag is set, the reason why should be made available. If the user clicks on a grayed-out option, the reason or reasons should be made known. And none of those, "Gosh, Oh, Gee, it could be any one of these 14 reasons or maybe something else" messages. The message needs to be intelligent, responsive, and accurate. This one is important. This one needs to be done right. Ok, so the issue is that you want to know why the menu is disabled. So, which of 20 different on-screen objects do you want a message to indicate could be selected to enable "copy" ? Even if you manage to get the message "right", how useful is the message "You must select something to copy." going to be after the second time you see it? At that point the greyed menu tells me everything I needed to know.
I have to agree with you, In fact a menu being greyed out is usually not the result of a flag being set, but the result of a flag NOT being set (to enable it). In most OOP based applications, what happens is that a "chain of command" is given an opportunity to enable the menu item if it has anything for the item to do - if not, it passes it on to the next object in the chain and so on. If the chain terminates with nothing set then BY DEFAULT the menu remains greyed out. So all that could be supplied as a reason at that point is "nothing in the command chain has anything for this command to do right now". Well duh, that's what a greyed menu item MEANS! It may or may not be intuitive (a moot point I don't wish to argue), but it's the work of three seconds to explain it to someone and learn it. Users don't necessarily need to know about chains of command and so on, though in practice this concept is fairly pervasive in a GUI app, so personally I find explaining it to novice users does actually help give them a clue about just how the computer works and why things are the way they are. Even my Mum(TM) gets it.
1) Power Failure Crash -- A "Continuous Save" is unpractical. Committing every action to permanent storage, aka a hard drive, would both kill performance and shorten the drive life. It would also increase the risk of hard drive failure during the crash by increasing the likelihood that the drive would be in use.
Completely unlike modern VM schemes, say.
The computer would refuse to do anything at all until you supplied the (unavailable) missing disk. The only solution I knew of to this was a reboot.
Actually there was a quick way out, if you knew it - type command-escape (or something, I forget). While not intuitive, once learned it made life so much easier it became second nature (though not so much that I can recall it exactly now - luckily such pains are a thing of the distant past).
Or do what Mac OS X does, and discretely request your attention by bouncing the app's icon in the dock - sort of the computer equivalent of politely putting its hand up. You can switch focus when it suits YOU, leavin gyou free to get on with finishing whatever you're doing in the active app.
The icon changes as soon as you drag an ejectable object. You don't have to move it over or even near the bin.
Solar energy can be used to make electric power with solar cells and large mirror arrays could heat water through which the the electric current from the solar cells would pass to make hydrogen. This technology exists now, but it is not likely to be cost effective as long as fossil fuel is still as cheap as it is now.
I think direct solar cells are probably a dead end, but the idea of heating water using solar is much more worthwhile. A simple solar water heater is easily made more than 90% efficient, and water is an efficient thermal storage/transport medium. There needs only then to be a reasonable way of converting that heat into electricity. This is where the Stirling Engine might finally find its application - obviously there are mechanical inefficiencies but the overall system would still knock direct solar cells into a cocked hat for efficiency. A back of the envelope calculation shows this idea to be quite workable in theory - why has no-one put much effort into researching it? have I missed something?
Most cars designed in the far east are, to my mind, ugly. In a way that most European cars are not. So maybe it's a cultural thing. Compare a Lexus to the equivalent Merc and superficially they are very similar, but the Merc is subtly different in a way that adds up to being infinitely more aesthetically pleasing. That said, I can't understand why some of these Japanese manufacturers don't just employ European styling houses - they spend billions developing new models, but often appear to leave the styling to the intern.
FM transmitters are just as bad - the maximum frequency is limited to 15 kHz, and the stereo seperation is poor due to the multiplexing of the L-R signal onto the 38kHz pilot tone.
Yes, these things are vitally important when you're inside a thin metal box full of bits of odd furniture and strange surfaces, with speakers wedged into odd corners wherever they can be fitted, the whole thing being moved by a powerplant putting out many dBs of noise and vibration, with other similar ones going past every few seconds, plus the variable levels of white noise caused by the airflow. Hmmm, I'm sure you can pick out the difference between 40 and 50 dB of stereo separation, or the fact that the high frequencies are rolling off a few kHz early.
Personally, I find the iTrip more than adequate for car use. The quality isn't bad at all once you get the right levels and an appropriate equalizer setting dialled in (I found it needed quite a bit of treble boost for my car). Yes, on my home hifi the iTrip's drawbacks are fairly obvious, but in the car it's fine.
...it wasn't so damn buggy. For the two or three weeks I had it installed, it was mostly locked up or crashed. After a while I realised I simply didn't need a bunch of buggy clocks so I trashed it. Had it been more reliable (and, to be blunt., more useful) it might have stayed around and I might have cared a lot more about the Dashboard/Konfabulator bun fight.
So, Bush gets in with a 51% majority and that now makes the earlier torture and basic violation of human rights OK? I see.
the next rouge state to be liberated
Rouge state? That's the bloody French commies you're referring to, I assume?
I share your frustration, but we did have our chance last month, and blew it. :(