Python is named after Monty Python, not a reptile. Fear off!
I know. It doesn't really help since most books use the snake motif. If the O'Reilly books had used woodcuts of John Cleese sitting in a tree, thoughtfully munching on some leaves or something on the covers I'd had been fine.
I mean, it's not a big thing by itself, but it means I hesitate to pick up a book about the language (and if there is an actual snake on the cover, I literally have trouble picking it up), and the name evokes bad associations I can't help to unconciously partly carry over to my opinion of the language.
Which is about as fair as disliking Python for its use of indenting instead of braces. Me, I dislike Python because it has the name of a snake, and I'm phobic:) (only half kidding, actually; I have a real difficulty reading a book when it has a picture of a snake on the cover or when I know a drawing or picture of one could appear whenever I turn a page).
(they actually have an Aibo especially programmed to understand the Osaka dialect.)
Ahh, Osaka-ben! Living in Kansai is like learning two new languages at the same time...
Agree with the parent poster - Japanese is as colloqial and unstructured as you want to make it. Beginning students tend to focus on standard business Japanese, though, which is somewhat formal and rulebound (just like standard English is for beginning language students).
Japanese also have the ability to use ellipsis (drop mutually understood parts) to an absurd degree. The problem is, if you didn't catch everything people already said, you can be totally lost about what people are talking about even when you hear and understand every word.
What Linux is the name of this fire we had a while back. Ah, the old Linux Fire.
That would be perfectly legal, trademark or no trademark. It only protects the use of the word in the specific domain it is defined (Operating systems, presumably, in this case). The purpose of trademark protection is to avoid confusion for the customers (and thus protection from that confusion for the owners).
Here in Japan, for instance, there is both a Unix laundry detergent and a Unix brand of plastic food containers. The domains do not overlap and thus no confusion.
Ugh, that zoom feature is really annoying. I zoom to read the text, and if anything, graphics should shrink, not grow, to accomodate the need for more text area. Having some headshot of the writer fill half the screen isn't helpful when I want to read the article.
Okay this is getting out of hand here. I HATE modern cars (I'm 22). For many reasons. Every feature added to cars now a days decreases the ability for younger kids to acutally DRIVE! I know people that can't back their car up with out a backup display screen and warning sensor. I know a woman that can't change lanes with out her on board display screen in her Lincoln.
With all these "features" it takes away from the driving, now adays.. kids get into the car an expect it to do everything for them. Power this, ABS that, self detecting OnStar. Its all bull.
Not to mention automatic transmission, power steering, hydraulic brakes, automatic spark advance, electric starter and fuel pump.
How can you call it real driving when the car does everything? If you don't set the spark advance yourself, or hand pump the fuel to the carburetors, how can you call yourself a driver? "Turn a key and it starts" - bull, I tell you. Bull.
Yes, making things convenient and useable is obviously a bad idea.
Because a touch screen isn't responsive. You don't get tactile feedback from pushing an unmoving screen. And that makes a huge difference in how easy the device is to use.
I'm sick of this crap. You can't carry 5 more ounces of something thats not much bigger than a credit card anymore? That's asinine. And dont act like you don't already have headphones/handsfree set for the phone.
The limit isn't weight, it's space. I have two pockets available in my pants, and I already have a wallet, keys, passcard, phone and an electronic dictionary. There isn't any more room. In fact, there's too much stuff already. If I could find a phone with a good (not crappy) Japanese-English dictionary, the standalone one would go in a hot second.
Yes, I could rearrange stuff, put things in my bag, learn to keep multiple headphones untangled, unload my pockets when I arrive at work or home. But it's inconvenient. As in "a hassle", "a source of irritation", and "interruption of the flow of daily life". When something whose purpose is to make life a little better and make me a little happier ends up annoying me, it's not a good device for me, no matter how wonderful it is on its own terms. Even a semi-crappy mp3 player in my phone easily beats a wonderful device that makes me annoyed by its existence as a separate device.
Seriously, the iPod is a very, very nice music player. All current mp3 playing phones are nowhere near as good as a scroll-wheeled iPod.
I'm sure it is. I never stated otherwise.
Convergence is a nice thing, and I do like it, but the camera on cell phones aren't good enough to replace an actual digital camera, and the mp3 playing phones aren't good enough to replace an actual mp3 player.
Digital music being what it is, however, what makes it a very, very nice music player is nothing that inherently is impossible to duplicate in a device like a phone (unlike the camera).
Consider, if you will, an iPod - an actual, real iPod, down to the translucent plastic and scroll wheel. There is no technical or UI reason not to be able to stuff a radio and a phone/email device in there (I use mine more for email than talk). Conversely, there is nothing magical about playing mp3 (as opposed to, say listening to radio) that makes it impossible to make a good UI for it in a phone.
Most importantly, it doesn't even have to be fully as good as the iPod; "good enough" really is good enough. My current phone only lacks a convenient way for me to download mp3:s (now I have to email them to myself which gets kind of old), and it doesn't play all my Ogg:ed audiobooks (which, by the way, the iPod can't either). The UI already is good enough for me.
Or to put in another way; a decent but not great player in my phone handily beats a wonderful player that stays at home since I carry too much crap already.
Now, if you really aren't all that into photos or music, an mp3 picture phone might be just what you are looking for.
Cameras are different than sound; optical quality really is size-limited. There are good physical reasons a camera phone - or a small standalone camera, for that matter - can't approach the optical quality or noise level of a larger one. An mp3 player isn't limited in the same way.
I really care about photography, so I carry a DSLR (a major reason I don't need still more stuff with me). I'm a casual listener; I use music and radio to entertain myself on the way to and from work. To the limit of my hearing (and my ability to care), that mp3 will sound exactly as good being played from my phone as it does from an iPod.
Can't speak of Australia, but in Sweden it's "Grogg", with two g's. It obviously comes from "Grog", but has changed spelling along with meaning, making it a different word.
Look at the nano, it's got such tiny flash chips which are huge storage-wise.
Storage size isn't the problem. There's no shortage of phones with a lot more than the 100 song capability of this one - including the Rockr. Note that Apple actually limits the capability to 100 songs, no matter how much memory you have.
Which to me basically says that Apple does not want a phone with music capability to succeed, and this device is deliberately underwhelming, and an attempt to deflect that trend for a while. It goes under the assumption that people will want to choose an Apple device, and faced with a bad phone, they will choose an Ipod instead.
I think that is a mistake. I use mhy phone as text reader and radio already, and I'd really hate going back to carry a separate device for that. I don't know what mp3 player will be my next one, but I do know it will be labeled as a telephone.
When your laptop is your only computer, it effectively works as that file server you mention. One movie (nice to have on trips if nothing else) is about 1Gb, as is one day's worth of shooting pictures for me (RAW really eats up space). PDF articles are surprisingly space hungry as well; they are not that big individually (my average seems to be at about half a meg), but you tend to collect them like rats collect bedding. All text I have (PDF papers and lots of other stuff) come out to well over 10Gb.
Downloading whole discographys from bittorrent and audiobooks I believe that you could do it.
Whole discographies? I'm as guilty of fanboyism as the next guy, but seriously, I have a hard time thinking of any band or artist (whose discography is longer than a couple of hit singles) where you actually would want to _listen_ - as opposed to, well, just have - more than half of their output.
And since files are so transient, there isn't the same point of having as you did with CDs or records. If, at some point, you feel you just have to hear "A Saucerful Of Secrets" again, if nothing else just to make sure it's as bad as you remember, then you can dig out that burnt CD in the back of your closet or download it.
I'm with the original poster - I don't think there is a month+ of music out there that I want to hear.
Audiobooks are a bit different of course, but there too, there's a limit to how many books I not only like, but that I like enough (and that fits the media well enough) to keep focus over ten hours or so of someone reading it to me. And it's of course pretty pointless to rip audiobooks at th esame high quality you do for music; at 32Kbits mp3 (or half that for Ogg) it is still perfectly fine, and still enjoyable at half that.
given the popularity of pseudoscience like "Intelligent Design"
Now that is a loaded statement.
Yes it is.
It doesn't go nearly far enough.
"Pseudoscience" implies that its proponents, cranky or not, at least sincerely believes in it. That is too charitable for "intelligent design".
"intelligent design" is a meticulously planned, focus-group designed, carefully executed fraud.
It is created only to deceive. It's intended purpose is not to explain anything, but only to diminish the public credibility of any real scientific explanatory model of life or the origin of our world.
For those who want the latest 2.12 goodness nicely prepackaged, Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) will be released with 2.12 on October 13:th, about a month from now.
It could be I'm from a different continent or something, but I haven't heard of a single one of those characters.
It lately feels like the movie industry has collectively jumped the shark. I used to go to the movies five or six times in a normal year, and I must have seen twenty b-movies or more every year on video with friends. But the past few years there's been nothing. When the only movie I've looked forward to in the past three years is the next Harry Potter, things are not looking good.
You are responsible for the design and implementation of the entire system, and yet you allow a huge, honking unreliable single point of failure that can bring the entire operation to its knees - you. That doesn't smack of good systems design to me.
Eartquake-prone areas tend to build mountain ridges and channels which creates coastlines and contributes both to active river systems, nice, livable islands and natural harbours.
Volcanos spew out large amounts of volcanic ash and lava, which quickly becomes excellent soil to grow stuff in.
With something complex like a data center, there's so much variance in how they're operated, exactly what they do, where they are, etc...having a standard may well *not* fit everyone's needs, either because their needs were not perceived or understood at the time or because their needs simply cannot be met by the standard.
True.
But when you have a formal standard, you have something to measure against. Every aspect of the data center design is not only standardized, but the how's, why's and therefore's are spelled out. If you suspect the standard doesn't meet your needs in some respect (a clear lack of surround sound for late-night fps tournaments, say), it makes it clear exactly how your criteria changes the requirements, and it makes it much easier to see how it could impact the rest of the design.
So even if you use not one single recommendation (we need the disco ball, damnit!), you have something reasonable and well documented to compare against, which makes your job easier.
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Python is named after Monty Python, not a reptile. Fear off!
:)
I know. It doesn't really help since most books use the snake motif. If the O'Reilly books had used woodcuts of John Cleese sitting in a tree, thoughtfully munching on some leaves or something on the covers I'd had been fine.
I mean, it's not a big thing by itself, but it means I hesitate to pick up a book about the language (and if there is an actual snake on the cover, I literally have trouble picking it up), and the name evokes bad associations I can't help to unconciously partly carry over to my opinion of the language.
Ah well, Ruby looks nicer anyhow
And Ruby looks like VB. I like my semicolons.
:) (only half kidding, actually; I have a real difficulty reading a book when it has a picture of a snake on the cover or when I know a drawing or picture of one could appear whenever I turn a page).
Which is about as fair as disliking Python for its use of indenting instead of braces. Me, I dislike Python because it has the name of a snake, and I'm phobic
(they actually have an Aibo especially programmed to understand the Osaka dialect.)
Ahh, Osaka-ben! Living in Kansai is like learning two new languages at the same time...
Agree with the parent poster - Japanese is as colloqial and unstructured as you want to make it. Beginning students tend to focus on standard business Japanese, though, which is somewhat formal and rulebound (just like standard English is for beginning language students).
Japanese also have the ability to use ellipsis (drop mutually understood parts) to an absurd degree. The problem is, if you didn't catch everything people already said, you can be totally lost about what people are talking about even when you hear and understand every word.
"grammer"?
Hmmm....
We of course do know who to sue for the most of the damage, whether based on the most pollutants or by the most per output economic activity.
And no, China just doesn't have the funds. We'll get to her later.
What Linux is the name of this fire we had a while back. Ah, the old Linux Fire.
That would be perfectly legal, trademark or no trademark. It only protects the use of the word in the specific domain it is defined (Operating systems, presumably, in this case). The purpose of trademark protection is to avoid confusion for the customers (and thus protection from that confusion for the owners).
Here in Japan, for instance, there is both a Unix laundry detergent and a Unix brand of plastic food containers. The domains do not overlap and thus no confusion.
Ugh, that zoom feature is really annoying. I zoom to read the text, and if anything, graphics should shrink, not grow, to accomodate the need for more text area. Having some headshot of the writer fill half the screen isn't helpful when I want to read the article.
A letter from a lawyer isn't a legal decree. It's a start of a conversation.
Since you need a lawyer for it, a start of a very expensive conversation.
And too often, a way for the initiator to monetarily outshout the other party before the "conversation" has even bagun.
You know, they could just pick up a phone.
"...the same object ..., and almost the same size."
If it's the same object, then it is the same size.
NutriFast?
I'll buy a scooter.
Okay this is getting out of hand here. I HATE modern cars (I'm 22). For many reasons. Every feature added to cars now a days decreases the ability for younger kids to acutally DRIVE! I know people that can't back their car up with out a backup display screen and warning sensor. I know a woman that can't change lanes with out her on board display screen in her Lincoln.
With all these "features" it takes away from the driving, now adays.. kids get into the car an expect it to do everything for them. Power this, ABS that, self detecting OnStar. Its all bull.
Not to mention automatic transmission, power steering, hydraulic brakes, automatic spark advance, electric starter and fuel pump.
How can you call it real driving when the car does everything? If you don't set the spark advance yourself, or hand pump the fuel to the carburetors, how can you call yourself a driver? "Turn a key and it starts" - bull, I tell you. Bull.
Yes, making things convenient and useable is obviously a bad idea.
Because a touch screen isn't responsive. You don't get tactile feedback from pushing an unmoving screen. And that makes a huge difference in how easy the device is to use.
I'm sick of this crap. You can't carry 5 more ounces of something thats not much bigger than a credit card anymore? That's asinine. And dont act like you don't already have headphones/handsfree set for the phone.
The limit isn't weight, it's space. I have two pockets available in my pants, and I already have a wallet, keys, passcard, phone and an electronic dictionary. There isn't any more room. In fact, there's too much stuff already. If I could find a phone with a good (not crappy) Japanese-English dictionary, the standalone one would go in a hot second.
Yes, I could rearrange stuff, put things in my bag, learn to keep multiple headphones untangled, unload my pockets when I arrive at work or home. But it's inconvenient. As in "a hassle", "a source of irritation", and "interruption of the flow of daily life". When something whose purpose is to make life a little better and make me a little happier ends up annoying me, it's not a good device for me, no matter how wonderful it is on its own terms. Even a semi-crappy mp3 player in my phone easily beats a wonderful device that makes me annoyed by its existence as a separate device.
Seriously, the iPod is a very, very nice music player. All current mp3 playing phones are nowhere near as good as a scroll-wheeled iPod.
I'm sure it is. I never stated otherwise.
Convergence is a nice thing, and I do like it, but the camera on cell phones aren't good enough to replace an actual digital camera, and the mp3 playing phones aren't good enough to replace an actual mp3 player.
Digital music being what it is, however, what makes it a very, very nice music player is nothing that inherently is impossible to duplicate in a device like a phone (unlike the camera).
Consider, if you will, an iPod - an actual, real iPod, down to the translucent plastic and scroll wheel. There is no technical or UI reason not to be able to stuff a radio and a phone/email device in there (I use mine more for email than talk). Conversely, there is nothing magical about playing mp3 (as opposed to, say listening to radio) that makes it impossible to make a good UI for it in a phone.
Most importantly, it doesn't even have to be fully as good as the iPod; "good enough" really is good enough. My current phone only lacks a convenient way for me to download mp3:s (now I have to email them to myself which gets kind of old), and it doesn't play all my Ogg:ed audiobooks (which, by the way, the iPod can't either). The UI already is good enough for me.
Or to put in another way; a decent but not great player in my phone handily beats a wonderful player that stays at home since I carry too much crap already.
Now, if you really aren't all that into photos or music, an mp3 picture phone might be just what you are looking for.
Cameras are different than sound; optical quality really is size-limited. There are good physical reasons a camera phone - or a small standalone camera, for that matter - can't approach the optical quality or noise level of a larger one. An mp3 player isn't limited in the same way.
I really care about photography, so I carry a DSLR (a major reason I don't need still more stuff with me). I'm a casual listener; I use music and radio to entertain myself on the way to and from work. To the limit of my hearing (and my ability to care), that mp3 will sound exactly as good being played from my phone as it does from an iPod.
Can't speak of Australia, but in Sweden it's "Grogg", with two g's. It obviously comes from "Grog", but has changed spelling along with meaning, making it a different word.
[sorry about the unfinished post]
Look at the nano, it's got such tiny flash chips which are huge storage-wise.
Storage size isn't the problem. There's no shortage of phones with a lot more than the 100 song capability of this one - including the Rockr. Note that Apple actually limits the capability to 100 songs, no matter how much memory you have.
Which to me basically says that Apple does not want a phone with music capability to succeed, and this device is deliberately underwhelming, and an attempt to deflect that trend for a while. It goes under the assumption that people will want to choose an Apple device, and faced with a bad phone, they will choose an Ipod instead.
I think that is a mistake. I use mhy phone as text reader and radio already, and I'd really hate going back to carry a separate device for that. I don't know what mp3 player will be my next one, but I do know it will be labeled as a telephone.
Look at the nano, it's got such tiny flash chips which are huge storage-wise.
When your laptop is your only computer, it effectively works as that file server you mention. One movie (nice to have on trips if nothing else) is about 1Gb, as is one day's worth of shooting pictures for me (RAW really eats up space). PDF articles are surprisingly space hungry as well; they are not that big individually (my average seems to be at about half a meg), but you tend to collect them like rats collect bedding. All text I have (PDF papers and lots of other stuff) come out to well over 10Gb.
Downloading whole discographys from bittorrent and audiobooks I believe that you could do it.
Whole discographies? I'm as guilty of fanboyism as the next guy, but seriously, I have a hard time thinking of any band or artist (whose discography is longer than a couple of hit singles) where you actually would want to _listen_ - as opposed to, well, just have - more than half of their output.
And since files are so transient, there isn't the same point of having as you did with CDs or records. If, at some point, you feel you just have to hear "A Saucerful Of Secrets" again, if nothing else just to make sure it's as bad as you remember, then you can dig out that burnt CD in the back of your closet or download it.
I'm with the original poster - I don't think there is a month+ of music out there that I want to hear.
Audiobooks are a bit different of course, but there too, there's a limit to how many books I not only like, but that I like enough (and that fits the media well enough) to keep focus over ten hours or so of someone reading it to me. And it's of course pretty pointless to rip audiobooks at th esame high quality you do for music; at 32Kbits mp3 (or half that for Ogg) it is still perfectly fine, and still enjoyable at half that.
given the popularity of pseudoscience like "Intelligent Design"
Now that is a loaded statement.
Yes it is.
It doesn't go nearly far enough.
"Pseudoscience" implies that its proponents, cranky or not, at least sincerely believes in it. That is too charitable for "intelligent design".
"intelligent design" is a meticulously planned, focus-group designed, carefully executed fraud.
It is created only to deceive. It's intended purpose is not to explain anything, but only to diminish the public credibility of any real scientific explanatory model of life or the origin of our world.
For those who want the latest 2.12 goodness nicely prepackaged, Ubuntu 5.10 (Breezy) will be released with 2.12 on October 13:th, about a month from now.
h light=(release)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/BreezyReleaseSchedule?hig
It could be I'm from a different continent or something, but I haven't heard of a single one of those characters.
It lately feels like the movie industry has collectively jumped the shark. I used to go to the movies five or six times in a normal year, and I must have seen twenty b-movies or more every year on video with friends. But the past few years there's been nothing. When the only movie I've looked forward to in the past three years is the next Harry Potter, things are not looking good.
You are making too much.
You are responsible for the design and implementation of the entire system, and yet you allow a huge, honking unreliable single point of failure that can bring the entire operation to its knees - you. That doesn't smack of good systems design to me.
Eartquake-prone areas tend to build mountain ridges and channels which creates coastlines and contributes both to active river systems, nice, livable islands and natural harbours.
Volcanos spew out large amounts of volcanic ash and lava, which quickly becomes excellent soil to grow stuff in.
With something complex like a data center, there's so much variance in how they're operated, exactly what they do, where they are, etc...having a standard may well *not* fit everyone's needs, either because their needs were not perceived or understood at the time or because their needs simply cannot be met by the standard.
True.
But when you have a formal standard, you have something to measure against. Every aspect of the data center design is not only standardized, but the how's, why's and therefore's are spelled out. If you suspect the standard doesn't meet your needs in some respect (a clear lack of surround sound for late-night fps tournaments, say), it makes it clear exactly how your criteria changes the requirements, and it makes it much easier to see how it could impact the rest of the design.
So even if you use not one single recommendation (we need the disco ball, damnit!), you have something reasonable and well documented to compare against, which makes your job easier.