I never understood what is the big thing with this Expose feature. Just use multiple desktops. And switch my moving your mouse to one edge of the display or another. What Expose does is it still moves the changes the position of the windows. I don't want that. I want to have the windows just the way I left them no moving around. So I have my email and web browsing on one desktop, then my word processor on another, my games on another and I just switch from desktop to desktop when I switch tasks. So sorry, but I think Unix and Linux is still ahead of the game here...
I still don't think that if they were to rebuild today from scratch New Orleans would become a metropolis just because there are tons of raw materials going through.
It is the human travel and small consumer goods like shaving cream, shoe shine, as well as food such as grains and meat that will have to pass through there _and_ have no better way to go but by river. That was the case, but it is not the case anymore. You can build a large city in the middle of the desert today (think Las Vegas) and connected it by highways and an airport.
The point being that it probably is a bad idea to build any large cities on that coast that are located below sea level.
Like someone above said, it is like having the old Soviet designers create an interface and having a Western (American, European) design firm create the same. The old Soviet group will probably make something simple, lacking many options and advanced features, but reliable and efficient.
The Westerners will probably design something with many features, very complicated, but also confusing and unreliable.
The two ways are mostly opposites of each other. In GNOME if I want to burn a CD I just drop files into the nautilus window and right click on Burn to Disk context menu. In KDE I have to find the k3B in the menus, I have to launch it, it will probably ask me many questions about my hardware and what preferences I would like, then I would have to look through many menu options to find what I need.
On the other way, I can configure k3b to burn at other speeds and other formats and have more control over it, while I cannot to that with GNOME, so therefore the tradeoff.
HCI research is there to show what is objectively easier to remember and utilize. What is the learning rate? The reaction time and such. The most advance HCI research that I know is conduced for the flight controller and radar screens and controls. There HCI is vital as literaly lives depend on it.
Trade routes for what? Lumber and oil. Do you really need a metropolis at the intersection of such a trade route. Do you really need 1 million people living in the path of hurricanes and below sea level because lumber and oil comes in there?
But of course you know history so well, you know that back in the day the steamboats on Mississippi where just about _the only_ reliable way to travel inland until the railroads were built, so the trade wasn't just oil, lumber and such things it was _everything_: food, consumer goods, and besides there was a large passenger transport. When is the last time you bought a ticket to travel from Ohio to New Orleans by river? That is why there was a city built there. Today there would be a small town where people who service the docks would live and not a big metropolis...
Good idea listen to the people who sold Manhattan island for some beads. -- Even better don't listen to them and build in the path of a hurricane and below sea level. You can go either way with that "Indians are stupid. -No French are the stupid ones" argument...
Anyway, slashbots might have modded my post at 4, but you didn't even make past 1 last time I checked...
The Native American tribes told the French not to build there because they've been there enough to know...but did anyone listen?... of course not.
I understand that it was the intersection of trade routes back in the day, but what is there today? I would move away from that place, I am sure so will other people. There still will be a "New Orleans" but from now on it will be known as the "Flooded New Orleans." I don't think it will ever recover completely...
New Orleans was on the top of my list of places to visit in the next couple of years, but not anymore, I think I'll wait 10 years or so.
I agree, the computer and the OS is so complicated one does need to learn a little bit of computer-talk to use it.
I also agree with the blog, too many preferences and too many flashing notification everywhere are very distracting. GNOME I think is on the right track with this, especially in the Ubuntu distro version. Applications are simple and streamlined.
Today most computer users are all tainted by MS Windowz interface, that is what they know and they won't learn anything different even if it means improved usability and efficiency in the future. Therefore there are two philosophies for designing new interfaces:
1) Design what is familiar to the users even if it considered "bad design" according to standards and HCI research
2) Design what is believed to be correct according to HCI research, even at the expense of confusing the Windowz crowd.
It seems that KDE has mostly addopted the first approach and GNOME the second.
An interesting point, in one of the HCI classes I took, we read a paper that compared the command line to the graphical point-n-click interface. It turns out users are slower to learn the commands but once they do they remember them longer. For example it might take a while for my grandpa to learn that 'ls' means 'list the files in the directory' as opposed to just double-clicking the folder. But once he will learn it he will know it for a longer time, as opposed to asking him to open a folder in windowz a week later -- he might try to click on it once, click with a wrong button or try a mouse gesture.
I wanted to use PostgreSQL for my project but the libraries to interface with the language weren't there yet (some in beta some in alpha). MySQL simply has more language libraries then PostgreSQL. It is a vicious circle. The more libraries, the more popular, the more popular - the more libraries for it...
That thing is what got me interested in computers since the age of 13. Tons of great games (IKARI, Exolon, The great escape, fairlight, saboteur and others), easy to hack, easy to pirate, easy to program (assembler, C, Pascal and BASIC of course). That thing rocked!
I used to have a Russian variant made in the early 90's called "BYTE". It was the cheapest ZX Spectrum compatible that my parents could afford, we didn't even have a color TV. 48K RAM and about 3Mhz it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. But that machine had a rubber keyboard that stopped working couple of months later, but that didn't stop me. I remember when I cut out the keyboard with a saw and individually soldered some keys I scavanged off of an old Soviet-made fax machine. The keys where similar to the old clicking IBM keyboards, it took me a whole night to solder but by morning my creation was ready, ugly as hell, but nice to the touch and working again.
I remember the nights I spent compiling little programs in Z80 assembler
LD A,10
LD B.20
ADD A,B
etc..etc...
Ah, the good 'ol days.
Thanks,
My application is certainly not very Pythonic, it is more Java-ish or C-ish. I checked out some of those sites, printed out the tips-and-tricks and put them on the wall. I still have to get used to using the apply() and map() function and list comprehension instead of the traditional 'for' loop.
The C/C++ module api is still daunting for me (though easier than JNI, that's for sure!). That is the last resort though.
"It sounds almost certain that your application is I/O bound. I would guess that writing it in C++ would not see a performance improvement."
Some parts of it are I/O bound (net downloading, reading/writting/searching a 4Gig database), but it also has computational components to compute various graph transformations and metrics.
The speed improvement will certainly be there even for I/O bound procedures, as I have to perform a complex operation for many rows from the database. So for each row it gets it from the database, then MySQL has to go back into python (instantiate python objects, do calculations, then go back to the database). It will certainly be faster to do it in C++. Then the pure computational parts will definetly be faster in C++. The time to write all the algorithms in C++ would have taken much longer, so there is the trade-off I made...
I can see that with software. It needs to run on a particular platform. But I regard music as data that I play, not software that I run. But I guess with today's DRM the line is blurred.
Hatta,
You said WTF!?. The 'F' is that I didn't contact Jon to ask him if I can posting the link to his program in a slashdot post.
You might say "WTF!? You don't have to ask permission to link". I would respond that the 'F' is that it is not illegal to link to his site, but it is not very nice if he has to pay for the bandwidth. So by not providing a click-able link I thought I was making sure that only those who really want to get his program will get there as opposed to having tens of thousands of slashdotters click on it just because it is something to do.
Do you read every single EULA and other agreements? They could have written there that I should give them my firstborn child, if I click the button.
All I know is that I payed for the songs so I can listen to them. And now I want to listen to them on my computer. Thanks to St. DVD Jon I can do that now.
I was writting a program to download then parse text, then build graphs and compute some metrics on the graphs. I knew java, C/C++ but I was looking for something that would allow me to get my problem into code faster, so in a week I learned Python and then I wrote the whole thing in Python. Why? Because the language and its libraries had what I was looking for. For example hashes (dictionaries) and lists are base types. To add a string to a hash using a key in Python is just hash[key]=string. Then iterating through lists is much simpler, as is some other stuff. The same probably goes for Ruby. The downside is that my program runs much slower than if it had been written in C++. So if you do a lot of computations in there might want to stick with C, it all depends...
The ~30 fps is the minimum below which you will start seeing individual frames. It doesn't mean that 30 is the best, if you look at the source with a corner of your eye, up to 70-75Hz you will still see the flickering. One can tell the difference between a 60Hz refresh rate on a monitor and 85Hz. Also if you stare at a
Also, as you say, the motion blur will be there at 30 fps but that depends also on the fluorescence of the materials used. The same 30 fps on CRT will look different than 30 fps on an LCD or projected on a screen.
My brother gave me an iTunes gift certificate. So bought some albums. After my windows hard drive died with a "click-o-death" I just re-installed Linux by itself and am using that now for about a year. But the problem is when I went to play the music that _I bought_ from the iTunes, I couldn't! I payed money for the freakin' songs, I want to play them. Why do I have to install windows or buy an Apple computer to play the music that I bought?
I found Jon L. Johansen's site and his two programs:
1. FairKeys - to get the keys from Apple's site
2. DeDRMS - uses the keys to DeDRM the files.
The site is here (no html hyperlink, copy and paste if you want):
nanocrew.net/?page_id=59
You also need to install mono for linux as the programs are in C#. After that just run with "mono programname options".
No I can play my albums again. Thanks Jon!
But then again, what is the meaning of it all? We are just flying around in a huge universe on this little planet. To each one of us, does it really matter if the Earth will blow up 1000 years from now or millions of years from now? I, you and everyone from today will be dead.
I get all philosophical at 2 am in the morning I guess... Seeing a picture from Mars makes me think how big the universe is and how short our lifetimes are. Then it all of the sudden seems somehow too trite and silly to worry whether I should buy a green or a blue car or what grocery store to shop at. In the next 100 years, I'll probably be dead and gone, so what is the point of it all...
No problem here, the "bright" police investigators can easily look through the source and figure out where everything is stored. Shouldn' IE, at least technically, be more restrictive to the investigators since (even if they could) they cannot look at the source and figure out how and where things go...
DNA will be expressed into proteins such as hormones. Pump yourself with testosterone and other such chemicals that control your brain chemistry and you'll want to reproduce with the nearest tree.
You might or might not want be able to resist. If the chemicals control a specific organ, it might shut down or go into overdrive without you 'wanting' it, just by having a mutation in the DNA that will upgregulate that particular chemical.
But ultimately you are right, the DNA can only create predispositions (to cancer, to heart disease etc...). The debate is then where does one end and the other begin? Can/should I kill because I am predisposed to violent behavior and thus not be found guilty because of it?
Their algorithm doesn't seem that revolutionary as it claims to be. Stuff similar to this has been done before in natural language recognition and processing research.
One should note that generating meaningful grammar doesn't mean generating meaningful sentences. It might be grammatically correct to say "blue bingo bats" but it doesn't mean anything. The machine has to have some common sense and "understand" concepts the way we do, to produce human language.
But they do seem to be using the well-known university researcher's approach and namely:
1. Repackage some previously done stuff under a cute acronym -- "ADIOS" in their case, but 10+ points for recursive ones.
2. Patent it
3....?
4. *Success and fortune.
What is so insane about it? It all depends on your target customer/audience base. If I sell scented candles and ship only to US, why would I want Chinese and Russians looking through my catalog. There is no way they can buy it but there is a high chance that they might hack my web site.
This is just an example, but the idea goes for other kinds of sites too...
Slashdot Mirror
I never understood what is the big thing with this Expose feature. Just use multiple desktops. And switch my moving your mouse to one edge of the display or another. What Expose does is it still moves the changes the position of the windows. I don't want that. I want to have the windows just the way I left them no moving around. So I have my email and web browsing on one desktop, then my word processor on another, my games on another and I just switch from desktop to desktop when I switch tasks. So sorry, but I think Unix and Linux is still ahead of the game here...
It is the human travel and small consumer goods like shaving cream, shoe shine, as well as food such as grains and meat that will have to pass through there _and_ have no better way to go but by river. That was the case, but it is not the case anymore. You can build a large city in the middle of the desert today (think Las Vegas) and connected it by highways and an airport.
The point being that it probably is a bad idea to build any large cities on that coast that are located below sea level.
Like someone above said, it is like having the old Soviet designers create an interface and having a Western (American, European) design firm create the same. The old Soviet group will probably make something simple, lacking many options and advanced features, but reliable and efficient.
The Westerners will probably design something with many features, very complicated, but also confusing and unreliable.
The two ways are mostly opposites of each other. In GNOME if I want to burn a CD I just drop files into the nautilus window and right click on Burn to Disk context menu. In KDE I have to find the k3B in the menus, I have to launch it, it will probably ask me many questions about my hardware and what preferences I would like, then I would have to look through many menu options to find what I need.
On the other way, I can configure k3b to burn at other speeds and other formats and have more control over it, while I cannot to that with GNOME, so therefore the tradeoff.
HCI research is there to show what is objectively easier to remember and utilize. What is the learning rate? The reaction time and such. The most advance HCI research that I know is conduced for the flight controller and radar screens and controls. There HCI is vital as literaly lives depend on it.
But of course you know history so well, you know that back in the day the steamboats on Mississippi where just about _the only_ reliable way to travel inland until the railroads were built, so the trade wasn't just oil, lumber and such things it was _everything_: food, consumer goods, and besides there was a large passenger transport. When is the last time you bought a ticket to travel from Ohio to New Orleans by river? That is why there was a city built there. Today there would be a small town where people who service the docks would live and not a big metropolis...
Good idea listen to the people who sold Manhattan island for some beads. -- Even better don't listen to them and build in the path of a hurricane and below sea level. You can go either way with that "Indians are stupid. -No French are the stupid ones" argument... Anyway, slashbots might have modded my post at 4, but you didn't even make past 1 last time I checked...
I understand that it was the intersection of trade routes back in the day, but what is there today? I would move away from that place, I am sure so will other people. There still will be a "New Orleans" but from now on it will be known as the "Flooded New Orleans." I don't think it will ever recover completely...
New Orleans was on the top of my list of places to visit in the next couple of years, but not anymore, I think I'll wait 10 years or so.
I also agree with the blog, too many preferences and too many flashing notification everywhere are very distracting. GNOME I think is on the right track with this, especially in the Ubuntu distro version. Applications are simple and streamlined.
Today most computer users are all tainted by MS Windowz interface, that is what they know and they won't learn anything different even if it means improved usability and efficiency in the future. Therefore there are two philosophies for designing new interfaces:
1) Design what is familiar to the users even if it considered "bad design" according to standards and HCI research
2) Design what is believed to be correct according to HCI research, even at the expense of confusing the Windowz crowd.
It seems that KDE has mostly addopted the first approach and GNOME the second.
An interesting point, in one of the HCI classes I took, we read a paper that compared the command line to the graphical point-n-click interface. It turns out users are slower to learn the commands but once they do they remember them longer. For example it might take a while for my grandpa to learn that 'ls' means 'list the files in the directory' as opposed to just double-clicking the folder. But once he will learn it he will know it for a longer time, as opposed to asking him to open a folder in windowz a week later -- he might try to click on it once, click with a wrong button or try a mouse gesture.
I wanted to use PostgreSQL for my project but the libraries to interface with the language weren't there yet (some in beta some in alpha). MySQL simply has more language libraries then PostgreSQL. It is a vicious circle. The more libraries, the more popular, the more popular - the more libraries for it...
I used to have a Russian variant made in the early 90's called "BYTE". It was the cheapest ZX Spectrum compatible that my parents could afford, we didn't even have a color TV. 48K RAM and about 3Mhz it was the most amazing thing I had ever seen. But that machine had a rubber keyboard that stopped working couple of months later, but that didn't stop me. I remember when I cut out the keyboard with a saw and individually soldered some keys I scavanged off of an old Soviet-made fax machine. The keys where similar to the old clicking IBM keyboards, it took me a whole night to solder but by morning my creation was ready, ugly as hell, but nice to the touch and working again.
I remember the nights I spent compiling little programs in Z80 assembler
LD A,10
LD B.20
ADD A,B
etc..etc...
Ah, the good 'ol days.
The C/C++ module api is still daunting for me (though easier than JNI, that's for sure!). That is the last resort though.
Some parts of it are I/O bound (net downloading, reading/writting/searching a 4Gig database), but it also has computational components to compute various graph transformations and metrics.
The speed improvement will certainly be there even for I/O bound procedures, as I have to perform a complex operation for many rows from the database. So for each row it gets it from the database, then MySQL has to go back into python (instantiate python objects, do calculations, then go back to the database). It will certainly be faster to do it in C++. Then the pure computational parts will definetly be faster in C++. The time to write all the algorithms in C++ would have taken much longer, so there is the trade-off I made...
I can see that with software. It needs to run on a particular platform. But I regard music as data that I play, not software that I run. But I guess with today's DRM the line is blurred.
They had a service in Russia where you pay only $.50 or such. But I don't think I'll ever want to pay them over the credit card...
You said WTF!?. The 'F' is that I didn't contact Jon to ask him if I can posting the link to his program in a slashdot post.
You might say "WTF!? You don't have to ask permission to link". I would respond that the 'F' is that it is not illegal to link to his site, but it is not very nice if he has to pay for the bandwidth. So by not providing a click-able link I thought I was making sure that only those who really want to get his program will get there as opposed to having tens of thousands of slashdotters click on it just because it is something to do.
All I know is that I payed for the songs so I can listen to them. And now I want to listen to them on my computer. Thanks to St. DVD Jon I can do that now.
I was writting a program to download then parse text, then build graphs and compute some metrics on the graphs. I knew java, C/C++ but I was looking for something that would allow me to get my problem into code faster, so in a week I learned Python and then I wrote the whole thing in Python. Why? Because the language and its libraries had what I was looking for. For example hashes (dictionaries) and lists are base types. To add a string to a hash using a key in Python is just hash[key]=string. Then iterating through lists is much simpler, as is some other stuff. The same probably goes for Ruby. The downside is that my program runs much slower than if it had been written in C++. So if you do a lot of computations in there might want to stick with C, it all depends...
The ~30 fps is the minimum below which you will start seeing individual frames. It doesn't mean that 30 is the best, if you look at the source with a corner of your eye, up to 70-75Hz you will still see the flickering. One can tell the difference between a 60Hz refresh rate on a monitor and 85Hz. Also if you stare at a Also, as you say, the motion blur will be there at 30 fps but that depends also on the fluorescence of the materials used. The same 30 fps on CRT will look different than 30 fps on an LCD or projected on a screen.
I found Jon L. Johansen's site and his two programs :
1. FairKeys - to get the keys from Apple's site
2. DeDRMS - uses the keys to DeDRM the files.
The site is here (no html hyperlink, copy and paste if you want):
nanocrew.net/?page_id=59
You also need to install mono for linux as the programs are in C#. After that just run with "mono programname options". No I can play my albums again. Thanks Jon!
I get all philosophical at 2 am in the morning I guess... Seeing a picture from Mars makes me think how big the universe is and how short our lifetimes are. Then it all of the sudden seems somehow too trite and silly to worry whether I should buy a green or a blue car or what grocery store to shop at. In the next 100 years, I'll probably be dead and gone, so what is the point of it all...
"No she didn't" "Yes she did, bitch" "I ain't yo baby's daddy, hoe" ....
No problem here, the "bright" police investigators can easily look through the source and figure out where everything is stored. Shouldn' IE, at least technically, be more restrictive to the investigators since (even if they could) they cannot look at the source and figure out how and where things go...
killing mice, performing experiments on them, western blots and such, in other words hard core terrorist activity...
In other words, they seem to be slamming Firefox, but actually it is pretty good advertisement for Firefox. They should put on their front page.
"Even the brightest police investigators can't look at your browser history! Get Firefox today, the most secure browser."
You might or might not want be able to resist. If the chemicals control a specific organ, it might shut down or go into overdrive without you 'wanting' it, just by having a mutation in the DNA that will upgregulate that particular chemical.
But ultimately you are right, the DNA can only create predispositions (to cancer, to heart disease etc...). The debate is then where does one end and the other begin? Can/should I kill because I am predisposed to violent behavior and thus not be found guilty because of it?
One should note that generating meaningful grammar doesn't mean generating meaningful sentences. It might be grammatically correct to say "blue bingo bats" but it doesn't mean anything. The machine has to have some common sense and "understand" concepts the way we do, to produce human language.
But they do seem to be using the well-known university researcher's approach and namely:
1. Repackage some previously done stuff under a cute acronym -- "ADIOS" in their case, but 10+ points for recursive ones. ...?
2. Patent it
3.
4. *Success and fortune.
*Most never get here.
This is just an example, but the idea goes for other kinds of sites too...