*chuckles* actualy... if you knew anything about css you would probably rewrite it and then discover that very little of CSS's features work in IE and then you would have to retrain yourself to not know anything about css and break all your code to make it work properly.
Web Design was where I first learned to hate Internet Explorer.
installing software is actualy something that drives me bonkers on OS X. Not so much the installation procedure but having to hop all over the internet to track down the packages I want. In a world where people actualy purchase software and they come in boxes etc. dragging and dopping might work, but If I want to install 50 must have administration tools and I don't want to think about it and I don't want to have to use the web to track them down that method simply maddening.
Give me a nice package management tool anyday over that.
In the same way that astronomy is still considered a science so to is evolutionary biology. We might not be able to have a lab setting for either of these sciences. We can't fully model their environment, it's way to big and complex and we dont know enough yet.
However that doesn't stop both fields from having their set if theorists, who seek to study and reproduce results via the scientific method. In astronomy take Stephen Hawking, he can't reproduce his theories on black holes in a lab, but we test them by only looking back into the past. In the same way, we can't test a lot of evolutionary biology in a lab, so we get our case studies from the past.
This doesn't prevent us from applying these knowledges to the future however. There is not reason why evoltutionary biology might not help us in the future. It has certainly progressed our knowledge and understanding of genetics and lead to some very interesting and pointed studies in that field. And it continues to reveal more and more interesting information about the way in which the world in which we live progresses through time.
Much like Stephen Hawkings theory of black holes might not have any relevent application to us _right now_ that doesn't mean that the study and furthermeant of such ventures should be given up as hopeless or worthless.
Sometimes to understand the future one has to take a look into the past, it's the long long records of more expirements than we could ever hope to reproduce.
is LaTeX actualy bundled in? or is it more of a TeX distribution. I see that it's based around the Web2c which is a TeX distribution not a LaTeX distribution.
I'm not sure I've ever fully understood teTeX's place in all this. Does it render LaTeX or TeX? The two are not entirely mutualy compatible and such hazyness makes me doubly wary.
I ended up at I-installer which was a bunch better than Fink but still pretty weird. And I'll deffinantly try TeXshop when the new drive comes in. I think my base arguement just comes back to OS X not having something like I-installer or Fink installed by default and the difficulties of tracking down such a system. For someone with no prior knowledge of what is available in terms of pacakge managers there is a distinct possibilty that he may never come across tools like I-installer and thus never be able to install LaTeX. Thus... my claim the support is not as good on OS X for LaTeX.
I mention this in a comment above, but I think my issue comes entirely from the cludgyness of tracking down an effective package manager to get the LaTeX distribution, then on top of that vaguely unintuitive ways/methods of installation.
The fact that OS X doesn't have the native built in tools to retrive said packages makes it quite a bit more difficult to install than in most modern linux distributions.
I know that in my personal experience I tried Fink, realized it didn't have LaTeX. Gave up. Found I-installer from a friend, Found that some of the packages I wanted were kept under odd names. Was slightly confused why I would have to hunt around on the internet for a tool to get a common package instead of having a built in tool.
I'm not saying that these things don't work once installed. They work great even. But the lack of an effective installation medium built into the OS does make getting said packages much more difficult.
The Question is not whether or not it works, we all know the programs like winedt and MikTex exist. It's a question of the full breadth of support, the ease of use/installation, and the availability of the tools that is being called into question. At least with winedt there are crippling issues with it's shareware implimentation. And while you indeed may love working with LaTeX on windows there are some serious qualms I have with the integration of all the tools in an effective manner. Poor CLI tools support is just the least of these problems.
(warning: I only used OS X for about two weeks before I blew out my laptops hard drive, during that time I found it to be a very enjoyable experience but had some troubles setting up an effective LaTeX environment. I am _Clearly_ an OS X newbie.)
My beef was mostly just getting the packages installed and working properly. Fink didn't seem to have any of the LaTeX packages (only TeX) and I ended up using something a friend recommended called i-installer. At this point LaTeX did work, but it certaintly wasn't easy or intuitive to get to that point. The very fact that I had to try multiple package management tools (As opposed to one built into the system as I hope OS X eventualy includes) made setting up a LaTeX environment much more difficult than on most modern linux distributions.
Anyways I would be happy to hear about how you got a fully working LaTeX environment with plugins effectively installed. Without the rigamarole of battling with package managers that don't seem to cover a full breadth of packages.
Since Fink doesn't include the LaTeX packages, what package manager did you use to get LaTeX? Did you compile from source on your own? What are peoples recommendations?
This is an excelent reason to move over, I find latex support in windows to be abismal, and only slightly better in OS X. But most of the people I know have moved to Linux becuase it's easier (for us). It's easier to install applications, easier to keep them update, and easier to make changes than in Windows. I also got fed up with breaking things in windows and having no way to figure out what had happened or how to fix it. I've found that everytime I break something in linux I can head to my favorite IRC channel, or Forum and have a clear answer in a couple hours if not minutes.
Clearly this isn't the case for everyone, but Linux/Unix just clicked with me, all the way to make config changes the applications and the underlying architecture. And this is not to expound upon the fun I have tinkering which just isn't available in the windows platform.
What is the difference between sorting emails into folders and archiving messages with labels? If you want to know what emails have the label, you click the link... they're all there and yet... none of them exist in your inbox. If you want to remove them from the folder but still be able to search for them... remove the label. If you quickly want to remove all the messages with that label from the inbox, you click the link, click all, and click archive.
Seriously. The Gmail interface is quite a bit different than a normal email client, in order to be happy using I think one has to abandon previous notions of how to get things done. Using labels is a very powerful tool and can easily be made to mimik the use of folders, all you need to know is how.
perhaps all we need is a logicaly structured language then grammer checking wouldn't be a problem at all!
I do say... that idea is double plus good!
Re:Different strokes for different folks
on
GNOME 2.12 Released
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
The way I see it you really have 2 options here.
First you have Gnome/KDE which dictate everything are huge projects that suck in all sorts of stuff and seek to standardize everything through brute force.
Second you have the rest... XFCE/Enlightenment/*Box/etc Which for the most part seek to stay out of your way and let you pick and choose.
If by "pizazz" you mean a long list of features I don't think your going to find it in the WM's that compete with Gnome/KDE at the moment. If you mean a quality fast slick user interface your own choice (or if you haven't upgraded ~E17) is really pretty and responsive though will of course suffer from lack of uptake with it's own widgets library. And my personal favorite XFCE which I think has some promising projects in the works (Thunar for instance) that should bring it closer to competing in the feature set department with Gnome/KDE.
Either way as soon as Gnome/KDE speed things up a bit, stay out of my way more, simplify their options and clean up the chaffe I'll probably give them another try. But for now Enlightenment and XFCE have my heart.
~Anders
Have you dared to bring up cell phones as an example of a refined UI? My god all mighty, it's as if they were designed by a monkey's equivelent of a 13 year old boy. Some buttons do one thing in one area, and a different thing in another, and lots of times the two functions are complete opposites of eachother. And let us not mention the complete and utter breakdown of a proper menuing system.
I understand that they are limited by size. But Christ, all I want to do is make the call and hang up, why do all the buttons do different things?! why are there two buttons, okay, and call when do I use which, under what circumstances do their functionalities overlap? Why is it different on every phone!
I'm not saying that computers don't need to nail that UI, and I do believe that the User Interface for most computers should by default be simple with the complex underbelly easily brought forward for those of us that apreciate such things.
Having said that, i doubt that I would agree with you on what a good, simple UI is. *changes his track in orpheus*
*chuckles*
Growning up in redmond I know many people who have worked at and for Microsoft including but not limited to a good number of my friends. And while, they are certainly wonderful people and on the whole fairly well rounded, your ideas on the expectations of a Microsoft employee are totaly out in left field.
It makes me wonder if you've ever wandered the redmond campus late at night and observed the folks that work there and their workspaces. Becuase a vast majority of the folks I've met and spent time with who worked there are very smart, very project oriented, but fairly narrow in their interests.
and not more than a handful I've met could tell me about the latests sports events, then move to music, and then to dancing, and then to wine... hell you would be lucky to get sports and wine, and only then becuase their wives drink the stuff.
(Rich, Blake, Randy... I love you all very much despite my harsh words) *laughs*
Anders
Re:Narrative is the weakest point
on
Power Up
·
· Score: 1
To be fair, the Akira movie was all over the place plot wise... and why not... it's combining no less than 6 wonderful manga comics (and large ones at that). The movie essentialy takes the first one, then at the last moment, tacks on the ending of the last one... which makes no sense!
The reasons are the same as why we might be interested in removing dictators from power, in maintaining human rights and in the developement and protection of democracy. That is... freedom.
While I take issues with some of the ways some countries have decided to "protect democracy" I also take issues with the way some people have decided to "spread opensource". That is, Zeolots of any nature are to be discouraged.
I don't think people should be yelled at shouted out or otherwise badgered about their choices of software. I do however think that there is a lack of education about opensource alternatives, and a great deal of FUD (dis/mis information) that's spread out and about and that fighting that is important.
But how do we fight FUD? but through the continuing open of discource between people about the alternatives and the freedoms (and the consequences of that freedom) that are available to them.
I'm guessing this just has to do with how the links to the page and the content are going to written (that is in the phrasing of the question flamingos will almost certainly be in the plural form).
half of this search buisness is setting up your search properly (which I am far from good at) where as my friend is just stellar at it. She can find anything.
I just think it would be interesting to have some more people post similar posts. You know... pick a topic you might search for, post what you wanted to find, and which search engines provided the best results. Barring mental retardation for setting up the search it seems at the very least some kind of data could be collected to talk about.
While I'm sure you had good intentions when posting this
I decided to do my own little research (just to see what
the other search engines returned) and I got rather different
information that you did.
These are the top 4 results for "Why are Flamingos Pink?"
(entered without quotation marks) in the top 3 search engine
providers Yahoo!, MSN, and Google.
As we can see... google out preforms all three, offering 3 sites that actualy contain the answer in the top 4 results, two of which are in the top two. CLEARLY providing better results on at least this topic than either Yahoo or MSN.
I don't think anyone is argueing that Yahoo doesn't have a whole ton of stuff available... cuase it does. I just think that it's been poorly implimented.
Gmail is just a little bit more than a JS clown costume with alot of storage space and free pop 3 access. It's completely altered the way in which webmail can be accessed, with threading, effective searching, labels instead of directories (that is REALLY nice), and a whole slew of useability features that just aren't available in most web clients. Coupled with it's awesome storage space this makes Gmail close to being useable for those of us that get a TON of email.
Google Maps:
Wow! an intuitive interface... if I want to spot a location... I type it in, on one line, and hit enter. If I want directions I click the link and there are two one line bars with an arrow that tells me which way the directions are going... switch the path? sure... it's simple. Not only that... but hell, it's the first web based map to get to my house correctly (not going on this weird slow backwards country rode, or weaving through the suburbs).
Their web search utility... hey... look at that. No mess, no fuss, just search.
I'm not going to sit up here and pretend like google's been making alot of fresh and new products. I just think it's ton a much better job of addapting these tools from real life objects and making them usable in the internet world. When Yahoo starts offering the ease of use and interface of google products I'll start heading to yahoo, until then, googles got the market cornered.
Slashdot Mirror
*chuckles* actualy... if you knew anything about css you would probably rewrite it and then discover that very little of CSS's features work in IE and then you would have to retrain yourself to not know anything about css and break all your code to make it work properly.
Web Design was where I first learned to hate Internet Explorer.
~Anders
installing software is actualy something that drives me bonkers on OS X. Not so much the installation procedure but having to hop all over the internet to track down the packages I want. In a world where people actualy purchase software and they come in boxes etc. dragging and dopping might work, but If I want to install 50 must have administration tools and I don't want to think about it and I don't want to have to use the web to track them down that method simply maddening.
Give me a nice package management tool anyday over that.
~Anders
hehe... enjoy.
~Anders
:) I'm used to using LaTeX from the command line. That suites me just fine.
I'll bite.
In the same way that astronomy is still considered a science so to is evolutionary biology. We might not be able to have a lab setting for either of these sciences. We can't fully model their environment, it's way to big and complex and we dont know enough yet.
However that doesn't stop both fields from having their set if theorists, who seek to study and reproduce results via the scientific method. In astronomy take Stephen Hawking, he can't reproduce his theories on black holes in a lab, but we test them by only looking back into the past. In the same way, we can't test a lot of evolutionary biology in a lab, so we get our case studies from the past.
This doesn't prevent us from applying these knowledges to the future however. There is not reason why evoltutionary biology might not help us in the future. It has certainly progressed our knowledge and understanding of genetics and lead to some very interesting and pointed studies in that field. And it continues to reveal more and more interesting information about the way in which the world in which we live progresses through time.
Much like Stephen Hawkings theory of black holes might not have any relevent application to us _right now_ that doesn't mean that the study and furthermeant of such ventures should be given up as hopeless or worthless.
Sometimes to understand the future one has to take a look into the past, it's the long long records of more expirements than we could ever hope to reproduce.
~Anders
is LaTeX actualy bundled in? or is it more of a TeX distribution. I see that it's based around the Web2c which is a TeX distribution not a LaTeX distribution.
I'm not sure I've ever fully understood teTeX's place in all this. Does it render LaTeX or TeX? The two are not entirely mutualy compatible and such hazyness makes me doubly wary.
~Anders
does TeTeX include a full LaTeX installation? Or is it more like TeX? Are the two systems completely compatible at the macro level? ~Anders
yeah,
I ended up at I-installer which was a bunch better than Fink but still pretty weird. And I'll deffinantly try TeXshop when the new drive comes in. I think my base arguement just comes back to OS X not having something like I-installer or Fink installed by default and the difficulties of tracking down such a system. For someone with no prior knowledge of what is available in terms of pacakge managers there is a distinct possibilty that he may never come across tools like I-installer and thus never be able to install LaTeX. Thus... my claim the support is not as good on OS X for LaTeX.
Thanks!
~Anders
I mention this in a comment above, but I think my issue comes entirely from the cludgyness of tracking down an effective package manager to get the LaTeX distribution, then on top of that vaguely unintuitive ways/methods of installation.
The fact that OS X doesn't have the native built in tools to retrive said packages makes it quite a bit more difficult to install than in most modern linux distributions.
I know that in my personal experience I tried Fink, realized it didn't have LaTeX. Gave up. Found I-installer from a friend, Found that some of the packages I wanted were kept under odd names. Was slightly confused why I would have to hunt around on the internet for a tool to get a common package instead of having a built in tool.
I'm not saying that these things don't work once installed. They work great even. But the lack of an effective installation medium built into the OS does make getting said packages much more difficult.
perhaps I've just been spoiled.
~Anders
The Question is not whether or not it works, we all know the programs like winedt and MikTex exist. It's a question of the full breadth of support, the ease of use/installation, and the availability of the tools that is being called into question. At least with winedt there are crippling issues with it's shareware implimentation. And while you indeed may love working with LaTeX on windows there are some serious qualms I have with the integration of all the tools in an effective manner. Poor CLI tools support is just the least of these problems.
~Anders
(warning: I only used OS X for about two weeks before I blew out my laptops hard drive, during that time I found it to be a very enjoyable experience but had some troubles setting up an effective LaTeX environment. I am _Clearly_ an OS X newbie.)
My beef was mostly just getting the packages installed and working properly. Fink didn't seem to have any of the LaTeX packages (only TeX) and I ended up using something a friend recommended called i-installer. At this point LaTeX did work, but it certaintly wasn't easy or intuitive to get to that point. The very fact that I had to try multiple package management tools (As opposed to one built into the system as I hope OS X eventualy includes) made setting up a LaTeX environment much more difficult than on most modern linux distributions.
Anyways I would be happy to hear about how you got a fully working LaTeX environment with plugins effectively installed. Without the rigamarole of battling with package managers that don't seem to cover a full breadth of packages.
Since Fink doesn't include the LaTeX packages, what package manager did you use to get LaTeX? Did you compile from source on your own? What are peoples recommendations?
Thanks!
~Anders
This is an excelent reason to move over, I find latex support in windows to be abismal, and only slightly better in OS X. But most of the people I know have moved to Linux becuase it's easier (for us). It's easier to install applications, easier to keep them update, and easier to make changes than in Windows. I also got fed up with breaking things in windows and having no way to figure out what had happened or how to fix it. I've found that everytime I break something in linux I can head to my favorite IRC channel, or Forum and have a clear answer in a couple hours if not minutes.
Clearly this isn't the case for everyone, but Linux/Unix just clicked with me, all the way to make config changes the applications and the underlying architecture. And this is not to expound upon the fun I have tinkering which just isn't available in the windows platform.
~Anders
if you look around you'll find some links to croquet, which is exactly what you're describing here. ~Anders
What is the difference between sorting emails into folders and archiving messages with labels? If you want to know what emails have the label, you click the link ... they're all there and yet... none of them exist in your inbox. If you want to remove them from the folder but still be able to search for them... remove the label. If you quickly want to remove all the messages with that label from the inbox, you click the link, click all, and click archive.
Seriously. The Gmail interface is quite a bit different than a normal email client, in order to be happy using I think one has to abandon previous notions of how to get things done. Using labels is a very powerful tool and can easily be made to mimik the use of folders, all you need to know is how.
~Anders
perhaps all we need is a logicaly structured language then grammer checking wouldn't be a problem at all! I do say... that idea is double plus good!
The way I see it you really have 2 options here.
First you have Gnome/KDE which dictate everything are huge projects that suck in all sorts of stuff and seek to standardize everything through brute force.
Second you have the rest... XFCE/Enlightenment/*Box/etc Which for the most part seek to stay out of your way and let you pick and choose. If by "pizazz" you mean a long list of features I don't think your going to find it in the WM's that compete with Gnome/KDE at the moment. If you mean a quality fast slick user interface your own choice (or if you haven't upgraded ~E17) is really pretty and responsive though will of course suffer from lack of uptake with it's own widgets library. And my personal favorite XFCE which I think has some promising projects in the works (Thunar for instance) that should bring it closer to competing in the feature set department with Gnome/KDE. Either way as soon as Gnome/KDE speed things up a bit, stay out of my way more, simplify their options and clean up the chaffe I'll probably give them another try. But for now Enlightenment and XFCE have my heart. ~Anders
Have you dared to bring up cell phones as an example of a refined UI? My god all mighty, it's as if they were designed by a monkey's equivelent of a 13 year old boy. Some buttons do one thing in one area, and a different thing in another, and lots of times the two functions are complete opposites of eachother. And let us not mention the complete and utter breakdown of a proper menuing system.
I understand that they are limited by size. But Christ, all I want to do is make the call and hang up, why do all the buttons do different things?! why are there two buttons, okay, and call when do I use which, under what circumstances do their functionalities overlap? Why is it different on every phone!
I'm not saying that computers don't need to nail that UI, and I do believe that the User Interface for most computers should by default be simple with the complex underbelly easily brought forward for those of us that apreciate such things.
Having said that, i doubt that I would agree with you on what a good, simple UI is. *changes his track in orpheus*
~Anders
*chuckles* Growning up in redmond I know many people who have worked at and for Microsoft including but not limited to a good number of my friends. And while, they are certainly wonderful people and on the whole fairly well rounded, your ideas on the expectations of a Microsoft employee are totaly out in left field. It makes me wonder if you've ever wandered the redmond campus late at night and observed the folks that work there and their workspaces. Becuase a vast majority of the folks I've met and spent time with who worked there are very smart, very project oriented, but fairly narrow in their interests. and not more than a handful I've met could tell me about the latests sports events, then move to music, and then to dancing, and then to wine... hell you would be lucky to get sports and wine, and only then becuase their wives drink the stuff. (Rich, Blake, Randy... I love you all very much despite my harsh words) *laughs* Anders
To be fair, the Akira movie was all over the place plot wise... and why not... it's combining no less than 6 wonderful manga comics (and large ones at that). The movie essentialy takes the first one, then at the last moment, tacks on the ending of the last one... which makes no sense!
/me shrugs
:)
The comics were great
In the reverse of this we at my house have replaced tiger with linux on our apple laptops. Is this ALSO an impossibility?
The reasons are the same as why we might be interested in removing dictators from power, in maintaining human rights and in the developement and protection of democracy. That is... freedom.
While I take issues with some of the ways some countries have decided to "protect democracy" I also take issues with the way some people have decided to "spread opensource". That is, Zeolots of any nature are to be discouraged.
I don't think people should be yelled at shouted out or otherwise badgered about their choices of software. I do however think that there is a lack of education about opensource alternatives, and a great deal of FUD (dis/mis information) that's spread out and about and that fighting that is important.
But how do we fight FUD? but through the continuing open of discource between people about the alternatives and the freedoms (and the consequences of that freedom) that are available to them.
--Anders
I'm guessing this just has to do with how the links to the page and the content are going to written (that is in the phrasing of the question flamingos will almost certainly be in the plural form).
/me sighs... thus is life
half of this search buisness is setting up your search properly (which I am far from good at) where as my friend is just stellar at it. She can find anything.
Anders
heh... too far down the tree... /me shrugs
I just think it would be interesting to have some more people post similar posts. You know... pick a topic you might search for, post what you wanted to find, and which search engines provided the best results. Barring mental retardation for setting up the search it seems at the very least some kind of data could be collected to talk about.
Anders
While I'm sure you had good intentions when posting this I decided to do my own little research (just to see what the other search engines returned) and I got rather different information that you did.
~ NS-1~linkin_id-3058014 & PAGE=PRODUCT&PROD_ID=962864&fp=F
l amingos_are_pink.htm
0 000244/104-8146884-9815145?v=glance Sells Answer
These are the top 4 results for "Why are Flamingos Pink?" (entered without quotation marks) in the top 3 search engine providers Yahoo!, MSN, and Google.
Yahoo!
http://www.finelinefeatures.com/pink/
http://www.shopping.com/xGS-Pink_Flamingos~FD-113
http://www.thewildones.org/Animals/flamingo.html Contains Answer
http://www.overstock.com/cgi-bin/d2.cgi?cid=48422
MSN
http://199.216.204.14/project04/legends2004/why_f
http://home.nycap.rr.com/useless/pink_flamingo/
http://www.cat1234.com/id56.htm
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010518.html Contains Answer
Google
http://www.straightdope.com/columns/010518.html Contains Answer
http://www.thewildones.org/Animals/flamingo.html Contains Answer
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/006
http://webexhibits.org/causesofcolor/7.html Contains Answer
As we can see... google out preforms all three, offering 3 sites that actualy contain the answer in the top 4 results, two of which are in the top two. CLEARLY providing better results on at least this topic than either Yahoo or MSN.
Anders
I don't think anyone is argueing that Yahoo doesn't have a whole ton of stuff available... cuase it does. I just think that it's been poorly implimented.
Gmail is just a little bit more than a JS clown costume with alot of storage space and free pop 3 access. It's completely altered the way in which webmail can be accessed, with threading, effective searching, labels instead of directories (that is REALLY nice), and a whole slew of useability features that just aren't available in most web clients. Coupled with it's awesome storage space this makes Gmail close to being useable for those of us that get a TON of email.
Google Maps:
Wow! an intuitive interface... if I want to spot a location... I type it in, on one line, and hit enter. If I want directions I click the link and there are two one line bars with an arrow that tells me which way the directions are going... switch the path? sure... it's simple. Not only that... but hell, it's the first web based map to get to my house correctly (not going on this weird slow backwards country rode, or weaving through the suburbs).
Their web search utility... hey... look at that. No mess, no fuss, just search.
I'm not going to sit up here and pretend like google's been making alot of fresh and new products. I just think it's ton a much better job of addapting these tools from real life objects and making them usable in the internet world. When Yahoo starts offering the ease of use and interface of google products I'll start heading to yahoo, until then, googles got the market cornered.
Anders