Mac users are never happy:) It must be such a rare thing to find a piece of software that works on the Mac, you'd think./configure, make, make install or whatever the 1-button GUI equivalent is would be forgotten in the moment of pure joy.
How anoying it is to install Firefox, browse to a flash website and realize that you have to go to the Macromedia site, download and install the plugin and only after that you can see flash files...
Wouldn't it be great if the most common plugins on the web would come with Firefox already ? I don't see any problem with that, maybe the browsology of 'light browser' is being taken too far...
Yes, that really sounds like the way forward. Distribute Mozilla bundled with non-free software used almost exclusively to disseminate adverts, and hated by a large number of net users.
At the risk of stating the obvious...it just doesn't matter how productive a 'newbie' is in his first hour or even his first six months. He'll be using a computer all his life, so if he has to invest time to learn a shell or a text editor or whatever, which makes him more productive for the next n years then that will be time well spent. If he doesn't want to make the effort because he has illogical negative feelings about command lines, then why should anyone care? It's his loss.
You give these rural areas a look at computers, an idea of how they can help. You give the teachers in the rural ideas a view of the future. You let them inspire the children and the parents. The next thing you know, the infrastructure demands will increase and slowly but surely it'll get done.
And of course, if they're used to computers from a young age, think how much Western companies can save when they come to train them as call-centre workers...
Perelman just casually posted his solution out to the web in much the same way that some of the most brilliant posts on/. come form "anonymous cowards" sitting in their offices at MIT. What a god.
Yes, that's the way maths works - people share their ideas online rather than wait years for the refereeing process. (Though the briefest browse through the "general" section of the arxiv will convince anyone that refereed journals are still necessary.)
Wasn't this sort of scientific openness one of the inspirations and models for OpenSource software?
Moz/Firefox is about the only browser to support max-width (the CSS property most useful to legibility?) - their web-site designers don't seem to have heard of it though...
I'm not sure it's really fair to lump the whole suite together. Excel and to a lesser extent Access are excellent, whereas Word and Outlook are the pits. Given the huge range of stuff that M$ turns out, and the fact that there are only a given number of developers of the highest calibre available, it's not surprising that different products are of wildly differing qualities.
Plain text can be generated from any reasonable markup language. The converse is not true. I completely understand that many PG contributors wouldn't want the hassle of applying complicated markup, and that it's better to have a text plain text rather than not at all. Fine - that's the practical situation as it exists. It just grates with me when people deny that well marked up text would be more useful to scholars and keep trying to argue that plain text would be the ideal format even if it weren't for these other constraints.
Although I knock PG a bit, my real frustration is that no government, no university (well, very few) is willing to pay to have people create electronic texts with all the desirable scholarly apparatus included.
Just look at the US: we're let hate groups say whatever they wanted, and now the hate speech they spew out is banalized, and people look at them as the redneck morons they are. In France, the criminalization of hate speech and hate-related objects makes them dangerously attractive.
There is undoubtedly a lot of truth in this, but I think it's also important to bear in mind that France has a long far-right tradition that is not always despised by the rest of the population, and that even today the French far-right has a far more authoritative intellectual base than it does in, say, Britain or America.
We've also recently become much more aware of the need to make useful texts which can be used for scholarly purposes in the future, leading to such improvements as retention of all page numbers.
At the risk of going over very old and well-trodden ground, if PG wanted to be useful for "scholarly purposes" it should long ago have corrected the original mistake of using plain text, and used a markup that could have kept page numbers and other meta-information for scholars, while giving the common reader a clean text with a suitable style sheet. But even today on the PG website is a "justification"
for sticking to plain text making it clear that scholars don't even figure in the intended audience for PG texts.
Aiming a book like this at teens sounds like a
gimmick to me. I remember when I was 13 priding
myself on needing no more documentation than
a terse man page to change the world. Maybe it's
the youth of today - not so tech savvy, fnarr, fnarr.
Maybe the problem is using class papers for
grading anyway. I'm not American, but my impression
is that it's common to do only one or two essays
a term, which then count towards grades. Far
better to get practice with an essay a fortnight
(though pity the poor teachers if it's a big class!)
and then grading just from the exam. If students
don't put effort into the term work then, that's
their loss. Or, class papers plus a viva at the
end of the year might do the job.
My experience with it has been rather disapppointing. Why I need to tag as spam two messages from the same sender or with the exact same subject is a mystery to me. After the 10th "Make $/d+ in XX days" type message one has to wonder just how effective this thing is.
This shouldn't be all that surprising - Bayesian filtering is all based on probabilities. The reason "Outlook message rules" is so bad is because a friend of mine might send me a joke about Viagra, which I don't want to have deleted indiscriminately as spam. False positives are infinitely more annoying than false negatives, so I'd much rather have conservative filtering that let a bit of spam through.
I'm not saying Bayseian algorithms are perfect yet (though they'll improve) - my personal experience has been SpamAssassin, which got 97% of spam, and I've been experimenting with Thunderbird for a week, which gets 85%-90% and will no doubt get much much better as I train it in the next couple of weeks - but ultimately Bayesian filtering is enough to beat enough spam to make spamming not worthwhile (if everyone did it...)
Marking what my spam filter (Thunderbird's built in one) misses is a significant effort. Then having to go through the spam folder and make sure all of these e-mails isn't actually from work is even more effort. Especially the ones that say "Meeting at 14:00 on thursday" or something.
But isn't the point that a Bayesian spam filter simply beats spam in the long run - there's nothing the spammers can do? I bet when you've trained Thunderbird for six months, there just won't be any false positives, and you'll have half-a-dozen spams a day, which is a pain but manageable.
The problem lies with Outlook (surprise!) and internet email - if they'd provide Bayesian filters (and people were patient enough to train them), spammers would just go out of business. But most computer users are stupid, and M$ and online email companies have a vested interest in letting spam get through.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the OP was looking for a Funny mod, not Informative. At least, I hope so.
Mac users are never happy :) It must be such a rare thing to find a piece of software that works on the Mac, you'd think ./configure, make, make install or whatever the 1-button GUI equivalent is would be forgotten in the moment of pure joy.
Yes, that really sounds like the way forward. Distribute Mozilla bundled with non-free software used almost exclusively to disseminate adverts, and hated by a large number of net users.
At the risk of stating the obvious...it just doesn't matter how productive a 'newbie' is in his first hour or even his first six months. He'll be using a computer all his life, so if he has to invest time to learn a shell or a text editor or whatever, which makes him more productive for the next n years then that will be time well spent. If he doesn't want to make the effort because he has illogical negative feelings about command lines, then why should anyone care? It's his loss.
And of course, if they're used to computers from a young age, think how much Western companies can save when they come to train them as call-centre workers...
Ah, so now the developers will start moving away from XFree86 in droves!
I don't know, but you provide compelling evidence that it can damage punctuation abilities.
Yes, that's the way maths works - people share their ideas online rather than wait years for the refereeing process. (Though the briefest browse through the "general" section of the arxiv will convince anyone that refereed journals are still necessary.)
Wasn't this sort of scientific openness one of the inspirations and models for OpenSource software?
Moz/Firefox is about the only browser to support max-width (the CSS property most useful to legibility?) - their web-site designers don't seem to have heard of it though...
Not to be more pedantic yet, but what dictionary defines a word as something included in the latest revision of the OED?/p?
Ok, someone had better let these people into the secret.... http://www.vim.org/
I'm not sure it's really fair to lump the whole suite together. Excel and to a lesser extent Access are excellent, whereas Word and Outlook are the pits. Given the huge range of stuff that M$ turns out, and the fact that there are only a given number of developers of the highest calibre available, it's not surprising that different products are of wildly differing qualities.
Plain text can be generated from any reasonable markup language. The converse is not true. I completely understand that many PG contributors wouldn't want the hassle of applying complicated markup, and that it's better to have a text plain text rather than not at all. Fine - that's the practical situation as it exists. It just grates with me when people deny that well marked up text would be more useful to scholars and keep trying to argue that plain text would be the ideal format even if it weren't for these other constraints.
Although I knock PG a bit, my real frustration is that no government, no university (well, very few) is willing to pay to have people create electronic texts with all the desirable scholarly apparatus included.
There is undoubtedly a lot of truth in this, but I think it's also important to bear in mind that France has a long far-right tradition that is not always despised by the rest of the population, and that even today the French far-right has a far more authoritative intellectual base than it does in, say, Britain or America.
At the risk of going over very old and well-trodden ground, if PG wanted to be useful for "scholarly purposes" it should long ago have corrected the original mistake of using plain text, and used a markup that could have kept page numbers and other meta-information for scholars, while giving the common reader a clean text with a suitable style sheet. But even today on the PG website is a "justification" for sticking to plain text making it clear that scholars don't even figure in the intended audience for PG texts.
Aiming a book like this at teens sounds like a gimmick to me. I remember when I was 13 priding myself on needing no more documentation than a terse man page to change the world. Maybe it's the youth of today - not so tech savvy, fnarr, fnarr.
Amen! Hallelujah! The One True Definition revealed on golden tablets!
Maybe the problem is using class papers for grading anyway. I'm not American, but my impression is that it's common to do only one or two essays a term, which then count towards grades. Far better to get practice with an essay a fortnight (though pity the poor teachers if it's a big class!) and then grading just from the exam. If students don't put effort into the term work then, that's their loss. Or, class papers plus a viva at the end of the year might do the job.
This shouldn't be all that surprising - Bayesian filtering is all based on probabilities. The reason "Outlook message rules" is so bad is because a friend of mine might send me a joke about Viagra, which I don't want to have deleted indiscriminately as spam. False positives are infinitely more annoying than false negatives, so I'd much rather have conservative filtering that let a bit of spam through.
I'm not saying Bayseian algorithms are perfect yet (though they'll improve) - my personal experience has been SpamAssassin, which got 97% of spam, and I've been experimenting with Thunderbird for a week, which gets 85%-90% and will no doubt get much much better as I train it in the next couple of weeks - but ultimately Bayesian filtering is enough to beat enough spam to make spamming not worthwhile (if everyone did it...)
But isn't the point that a Bayesian spam filter simply beats spam in the long run - there's nothing the spammers can do? I bet when you've trained Thunderbird for six months, there just won't be any false positives, and you'll have half-a-dozen spams a day, which is a pain but manageable.
The problem lies with Outlook (surprise!) and internet email - if they'd provide Bayesian filters (and people were patient enough to train them), spammers would just go out of business. But most computer users are stupid, and M$ and online email companies have a vested interest in letting spam get through.