Word Docs aren't always formatted correctly and if I want to print it at home, I need to fix it up, or if I make edits and send it to someone else, they'll sometimes need to fix up the doc.
Is this a problem limited to Libre/Open Office, or just Word Docs in general? I have heard about formatting issues when opening a.doc file in a different Office version to the one it was written in.
Out of interest, would sharing documents as PDFs externally be better, or do documents usually need editing externally as well? What about rich text format (.rtf) - editable and opens well enough in Word and Libre/Open Office (last time I checked, anyway). I'm unsure of the limitation of this compared to.doc as whenever I've saved as.rtf it hasn't been a particularly complex document.
Something has to replace Facebook. Not this but something has to. I am sure most Slashdotters would prefer some open/free/libre thing. Where is it?!
Some people use Google+ (which has a data liberation so you can export all your data if you like, but probably not as open as some would like). There is also "Diaspora*" which is open, but still in development I believe.
If you don't want to run apps, and don't want app requests, you can turn off apps (it might be called "turn off platform apps"), in one of the settings available (probably privacy). That turns off apps completely - you don't get any requests (at least I haven't), although things still appear in the news feeds (shame these can't all be blocked).
And as far as I can tell, apps your friends use can't access your information when they use them if you have apps turned off (otherwise they can see your name and try to interact with you somehow, I guess that would trigger a request).
However a poster further up on this page has said they they tried to turn Facebook apps off and were unsuccessful due to an error, so I don't know how well the functionality works at the moment.
Try disabling apps in your facebook account. You can't. There is a button in the privacy settings to turn off all apps. Here's what it says when you click it:
There was an error while disabling applications and websites. Please try again.
I have been trying for over half a year. Same error every time. Clearly they are lying, and just don't want me to turn that off.
Shady lying bastards.
I turned that off a long time ago, so it worked at some point in time. Do you have any apps/websites connected currently? Maybe they need to be removed first before turning it off completely.
I do check the settings occasionally, just to check that apps haven't been turned on again without me knowing.
Reminds me a bit of a situation in the UK where people riled against Jeremy Clarkson for a comment he said in a talk show. It was around the time when some of the public sector were striking over cuts.
The clip that went around on the internet was his saying "...they should be taken outside and shot".
The full clip, however started with him saying something in support of the strikes, and then saying "but as this is the BBC, we need to cover both viewpoints so..." (the BBC is required to show both sides of stories). The clip that was going round was fairly obviously of him being cut off mid sentence, but people didn't seem to care enough to try and find the context and ranted about it.
It is a shame that people in general don't care enough about finding the full story and are quite happy to just hear bits edited to provoke a reaction, resulting in them reacting in the way that was intended by the editor.
"The "eye of a needle" has been interpreted as a gate in Jerusalem, which opened after the main gate was closed at night. A camel could only pass through this smaller gate if it was stooped and had its baggage removed. This story has been put forth since at least the 15th century, and possibly as far back as the 9th century. However, there is no evidence for the existence of such a gate."
(from Wikipedia, where else?)
The idea that the saying actually meant a camel and a gate was also disputed on UK show QI:
General Ignorance
It is hard for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle for the simple reason that it is too big. Jesus was being literal when he said it. It was a common phrase at the time, although another expression similar to it at the time was "passing an elephant through the eye of a needle." Similar expressions appear in the Torah and the Koran. Rich people tried to invent get-out clauses when they read this. One example was the idea of a gate. Another was that it was a mistranslation from the Greek for "Rope". (Forfeit: It was a gateway into Jerusalem)
It's basically just an easier avenue for people without mod points to get spam downmodded more quickly.
How quickly, on average, will flagged posts get responded to? The moderation guidelines say to focus more on promoting rather than demoting, is the flagging system a way to allow mods to flag something without needing to downmod it themselves (so they have more points for promoting)? Or should things still be downmoded (troll, flamebait) when mods come across them?
Also, can we use the flag to report potentially bad moderations (somone moderating troll on an insightful comment, or the other way around, for example)?
Or some people just learned how to use their bookmarks bar. I've known people who had Google as their homepage and they would search for Facebook.com and then click on the link Google gave them.
They might have switched to pinned tabs (I have for a few sites). Don't need a bookmark either as it is always there when you load the browser.
Now, however, even putting a + sign in front of a search term doesn't seem to guarantee that that search term will be in all of the returned results. In fact, adding the + sign often doesn't change the base results at all...perhaps the forced term is hidden in the page metadata somewhere, but I don't care about metadata, I only want it if it's on a visible section of an actual webpage or document, and explicitly matches the exact term as I typed it (i.e., '+bubble' should not return pages about some person talking about Bubbles their golden retriever, or bubbly champagne parties...)
Google updated their search terms slightly recently; you need to put a word in quotes to explicitly match. So "bubble" should do what +bubble used to do.
printing variables out or logging them to a file isn't much different than setting a watch on them in a debugger anyway. if all i need to see is the value of a variable what does a debugger even gain me?
people have gotten lazy they don't know how to debug without a debugger... "if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail"
One thing I've found handy with a debugger is when you can change the values (not just looking at them) mid execution, to see how the code handles the different value (same with code replacement and executing the changed code without having to recompile and run again). It's also nice to see what the state of all variables are at each line - if printing I would have to print them all out multiple times, including where in the program I am.
I did used to do the printing/saving values when I was first starting, then learnt how to use a debugger properly as it is a lot quicker, so I think the time saved is enough to be valuable. I still occasionally print values out, but very rarely nowadays.
I also think it is helpful to see what the code is doing when executed; sure I could walk through it in my head and figure it out, but stepping through code does it for me. Thats just a personal preference though I guess.
I've never seen magazines sold in book stores, such as Waterstones in the UK. Most people in the UK buy from news agents, as the name suggests, they are shops that mainly sell newspapers and magazines (plus milk, perhaps stationary and sweets (candy)).
Borders used to sell them before they closed down. WHSmiths sells a lot of magazines, but only about half the stuff they sell are books (the rest being stationary and other items), so I don't know how much one would classify them as a "book shop". Even the tiny WHSmiths in Kings Cross sells a variety of magazines (Linux and photography ones), and only a few books (the rest selling sweets and drinks to commuters, but I think that is more based on a newsagents type shop)
No, the video shows these people have no idea what SPYW is all about.
This is what I was thinking.
I did a very quick test (so take with a grain of salt): I checked my Google+ stream for something recent that I could search for (I saw a news story posted about a compary called "Delta"). I then did a search for that term ("delta" in this case), and there was the option to see the personalised results - this included the news item that I had seen, so something very relevant (as it was part of my "world" as Google says). I used the bookmarklet to see what the "don't be evil" had, and it didn't have this item at all, nor anything else from other social networks. The refined search results were less relevant (or less relevant according to what my expetations of including "my world" would be).
I suspect for additional testing (I only did a quick one) I should check my Facebook/Twitter stream for something (so it is relevant and I know it exists in my "world") and do a search for that using the bookmarklet, to see if it comes up.
Seriously though, there really needs to be a well-recognized way to indicate sarcasm in text. Apparently, giving a feature list of NTFS as the supposed feature list of it's replacement wasn't obvious enough for some people, moderators included.
That would be the "Snark" punctuation mark. It is basically a reverse question mark and used to denote a second or hidden meaning. I don't think it is too well know though (I doubt that slashdot would be able to display it, given their trouble with other characters).
Sorry about teh unformatted post previous.. I am sure Slashdot is moving to WYSIWYG any day now;)
You can change your posting settings (click the little gear icon), setting it to "Plain Old Text" is probably what you want:
"Plain Old Text: Same as "HTML Formatted", except that <BR> is automatically inserted for newlines, and other whitespace is converted to non-breaking spaces in a more-or-less intelligent way."
Considering that people search for Bing on Google, yes, people do choose to use Bing. It's not a small number - there's close 10 million searches per month for Bing related queries on Google alone.
You can check search query data here. Remember to change to [exact] search on match types so that it shows real search amount for specific queries.
[bing] 7,480,000
...
I wonder how many people search for [google] using Bing. Does Bing have a similarly useful way to see their search data? I had a quick look but couldn't find anything (and the one thing I did find was their top searches, which didn't include numbers).
Interesting, since your UID indicates you're rather new here.
Correlation is not causation. In this case, "when a particular individual signed up for an account" is not the same as "when a particular individual started reading."
What does the correlation of a (new) user that often posts a long message as a first post in an article either praising a company or complaining about the same companies say? That they are lucky enough to see new articles as soon as they are posted and are able to type very quickly?
The problem with Slashdot is the huge amount of groupthink and related moderation. Slashdot has a HUGE problem with downmodding any non-popular opinion (within slashdot crowd). Reddit addresses that, while Slashdot does not. For example, look at any comment that even points out that piracy might not be right, open source programs might not be that good or that Microsoft could sometimes be right. They are instantly downmodded, based on groupthink and not even wanting to hear dissenting opinions.
Often this is done because the comment has little to no relevance to the topic at hand, not due to groupthink.
For example, if someone consistently posts one of the first posts in a topic, with a multi-paragraph response that is vaguely connected to the article but is just an excuse to take jabs at something, it is likely to be modded down.
Considering mods can look back through a users posting history, if this is happening repeatedly, it looks like someone is either trolling or being paid to post (either good things about a company, or bad things about another company) so it is less not wanting to hear dissenting opinions and more to do with not wanting to hear astroturfing/shilling.
Same in the UK, they don't start until secondary school (equivalent of high school i guess), and are pretty basic (Teaching you how to order a cup of coffee in french or german)... And you will almost never encounter the language you learn anywhere but school.
It can be hard to encounter a European language [1], even in the country it is spoken. I have heard stories of friends of mine who wanted to try out the French they leared at school while in France. The people they try to talk to pick up that they are native English speakers very quickly and just talk to them in English (its quicker for them I guess). I have done travelling though some of Europe [2] and have usually been able to get by without learning much of the language there, because most people speak English. I had a problem once on a train, but the conductor had various translations written down and just pointed some at me.
[1] This may be true for non-European languages, but I have mainly experienced European ones and didn't want to assume it is the same everywhere
[2] The general impression I got was that almost everyone in Western Europe can speak English fairly fluently, and in Eastern Europe most can, however there is an age gap whereby some of the older population didn't learn it so don't speak it, but most of the younger population can speak English
The real issue is if they are prioritizing thier data ahead of thier competitors...that would lead to more clicks to thier own pages which is more ad revenue. Kind of an anti trust issue here...
In the case of twitter, they had been asked to not use their (twitters) data, so are not using it (and therefore would be unable to involve it in some kind of prioritizing list). From Google:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions. https://plus.google.com/116899029375914044550/posts/24uqWqvALud
Slashdot Mirror
Word Docs aren't always formatted correctly and if I want to print it at home, I need to fix it up, or if I make edits and send it to someone else, they'll sometimes need to fix up the doc.
Is this a problem limited to Libre/Open Office, or just Word Docs in general? I have heard about formatting issues when opening a .doc file in a different Office version to the one it was written in.
Out of interest, would sharing documents as PDFs externally be better, or do documents usually need editing externally as well? What about rich text format (.rtf) - editable and opens well enough in Word and Libre/Open Office (last time I checked, anyway). I'm unsure of the limitation of this compared to .doc as whenever I've saved as .rtf it hasn't been a particularly complex document.
Something has to replace Facebook. Not this but something has to. I am sure most Slashdotters would prefer some open/free/libre thing. Where is it?!
Some people use Google+ (which has a data liberation so you can export all your data if you like, but probably not as open as some would like). There is also "Diaspora*" which is open, but still in development I believe.
And now a response addressing the article (again, from the oatmeal): http://theoatmeal.com/blog/tesla_response
If you don't want to run apps, and don't want app requests, you can turn off apps (it might be called "turn off platform apps"), in one of the settings available (probably privacy). That turns off apps completely - you don't get any requests (at least I haven't), although things still appear in the news feeds (shame these can't all be blocked).
And as far as I can tell, apps your friends use can't access your information when they use them if you have apps turned off (otherwise they can see your name and try to interact with you somehow, I guess that would trigger a request).
However a poster further up on this page has said they they tried to turn Facebook apps off and were unsuccessful due to an error, so I don't know how well the functionality works at the moment.
Try disabling apps in your facebook account. You can't. There is a button in the privacy settings to turn off all apps. Here's what it says when you click it:
There was an error while disabling applications and websites. Please try again.
I have been trying for over half a year. Same error every time. Clearly they are lying, and just don't want me to turn that off.
Shady lying bastards.
I turned that off a long time ago, so it worked at some point in time. Do you have any apps/websites connected currently? Maybe they need to be removed first before turning it off completely.
I do check the settings occasionally, just to check that apps haven't been turned on again without me knowing.
How could there not be a Monty Python joke in here somewhere?
Perhaps someone was going to make one, but got hit on the head by a coconut
Reminds me a bit of a situation in the UK where people riled against Jeremy Clarkson for a comment he said in a talk show. It was around the time when some of the public sector were striking over cuts.
The clip that went around on the internet was his saying "...they should be taken outside and shot".
The full clip, however started with him saying something in support of the strikes, and then saying "but as this is the BBC, we need to cover both viewpoints so..." (the BBC is required to show both sides of stories). The clip that was going round was fairly obviously of him being cut off mid sentence, but people didn't seem to care enough to try and find the context and ranted about it.
It is a shame that people in general don't care enough about finding the full story and are quite happy to just hear bits edited to provoke a reaction, resulting in them reacting in the way that was intended by the editor.
I really don't see why regular people will not like WP especially compared to Android (iPhone is much harder target)
I suspect the parent answered your question at the end of their post:
On top of that it's probably the apps.
"The "eye of a needle" has been interpreted as a gate in Jerusalem, which opened after the main gate was closed at night. A camel could only pass through this smaller gate if it was stooped and had its baggage removed. This story has been put forth since at least the 15th century, and possibly as far back as the 9th century. However, there is no evidence for the existence of such a gate." (from Wikipedia, where else?)
The idea that the saying actually meant a camel and a gate was also disputed on UK show QI:
General Ignorance
It is hard for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle for the simple reason that it is too big. Jesus was being literal when he said it. It was a common phrase at the time, although another expression similar to it at the time was "passing an elephant through the eye of a needle." Similar expressions appear in the Torah and the Koran. Rich people tried to invent get-out clauses when they read this. One example was the idea of a gate. Another was that it was a mistranslation from the Greek for "Rope". (Forfeit: It was a gateway into Jerusalem)
Source: http://www.comedy.co.uk/guide/tv/qi/episodes/5/8/
Transcript of episode: http://sites.google.com/site/qitranscripts/transcripts/5x08 (search the page for "eye of a needle", which will have what was said)
It's basically just an easier avenue for people without mod points to get spam downmodded more quickly.
How quickly, on average, will flagged posts get responded to? The moderation guidelines say to focus more on promoting rather than demoting, is the flagging system a way to allow mods to flag something without needing to downmod it themselves (so they have more points for promoting)? Or should things still be downmoded (troll, flamebait) when mods come across them?
Also, can we use the flag to report potentially bad moderations (somone moderating troll on an insightful comment, or the other way around, for example)?
Or some people just learned how to use their bookmarks bar. I've known people who had Google as their homepage and they would search for Facebook.com and then click on the link Google gave them.
They might have switched to pinned tabs (I have for a few sites). Don't need a bookmark either as it is always there when you load the browser.
Now, however, even putting a + sign in front of a search term doesn't seem to guarantee that that search term will be in all of the returned results. In fact, adding the + sign often doesn't change the base results at all...perhaps the forced term is hidden in the page metadata somewhere, but I don't care about metadata, I only want it if it's on a visible section of an actual webpage or document, and explicitly matches the exact term as I typed it (i.e., '+bubble' should not return pages about some person talking about Bubbles their golden retriever, or bubbly champagne parties...)
Google updated their search terms slightly recently; you need to put a word in quotes to explicitly match. So "bubble" should do what +bubble used to do.
printing variables out or logging them to a file isn't much different than setting a watch on them in a debugger anyway. if all i need to see is the value of a variable what does a debugger even gain me?
people have gotten lazy they don't know how to debug without a debugger... "if all you have is a hammer then everything looks like a nail"
One thing I've found handy with a debugger is when you can change the values (not just looking at them) mid execution, to see how the code handles the different value (same with code replacement and executing the changed code without having to recompile and run again). It's also nice to see what the state of all variables are at each line - if printing I would have to print them all out multiple times, including where in the program I am.
I did used to do the printing/saving values when I was first starting, then learnt how to use a debugger properly as it is a lot quicker, so I think the time saved is enough to be valuable. I still occasionally print values out, but very rarely nowadays.
I also think it is helpful to see what the code is doing when executed; sure I could walk through it in my head and figure it out, but stepping through code does it for me. Thats just a personal preference though I guess.
I've never seen magazines sold in book stores, such as Waterstones in the UK. Most people in the UK buy from news agents, as the name suggests, they are shops that mainly sell newspapers and magazines (plus milk, perhaps stationary and sweets (candy)).
Borders used to sell them before they closed down. WHSmiths sells a lot of magazines, but only about half the stuff they sell are books (the rest being stationary and other items), so I don't know how much one would classify them as a "book shop". Even the tiny WHSmiths in Kings Cross sells a variety of magazines (Linux and photography ones), and only a few books (the rest selling sweets and drinks to commuters, but I think that is more based on a newsagents type shop)
No, the video shows these people have no idea what SPYW is all about.
This is what I was thinking.
I did a very quick test (so take with a grain of salt): I checked my Google+ stream for something recent that I could search for (I saw a news story posted about a compary called "Delta"). I then did a search for that term ("delta" in this case), and there was the option to see the personalised results - this included the news item that I had seen, so something very relevant (as it was part of my "world" as Google says). I used the bookmarklet to see what the "don't be evil" had, and it didn't have this item at all, nor anything else from other social networks. The refined search results were less relevant (or less relevant according to what my expetations of including "my world" would be).
I suspect for additional testing (I only did a quick one) I should check my Facebook/Twitter stream for something (so it is relevant and I know it exists in my "world") and do a search for that using the bookmarklet, to see if it comes up.
He did not create his clothes. They are copyrighted, but not by him.
I always thought that fashion (and recipes) were unable to be covered by copyright.
Seriously though, there really needs to be a well-recognized way to indicate sarcasm in text. Apparently, giving a feature list of NTFS as the supposed feature list of it's replacement wasn't obvious enough for some people, moderators included.
That would be the "Snark" punctuation mark. It is basically a reverse question mark and used to denote a second or hidden meaning. I don't think it is too well know though (I doubt that slashdot would be able to display it, given their trouble with other characters).
Sorry about teh unformatted post previous.. I am sure Slashdot is moving to WYSIWYG any day now ;)
You can change your posting settings (click the little gear icon), setting it to "Plain Old Text" is probably what you want:
"Plain Old Text: Same as "HTML Formatted", except that <BR> is automatically inserted for newlines, and other whitespace is converted to non-breaking spaces in a more-or-less intelligent way."
Oh yes, powering from the lights works great.
Until they want to watch a video during class.
Even better - you won't get screen glow from someone on the internet when everyone is trying to watch a video.
[google] 277,000,000
[google search] 1,000,000
[search google] 49,500 (vs [bing search] 60,500)
[google maps] 45,500,000 (vs [bing map] 74,000)
[google images] 3,350,000 (vs [bing images] 90,500)
Considering that people search for Bing on Google , yes, people do choose to use Bing. It's not a small number - there's close 10 million searches per month for Bing related queries on Google alone.
You can check search query data here. Remember to change to [exact] search on match types so that it shows real search amount for specific queries.
[bing] 7,480,000 ...
I wonder how many people search for [google] using Bing. Does Bing have a similarly useful way to see their search data? I had a quick look but couldn't find anything (and the one thing I did find was their top searches, which didn't include numbers).
Interesting, since your UID indicates you're rather new here.
Correlation is not causation. In this case, "when a particular individual signed up for an account" is not the same as "when a particular individual started reading."
What does the correlation of a (new) user that often posts a long message as a first post in an article either praising a company or complaining about the same companies say? That they are lucky enough to see new articles as soon as they are posted and are able to type very quickly?
The problem with Slashdot is the huge amount of groupthink and related moderation. Slashdot has a HUGE problem with downmodding any non-popular opinion (within slashdot crowd). Reddit addresses that, while Slashdot does not. For example, look at any comment that even points out that piracy might not be right, open source programs might not be that good or that Microsoft could sometimes be right. They are instantly downmodded, based on groupthink and not even wanting to hear dissenting opinions.
Often this is done because the comment has little to no relevance to the topic at hand, not due to groupthink.
For example, if someone consistently posts one of the first posts in a topic, with a multi-paragraph response that is vaguely connected to the article but is just an excuse to take jabs at something, it is likely to be modded down.
Considering mods can look back through a users posting history, if this is happening repeatedly, it looks like someone is either trolling or being paid to post (either good things about a company, or bad things about another company) so it is less not wanting to hear dissenting opinions and more to do with not wanting to hear astroturfing/shilling.
Same in the UK, they don't start until secondary school (equivalent of high school i guess), and are pretty basic (Teaching you how to order a cup of coffee in french or german)... And you will almost never encounter the language you learn anywhere but school.
It can be hard to encounter a European language [1], even in the country it is spoken. I have heard stories of friends of mine who wanted to try out the French they leared at school while in France. The people they try to talk to pick up that they are native English speakers very quickly and just talk to them in English (its quicker for them I guess). I have done travelling though some of Europe [2] and have usually been able to get by without learning much of the language there, because most people speak English. I had a problem once on a train, but the conductor had various translations written down and just pointed some at me.
[1] This may be true for non-European languages, but I have mainly experienced European ones and didn't want to assume it is the same everywhere
[2] The general impression I got was that almost everyone in Western Europe can speak English fairly fluently, and in Eastern Europe most can, however there is an age gap whereby some of the older population didn't learn it so don't speak it, but most of the younger population can speak English
The real issue is if they are prioritizing thier data ahead of thier competitors...that would lead to more clicks to thier own pages which is more ad revenue. Kind of an anti trust issue here...
In the case of twitter, they had been asked to not use their (twitters) data, so are not using it (and therefore would be unable to involve it in some kind of prioritizing list). From Google:
We are a bit surprised by Twitter's comments about Search plus Your World, because they chose not to renew their agreement with us last summer (http://goo.gl/chKwi), and since then we have observed their rel=nofollow instructions.
https://plus.google.com/116899029375914044550/posts/24uqWqvALud