Not sure how this will go over if your library is already in the thousands, but there's one tip I want to share with people who are just getting their libraries started and don't buy more than a few dozen books a year:
Dispense with this tedious alphabetizing stuff, which will force you to open up space between existing books whenever you muy something new. Just set up some broad categories -- say, one bookcase or shelf per category -- and then add your books to the end of the shelf, as you acquire them. They will then be arranged in what is *for you* chronological order.
When you're done with a book, either return it to its original position, or put it at the front of the shelf. (But stick with one or the other of these systems.)
You're arranging the books so that *you* can find them again after already having read them at least once, right? I can often remember *when* I read a book, but not who wrote it. I also have many books which don't have an identifiable "author" (they were written by several people, or are collections of old photocopies custom-made). If you have books in multiple languages, you have to start worrying about how you "alphabetize" other alphabets.
Why? Because of the huge number of applications that are only produced for Windows -- these are small enough that the makers can't be bothered to, or don't have the expertise to, make a Mac version, yet aren't essential enough to make me go out and buy a Windows machine just to run them.
One example would be the PC interface software for my cell phone. Nice to have, but I only use it every few months to back stuff up and am not about to go buy a PC just to run it. Same story for game hacking utilities.
Congratulations to Narf. I'm anxiously awaiting booting WinXP on my Intel iMac.
I'm going to play devil's advocate with you a little on 'very unique'.
I think most people know that 'unique' means 'one of a kind'. When you say 'very unique', you want the listener to know not only that the item in question is not only not the same as anything else, but that it's significantly different.
Baseball fans might say that Colorado has unique uniforms because they don't look like other teams. But when you look at their black vest (only one in MLB history) with silver shoulder piping (never seen that before either), well, that's very one-of-a-kind.
Unfortunately I can't seem to find any pictures of it on the internet, but Fossil made a great watch which had Chinese/Japanese numerals for both the hours (printed on the face; not that hard to find) and the seconds (digital!). Sets you back about Y8500 in Japan. Mine has a deep blue face and always gets attention.
The men's version is big and heavy, and the LCDs forming the numbers aren't the rectangular ones we're used to. Rather, they crafted the shapes of them so that the numerals look like they're written with a brush or pen. There are a couple of kludges -- the "1", which is normally a horizontal line through the center, reuses the bottom of the "3" so it's a single horizontal line at the base, and rather than use the perfectly-circular kanji zero, they used the 10 sign instead (looks like a big plus sign if you're unfamiliar with Chinese). So it counts '57, 58, 59, 60, 01, 02...'
The problem is that when I wear it in the US, people inevitably say, "Oh, that's right; you live in Japan. Of course you'd have an all-Japanese watch."
To which I have to reply, "No, this thing is special and rare and you can't find it just anywhere. This is the first-ever watch with digital kanji numerals. See? Look at... hey, wait, come back here!"
Firehed, while your duct-tape plan would seem logical, just wait until they, unable to have human beings watch all the cameras, start flagging any cameras whose average color value is too close to #000000. "We know you're hiding something -- turn the lights on, take that duct tape off, or face arrest for evading polive doing their lawful spying duty!"
The idea is simple -- it takes time for a tremor to propagate from its epicenter, but a sensor near the epicenter can transmit data virtually instantly. This short period can be enough for people to stop their cars, get under desks, etc., etc.
The article mentions how interest in this kind of thing has waned since the 1995 Kobe earthquake. I'd add that the average Japanese person knew little about the internet and its capabilities of delivering information at light-speed in 1995. (The average person then didn't even have a cell phone!)
With people's memories so short, look for interest in thsi technology explode after the next big earthquake. Hopefully that won't be the one that kills thousands and destroys people's homes.
QR, you are quite right about that, but keep in mind that pinyin was consciously devised (in living memory, even -- the 1950s) and thus irregularity should be kept to a minimum. English, on the other hand, has had centuries of sound change (such as the Great Vowel Shift around Chaucer's time) messing with spellings until they become quite divergent from what logic would predict.
A better analogy using Chinese would be to compare the characters which have semantic and phonetic elements both included -- more than half of them are like this -- and see if all the ones with a given phonetic part still sound similar today. You will of course find many irregular pronunciations creeping in. (I'd give examples, but Slashdot doesn't handle Asian fonts well.)
Other romanization systems are easier to learn -- the Hepburn system for Japanese can almost be summed up as "vowels as in Italian; consonants as in English". There are a number of intuitive systems for romanizing Cyrillic, depending on what your native language is -- plenty of hassle when web searching though (Tchaikovsky? Tschaikowskij? Chaikovskiy?).
Not really relevant to typing on a computer, but you have to give Pinyin credit for the tone-marking system -- that's really intuitive and works well. Computer software just needs to make those accented letter easier to type and display.
Putko, they did of course have standards, but they only make sense if you already speak Chinese.
"Tian" does not rhyme with "fan", but somehow, "duo" and "luo" rhyme with "po" and "fo", which do contain "u" sonuds in the middle; they just aren't written because plain "po" doesn't exist.
One of the purposes of pinyin was a potential replacement of the character system with it, so I can understand them not considering the interests of non-native speakers, but if you're going to force it on non-natives too, well, expect to see spelling "errors" becmoe unavoidable when they use Chinese.
I can only add that the Chinese government, with their insistence on the not-at-all-intuitive-to-non-Chinese-speakers romanization system that is Pinyin, have only themselves to blame.
Ask a number of reasonably educated people whose native languages use the Roman alphabet to listen to a Chinese person pronounce "Tiananmen" and then write down what they think the spelling should be. I guarantee many of them will "misspell" it as "Tienanmen", since the vowel in question is pronounced like the sound that most languages express with an "e".
Expect more of this as Pinyin isn't going away any time soon.
(And yes, I do have my flame-retardant jacket, Academic Dispute Wear Edition, all prepared!)
If women were "property" until they got the vote in 1920, then I suppose men were "beasts of burden" until the military draft was undone in 1973. Until 1973, all women over 21 could vote no matter what contributions -- tax, military service, etc. -- they made to the nation. Young men, on the other hand, were forced to serve in the military and die if the nation demanded it, in order to have the vote.
If you claim that only women were oppressed in US history, you're willfully ignorant.
Why am I left with the feeling that I'm responding to a cut-and-paste troll?
If the parent is a non-native speaker of English who genuinely confused the word federalism with feudalism, then they get a pass. I suppose.
I suspect that people with equally good hearing in each ear whould choose to hold the phone in their non-dominant hand, leaving their better hand available to write notes.
At least that's what I, a left-hander, have consoled myself with when I notice that just about every public phone and push-button office phone in existence is designed for the phone to be held by a left hand and dialed by a right hand.
Bring back "ambidextrous" rotary phones! Those things had the handset horizontally across the top!
<p><i>The only place it really makes sense anymore to use a desktop is if you're a gamer... It's just so much more convenient to grab a laptop and go sit on the couch and work instead of being tied to my office's desk.</i>
<p>True for a lot of people, but desktops have their advantages -- you can use a nice old mechanical keyboard if you so prefer; screens are bigger and easier to see, and (for me, most importantly), the distance between the keyboard and screen is adjustable. If you do most of your computing -- word processing in particular -- at home, hunching over that laptop keyboard sure gets tiring.
These comments have been very instructive. Never thought about motion blur before!
I remember reading long ago that supposedly humans could only see 24 fps, and accepted that. But when watching film that had a minutes:seconds-frames clock at the bottom moving upward from 00:00-00 to 00:00-29 and then to 00:01-00, I could clearly see the numbers increasing, which meant that I was "seeing" 30 fps.
Applying this idea to a digital stopwatch running at 100 "frames" per second resulted in a blur on the last digit, so obviously my vision wasn't so superhuman as to be able to see 100 fps.
Someone with more ability than me should set up a website or small application where you enter a number N, and the computer displays numbers from 00 to N at N frames per second. If you're seeing discrete digits, you can see N fps. If you're seeing a blur, enter a smaller N.
In other words did the people who buy "Planet Of The Apes" also buy the book about MLK, implying an association between black people and apes?
That implication is unjustified -- people could have associated the society in POTA with the one MLK was fighting against, or it could have been as innocuous as "I remember listening to King speak when I was a kid in the '60s; let's watch that. What else was I into back then; oh yeah, that Planet of the Apes movie. Sixties culture sure was great!"
Raise your hand if you're one of those schmucks who can't even remember your Slashdot password because your PC automatically logs you in every time you visit! ^_^;
Interesting when observed evidence suggests that in the US, males don't catch up to females until after high school. For example, my high school graduating class had eight girls in the top ten.
At the risk of making a flagrant generalization, I'd say that this is more due to current US policies of doing everything possible to help girls in their education while simultaneously ignoring boys' needs almost entirely, rather than being the result of any difference in Finnish versus US IQs. It's not until the working world that the "girl power" system's influence dissipates.
I am loath to educate my young son in the US given the conditions today.
3. Enterprises using Skype risk a communication barrier with countries and institutions that have already banned the service.
Entire countries can ban the use of Skype?
Before I make a knee-jerk comment about totalitarian/nanny-state governments, could I turn in another knee-jerk direction and first suggest that such governments turn their nationwide-banning attention to Windows?
Those problems may well be solved, but I think a bigger hurdle is going to be the fact that many people live in countries (the UK, Japan, etc.) with national TV stations who make you pay just for possessing a device capable of receiving their broadcasts.
(Arguments about that have gone back and forth on Slashdot many times before.)
Camera phones are already becoming the norm because it doesn't cost the user any more to have a camera that he/she neve ruses. But with TV capability, it means that people who just want basic phones and have no desire to watch broadcasts have to prevent others from wanting this feature, otherwise they'll be stuck paying through the nose next time they want to upgrade and the only things available are TV phones with BBC/NHK/etc. fees attached.
Or national TV stations could change their policies and find a way to only charge people who make use of their stations. But we all know how likely that is to happen.
I heard, a long time ago, that 79% of all drivers believed they were better than average. That's truly educational. By definition, half the drivers are "better than average" and the other half are "worse than average".
Actually, those 79% of drivers might have been right.
Consider a society with 10 drivers. One of them has ten accidents and the other nine drive flawlessly. So the average number of accidents per driver is 1.0, and 90% of the drivers are "better than average"!
It's a few truly terrible drivers skewing the "average", which means that the median would probably be a better statistic. Same with the huge salaries for top athletes compared to guys riding the minor-league buses. The average baseball salary might be over a million, but the median might not be.
Easy, just put up fuel prices. In the UK, we are paying around 90p per litre - around $6 per gallon. If people were paying that sort of price, then they might be more keen to drive something that gets more than 20 miles per gallon.
Ideally, this should be coupled with non-profitmaking public transport, which is exempt from fuel tax.
"Simply" taxing fuel more won't help the average person unless those taxes go directly towards your second proposal of public transport, and these taxpayers get to weigh the costs and benefits of driving their own cars. The public transport has to be available to a significant-enough percentage of the population, otherwise the people out in the sticks are still stuck driving their cars, only now they have to pay even more for fuel.
In a small country like England, this might be feasible, but in the US and Canada you just can't plan train and bus routes over the vast expanses of places like Wyoming. For people out there, driving is the best solution (and pollution is less of a factor in their air quality, given the lower density of cars).
How about variable fuel taxes based on the proximity of public transportation?
It's egregious that people need to become 2% more skilled every year just to maintain their purchasing power.
Unfortunately the world's governments have colluded to issue money backed not by gold, silver, or something else humans across the world hold to be valuable, but rather by nothing more than a government promise.
This is what needs to be solved if people want to have long-term confidence in the value of their money and the security of their futures.
Slashdot Mirror
This is Apple's big 30th anniversary announcement? More nanny-ism in their products? Excuse me while I call my broker and sell short. ^_^;
Not sure how this will go over if your library is already in the thousands, but there's one tip I want to share with people who are just getting their libraries started and don't buy more than a few dozen books a year:
Dispense with this tedious alphabetizing stuff, which will force you to open up space between existing books whenever you muy something new. Just set up some broad categories -- say, one bookcase or shelf per category -- and then add your books to the end of the shelf, as you acquire them. They will then be arranged in what is *for you* chronological order.
When you're done with a book, either return it to its original position, or put it at the front of the shelf. (But stick with one or the other of these systems.)
You're arranging the books so that *you* can find them again after already having read them at least once, right? I can often remember *when* I read a book, but not who wrote it. I also have many books which don't have an identifiable "author" (they were written by several people, or are collections of old photocopies custom-made). If you have books in multiple languages, you have to start worrying about how you "alphabetize" other alphabets.
Dump all that and go chronological!
Why? Because of the huge number of applications that are only produced for Windows -- these are small enough that the makers can't be bothered to, or don't have the expertise to, make a Mac version, yet aren't essential enough to make me go out and buy a Windows machine just to run them.
One example would be the PC interface software for my cell phone. Nice to have, but I only use it every few months to back stuff up and am not about to go buy a PC just to run it. Same story for game hacking utilities.
Congratulations to Narf. I'm anxiously awaiting booting WinXP on my Intel iMac.
I'm going to play devil's advocate with you a little on 'very unique'.
I think most people know that 'unique' means 'one of a kind'. When you say 'very unique', you want the listener to know not only that the item in question is not only not the same as anything else, but that it's significantly different.
Baseball fans might say that Colorado has unique uniforms because they don't look like other teams. But when you look at their black vest (only one in MLB history) with silver shoulder piping (never seen that before either), well, that's very one-of-a-kind.
Unfortunately I can't seem to find any pictures of it on the internet, but Fossil made a great watch which had Chinese/Japanese numerals for both the hours (printed on the face; not that hard to find) and the seconds (digital!). Sets you back about Y8500 in Japan. Mine has a deep blue face and always gets attention.
The men's version is big and heavy, and the LCDs forming the numbers aren't the rectangular ones we're used to. Rather, they crafted the shapes of them so that the numerals look like they're written with a brush or pen. There are a couple of kludges -- the "1", which is normally a horizontal line through the center, reuses the bottom of the "3" so it's a single horizontal line at the base, and rather than use the perfectly-circular kanji zero, they used the 10 sign instead (looks like a big plus sign if you're unfamiliar with Chinese). So it counts '57, 58, 59, 60, 01, 02...'
The problem is that when I wear it in the US, people inevitably say, "Oh, that's right; you live in Japan. Of course you'd have an all-Japanese watch."
To which I have to reply, "No, this thing is special and rare and you can't find it just anywhere. This is the first-ever watch with digital kanji numerals. See? Look at... hey, wait, come back here!"
Firehed, while your duct-tape plan would seem logical, just wait until they, unable to have human beings watch all the cameras, start flagging any cameras whose average color value is too close to #000000. "We know you're hiding something -- turn the lights on, take that duct tape off, or face arrest for evading polive doing their lawful spying duty!"
The idea is simple -- it takes time for a tremor to propagate from its epicenter, but a sensor near the epicenter can transmit data virtually instantly. This short period can be enough for people to stop their cars, get under desks, etc., etc.
The article mentions how interest in this kind of thing has waned since the 1995 Kobe earthquake. I'd add that the average Japanese person knew little about the internet and its capabilities of delivering information at light-speed in 1995. (The average person then didn't even have a cell phone!)
With people's memories so short, look for interest in thsi technology explode after the next big earthquake. Hopefully that won't be the one that kills thousands and destroys people's homes.
:That sounds painful!
Hey, if you chose to ignore the warnings and eat the Shuffle, whatever happens after is your lookout.
I hope Steve Jobs doesn't give in and sticks this lawsuit into this guy's ass like a handgrenade and makes his lawyers pull the pin.
Never again will I begrudge lawyers their high salaries!
QR, you are quite right about that, but keep in mind that pinyin was consciously devised (in living memory, even -- the 1950s) and thus irregularity should be kept to a minimum. English, on the other hand, has had centuries of sound change (such as the Great Vowel Shift around Chaucer's time) messing with spellings until they become quite divergent from what logic would predict.
A better analogy using Chinese would be to compare the characters which have semantic and phonetic elements both included -- more than half of them are like this -- and see if all the ones with a given phonetic part still sound similar today. You will of course find many irregular pronunciations creeping in. (I'd give examples, but Slashdot doesn't handle Asian fonts well.)
Other romanization systems are easier to learn -- the Hepburn system for Japanese can almost be summed up as "vowels as in Italian; consonants as in English". There are a number of intuitive systems for romanizing Cyrillic, depending on what your native language is -- plenty of hassle when web searching though (Tchaikovsky? Tschaikowskij? Chaikovskiy?).
Not really relevant to typing on a computer, but you have to give Pinyin credit for the tone-marking system -- that's really intuitive and works well. Computer software just needs to make those accented letter easier to type and display.
Putko, they did of course have standards, but they only make sense if you already speak Chinese.
"Tian" does not rhyme with "fan", but somehow, "duo" and "luo" rhyme with "po" and "fo", which do contain "u" sonuds in the middle; they just aren't written because plain "po" doesn't exist.
One of the purposes of pinyin was a potential replacement of the character system with it, so I can understand them not considering the interests of non-native speakers, but if you're going to force it on non-natives too, well, expect to see spelling "errors" becmoe unavoidable when they use Chinese.
I can only add that the Chinese government, with their insistence on the not-at-all-intuitive-to-non-Chinese-speakers romanization system that is Pinyin, have only themselves to blame.
Ask a number of reasonably educated people whose native languages use the Roman alphabet to listen to a Chinese person pronounce "Tiananmen" and then write down what they think the spelling should be. I guarantee many of them will "misspell" it as "Tienanmen", since the vowel in question is pronounced like the sound that most languages express with an "e".
Expect more of this as Pinyin isn't going away any time soon.
(And yes, I do have my flame-retardant jacket, Academic Dispute Wear Edition, all prepared!)
If women were "property" until they got the vote in 1920, then I suppose men were "beasts of burden" until the military draft was undone in 1973. Until 1973, all women over 21 could vote no matter what contributions -- tax, military service, etc. -- they made to the nation. Young men, on the other hand, were forced to serve in the military and die if the nation demanded it, in order to have the vote. If you claim that only women were oppressed in US history, you're willfully ignorant.
Why am I left with the feeling that I'm responding to a cut-and-paste troll?
If the parent is a non-native speaker of English who genuinely confused the word federalism with feudalism, then they get a pass. I suppose.
I suspect that people with equally good hearing in each ear whould choose to hold the phone in their non-dominant hand, leaving their better hand available to write notes.
At least that's what I, a left-hander, have consoled myself with when I notice that just about every public phone and push-button office phone in existence is designed for the phone to be held by a left hand and dialed by a right hand.
Bring back "ambidextrous" rotary phones! Those things had the handset horizontally across the top!
<p><i>The only place it really makes sense anymore to use a desktop is if you're a gamer ... It's just so much more convenient to grab a laptop and go sit on the couch and work instead of being tied to my office's desk.</i>
<p>True for a lot of people, but desktops have their advantages -- you can use a nice old mechanical keyboard if you so prefer; screens are bigger and easier to see, and (for me, most importantly), the distance between the keyboard and screen is adjustable. If you do most of your computing -- word processing in particular -- at home, hunching over that laptop keyboard sure gets tiring.
These comments have been very instructive. Never thought about motion blur before!
I remember reading long ago that supposedly humans could only see 24 fps, and accepted that. But when watching film that had a minutes:seconds-frames clock at the bottom moving upward from 00:00-00 to 00:00-29 and then to 00:01-00, I could clearly see the numbers increasing, which meant that I was "seeing" 30 fps.
Applying this idea to a digital stopwatch running at 100 "frames" per second resulted in a blur on the last digit, so obviously my vision wasn't so superhuman as to be able to see 100 fps.
Someone with more ability than me should set up a website or small application where you enter a number N, and the computer displays numbers from 00 to N at N frames per second. If you're seeing discrete digits, you can see N fps. If you're seeing a blur, enter a smaller N.
I wonder what the average human score would be.
In other words did the people who buy "Planet Of The Apes" also buy the book about MLK, implying an association between black people and apes?
That implication is unjustified -- people could have associated the society in POTA with the one MLK was fighting against, or it could have been as innocuous as "I remember listening to King speak when I was a kid in the '60s; let's watch that. What else was I into back then; oh yeah, that Planet of the Apes movie. Sixties culture sure was great!"
Shouldn't be that hard. Wasn't the whole continent once a jail?
Raise your hand if you're one of those schmucks who can't even remember your Slashdot password because your PC automatically logs you in every time you visit! ^_^;
Interesting when observed evidence suggests that in the US, males don't catch up to females until after high school. For example, my high school graduating class had eight girls in the top ten.
At the risk of making a flagrant generalization, I'd say that this is more due to current US policies of doing everything possible to help girls in their education while simultaneously ignoring boys' needs almost entirely, rather than being the result of any difference in Finnish versus US IQs. It's not until the working world that the "girl power" system's influence dissipates. I am loath to educate my young son in the US given the conditions today.
Reasons to ban Skype:
3. Enterprises using Skype risk a communication barrier with countries and institutions that have already banned the service.
Entire countries can ban the use of Skype?
Before I make a knee-jerk comment about totalitarian/nanny-state governments, could I turn in another knee-jerk direction and first suggest that such governments turn their nationwide-banning attention to Windows?
Those problems may well be solved, but I think a bigger hurdle is going to be the fact that many people live in countries (the UK, Japan, etc.) with national TV stations who make you pay just for possessing a device capable of receiving their broadcasts.
(Arguments about that have gone back and forth on Slashdot many times before.)
Camera phones are already becoming the norm because it doesn't cost the user any more to have a camera that he/she neve ruses. But with TV capability, it means that people who just want basic phones and have no desire to watch broadcasts have to prevent others from wanting this feature, otherwise they'll be stuck paying through the nose next time they want to upgrade and the only things available are TV phones with BBC/NHK/etc. fees attached.
Or national TV stations could change their policies and find a way to only charge people who make use of their stations. But we all know how likely that is to happen.
I heard, a long time ago, that 79% of all drivers believed they were better than average. That's truly educational. By definition, half the drivers are "better than average" and the other half are "worse than average".
Actually, those 79% of drivers might have been right.
Consider a society with 10 drivers. One of them has ten accidents and the other nine drive flawlessly. So the average number of accidents per driver is 1.0, and 90% of the drivers are "better than average"!
It's a few truly terrible drivers skewing the "average", which means that the median would probably be a better statistic. Same with the huge salaries for top athletes compared to guys riding the minor-league buses. The average baseball salary might be over a million, but the median might not be.
Easy, just put up fuel prices. In the UK, we are paying around 90p per litre - around $6 per gallon. If people were paying that sort of price, then they might be more keen to drive something that gets more than 20 miles per gallon.
Ideally, this should be coupled with non-profitmaking public transport, which is exempt from fuel tax.
"Simply" taxing fuel more won't help the average person unless those taxes go directly towards your second proposal of public transport, and these taxpayers get to weigh the costs and benefits of driving their own cars. The public transport has to be available to a significant-enough percentage of the population, otherwise the people out in the sticks are still stuck driving their cars, only now they have to pay even more for fuel.
In a small country like England, this might be feasible, but in the US and Canada you just can't plan train and bus routes over the vast expanses of places like Wyoming. For people out there, driving is the best solution (and pollution is less of a factor in their air quality, given the lower density of cars).
How about variable fuel taxes based on the proximity of public transportation?
It's egregious that people need to become 2% more skilled every year just to maintain their purchasing power.
Unfortunately the world's governments have colluded to issue money backed not by gold, silver, or something else humans across the world hold to be valuable, but rather by nothing more than a government promise.
This is what needs to be solved if people want to have long-term confidence in the value of their money and the security of their futures.