there are really several related questions here: ability to spell, ability to type accurately, and ability to hand-write clearly, and ability to write coherently. those are different skills, and mixing them up doesn't help understand what's going on.
people who have conservative opinions about writing and spelling tend to complain about the poor quality of language used in online communication. "omg orly? lol ttfn." if the reader doesn't understand the abbreviated strings, it's just noise. if the reader understands, then it is the same as "oh my god, oh really? laughing out loud, ta-ta for now." in its expanded form, is it bad writing? not particularly. the abbreviations are a commonly understood shorthand. to the extent that it's not commonly understood, it might be difficult to read, but it doesn't indicate poor communication.
these same complainers talk about how online communication hurts writing skills. i think people write a lot more online than they wrote 25 years ago. we're not handwriting letters on paper and licking stamps any more. but i send hundreds of emails every week. and instead of writing longhand or typing on a typewriter or dictating text into an audio recorder and sending it to the typing pool, i use a text editor or word processor or text widget.
back to the omg and lol abbreviatons. if people were that concerned about reading such shortcuts, they could use software to fix it, either on the transmit or receive sides. we could use predictive text systems like T9 or IMEs like those used to type Asian languages. a person could use such systems to convert the abbreviations into more fully-fledged language.
now what about writing skills? "omg lolz" suffices in an im or sms message. if you're at work, maybe it's not so cool to write to a patient, "plz call the lab and schedule a chest mri, and have them send me the results of ur blood work." then again, doctors are known for their cryptic handwriting and rx abbrevs - sig 1 po qid pc prn. it's important to understand the message that your writing style conveys.
I don't know where to find the Hosaka paper now. I read it back then. I'm not in the imaging biz any more, so I haven't kept up.
The Picture Coding Symposium (where Hosaka presented and published his 1986 paper) still exists, perhaps you can get it from them.
Here's a paper which shows some Hosaka plots and discusses them, and apparently has some more recent info, since it was written 10 years after Hosaka's - still more than 10 year ago.
Well, V's were a Roman thing, and this was Greek. I was going to go with sigmas for the E's but I couldn't figure out how to convince the comment system to buy it. I figured P for R and Y for U would be too weird, and the Greek vase thing was silly enough.
If you need to cut, there's no tool as good as a sharp knife. If you need to turn a screw, a sharp knife probably isn't the right tool. If you have a guy who's a sharp knife, and you're using him to turn screws, maybe the problem isn't him. Maybe the problem is you.
Yeah, if only we could see. Ummm, what would that take. Some kind of invention where you could record a moving image and make it available for playback on demand. Maybe someday.
I'm a linux hacker. I usually sit at my desk and hack, but I've spent most of the last month on the road visiting customers. So I recently decided to get myself a netbook (i didn't shop much, and grabbed an acer aspire one aoa 150-1570 running XP). I didn't buy it for daily home use, I bought it to throw in a backpack. I am very impressed with it for that. It's a bit small physically, but entirely sufficient for occasional road use.
When I was shopping for it, there was a sales weasel kid who claimed it was a toy, it had a glorified PDA processor, and it wasn't really a computer. He was 100% wrong. I'm very happy with it for mail, web, sucking pics off my camera, etc. It's slower than a modern machine, but who cares? So it takes an extra second to load gmail when I'm in a hotel room in some city far from home. It runs standard PC apps, and it has good fit and finish.
The acer has choice of 3-cell battery or 6-cell. They didn't have the 6-cell where I was buying it. The 3-cell gives you at least 2 hours of use, and in most cases, I have it plugged in anyway. I'm using it in a hotel room, not in the woods. The bigger battery would have made it weigh an extra 20% or so, so lighter and smaller is fine with me.
I think the fact that it's light gives it a subtle advantage - the light weight gives it less momentum when you drop it, so it helps make it less prone to accidental drop damage.
re xp vs linux, i would prefer linux if they were equally functional, but I like to use various audio and video on my travel laptop (to listen to news and radio from home when I'm overseas). I find that support for non-free encoders that media outlets use is hard to set up on Linux, so I'm glad to have xp. If I want, I can dual boot Linux, but for a road toy, I don't feel the need.
In the end, people use computers to run apps. The OS is an app loader. That's if you think OS means kernel. If you think OS means kernel and UI, then the OS is app loader and decorations. Either way, no one should care which OS a machine is running, it's about the app.
Read my post again, angry soldier. I said nothing for or against weapons or war. If you want to vent your anger, go for it, but don't attribute opinions to me that I did not express. I just made plain that I thought it was deceptive to call the device a life-saving tool. You can call an MX missile a Peacekeeper if you like, but that doesn't make it so. If you produce a device that makes it easier to find and kill your enemies, then call it that. A trustworthy government and military do not need to resort to propaganda. I worked on military contracts for a few years, I never considered that work life-saving.
From tfa:... the new technology developed by Dreampact could be a life-saving tool for soldiers.
A life-saving tool, like an ambulance? To the extent that this will be a life-saving tool for some soldiers, it will be a life-ending tool for other soldiers.
I find that simple regexes involving dot or dot-star are some of the handiest, especially when editing or reading code with a pager. For example:
1) Let's say you're editing a C program, and you need to search for a string:
dev->q->item
who wants to type all those ->'s in a search?
instead, search for
dev..q..item
Same goes for searching for a path. If you're searching for foo/bar/arp , don't bother typing/foo\/bar\/arp , instead, type/foo.bar.arp.
When I'm searching, I'll often hit a dot rather than any key I need to hit shift for or that's hard to find or that will complicate the regex (like any of ~|/\).
Yes, I know you need to type the real characters when you're actually typing the code, but this is about matching and searching.
2) In editors and pagers (like less), all matched strings on the display are often highlighted (rather than just the one you found). It's handy to use this highlighting to break text up visually when you're reading it.
Let's say you're doing a recursive diff of two directories and there are a handful of files with changes, and you want to look at them. you do: "diff -r dir1 dir2" and a bunch of changes scroll down the screen, so you pipe into less, and it's still a big mass of text. Some horizontal divisions might make it easier to read.
The diff output will have the string "diff -r dir1/foo dir2/foo" before each file foo.
If you search for the string diff or ^diff , less will highlight all the matched strings. But if you search for the string ^diff.* , then less will highlight the whole line found, which is very handy when you're parsing the file visually
3) When editing, if you have a long messy string to search for, just find something useful that the beginning and end of the string to search for. If you need to search for internationionlization, search for int.*ion. If it matches something else, you just hit a key or two to search again for the next one.
4) When browsing text in a file, many people just lean on the arrow keys to navigate around. I think it's always handier to search for a string rather than just blindly scrolling. And make the search simple, and use the "search next (or last)" keys to move around. Don't be too specific. Be lazy (or fuzzy or efficient). Regexes need to be precise if you are coding a task and you need to find data exactly. When you're editing, you're just using them to navigate, and you can be fuzzier.
I think this would be fair if they took the tax revenue and plowed it back into their virtual infrastructure - paving virtual roads, building virtual bridges, paying virtual police and firefighters, and so forth.
The quote in the lead paragraph for this article was not in the referenced article. I checked, because the first sentence was so poorly constructed, with a textbook-worthy example of a dangling modifier:
The loss of a fatty skin that coats the nerve cells, called neurons, during middle age causes the slowdown, experts say.
If the article is about the loss of the fatty sheath, why mention what nerve cells are called?
The base UCLA article explains that the fatty sheath (myelin) is around nerve fibers (axons) not nerve cells (neurons). The bad quote was copied from telegraph.co.uk, and I found it ironic in an article about loss of mental acuity.
My wild guess is that the British writer saw that the lead paragraph in the UCLA article was focused on baseball and it threw him a googly (howzat!) and he was overcome by the urge to rewrite.
Saying that go is harder than chess is like saying that the Empire State Building is harder to lift than the Chrysler Building; the complexity of both games is well beyond the horizon of human capability, and is likely to remain so. Because there are more possible moves in one ply of go than in one ply of chess doesn't make the whole game harder, better, or more interesting for people to play. If you like, you can play the games with a fast clock and go by your wits. Or if you want a bigger think, you can lengthen the time controls (or use a calendar instead of a clock). Droning on about which is harder is pompous, and if you're a go player and you can't beat an average player at chess, then how relevant is your opinion of how much easier chess is? (The reverse is also true, but it seems that the "our game is harder" rant is more the province of go players.)
The CK12 approach can reduce the cost of instructional materials while making them more customizable for each locality and each student
Which raises the question, "Why will a school district need to customize its physics textbook?" Local value of C? Of G? Of pi? Or does the head of the high school physics department just want to chime in with his opinion on the existence of the Higgs boson?
While TFA mentions its reasons, is the point of this exercise really just to give a school district free and malleable source material that they can distort to suit their whim?
Slashdot Mirror
people who have conservative opinions about writing and spelling tend to complain about the poor quality of language used in online communication. "omg orly? lol ttfn." if the reader doesn't understand the abbreviated strings, it's just noise. if the reader understands, then it is the same as "oh my god, oh really? laughing out loud, ta-ta for now." in its expanded form, is it bad writing? not particularly. the abbreviations are a commonly understood shorthand. to the extent that it's not commonly understood, it might be difficult to read, but it doesn't indicate poor communication.
these same complainers talk about how online communication hurts writing skills. i think people write a lot more online than they wrote 25 years ago. we're not handwriting letters on paper and licking stamps any more. but i send hundreds of emails every week. and instead of writing longhand or typing on a typewriter or dictating text into an audio recorder and sending it to the typing pool, i use a text editor or word processor or text widget.
back to the omg and lol abbreviatons. if people were that concerned about reading such shortcuts, they could use software to fix it, either on the transmit or receive sides. we could use predictive text systems like T9 or IMEs like those used to type Asian languages. a person could use such systems to convert the abbreviations into more fully-fledged language.
now what about writing skills? "omg lolz" suffices in an im or sms message. if you're at work, maybe it's not so cool to write to a patient, "plz call the lab and schedule a chest mri, and have them send me the results of ur blood work." then again, doctors are known for their cryptic handwriting and rx abbrevs - sig 1 po qid pc prn. it's important to understand the message that your writing style conveys.
This will make Richard Stallman Rich. Isn't it ironic? Don't you think?
The Picture Coding Symposium (where Hosaka presented and published his 1986 paper) still exists, perhaps you can get it from them.
Here's a paper which shows some Hosaka plots and discusses them, and apparently has some more recent info, since it was written 10 years after Hosaka's - still more than 10 year ago.
http://www.sci.brooklyn.cuny.edu/~eskicioglu/papers/IEEETransCom95.pdf
I assume that if you google for Hosaka and Eskicioglu you can follow the bibliography trail to more recent work, if you like.
HOSAKA K., A new picture quality evaluation method.
Proc. International Picture Coding Symposium, Tokyo, Japan, 1986, 17-18.
Well, V's were a Roman thing, and this was Greek. I was going to go with sigmas for the E's but I couldn't figure out how to convince the comment system to buy it. I figured P for R and Y for U would be too weird, and the Greek vase thing was silly enough.
They have identified their first inscription....
ALL YOUR VASE ARE BELONG TO US
Do you have six minutes a week?
D'oh. New idea will cost you extra.
TCP - Total Cost of Pwnership
Maybe they got Ron Burgundy to train the dogs to track the scent of smelly pirate hookers.
This is another one.
http://www.treventus.com/index_en.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hlOQuuLYavY
Funny, my other complaint is twice as slow.
Yeah, I prefer "half fast."
If you need to cut, there's no tool as good as a sharp knife. If you need to turn a screw, a sharp knife probably isn't the right tool. If you have a guy who's a sharp knife, and you're using him to turn screws, maybe the problem isn't him. Maybe the problem is you.
I was amused that on the Slashdot home page, the Today/Yesterday links were right under the title for this story.
Yeah, if only we could see. Ummm, what would that take. Some kind of invention where you could record a moving image and make it available for playback on demand. Maybe someday.
I'm a linux hacker. I usually sit at my desk and hack, but I've spent most of the last month on the road visiting customers. So I recently decided to get myself a netbook (i didn't shop much, and grabbed an acer aspire one aoa 150-1570 running XP). I didn't buy it for daily home use, I bought it to throw in a backpack. I am very impressed with it for that. It's a bit small physically, but entirely sufficient for occasional road use.
When I was shopping for it, there was a sales weasel kid who claimed it was a toy, it had a glorified PDA processor, and it wasn't really a computer. He was 100% wrong. I'm very happy with it for mail, web, sucking pics off my camera, etc. It's slower than a modern machine, but who cares? So it takes an extra second to load gmail when I'm in a hotel room in some city far from home. It runs standard PC apps, and it has good fit and finish.
The acer has choice of 3-cell battery or 6-cell. They didn't have the 6-cell where I was buying it. The 3-cell gives you at least 2 hours of use, and in most cases, I have it plugged in anyway. I'm using it in a hotel room, not in the woods. The bigger battery would have made it weigh an extra 20% or so, so lighter and smaller is fine with me.
I think the fact that it's light gives it a subtle advantage - the light weight gives it less momentum when you drop it, so it helps make it less prone to accidental drop damage.
re xp vs linux, i would prefer linux if they were equally functional, but I like to use various audio and video on my travel laptop (to listen to news and radio from home when I'm overseas). I find that support for non-free encoders that media outlets use is hard to set up on Linux, so I'm glad to have xp. If I want, I can dual boot Linux, but for a road toy, I don't feel the need.
In the end, people use computers to run apps. The OS is an app loader. That's if you think OS means kernel. If you think OS means kernel and UI, then the OS is app loader and decorations. Either way, no one should care which OS a machine is running, it's about the app.
Did you ever see the hippos doing the Dance of the Hours in Disney's Fantasia? It's like that.
Read my post again, angry soldier. I said nothing for or against weapons or war. If you want to vent your anger, go for it, but don't attribute opinions to me that I did not express. I just made plain that I thought it was deceptive to call the device a life-saving tool. You can call an MX missile a Peacekeeper if you like, but that doesn't make it so. If you produce a device that makes it easier to find and kill your enemies, then call it that. A trustworthy government and military do not need to resort to propaganda. I worked on military contracts for a few years, I never considered that work life-saving.
A life-saving tool, like an ambulance? To the extent that this will be a life-saving tool for some soldiers, it will be a life-ending tool for other soldiers.
1) Let's say you're editing a C program, and you need to search for a string:
dev->q->item
who wants to type all those ->'s in a search?
instead, search for /foo\/bar\/arp , instead, type /foo.bar.arp .
dev..q..item
Same goes for searching for a path. If you're searching for foo/bar/arp , don't bother typing
When I'm searching, I'll often hit a dot rather than any key I need to hit shift for or that's hard to find or that will complicate the regex (like any of ~|/\). Yes, I know you need to type the real characters when you're actually typing the code, but this is about matching and searching.
2) In editors and pagers (like less), all matched strings on the display are often highlighted (rather than just the one you found). It's handy to use this highlighting to break text up visually when you're reading it.
Let's say you're doing a recursive diff of two directories and there are a handful of files with changes, and you want to look at them. you do: "diff -r dir1 dir2" and a bunch of changes scroll down the screen, so you pipe into less, and it's still a big mass of text. Some horizontal divisions might make it easier to read.
The diff output will have the string "diff -r dir1/foo dir2/foo" before each file foo.
If you search for the string diff or ^diff , less will highlight all the matched strings. But if you search for the string ^diff.* , then less will highlight the whole line found, which is very handy when you're parsing the file visually
3) When editing, if you have a long messy string to search for, just find something useful that the beginning and end of the string to search for. If you need to search for internationionlization, search for int.*ion. If it matches something else, you just hit a key or two to search again for the next one.
4) When browsing text in a file, many people just lean on the arrow keys to navigate around. I think it's always handier to search for a string rather than just blindly scrolling. And make the search simple, and use the "search next (or last)" keys to move around. Don't be too specific. Be lazy (or fuzzy or efficient). Regexes need to be precise if you are coding a task and you need to find data exactly. When you're editing, you're just using them to navigate, and you can be fuzzier.
I think this would be fair if they took the tax revenue and plowed it back into their virtual infrastructure - paving virtual roads, building virtual bridges, paying virtual police and firefighters, and so forth.
If the article is about the loss of the fatty sheath, why mention what nerve cells are called?
The base UCLA article explains that the fatty sheath (myelin) is around nerve fibers (axons) not nerve cells (neurons). The bad quote was copied from telegraph.co.uk, and I found it ironic in an article about loss of mental acuity.
My wild guess is that the British writer saw that the lead paragraph in the UCLA article was focused on baseball and it threw him a googly (howzat!) and he was overcome by the urge to rewrite.
Saying that go is harder than chess is like saying that the Empire State Building is harder to lift than the Chrysler Building; the complexity of both games is well beyond the horizon of human capability, and is likely to remain so. Because there are more possible moves in one ply of go than in one ply of chess doesn't make the whole game harder, better, or more interesting for people to play. If you like, you can play the games with a fast clock and go by your wits. Or if you want a bigger think, you can lengthen the time controls (or use a calendar instead of a clock). Droning on about which is harder is pompous, and if you're a go player and you can't beat an average player at chess, then how relevant is your opinion of how much easier chess is? (The reverse is also true, but it seems that the "our game is harder" rant is more the province of go players.)
Reminds my of Brian Kernighan's 1995 Usenix Tcl/Tk conference paper, Experience with Tcl/Tk for Scientific and Engineering Visualization.
Which raises the question, "Why will a school district need to customize its physics textbook?" Local value of C? Of G? Of pi? Or does the head of the high school physics department just want to chime in with his opinion on the existence of the Higgs boson?
While TFA mentions its reasons, is the point of this exercise really just to give a school district free and malleable source material that they can distort to suit their whim?