White Americans earning less than $75K/year are about twice as likely to be using the Net as black Americans in the same income bracket. Why...?
I suspect it's because the numbers don't tell the whole story. First off, there's a wide variation in people earning less than $75K a year; comparing people earning $60 to 75k a year would be more relevant. Also, while their incomes may be similar, I would bet that the average black person didn't get as much from their parents, and has more "dependents." That is, not children (although they may average more of those), but parents or other relatives who need financial assistance because they didn't earn much, didn't save much (or invest it in stocks), etc.
Re:Something going wrong is standard: "Throttle 10
on
NASA's X-37
·
· Score: 2
>What does it mean when the shuttle tells NASA they've throttled up to 104%?
It's based on the maximum thrust of the original shuttle engines, they've tweaked them for slightly higher performance since.
Re:just one thing, if something goes wrong
on
NASA's X-37
·
· Score: 2
>I think I remember terminal velocity being 186 miles an hour or something close to that
Near the ground, yes. Terminal velocity is dependent upon atmospheric drag. He started in the much thinner atmosphere at 59,000 feet, so less drag.
If you fell from orbit around the moon, there would be no terminal velocity limit -- you would just keep accelerating until the rather sudden stop.
Yes it is, Slashdot occasionally shows the problem when ad.blockstackers.com is acting up. Netscape won't render the page at all, IE5 will but then throws you into an error report page. (IE is still more usable, since you can go back and hit the stop button and see the page.) Hopefully Mozilla will handle this problem better.
I knew this would be the most controversial of my ideas, but if you think about it, bookmark management really does belong in a separate application...
I've felt this for several years now.
1) Navigator's "Edit bookmarks" thing looks like a separate application anyway, so there's no reason for it to be all in one. Netscape itself should provide the bookmark manager as a separate app, but part of the whole package.
2) people do have to use multiple browsers at times, and you could rig up the same bookmark manager to handle multiple browsers (Netscape, IE, kfm, Opera) instead of having each have its own bookmark list.
3) The bookmark manager could be opened separately, or even have a way to incorporate it into a menu; then rather than start the browser and then select the bookmark, you just click on the bookmark you want.
4) Navigator's bookmark management is woefully inferior to IE's. If I could fix one thing for Mozilla, that would be it. There's no reason to make me compile the whole app just to fix that manager.
5) Some places will want to have a bookmark czar, who maintains a global set of useful bookmarks (say, to the company's key website pages, suppliers, and competitors) that should be accessible to some group of people as part of their menu. Having a separate app would allow building a manager that supports a global and a local list of bookmarks.
Also, there should be a way (if there isn't already) to have each new page submitted to an external app. This app could then keep track of the page marks, just like the back and forward menus, but it would also keep a tree view of all links traversed so that if you (for example) go to slashdot, go to freshmeat, hit "back" and then go to a Slashdot story, freshmeat would still be visible as a previous path.
BTW, I agree that responder to you was rather out of line, that there was no reason to be so antagonistic.
P.S. To the mozilla crew, good work! I'm acquiver with anticipation...
Eliminate the Price-Anderson Act, and the civilian Nuclear Energy system would be shut down by the beancounters.
I'd blame it more on the lawyers and public hysteria. Just as Dow-Corning has been bankrupted by breast implant suits despite the latest scientific evidence claiming no link between implants, the threat of lawsuits is enough to cripple development of further plants. Yet the ones that exist in the U.S. work cleanly and safely, as opposed to coal plants which result in coal miner deaths, hydroelectric plants which disrupt the whole water ecosphere, fuel-burning plants which lead to spills, etc. Maybe solar plants (using mirrors to concentrate the light, so the environmental impact of the collectors is low), wind-powered ones, or salinity or thermal-gradient plants could do better, but not by much.
>Here in the U.S., DVDs typically cost as much or a little bit more than audio CDs
He was talking about drives, not discs. At least in the U.S., a decent IDE DVD-ROM drive, like the slot-loading Pioneer 103, costs a little over $100 most places.
One important distinction: what you are saying is certainly true of a multi-user, shared system like Unix or Win NT. However, for Win95 or the Mac, where there's usually only one user, it is a different story.
Both the Mac and Windows have a fundamental flaw that affects single and multi-user: they make the physical drive (partition) structure visible. On Windows, you see C:, D:, etc. On the Mac, you see named drives, slightly more elegant and immune to letter changes as drives are added, but still the same basic idea. How many hard drives does a Linux system have? It's not nearly so important to the user -- and for non-removable drives, there's no reason for it to be.
I've never seen a well-organized Mac or Windows system. Windows newly-added user documents placement puts them as a subdirectory of the system -- making it all the harder to back Windows up separately from the user data. And Windows apps generally ignore it, other than some of the latest ones from Microsoft. And the Mac advocates here have advocated *both* putting all apps under an Applications directory (presumably one per drive, btw), and not doing so in order to shorten the paths to find them.
The Linux file permissions mean most users *can't* put stuff everywhere and anywhere. Unless you have root, where are you going to put your stuff,/temp?
Where would you look for a user's file on Windows (or MacOS for that matter)? Just about anywhere in the file hierarchy. In contrast, a Linux user's file should be somewhere under the (much smaller)/home/ directory. So not only should WordPerfect automatically assume data files are in that directory, but you could also have a "show me all my WordPerfect files" button on the File Open dialog for WordPerfect and it could quickly look through her subdirectories and give her a list of them.
Note that you should probably also have a list of recently changed files for a given user. A file created five minutes ago is more likely to be the one I want to work on now than one I haven't touched in six months. And the WordPerfect file I saved five minutes ago is *extremely* likely to be the one I want when I start up WordPerfect. It could be that easy, without changing fundamentals of Linux.
BTW, why does Linux need to say the system is halted twice?
Or as Dr. Fred "Mythical Man-Month" Brooks said to us about presentations: "Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em, and then tell 'em what you done told 'em."
The possibility of damaging hardware while programming it can be mostly eliminated with decent documentation, and the rest of the cases can be handled by including a disclaimer.
This is simply not true. A vendor can't claim no warranty, and customers are going to claim they used them with the vendor code, not hacked, warranty-violating drivers. If Joe random programmer releases a new driver that gets 5% better performance but fries cards on a random basis, and a bunch of people download and use it, the vendor is going to get returns from those people. Since it's nigh-impossible to prove that it's the driver's fault, the vendor will end up having to replace those cards at their expense.
I must admit though, for those of us with a slightly higher intelegence, it sure is nice to have all you mindless worker ants making the world a better place for us.
Interesting spelling of intelligence, given the claim it is used in...
The problem is, as long as there are those who are willing to put in outrageous hours for next-to-nothing, that's what employers are going to expect and look for. Older, wiser people with responsibilities and common sense -- often the same people who in years past were the worker bees -- will find it harder to get employment.
One of my neighbors was asking me if I knew any programmers as her company was looking to hire. Then later she said it wasn't that they couldn't find anyone, it's just that the people they could find were so expensive. (Funny, I don't go in to my doctor's or lawyer's office and say "you do good work, but couldn't you do it for $35,000 a year?")
This is the Immersion FEELit mouse, which was first mentioned in the press in late '97. (Do a search on your favorite webcrawler.) It looks like they've finally gotten the deal down with Logitech to actually get them into production.
I think it could be a useful part of the GUI; perhaps I'm just clumsy, but I miss the button I meant to hit, or drag the folder I just meant to open, or do other similar mistakes often enough for it to be annoying. Perhaps this would help.
The drive is packaged by Acer, and was on the Linux compatibility lists. I haven't tried it with Linux yet, just (yeah, I know) Windows. It's IDE, and puts me up to the 4 device limit.
If you go SCSI, the Yamaha 4x/4x/16x drives look fairly appealing.
Re:It's not the features that bloat the ware
on
All Hail Bloatware
·
· Score: 2
>Why does Excel need a 3D flight simulator?
Because Microsoft doesn't credit individual programmers unless they sneak it in. Most game programs have a list of contributors in the manual, down to the guy who beta-tested it for a couple of hours one day. Microsoft software? Rarely is there credit. So Microsoft programmers find a sneaky way to sign their names to the work.
If you play the flight sim, you'll notice a scrolling list of the people involved in excel on one of the terrain features.
DVD-RAM drives write DVD-RAM discs only, not CD-Rs. Those discs have a hard case rather like a 3 1/2" floppy. (Apparently you can remove the case and some DVD-ROMs will read it.) If you need permanent archival storage of files that will fit on a CD-R, they still win on price and flexibility (since almost anyone can read them.) DVD-RW drives, with caseless DVDs, are anticipated for later this year or early next.
My recommendation, if you're buying for personal use, is to get a cheapish CD-R now. I got one for $100 after a $50 rebate from Staples; at 2x/6x it's slow, but perfectly usable. Save the money and upgrade to writable DVDs once the technology has stabilized.
>But why would IBM want to make their products more "acceptable" to the open-source community?
Because they want the contributions of open source developers. IBM isn't selling the software, they're selling services based on it. So getting those free open source eyeballs is a big plus; it makes the software better, and thus more competitive with non-free alternatives.
>QT went free and open-source, yet was hated since it still was commercial.
Well, QT isn't as hated as it was. But there's still discomfort at helping develop something that someone else is making money off of (as QT has both free and non-free sales). Since IBM isn't doing this directly, making the license as friendly as possible allows them to do this. QT can't make their license freer than it is without damaging their business model.
Slashdot Mirror
White Americans earning less than $75K/year are about twice as likely to be using the Net as black Americans in the same income bracket. Why...?
I suspect it's because the numbers don't tell the whole story. First off, there's a wide variation in people earning less than $75K a year; comparing people earning $60 to 75k a year would be more relevant. Also, while their incomes may be similar, I would bet that the average black person didn't get as much from their parents, and has more "dependents." That is, not children (although they may average more of those), but parents or other relatives who need financial assistance because they didn't earn much, didn't save much (or invest it in stocks), etc.
>What does it mean when the shuttle tells NASA they've throttled up to 104%?
It's based on the maximum thrust of the original shuttle engines, they've tweaked them for slightly higher performance since.
>I think I remember terminal velocity being 186 miles an hour or something close to that
Near the ground, yes. Terminal velocity is dependent upon atmospheric drag. He started in the much thinner atmosphere at 59,000 feet, so less drag.
If you fell from orbit around the moon, there would be no terminal velocity limit -- you would just keep accelerating until the rather sudden stop.
>This isn't a problem with Netscape.
Yes it is, Slashdot occasionally shows the problem when ad.blockstackers.com is acting up. Netscape won't render the page at all, IE5 will but then throws you into an error report page. (IE is still more usable, since you can go back and hit the stop button and see the page.) Hopefully Mozilla will handle this problem better.
>Look I have used Java, it is slow, anybody who says other wise is utterly clueless.
That means the Java *implementations* you have used are slow. It says nothing about the language itself.
Learn the difference, it's important.
(Note that I program almost exclusively in C++, I just hate inaccurate statements.)
It says IPO shares will be made available to, among others, friends of Red Hat.
:-)
I'm a friend, really I am! Can I get some please?
I knew this would be the most controversial of my ideas, but if you think about it, bookmark management really does belong in a separate application...
I've felt this for several years now.
1) Navigator's "Edit bookmarks" thing looks like a separate application anyway, so there's no reason for it to be all in one. Netscape itself should provide the bookmark manager as a separate app, but part of the whole package.
2) people do have to use multiple browsers at times, and you could rig up the same bookmark manager to handle multiple browsers (Netscape, IE, kfm, Opera) instead of having each have its own bookmark list.
3) The bookmark manager could be opened separately, or even have a way to incorporate it into a menu; then rather than start the browser and then select the bookmark, you just click on the bookmark you want.
4) Navigator's bookmark management is woefully inferior to IE's. If I could fix one thing for Mozilla, that would be it. There's no reason to make me compile the whole app just to fix that manager.
5) Some places will want to have a bookmark czar, who maintains a global set of useful bookmarks (say, to the company's key website pages, suppliers, and competitors) that should be accessible to some group of people as part of their menu. Having a separate app would allow building a manager that supports a global and a local list of bookmarks.
Also, there should be a way (if there isn't already) to have each new page submitted to an external app. This app could then keep track of the page marks, just like the back and forward menus, but it would also keep a tree view of all links traversed so that if you (for example) go to slashdot, go to freshmeat, hit "back" and then go to a Slashdot story, freshmeat would still be visible as a previous path.
BTW, I agree that responder to you was rather out of line, that there was no reason to be so antagonistic.
P.S. To the mozilla crew, good work! I'm acquiver with anticipation...
Eliminate the Price-Anderson Act, and the civilian Nuclear Energy system would be shut down by the beancounters.
I'd blame it more on the lawyers and public hysteria. Just as Dow-Corning has been bankrupted by breast implant suits despite the latest scientific evidence claiming no link between implants, the threat of lawsuits is enough to cripple development of further plants. Yet the ones that exist in the U.S. work cleanly and safely, as opposed to coal plants which result in coal miner deaths, hydroelectric plants which disrupt the whole water ecosphere, fuel-burning plants which lead to spills, etc. Maybe solar plants (using mirrors to concentrate the light, so the environmental impact of the collectors is low), wind-powered ones, or salinity or thermal-gradient plants could do better, but not by much.
>Here in the U.S., DVDs typically cost as much or a little bit more than audio CDs
He was talking about drives, not discs. At least in the U.S., a decent IDE DVD-ROM drive, like the slot-loading Pioneer 103, costs a little over $100 most places.
You mean "last year's earnings". AMD only [...]
Read the header again, it's Intel whose "lower than expected earnings" were still quite juicy. Damn, I was an idiot to sell my Intel...
PNG does not support animation. I believe there's another format (MNG?) for mini-animations.
One important distinction: what you are saying is certainly true of a multi-user, shared system like Unix or Win NT. However, for Win95 or the Mac, where there's usually only one user, it is a different story.
/temp?
Both the Mac and Windows have a fundamental flaw that affects single and multi-user: they make the physical drive (partition) structure visible. On Windows, you see C:, D:, etc. On the Mac, you see named drives, slightly more elegant and immune to letter changes as drives are added, but still the same basic idea. How many hard drives does a Linux system have? It's not nearly so important to the user -- and for non-removable drives, there's no reason for it to be.
I've never seen a well-organized Mac or Windows system. Windows newly-added user documents placement puts them as a subdirectory of the system -- making it all the harder to back Windows up separately from the user data. And Windows apps generally ignore it, other than some of the latest ones from Microsoft. And the Mac advocates here have advocated *both* putting all apps under an Applications directory (presumably one per drive, btw), and not doing so in order to shorten the paths to find them.
The Linux file permissions mean most users *can't* put stuff everywhere and anywhere. Unless you have root, where are you going to put your stuff,
But Linux's design actually can make this easier.
/home/ directory. So not only should WordPerfect automatically assume data files are in that directory, but you could also have a "show me all my WordPerfect files" button on the File Open dialog for WordPerfect and it could quickly look through her subdirectories and give her a list of them.
Where would you look for a user's file on Windows (or MacOS for that matter)? Just about anywhere in the file hierarchy. In contrast, a Linux user's file should be somewhere under the (much smaller)
Note that you should probably also have a list of recently changed files for a given user. A file created five minutes ago is more likely to be the one I want to work on now than one I haven't touched in six months. And the WordPerfect file I saved five minutes ago is *extremely* likely to be the one I want when I start up WordPerfect. It could be that easy, without changing fundamentals of Linux.
BTW, why does Linux need to say the system is halted twice?
However, there should be a way to distribute information. A way for new, smalltime companies to say "here we are, and this is what we do".
Sounds kind of like a web site to me...
Or as Dr. Fred "Mythical Man-Month" Brooks said to us about presentations:
"Tell 'em what you're going to tell 'em, tell 'em, and then tell 'em what you done told 'em."
The possibility of damaging hardware while programming it can be mostly eliminated with decent documentation, and the rest of the cases can be handled by including a disclaimer.
This is simply not true. A vendor can't claim no warranty, and customers are going to claim they used them with the vendor code, not hacked, warranty-violating drivers. If Joe random programmer releases a new driver that gets 5% better performance but fries cards on a random basis, and a bunch of people download and use it, the vendor is going to get returns from those people. Since it's nigh-impossible to prove that it's the driver's fault, the vendor will end up having to replace those cards at their expense.
I must admit though, for those of us with a slightly higher intelegence, it sure is nice to have all you mindless worker ants making the world a better place for us.
Interesting spelling of intelligence, given the claim it is used in...
The problem is, as long as there are those who are willing to put in outrageous hours for next-to-nothing, that's what employers are going to expect and look for. Older, wiser people with responsibilities and common sense -- often the same people who in years past were the worker bees -- will find it harder to get employment.
One of my neighbors was asking me if I knew any programmers as her company was looking to hire. Then later she said it wasn't that they couldn't find anyone, it's just that the people they could find were so expensive. (Funny, I don't go in to my doctor's or lawyer's office and say "you do good work, but couldn't you do it for $35,000 a year?")
This is the Immersion FEELit mouse, which was first mentioned in the press in late '97. (Do a search on your favorite webcrawler.) It looks like they've finally gotten the deal down with Logitech to actually get them into production.
I think it could be a useful part of the GUI; perhaps I'm just clumsy, but I miss the button I meant to hit, or drag the folder I just meant to open, or do other similar mistakes often enough for it to be annoying. Perhaps this would help.
>This is getting quite repetitive.
'Twas meant to be a joke -- the "OW!" was meant to be my response to someone smacking me upside the head for saying this...
No one has suggested how awesome a Beowulf cluster of these would be...OW!
The drive is packaged by Acer, and was on the Linux compatibility lists. I haven't tried it with Linux yet, just (yeah, I know) Windows. It's IDE, and puts me up to the 4 device limit.
If you go SCSI, the Yamaha 4x/4x/16x drives look fairly appealing.
>Why does Excel need a 3D flight simulator?
Because Microsoft doesn't credit individual programmers unless they sneak it in. Most game programs have a list of contributors in the manual, down to the guy who beta-tested it for a couple of hours one day. Microsoft software? Rarely is there credit. So Microsoft programmers find a sneaky way to sign their names to the work.
If you play the flight sim, you'll notice a scrolling list of the people involved in excel on one of the terrain features.
DVD-RAM drives write DVD-RAM discs only, not CD-Rs. Those discs have a hard case rather like a 3 1/2" floppy. (Apparently you can remove the case and some DVD-ROMs will read it.) If you need permanent archival storage of files that will fit on a CD-R, they still win on price and flexibility (since almost anyone can read them.) DVD-RW drives, with caseless DVDs, are anticipated for later this year or early next.
My recommendation, if you're buying for personal use, is to get a cheapish CD-R now. I got one for $100 after a $50 rebate from Staples; at 2x/6x it's slow, but perfectly usable. Save the money and upgrade to writable DVDs once the technology has stabilized.
"Also during 1998 [...] Windows 98 was 17.2 percent, up 39 percent over 1997."
Perhaps this is a trivial complaint, but Windows 98 came out in 1998. So how could its shipments possibly go up 39 percent from 1997 to 1998?
>But why would IBM want to make their products more "acceptable" to the open-source community?
Because they want the contributions of open source developers. IBM isn't selling the software, they're selling services based on it. So getting those free open source eyeballs is a big plus; it makes the software better, and thus more competitive with non-free alternatives.
>QT went free and open-source, yet was hated since
it still was commercial.
Well, QT isn't as hated as it was. But there's still discomfort at helping develop something that someone else is making money off of (as QT has both free and non-free sales). Since IBM isn't doing this directly, making the license as friendly as possible allows them to do this. QT can't make their license freer than it is without damaging their business model.