That's patently untrue, windows service packs always have good stuff in them. The reliability change from XP SP1 - SP2 was incredible. At any rate if you are talking about patches then yes they don't add new features but service pack updates most certainly do.
There are essentially two kinds of webmasters today
Those that use FF and hate IE, and consequentially develop bugs fixes for it after it is working properly FF.
Those that use IE and test for it because change is hard and difficult.
more than that though, the second category is frequently upper management. They look at a stats chart and see that 70% of the internet uses IE, so they ask their coders to design for IE. FF becomes collateral damage for MS specific programs that the coders use as modules. There is only so much time to work on any given project and the decision gets made to save time by rolling with these packages. There does appear to be a silver lining this cloud though.
I've been working at videosift for a while, and our FF base is at around 45% of 20,000 unique ip's a day. We actually offer features for ff that are not available to IE users because of problems with the IE browser. I see this a lot with newer sites. OSS has dropped the barrier to entry in the web market and consequently lots of new widgets are optimized for firefox. Sure there are lots of sprockets for IE, but we all know a widget is almost as good as a self sealing stem bolt.
I have long wondered whether or not technologies like this might be a way to combat the inevitable hearing loss that we will be seeing from the increase in popularity of gadgets like the iconic ipod. Perhaps with a set of these one could rock out at what you thought was a loud volume without damaging the ear drum.
I would have to agree with Mr. Dell as well, although i would ad another caveat. The competition between KDE and Gnome is truly aweful for the linux community. I mean hell the problems between the two renders simple things like the clipboard unoperable between certain programs. Before someone jumps on me i know that there are ways to fix this, but one should not need to fix the clipboard.
Imagine what would happen if they merged core functions and came up with a common base, then just added gui choices on top. You could then market them together, as one desktop solution. At any rate this is something that people come down vehemently on which one should be the defacto, personally i would rock KDE, i love it on my Slackware install, although the wireless utility is crap.
I suggest if you feel that way then you should hop over to http://www.metafilter.com./ The conversation there is almost always fantastic and they have developed the art of relevant hyperlinks into an art form. The group mind at metafilter basically says thou shalt not state opinions without in-line hyper links.
There is also an excellent article by Umberto Eco to much the same effect, but then again most slashdotters have probably never heard of venerated master of literary tradition.
http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_boo k.html
well i doubt that 4 or l8 will ever be included in websters, but i would wager TTYL will be there by the end of 2010, also yo is already included and is in fact middle english.
http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary/yo
I've worked at work places where the boss uses chat speak. Its a coming inevitability. People are always bitching about the decline of our times, yet each year we have more new inventions. I can't imagine having to write out commonly abbreviated phrases in irc or aim such as TIA, ROFL, RTFM, ATM, etc... Granted he's probably talking about email conversations, and i tend to stick to complete grammar or spelling in my communications. At any rate one mans stand for decency means squat against the Juggernaut that is changing perceptions.
Abbreviations are permitted as long as an abbreviation appears in Webster's New World College Dictionary and conforms either to the Chicago or APA styles"
Well since Webster's has a long tradition of incorporating evolving vernaculars into their dictionary i would say that with in 10 years they will probably have a lot of "chat speak." While i don't think you can be faulted for grading like that on tests or homework, if you are really just ignoring conversation from people on that grounds I would wonder what exactly it is that has made you so bitter.
On a more serious note, This is probably true the for the most part. However, i think that our ability to do other things has increased. For instance it is now pretty common to read stories with interspersed pictures or hyperlinks. These types of media immersion in our writing means that we are actually maintaining a higher level of content in most cases. Also i think that grammar nazi's like to be well nazi's about the topic. Most people can read even a truly awful sentence and still understand what was trying to be said.
Furthermore, IM, SMS, or 1337 speak requires recognizing some serious bastardizations of the English language, ones you might have never run into before, as well as large numbers of acronyms. Honestly how many acronyms do you know? I feel like these are higher level skills in comparison to simply reading a sentence. The sentence might not be pretty by quotidian standards, but it probably requires more going on upstairs to read it.
Finally the bit including our spelling is crap. We have spell checks, there are spell checks everywhere, in 97 you could effectively end an argument with some one by pointing out their poor spelling. This sort of ad hominem is no longer tolerated because at the worst some one can scream "stupid spell check," and we all nod in agreement, because it has happened to you.
Prior to the Bush administration the department of education had no real funding because they are largely hated by local school officials. Bush had to give them more funding when he started the hillariously named "No Child Left Behind Act." I believe that while the department of education gets more loot now schools don't get any of it. Which is why many states have toyed around with suing the government for requiring the mandatory tests that the aforementioned act requires
I blogged this, and found a good 7 more links, excerpt from post below.
"Korea to unveil Police Robots in 5 years. This project is being spearheaded by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology). Whom the team at engadget visited early last year.
Some of KAIST's earlier robots, Ahra and Maru.
Update: Meant to include a link to the KAIST homepage... Also they created synthetic skin for robots this week with a 1mm spacial resoltuion, which is the highest to date...."
lame p2p app? you dumbass, itunes is a piece of proprietary shit. I suggest you investigate azureus or any other high quality bittorrent program, also i'm willing to bet there is a larger library of bittorrent media than itunes media. Oooh and the kicker you can get it in teh lossless format. Although your ipod won't play those... what with it sucking and all.
Only a tard or a mac fan boy would buy such a drm laden piece of crap. Other mp3 players are much better for the sophisticated pirate. My archos plays divx, was cheaper, has nicer battery life, and also works as an external hard drive... pwn3d
I blogged this a solid month ago after posting it on metafilter.
including such tidbits as this one.
"This is very interesting and I don't want to diminish what this group has accomplished, but there is still a long way to go before we have a scaleable quantum computer.
The biggest problem, as I understand it, is not in our ability to mass produce quantum computing systems. It is creating multi-qubit entangled systems. In quantum computing, 2 8-qubit registers is not the equivalent to 1 16-cubit register, which is much harder to produce.
There was a recent FPP which linked to a number of articles, including one by a physicist who predicted that the largest qubit system allowed by the laws of nature was around 400 qubits. I don't agree with him, but we are certainly a long way from producing "usefully complex" quantum computers."
Slashdot Mirror
That's patently untrue, windows service packs always have good stuff in them. The reliability change from XP SP1 - SP2 was incredible. At any rate if you are talking about patches then yes they don't add new features but service pack updates most certainly do.
There are essentially two kinds of webmasters today Those that use FF and hate IE, and consequentially develop bugs fixes for it after it is working properly FF. Those that use IE and test for it because change is hard and difficult. more than that though, the second category is frequently upper management. They look at a stats chart and see that 70% of the internet uses IE, so they ask their coders to design for IE. FF becomes collateral damage for MS specific programs that the coders use as modules. There is only so much time to work on any given project and the decision gets made to save time by rolling with these packages. There does appear to be a silver lining this cloud though. I've been working at videosift for a while, and our FF base is at around 45% of 20,000 unique ip's a day. We actually offer features for ff that are not available to IE users because of problems with the IE browser. I see this a lot with newer sites. OSS has dropped the barrier to entry in the web market and consequently lots of new widgets are optimized for firefox. Sure there are lots of sprockets for IE, but we all know a widget is almost as good as a self sealing stem bolt.
I have long wondered whether or not technologies like this might be a way to combat the inevitable hearing loss that we will be seeing from the increase in popularity of gadgets like the iconic ipod. Perhaps with a set of these one could rock out at what you thought was a loud volume without damaging the ear drum.
VideoSift has garnered more than a million ip's in 2 months of operation. It is certainly worth checking out if you haven't already.
I would have to agree with Mr. Dell as well, although i would ad another caveat. The competition between KDE and Gnome is truly aweful for the linux community. I mean hell the problems between the two renders simple things like the clipboard unoperable between certain programs. Before someone jumps on me i know that there are ways to fix this, but one should not need to fix the clipboard. Imagine what would happen if they merged core functions and came up with a common base, then just added gui choices on top. You could then market them together, as one desktop solution. At any rate this is something that people come down vehemently on which one should be the defacto, personally i would rock KDE, i love it on my Slackware install, although the wireless utility is crap.
I suggest if you feel that way then you should hop over to http://www.metafilter.com./ The conversation there is almost always fantastic and they have developed the art of relevant hyperlinks into an art form. The group mind at metafilter basically says thou shalt not state opinions without in-line hyper links. There is also an excellent article by Umberto Eco to much the same effect, but then again most slashdotters have probably never heard of venerated master of literary tradition. http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_future_of_boo k.html
well i doubt that 4 or l8 will ever be included in websters, but i would wager TTYL will be there by the end of 2010, also yo is already included and is in fact middle english. http://www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/dictionary/yo
I've worked at work places where the boss uses chat speak. Its a coming inevitability. People are always bitching about the decline of our times, yet each year we have more new inventions. I can't imagine having to write out commonly abbreviated phrases in irc or aim such as TIA, ROFL, RTFM, ATM, etc... Granted he's probably talking about email conversations, and i tend to stick to complete grammar or spelling in my communications. At any rate one mans stand for decency means squat against the Juggernaut that is changing perceptions.
Abbreviations are permitted as long as an abbreviation appears in Webster's New World College Dictionary and conforms either to the Chicago or APA styles"
Well since Webster's has a long tradition of incorporating evolving vernaculars into their dictionary i would say that with in 10 years they will probably have a lot of "chat speak." While i don't think you can be faulted for grading like that on tests or homework, if you are really just ignoring conversation from people on that grounds I would wonder what exactly it is that has made you so bitter.
On a more serious note, This is probably true the for the most part. However, i think that our ability to do other things has increased. For instance it is now pretty common to read stories with interspersed pictures or hyperlinks. These types of media immersion in our writing means that we are actually maintaining a higher level of content in most cases. Also i think that grammar nazi's like to be well nazi's about the topic. Most people can read even a truly awful sentence and still understand what was trying to be said. Furthermore, IM, SMS, or 1337 speak requires recognizing some serious bastardizations of the English language, ones you might have never run into before, as well as large numbers of acronyms. Honestly how many acronyms do you know? I feel like these are higher level skills in comparison to simply reading a sentence. The sentence might not be pretty by quotidian standards, but it probably requires more going on upstairs to read it. Finally the bit including our spelling is crap. We have spell checks, there are spell checks everywhere, in 97 you could effectively end an argument with some one by pointing out their poor spelling. This sort of ad hominem is no longer tolerated because at the worst some one can scream "stupid spell check," and we all nod in agreement, because it has happened to you.
Prior to the Bush administration the department of education had no real funding because they are largely hated by local school officials. Bush had to give them more funding when he started the hillariously named "No Child Left Behind Act." I believe that while the department of education gets more loot now schools don't get any of it. Which is why many states have toyed around with suing the government for requiring the mandatory tests that the aforementioned act requires
I blogged this, and found a good 7 more links, excerpt from post below.
"Korea to unveil Police Robots in 5 years. This project is being spearheaded by KAIST (Korea Advanced Institute of Science & Technology). Whom the team at engadget visited early last year. Some of KAIST's earlier robots, Ahra and Maru.
mefi thread here.
Update: Meant to include a link to the KAIST homepage... Also they created synthetic skin for robots this week with a 1mm spacial resoltuion, which is the highest to date...."
lame p2p app? you dumbass, itunes is a piece of proprietary shit. I suggest you investigate azureus or any other high quality bittorrent program, also i'm willing to bet there is a larger library of bittorrent media than itunes media. Oooh and the kicker you can get it in teh lossless format. Although your ipod won't play those... what with it sucking and all.
Only a tard or a mac fan boy would buy such a drm laden piece of crap. Other mp3 players are much better for the sophisticated pirate. My archos plays divx, was cheaper, has nicer battery life, and also works as an external hard drive... pwn3d
I blogged this a solid month ago after posting it on metafilter.
including such tidbits as this one.
"This is very interesting and I don't want to diminish what this group has accomplished, but there is still a long way to go before we have a scaleable quantum computer.
The biggest problem, as I understand it, is not in our ability to mass produce quantum computing systems. It is creating multi-qubit entangled systems. In quantum computing, 2 8-qubit registers is not the equivalent to 1 16-cubit register, which is much harder to produce.
There was a recent FPP which linked to a number of articles, including one by a physicist who predicted that the largest qubit system allowed by the laws of nature was around 400 qubits. I don't agree with him, but we are certainly a long way from producing "usefully complex" quantum computers."
by justkevin