I wanted to watch the video on the magazine, for the geekiness of it, and was bored, watching the fancy graphics, while I was waiting for the name of the advertised product (which I have already forgotten, as the tech was more impressive than the name of an unknown product) to appear.
Now that I've seen what it's all about, and the novelty is lost, there is no way I am going to wait 45 seconds per page, to watch a <censored> video, while leafing through a magazine. In fact, I won't even notice there is a video, as it took a couple of seconds for the video to switch on, by which time I will have turned the page. If they cannot attract my attention with what's printed on the page, I am not going to see their ad!
This new technology does offer some interesting possibilities, though. Imagine, e.g., that I somehow get hold of my competitor's video, before it is published. I then create a video for my competing product, whose audio track is (inverse of competitor's audio track) + "competitor's products are useless" + (pitch for my product), then pay the magazine handsomely to publish my ad next to the competitor's, so that they are both activated when readers open the magazine at that page. Loads of fun!
...and I had a very hard time understanding why one would put anything other than a 7 inside the parentheses.
Then it dawned on me that, apparently, some US students interpret the "equals" sign as a "write the result of the preceding arithmetic operations" sign, which the students promptly do. Then, they see the "+2" following the parentheses, and are completely dumbfounded by it, so they assume there is a missing "write the result of the preceding arithmetic operations" sign, which they add, so that they can enter the result of "9+2" after it. Presumably, "+" does not mean just "plus", but “add these numbers and write the result after the "write the result of the preceding arithmetic operations" sign”.
Actually, the program might be able to help: From what I understand, the Linear A alphabet is related to the linear B alphabet, which has been deciphered, even though the languages may be different. We know a bit about context (what we have are mostly inventories), and we even know the meaning of one word: the one next to the total of the amounts in the inventory probably means "total". Furthermore, that word, ku-ro, is similar to a form of a Greek word for "total" ("houlon"), so it is very likely that the language is at least indoeuropean in origin. One could try using various indoeuropean languages as candidates for the related language, until the program comes up with something meanngful.
Now, if only we had a larger sample of the language of the disk of Phaestos...
I don't know of any way to explain addiction in terms that a kid can truly understand.
While I don't believe I am addicted to any substance, from what I've seen in people who smoke, it's the same as with food. When you are hungry, it is very hard not to eat something, if food is available. And, if it isn't, finding something to eat is all you can think of.
This was on an x86 (a pentium 4), so my guess is that Linux no longer ignores some of the bits that the author claims that are ignored, which is why I mentioned the distribution and kernel version.
***Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World".***
Not only does it not say "Hello World", it doesn't even run. I tried it on a Fedora 11 system
with kernel 2.6.30.10-105.2.23, and the last two versions of tiny.asm die with:
Killed
137
The "file" command claims that the tiny executable is "ELF 32-bit invalid byte order (SYSV)", which probably explains why.
The shortest version that does run is the 64 byte version, but, even for that, the "file" command has bad things to say: "ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, corrupted section header size".
I'm surprised that the twelve most commonly used browsers include several that I hadn't heard about (most of which are not that good, if one is to believe TFA) but do not include SeaMonkey. Perhaps it is too much like Firefox+Thunderbird for people to actually want to use it.
1) I'm not geeky enough to figure out whatever the hell gibberish code that's written in
You don't need to touch the code.
, and I can't find any kind of GUI for setting that up.
In the adblock options, click on the name of your filter subscription, e.g., "Filter subscription: EasyPrivacy+EasyList" and hit the "Delete" key. How hard can that be? Better still, when installing the plugin, and you are asked to select a subscription, don't select any!
if I'm reading it right, blocks ad-server domains, not content domains.
It blocks URLs, using regular expressions. If you want to build your own black list, then, whenever you see an ad that you want to block, simply right click on the ad and select "Adblock Plus: Block Image..." from the context menu. You will be presented with a dialog where an appropriate regular expression is already selected, so you don't even have to bother figuring out how to write regular expressions Just hit "Add filter", and you're on your way to building your personalized black list.
As an example, say you are presented with an ad image from the http://spamareus.com/ads/ad1234.jpg URL. When you invoke the Adblock dialog, the preselected regular expression will be http://spamareus.com/ads/* , meaning that everything from the ads folder will be blocked, which is usually what you want.
The problem is that AdBlock's only mode is "always on, except on whitelisted sites." If it had a mode of "always off, except for blacklisted sites" then I think a lot more people would get behind it
Actually, Adblock works exactly as you describe. It allows everything except some blacklisted sites. If you don't want to use someone else's list of blacklisted sites, simply do not subscribe to a list such as Easylist (or delete it if you have already subscribed to one) and only use your own black list. White lists are there to allow you to visit sites that have been blacklisted in one of your subscriptions.
Although we already have non-Latin domain names, these were rather inconvenient for languages that are based on alphabets that are not derived from the Latin alphabet. E.g., if you wanted a Greek domain, you'd get something like <bunch_of_Greek_characters>.gr, which requires keyboard switching to type, and is more inconvenient than simply typing an all-Latin name. Turning that "gr" into Greek may actually make browsing Greek sites easier, as the keyboard may be left permanently switched to Greek, while typing.
The same goes for Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.
It goes without saying that there is a lot of money to be made here. Not only are non-English web sites now going to have an incentive to actually register non-Latin domain names, they're still going to keep renewing the old Latin domain names as well, so that the sites remain accessible from the English-speaking parts of the world.
The way to get it right is to make the ribbon interface optional.
As I see it, there are three kinds of office users:
People who use office as a glorified typewriter. They type text, separate paragraphs by hitting the enter key, and the most formatting they ever do is use the occasional bold or italics. For these people, the user interface is mostly irrelevant, so the fancier it looks, the better. Since they don't use it, it might as well look nice.
People whose use office a lot, such as secretaries, PHBs who write reports and memos all the time, etc. These people can, through continuous exposure, actually learn the new interface, be it good or bad. Some will like it, some will not. All of them will learn to use the new interface instinctively, so these are the people who will point out how they miss the new interface when it is not available.
People who use office occasionally. These people are never going to familiarize themselves enough with the new interface, to become proficient. These are the people who point out the flaws in the new interface, because, to them, they really are insurmountable obstacles.
Supporting both interfaces, would make people in all three groups happy. Microsoft have focused only on the first two groups. After all, if they had offered both interfaces, the new interface would have had to survive on its merits, a concept with which they do not seem very comfortable.
I would place myself in the third group. I occasionally have to edit a heavily formatted word document, and I type the occasional letter. I've been using Office 2007 for more than a year now, and each time, the experience has been painful. Some times you can hear me swearing from down the hall, some times I give up in disgust and re-type the whole thing in OpenOffice, compatibility with MS-Office be damned, and finally, last week, I gave up and installed the Classic menu add-ins for Office 2007 which almost make Office 2007 usable again.
These wonderful new glasses have a slider, that you're supposed to tweak until whatever you want to look at comes in focus, every single time you want to focus on something, i.e., all of the time!
How is this superior to varifocals, where all you're required to do, to focus anywhere you like, is to just look at the damn thing? (Yes, it's a bit more complicated than that, but once you've used varifocals for a few days, it becomes completely instictive.)
I' ve been wearing varifocals for a couple of years now, and I heartily recommend them.
Windows XP was released in 2001. If you asked for support and patches for, say, Mozilla Phoenix 0.3 (released 2002), you'd get laughed out of pretty much everywhere.
Reminds me of the Donald Duck story The Hypno-Gun, where Donald's nephews had a gun with a spinning disk in front, that they would point at each other shouting "Bing! You're hypnotized!" and pretend that they had been hypnotized. Of course the gun was just a toy, only working on Donald, with the expected hilarious results.
I won't disagree that the way Greek cities, especially Athens, are built is a mess. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for this problem. If one exists, it is unlikely that it will involve taking detailed street view images, however!
The DPA on Monday also ordered a Greek mapping site, kapou.gr, to suspend a similar street-level image service until it provides further privacy clarifications and uses face-blurring on its online images. The Greek site on Tuesday said it had stopped posting photographs while it was upgrading its service.
Slashdot Mirror
I wanted to watch the video on the magazine, for the geekiness of it, and was bored, watching the fancy graphics, while I was waiting for the name of the advertised product (which I have already forgotten, as the tech was more impressive than the name of an unknown product) to appear.
Now that I've seen what it's all about, and the novelty is lost, there is no way I am going to wait 45 seconds per page, to watch a <censored> video, while leafing through a magazine. In fact, I won't even notice there is a video, as it took a couple of seconds for the video to switch on, by which time I will have turned the page. If they cannot attract my attention with what's printed on the page, I am not going to see their ad!
This new technology does offer some interesting possibilities, though. Imagine, e.g., that I somehow get hold of my competitor's video, before it is published. I then create a video for my competing product, whose audio track is (inverse of competitor's audio track) + "competitor's products are useless" + (pitch for my product), then pay the magazine handsomely to publish my ad next to the competitor's, so that they are both activated when readers open the magazine at that page. Loads of fun!
there must be prior art.
There is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omphalos
...and I had a very hard time understanding why one would put anything other than a 7 inside the parentheses.
Then it dawned on me that, apparently, some US students interpret the "equals" sign as a "write the result of the preceding arithmetic operations" sign, which the students promptly do. Then, they see the "+2" following the parentheses, and are completely dumbfounded by it, so they assume there is a missing "write the result of the preceding arithmetic operations" sign, which they add, so that they can enter the result of "9+2" after it. Presumably, "+" does not mean just "plus", but “add these numbers and write the result after the "write the result of the preceding arithmetic operations" sign”.
Wow!
Actually, the program might be able to help: From what I understand, the Linear A alphabet is related to the linear B alphabet, which has been deciphered, even though the languages may be different. We know a bit about context (what we have are mostly inventories), and we even know the meaning of one word: the one next to the total of the amounts in the inventory probably means "total". Furthermore, that word, ku-ro, is similar to a form of a Greek word for "total" ("houlon"), so it is very likely that the language is at least indoeuropean in origin. One could try using various indoeuropean languages as candidates for the related language, until the program comes up with something meanngful.
Now, if only we had a larger sample of the language of the disk of Phaestos...
I don't know of any way to explain addiction in terms that a kid can truly understand.
While I don't believe I am addicted to any substance, from what I've seen in people who smoke, it's the same as with food. When you are hungry, it is very hard not to eat something, if food is available. And, if it isn't, finding something to eat is all you can think of.
You are saying that out of 62 of the users who are getting the ballot box, in the past month 61 have chosen IE and one has chosen to switch?
No, he's saying that 0.62 have chosen to switch!
This used to be true on x86 but isn't anymore.
This was on an x86 (a pentium 4), so my guess is that Linux no longer ignores some of the bits that the author claims that are ignored, which is why I mentioned the distribution and kernel version.
***Yeah, but the 45-byte program doesn't say "Hello World".***
Not only does it not say "Hello World", it doesn't even run. I tried it on a Fedora 11 system with kernel 2.6.30.10-105.2.23, and the last two versions of tiny.asm die with:
Killed
137
The "file" command claims that the tiny executable is "ELF 32-bit invalid byte order (SYSV)", which probably explains why.
The shortest version that does run is the 64 byte version, but, even for that, the "file" command has bad things to say: "ELF 32-bit LSB executable, Intel 80386, version 1 (SYSV), statically linked, corrupted section header size".
I'm surprised that the twelve most commonly used browsers include several that I hadn't heard about (most of which are not that good, if one is to believe TFA) but do not include SeaMonkey. Perhaps it is too much like Firefox+Thunderbird for people to actually want to use it.
1) I'm not geeky enough to figure out whatever the hell gibberish code that's written in
You don't need to touch the code.
, and I can't find any kind of GUI for setting that up.
In the adblock options, click on the name of your filter subscription, e.g., "Filter subscription: EasyPrivacy+EasyList" and hit the "Delete" key. How hard can that be? Better still, when installing the plugin, and you are asked to select a subscription, don't select any!
if I'm reading it right, blocks ad-server domains, not content domains.
It blocks URLs, using regular expressions. If you want to build your own black list, then, whenever you see an ad that you want to block, simply right click on the ad and select "Adblock Plus: Block Image..." from the context menu. You will be presented with a dialog where an appropriate regular expression is already selected, so you don't even have to bother figuring out how to write regular expressions Just hit "Add filter", and you're on your way to building your personalized black list.
As an example, say you are presented with an ad image from the http://spamareus.com/ads/ad1234.jpg URL. When you invoke the Adblock dialog, the preselected regular expression will be http://spamareus.com/ads/* , meaning that everything from the ads folder will be blocked, which is usually what you want.
The problem is that AdBlock's only mode is "always on, except on whitelisted sites." If it had a mode of "always off, except for blacklisted sites" then I think a lot more people would get behind it
Actually, Adblock works exactly as you describe. It allows everything except some blacklisted sites. If you don't want to use someone else's list of blacklisted sites, simply do not subscribe to a list such as Easylist (or delete it if you have already subscribed to one) and only use your own black list. White lists are there to allow you to visit sites that have been blacklisted in one of your subscriptions.
...some way out of here.
Each state just changes the picture of the coins (except 1€ coin)
1€ coins also have different "picture" (i.e., national) sides: http://www.ecb.int/euro/coins/1euro/html/index.en.html
Although we already have non-Latin domain names, these were rather inconvenient for languages that are based on alphabets that are not derived from the Latin alphabet. E.g., if you wanted a Greek domain, you'd get something like <bunch_of_Greek_characters>.gr, which requires keyboard switching to type, and is more inconvenient than simply typing an all-Latin name. Turning that "gr" into Greek may actually make browsing Greek sites easier, as the keyboard may be left permanently switched to Greek, while typing.
The same goes for Cyrillic, Arabic, Chinese, etc.
It goes without saying that there is a lot of money to be made here. Not only are non-English web sites now going to have an incentive to actually register non-Latin domain names, they're still going to keep renewing the old Latin domain names as well, so that the sites remain accessible from the English-speaking parts of the world.
Actually, SideWiki will allow us to both post and moderate on slashdot at the same time!
How quaint!
Maybe Open Office will get it right.
The way to get it right is to make the ribbon interface optional.
As I see it, there are three kinds of office users:
Supporting both interfaces, would make people in all three groups happy. Microsoft have focused only on the first two groups. After all, if they had offered both interfaces, the new interface would have had to survive on its merits, a concept with which they do not seem very comfortable.
I would place myself in the third group. I occasionally have to edit a heavily formatted word document, and I type the occasional letter. I've been using Office 2007 for more than a year now, and each time, the experience has been painful. Some times you can hear me swearing from down the hall, some times I give up in disgust and re-type the whole thing in OpenOffice, compatibility with MS-Office be damned, and finally, last week, I gave up and installed the Classic menu add-ins for Office 2007 which almost make Office 2007 usable again.
These wonderful new glasses have a slider, that you're supposed to tweak until whatever you want to look at comes in focus, every single time you want to focus on something, i.e., all of the time!
How is this superior to varifocals, where all you're required to do, to focus anywhere you like, is to just look at the damn thing? (Yes, it's a bit more complicated than that, but once you've used varifocals for a few days, it becomes completely instictive.)
I' ve been wearing varifocals for a couple of years now, and I heartily recommend them.
ÎὠμÎÎ á¼(TM)ÎÎÎνÎÎή á¼ÏfÏÎν...
I couldn't have put it better myself!
Q: Why does it take years for people to decode those scripts? A: Because it is all greek to us.
And why did it take those Greek computer scientists a lot less?
That's right: because it was all Greek to them!
I demand that these tapes may or may not be the Apollo video!
Windows XP was released in 2001. If you asked for support and patches for, say, Mozilla Phoenix 0.3 (released 2002), you'd get laughed out of pretty much everywhere.
If you wanted support and patches, yes. But if you wanted to install it, you wouldn't have much trouble.
Reminds me of the Donald Duck story The Hypno-Gun, where Donald's nephews had a gun with a spinning disk in front, that they would point at each other shouting "Bing! You're hypnotized!" and pretend that they had been hypnotized. Of course the gun was just a toy, only working on Donald, with the expected hilarious results.
I won't disagree that the way Greek cities, especially Athens, are built is a mess. Unfortunately, there is no simple solution for this problem. If one exists, it is unlikely that it will involve taking detailed street view images, however!
The DPA on Monday also ordered a Greek mapping site, kapou.gr, to suspend a similar street-level image service until it provides further privacy clarifications and uses face-blurring on its online images. The Greek site on Tuesday said it had stopped posting photographs while it was upgrading its service.