If such a discovery were ever to be made, the only responsible course for the discoverer would be to keep the discovery a secret, and to form, as discretely as possible, a society of Custodians of the knowledge, whose task it would be to keep the O(n) solution safe. By applying their knowledge in secret beneficial ways, they could subtly steer the course of Mankind's history towards a future time when they would be sufficiently prepared to deal with the consequences of the O(n) solution.
The organization would, of course, have to be composed of all the top computer scientists in the world, and would have to continually recruit all of those intelligent enough and close enough to coming upon the discovery on their own. On the other hand, in the classrooms, the old dogma would have to perpetuated to keep society safe from the disastrous effects of a premature disclosure.
If--and I say IF--one of us slashdotters should stumble upon such a discovery, I should hope he would realize the Promethean significance of it, and refrain from submitting it to Taco or whomever. I have been studying and thinking about the science of Psychohistory for a long time, and have meditated profoundly over the works of Harri Sheldon. I would be glad to provide my aid in constituting the Society. And please respond via private e-mail.
Am I the only one who thinks LyX is a far better way of producing documents than *Word or *Office? While granted the LaTeX-based paradigm is substantially different, LyX manages to shield the user from a most of the really hairy details of LaTeX itself.
So, with all this warring about *Word and *Office, I'd like to know whether there are many slashdotters using LyX who are just keeping silent about it, or skipping this (to them) irrelevant topic.
How about making "virtual desktops", similar to Evolution's virtual folders: instead of simply having desktops number 1-8, you could have named virtual desktops. Any particular window could then exist on several desktops at the same time. You could switch between different "views" of the same windows by flipping between virtual desktops. This would save a lot of time resizing and switching between windows.
Another nice thing to implement would be an xterm that can be connected to other xterms to produce a pipe, simply by right-clicking-and-dragging. Imagine, you open a pipe window, drag the output from window#1 to the pipe. Flip to another virtual window, where you have the same pipe open, and drag the from pipe to window#2. Now you can type away on window#1 and the output gets piped to window#2. It sounds complicated but I imagine this could be very nice for a power user.:) Can this be done in sawfish? Anyone care to mail me with some ideas?
They could save even more money and make their schools even better by encouraging students to work on the Free Software: the students learn about computer science and get credits, while the government gets some nice mail clients at no cost.
If less people had the conviction to die doing crazy evil things, and more people sat around in jammies eating Shreddies, the world would be a better place
I think if the software were distributed only as source and under GPL, maybe even using CVS, then the courts would have a very hard time characterizing Heroine as a vendor, and finding an implicit warranty.
And if a Debian packager put the stuff together, again, there wouldn't be any imputable "warranty".
As for liability in tort: it would be impossible to establish tort in a GPL project where there were many contributors working for free, and where everyone, including the "user" is allowed to modify the code. Where everyone is allowed to read, write and use the code, there are no "merchants" and "users" and hence no assumption of warranty.
I mean, could Alan Cox sue Linus for screwing something up? Or could you sue a newbie for submitting a shitty patch? Who told you the patch was good?
Anything better than Esound?
on
DeMuDi Linux
·
· Score: 1
Does linux have any decent solution for playing multiple streams at the same time, and automatically mixing them?
I wish I could listen to mp3s and still be able to get alarms and reminders announced to me via festival.
I tried esound, and the distortion and overhead are unbearable. I'm using an 750 Athlon, too.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has powerful muscles, but no personality. -Einstein
Hm... we should take care not to make the muscle our god; it has powerful personality, but no intellect.
Actually, if the criticism of banner ads is based on the low clickthru rate, there is no chance that interruption ads will do any better: Supposing you wanted to read the daily news and, in order to do so, forced yourself to sit through a 20 second commercial. After watching it, are you seriously going to click the "For More Information..." button? Not likely.
So, implicitly, adopting interruption ads means abandoning click-thrus as a measure of success. But if you weren't measuring success by click-thrus in the first place, then how do you know that banner ads don't work?
Personally, I think banner ads should base themselves on the metaphor of a coupon: they should be easy to clip (a single click), and cause as little interruption as possible. They should persist, i.e. remain in a "Coupon Box" until the customer decides to use it. There'd be a couple of benefits over real coupons: you won't lose them, you don't need scissors.
The problem with a lot of discussions over web advertising is that people look at it as a kind of warfare: Advertisers try to wage a brainwashing operation on Consumers, who, in turn, try to resist as much as possible while extracting a maximal amount of free services. I think that's a lose-lose paradigm. Instead, we should view advertisements as a means of matching buyers and sellers. This can be done through a series of pareto optimal transactions.
If I, as a consumer, come across a coupon for a product that I want, I'll feel the urge to clip it. The consumer will likely click if the discount offered by the coupon is greater than the cost (inconvenience) of clicking it.
And here's a really interesting consequence: If you then assign an estimated cost value to the inconvenience of clicking, you can compare that against the value of the coupon. Then you chart the value of the coupon against click-thrus. This would give you some pretty interesting consumer-preference information. Click-thru rates would finally provide some sort of meaningful economic data.
In addition to consumer preference data, the web-coupon would contain information of where it came from. Thus, you would be able to match the ad to the final sale. This, of course, would be very valuable to advertisers and merchants in terms of deciding how much and where to advertise.
So I think coupons, designed to be as little intrusive as possible, would work really well for merchants. And for consumers too, since it minimizes the extent of useless annoyance, while maximizing the number of Pareto optimal web-based transactions.
You're right about right clicking. I do that too. However, advertising is targeted to the masses--and I have a feeling less than 80% of people do what you described.
In addition to making it easy for lazy people to save the coupon, it also would consume less memory than having an extra window open. Furthermore, by storing the coupon in a "box", you could put off looking into it for as long as you want until the coupon expires. You wouldn't leave a window open for days just because of a discount offer.
When you do feel like shopping, you might look through your coupon box to look for something you thought was interesting earlier.
I guess my point boils down to convenience, mindshare and metaphors. But I think those things are central to advertising.
BTW, I look at the JWZ site. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
After making that last posting, I got the sudden urge to try to register something like clickcoupon.com and set up a centralized coupon clicking system. Then I realized, this doesn't even have to be centralized! You could make a trivially simple javascript program that, when clicked, pops up the name of your product, and puts a little cookie on your drive, (and, if you have the right mozilla plug-in, maybe adds an xml item to your "coupon box"). Then when you surf over, later, to get some soda or whatever, the site notices your coupon (cookie) and will give you the choice of taking up the special offer.
Hmm... So... We could write a GPL plugin and help people install it. It'd be way less intrusive than full screen ads, less disruptive than clicking over to a merchant site when you're in the middle of something else, and yet would succeed in establishing introducing compatible customers and merchants to each other.
If anyone is interested in this, send me an e-mail
I wouldn't mind doing a project like this. Maybe we can save the banner ad! (by turning it into a "click coupon")
One problem with clicking on an ad, though, is that it breaks your train of thought. Suppose I'm reading through a couple of articles on lamprey cyborgs, and I come across an ad for Whoop-Ass cola. I think to myself, "Yum tasty", but I don't want to click there because it would make me lose my train of thought. So, to get me to click there and incur the opportunity cost of diverting my thought processes, they'd have to give me a pretty big incentive.
HOWEVER, if they could set it up (maybe with a cookie?) such that I could click on the ad without losing my page, and get a coupon added to a coupon box (maybe in the sidebar) that I could look at later on when I'm feeling thirsty, that would probably work really well.
You mentioned the problem of needing a second device for "clicking". IMHO, I think the way to go is definitely to combine multiple devices in as much as possible. I was imagining a set-up for a person with full abilities, who can type, look, talk and listen at the same time--if you coordinate the various devices properly, you can make things a lot easier. For example, I think the using your hands for both keyboard and mouse is extremely awkward. And a lot of the time, you don't need precise mouse movements, for instance when choosing which dialog to respond to. Or, you can have faces on the screen that will return eye contact when you look at it, and then process what you say into a microphone.
In the case of a disabled person, perhaps one should try to take advantage of as many abilities as are remaining, and combine them to substitute for the missing ability. Thus, eye and tongue movements could substitute for a point and click device. I think there are certain things that eyes do very naturally, such pointing at interesting things. A "natural" person usually looks at what he finds interesting, and then "acts" on the things by using some other muscle. It is not natural to have a time-triggered click, because people normally look at a thing while deciding whether to do something with it. Maybe there is a breathing pattern that is naturally associated with performing an action on an object. I think it might be useful to observe everyday activity to see what gestures correspond to abstract concepts like "examine", "activate" etc. And then, one has to find which of those gestures are available to disabled people. The goal, I think, is to make them feel as though they weren't disabled, but rather were acting naturally.
By mimicking natural activity with some analogous user interface, I think the experience would be very comfortable and efficient.
Slashdot Mirror
>And, more importantly, he probably has the busienss >T1 terminiated in his house.
Deducted as an expenditure, too!
If such a discovery were ever to be made, the only responsible course for the discoverer would be to keep the discovery a secret, and to form, as discretely as possible, a society of Custodians of the knowledge, whose task it would be to keep the O(n) solution safe. By applying their knowledge in secret beneficial ways, they could subtly steer the course of Mankind's history towards a future time when they would be sufficiently prepared to deal with the consequences of the O(n) solution.
The organization would, of course, have to be composed of all the top computer scientists in the world, and would have to continually recruit all of those intelligent enough and close enough to coming upon the discovery on their own. On the other hand, in the classrooms, the old dogma would have to perpetuated to keep society safe from the disastrous effects of a premature disclosure.
If--and I say IF--one of us slashdotters should stumble upon such a discovery, I should hope he would realize the Promethean significance of it, and refrain from submitting it to Taco or whomever. I have been studying and thinking about the science of Psychohistory for a long time, and have meditated profoundly over the works of Harri Sheldon. I would be glad to provide my aid in constituting the Society. And please respond via private e-mail.
Am I the only one who thinks LyX is a far better way of producing documents than *Word or *Office? While granted the LaTeX-based paradigm is substantially different, LyX manages to shield the user from a most of the really hairy details of LaTeX itself.
So, with all this warring about *Word and *Office, I'd like to know whether there are many slashdotters using LyX who are just keeping silent about it, or skipping this (to them) irrelevant topic.
I think we need to start using fuzzy logic...
"localhost does not exist, try again"
What should I do?
Anyone know how to stop Netscape from sending you to www.localhost.com whenever you type localhost in the address bar?
Man, that site has now been slashdotted to oblivion
I find people who find people who find people on Slashdot perplexing perplexing perplexing
Or, alternatively, you could back up one ram drive to another
How about making "virtual desktops", similar to Evolution's virtual folders: instead of simply having desktops number 1-8, you could have named virtual desktops. Any particular window could then exist on several desktops at the same time. You could switch between different "views" of the same windows by flipping between virtual desktops. This would save a lot of time resizing and switching between windows.
:) Can this be done in sawfish? Anyone care to mail me with some ideas?
Another nice thing to implement would be an xterm that can be connected to other xterms to produce a pipe, simply by right-clicking-and-dragging. Imagine, you open a pipe window, drag the output from window#1 to the pipe. Flip to another virtual window, where you have the same pipe open, and drag the from pipe to window#2. Now you can type away on window#1 and the output gets piped to window#2. It sounds complicated but I imagine this could be very nice for a power user.
why not implement a graphical version of the pipe? Or at least improve cut and paste
They could save even more money and make their schools even better by encouraging students to work on the Free Software: the students learn about computer science and get credits, while the government gets some nice mail clients at no cost.
If less people had the conviction to die doing crazy evil things, and more people sat around in jammies eating Shreddies, the world would be a better place
This stuff should be open-sourced I guess
Could someone send me the latest sources?
I think if the software were distributed only as source and under GPL, maybe even using CVS, then the courts would have a very hard time characterizing Heroine as a vendor, and finding an implicit warranty.
And if a Debian packager put the stuff together, again, there wouldn't be any imputable "warranty".
As for liability in tort: it would be impossible to establish tort in a GPL project where there were many contributors working for free, and where everyone, including the "user" is allowed to modify the code. Where everyone is allowed to read, write and use the code, there are no "merchants" and "users" and hence no assumption of warranty.
I mean, could Alan Cox sue Linus for screwing something up? Or could you sue a newbie for submitting a shitty patch? Who told you the patch was good?
Cool! How did you figure out the syntax? I want to do something similar.
The Little Schemer, and the Seasoned Schemer
Does linux have any decent solution for playing multiple streams at the same time, and automatically mixing them? I wish I could listen to mp3s and still be able to get alarms and reminders announced to me via festival. I tried esound, and the distortion and overhead are unbearable. I'm using an 750 Athlon, too.
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has powerful muscles, but no personality. -Einstein Hm... we should take care not to make the muscle our god; it has powerful personality, but no intellect.
Actually, if the criticism of banner ads is based on the low clickthru rate, there is no chance that interruption ads will do any better: Supposing you wanted to read the daily news and, in order to do so, forced yourself to sit through a 20 second commercial. After watching it, are you seriously going to click the "For More Information..." button? Not likely.
So, implicitly, adopting interruption ads means abandoning click-thrus as a measure of success. But if you weren't measuring success by click-thrus in the first place, then how do you know that banner ads don't work?
Personally, I think banner ads should base themselves on the metaphor of a coupon: they should be easy to clip (a single click), and cause as little interruption as possible. They should persist, i.e. remain in a "Coupon Box" until the customer decides to use it. There'd be a couple of benefits over real coupons: you won't lose them, you don't need scissors.
The problem with a lot of discussions over web advertising is that people look at it as a kind of warfare: Advertisers try to wage a brainwashing operation on Consumers, who, in turn, try to resist as much as possible while extracting a maximal amount of free services. I think that's a lose-lose paradigm. Instead, we should view advertisements as a means of matching buyers and sellers. This can be done through a series of pareto optimal transactions.
If I, as a consumer, come across a coupon for a product that I want, I'll feel the urge to clip it. The consumer will likely click if the discount offered by the coupon is greater than the cost (inconvenience) of clicking it.
And here's a really interesting consequence: If you then assign an estimated cost value to the inconvenience of clicking, you can compare that against the value of the coupon. Then you chart the value of the coupon against click-thrus. This would give you some pretty interesting consumer-preference information. Click-thru rates would finally provide some sort of meaningful economic data.
In addition to consumer preference data, the web-coupon would contain information of where it came from. Thus, you would be able to match the ad to the final sale. This, of course, would be very valuable to advertisers and merchants in terms of deciding how much and where to advertise.
So I think coupons, designed to be as little intrusive as possible, would work really well for merchants. And for consumers too, since it minimizes the extent of useless annoyance, while maximizing the number of Pareto optimal web-based transactions.
Cool. A PGP signature. So we KNOW it's REALLY anonymous coward talking.
You're right about right clicking. I do that too. However, advertising is targeted to the masses--and I have a feeling less than 80% of people do what you described.
In addition to making it easy for lazy people to save the coupon, it also would consume less memory than having an extra window open. Furthermore, by storing the coupon in a "box", you could put off looking into it for as long as you want until the coupon expires. You wouldn't leave a window open for days just because of a discount offer.
When you do feel like shopping, you might look through your coupon box to look for something you thought was interesting earlier.
I guess my point boils down to convenience, mindshare and metaphors. But I think those things are central to advertising.
BTW, I look at the JWZ site. NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!
After making that last posting, I got the sudden urge to try to register something like clickcoupon.com and set up a centralized coupon clicking system. Then I realized, this doesn't even have to be centralized! You could make a trivially simple javascript program that, when clicked, pops up the name of your product, and puts a little cookie on your drive, (and, if you have the right mozilla plug-in, maybe adds an xml item to your "coupon box"). Then when you surf over, later, to get some soda or whatever, the site notices your coupon (cookie) and will give you the choice of taking up the special offer.
Hmm... So... We could write a GPL plugin and help people install it. It'd be way less intrusive than full screen ads, less disruptive than clicking over to a merchant site when you're in the middle of something else, and yet would succeed in establishing introducing compatible customers and merchants to each other.
If anyone is interested in this, send me an e-mail
I wouldn't mind doing a project like this. Maybe we can save the banner ad! (by turning it into a "click coupon")
One problem with clicking on an ad, though, is that it breaks your train of thought. Suppose I'm reading through a couple of articles on lamprey cyborgs, and I come across an ad for Whoop-Ass cola. I think to myself, "Yum tasty", but I don't want to click there because it would make me lose my train of thought. So, to get me to click there and incur the opportunity cost of diverting my thought processes, they'd have to give me a pretty big incentive.
HOWEVER, if they could set it up (maybe with a cookie?) such that I could click on the ad without losing my page, and get a coupon added to a coupon box (maybe in the sidebar) that I could look at later on when I'm feeling thirsty, that would probably work really well.
What do you think?
You mentioned the problem of needing a second device for "clicking". IMHO, I think the way to go is definitely to combine multiple devices in as much as possible. I was imagining a set-up for a person with full abilities, who can type, look, talk and listen at the same time--if you coordinate the various devices properly, you can make things a lot easier. For example, I think the using your hands for both keyboard and mouse is extremely awkward. And a lot of the time, you don't need precise mouse movements, for instance when choosing which dialog to respond to. Or, you can have faces on the screen that will return eye contact when you look at it, and then process what you say into a microphone.
In the case of a disabled person, perhaps one should try to take advantage of as many abilities as are remaining, and combine them to substitute for the missing ability. Thus, eye and tongue movements could substitute for a point and click device. I think there are certain things that eyes do very naturally, such pointing at interesting things. A "natural" person usually looks at what he finds interesting, and then "acts" on the things by using some other muscle. It is not natural to have a time-triggered click, because people normally look at a thing while deciding whether to do something with it. Maybe there is a breathing pattern that is naturally associated with performing an action on an object. I think it might be useful to observe everyday activity to see what gestures correspond to abstract concepts like "examine", "activate" etc. And then, one has to find which of those gestures are available to disabled people. The goal, I think, is to make them feel as though they weren't disabled, but rather were acting naturally.
By mimicking natural activity with some analogous user interface, I think the experience would be very comfortable and efficient.