There are not really more words in the actively used language today, but different ones. Sure the total vocabulary of a language continually grows, but the active vocabulary is mostly constant. A lot of words also fall into disuse.
I'm not a native English speaker, and one of my most funny moments was when I was driving though the country side with some Canadian friends, and pointed out a man using a scythe. This was a word they hadn't heard before and didn't know what it was. They even argued that it was not an English word and as a foreigner I was mixing things up. Until I asked them to tell me the word for the tool the Grim Reaper is wielding. They didn't know and I could convince them this was called a scythe and it was a valid English word.
My anecdote is to illustrate that there are many words like scythe, that a lot of young people will not know, but older people will.
Even fewer will know how to use one. This illustrates another important thing. Old tools could often make you lose a limb if used incorrectly. Therefore older people are much more hesitant to randomly try things, if they don't know and haven't been instructed on proper use.
certainly not a scheduler. Now I have two sets of alarms that ring on weekdays, one set of gentle tones and one really nasty "get up NOW" alarm. More complex? Yes. Better? Yes.
It's not better if all you need is one alarm. Or if you were trained on mechanical devices that only had one alarm due to their mechanical limits.
A lot is about managing expectations. And old people come with a different set of expectations than young people. If you are expecting a device to only have one alarm, and you can change it's time and turn it on/off, then the concept of having an unlimited list of alarms, with different properties, and that you can add/remove alarms is just not going to occur to you if there are not enough UI interface elements to help. I have to agree that the iPhone alarm interface is too much geared towards people who already have experience with devices that support "lists of alarms".
TL;DR If you can't use this, however old you may be,
Where users often fail, not just older ones, is in the step. This diagram doesn't work if people are afraid to "break something".
In part it is because in older mechanical tools, incorrect usage would break things. So people who grew up with tools like that are much more hesitant to go exploring at random.
The other thing is that if you really have no experience with computers, then going exploring at random will cause things to break, because there are so many foreign concepts to master. Just the basics like a file system, with folders and disks and files are already quite an advanced concept.
But it's still quite easy to click on random stuff and make your documents disappear. People with little experience with computers will do these things as they will misinterpret basic things that the UI is trying to communicate to them. And we often don't have enough difference between the amount of warning you get when doing "really dangerous" stuff, and "less dangerous" things.
Changing the resolution, refresh rate or colour depth of the display would come with very serious warnings, while it would work fine in 99.9% of cases. And resolution, refresh rate and colour depth are already very advanced concepts to begin with. Things like that baffle most people, and gives them a sense that they could break things and should probably stay clear of tampering with things they don't fully understand.
It's just that there is only one button with no clear function labelled with [+]. A younger person presented with an interface with one button, even if not clear what it does, will simply push it to find out. An older person will probably ignore the unclear button and get stuck.
Yes, I think you're right. The problem is the concept of creating alarms. It's a degree of freedom that the developers put in most modern OSses, that are counter intuitive to someone who grew up with mechanical tools, because those have a limited number of choices due to their nature.
The "older" users aren't expecting a list of alarms and are thus not recognizing it as such.
Next to that it the hesitation to explore interface elements that have no clear function, like another poster points out. So the [+] button instead of an [Add alarm] button makes matters worse on iOS. It's an interface element that Apple could have designed better.
It might not be specific for 1600s books, but a lot of older books are worth reading. This goes as far back as the ancient Greeks, with the Illiad, theatre plays and the works of Plato and Aristotle.
A book like the Three Musketeers or Sherlock Holmes is very enjoyable to read as well. Jules Verne, Dickens, Shakespeare, there are many I could name.
Once you get past the swords, horses and carriages, a good writer or good story is still a nice read. Most books are about people, and they haven't changed much, only the technology.
Unfortunately, content creators always seem to find ways to hurt the ones who want to buy their stuff.
Yeah, why? I don't get it. I happen to live outside the USA (in the Netherlands), and most stuff I'm interested in isn't even for sale here. All I get when I go to iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, or one of the others, is "This service isn't available in your area" type messages.
The only reason I've heard is that the content owners hope to sell it to local (Dutch) TV networks one day, and therefore sit on it. But they seem to be doing it collectively. A store like iTunes Netherlands only has songs, no movies or TV series at all. None. While they've been offering it in the US since about 2004?
Friends of mine like Japanese Anime. It's almost impossible to obtain outside Japan.
Sure, if everyone would turn to these on demand services, we'd need more bandwidth on the Internet. Maybe some smart protocol can be devised, and otherwise I'd happily upgrade and pay some more to have access to such services.
Someone suggested elsewhere in this thread to use WebDAV, if people need to upload stuff from Windows computers where you can't install a sFTP client, as that does work out of the box and allows secure login. Might be an idea for you as well?
But the real problem of course is that these journals are very expensive, so only a few have subscriptions (which makes them expensive). That makes it very enticing to copy stuff. If they were a dollar/euro per copy, the professors would just tell everyone to go buy a copy. Now if it's an older article that might of course not be possible, unless you can buy them as a PDF or eBook.
It's becoming more and more a struggle to have access to journals, the subscriptions are expensive. And as I don't see these publishers making huge profits, I assume the costs are high as well, due to the process and specialized skills involved, and the relatively small market per title.
We need a new model, but I don't know how to make it work. Any suggestions?
It probably depends what country and what age you were. In the 90s for teenagers in Britain, it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger (released 1999), with the latter being much more popular..
Agreed.
This is how I have seen it in the Netherlands: First half of the nineties: IRC, telnet talkers and such From 1996-2000/1: ICQ and some lingering IRC. From 2000/1-2006: MSN and some lingering ICQ and IRC From 2006: Hyves, Facebook, mySpace, Skype and lingering MSN
Because of a large installed base, it seems to take an old "champion" a long time to really drop into disuse even if the majority of users flock to a new service, they maintain the old one for several years.
AIM: maybe in the USA where America was Online, not so much in the rest of the world.
The problem with the Linux/Unix CLI, is that it assumes you know the name of the program/tool you want to use.
Once you do, there usually is indeed a decent man page.
I've been using Unix since 1994, and Linux since 1997, but still I often struggle. I often have this "crap, I used this neat trick to do XYZ three years ago, but for the life of me, I can't remember what tools and options I used." I remember the stuff I use regularly, but of stuff that I only use once I a blue moon, it often takes a lot of time before I figured out again what tools and options I used. Especially if in the mean time there's been a couple of new versions and everything got re-arranged, renamed or redesigned.
And a lot of the more obscure tools don't have man pages, it's just the basic GNU tools that are quite solid in that respect, once you need more that that, it becomes harder.
I use vi a lot, as I work a lot on minimal systems, that don't have much else installed. But I still don't really "have the hang of it", this change between input and command mode gets me every time. When I can, I use Kate, but that needs lot's of KDE and Qt stuff, and a working (remote) X, so often isn't available.
Sad but true. I doubt very many people under the age of 40 have read the Lensman series.
I have read the first two, and then I was too bored to read further. There is lots of other SF from the 50's that is more fun to read in my view. I really enjoyed reading some old Perry Rhodan books last year for example.
What we seem to be evolving is our culture. I see things like religion and politics as the DNA of our culture. And I think we are still biologically evolving as well, I just can't pinpoint the details. Plenty of wars and diseases still going on, as well as nerds in their basement not reproducing but posting on/.
Also because of our global travel habits, interesting things are happening in the mixing of races. Just look at Obama if you want an example. I have no clue where that will lead us.
Yeah, not just CAD. I find that once you get outside the most used areas, there often isn't a program for Linux, at least not FOSS, or with very limited functionality compared to commercial alternatives.
Sure, I could go and write my own. But in my spare time I can't reproduce the full efforts of Adobe, AutoDesk, Corel, Wolfram, Mathworks, etc.
I think I just wish that it was easier for companies to develop cross-platform, so more commercial software would be available outside Windows, and with more differentiated licences. Not everyone wants to use Indesign, Illustrator and Photoshop professionally, often it's non-profits like schools, churches, hobby clubs, and then the price tags are steep.
I'm not sure if I would be eligible for that program, but it seems quite nice and permissive. I don't see the.edu requirement anywhere. As I don't live in the USA, those types of domains are not available to me.
I think that if the story was indeed very different from the official US government one, then the Pakistani have enough survivors (among whom bin Laden's youngest wife) who will tell the story. And given the state of Pakistan currently, their version of events would not take long to come out.
If the US, Pakistan and al Qaida all have basically the same story, that's proof enough for me that that's probably how it happened.
Food production is more inelastic as you seem to think. Nearly all arable land in the world is being used. Only some of the stuff that's being used for bio-fuels and on which we built our cities and roads could be put in production. Maybe a couple of areas of rain forest.
Agriculture is one of the big sources of renewable resources, but as non-renewable resources get more scarce, the pressures will increase to use agriculture for non-food production. Next to that climate change will have a big impact, as it makes weather and thus agricultural production less predictable.
The USA used to be a big exporter of food, but this has declined a lot over the last decade, mostly due to the above reasons. Nowadays China goes to South America to get it's food. The result is less goes to Africa, the Middle East and other poor places.
I don't think your solution will work. There will just be new thugs. What works is building institutions, rule of law and government. That's not the only thing, but in my view the thing that would make the most difference.
Presidents personally go to visits to other countries to sell Boeing's products.
Nearly every head of state has representatives of their local industry in their entourage when on state visits. Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings and Queens, even the occasional Dictator, they all do it.
I think the point of the article is that no such material exists yet, and we have no clue how to make something like that in an economic way.
The biggest problem with most of these solutions, is getting them "up there". Moving things to space is very expensive. It's hard to get a feeling for it. I once compared it to the the Trust SSC, the first car to go Mach 1: 1,228 km/h (763 mph). To reach orbit you need to go about 40,000 km/h, given that the energy goes with the square of the speed, you need (40,000/1,228)^2 = 1061 times more energy. In other words, the energy required to reach the speed of sound, is only 0.1% of what is required to get into space. That might give you an idea of the challenge.
I guarantee you if I step off the ISS, I'm plunging to earth.
you might be a troll, but I'm answering any way. You would not plunge down to earth, but you would just float next to it, maybe slowly drift away from it. There is no air to slow you down.
The whole trick is that you are actually going quite fast, about 16,000 mph or faster, you do fall down, but the earth is curved and drops away at the same rate. That's how things stay "in orbit". As there is no air, nothing slows you down and you just keep falling in a circle around the earth, constantly missing it because of your high horizontal speed.
I used to live in 30 m2, I was even able to have about a 15 m2 living room in there with 3 couches for a maximum of 11 people. The biggest space saver for me was going vertical. All storage space I had was up to the ceiling, and my bed was raised to 2 meters (top half of a bunk bed), and I had my desk under it.
I didn't have a bathroom in those 30 m2 though, It was shared with one other person. I did have a kitchen.
One of the couches could unfold into a king size bed if needed.
I know what you mean, but... have you ever pulled out one of those old books and read them? If so, how many?
I'm not the grandparent, but yes. I only ever buy books when I want to read them a second time (first time is from the library). Usually I end up reading them a 3rd time or more. Things like Lords of the Rings and Dune I must have read at least 7-8 times. Some books I don't read in their entirety tough, I have quite a few atlasses, maps, cookbooks, historical reference works, RPG manuals and such. Overall I think I have about 30 meters of filled bookshelves, so the collection is quite substantial.
Even if I could, I would not replace it with an eReader, as I don't trust the formats to be still readable in a few decades. Quite a few books I have are older than the invention of the transistor. Either originally owned by my parents or grandparents, or bought second hand. Some I hope to pass on to my children one day. I have books that are literally over a hundred years old passed down from my great grandparents. Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens or Jules Verne are still well worth reading. Not nearly all my books are that old, but I don't want to increase my burden of format shifting any more than I have to.
I used to live in 30 m^2 for quite a while, although that didn't include a bathroom. 344 ft^2 is 32 m^2, so even slightly larger, but he's got a bathroom as well. This is in a medium (200.000) city in the Netherlands in Europe. For students and young adults small apartments in this range are not unusual over here. It's not big, but I had a living room that could seat 11 people, 6 meters of bookshelves, a desk, a bed and a small kitchen. I lived there quite happily for the first 3-4 years I had a job.
Slashdot Mirror
There are not really more words in the actively used language today, but different ones. Sure the total vocabulary of a language continually grows, but the active vocabulary is mostly constant. A lot of words also fall into disuse.
I'm not a native English speaker, and one of my most funny moments was when I was driving though the country side with some Canadian friends, and pointed out a man using a scythe. This was a word they hadn't heard before and didn't know what it was. They even argued that it was not an English word and as a foreigner I was mixing things up. Until I asked them to tell me the word for the tool the Grim Reaper is wielding. They didn't know and I could convince them this was called a scythe and it was a valid English word.
My anecdote is to illustrate that there are many words like scythe, that a lot of young people will not know, but older people will.
Even fewer will know how to use one. This illustrates another important thing. Old tools could often make you lose a limb if used incorrectly. Therefore older people are much more hesitant to randomly try things, if they don't know and haven't been instructed on proper use.
certainly not a scheduler. Now I have two sets of alarms that ring on weekdays, one set of gentle tones and one really nasty "get up NOW" alarm. More complex? Yes. Better? Yes.
It's not better if all you need is one alarm. Or if you were trained on mechanical devices that only had one alarm due to their mechanical limits.
A lot is about managing expectations. And old people come with a different set of expectations than young people. If you are expecting a device to only have one alarm, and you can change it's time and turn it on/off, then the concept of having an unlimited list of alarms, with different properties, and that you can add/remove alarms is just not going to occur to you if there are not enough UI interface elements to help. I have to agree that the iPhone alarm interface is too much geared towards people who already have experience with devices that support "lists of alarms".
TL;DR If you can't use this, however old you may be,
Where users often fail, not just older ones, is in the step. This diagram doesn't work if people are afraid to "break something".
In part it is because in older mechanical tools, incorrect usage would break things. So people who grew up with tools like that are much more hesitant to go exploring at random.
The other thing is that if you really have no experience with computers, then going exploring at random will cause things to break, because there are so many foreign concepts to master. Just the basics like a file system, with folders and disks and files are already quite an advanced concept.
But it's still quite easy to click on random stuff and make your documents disappear. People with little experience with computers will do these things as they will misinterpret basic things that the UI is trying to communicate to them. And we often don't have enough difference between the amount of warning you get when doing "really dangerous" stuff, and "less dangerous" things.
Changing the resolution, refresh rate or colour depth of the display would come with very serious warnings, while it would work fine in 99.9% of cases. And resolution, refresh rate and colour depth are already very advanced concepts to begin with. Things like that baffle most people, and gives them a sense that they could break things and should probably stay clear of tampering with things they don't fully understand.
It's just that there is only one button with no clear function labelled with [+]. A younger person presented with an interface with one button, even if not clear what it does, will simply push it to find out. An older person will probably ignore the unclear button and get stuck.
Yes, I think you're right. The problem is the concept of creating alarms. It's a degree of freedom that the developers put in most modern OSses, that are counter intuitive to someone who grew up with mechanical tools, because those have a limited number of choices due to their nature.
The "older" users aren't expecting a list of alarms and are thus not recognizing it as such.
Next to that it the hesitation to explore interface elements that have no clear function, like another poster points out. So the [+] button instead of an [Add alarm] button makes matters worse on iOS. It's an interface element that Apple could have designed better.
It might not be specific for 1600s books, but a lot of older books are worth reading. This goes as far back as the ancient Greeks, with the Illiad, theatre plays and the works of Plato and Aristotle.
A book like the Three Musketeers or Sherlock Holmes is very enjoyable to read as well. Jules Verne, Dickens, Shakespeare, there are many I could name.
Once you get past the swords, horses and carriages, a good writer or good story is still a nice read. Most books are about people, and they haven't changed much, only the technology.
Unfortunately, content creators always seem to find ways to hurt the ones who want to buy their stuff.
Yeah, why? I don't get it. I happen to live outside the USA (in the Netherlands), and most stuff I'm interested in isn't even for sale here. All I get when I go to iTunes, Hulu, Netflix, Amazon, or one of the others, is "This service isn't available in your area" type messages.
The only reason I've heard is that the content owners hope to sell it to local (Dutch) TV networks one day, and therefore sit on it. But they seem to be doing it collectively. A store like iTunes Netherlands only has songs, no movies or TV series at all. None. While they've been offering it in the US since about 2004?
Friends of mine like Japanese Anime. It's almost impossible to obtain outside Japan.
Sure, if everyone would turn to these on demand services, we'd need more bandwidth on the Internet. Maybe some smart protocol can be devised, and otherwise I'd happily upgrade and pay some more to have access to such services.
Someone suggested elsewhere in this thread to use WebDAV, if people need to upload stuff from Windows computers where you can't install a sFTP client, as that does work out of the box and allows secure login. Might be an idea for you as well?
Not really any Astrophysics, I'm good.
But the real problem of course is that these journals are very expensive, so only a few have subscriptions (which makes them expensive). That makes it very enticing to copy stuff. If they were a dollar/euro per copy, the professors would just tell everyone to go buy a copy. Now if it's an older article that might of course not be possible, unless you can buy them as a PDF or eBook.
It's becoming more and more a struggle to have access to journals, the subscriptions are expensive. And as I don't see these publishers making huge profits, I assume the costs are high as well, due to the process and specialized skills involved, and the relatively small market per title.
We need a new model, but I don't know how to make it work. Any suggestions?
It probably depends what country and what age you were. In the 90s for teenagers in Britain, it was ICQ, then MSN Messenger (released 1999), with the latter being much more popular. .
Agreed.
This is how I have seen it in the Netherlands:
First half of the nineties: IRC, telnet talkers and such
From 1996-2000/1: ICQ and some lingering IRC.
From 2000/1-2006: MSN and some lingering ICQ and IRC
From 2006: Hyves, Facebook, mySpace, Skype and lingering MSN
Because of a large installed base, it seems to take an old "champion" a long time to really drop into disuse even if the majority of users flock to a new service, they maintain the old one for several years.
AIM: maybe in the USA where America was Online, not so much in the rest of the world.
The problem with the Linux/Unix CLI, is that it assumes you know the name of the program/tool you want to use.
Once you do, there usually is indeed a decent man page.
I've been using Unix since 1994, and Linux since 1997, but still I often struggle. I often have this "crap, I used this neat trick to do XYZ three years ago, but for the life of me, I can't remember what tools and options I used." I remember the stuff I use regularly, but of stuff that I only use once I a blue moon, it often takes a lot of time before I figured out again what tools and options I used. Especially if in the mean time there's been a couple of new versions and everything got re-arranged, renamed or redesigned.
And a lot of the more obscure tools don't have man pages, it's just the basic GNU tools that are quite solid in that respect, once you need more that that, it becomes harder.
I use vi a lot, as I work a lot on minimal systems, that don't have much else installed. But I still don't really "have the hang of it", this change between input and command mode gets me every time. When I can, I use Kate, but that needs lot's of KDE and Qt stuff, and a working (remote) X, so often isn't available.
Sad but true. I doubt very many people under the age of 40 have read the Lensman series.
I have read the first two, and then I was too bored to read further. There is lots of other SF from the 50's that is more fun to read in my view. I really enjoyed reading some old Perry Rhodan books last year for example.
What we seem to be evolving is our culture. I see things like religion and politics as the DNA of our culture. /.
And I think we are still biologically evolving as well, I just can't pinpoint the details. Plenty of wars and diseases still going on, as well as nerds in their basement not reproducing but posting on
Also because of our global travel habits, interesting things are happening in the mixing of races. Just look at Obama if you want an example. I have no clue where that will lead us.
Yeah, not just CAD. I find that once you get outside the most used areas, there often isn't a program for Linux, at least not FOSS, or with very limited functionality compared to commercial alternatives.
Sure, I could go and write my own. But in my spare time I can't reproduce the full efforts of Adobe, AutoDesk, Corel, Wolfram, Mathworks, etc.
I think I just wish that it was easier for companies to develop cross-platform, so more commercial software would be available outside Windows, and with more differentiated licences. Not everyone wants to use Indesign, Illustrator and Photoshop professionally, often it's non-profits like schools, churches, hobby clubs, and then the price tags are steep.
I'm not sure if I would be eligible for that program, but it seems quite nice and permissive. I don't see the .edu requirement anywhere. As I don't live in the USA, those types of domains are not available to me.
I think that if the story was indeed very different from the official US government one, then the Pakistani have enough survivors (among whom bin Laden's youngest wife) who will tell the story. And given the state of Pakistan currently, their version of events would not take long to come out.
If the US, Pakistan and al Qaida all have basically the same story, that's proof enough for me that that's probably how it happened.
Food production is more inelastic as you seem to think. Nearly all arable land in the world is being used. Only some of the stuff that's being used for bio-fuels and on which we built our cities and roads could be put in production. Maybe a couple of areas of rain forest.
Agriculture is one of the big sources of renewable resources, but as non-renewable resources get more scarce, the pressures will increase to use agriculture for non-food production. Next to that climate change will have a big impact, as it makes weather and thus agricultural production less predictable.
The USA used to be a big exporter of food, but this has declined a lot over the last decade, mostly due to the above reasons. Nowadays China goes to South America to get it's food. The result is less goes to Africa, the Middle East and other poor places.
I don't think your solution will work. There will just be new thugs. What works is building institutions, rule of law and government.
That's not the only thing, but in my view the thing that would make the most difference.
Presidents personally go to visits to other countries to sell Boeing's products.
Nearly every head of state has representatives of their local industry in their entourage when on state visits. Prime Ministers, Presidents, Kings and Queens, even the occasional Dictator, they all do it.
I think the point of the article is that no such material exists yet, and we have no clue how to make something like that in an economic way.
The biggest problem with most of these solutions, is getting them "up there". Moving things to space is very expensive. It's hard to get a feeling for it.
I once compared it to the the Trust SSC, the first car to go Mach 1: 1,228 km/h (763 mph). To reach orbit you need to go about 40,000 km/h, given that the energy goes with the square of the speed, you need (40,000/1,228)^2 = 1061 times more energy. In other words, the energy required to reach the speed of sound, is only 0.1% of what is required to get into space. That might give you an idea of the challenge.
I guarantee you if I step off the ISS, I'm plunging to earth.
you might be a troll, but I'm answering any way. You would not plunge down to earth, but you would just float next to it, maybe slowly drift away from it. There is no air to slow you down.
The whole trick is that you are actually going quite fast, about 16,000 mph or faster, you do fall down, but the earth is curved and drops away at the same rate. That's how things stay "in orbit". As there is no air, nothing slows you down and you just keep falling in a circle around the earth, constantly missing it because of your high horizontal speed.
I used to live in 30 m2, I was even able to have about a 15 m2 living room in there with 3 couches for a maximum of 11 people. The biggest space saver for me was going vertical. All storage space I had was up to the ceiling, and my bed was raised to 2 meters (top half of a bunk bed), and I had my desk under it.
I didn't have a bathroom in those 30 m2 though, It was shared with one other person. I did have a kitchen.
One of the couches could unfold into a king size bed if needed.
I know what you mean, but ... have you ever pulled out one of those old books and read them? If so, how many?
I'm not the grandparent, but yes. I only ever buy books when I want to read them a second time (first time is from the library). Usually I end up reading them a 3rd time or more. Things like Lords of the Rings and Dune I must have read at least 7-8 times.
Some books I don't read in their entirety tough, I have quite a few atlasses, maps, cookbooks, historical reference works, RPG manuals and such. Overall I think I have about 30 meters of filled bookshelves, so the collection is quite substantial.
Even if I could, I would not replace it with an eReader, as I don't trust the formats to be still readable in a few decades. Quite a few books I have are older than the invention of the transistor. Either originally owned by my parents or grandparents, or bought second hand. Some I hope to pass on to my children one day.
I have books that are literally over a hundred years old passed down from my great grandparents. Sherlock Holmes or Charles Dickens or Jules Verne are still well worth reading.
Not nearly all my books are that old, but I don't want to increase my burden of format shifting any more than I have to.
I used to live in 30 m^2 for quite a while, although that didn't include a bathroom. 344 ft^2 is 32 m^2, so even slightly larger, but he's got a bathroom as well.
This is in a medium (200.000) city in the Netherlands in Europe. For students and young adults small apartments in this range are not unusual over here. It's not big, but I had a living room that could seat 11 people, 6 meters of bookshelves, a desk, a bed and a small kitchen. I lived there quite happily for the first 3-4 years I had a job.