just shouts "more money than brains." It was on/. a while back. (! yr? 2 yrs? more?) Somebody costed out what people were paying for texting, and on a per-byte basis, it cost more than what NASA paid to communicate with the space telescope. I never could understand people putting up with that. Voip + wifi for me since about 2005.
Google's way of coming up with pageranks is fundamentally flawed. It's a popularity test, not an information content test. It leads to link farming. Even worse, it leads everyone, even otherwise well-meaning people, not to cite their sources so they won't lose pagerank by having more outgoing links than incoming ones. That is bad, bad, bad, bad, and bad. Citing sources is a foundation of any real information system, so Google's method will ultimately end in a web full of unsubstantiated blather going in circles. It's happening already, but we've barely begun to sink into the morass.
An essential improvement is coming up with a way to identify and rank by actual information content. No, I have no idea how to do that. I'm just a biologist, struggling with plain old "I." AI is beyond me.
Haven't used Win-anything as my main OS in years, but doing taxes is easiest using one of the standard $10 tax programs. My taxes are a bit on the complicated side, and I don't like the privacy implications of making them cloudy. So there's XP on virtualbox which gets fired up once a year.
Yes. Exactly. Furthermore, you can even make the default whatever is "good for us." But make it customizable. Easily customizable. Right-click-and-done customizable.
Seconded. Thirded. Fourthed. I've been using Ubuntu as my main OS since Dapper, whenever that was (2006?) I've had to use Macs for my work (for a while, some automated sequencer software ran only on Macs). I never could understand in what universe a global menu made sense. You want the menu associated with the task to which it relates. Duh, right? And the business about having to do some indeterminate number of clicks and hunting, instead of just a couple of clicks through a menu tree. It's delirium to call the more tedious and time-consuming method "easier." After a while, I opened a terminal and used ctrl-r to find commands. And don't even get me started on those great huge clunky buttons all over the left side of my screen.
Agree. Glad to see someone of Stallman's stature say what I'm thinking. I'm more of a pessimist, though. I'm not sure Jobs' malign influence will now be gone.
The fallback is to use Google servers. Are there any guarantees Google can't track that data is some way? I don't know enough about how this works to have any idea what's technically feasible. If it is feasible, is this another one of those things where people will say, "Well, they're a private company. They can do anything they want"? Who's looked at this? What have they found?
That's a fairly minor wrinkle on the main one. Setting up browser control of OS may not be that big a deal on the tech supporter side. The tech supportee could be another story.
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it was in one of their reports on the FCC web site, buried in the interminable methodology section. I'll try to find the time to get the link.
Before participation: Time Warner/Roadrunner here in Southern California gave me less than a tenth of advertised speeds. Officially 7mbits down, 1mb up, the actual service was more like 400kbits. Up to 800kb, sometimes even over a whole megabite early in the morning. (Exciting!) After the initial burst, which hit over a megabit down fairly often, there were times when it slowed all the way to single digits in KB.
Under the Sam Knows program, the FCC lets the ISPs know which subscribers are part of the test. (Bit of a problem right there, I'd say.) A few days before we had the government router hooked up, no doubt when Time Warner got word of our new "status," our speeds suddenly shot up into the advertised range. I nearly swooned the first time I saw a download go by at over a megabyte. And, interestingly enough, they've stayed there. It wasn't just some random thing. We don't usually get 7mb, but 5-6mb is the norm now.
So the info that ISPs aren't delivering stated speeds even in the FCC study is interesting, given that they seem to be jimmying the results for all they're worth.
(Speed tests before the FCC program would show us getting multi-megabits that we never saw in real life. Two things there: burst-shaping, no doubt, and I've heard that ISPs have ways of recognizing speed test traffic and giving it bandwidth.)
All the search engines now generally available use tag-based methods. Among librarians -- who are the real professionals at information searches -- that's a method for quick superficial results.
Promoting deeper research and understanding is best done with subject-based methods. E.g. the way libraries are organized, Library of Congress cataloguing system, etc.
Problem is, AI is nowhere near good enough to do that yet. So you need to hire humans, lots of humans, to actually think about the information. Which is way too expensive.
Another tag-based search engine, even if it's Etzioni's own, is just one more look-alike in the crowd.
Unbunch your own knickers. Mozilla puts the stuff out there for comment. People comment. Many don't like it. That's the whole point of putting it out for comment early enough in the design process to be able to change things.
(Now all Mozilla needs to do is actually listen to the comments, and stop trying to imitate Chrome, Mac, or cellphone UIs. But, as another commenter said, so long as I can change the default, I'm not hopelessly hot and bothered.)
Actually, as the AC at 4:23 says, stupid trolling on news sites is a feature, not a bug. It increases page views and potentially clicks, which allows the news organization to charge more for ads. The "news" is just a loss leader in that model.
I'm *not* saying it's a good model. As far as I'm concerned, we should scrap the whole monetize-everything-in-sight idea and start over.
No, you're quite right, the newbies don't blindly do anything. I should have been clearer. I hear them complain about Win__fill_in_the_blank. I say, "Why not try Ubuntu? I can show you how." And I make a dual boot system, find out how they want their Desktop to look, which functions are important to them (multimedia, usually), and set it up for them. Takes me about half an hour.
Except with Unity, I can't do that customizing. So now it's no longer "Why not try Ubuntu?" That was my only point. And since that's how usage of Linux and the distros spreads, I think it needs to be made.
Yup. I'm no power user. More of a black-belt newbie. I used to spend quite a bit of time on the forums, mostly helping with installation and data recovery issues (when I could understand the question). Now? Without any conscious decision to move away, it's been a few months. Starting at about the time I installed a natty alpha and began to think that I might have to move away from ubuntu, if that was any indication of what it was going to be.
BS. Unless they've never used a computer before. Chances are, they're refugees from Windows. The problem some of us are trying to point out is that Unity can't be configured into something familiar for them. Gnome2 can, but I gather Gnome3 plans to take that away as well.
Result? Among too many of the potential refugees I know: "Oh hell. I guess I'll just go with Win7 if I have to learn a whole new Desktop anyway."
So now I'm suggesting Linux Mint. (And I'm having another look at Mandriva after the comment above. Haven't paid attention to them in years.) But it's still a shame. All that momentum behind Ubuntu, just evaporating because a bunch of geeks are the ultimate fools, the kind who don't know that they don't know. And what they all-too-obviously don't know is UI.
N900 voip calls over wifi work okay. I have a pretty sucky ISP (Time Warner / Roadrunner. Monopoly in my neighborhood.) and the bandwidth I get varies all over the map from less than 100KB to the advertised 1MB, but the voip calls work and don't drop. I am always starting to talk at the same time as the other person because of the jitter etc issues. Also, probably because I don't have my router set up right, for about half a second at the beginning of the call, speech is really chopped up. After that, I guess, it allocates the necessary bandwidth and it's okay.
Setup on the N900 is effortless, as people have pointed out. Enter the data, and the N900 finds the networks for you and hops on. What I haven't figured out, and I'd be glad if the parent mentioned how he did it, is how I can *stop* it from falling back to 3G. For some reason, it's always trying to route calls through T-mobile first and I have to keep selecting wifi.
My T-mobile plan is a $10/mo pay-as-you-go which, after the first year can be extended for $1/month. So, starting in July, I'll have cell service for $12 per year. I'm looking forward to it, since whole months go by without me using cell at all. Call quality on cell networks is crystal clear.
I have nothing but good things to say about Callcentric. They're 2cents/min, and ~$4 monthly for fees and 911 service. They do need a bit more savvy to hook up than Skype. Unlike Skype, though, they actually work all the time for every call. (I don't have anything to do with either company, except paying a bill for service.)
And where do these turkeys get off, telling me how to work? They should be making it easy for me to work *my* way -- it's called customizability -- and not coming up with some stupid touchy design for somebody else's box and telling me to wear it on mine.
Um, super secret tip. (Are we alone? Okay, then.) When your boss says jump, you say "How high?" Your boss is currently your prof. Your prof is going to be hugely unimpressed by your commitment to doing something he/she considers important enough for you to spend your own money on if you don't go. Your prof is the one who'll be writing letters of reference for you.
So, do you really want your prof to be hugely unimpressed with you? Networking is very important, as some of the other people down here in the I-work-for-a-living section have already said. Networking starts at home. Trust me on this. I'm a prof. And I've been in exactly the position you describe where I had a student who blew off what I thought was an important conference. I was hugely unimpressed. Etc., through the other consequences you might expect.
Slashdot Mirror
just shouts "more money than brains." It was on /. a while back. (! yr? 2 yrs? more?) Somebody costed out what people were paying for texting, and on a per-byte basis, it cost more than what NASA paid to communicate with the space telescope. I never could understand people putting up with that. Voip + wifi for me since about 2005.
"Is anyone at Google still thinking?" Apparently, not. Unless it's "Nobody will bother re-doing their network to all new SSIDs. Bwahahaha."
I should add: one ought to be actively rewarded for citing sources. Definitely not penalized.
Google's way of coming up with pageranks is fundamentally flawed. It's a popularity test, not an information content test. It leads to link farming. Even worse, it leads everyone, even otherwise well-meaning people, not to cite their sources so they won't lose pagerank by having more outgoing links than incoming ones. That is bad, bad, bad, bad, and bad. Citing sources is a foundation of any real information system, so Google's method will ultimately end in a web full of unsubstantiated blather going in circles. It's happening already, but we've barely begun to sink into the morass.
An essential improvement is coming up with a way to identify and rank by actual information content. No, I have no idea how to do that. I'm just a biologist, struggling with plain old "I." AI is beyond me.
Haven't used Win-anything as my main OS in years, but doing taxes is easiest using one of the standard $10 tax programs. My taxes are a bit on the complicated side, and I don't like the privacy implications of making them cloudy. So there's XP on virtualbox which gets fired up once a year.
Yes. Exactly. Furthermore, you can even make the default whatever is "good for us." But make it customizable. Easily customizable. Right-click-and-done customizable.
Seconded. Thirded. Fourthed. I've been using Ubuntu as my main OS since Dapper, whenever that was (2006?) I've had to use Macs for my work (for a while, some automated sequencer software ran only on Macs). I never could understand in what universe a global menu made sense. You want the menu associated with the task to which it relates. Duh, right? And the business about having to do some indeterminate number of clicks and hunting, instead of just a couple of clicks through a menu tree. It's delirium to call the more tedious and time-consuming method "easier." After a while, I opened a terminal and used ctrl-r to find commands. And don't even get me started on those great huge clunky buttons all over the left side of my screen.
I switched to LinuxMint Debian and KDE.
Agree. Glad to see someone of Stallman's stature say what I'm thinking. I'm more of a pessimist, though. I'm not sure Jobs' malign influence will now be gone.
The fallback is to use Google servers. Are there any guarantees Google can't track that data is some way? I don't know enough about how this works to have any idea what's technically feasible. If it is feasible, is this another one of those things where people will say, "Well, they're a private company. They can do anything they want"? Who's looked at this? What have they found?
That's a fairly minor wrinkle on the main one. Setting up browser control of OS may not be that big a deal on the tech supporter side. The tech supportee could be another story.
"A bad one makes it so hard that you just want to reach for a bash prompt."
So true in both the computerese and the English sense of the word "bash."
I want him to live forever. And prosper. I guess you can't have everything. /*goes off into corner for a quiet little moan*/
It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure it was in one of their reports on the FCC web site, buried in the interminable methodology section. I'll try to find the time to get the link.
Before participation: Time Warner/Roadrunner here in Southern California gave me less than a tenth of advertised speeds. Officially 7mbits down, 1mb up, the actual service was more like 400kbits. Up to 800kb, sometimes even over a whole megabite early in the morning. (Exciting!) After the initial burst, which hit over a megabit down fairly often, there were times when it slowed all the way to single digits in KB.
Under the Sam Knows program, the FCC lets the ISPs know which subscribers are part of the test. (Bit of a problem right there, I'd say.) A few days before we had the government router hooked up, no doubt when Time Warner got word of our new "status," our speeds suddenly shot up into the advertised range. I nearly swooned the first time I saw a download go by at over a megabyte. And, interestingly enough, they've stayed there. It wasn't just some random thing. We don't usually get 7mb, but 5-6mb is the norm now.
So the info that ISPs aren't delivering stated speeds even in the FCC study is interesting, given that they seem to be jimmying the results for all they're worth.
(Speed tests before the FCC program would show us getting multi-megabits that we never saw in real life. Two things there: burst-shaping, no doubt, and I've heard that ISPs have ways of recognizing speed test traffic and giving it bandwidth.)
All the search engines now generally available use tag-based methods. Among librarians -- who are the real professionals at information searches -- that's a method for quick superficial results.
Promoting deeper research and understanding is best done with subject-based methods. E.g. the way libraries are organized, Library of Congress cataloguing system, etc.
Problem is, AI is nowhere near good enough to do that yet. So you need to hire humans, lots of humans, to actually think about the information. Which is way too expensive.
Another tag-based search engine, even if it's Etzioni's own, is just one more look-alike in the crowd.
Unbunch your own knickers. Mozilla puts the stuff out there for comment. People comment. Many don't like it. That's the whole point of putting it out for comment early enough in the design process to be able to change things.
(Now all Mozilla needs to do is actually listen to the comments, and stop trying to imitate Chrome, Mac, or cellphone UIs. But, as another commenter said, so long as I can change the default, I'm not hopelessly hot and bothered.)
Actually, as the AC at 4:23 says, stupid trolling on news sites is a feature, not a bug. It increases page views and potentially clicks, which allows the news organization to charge more for ads. The "news" is just a loss leader in that model.
I'm *not* saying it's a good model. As far as I'm concerned, we should scrap the whole monetize-everything-in-sight idea and start over.
No, you're quite right, the newbies don't blindly do anything. I should have been clearer. I hear them complain about Win__fill_in_the_blank. I say, "Why not try Ubuntu? I can show you how." And I make a dual boot system, find out how they want their Desktop to look, which functions are important to them (multimedia, usually), and set it up for them. Takes me about half an hour.
Except with Unity, I can't do that customizing. So now it's no longer "Why not try Ubuntu?" That was my only point. And since that's how usage of Linux and the distros spreads, I think it needs to be made.
Bwahahahaha! Somebody! Mod parent up 5x funny! (And too true, salted with a tad of excess harsh.)
Yup. I'm no power user. More of a black-belt newbie. I used to spend quite a bit of time on the forums, mostly helping with installation and data recovery issues (when I could understand the question). Now? Without any conscious decision to move away, it's been a few months. Starting at about the time I installed a natty alpha and began to think that I might have to move away from ubuntu, if that was any indication of what it was going to be.
"newbies ... don't have expectations"
BS. Unless they've never used a computer before. Chances are, they're refugees from Windows. The problem some of us are trying to point out is that Unity can't be configured into something familiar for them. Gnome2 can, but I gather Gnome3 plans to take that away as well.
Result? Among too many of the potential refugees I know: "Oh hell. I guess I'll just go with Win7 if I have to learn a whole new Desktop anyway."
So now I'm suggesting Linux Mint. (And I'm having another look at Mandriva after the comment above. Haven't paid attention to them in years.) But it's still a shame. All that momentum behind Ubuntu, just evaporating because a bunch of geeks are the ultimate fools, the kind who don't know that they don't know. And what they all-too-obviously don't know is UI.
It couldn't be implemented perfectly, or even well. But it would be better than the current stream of logorrhea. It should at least be tried.
N900 voip calls over wifi work okay. I have a pretty sucky ISP (Time Warner / Roadrunner. Monopoly in my neighborhood.) and the bandwidth I get varies all over the map from less than 100KB to the advertised 1MB, but the voip calls work and don't drop. I am always starting to talk at the same time as the other person because of the jitter etc issues. Also, probably because I don't have my router set up right, for about half a second at the beginning of the call, speech is really chopped up. After that, I guess, it allocates the necessary bandwidth and it's okay.
Setup on the N900 is effortless, as people have pointed out. Enter the data, and the N900 finds the networks for you and hops on. What I haven't figured out, and I'd be glad if the parent mentioned how he did it, is how I can *stop* it from falling back to 3G. For some reason, it's always trying to route calls through T-mobile first and I have to keep selecting wifi.
My T-mobile plan is a $10/mo pay-as-you-go which, after the first year can be extended for $1/month. So, starting in July, I'll have cell service for $12 per year. I'm looking forward to it, since whole months go by without me using cell at all. Call quality on cell networks is crystal clear.
I have nothing but good things to say about Callcentric. They're 2cents/min, and ~$4 monthly for fees and 911 service. They do need a bit more savvy to hook up than Skype. Unlike Skype, though, they actually work all the time for every call. (I don't have anything to do with either company, except paying a bill for service.)
And where do these turkeys get off, telling me how to work? They should be making it easy for me to work *my* way -- it's called customizability -- and not coming up with some stupid touchy design for somebody else's box and telling me to wear it on mine.
That ie6countdown.com site needs a big "Get Firefox" button in the middle. Get to work!
Um, super secret tip. (Are we alone? Okay, then.) When your boss says jump, you say "How high?" Your boss is currently your prof. Your prof is going to be hugely unimpressed by your commitment to doing something he/she considers important enough for you to spend your own money on if you don't go. Your prof is the one who'll be writing letters of reference for you.
So, do you really want your prof to be hugely unimpressed with you? Networking is very important, as some of the other people down here in the I-work-for-a-living section have already said. Networking starts at home. Trust me on this. I'm a prof. And I've been in exactly the position you describe where I had a student who blew off what I thought was an important conference. I was hugely unimpressed. Etc., through the other consequences you might expect.