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Comment Re:Wow manually edit configuration files. (Score 1) 223

by Raineer (#28328885) Attached to: DTV Transition Mostly Smooth, Windows Media Center Problems

I had a chuckle at the "manually edit" part, as well.

The fact is, editing by its vary nature is manual, so the modifier is redundant. The shopping list or letter to grandma in Word, or the one-liner email in Gmail are all manually written and manually edited.

If you've ever worked any sort of support you'd understand that a solid 95% of the American public are terrified to edit anything they didn't write themselves. I completely agree that it's very similar to editing that grocery list, and this would even come with directions!

However, there is a funny thing about directions given to the average person. If they get above 4 or 5 steps (this includes mouse clicks), people see too much and get overwhelmed immediately. I am so blessed as to spend my day job supporting a service force who have been given their own laptops for the last 12 years. I still get many calls every day from technicians (who spend their days disassembling and repairing printers) saying they can't follow a 5 step process for loading firmware into said device.

My favorite ever feedback was "You think in too many steps, please simplify this." The moral of the story is... if there's more than 3, even mouse clicks are hard.
Space

Dark Matter Discovered Near Solar System? 179

Posted by Soulskill from the near-being-a-relative-term dept.
gpronger writes "The ATIC (Advanced Thin Ionization Calorimeter) has potentially discovered the presence of dark matter close (only 3000 light-years) to our solar system. The system detected a large-amount of high energy cosmic rays which match the theoretical signature of dark matter annihilating itself. The universe is believed to be composed of about 25% dark matter, but there has been little evidence of it. This discovery, if correct, would be the first." The paper was published in Nature , but it requires a subscription to see beyond the abstract.
Hardware Hacking

Submission + - Kickass $100 DESKTOP from Zonbu (worldchanging.com)

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: To hell with the $100 laptop. This is vastly superior, if it lives up to the hype. Jeremy at Worldchanging sez — "You've heard of the $100 laptop. What about a $100 desktop? Meet Zonbu: a new computer company making desktop computers that are both extremely green and extremely cheap. Impossible, you say? Not so. They've done it by using the Product-Service-System concept. I recently had the pleasure of testing out a unit they sent me, and I have to give it a thumbs-up." I haven't used it yet myself, but it sure looks cool.
Slashdot.org

New Dynamic Updating Discussions 100

Posted by CmdrTaco from the new-and-improved dept.
Slashdot users of the Discussion2 system now have a new 'Update' button visible on their floating control slider, as well at the end of the discussion. This button will update your page to include comments posted since the page was loaded, so now you can keep discussion pages up to date without doing a full reload. It's nowhere near complete yet, but it's a nice step that goes a long ways towards making it easier to use larger discussions while they are actively updating. If you aren't using Discussion2, you need to log in, and toggle the checkbox visible on every page. You probably need bother only if you are using Firefox 1.5 or 2.x or Safari. You can send bug reports to me if you want.

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I tell them to turn to the study of mathematics, for it is only there that they might escape the lusts of the flesh. -- Thomas Mann, "The Magic Mountain"

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