I think we agree that the Slashdot population is made up mostly of nerds, and we know the tagline is "News for Nerds." How can you look at a story that has well over 900 comments (at the time of my posting, at least) and say, "This doesn't belong here, nerds don't want this here!"?
One nice thing about nerds is that we care about and have opinions on all sorts of things, including politics, and we all (well, most of us) seem to enjoy good arguments and intelligent debates. Given, there are a lot of idiots/trolls/flamebait, but Slashdot still has a decent population of intelligent people with a healthy variety of opinions, political leanings, and experiences. This makes it an ideal forum for nerds to get their argumentative jollies. As you said, anybody who cares probably already knew about this from another source, but the politics section seems to be intended for discussion rather than for information. It's nothing remotely like CNN.
It's too bad there's no fair way to clearly define that thin grey line, and it has to be taken on a case-by-case basis (Unless there's some method I'm missing).
The machine, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), aims to recreate the conditions of the Big Bang, when the universe is thought to have exploded into existence about 14 billion years ago.
"There was a hell of a bang, the tunnel housing the machine filled with helium and dust and we had to call in the fire brigade to evacuate the place"
Net Applications collects its data from the browsers of visitors to its network of more than 40,000 Web sites.
Hm... If I had Vista right now, I might be furiously surfing the net, trying to get it to function...
Although, slightly more seriously, when people upgrade to a new and different OS, regardless of how well it works, they'll probably spend much more time than they normally do on the internet figuring things out and such. Could this cause a spike in "market share"? I mean, I'm sure Vista's market share is actually increasing, but the Mac's measured market share would suffer in this method of research because Mac users aren't going to increase their web usage because of Vista. Windows users, especially those who have already upgraded, will.
When was the last time you saw a cat torturing another cat for fun, or to scare the other cats into submission?
This is true, cats usually don't go all out against each other, but have you ever seen one once it catches a mouse? They're brutal. They take something that is completely powerless (an unarmed innocent, say) and toys with it, tortures it, kills it slowly. They really like the torturing bit. A cat with, say, the military power of the United States would likely increase these mouse-capades by a few orders of magnitude.
Imagine the president (This is a hypothetical cat president, not a satirical one, as far as I know) setting his sights on some poor, defenseless, third-world country, putting the whole country under siege, and slowly decimating the population (eventually probably giving up on the decimation and just killing all of them) over time. My guess is that it wouldn't be all that well received. Such a one-sided conflict could barely be called a "war," but is more like macro-torture.
I'm not sure exactly how such a cat would vote on things like Iraq, probably at this point they'd back off, because they don't like going after tough fights on others' territory. But if you give a cat (or group of cats) too much power, they will be aggresive and will take advantage of weaker parties. They're natural hunters, after all.
Eh, it was a joke. I actually love physics and thinking about the laws that govern nature, although I'm not studying it. If those laws were just set by some higher power or whatnot then you're right, they're still laws worth investigating, and the presence of a being smarter than man just gives us something to aspire to, I suppose.
However, the summary (I didn't RTFA) suggests that some of the most basic laws of physics we hold so dear are flawed to the point where sometimes they simply aren't true. Some could (as in the ID debate) assert that all physics is then subjective to the whim of a higher power (another reply mentioned Occasionalism, which is this idea exactly, apparently) in which case (they could claim) it would be silly to try to make sense of everything using laws and rules, because that more intelligent being is beyond our comprehension and may change its mind every now and then.
that Newton's Laws are actually just flawed theories? In that case, sign me up for the new "Intelligent Force" theory. Everything accelerates because something smarter than me decided it would, and there's no point asking questions. No more physics equations for me!
Trilling and his team looked for disks in 69 binary systems between 50 and 200 light-years away from Earth. All the stars are more massive and younger than our middle-aged Sun.
Better endowed and younger, eh? And you can have two at once? Maybe we'd better rethink our exclusive orbit with our Sun... After all, we just keep going in circles.
Man, I hope it's as awesome as we all want it to be. Specifically, awesome enough to almost make me consider switching back from Opera. (Not that I want to, but I always enjoy watching competition)
Of course, by then we may have Opera 10 coming up... Good luck, Mozilla!
I don't think Wikipedia should be used to find critical information. It should be (and mostly is, best I can tell) used out of fleeting interest and curiosity. I'd never use Wikipedia for serious research, except maybe as a starting point to find reliable sources, but I use it all the time to find out completely irrelevant and intriguing things, like when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and what the worst movies of all time are and who that guy was that did that one thing I vaguely remember. I don't necessarily need these factoids to be accurate; the fact that they're there is enough.
Requiring qualifications would take away some of the charm of Wikipedia. Often, a very interesting and entertaining part of using it is noticing where the flamebait contributors set in. Besides, with such a widely used system, over time the information usually levels out to around "not false" in quality. As long as users know to take everything with a grain of salt and use Wikipedia for entertainment rather than serious reference, "not false" is definitely enough.
I have very little experience with Linux, but is it actually all that slow in comparison to other OSs? Most of my school's computers will boot in either XP or Redhat, and booting in Linux takes a tiny fraction of the time as XP. Is that a well-optimized version of Redhat? Or is Linux slow just in comparison to OSX (or others)? Or do Linux users just want it to be as fast as humanly possible (A noble quest), and it will never boot soon enough?
Further, while HP leads worldwide PC sales, it is second to Dell within the US. How is that even possible?
Uh... Considering the article concerns (simple) analysis of numbers and statistics, the author should be able to wrap his mind around this relatively simple situation.
Also:
BMW doesn't compete against ship and plane builders, nor even the entire line of cars built by GM. It would therefore be absurd to talk about BMW's small share of the "vehicle market," or even to compare its market
share among other car makers. It's simply pointless and irrelevant.
is actually an impressively good argument to start out the article, but the author seems to think it only holds true when the analogous "BMW" is Apple. Later, Ballmer (Granted, Ballmer's comments did make no sense, but the author could have chosen better criticisms. I mean, come on, Ballmer's a gold mine for any MS critic.) was attacked for attempting to use sales percentages for the Zune from only a select segment of the market. The author refused to narrow the market for the Zune, but insisted on narrowing it for the Mac. It does seem that the upper end of the market is where the Zune was meant to compete, and its numbers there might be ever-so-slightly better.
The second article was more even-handed and it made really good points, but the author could have written a completely unbiased article with the same data and been more convincing about it. For example, why kick the Zune while it's down?
Even if Microsoft had shipped a million Zunes already, it would barely even show up as a blip on the installed base of iPods, or in comparison to any other recent consumer electronics launches.
Well, yeah, it was a pretty low goal. Why poke fun at low expectations? Pointing out that there's no way the Zune can achieve that goal would be OK, but it's just unnecessary to make fun of the goal itself. Besides, the idea was to start out small, to make the Zune vs. iPod competition the new David vs. Goliath. Of course, in this case, David is without a sling. Or a rock.
Slashdot Mirror
I think we agree that the Slashdot population is made up mostly of nerds, and we know the tagline is "News for Nerds." How can you look at a story that has well over 900 comments (at the time of my posting, at least) and say, "This doesn't belong here, nerds don't want this here!"?
One nice thing about nerds is that we care about and have opinions on all sorts of things, including politics, and we all (well, most of us) seem to enjoy good arguments and intelligent debates. Given, there are a lot of idiots/trolls/flamebait, but Slashdot still has a decent population of intelligent people with a healthy variety of opinions, political leanings, and experiences. This makes it an ideal forum for nerds to get their argumentative jollies. As you said, anybody who cares probably already knew about this from another source, but the politics section seems to be intended for discussion rather than for information. It's nothing remotely like CNN.
Link!
Two little dashes in the url became one superdash!
It's too bad there's no fair way to clearly define that thin grey line, and it has to be taken on a case-by-case basis (Unless there's some method I'm missing).
The inefficiency of real justice is aggravating.
Eh, sounds partially successful.
Hm... If I had Vista right now, I might be furiously surfing the net, trying to get it to function...
Although, slightly more seriously, when people upgrade to a new and different OS, regardless of how well it works, they'll probably spend much more time than they normally do on the internet figuring things out and such. Could this cause a spike in "market share"? I mean, I'm sure Vista's market share is actually increasing, but the Mac's measured market share would suffer in this method of research because Mac users aren't going to increase their web usage because of Vista. Windows users, especially those who have already upgraded, will.
Imagine the president (This is a hypothetical cat president, not a satirical one, as far as I know) setting his sights on some poor, defenseless, third-world country, putting the whole country under siege, and slowly decimating the population (eventually probably giving up on the decimation and just killing all of them) over time. My guess is that it wouldn't be all that well received. Such a one-sided conflict could barely be called a "war," but is more like macro-torture.
I'm not sure exactly how such a cat would vote on things like Iraq, probably at this point they'd back off, because they don't like going after tough fights on others' territory. But if you give a cat (or group of cats) too much power, they will be aggresive and will take advantage of weaker parties. They're natural hunters, after all.
Eh, it was a joke. I actually love physics and thinking about the laws that govern nature, although I'm not studying it. If those laws were just set by some higher power or whatnot then you're right, they're still laws worth investigating, and the presence of a being smarter than man just gives us something to aspire to, I suppose.
However, the summary (I didn't RTFA) suggests that some of the most basic laws of physics we hold so dear are flawed to the point where sometimes they simply aren't true. Some could (as in the ID debate) assert that all physics is then subjective to the whim of a higher power (another reply mentioned Occasionalism, which is this idea exactly, apparently) in which case (they could claim) it would be silly to try to make sense of everything using laws and rules, because that more intelligent being is beyond our comprehension and may change its mind every now and then.
You mean "... if his post weren't full of spelling and grammar errors."
that Newton's Laws are actually just flawed theories? In that case, sign me up for the new "Intelligent Force" theory. Everything accelerates because something smarter than me decided it would, and there's no point asking questions. No more physics equations for me!
Man, I hope it's as awesome as we all want it to be. Specifically, awesome enough to almost make me consider switching back from Opera. (Not that I want to, but I always enjoy watching competition)
Of course, by then we may have Opera 10 coming up... Good luck, Mozilla!
I don't think Wikipedia should be used to find critical information. It should be (and mostly is, best I can tell) used out of fleeting interest and curiosity. I'd never use Wikipedia for serious research, except maybe as a starting point to find reliable sources, but I use it all the time to find out completely irrelevant and intriguing things, like when the Ottoman Empire collapsed and what the worst movies of all time are and who that guy was that did that one thing I vaguely remember. I don't necessarily need these factoids to be accurate; the fact that they're there is enough.
Requiring qualifications would take away some of the charm of Wikipedia. Often, a very interesting and entertaining part of using it is noticing where the flamebait contributors set in. Besides, with such a widely used system, over time the information usually levels out to around "not false" in quality. As long as users know to take everything with a grain of salt and use Wikipedia for entertainment rather than serious reference, "not false" is definitely enough.
I have very little experience with Linux, but is it actually all that slow in comparison to other OSs? Most of my school's computers will boot in either XP or Redhat, and booting in Linux takes a tiny fraction of the time as XP. Is that a well-optimized version of Redhat? Or is Linux slow just in comparison to OSX (or others)? Or do Linux users just want it to be as fast as humanly possible (A noble quest), and it will never boot soon enough?
From the first article: Uh... Considering the article concerns (simple) analysis of numbers and statistics, the author should be able to wrap his mind around this relatively simple situation.
Also: is actually an impressively good argument to start out the article, but the author seems to think it only holds true when the analogous "BMW" is Apple. Later, Ballmer (Granted, Ballmer's comments did make no sense, but the author could have chosen better criticisms. I mean, come on, Ballmer's a gold mine for any MS critic.) was attacked for attempting to use sales percentages for the Zune from only a select segment of the market. The author refused to narrow the market for the Zune, but insisted on narrowing it for the Mac. It does seem that the upper end of the market is where the Zune was meant to compete, and its numbers there might be ever-so-slightly better.
The second article was more even-handed and it made really good points, but the author could have written a completely unbiased article with the same data and been more convincing about it. For example, why kick the Zune while it's down? Well, yeah, it was a pretty low goal. Why poke fun at low expectations? Pointing out that there's no way the Zune can achieve that goal would be OK, but it's just unnecessary to make fun of the goal itself. Besides, the idea was to start out small, to make the Zune vs. iPod competition the new David vs. Goliath. Of course, in this case, David is without a sling. Or a rock.