I am saying both your "key" points are useless to write down anywhere:
1. 2 or 3 generations of strife. No time to educate your kids, people are just too busy to try to survive. Uneducated second generation and absolutely illiterate 3rd generation. Can't read your key points.
2. Even if someone could read, who can understand it? Define star. Define sun. Define soap.
2. Even if someone could read and understand, who would trust 2 cryptic and ancient looking messages? Why do what is written on some heaven-forsaken cave wall when more urgent issues are at hand.
3. The other guy asked you how would the stone-age descendants find the "soap", even if the reader could understand what soap means. You say google how to make soap. As if 3 generations of nearly stone-age culture would leave Google/internet/power/computers intact. Or maybe you are saying someone googles it now, and find a way to transmit the information genetically. But this wasn't mentioned clearly in your post.
4. Grandparents don't survive / aren't available in near stone-age strife.
5. "Sun is a star" doesn't lead to any math, by any stretch of imagination. It is simply a natural language construct. Like "fear is an emotion", "woman is a person", "arm is a limb" etc.
If we're talking about a method of transmitting key bits of knowledge to illiterate savages, then we need to rethink this conversation
We're not talking about a method, as if it were some goal of some sort. I don't care in the least what happens in such a near stone-age scenario: and I doubt many others are ready to work to improve the lot of near stone-age descendants. So I take it purely as an intellectual exercise. You said writing those stupid things would make someone discover medicine and math. I said it is bullshit for the above reasons.
If a burglar doesn't believe that other people do or should care about home security, they would just smash a window whether someone was home or not, and be genuinely surprised if the homeowner pulled a gun on them.
"Do" - yes. "Should" - only a really stupid burglar. Any sane person would believe that other people should take care of their own health. This doesn't mean the said sane person would get "genuinely surprised" if he observes that other people in fact do not take care of their own health.
Flash has interface elements which are specific to the web, or at least desktop computing where you're using a keyboard and a mouse, navigating menus, and whatnot. It's got tooltips that happen when you hover the mouse and things which make no sense in a purely touch-screen interface that is used on the iPad
So the developers don't have to use those interface elements in "a purely touch-screen interface that is used on the iPad". Just because Flash has an interface element doesn't mean developers must use it in all their apps. Flash has multi-touch support. Secondly, I have never used any of those "interface elements" of flash in any flash video. Just because flash has some feature that is good for Desktop/Laptop computing does not mean any instance of Flash automatically becomes invalid for "iPad".
I have an old laptop which I use disconnected from network. I run some java applications on it. Your statement is akin to saying : Java has API elements which are specific to network (java.net.. etc.) which make no sense in a purely non-network computer. So don't use java in any non-networked computer.
Why do people here on slashdot have this crazy notion that slashdotters are everyone?
No one here is assuming that, at least not the GP post by tepples. Notice the "until"? It is used to indicate an expectation/fear/possibility that such-and-such might happen in the future. So your word "are" is misplaced. Use future tense (in a non-certain manner i.e less than 100 percent probability), and you might be closer to what the GP post means.
Now, why such a expectation/fear/possibility ? There are more people who might be happy with just an appliance, with losing some of the flexibility of a full-fledged openly architectured because they don't use much of that flexibility. This makes the flexible computers expensive because fewer people use it, there is less demand and hence less economy of scale for the manufacturers.
Now, why express this expectation/fear/possibility rather than keep it to oneself? Simple : self-interest. For better or worse, historically computers have been very flexible. Even if most people don't use much of the flexibility. If this changes, it obviously goes against slashdotters - who actually used the flexibility.
What is so surprising in a slashdotter making such a post, that too on slashdot?
Parse error. The don't quite get the meaning of this sentence, but I would proceed after assuming that religion is what you call any irrational thought process. Please correct me if I am wrong in this assumption. While understandable, there are better and less ambiguous words in the English language for this - the word "irrational" itself is not a bad choice.
Religion is what this is about. Most buyers of a product do not have a religious attitude about the product.
As a corollary of the above assumption, I would have to assume that you are saying Most buyers of a product do not have an irrational attitude about the product.
This is absolutely incorrect. Any buying decision taken on the basis of brand/loyalty to company is irrational. Billions of dollars are being spent per year for "brand building" by professionals, who know what they are doing. Numerous academic and corporate-funded studies have shown that people are extremely irrational about buying decisions.
I summarize my understanding (might be incorrect due to "unconventional" language of yours) thus - First you equate any irrational decision to religion. Then you say that religion induces people to go to extremes, say, become killers, and then you want it to imply that anyone not killing cannot be irrational.
But that (fanboy) is a valid, and even popular, state of being! People want to "belong" somewhere. A lot of fanaticism in the world is due to that, and if we call it "fanboy" in the technical world, that doesn't take anything from it being a state of being in which many contemporary people live and die. There is a whole field of professional study which comes out with novel ways of making people fanboys. It goes under various names - marketing, branding, advertisement, promotion of brand loyalty.
So, at times calling someone a "fanboy" is a kind of ad hominem attack, skirting the real issue. At other times, "fanboy" is a true description of the state of being of the a person.
Neither the US *nor* the USSR 'single-handedly' won WWII, nor did one or the other do 'most of the damage'.
While this is right, but in general perception, the lie that US single-handedly won WWII is much-much more popular than the other lie that USSR single-handedly won WWII. Stupid Hollywood movies and ignorant people taking them for history is a big reason for this.
Even otherwise, US has more of a (cultural and informational) influence on the rest of the world than USSR/Russia - lot has to do with Americans speaking a (variant of a) much more popular language than Russians do.
Hence debunking one lie has been much more important than debunking the other. So much so that I never heard anyone telling that Russians single-handedly won the WWII.
Though in my experience, VNC is almost as trouble-free as rdesktop, I don't understand what your dad feels is complicated about VNC. Some network port blocked?
Both VNC and rdesktop have different quirks for clipboard, so I have to use both.
I hate this idea they have that the entire world around us should remain static, and this utter surprise whenever our actions have some kind of effect on that world.
If you hate such an idea, you must be hating being a human, and being around humans (if you stay around humans, that is). While it is expected that the world will change, it is not predictable in what ways it will change, and when. So any change surprises human beings. This is not to say they didn't want/expect any change, or that they cannot accept / reconcile themselves with the change.
Now, given that they are initially surprised, it is conceivable (and even expected) that they give the changed thing a new name for a while. This is because language has a baggage of history. The same word (weed) is not sufficient to express this changed thing (resistant weed), and in some way it is superior to the "weed as we knew it". Elementary linguistics, and understanding of English language will make it clear that superweed is an acceptable name while human beings are surprised with them.
Slashdot -> Help & Preferences -> Discussions -> Posting -> Comment Post Mode = "Plain Old Text". All your love will show in your paragraphs without your inserting any HTML non-sense.
Discounting Microsoft (though this may change with Windows Phone 7), Nokia, and Palm, all of which are flailing about and unable to adapt to the current market
In what sense is Nokia "flailing about" and "unable to adapt to the current market"?
Commercial success? tick (Being on Slashdot) hacker friendly? tick
Mobile phones is a major source of income for Nokia. Minor source for Apple. Still total profit of Nokia is similar to that of Apple. RDF?
Interesting. I do the opposite - using thunderbird's display mail user agent add-on, I conveniently check the device/agent used for sending the mail by my correspondent. Then I set my expectations according to that.
If everyone does like you, my strategy wouldn't be required. If everyone does like me, your strategy wouldn't be required.
I'm not making the statement that agriculture was promoted for any particular purpose, I'm simply saying that the side effect was the creation of a ruling elite.
OK, I somehow got the impression that you wee suggesting this. Now I kind of see your point, and where I don't - I am not so sure about it.
Hunting grounds are probably an order of magnitude larger than any agricultural fields
Still you think agriculture was promoted for the good of so called "ruling elite" rather than simple space efficiency? That it is even possible to ponder whether the benefit outweighs the loss? Because that suggests it is possible that society as we have could make do with an order of magnitude less land than we have.
Storage helps them survive during years of scarcity, but at the price of freedom. They become beholden to whoever controls the food supplies during the scarce years.
Agriculture itself does not reduce freedom. If the farmer were free, he could also store the food-grains himself. Or practice community storage, or pay someone to store the food-grains. The fact is that he is already not free - which is why he is beholden. So blaming agriculture for this loss of freedom is wrong.
Hunting also imposes its own loss of freedom. When there is scanty rainfall for hundreds of miles around a person and there is extreme shortage of game in the next season as a result in the area, there are no fast means of transport to go to the place of abundance of game, there is no communication even to figure out where to go if possible. Even if he goes to a place of abundant game, that place is already occupied by natives of that place, possibly ruled by a different state, necessitating conflict. What freedom is this?
With agriculture, you have to police fields as well as granaries. With hunting, you have to police hunting grounds. Bigger hunting grounds than agricultural fields are needed to sustain similar population, but they are of similar order of magnitude so I don't see a major difference there.
What use is watching the granary without watching the fields? At this point you say that population is essentially slave so no need to watch fields much, they will automatically come to the ruling elite only. But similar argument can be made for hunting too - population is essentially slave so no need to watch the hunting grounds. They will come to the ruling elite for permission to hunt.
Game may migrate? Fertility of soil decreases unless proper agricultural practices are followed - many of which have been discovered in last 1000 years. Many tribals in my country (and other places too) still burn down new forests every few years to clear new land for agriculture because previous land is useless.
Then you will say - "So follow proper agricultural practices". As a response, I say that if the civilization is so advanced, game can also be prevented from migration. Solve the problems of game (food, habitat in the chief) and they will not migrate. Various kinds of makeshift fencing also works.
You also ignore the major benefit to the proletariat from agriculture - storage helps them survive during years of scarcity. So it is not just the ruling elite that benefits from agriculture.
The real drivers for agriculture were control -> a ruling elite can only really exist if you have agriculture
Why so? The ruling elite can easily own the whole land and charge for hunting per unit time / per kg game / arbitrary prices.
Nature goes through cycles - some seasons there is abundant food and some seasons food is scarce. Even when the food is scarce, the ruling elite do not go to bed hungry. So the storability of food grains serves more for the convenience of the "proletariat", if you excuse the Marx-ish terminology.
That the proletariat does not starve and halve in number every food-deficient season is important for the "ruling elite" too, but that is besides the point.
In short, the way it should work is your OS sets the DPI automatically based on your display, and a 10pt font will appear the same size no matter what the display device
While you are right that we could do with better collaboration between the screen and computer - but distance also matters. So size of 10pt font shouldn't always be the same just based on DPI.
For different types of devices, the typical distance of the user from the screen is different. The following list is sorted in increasing order of the typical distance (in my opinion) of the user from the screen: 1. Mobile phone 2. Laptop 3. Desktop 4. TV 5. Projector - I hope for high DPI affordable projectors within a few decades
QUESTION: is a 19" wide screen actually less pixels than an 19" std ratio??? meaning is it cheaper to make, less raw material??? letting manufactures sell us less for the same price?
That it has less pixels has been explained by Calinous in a sibling post. But then, it is still cheaper to make because there is more demand for wide screens. One of the reasons is that wide is good for video, and computers are increasingly being used for watching videos. So manufacturers get more economy of scale when manufacturing wide screens.
While your point is valid, does it matter too much? Mostly, when viewing flash content, people completely watch flash content. HTML is typically only an enabler for flash in most cases and after launching flash the HTML can as well not exist for all the user cares. So, full-screening flash / window-manager zooming of flash part of the window works quite well for most people in most cases.
Do you have a popular use case where the user needs to view the non-flash web page along with flash content?
Slashdot Mirror
I am saying both your "key" points are useless to write down anywhere:
1. 2 or 3 generations of strife. No time to educate your kids, people are just too busy to try to survive. Uneducated second generation and absolutely illiterate 3rd generation. Can't read your key points.
2. Even if someone could read, who can understand it? Define star. Define sun. Define soap.
2. Even if someone could read and understand, who would trust 2 cryptic and ancient looking messages? Why do what is written on some heaven-forsaken cave wall when more urgent issues are at hand.
3. The other guy asked you how would the stone-age descendants find the "soap", even if the reader could understand what soap means. You say google how to make soap. As if 3 generations of nearly stone-age culture would leave Google/internet/power/computers intact. Or maybe you are saying someone googles it now, and find a way to transmit the information genetically. But this wasn't mentioned clearly in your post.
4. Grandparents don't survive / aren't available in near stone-age strife.
5. "Sun is a star" doesn't lead to any math, by any stretch of imagination. It is simply a natural language construct. Like "fear is an emotion", "woman is a person", "arm is a limb" etc.
If we're talking about a method of transmitting key bits of knowledge to illiterate savages, then we need to rethink this conversation
We're not talking about a method, as if it were some goal of some sort. I don't care in the least what happens in such a near stone-age scenario: and I doubt many others are ready to work to improve the lot of near stone-age descendants. So I take it purely as an intellectual exercise. You said writing those stupid things would make someone discover medicine and math. I said it is bullshit for the above reasons.
If a burglar doesn't believe that other people do or should care about home security, they would just smash a window whether someone was home or not, and be genuinely surprised if the homeowner pulled a gun on them.
"Do" - yes. "Should" - only a really stupid burglar. Any sane person would believe that other people should take care of their own health. This doesn't mean the said sane person would get "genuinely surprised" if he observes that other people in fact do not take care of their own health.
Real easy to make. Google 'lye ash soap'.
Google in stone age? Are you nuts?
"sun is a star" thing is an intro to math (in a sense).
No. The "thing" is just an entry in an English dictionary. It has nothing at all to do with math.
In fact, after 2/3 generations of an illiterate society, who would be able to read your "sun is a star", let alone derive calculus from it.
Three out of four of your security feeds say the battery performance of this app is unacceptable and should be avoided
Why would security feeds say anything about battery performance?
Flash has interface elements which are specific to the web, or at least desktop computing where you're using a keyboard and a mouse, navigating menus, and whatnot. It's got tooltips that happen when you hover the mouse and things which make no sense in a purely touch-screen interface that is used on the iPad
So the developers don't have to use those interface elements in "a purely touch-screen interface that is used on the iPad". Just because Flash has an interface element doesn't mean developers must use it in all their apps. Flash has multi-touch support. Secondly, I have never used any of those "interface elements" of flash in any flash video. Just because flash has some feature that is good for Desktop/Laptop computing does not mean any instance of Flash automatically becomes invalid for "iPad".
I have an old laptop which I use disconnected from network. I run some java applications on it. Your statement is akin to saying : Java has API elements which are specific to network (java.net.. etc.) which make no sense in a purely non-network computer. So don't use java in any non-networked computer.
Until they're everything to almost everyone.
Why do people here on slashdot have this crazy notion that slashdotters are everyone?
No one here is assuming that, at least not the GP post by tepples. Notice the "until"? It is used to indicate an expectation/fear/possibility that such-and-such might happen in the future. So your word "are" is misplaced. Use future tense (in a non-certain manner i.e less than 100 percent probability), and you might be closer to what the GP post means.
Now, why such a expectation/fear/possibility ? There are more people who might be happy with just an appliance, with losing some of the flexibility of a full-fledged openly architectured because they don't use much of that flexibility. This makes the flexible computers expensive because fewer people use it, there is less demand and hence less economy of scale for the manufacturers.
Now, why express this expectation/fear/possibility rather than keep it to oneself? Simple : self-interest. For better or worse, historically computers have been very flexible. Even if most people don't use much of the flexibility. If this changes, it obviously goes against slashdotters - who actually used the flexibility.
What is so surprising in a slashdotter making such a post, that too on slashdot?
But I call religion.
Parse error. The don't quite get the meaning of this sentence, but I would proceed after assuming that religion is what you call any irrational thought process. Please correct me if I am wrong in this assumption. While understandable, there are better and less ambiguous words in the English language for this - the word "irrational" itself is not a bad choice.
Religion is what this is about. Most buyers of a product do not have a religious attitude about the product.
As a corollary of the above assumption, I would have to assume that you are saying Most buyers of a product do not have an irrational attitude about the product.
This is absolutely incorrect. Any buying decision taken on the basis of brand/loyalty to company is irrational. Billions of dollars are being spent per year for "brand building" by professionals, who know what they are doing. Numerous academic and corporate-funded studies have shown that people are extremely irrational about buying decisions.
I summarize my understanding (might be incorrect due to "unconventional" language of yours) thus - First you equate any irrational decision to religion. Then you say that religion induces people to go to extremes, say, become killers, and then you want it to imply that anyone not killing cannot be irrational.
But that (fanboy) is a valid, and even popular, state of being! People want to "belong" somewhere. A lot of fanaticism in the world is due to that, and if we call it "fanboy" in the technical world, that doesn't take anything from it being a state of being in which many contemporary people live and die. There is a whole field of professional study which comes out with novel ways of making people fanboys. It goes under various names - marketing, branding, advertisement, promotion of brand loyalty.
So, at times calling someone a "fanboy" is a kind of ad hominem attack, skirting the real issue. At other times, "fanboy" is a true description of the state of being of the a person.
I thought you got caught.
Neither the US *nor* the USSR 'single-handedly' won WWII, nor did one or the other do 'most of the damage'.
While this is right, but in general perception, the lie that US single-handedly won WWII is much-much more popular than the other lie that USSR single-handedly won WWII. Stupid Hollywood movies and ignorant people taking them for history is a big reason for this.
Even otherwise, US has more of a (cultural and informational) influence on the rest of the world than USSR/Russia - lot has to do with Americans speaking a (variant of a) much more popular language than Russians do.
Hence debunking one lie has been much more important than debunking the other. So much so that I never heard anyone telling that Russians single-handedly won the WWII.
Have you tried this ?
Though in my experience, VNC is almost as trouble-free as rdesktop, I don't understand what your dad feels is complicated about VNC. Some network port blocked?
Both VNC and rdesktop have different quirks for clipboard, so I have to use both.
I hate this idea they have that the entire world around us should remain static, and this utter surprise whenever our actions have some kind of effect on that world.
If you hate such an idea, you must be hating being a human, and being around humans (if you stay around humans, that is). While it is expected that the world will change, it is not predictable in what ways it will change, and when. So any change surprises human beings. This is not to say they didn't want/expect any change, or that they cannot accept / reconcile themselves with the change.
Now, given that they are initially surprised, it is conceivable (and even expected) that they give the changed thing a new name for a while. This is because language has a baggage of history. The same word (weed) is not sufficient to express this changed thing (resistant weed), and in some way it is superior to the "weed as we knew it". Elementary linguistics, and understanding of English language will make it clear that superweed is an acceptable name while human beings are surprised with them.
Slashdot -> Help & Preferences -> Discussions -> Posting -> Comment Post Mode = "Plain Old Text". All your love will show in your paragraphs without your inserting any HTML non-sense.
As always, a preview helps too.
Discounting Microsoft (though this may change with Windows Phone 7), Nokia, and Palm, all of which are flailing about and unable to adapt to the current market
In what sense is Nokia "flailing about" and "unable to adapt to the current market"?
Commercial success? tick
(Being on Slashdot) hacker friendly? tick
Mobile phones is a major source of income for Nokia. Minor source for Apple. Still total profit of Nokia is similar to that of Apple. RDF?
Interesting. I do the opposite - using thunderbird's display mail user agent add-on, I conveniently check the device/agent used for sending the mail by my correspondent. Then I set my expectations according to that.
If everyone does like you, my strategy wouldn't be required. If everyone does like me, your strategy wouldn't be required.
I'm not making the statement that agriculture was promoted for any particular purpose, I'm simply saying that the side effect was the creation of a ruling elite.
OK, I somehow got the impression that you wee suggesting this. Now I kind of see your point, and where I don't - I am not so sure about it.
thanks
Hunting grounds are probably an order of magnitude larger than any agricultural fields
Still you think agriculture was promoted for the good of so called "ruling elite" rather than simple space efficiency? That it is even possible to ponder whether the benefit outweighs the loss? Because that suggests it is possible that society as we have could make do with an order of magnitude less land than we have.
Storage helps them survive during years of scarcity, but at the price of freedom. They become beholden to whoever controls the food supplies during the scarce years.
Agriculture itself does not reduce freedom. If the farmer were free, he could also store the food-grains himself. Or practice community storage, or pay someone to store the food-grains. The fact is that he is already not free - which is why he is beholden. So blaming agriculture for this loss of freedom is wrong.
Hunting also imposes its own loss of freedom. When there is scanty rainfall for hundreds of miles around a person and there is extreme shortage of game in the next season as a result in the area, there are no fast means of transport to go to the place of abundance of game, there is no communication even to figure out where to go if possible. Even if he goes to a place of abundant game, that place is already occupied by natives of that place, possibly ruled by a different state, necessitating conflict. What freedom is this?
With agriculture, you have to police fields as well as granaries. With hunting, you have to police hunting grounds. Bigger hunting grounds than agricultural fields are needed to sustain similar population, but they are of similar order of magnitude so I don't see a major difference there.
What use is watching the granary without watching the fields? At this point you say that population is essentially slave so no need to watch fields much, they will automatically come to the ruling elite only. But similar argument can be made for hunting too - population is essentially slave so no need to watch the hunting grounds. They will come to the ruling elite for permission to hunt.
Game may migrate? Fertility of soil decreases unless proper agricultural practices are followed - many of which have been discovered in last 1000 years. Many tribals in my country (and other places too) still burn down new forests every few years to clear new land for agriculture because previous land is useless.
Then you will say - "So follow proper agricultural practices". As a response, I say that if the civilization is so advanced, game can also be prevented from migration. Solve the problems of game (food, habitat in the chief) and they will not migrate. Various kinds of makeshift fencing also works.
You also ignore the major benefit to the proletariat from agriculture - storage helps them survive during years of scarcity. So it is not just the ruling elite that benefits from agriculture.
The real drivers for agriculture were control -> a ruling elite can only really exist if you have agriculture
Why so? The ruling elite can easily own the whole land and charge for hunting per unit time / per kg game / arbitrary prices.
Nature goes through cycles - some seasons there is abundant food and some seasons food is scarce. Even when the food is scarce, the ruling elite do not go to bed hungry. So the storability of food grains serves more for the convenience of the "proletariat", if you excuse the Marx-ish terminology.
That the proletariat does not starve and halve in number every food-deficient season is important for the "ruling elite" too, but that is besides the point.
In short, the way it should work is your OS sets the DPI automatically based on your display, and a 10pt font will appear the same size no matter what the display device
While you are right that we could do with better collaboration between the screen and computer - but distance also matters. So size of 10pt font shouldn't always be the same just based on DPI.
For different types of devices, the typical distance of the user from the screen is different. The following list is sorted in increasing order of the typical distance (in my opinion) of the user from the screen:
1. Mobile phone
2. Laptop
3. Desktop
4. TV
5. Projector - I hope for high DPI affordable projectors within a few decades
QUESTION: is a 19" wide screen actually less pixels than an 19" std ratio??? meaning is it cheaper to make, less raw material??? letting manufactures sell us less for the same price?
That it has less pixels has been explained by Calinous in a sibling post. But then, it is still cheaper to make because there is more demand for wide screens. One of the reasons is that wide is good for video, and computers are increasingly being used for watching videos. So manufacturers get more economy of scale when manufacturing wide screens.
In Firefox 3.5.9, go to :
Content - Fonts & colors - Advanced - Minimum Font size.
Works quite well.
I really love monospace/fixed-width fonts. Whether it be typing / reading / editing, I feel much more comfortable with monospace.
While your point is valid, does it matter too much? Mostly, when viewing flash content, people completely watch flash content. HTML is typically only an enabler for flash in most cases and after launching flash the HTML can as well not exist for all the user cares. So, full-screening flash / window-manager zooming of flash part of the window works quite well for most people in most cases.
Do you have a popular use case where the user needs to view the non-flash web page along with flash content?
http://www.snopes.com/college/exam/barometer.asp