You stop inheriting it once it's no longer useful or necessary to make a meaningful comparison.
Comparing big tanker engines that are oil powered to electrical engines is not correct until you add in the efficiency of electrical production from oil.
If you instead have either the engine or the power plant as nuclear-powered, you don't really have an apples-apples comparison anymore until you reach further back and take into account the resources (mostly manpower) required to extract & transport the raw materials and operate, and possibly any significant one-time cost differences in creating such an engine or power plant.
After three years? Are you posting from a time warp? Windows 7 general availability was October 22, 2009. It hasn't even been 1 year. And yet its install base is about a third of a product that has been on sale for almost *9* years, of which for less than 3 of those years there was another OS product (which did not do so well in the marketplace).
Even if you decided to change the subject by combining Vista and Windows 7, they combine to well over 1/3 of XP's marketshare in well under 3 years.
So let's replace that by something that makes more sense:
"Failing to replace more than a third of a previous OS product before 1 year".
I'd say that this does not contradict doing well *at all*.
That's only if you don't value your free time at all. I don't value my free time any less than my work time. If I did, I might try to find more real work to rake in more money in lieu of that free time.
Yes, I'd press the damn button on the PS3 myself. But I pay other people to maintain my car and my A/C and every couple of weeks to clean my house. I know how to do these things, but I just don't want to and would rather be playing video games. And I can afford this exchange. So long as the person you hire is reputable, they probably do a better job in that amount of time than I could anyway. But even if they can't, I'd rather pay.
No, in science, proof comes first, explanations come later. You rarely have to disprove things in science because they are assumed false via the scientific method. The only things you have to disprove are things that had a lot of evidence, but you have another more complicated explanation that explains those things equally well: you have to find a case where your more complicated explanation contradicts the simpler explanation, and disprove the simpler explanation.
And even in that case, the simpler explanation is restricted rather than thrown away.
It is not the domain of science to come up with an explanation for or disprove any random reported phenomena, anymore than you have to explain your striking physical resemblance to Mary Antoinette or disprove it. It's up to proponents of an idea to put up or shut up. There's nothing at all that prevents an aura reader from doing research of their own.
Just because people that can do it don't want to be studied, doesn't mean that it isn't real.
It certainly doesn't mean it's real, though, and the default answer is that it's not, much as by default I assume you are not personally able to fly without mechanical assistance. Especially when there's no proposed mechanism (maybe they can see infrared!!! is not really a fleshed-out theory). And frankly, you would not expect absolutely everybody who can do thing X to be of one mind about how to deal with scientists, so any unified front is circumstantial evidence against, and that's all we've got.
But every time it has been studied, the testee has been unable to back up their claims.
But, I'm sure you'll write this off as delusional, but it is ultimately a stronger position than yours is. But, it's not really confirmation bias when it suggests what you want it to, is it?
Orwellian? The whole schtick of 1984 was about changing the meanings of things and pretending that no change ever occurred, and also using the fewest, most generic words possible so you could not convey new and dangerous ideas crisply. Reducing a volume control to "button" and changing what it does is far more Orwellian than just saying it's a volume control and you don't get to change that. Which is not to say that it's a good analogy either.
"What's a 'volume button'" indeed. You know full well what it is. Orwell called this sort of pretense "doublethink", albeit in his book you were supposed to believe what you were saying. And you'll find that the button is labelled in the manual, and that the APIs do define that it controls volume, and nothing else, always.
You'll never get to determine, for your own usage scenarios, whether it's more comfortable or natural to press a button on the side of the device to take a picture. You won't have to make that choice for yourself, because Apple has already made it for you.
You also can't determine for your own usage scenario that you want eight buttons along the right side and a trackball. And you can't determine that all the buttons are locked to your app so that it's impossible to get back to the home screen short of draining the battery.
If you want these buttons reprogrammable, the iPhone isn't for you. What Apple has done is made this an up-front choice, rather than one that has to be researched and re-made for every single application.
Do you turn on your music, take a phone call, and then start the camera?
Yes. Why is this difficult to figure out?
The volume control has two buttons. I really *don't* know what it's doing. Maybe they both do the same thing. Maybe they are a software zoom control (that's what I assumed at first).
Do you get confused when you're online and you're using TAB to skip between interface elements, you land on a button, press the space bar, and it "clicks" the button?
There's a lot of data to say that yes, people find that incredibly confusing. Enter is much more commonly understood. People hit tab and spacebar by accident, frequently, when they actually mean to insert a tab into a text element. It's not a great design but we're stuck with it.
And what's the deal with that TAB button, anyway?
Yeah. It sucks. You seem to think it's a good thing.
And don't even get me started on a backspace key that would cause my browser to go to the previous page. That totally loses me.
Your sarcasm is noted but this one pisses people off. And this search just gets the people who understand it. It's again an example of really poor design. If you accidentally hit the tab key because you expect spaces, then decide to cancel the tab key, now you've lost all of your form fields.
Honestly, the volume button is far less confusing than every example you gave, because while the volume button is ultimately kind of a minor detail, the keyboard modality you mentioned is horrible UX that's been grandfathered into products forever and now we're stuck with them. That's *why* a company like Apple doesn't want to go down this road.
That's actually a really interesting use-case, but I doubt more than a handful of users (advanced or no) have ever set up their start menu in that way. That's pretty much an emergent behaviour rather than a designed behaviour, and it's not something that most power users are doing. In general, power users are defined by doing things that both noob users and other power users don't do.
If you really wanted, you could make a hotkey keybinding, or just rename your file "1743" so that search would find it in the same number of steps. I have to also question whether that's even faster in the end than just typing your destination in the majority of cases, including the majority of power user cases. It is definitely a case of having gotten used to the quirks of one OS.
Personally, I would actually be happiest if they left the searchbox but brought back the flyout menus, instead of having to choose one or the other. Maybe then they could compromise with you by having a winkey shortcut to open the flyout menu with focus on the menu and not on the searchbox.
I do appreciate the argument about search not being perfectly predictable. I tend to think that the start menu search should have a separate scope from the general search indexing, so you could all but guarantee that nothing changes unless you specifically add something yourself or install something, and results are always basically instant.
The first online music store that agreed to sell DRM music would benefit, iTunes would never have taken off, and the record companies would be fine. Apple was able to turn the tables on the record companies when iTunes became a huge and dominant market for them.
Although I expect there is a unified equation, I don't see how simple logic says any such thing (not without the argument also being easily overturned). At best, incredibly complicated logic says that, but I'm not convinced that's even true.
That's a very inertial-frame-centric view of the Universe, but it isn't true except for very deviant definitions of "real" that also rejects relativity and implies that gravity is not "real" (for it, too, is a fictitious force, which isn't the same as saying it isn't real).
I've mostly used credit unions, not actual banks, but I've had accounts in Canada and the US. If there's a history limit on either of them, I've never encountered it (and I have gone back for years before).
It surprises me that there's any question of this at the "real" banks.
Different people have different learning styles. Personally, I really do learn best sitting with a book on my own.
The primary value of University was:
1. Telling me which books to read in which order in order to get from point A (high school graduate) to point B (what I really wanted to understand).
This really isn't easy to come by even if you technically have all the information before you. Things like OpenCourseWare help, but it doesn't provide the full guide yet.
2. Providing external deadlines.
To be honest, there are boring things I don't care to understand in and of themselves that I do have to understand to comprehend some details of quantum mechanics. In self-study, that's where I would slow down, and it would take me longer in the end. But nobody was putting the brakes on me learning faster on the parts I was more interested in.
3. A set of fellow students who came from a similar point A and heading to a similar point B who I could work with.
Some things are inefficient when done alone. Even for a massive introvert like me.
This is quite aside from the whole "networking" thing, which is also a benefit but I get that you can network on your own.
4. Occasionally assignments were well-crafted to not be busy-work and not just to "test" me, but to make me "independently" guide me to new ideas that turned out to be the breakthrough ideas of the past.
The courses that were closer to pure math were generally best at this, but physics and similar (chemistry, fluid dynamics, etc.) courses could also help with that.
I contend that many to most assignments were bullshit busywork that mostly proved that I wouldn't buckle under pressure rather than being useful in their own right, and I hate those. I think most assignments were worthless. But not all. And part of the key there is for this to work, you have to know that the student has all the pieces of the puzzle before you nudge them to think about something that requires putting them together.
5. A few pieces of paper I could refer to as an affidavit to prove to other people and organisations that I understood what I studied and could take the pressure of a high-stress program, which represent the opinions of dozens of professors (many to most of whom are world-class experts in their respective fields).
Now, as it turns out, I'm not actually a pure programmer or pure IT person like many on slashdot, so while "write open source code" can be helpful in accomplishing the same goal for some people (just as having a personal portfolio can help for an artist), it's difficult for me to demonstrate some of my engineering skills that require a lot of very expensive, very immobile equipment to demonstrate my skill. Plus you have to get people on the OSS project to accept you.
I'm sure not all of these points apply to others. I'm sure some people find a lot of value from lectures, or office hours, or access to certain rare resources their University has (eg. a student-run nuclear reactor, a rare books library which unfortunately has not been digitized, etc.). And after your "10000 hours" or however long it is, work experience and references will tend to trump point 5.
That is the entire point of having an open source project is that the developers don't have to be experts.
Since when?
I don't think I've ever heard that before. I thought it was usually either one or both of:
1. So that you'd get more experts working on your product. 2. Because of an ethical stance about being able to modify software that you run without having to learn to read optimised assembly.
Not sure I agree, simply because if you throw out the two convenient reference points, freezing at 0 and boiling at 100, then there's really no big advantage in the size of Celsius degrees. Kelvin is convenient basically because Celsius is convenient and having 0 at absolute 0 is convenient. I think other than Celsius, the only everyday measure referencing the Celsius degree size is the calorie.
Maybe we could make one where 0 degrees is absolute 0, and 1000 degrees is freezing (or boiling...pick one). Or even pick one such that the width of a degree is determined by other SI units, eg. the amount of temperature increase provided by one joule of energy on one gram of water.
No, that's wrong. You can play it without an Internet connection (from a "guest" account), but you can't install it. Much to my disappointment since I was on vacation without Internet the week after the game released (I didn't want to play it during my vacation, but I *did* want to play it during the airport layover, and the intermediate airport didn't have WiFi).
He's referring to www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf and I believe he's technically correct: the most useless kind of correct. It's not about tax brackets, which don't roll over at $40000, it's that the US federal tax schedule has a $50 granularity.
What's happening is that a person making $39999.99 is allowed to pay the taxes that a person making $39950 should according to a straight up percent-based calculation. This comes to a whopping $12 (sometimes $13) of difference, after you hit $34000 until you hit $82300 so if you get a raise of less than $50 per year then you have basically a 1 in 4 chance of getting screwed out of a couple bucks on net. Then, up to $100000 it's all the way up to $14 (*gasp*). After that, you don't get the benefit of the $50 granularity and you have to pay the calculated amount, so what you are saying takes effect.
Slashdot Mirror
New rule: obvious console fanboys (or anti-fanboys) may not accuse anybody else of being fanboys.
It's just too cute.
If I were an astroturfer, one thing I'd do is accuse other people of being astroturfers, to bring up my anti-astroturfer cred.
Also? I'd jump on puppies while wearing steel-toed boots.
You stop inheriting it once it's no longer useful or necessary to make a meaningful comparison.
Comparing big tanker engines that are oil powered to electrical engines is not correct until you add in the efficiency of electrical production from oil.
If you instead have either the engine or the power plant as nuclear-powered, you don't really have an apples-apples comparison anymore until you reach further back and take into account the resources (mostly manpower) required to extract & transport the raw materials and operate, and possibly any significant one-time cost differences in creating such an engine or power plant.
After three years? Are you posting from a time warp? Windows 7 general availability was October 22, 2009. It hasn't even been 1 year. And yet its install base is about a third of a product that has been on sale for almost *9* years, of which for less than 3 of those years there was another OS product (which did not do so well in the marketplace).
Even if you decided to change the subject by combining Vista and Windows 7, they combine to well over 1/3 of XP's marketshare in well under 3 years.
So let's replace that by something that makes more sense:
"Failing to replace more than a third of a previous OS product before 1 year".
I'd say that this does not contradict doing well *at all*.
Selling something in an online store is not the same as advertising online for a brick-and-mortar store.
That's only if you don't value your free time at all. I don't value my free time any less than my work time. If I did, I might try to find more real work to rake in more money in lieu of that free time.
Yes, I'd press the damn button on the PS3 myself. But I pay other people to maintain my car and my A/C and every couple of weeks to clean my house. I know how to do these things, but I just don't want to and would rather be playing video games. And I can afford this exchange. So long as the person you hire is reputable, they probably do a better job in that amount of time than I could anyway. But even if they can't, I'd rather pay.
What if they charge $30 more for no reason at all, and also do firmware updates? Is that better?
Canadian dollars are worth 0.985 American dollars, a difference which doesn't even come close to covering the difference.
No, in science, proof comes first, explanations come later. You rarely have to disprove things in science because they are assumed false via the scientific method. The only things you have to disprove are things that had a lot of evidence, but you have another more complicated explanation that explains those things equally well: you have to find a case where your more complicated explanation contradicts the simpler explanation, and disprove the simpler explanation.
And even in that case, the simpler explanation is restricted rather than thrown away.
It is not the domain of science to come up with an explanation for or disprove any random reported phenomena, anymore than you have to explain your striking physical resemblance to Mary Antoinette or disprove it. It's up to proponents of an idea to put up or shut up. There's nothing at all that prevents an aura reader from doing research of their own.
Just because people that can do it don't want to be studied, doesn't mean that it isn't real.
It certainly doesn't mean it's real, though, and the default answer is that it's not, much as by default I assume you are not personally able to fly without mechanical assistance. Especially when there's no proposed mechanism (maybe they can see infrared!!! is not really a fleshed-out theory). And frankly, you would not expect absolutely everybody who can do thing X to be of one mind about how to deal with scientists, so any unified front is circumstantial evidence against, and that's all we've got.
But every time it has been studied, the testee has been unable to back up their claims.
But, I'm sure you'll write this off as delusional, but it is ultimately a stronger position than yours is. But, it's not really confirmation bias when it suggests what you want it to, is it?
This sentence has some poetic irony in it.
Orwellian? The whole schtick of 1984 was about changing the meanings of things and pretending that no change ever occurred, and also using the fewest, most generic words possible so you could not convey new and dangerous ideas crisply. Reducing a volume control to "button" and changing what it does is far more Orwellian than just saying it's a volume control and you don't get to change that. Which is not to say that it's a good analogy either.
"What's a 'volume button'" indeed. You know full well what it is. Orwell called this sort of pretense "doublethink", albeit in his book you were supposed to believe what you were saying. And you'll find that the button is labelled in the manual, and that the APIs do define that it controls volume, and nothing else, always.
You'll never get to determine, for your own usage scenarios, whether it's more comfortable or natural to press a button on the side of the device to take a picture. You won't have to make that choice for yourself, because Apple has already made it for you.
You also can't determine for your own usage scenario that you want eight buttons along the right side and a trackball. And you can't determine that all the buttons are locked to your app so that it's impossible to get back to the home screen short of draining the battery.
If you want these buttons reprogrammable, the iPhone isn't for you. What Apple has done is made this an up-front choice, rather than one that has to be researched and re-made for every single application.
Do you turn on your music, take a phone call, and then start the camera?
Yes. Why is this difficult to figure out?
The volume control has two buttons. I really *don't* know what it's doing. Maybe they both do the same thing. Maybe they are a software zoom control (that's what I assumed at first).
Do you get confused when you're online and you're using TAB to skip between interface elements, you land on a button, press the space bar, and it "clicks" the button?
There's a lot of data to say that yes, people find that incredibly confusing. Enter is much more commonly understood. People hit tab and spacebar by accident, frequently, when they actually mean to insert a tab into a text element. It's not a great design but we're stuck with it.
And what's the deal with that TAB button, anyway?
Yeah. It sucks. You seem to think it's a good thing.
And don't even get me started on a backspace key that would cause my browser to go to the previous page. That totally loses me.
Your sarcasm is noted but this one pisses people off. And this search just gets the people who understand it. It's again an example of really poor design. If you accidentally hit the tab key because you expect spaces, then decide to cancel the tab key, now you've lost all of your form fields.
Honestly, the volume button is far less confusing than every example you gave, because while the volume button is ultimately kind of a minor detail, the keyboard modality you mentioned is horrible UX that's been grandfathered into products forever and now we're stuck with them. That's *why* a company like Apple doesn't want to go down this road.
That's actually a really interesting use-case, but I doubt more than a handful of users (advanced or no) have ever set up their start menu in that way. That's pretty much an emergent behaviour rather than a designed behaviour, and it's not something that most power users are doing. In general, power users are defined by doing things that both noob users and other power users don't do.
If you really wanted, you could make a hotkey keybinding, or just rename your file "1743" so that search would find it in the same number of steps. I have to also question whether that's even faster in the end than just typing your destination in the majority of cases, including the majority of power user cases. It is definitely a case of having gotten used to the quirks of one OS.
Personally, I would actually be happiest if they left the searchbox but brought back the flyout menus, instead of having to choose one or the other. Maybe then they could compromise with you by having a winkey shortcut to open the flyout menu with focus on the menu and not on the searchbox.
I do appreciate the argument about search not being perfectly predictable. I tend to think that the start menu search should have a separate scope from the general search indexing, so you could all but guarantee that nothing changes unless you specifically add something yourself or install something, and results are always basically instant.
The first online music store that agreed to sell DRM music would benefit, iTunes would never have taken off, and the record companies would be fine. Apple was able to turn the tables on the record companies when iTunes became a huge and dominant market for them.
That's not a contradiction. For instance, that's the exact behaviour you'd expect of a person who ranked three hypothetical conditions like this:
1. Nobody can be a patent troll.
2. Everybody can be a patent troll.
3. Everybody, except you, can be a patent troll.
Physics is not a strict superset of logic, nor of math.
Although I expect there is a unified equation, I don't see how simple logic says any such thing (not without the argument also being easily overturned). At best, incredibly complicated logic says that, but I'm not convinced that's even true.
That's a very inertial-frame-centric view of the Universe, but it isn't true except for very deviant definitions of "real" that also rejects relativity and implies that gravity is not "real" (for it, too, is a fictitious force, which isn't the same as saying it isn't real).
The GP is actually correct.
No it doesn't.
Nor does it change the fact that the Western Roman Empire collapsed in 476. Or that peanuts are technically legumes and not nuts.
But I don't get why you're bringing that up.
There's basically no connection between saying zed vs. zee and saying zehbra vs. zeebra.
(I'm a Canadian. It's zed, and it's zeebra.)
I've mostly used credit unions, not actual banks, but I've had accounts in Canada and the US. If there's a history limit on either of them, I've never encountered it (and I have gone back for years before).
It surprises me that there's any question of this at the "real" banks.
Different people have different learning styles. Personally, I really do learn best sitting with a book on my own.
The primary value of University was:
1. Telling me which books to read in which order in order to get from point A (high school graduate) to point B (what I really wanted to understand).
This really isn't easy to come by even if you technically have all the information before you. Things like OpenCourseWare help, but it doesn't provide the full guide yet.
2. Providing external deadlines.
To be honest, there are boring things I don't care to understand in and of themselves that I do have to understand to comprehend some details of quantum mechanics. In self-study, that's where I would slow down, and it would take me longer in the end. But nobody was putting the brakes on me learning faster on the parts I was more interested in.
3. A set of fellow students who came from a similar point A and heading to a similar point B who I could work with.
Some things are inefficient when done alone. Even for a massive introvert like me.
This is quite aside from the whole "networking" thing, which is also a benefit but I get that you can network on your own.
4. Occasionally assignments were well-crafted to not be busy-work and not just to "test" me, but to make me "independently" guide me to new ideas that turned out to be the breakthrough ideas of the past.
The courses that were closer to pure math were generally best at this, but physics and similar (chemistry, fluid dynamics, etc.) courses could also help with that.
I contend that many to most assignments were bullshit busywork that mostly proved that I wouldn't buckle under pressure rather than being useful in their own right, and I hate those. I think most assignments were worthless. But not all. And part of the key there is for this to work, you have to know that the student has all the pieces of the puzzle before you nudge them to think about something that requires putting them together.
5. A few pieces of paper I could refer to as an affidavit to prove to other people and organisations that I understood what I studied and could take the pressure of a high-stress program, which represent the opinions of dozens of professors (many to most of whom are world-class experts in their respective fields).
Now, as it turns out, I'm not actually a pure programmer or pure IT person like many on slashdot, so while "write open source code" can be helpful in accomplishing the same goal for some people (just as having a personal portfolio can help for an artist), it's difficult for me to demonstrate some of my engineering skills that require a lot of very expensive, very immobile equipment to demonstrate my skill. Plus you have to get people on the OSS project to accept you.
I'm sure not all of these points apply to others. I'm sure some people find a lot of value from lectures, or office hours, or access to certain rare resources their University has (eg. a student-run nuclear reactor, a rare books library which unfortunately has not been digitized, etc.). And after your "10000 hours" or however long it is, work experience and references will tend to trump point 5.
I've never heard of this. Do you have a source?
The current pop culture trend is that dumb people have higher ethical standards. Which I also doubt. I just don't see why it would be correlated.
I bet that there's a lower crime rate (both conviction and actual guilt) among the very intelligent, but that's not quite the same thing.
That is the entire point of having an open source project is that the developers don't have to be experts.
Since when?
I don't think I've ever heard that before. I thought it was usually either one or both of:
1. So that you'd get more experts working on your product.
2. Because of an ethical stance about being able to modify software that you run without having to learn to read optimised assembly.
Not sure I agree, simply because if you throw out the two convenient reference points, freezing at 0 and boiling at 100, then there's really no big advantage in the size of Celsius degrees. Kelvin is convenient basically because Celsius is convenient and having 0 at absolute 0 is convenient. I think other than Celsius, the only everyday measure referencing the Celsius degree size is the calorie.
Maybe we could make one where 0 degrees is absolute 0, and 1000 degrees is freezing (or boiling...pick one). Or even pick one such that the width of a degree is determined by other SI units, eg. the amount of temperature increase provided by one joule of energy on one gram of water.
No, that's wrong. You can play it without an Internet connection (from a "guest" account), but you can't install it. Much to my disappointment since I was on vacation without Internet the week after the game released (I didn't want to play it during my vacation, but I *did* want to play it during the airport layover, and the intermediate airport didn't have WiFi).
He's referring to www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/i1040tt.pdf and I believe he's technically correct: the most useless kind of correct. It's not about tax brackets, which don't roll over at $40000, it's that the US federal tax schedule has a $50 granularity.
What's happening is that a person making $39999.99 is allowed to pay the taxes that a person making $39950 should according to a straight up percent-based calculation. This comes to a whopping $12 (sometimes $13) of difference, after you hit $34000 until you hit $82300 so if you get a raise of less than $50 per year then you have basically a 1 in 4 chance of getting screwed out of a couple bucks on net. Then, up to $100000 it's all the way up to $14 (*gasp*). After that, you don't get the benefit of the $50 granularity and you have to pay the calculated amount, so what you are saying takes effect.