That is rather curios. Java has always been backwards compatible - using the latest version should always work with older code (unless these libraries use proprietary extensions, in which case this is not a Java issue but a library issue). Care to share what type of problems you run into?
Spot on. I once spent some time (fruitlessly) trying to explain to a guy that a cheap test for HIV that has a false positive rate of 5% will be useful in sub-Saharan Africa (where the occurrence of HIV is around 10-20% of the population), but that very same test is useless in Scandinavia (where it will almost always report a false positive).
I pointed out to you that societal change is not dependent on individual well-being. You attributed to that the assertion that societal change precludes increases in individual well-being. I made no such claim (hence most of your retort is a straw man).
Whether hunter-gatherers were happier than we are today is essentially unmeasurable, since we don't know how happy they were with what they had. What we do know is that their happiness were irrelevant within the change in society.
It is easy to imagine a modern society where the inhabitants are unhappier than hunter-gatherer societies. North Korea may well be such an example, or England in medieval times during the feudal system. Your idea of "progress implies improved happiness" is not only misguided but flat out fallacious.
explain how a society where "everybody's wants were easily satisfied" evolves into modern industrial society if that initial premise is true?
That's easy. Change in society does not have to be driven by improvement on an individual level. Societies that grow food crop will have higher population growths than societies of hunter-gatherers. As agricultural society expands, it usurps/conquers/murders the neighbouring hunter-gatherer societies. Whether individuals in the agricultural society were happier/more content/healthier is not relevant - they simply had more people, and hence more military power. Same for the industrial revolution.
Sure, I get what you are saying, but there is a problem with it.You assume that the concept of "meaningful thinking" is well-defined. That is a perilous assumption that can get you into all sorts of trouble.
It may well be that what we perceive as "meaningful thinking" is nothing but simple machine algorithms that get interpreted in a specific way but other machine algorithms in our brain. Our brains may very well be machines that have, instead of being programmed by another machine, evolved to categorize information and apply it within our evolutionary context.
Applying "meaning" to it may very well be an illusion. A self-propagating illusion.
Who wants to confront their anxieties as a form of relaxation?
I think you have an interesting interpretation of what he meant by human anxieties. I think he simply meant story lines based on human situations. Like say Alan Wake, or Deus Ex, both of which are driven by a man's desperate search for his lost wife/girlfriend. Not so much about the IRS, or being pregnant.
But hey, who does not enjoy seeing a straw man go up in flames once in a while?
The companies you mentioned all have vastly more resources and technical expertise at their disposal than Canonical does.
The size of Canonical is essentially a non-sequitur. It is not only large companies that can benefit from in-house developed software assets. The question is whether the benefit justifies the investment.
But the main reason that his "NIH syndrome" criticism is valid is that in all of its recent defense of MIr, Canonical has not cited any other reason for not being satisfied with Wayland. Or at least not any other reason that wasn't later retracted for being based on blatantly false claims.
'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.'
They don't have to be dissatisfied with Wayland per se for this decision to be the right one for them. There are upsides to maintaining your own codebase, especially when it comes down to an integral part of your core business. Hence my example of the above mentioned tech companies - they have learned that sometimes being in control of your own assets is important enough to invest some resources to it.
Ubuntu is convinced that they have to spend all their development resources on reinventing the wheel because Wayland isn't an internal project (but it could be).
You simply invoke "NIH-syndrome" without clarifying why Canonical is making the wrong decision in this specific case. You are implying that it is *never* a good decision to do things in-house when an existing solution (however imperfect) is already available. But looking around at technology companies that are successful (Apple, Google, Amazon), it is obvious that your reasoning is flawed, as all these companies have, on occasion, done things in-house when existing solutions were already available.
Clearly, the decision to do something in-house or not is more complex than following a stupid rule of thumb.
Given de Icaza's past association with Microsoft (CodePlex Foundation) and the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman's description of de Icaza as a 'traitor to the free software community,' this might be seen as more of a blow to Microsoft than to GNU/Linux."
Does having a previous association with Microsoft automatically disqualify you from having a valid opinion? Shouldn't we be looking at what he is saying, as opposed to who is saying it?
The only thing their browser is really excellent at is IIRC browsing porn or generally image galleries with lots of image content.
BS. I have a limited data plan, and I use Opera to reduce the amount of $$$ I pay. And it works extremely well. So what if my data routes through a server? It goes through various central points anyway. I know Opera can see my surfing habits, and adapt my surfing behaviour accordingly.
Privacy is important, but it is ridiculous to assert that it is the only thing to take into consideration.
Cyberspace may not be real, but neither are many things that we take seriously everyday. Fashion, money, social status, the financial market, rock music are all examples of things that have no real existence outside of our mind's perceptions.
Does not mean that simply ignoring it will be useful in any way.
By not filing criminal charges, the government got a lower burden of proof — preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt — while the potential for a $5 billion fine provides punishment as severe as any criminal case against a corporation could.
I don't know - isn't that the core of the problem? Because the participants knew they were never going to face jail-time, they knew they could do what they want. So what if the bank/credit agency got fined after the fact? By that time, the bonuses have been paid.
And why is the credit agencies getting off so lightly? They were supposed to be the referees in this system. Banks are being forced to ring-fence their investment and retail arms - surely the credit agencies have to answer for their conflict of interest too?
The question is not retarded at all (but nonetheless congrats on getting your clever dick 5, given by those that prefer wit to contemplation). As our scientific knowledge increases, the amount of work we need to do in order to increase it further becomes ever greater. It is entirely possible that we have exhausted the easy, low hanging fruit in scientific discovery - it is possible that science is now a matter of hard work, done by teams of scientists working together, rather that the lone genius working in his lab. There is nothing wrong with this - but an effect of this could well be that the age of the science-guru is over.
I'm all for the testing of psychopaths, but how do we test for them? Last time I checked, the psychopathy test is a secret test, and you need to be a psychologist in order to access it. This type of secrecy put some serious concerns on whether being a psychopath is really something that can be verified scientifically.
Just so there is not misunderstanding: I do not doubt the existence of psychopaths. I just wonder whether we have a better test for it than what amounts to a secret procedure that is only known to people *who have a stake in having these tests done* in the first place.
And perhaps this is the reason why scientists/environmentalists/medical doctors are more prone to state the worst case scenario. Because it is better to say "WE ARE GOING TO DIE" and not, than to say "all will be fine" and it ain't.
If you want to avoid having talent leave, then pay them what the competition is offering, and treat them well. It's pretty simple.
And what is the competition offering? How can I get this competition to offer it to me? The competition I last saw were sitting in India, and they ain't offering much.
A satisfied user doesn't help "spread the Linux base"? Why not, I ask seriously?
Because there is clearly something wrong with how things are. And being satisfied with something wrong does not help to fix it. The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it.
That's all irrelevant. What matters is that keyboard and mouse gamers beat the pants off of gamepad players whenever they go head to head. The keyboard and mouse is the superior controller by the only metric that matters, performance.
And here I was thinking that, where it comes to games, fun was the metric that matters.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think more people can relate with the image of 50 power stations than the abstract number of 50 GW. I know this, because I am one of them.
That is rather curios. Java has always been backwards compatible - using the latest version should always work with older code (unless these libraries use proprietary extensions, in which case this is not a Java issue but a library issue). Care to share what type of problems you run into?
Spot on. I once spent some time (fruitlessly) trying to explain to a guy that a cheap test for HIV that has a false positive rate of 5% will be useful in sub-Saharan Africa (where the occurrence of HIV is around 10-20% of the population), but that very same test is useless in Scandinavia (where it will almost always report a false positive).
I pointed out to you that societal change is not dependent on individual well-being. You attributed to that the assertion that societal change precludes increases in individual well-being. I made no such claim (hence most of your retort is a straw man).
Whether hunter-gatherers were happier than we are today is essentially unmeasurable, since we don't know how happy they were with what they had. What we do know is that their happiness were irrelevant within the change in society.
It is easy to imagine a modern society where the inhabitants are unhappier than hunter-gatherer societies. North Korea may well be such an example, or England in medieval times during the feudal system. Your idea of "progress implies improved happiness" is not only misguided but flat out fallacious.
explain how a society where "everybody's wants were easily satisfied" evolves into modern industrial society if that initial premise is true?
That's easy. Change in society does not have to be driven by improvement on an individual level. Societies that grow food crop will have higher population growths than societies of hunter-gatherers. As agricultural society expands, it usurps/conquers/murders the neighbouring hunter-gatherer societies. Whether individuals in the agricultural society were happier/more content/healthier is not relevant - they simply had more people, and hence more military power. Same for the industrial revolution.
Sure, I get what you are saying, but there is a problem with it.You assume that the concept of "meaningful thinking" is well-defined. That is a perilous assumption that can get you into all sorts of trouble.
It may well be that what we perceive as "meaningful thinking" is nothing but simple machine algorithms that get interpreted in a specific way but other machine algorithms in our brain. Our brains may very well be machines that have, instead of being programmed by another machine, evolved to categorize information and apply it within our evolutionary context.
Applying "meaning" to it may very well be an illusion. A self-propagating illusion.
If you are interested, an interesting handling of this topic by Alex Rosenberg can be found here: http://onthehuman.org/2009/11/the-disenchanted-naturalists-guide-to-reality/
They don't "think" about it in any meaningful way.
O yes? And what does it mean to think about something in a meaningful way?
tsk tsk. To each their own.
Who wants to confront their anxieties as a form of relaxation?
I think you have an interesting interpretation of what he meant by human anxieties. I think he simply meant story lines based on human situations. Like say Alan Wake, or Deus Ex, both of which are driven by a man's desperate search for his lost wife/girlfriend. Not so much about the IRS, or being pregnant.
But hey, who does not enjoy seeing a straw man go up in flames once in a while?
The companies you mentioned all have vastly more resources and technical expertise at their disposal than Canonical does.
The size of Canonical is essentially a non-sequitur. It is not only large companies that can benefit from in-house developed software assets. The question is whether the benefit justifies the investment.
But the main reason that his "NIH syndrome" criticism is valid is that in all of its recent defense of MIr, Canonical has not cited any other reason for not being satisfied with Wayland. Or at least not any other reason that wasn't later retracted for being based on blatantly false claims.
'The upsides of doing our own thing — we can do exactly and only what we want, we can build an easily-testable codebase, we can use our own infrastructure, we don't have an additional layer of upstream review.'
They don't have to be dissatisfied with Wayland per se for this decision to be the right one for them. There are upsides to maintaining your own codebase, especially when it comes down to an integral part of your core business. Hence my example of the above mentioned tech companies - they have learned that sometimes being in control of your own assets is important enough to invest some resources to it.
Ubuntu is convinced that they have to spend all their development resources on reinventing the wheel because Wayland isn't an internal project (but it could be).
You simply invoke "NIH-syndrome" without clarifying why Canonical is making the wrong decision in this specific case. You are implying that it is *never* a good decision to do things in-house when an existing solution (however imperfect) is already available. But looking around at technology companies that are successful (Apple, Google, Amazon), it is obvious that your reasoning is flawed, as all these companies have, on occasion, done things in-house when existing solutions were already available.
Clearly, the decision to do something in-house or not is more complex than following a stupid rule of thumb.
Given de Icaza's past association with Microsoft (CodePlex Foundation) and the Free Software Foundation's founder Richard Stallman's description of de Icaza as a 'traitor to the free software community,' this might be seen as more of a blow to Microsoft than to GNU/Linux."
Does having a previous association with Microsoft automatically disqualify you from having a valid opinion? Shouldn't we be looking at what he is saying, as opposed to who is saying it?
The only thing their browser is really excellent at is IIRC browsing porn or generally image galleries with lots of image content.
BS. I have a limited data plan, and I use Opera to reduce the amount of $$$ I pay. And it works extremely well. So what if my data routes through a server? It goes through various central points anyway. I know Opera can see my surfing habits, and adapt my surfing behaviour accordingly.
Privacy is important, but it is ridiculous to assert that it is the only thing to take into consideration.
Cyberspace may not be real, but neither are many things that we take seriously everyday. Fashion, money, social status, the financial market, rock music are all examples of things that have no real existence outside of our mind's perceptions.
Does not mean that simply ignoring it will be useful in any way.
By not filing criminal charges, the government got a lower burden of proof — preponderance of the evidence rather than beyond a reasonable doubt — while the potential for a $5 billion fine provides punishment as severe as any criminal case against a corporation could.
I don't know - isn't that the core of the problem? Because the participants knew they were never going to face jail-time, they knew they could do what they want. So what if the bank/credit agency got fined after the fact? By that time, the bonuses have been paid.
And why is the credit agencies getting off so lightly? They were supposed to be the referees in this system. Banks are being forced to ring-fence their investment and retail arms - surely the credit agencies have to answer for their conflict of interest too?
The question is not retarded at all (but nonetheless congrats on getting your clever dick 5, given by those that prefer wit to contemplation). As our scientific knowledge increases, the amount of work we need to do in order to increase it further becomes ever greater. It is entirely possible that we have exhausted the easy, low hanging fruit in scientific discovery - it is possible that science is now a matter of hard work, done by teams of scientists working together, rather that the lone genius working in his lab. There is nothing wrong with this - but an effect of this could well be that the age of the science-guru is over.
I'm all for the testing of psychopaths, but how do we test for them? Last time I checked, the psychopathy test is a secret test, and you need to be a psychologist in order to access it. This type of secrecy put some serious concerns on whether being a psychopath is really something that can be verified scientifically.
Just so there is not misunderstanding: I do not doubt the existence of psychopaths. I just wonder whether we have a better test for it than what amounts to a secret procedure that is only known to people *who have a stake in having these tests done* in the first place.
The rest is minor shit that isn't holding back anything except you, it seems.
Gamers are going elsewhere for their fix.
They are?
Unlike PC games, which may require finicky custom settings, consoles 'just work,' fans have long pointed out. Well, so does the iPad.
And that proves ...?
And perhaps this is the reason why scientists/environmentalists/medical doctors are more prone to state the worst case scenario. Because it is better to say "WE ARE GOING TO DIE" and not, than to say "all will be fine" and it ain't.
Frankly, I like police vehicles to be visible so that I can find them in the event of an emergency if I need help.
Drug dealers have the same desire. For different reasons.
Funny post, since Nintendo just announced the release of the Wii U in UK on 30 November - BEFORE the Japan release.
If you want to avoid having talent leave, then pay them what the competition is offering, and treat them well. It's pretty simple.
And what is the competition offering? How can I get this competition to offer it to me? The competition I last saw were sitting in India, and they ain't offering much.
A satisfied user doesn't help "spread the Linux base"? Why not, I ask seriously?
Because there is clearly something wrong with how things are. And being satisfied with something wrong does not help to fix it. The first step to fixing a problem is acknowledging it.
That's all irrelevant. What matters is that keyboard and mouse gamers beat the pants off of gamepad players whenever they go head to head. The keyboard and mouse is the superior controller by the only metric that matters, performance.
And here I was thinking that, where it comes to games, fun was the metric that matters.