I filed a few Chrome bugs, and all I got in response were arguments from developers. Now, that isn't to say that I wasn't wrong, but they just seem uninterested in listening, even to well-reasoned arguments. I don't know what motivates them, but whatever it is, I don't care, because that's when I decided not to use Chrome.
I like Free Software. I even call it that because I understand and appreciate the "moral" position they take. I see the GPL as a way to protect free exchange of ideas from the greedy hands of corportations trying to make a buck off our hard work. I've put plenty of my own work under the GPL.
But I don't think Stallman has thought two minutes of his life about product usability. People like me buy Macs and accept the compromise to software freedom because we're tired of growing gray hairs fighting bad Free Software.
I really enjoy computer science, but damnit, I hate computers. And by that, I mean personal computers as they are programmed for us to use. I lose way too much of my time trying to get the damn things to work and do stuff that in the 21st century should be completely automatic and self-correcting. More than any other company, Apple makes usability a priority, so at the end of the day, Macs make me feel a little less worn out.
As a geek with slight Asperger's tendencies, I have a history of doing and saying inappropriate things. As I approach my 40's, it's now rare that I make a significant social faux pas, but that's after many years of careful study. Of course, I know NOW that what this boss did was totally inappropriate.
But I can tell you with great certainty, that even as an annoying nerdy teenager, I would have judged this memo of his to be mean-spirited and completely unprofessional.
How do people get it into their heads that this kind of crap is acceptable?
Linus said "probably", because this is the fate of a majority of projects. Also, Stallman didn't just put the idea out there and let it sit. He's been working on it and an organization dedicated to it ever since. It's taken a long long time for Free Software to get as 'mainstream' as it is, and in the mean time, we've gotten plenty of variants on the original theme, like 'Open Source' (which at a practical level isn't really any different).
Most evaluation systems (admissions, peer review, employee reviews, etc.) are actually quite good at weeding out the truly bad and identifying and highly rating the truly good. (Putting aside corruption, of course.) This is simple natural selection. Schools, publications, and employers want the best, because that gets them better results, better reputation, and better revenue.
It's only the marginal people who find themselves "unfairly" rated. And indeed, in a perfect system, with a rating oracle, people would be ordered properly, and schools would let in the best N students that they have room for. But this is impossible, so when it comes to marginal people (and a quota for admissions or articles, etc.), we have to GUESS about how relatively mediocre these people are. Mind you the bar can be very high. If you only accept the top 10%, then you're going to reject a hell of a lot of really good students. But in any case, your instutition (or journal or whatever) is going to get really good students. Without some serious cheating and hacking or a case of mistaken identity, it's impossible for a terrible student to get mistakenly identified as a spectacular one. The randomness occurs around the cutoff line. Even when things like affirmative action get involved, mostly all it does is reshuffle people around the mediocre line. A terrible white student is never going to be accepted over a fantastic black student, unless your school is flagrantly racist or has some stupid legacy program that can override other concerns.
So what about those mediocre people? No one should argue that college acceptance should be based on some criteria other than merit. Merit has to be demonstrated based on things like past academic achievement, important extra curriculars, etc. If you have not demonstrated those things well enough, then that is your problem. If a low-income student had to work a job in highschool, and that affected his grades, then that IS unfair. Shit happens, but there should be means to account for this. But in the general case, students do marginally because they didn't work very hard. It's the rare individual who can do well WITHOUT working hard. In any case, those who did do very very well, are the ones we want to accept into jobs and universities. Those who were unable or unwiling to demonstrate their abilities provide evaluators with no means to evaluate them. And as there is no magical source of other information, there's nothing we can do about it.
But as other commenters have pointed out, a large part of his motivation comes from the fact that his company isn't competing well in that market. The iPad basically owns the tablet market. If there is a bubble, what will happen is that every tablet will die except the iPad.
That's bad for choice, particularly for people who want to hack their devices, put on unapproved apps, etc. Also, Apple is influenced at least somewhat by the innovations found in the competition. However, none of this will affect iPad prices, since Apple lives in their own world there. That isn't to say that they overcharge for what they sell, but that they don't sell any low-end stuff.
The only Slashdot admin whose email address I have is Malda's, so I would send him occasional bug reports. Now all my ignored bug reports will be even MORE ignored!!! ARGH!!!
As someone with mild Asperger's, I call bollox on this.
While it seems self-evident that like-minded people would breed, concentrating certain traits, and some of those traits may lead to ASD-like symptoms, I think the whole matter is overblown.
For one thing, it's already well established that the increase in diagnosis is due to greater awareness of the condition and a broadening of the definition. If we applied today's ASD standards to people in the 19th century, you would get nearly the same rate of ASD found in the population.
Any differences would be attributed to things like diet (our current diet absolutely sucks and leads to artificial ADD-like symptoms) and socialization. Before fast food, people had to work harder to eat, and they often had to grow it themselves. The nutritonal content was greater. Secondly, we live in an internet and TV culture that isolates people and doesn't force them to interact socially. It is likely that potential for autism among the Amish is no less than in the rest of the population, yet their family-focused culture will present better social training to their children.
My wife and I both display ASD traits, mine worse than hers. We were worried that our daughter would inherit this. However, she's displaying no signs of it. That could be a fluke. OR it could be the fact that we feed her an organic diet (to the maximum extent possible with a picky toddler). I'm not even sure we're doing such a great job with the social interaction, because there's more TV (actually Netflix) going on than we think is best, but nevertheless her social attentiveness seems superior to her training. We're trying to teach her well, but she interacts well socially in ways that we did not train her to. (Oh, and I think Netflix isn't as bad as regular TV, because TV is interrupted by commercials. Therefore Netflix requires and encourages a better attention span.) She's also spending a lot of time with her socially-skilled grandparents (my wife's parents, as opposed to mine who are socially unskilled). Also, I think the fact that we are concerned about ASD affects how we interact with her ourselves. And finally, just to be really freaky, we started vaccinations late. It's stupid to avoid them entirely, but it does no harm to have them a little later for a child that is not in daycare. (Although there have been a handful of bizarre cases, where a child was given too many different vaccines at one time, I don't think that vaccines are generally implicated in ASD. Just space them out so that the immune system will not be overwhelmed.)
If teenagers had some maturity and discipline, which they don't, they could make good use of the time by doing homework and sleeping. Instead, most will spend the time screwing around and getting into trouble. I would have just hacked on my computer all day, which would also have avoided sleep and homework. Teenagers have the same sleep requirements as pre-teens, but the rhythm is shifted. One school tried shifting their start and end time later, and the absentee rate went down and the grades went up. As it is, most highschool schedules are stupid, and students could use the extra day to make up for the lost sleep. Sadly, most won't avail themselves of that. Teenagers think they have an energy surplus, but it's mostly that they are more easily bored and distracted. Of course, they'd be less distractable if we fed them a proper diet instead of McDonalds all the time. Another school in the southeast US tried feeding their students healthy lunches, and the absentee rate went down and the grades went up. Whoda thunk it.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I just used IQ as an example. IQ doesn't account for social ability, and that can actually go a very long way in some fields. (Indicentally, but perhaps unrelated, some socilological studies have found Africans to generally have somewhat superior social ability.)
Right now, I'm working on my Ph.D. I'm also 38. I've met lots of people whose IQ has got to be higher than mine. BUT I'm outperforming them because I have more practical experience from industry. For instance, I can code like 10 times faster, with fewer bugs. This frees up brain cycles so that I can spend extra time on the stuff I'm not so good at. Experience is winning out over IQ.
IQ does not by any means imply success, no matter how high it is. I've known many people who were much brighter than me, but they are sad failures. They still live alone in crappy apartments. Me, I have a family, a house, two cars, etc. This is because, unlike them, I was willing to work on things that didn't interest me, simply because they were necessary for success. Ok, so my friend with a 150 IQ can best me in phiosophical debates. But my parents were no better off than his, yet I've owned multiple sports cars and a Lexus (which I sold before going back to grad school, because I needed some money in the bank), I made a killing on the housing market in Florida (although that was more luck than anything else), and I have massive equity in my second house.
I'm willing, of course, to believe that intellectualism can be much more important to some people than material wealth. That's fine. I mean, if they're happy, good for them. But personally, I feel that my intellectual fulfillment NOW has been enhanced simply by the fact that I have been willing in the past to sometimes set aside the play time to work at a job that isn't a laugh a minute.
My question regarding those high-IQ people who won't work on stuff they don't like is this: Are they simply unwilling to do that, or are they UNABLE?
I mean, maybe some people CANNOT work on things they aren't interested in. I performed very badly in highschool because I wouldn't "knuckle down" and do my homework. Was I lazy? Or did the ADHD fundamentally prevent me from concentrating on my work? Highschool homework was of absolutely no interest to me, so I found it to be incredibly difficult to maintain any kind of attention span. My dad would tell me that I didn't perform because I wasn't INTERESTED. My reaction to that was that I didn't know of any kind of magical way MAKE myself interested. Others would point out that it ISN'T interesting, but it has indirect benefits later. Those indirect benefits were too far off for me to find them motivating.
So I can't really put people down who didn't have the same success that I did. The difference for me was that I eventually changed my attitude. Also, the fact that I picked the right field to go into (computer science), it was always INTERESTING ENOUGH to keep me working. Also, my parents weren't going to take me in (as an adult in my 20's), so fear of starving was also a motivation. Another thing that affected me was having chronic fatigue syndrome. Just to survive, I had to completely eliminate any activity that was not central to survival. As a result, I learned to focus. Now that the CFS is much less of a problem, being able to focus is another way I can outperform people with higher IQs.
So I have no idea what about me or anyone else is innate and what is environment driven that relates to success. In other words, I've learned very little from this discussion.:)
In other words, any kind of Affirmative Action should be based exclusively on economic status, with perhaps a small consideration of social status, regardless of skin color?
Wholeheartedly agreed.:)
There are some things to consider. If you're descended from slaves, then I can entertain the notion of giving you certain kinds of special consideration when it comes to things like scholarships. It's been a long time since African slaves were emancipated in this country, but some of those repercussions persist, and there is still a huge effect of racism. That being said, you get this special treatment if you're of African heritage, regardless of whether or not you are descended from slaves.
But what about the poor whites? Why are they poor? They were not slaves, so there's some other reason. Should they receive similar treatment? Good question, I think.
There are other groups that have been oppressed. None quite so oppressed as black slaves, but let's consider the Irish. In the 19th century (IIRC), Irish immigrants were subject to many of the same kinds of discrimination as emancipated slaves. They were treated as subhuman (which you can see in many of the political cartoons of the day), they were subject to physical abuse, etc. Many descendents of these people currently live in Appalacia. Should they, as an oppressed minority, also be given some kind of special treatment?
Anyhow, here's my final opinion on the extent to which people should be given special treatment for low economic status:
On a sliding scale (depending on your income level), if you did well enough in highschool, you should be entitied to financial aid to get an undergraduate degree.
That's it. Once you've got your undergraduate degree, all bets are off. Employers and graduate programs will (or should) judge you exclusively on the basis of your performance in undergrad. Employers will pay you, and grad schools will offer you fellowships and RA/TA positions.
One of the reasons I say "sliding scale" is that cutoffs are really stupid. Say the cutoff is $40k/year, so that if your parents make $39k, you can get financial aid, why is it that at $41k, you're completely cut off?
Another option would be to completely subsidize undergraduate tuition. BUT, this requires certain performance in highschool (which I would not have qualified for, but whatever), AND it requires certain on-going performance in college (where I did fine). For instance, if your GPA dips below a certain point, you're on probation, and if you don't get it back up in a certain period, you're out. This is already true for many scholarships, but perhaps it could be applied to everyone, on the basis of PERFORMANCE. This will have the effect of aiding the hard working people to get degrees. YES, SOME PEOPLE WILL GET LEFT BEHIND. Most of those people will get left behind because they didn't work hard, and some will get left behind because they're not very bright or because they picked the wrong degree program, etc. This system, however, would reward good choices and punish bad ones. Simple as that. You can argue that one professor gave you a bad grade unfairly, but if ALL your grades are bad, that's your own damn fault. If we have a system that makes it so that you don't have to work a job to get through undergrad, you have no excuses.
This isn't perfect, of course. There are two cultural phenomena coming into play here. One is that of entitlement. People believe they are owed things, regardless of their effort. (Fact: You are entitled to NOTHING.) The other comes from a misunderstanding of the backlash. Those that work hard say that if you work hard, you will succeed. This isn't precisely true. If you don't work hard, you're probably going to fail (unless you're some kind of megagenius). If you DO work hard, you may still fail. But working hard definitely makes success WAY MORE LIKELY. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. But I've seen some funny behaviors of students in
How about not show the image until someone clicks on something that makes it visible? This way, if someone goes to the page on "ejaculation", they don't, by default, see an animated gif of some dude ejaculating. But if they REALLY WANT TO, they can click to view it. Either way, they still have access to the text that describes the biology.
One of the problems with affirmative action "getting them into the school" is that it can get them into schools that are above their intellectual level or competitive beyond what they're prepared for.
This is not any statement about any particular group's intelligence. This is about INDIVIDUAL intelligence. For instance, I (a white person) may not be cut out for Harvard Law School. Perhaps I should go to Cincinnati instead, because I'm more likely to succeed. (Cincinnati is a good law school, BTW.) If I went to Harvard, I'd probably break under the pressure and drop out, and a career councelor would do well to raise this issue to me. Now, let's consider a black person of intelligence equal to mine. If affirmative action helped them inappropriately get into Hardvard Law, then affirmative action has just DECREASED their chances of success!
That would be bad. Bad for that person, bad for our culture's progress towards equal rights, bad for our culture's perception of minorities and their capabilities, etc. (Being a minority doesn't make one more likely to be less intelligent, and unfortunately, some bigots need to have that fact reinforced regularly.) What we want is to give everyone an equal opportunity to SUCCEED, and to a certain extent, that involves placing them in the school where they are challenged appropriately, will learn best, and are most likely to succeed, IF THEY WORK HARD.
People are gifted with whatever intelligence they were born with, also affected by upbringing and primary education. This is not a basis on which to JUDGE people in terms of their human value so much as an attribute that varies from one person to another and which affects what they are capable of conceiving of intellectually. On the other hand, WORK ETHIC, is something that everyone should learn, and if you don't learn it, you are more likely to fail, and that is your fault if you do. If you are willing to WORK, then there is SOME job out there that you can do well at and succeed in. Our objective should be appropriate placement. Now, if someone decides that they want to go to a school that is above or below our recommendation, that is their choice. Our recommendation can be wrong, because we can incorrectly evaluate people. But that is a different matter.
The fact is, most people, regardless of race or any other attribute, would not do well in Harvard Law School.
More likely than an intelligence issue, the reason many people of lower socio-economic classes may fail at a place like Harvard is that they simply have not learned the sort of competitiveness and intellectual strategies that more affluent people perhaps tend to be exposed to in early life. (Of course, you also get your share of rich brats who are equally ignorant.) This is an issue of preparation, not smarts. Someone from a rich family in Boston may need an IQ of 115 to get through Harvard Law, in part because their parents are lawyers who have prepared their children for all the gotchas that happen in law school. Someone from the back waters of Appalacia may need an IQ of 125 to get through Harvard Law, simply because they have to do a whole hell of a lot more learning and adapting on the fly while they are there. Inner-city blacks are in the same boat as the back-water Appalacians. However, if the undereducated go to Cincinnati instead, they will succeed, and moreover, they will be able to impart to their children (who inherit the same genes, so it's not a racial issue) the knowledge necessary to succeed at Harvard.
Also, I need to make the obligatory comments about race. Race, as we perceive it, is based mostly on superficial factors like skin color. Africans, South Indians, etc. are brown because there's more sun in the place they're adapted to. Europeans are pink because there's less sun. You can do your own research on the relationship between UV, vitamin D, skin cancer, birth defects, etc. However, humans haven't been out of Africa long enough to evolve any really significant differences. At most, there's
Yes, Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to math. But I don't see why it can't, at least loosely, apply to other things. Physics is basically just math anyhow. Besides the axioms of mathematics, there are other axioms, like the Lorentz factor. It's something we had to determine empirically (or it's based on things that had to be determined empirically). An axiom is something we can't prove, but we nevertheless know it because it's been measures or it's self-evident, or various other possible reasons.
Not really. Yes, it copies nature, but it copies nature in a way that's novel and clever. Perhaps we should say that it was INSPIRED by nature, but inventive nontheless. Now, another commenter pointed out that someone else before him had tried to do the same thing, so that would be prior art, but that would then be the patentable invention.
First, it's clever to notice a useful pattern in nature. Not everyone does that easily. Second, it's clever to find a practical way to translate that pattern to another context to solve a problem.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like TOO much of a stretch to imagine that there may be massive particles that interact only through gravity and the weak nuclear force.
Just like in that episode of Forever Night?
on
Cancer Cured By HIV
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· Score: 1
Some vampires were getting sick, and the cure was to infect them with HIV.
(Of course, I realize that the summary here is crap, but still, life can parallel fiction.)
The margins on retail DRAM are really slim. Even in "performance" memory, where they charge more, there's still overhead in binning for the more aggressive timing numbers. Unless DRAM sticks were all you did, or your retail DRAM business was a front for a DRAM maker (as Crucial is for Micron), then I don't see how selling DRAM is going to add much to the bottom line of a large company like AMD. Are they going to charge more than Crucial does for the same stuff? Are they going to do something to make buyers feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt about their AMD CPU warranty if they don't use the "correct RAM", just so they can charge even more?
It's a myth that Wayland lacks network transparency. It currently doesn't DEFINE it, but it doesn't LACK it. That may sound like a semantic game, but it's the same as saying that X11 lacks policy, which is imposed by the window manager, a separate program. Wayland provides drawing surfaces to applications and then composites them onto the screen. There are many different ways in which the drawing surfaces can get moved from the client to the server for display. Locally, they're the same memory space. With remote applications, you can either move pixels, or you can have the rendering API send commands over the network.
I'm no expert on middle east politics, but there seems to be some amount of conflict over there. Saudi Arabia seems to be among the friendlier countries, but there's no guarantee that they won't be attacked by some radicals who think the Saudis aren't Muslim enough or something. Or maybe the Saudis will piss off the Israelis. However you spin it, this building could conceivable make a nice big target for some terrorists.
I mean, it could be that Linus is a stick in the mud, lacking imagination and afraid of change. MAYBE he just doesn't want to learn a new UI paradigm.
But more likely, as has always been, KDE and GNOME are plagued by a complete lack of usability engineering. That isn't to say that they have no usability engineers, but the politics is such that they're never listened to. Instead, we get a mish-mash of inconsistent components. Every component has its own philosophy, usually based around the needs of some particular geek with no sense of how anyone else might want to function. And there's no unifying theme. There are no usability studies, and no one pays attention to the many decades of usability studies that have been already done. (Did you know that most KDE themes have a single-pixel gap between a scrollbar and the edge of the screen? WHY?!?!)
That's a bit harsh, actually. I'm not fan of Linux desktops, but KDE 4.x, unlike the GNOME crowd, at least TRIED to be creative. Amazingly, they actually innovated, with their plasma desktop. They broke a lot of old ideas and actually worked towards creating something that was both attractive and usable. I'll have to check out KDE 4.7 to see where they've gone since I last looked at it (around 4.5, I think). I'm just afraid that geek politics is going to eventually stall all that progress. Too many people wanting to do things the old way, not understanding the vision of the leadership, therefore not working towards that ultimate goal.
The only way to fix Free Software usability problems would be to develop a more cathedral-like model. There needs to be solid leadership from someone who is seriously accomplished in the area of UI design, and then most of the rest of the team needs to be experts in usability, while maybe 30% of the people are actual coding experts, whose job is to just do engineering to implement the designs from the top.
iOS and OS X already share a lot of basic underpinnings. Indeed, you could think of iOS as a sort of fork of OS X. So it makes sense that a lot of redundancies will re-merge over time. It just makes the OS easier to maintain.
On the other hand, the hardware is NOT going to merge. When you buy a PC, one of the things you want is PERFORMANCE. That need isn't going to go away. When you buy a tablet, a major driving convern is ENERGY EFFICIENCY. That isn't going to go away either. There are other differences as well, like weight, multiple overlapping windows, etc. The PC vs. tablet needs are incompatible. It's going to be a LONG TIME before any ARM processor catches up to any Intel processor in peak performance, and likewise, Intel is a long way from competing with ARM architecture on energy efficiency (that x86 translation front-end takes up like half the power budget of an Atom processor).
There are also very differing UI needs. A tablet CAN have a keyboard and mouse but usually doesn't, whereas the PC always does. Moreover, UIKit and AppKit are very well entrenched. It may be that their underlying code will merge into a single library, but they'll expose separate function bindings that provide quite different functionality, and it'll make sense then to break it into three libraries, which is AppKit, UIKit, and the common stuff. (And indeed this may already be the case.)
One of the problems with moon-related theories is that there really is hardly any evidence left for us to go on. There's a prevailing theory that a mars-sized planet struck earth, and the rebound caused a the moon to glob off. How do we know this is, well, plausible? First, some reasonable assumptions are made about the pre-moon earth, then a computer simulation is run that applies the theory, and then the final results of the simulation are compared to the present time. The prevailing moon theory is therefore the best explanation we have come up with so far. However, scientists rightfully call this a "default" theory, because although it makes a reasonable model, no one believes it's necessarily TRUE. No one is attached to it. Its basically just the only thing we have, so we use it. As soon as someone comes along with some more evidence and/or a better explanation, the old theory will be dropped like a bag of rocks.
As precarious as moon theory is, it's a fantastic example of how science should be. No one should be attached to any theories, and every theory should be treated as if it could be overturned at any instant. Many theories are much more solidly grounded, making them very much more likely to be true. And most theories are really made up lots and lots of small theories (like evolution, which is not any single theory but a whole collection of connected theories).
Am I making a criticism of science? No. Of scientists. Many scientists get too attached to their "life's work" and therefore turn from scientists into evangelists. Fortunately, in many fields there are lots of competing scientists who are very attached to incompatible theories, so it tends to balance out. (This sort of balancing out of competing corruption happens in politics sometimes too.)
The summary misrepresents the value of using the null terminator.
With a one-byte length, strings are limited to 255 characters. Is that good? Would you never want to have a longer string? If you want to have a 2-byte counter, do you now have to create a whole new long-string data type and overload every library function? It doesn't seem scalable.
On the other hand, the null terminator is a single byte no matter what and can support strings of arbitrary length.
Of course, there are disadvantages. For instance, computing length and concatenating strings take longer.
But don't act like using a byte-sized length field is fundamentally superior.
Slashdot Mirror
I filed a few Chrome bugs, and all I got in response were arguments from developers. Now, that isn't to say that I wasn't wrong, but they just seem uninterested in listening, even to well-reasoned arguments. I don't know what motivates them, but whatever it is, I don't care, because that's when I decided not to use Chrome.
I like Free Software. I even call it that because I understand and appreciate the "moral" position they take. I see the GPL as a way to protect free exchange of ideas from the greedy hands of corportations trying to make a buck off our hard work. I've put plenty of my own work under the GPL.
But I don't think Stallman has thought two minutes of his life about product usability. People like me buy Macs and accept the compromise to software freedom because we're tired of growing gray hairs fighting bad Free Software.
I really enjoy computer science, but damnit, I hate computers. And by that, I mean personal computers as they are programmed for us to use. I lose way too much of my time trying to get the damn things to work and do stuff that in the 21st century should be completely automatic and self-correcting. More than any other company, Apple makes usability a priority, so at the end of the day, Macs make me feel a little less worn out.
As a geek with slight Asperger's tendencies, I have a history of doing and saying inappropriate things. As I approach my 40's, it's now rare that I make a significant social faux pas, but that's after many years of careful study. Of course, I know NOW that what this boss did was totally inappropriate.
But I can tell you with great certainty, that even as an annoying nerdy teenager, I would have judged this memo of his to be mean-spirited and completely unprofessional.
How do people get it into their heads that this kind of crap is acceptable?
Linus said "probably", because this is the fate of a majority of projects. Also, Stallman didn't just put the idea out there and let it sit. He's been working on it and an organization dedicated to it ever since. It's taken a long long time for Free Software to get as 'mainstream' as it is, and in the mean time, we've gotten plenty of variants on the original theme, like 'Open Source' (which at a practical level isn't really any different).
I think this is slightly off topic, but anyhow.
Most evaluation systems (admissions, peer review, employee reviews, etc.) are actually quite good at weeding out the truly bad and identifying and highly rating the truly good. (Putting aside corruption, of course.) This is simple natural selection. Schools, publications, and employers want the best, because that gets them better results, better reputation, and better revenue.
It's only the marginal people who find themselves "unfairly" rated. And indeed, in a perfect system, with a rating oracle, people would be ordered properly, and schools would let in the best N students that they have room for. But this is impossible, so when it comes to marginal people (and a quota for admissions or articles, etc.), we have to GUESS about how relatively mediocre these people are. Mind you the bar can be very high. If you only accept the top 10%, then you're going to reject a hell of a lot of really good students. But in any case, your instutition (or journal or whatever) is going to get really good students. Without some serious cheating and hacking or a case of mistaken identity, it's impossible for a terrible student to get mistakenly identified as a spectacular one. The randomness occurs around the cutoff line. Even when things like affirmative action get involved, mostly all it does is reshuffle people around the mediocre line. A terrible white student is never going to be accepted over a fantastic black student, unless your school is flagrantly racist or has some stupid legacy program that can override other concerns.
So what about those mediocre people? No one should argue that college acceptance should be based on some criteria other than merit. Merit has to be demonstrated based on things like past academic achievement, important extra curriculars, etc. If you have not demonstrated those things well enough, then that is your problem. If a low-income student had to work a job in highschool, and that affected his grades, then that IS unfair. Shit happens, but there should be means to account for this. But in the general case, students do marginally because they didn't work very hard. It's the rare individual who can do well WITHOUT working hard. In any case, those who did do very very well, are the ones we want to accept into jobs and universities. Those who were unable or unwiling to demonstrate their abilities provide evaluators with no means to evaluate them. And as there is no magical source of other information, there's nothing we can do about it.
Before people knew about germs, what were germaphobes afraid of?
I'm not sure which this is.
But as other commenters have pointed out, a large part of his motivation comes from the fact that his company isn't competing well in that market. The iPad basically owns the tablet market. If there is a bubble, what will happen is that every tablet will die except the iPad.
That's bad for choice, particularly for people who want to hack their devices, put on unapproved apps, etc. Also, Apple is influenced at least somewhat by the innovations found in the competition. However, none of this will affect iPad prices, since Apple lives in their own world there. That isn't to say that they overcharge for what they sell, but that they don't sell any low-end stuff.
The only Slashdot admin whose email address I have is Malda's, so I would send him occasional bug reports. Now all my ignored bug reports will be even MORE ignored!!! ARGH!!!
As someone with mild Asperger's, I call bollox on this.
While it seems self-evident that like-minded people would breed, concentrating certain traits, and some of those traits may lead to ASD-like symptoms, I think the whole matter is overblown.
For one thing, it's already well established that the increase in diagnosis is due to greater awareness of the condition and a broadening of the definition. If we applied today's ASD standards to people in the 19th century, you would get nearly the same rate of ASD found in the population.
Any differences would be attributed to things like diet (our current diet absolutely sucks and leads to artificial ADD-like symptoms) and socialization. Before fast food, people had to work harder to eat, and they often had to grow it themselves. The nutritonal content was greater. Secondly, we live in an internet and TV culture that isolates people and doesn't force them to interact socially. It is likely that potential for autism among the Amish is no less than in the rest of the population, yet their family-focused culture will present better social training to their children.
My wife and I both display ASD traits, mine worse than hers. We were worried that our daughter would inherit this. However, she's displaying no signs of it. That could be a fluke. OR it could be the fact that we feed her an organic diet (to the maximum extent possible with a picky toddler). I'm not even sure we're doing such a great job with the social interaction, because there's more TV (actually Netflix) going on than we think is best, but nevertheless her social attentiveness seems superior to her training. We're trying to teach her well, but she interacts well socially in ways that we did not train her to. (Oh, and I think Netflix isn't as bad as regular TV, because TV is interrupted by commercials. Therefore Netflix requires and encourages a better attention span.) She's also spending a lot of time with her socially-skilled grandparents (my wife's parents, as opposed to mine who are socially unskilled). Also, I think the fact that we are concerned about ASD affects how we interact with her ourselves. And finally, just to be really freaky, we started vaccinations late. It's stupid to avoid them entirely, but it does no harm to have them a little later for a child that is not in daycare. (Although there have been a handful of bizarre cases, where a child was given too many different vaccines at one time, I don't think that vaccines are generally implicated in ASD. Just space them out so that the immune system will not be overwhelmed.)
If teenagers had some maturity and discipline, which they don't, they could make good use of the time by doing homework and sleeping. Instead, most will spend the time screwing around and getting into trouble. I would have just hacked on my computer all day, which would also have avoided sleep and homework. Teenagers have the same sleep requirements as pre-teens, but the rhythm is shifted. One school tried shifting their start and end time later, and the absentee rate went down and the grades went up. As it is, most highschool schedules are stupid, and students could use the extra day to make up for the lost sleep. Sadly, most won't avail themselves of that. Teenagers think they have an energy surplus, but it's mostly that they are more easily bored and distracted. Of course, they'd be less distractable if we fed them a proper diet instead of McDonalds all the time. Another school in the southeast US tried feeding their students healthy lunches, and the absentee rate went down and the grades went up. Whoda thunk it.
Oh, don't get me wrong. I just used IQ as an example. IQ doesn't account for social ability, and that can actually go a very long way in some fields. (Indicentally, but perhaps unrelated, some socilological studies have found Africans to generally have somewhat superior social ability.)
Right now, I'm working on my Ph.D. I'm also 38. I've met lots of people whose IQ has got to be higher than mine. BUT I'm outperforming them because I have more practical experience from industry. For instance, I can code like 10 times faster, with fewer bugs. This frees up brain cycles so that I can spend extra time on the stuff I'm not so good at. Experience is winning out over IQ.
IQ does not by any means imply success, no matter how high it is. I've known many people who were much brighter than me, but they are sad failures. They still live alone in crappy apartments. Me, I have a family, a house, two cars, etc. This is because, unlike them, I was willing to work on things that didn't interest me, simply because they were necessary for success. Ok, so my friend with a 150 IQ can best me in phiosophical debates. But my parents were no better off than his, yet I've owned multiple sports cars and a Lexus (which I sold before going back to grad school, because I needed some money in the bank), I made a killing on the housing market in Florida (although that was more luck than anything else), and I have massive equity in my second house.
I'm willing, of course, to believe that intellectualism can be much more important to some people than material wealth. That's fine. I mean, if they're happy, good for them. But personally, I feel that my intellectual fulfillment NOW has been enhanced simply by the fact that I have been willing in the past to sometimes set aside the play time to work at a job that isn't a laugh a minute.
My question regarding those high-IQ people who won't work on stuff they don't like is this: Are they simply unwilling to do that, or are they UNABLE?
I mean, maybe some people CANNOT work on things they aren't interested in. I performed very badly in highschool because I wouldn't "knuckle down" and do my homework. Was I lazy? Or did the ADHD fundamentally prevent me from concentrating on my work? Highschool homework was of absolutely no interest to me, so I found it to be incredibly difficult to maintain any kind of attention span. My dad would tell me that I didn't perform because I wasn't INTERESTED. My reaction to that was that I didn't know of any kind of magical way MAKE myself interested. Others would point out that it ISN'T interesting, but it has indirect benefits later. Those indirect benefits were too far off for me to find them motivating.
So I can't really put people down who didn't have the same success that I did. The difference for me was that I eventually changed my attitude. Also, the fact that I picked the right field to go into (computer science), it was always INTERESTING ENOUGH to keep me working. Also, my parents weren't going to take me in (as an adult in my 20's), so fear of starving was also a motivation. Another thing that affected me was having chronic fatigue syndrome. Just to survive, I had to completely eliminate any activity that was not central to survival. As a result, I learned to focus. Now that the CFS is much less of a problem, being able to focus is another way I can outperform people with higher IQs.
So I have no idea what about me or anyone else is innate and what is environment driven that relates to success. In other words, I've learned very little from this discussion. :)
In other words, any kind of Affirmative Action should be based exclusively on economic status, with perhaps a small consideration of social status, regardless of skin color?
Wholeheartedly agreed. :)
There are some things to consider. If you're descended from slaves, then I can entertain the notion of giving you certain kinds of special consideration when it comes to things like scholarships. It's been a long time since African slaves were emancipated in this country, but some of those repercussions persist, and there is still a huge effect of racism. That being said, you get this special treatment if you're of African heritage, regardless of whether or not you are descended from slaves.
But what about the poor whites? Why are they poor? They were not slaves, so there's some other reason. Should they receive similar treatment? Good question, I think.
There are other groups that have been oppressed. None quite so oppressed as black slaves, but let's consider the Irish. In the 19th century (IIRC), Irish immigrants were subject to many of the same kinds of discrimination as emancipated slaves. They were treated as subhuman (which you can see in many of the political cartoons of the day), they were subject to physical abuse, etc. Many descendents of these people currently live in Appalacia. Should they, as an oppressed minority, also be given some kind of special treatment?
Anyhow, here's my final opinion on the extent to which people should be given special treatment for low economic status:
On a sliding scale (depending on your income level), if you did well enough in highschool, you should be entitied to financial aid to get an undergraduate degree.
That's it. Once you've got your undergraduate degree, all bets are off. Employers and graduate programs will (or should) judge you exclusively on the basis of your performance in undergrad. Employers will pay you, and grad schools will offer you fellowships and RA/TA positions.
One of the reasons I say "sliding scale" is that cutoffs are really stupid. Say the cutoff is $40k/year, so that if your parents make $39k, you can get financial aid, why is it that at $41k, you're completely cut off?
Another option would be to completely subsidize undergraduate tuition. BUT, this requires certain performance in highschool (which I would not have qualified for, but whatever), AND it requires certain on-going performance in college (where I did fine). For instance, if your GPA dips below a certain point, you're on probation, and if you don't get it back up in a certain period, you're out. This is already true for many scholarships, but perhaps it could be applied to everyone, on the basis of PERFORMANCE. This will have the effect of aiding the hard working people to get degrees. YES, SOME PEOPLE WILL GET LEFT BEHIND. Most of those people will get left behind because they didn't work hard, and some will get left behind because they're not very bright or because they picked the wrong degree program, etc. This system, however, would reward good choices and punish bad ones. Simple as that. You can argue that one professor gave you a bad grade unfairly, but if ALL your grades are bad, that's your own damn fault. If we have a system that makes it so that you don't have to work a job to get through undergrad, you have no excuses.
This isn't perfect, of course. There are two cultural phenomena coming into play here. One is that of entitlement. People believe they are owed things, regardless of their effort. (Fact: You are entitled to NOTHING.) The other comes from a misunderstanding of the backlash. Those that work hard say that if you work hard, you will succeed. This isn't precisely true. If you don't work hard, you're probably going to fail (unless you're some kind of megagenius). If you DO work hard, you may still fail. But working hard definitely makes success WAY MORE LIKELY. It is a necessary but not sufficient condition. But I've seen some funny behaviors of students in
How about not show the image until someone clicks on something that makes it visible? This way, if someone goes to the page on "ejaculation", they don't, by default, see an animated gif of some dude ejaculating. But if they REALLY WANT TO, they can click to view it. Either way, they still have access to the text that describes the biology.
But maybe I'm missing the point.
One of the problems with affirmative action "getting them into the school" is that it can get them into schools that are above their intellectual level or competitive beyond what they're prepared for.
This is not any statement about any particular group's intelligence. This is about INDIVIDUAL intelligence. For instance, I (a white person) may not be cut out for Harvard Law School. Perhaps I should go to Cincinnati instead, because I'm more likely to succeed. (Cincinnati is a good law school, BTW.) If I went to Harvard, I'd probably break under the pressure and drop out, and a career councelor would do well to raise this issue to me. Now, let's consider a black person of intelligence equal to mine. If affirmative action helped them inappropriately get into Hardvard Law, then affirmative action has just DECREASED their chances of success!
That would be bad. Bad for that person, bad for our culture's progress towards equal rights, bad for our culture's perception of minorities and their capabilities, etc. (Being a minority doesn't make one more likely to be less intelligent, and unfortunately, some bigots need to have that fact reinforced regularly.) What we want is to give everyone an equal opportunity to SUCCEED, and to a certain extent, that involves placing them in the school where they are challenged appropriately, will learn best, and are most likely to succeed, IF THEY WORK HARD.
People are gifted with whatever intelligence they were born with, also affected by upbringing and primary education. This is not a basis on which to JUDGE people in terms of their human value so much as an attribute that varies from one person to another and which affects what they are capable of conceiving of intellectually. On the other hand, WORK ETHIC, is something that everyone should learn, and if you don't learn it, you are more likely to fail, and that is your fault if you do. If you are willing to WORK, then there is SOME job out there that you can do well at and succeed in. Our objective should be appropriate placement. Now, if someone decides that they want to go to a school that is above or below our recommendation, that is their choice. Our recommendation can be wrong, because we can incorrectly evaluate people. But that is a different matter.
The fact is, most people, regardless of race or any other attribute, would not do well in Harvard Law School.
More likely than an intelligence issue, the reason many people of lower socio-economic classes may fail at a place like Harvard is that they simply have not learned the sort of competitiveness and intellectual strategies that more affluent people perhaps tend to be exposed to in early life. (Of course, you also get your share of rich brats who are equally ignorant.) This is an issue of preparation, not smarts. Someone from a rich family in Boston may need an IQ of 115 to get through Harvard Law, in part because their parents are lawyers who have prepared their children for all the gotchas that happen in law school. Someone from the back waters of Appalacia may need an IQ of 125 to get through Harvard Law, simply because they have to do a whole hell of a lot more learning and adapting on the fly while they are there. Inner-city blacks are in the same boat as the back-water Appalacians. However, if the undereducated go to Cincinnati instead, they will succeed, and moreover, they will be able to impart to their children (who inherit the same genes, so it's not a racial issue) the knowledge necessary to succeed at Harvard.
Also, I need to make the obligatory comments about race. Race, as we perceive it, is based mostly on superficial factors like skin color. Africans, South Indians, etc. are brown because there's more sun in the place they're adapted to. Europeans are pink because there's less sun. You can do your own research on the relationship between UV, vitamin D, skin cancer, birth defects, etc. However, humans haven't been out of Africa long enough to evolve any really significant differences. At most, there's
Yes, Gödel's incompleteness theorem applies to math. But I don't see why it can't, at least loosely, apply to other things. Physics is basically just math anyhow. Besides the axioms of mathematics, there are other axioms, like the Lorentz factor. It's something we had to determine empirically (or it's based on things that had to be determined empirically). An axiom is something we can't prove, but we nevertheless know it because it's been measures or it's self-evident, or various other possible reasons.
Not really. Yes, it copies nature, but it copies nature in a way that's novel and clever. Perhaps we should say that it was INSPIRED by nature, but inventive nontheless. Now, another commenter pointed out that someone else before him had tried to do the same thing, so that would be prior art, but that would then be the patentable invention.
First, it's clever to notice a useful pattern in nature. Not everyone does that easily. Second, it's clever to find a practical way to translate that pattern to another context to solve a problem.
On the other hand, it doesn't seem like TOO much of a stretch to imagine that there may be massive particles that interact only through gravity and the weak nuclear force.
Some vampires were getting sick, and the cure was to infect them with HIV.
(Of course, I realize that the summary here is crap, but still, life can parallel fiction.)
The margins on retail DRAM are really slim. Even in "performance" memory, where they charge more, there's still overhead in binning for the more aggressive timing numbers. Unless DRAM sticks were all you did, or your retail DRAM business was a front for a DRAM maker (as Crucial is for Micron), then I don't see how selling DRAM is going to add much to the bottom line of a large company like AMD. Are they going to charge more than Crucial does for the same stuff? Are they going to do something to make buyers feel fear, uncertainty, and doubt about their AMD CPU warranty if they don't use the "correct RAM", just so they can charge even more?
It's a myth that Wayland lacks network transparency. It currently doesn't DEFINE it, but it doesn't LACK it. That may sound like a semantic game, but it's the same as saying that X11 lacks policy, which is imposed by the window manager, a separate program. Wayland provides drawing surfaces to applications and then composites them onto the screen. There are many different ways in which the drawing surfaces can get moved from the client to the server for display. Locally, they're the same memory space. With remote applications, you can either move pixels, or you can have the rendering API send commands over the network.
I'm no expert on middle east politics, but there seems to be some amount of conflict over there. Saudi Arabia seems to be among the friendlier countries, but there's no guarantee that they won't be attacked by some radicals who think the Saudis aren't Muslim enough or something. Or maybe the Saudis will piss off the Israelis. However you spin it, this building could conceivable make a nice big target for some terrorists.
So who would want to work there?
I mean, it could be that Linus is a stick in the mud, lacking imagination and afraid of change. MAYBE he just doesn't want to learn a new UI paradigm.
But more likely, as has always been, KDE and GNOME are plagued by a complete lack of usability engineering. That isn't to say that they have no usability engineers, but the politics is such that they're never listened to. Instead, we get a mish-mash of inconsistent components. Every component has its own philosophy, usually based around the needs of some particular geek with no sense of how anyone else might want to function. And there's no unifying theme. There are no usability studies, and no one pays attention to the many decades of usability studies that have been already done. (Did you know that most KDE themes have a single-pixel gap between a scrollbar and the edge of the screen? WHY?!?!)
That's a bit harsh, actually. I'm not fan of Linux desktops, but KDE 4.x, unlike the GNOME crowd, at least TRIED to be creative. Amazingly, they actually innovated, with their plasma desktop. They broke a lot of old ideas and actually worked towards creating something that was both attractive and usable. I'll have to check out KDE 4.7 to see where they've gone since I last looked at it (around 4.5, I think). I'm just afraid that geek politics is going to eventually stall all that progress. Too many people wanting to do things the old way, not understanding the vision of the leadership, therefore not working towards that ultimate goal.
The only way to fix Free Software usability problems would be to develop a more cathedral-like model. There needs to be solid leadership from someone who is seriously accomplished in the area of UI design, and then most of the rest of the team needs to be experts in usability, while maybe 30% of the people are actual coding experts, whose job is to just do engineering to implement the designs from the top.
I'm afraid this will never happen.
iOS and OS X already share a lot of basic underpinnings. Indeed, you could think of iOS as a sort of fork of OS X. So it makes sense that a lot of redundancies will re-merge over time. It just makes the OS easier to maintain.
On the other hand, the hardware is NOT going to merge. When you buy a PC, one of the things you want is PERFORMANCE. That need isn't going to go away. When you buy a tablet, a major driving convern is ENERGY EFFICIENCY. That isn't going to go away either. There are other differences as well, like weight, multiple overlapping windows, etc. The PC vs. tablet needs are incompatible. It's going to be a LONG TIME before any ARM processor catches up to any Intel processor in peak performance, and likewise, Intel is a long way from competing with ARM architecture on energy efficiency (that x86 translation front-end takes up like half the power budget of an Atom processor).
There are also very differing UI needs. A tablet CAN have a keyboard and mouse but usually doesn't, whereas the PC always does. Moreover, UIKit and AppKit are very well entrenched. It may be that their underlying code will merge into a single library, but they'll expose separate function bindings that provide quite different functionality, and it'll make sense then to break it into three libraries, which is AppKit, UIKit, and the common stuff. (And indeed this may already be the case.)
One of the problems with moon-related theories is that there really is hardly any evidence left for us to go on. There's a prevailing theory that a mars-sized planet struck earth, and the rebound caused a the moon to glob off. How do we know this is, well, plausible? First, some reasonable assumptions are made about the pre-moon earth, then a computer simulation is run that applies the theory, and then the final results of the simulation are compared to the present time. The prevailing moon theory is therefore the best explanation we have come up with so far. However, scientists rightfully call this a "default" theory, because although it makes a reasonable model, no one believes it's necessarily TRUE. No one is attached to it. Its basically just the only thing we have, so we use it. As soon as someone comes along with some more evidence and/or a better explanation, the old theory will be dropped like a bag of rocks.
As precarious as moon theory is, it's a fantastic example of how science should be. No one should be attached to any theories, and every theory should be treated as if it could be overturned at any instant. Many theories are much more solidly grounded, making them very much more likely to be true. And most theories are really made up lots and lots of small theories (like evolution, which is not any single theory but a whole collection of connected theories).
Am I making a criticism of science? No. Of scientists. Many scientists get too attached to their "life's work" and therefore turn from scientists into evangelists. Fortunately, in many fields there are lots of competing scientists who are very attached to incompatible theories, so it tends to balance out. (This sort of balancing out of competing corruption happens in politics sometimes too.)
The summary misrepresents the value of using the null terminator.
With a one-byte length, strings are limited to 255 characters. Is that good? Would you never want to have a longer string? If you want to have a 2-byte counter, do you now have to create a whole new long-string data type and overload every library function? It doesn't seem scalable.
On the other hand, the null terminator is a single byte no matter what and can support strings of arbitrary length.
Of course, there are disadvantages. For instance, computing length and concatenating strings take longer.
But don't act like using a byte-sized length field is fundamentally superior.