Re:Could Someone Help Me Out With This?
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Debt Deal Reached
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· Score: 1
Seriously. My wife and I have debt in two places: Revolving on the credit card and a mortgage. We pay off our credit card every month, and we also reserve a portion of our income for savings. If we want to buy an expensive item, we schedule it far enough into the future that we'll have saved for it by then. If we were stupid or unlucky one month, then those expenses get delayed further. This way, we stay out of debt. (BTW, having a mortgage that is in good standing, despite the fact that it's debt, appears to look good for you on your credit score, at least that's how I understand it.)
"Spending beyond their means." We hear this all the time. It's almost cliche. But that's not really the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is deeper than that and is caused by the fact that we an an entitlement culture. People want stuff and feel that it should be handed to them. When they're finally kicked out of their parents' basement, they run up debt on credit cards and drive themselves into a hole.
Sadly but predictably, this same kind of bad judgement is associated with a lack of ambition and work ethic. We've bred generations (this is not new!) of people who don't believe they should have to WORK for the stuff they own. Those people don't do well in high school, don't do well in college, get low-paying jobs, and yet still expect to own the most expensive 60-inch plasma TVs.
Because we have an entitlement CULTURE, this kind of bad behavior is ubiquitous, and this is why our economy is in the toilet. Communism took away the incentive to work harder, because you couldn't get more by working harder. Now, we have a class of people who are doing this to themselves. And what's more, because of the way the bankruptcy system works, these people can get themselves bailed out (to a certain extent -- they're not completely let off the hook). Once these people are finally forced into a corner, they're either destitute or on a government-controlled budget, basically removing them from the ecomomy. And then they're just dead weight.
If people were just more responsible with their money, our economy would be thriving!
The way some people talk about this, it's like a Jew or Muslim committing suicide after having accidentally eaten some pork they didn't know about. Give me a break.
I realize the FSF is trying to set a good example, but to refer to it as bad mistake and consider taking the programs offline over it? If that's the right thing to do, fine, but don't get so worked up about it. This is what I call an insignificant error, and it's corrected the way any GPL compliance issue is corrected: You go find the source (or the source of the source) and make it available. Fortunately, I'm not seeing anyone pointing fingers or telling people they were bad for making this mistake. I still think it's overblown. Not overblowing it would involve a minor blog post stating that some source is missing and it'll be uploaded soon.
The GPL is a good license. But it is not the Word of God. If you violate it, you will not go to hell.
If you want to look at this in moral terms, those who neglected to provide this small amount of source code MEANT to do the right thing, and moreover, there was no significant neglegence here, because no one was harmed by the omission.
Man, people really like to make a huge deal out of nothing.
(In retrospect, my post here is probably also making a big deal out of nothing. But this is a comment post on Slashdot, and most Slashdot comments are utterly useless, including most of my own.)
The greatest performance limiter of today's top-of-the-line computers is the mechanical hard disk. Although the article may have some concepts screwed up (I assume), the one upgrade that makes the greatest _apparent_ improvement in performance is switching from an HDD to an SSD. Yes, it's true that more DRAM helps, but any decent NEW system today already comes with 4GB of RAM (2GB if you really cheap out). 4GB is overkill for most users, so switching to an SSD will have a greater impact on general performance than upgrading to 8GB of RAM. This is because 4GB of RAM is more than enough cache their most frequently used disk blocks, so the only performance hit people will see is the time to load a program that isn't already cached in RAM. Everything else will _already_ be in RAM.
Now, I'm a power user, and going from 4GB to 8GB makes a huge difference for me. I always have several apps open at once and maybe 50 tabs in Safari. (Also Mac OS X has a shameful VM compard to Linux, so the extra RAM helps even more on a Mac. Linux seems to do a way better job of figuring out what to keep cached and paged in when under memory pressure.) But as it is, because everything else is so fast (Sandy Bridge, all the RAM, etc.), the only thing that limits peformance for me is the mechanical hard drive. It's very noticable, especially after I've rebooted. My problem is that I wanted the larger drive and didn't want to shell out $1500 for the 512GB SSD. I had to make a compromise because I'm still a grad student.
Yes, Apple doesn't like jailbreaking, but it would be stupid of them to not patch the flaw now that it's discovered. It would be nice if they were to provide a sanctioned means to jailbreak the device, but that's another matter. If I wanted a device this open, I'd figure out which Android phone was most hackable and buy that.... and put up with the inferior user interface. As it turns out, I HATE inferior user interfaces, which is why I avoid things like Linux and Windows desktops and which is why I bought an iPhone. For all of the things that are commonly done with a smartphone, the iPhone works great without any fuss (AT&T's flaky network aside). I'm content to stay within this walled garden, because although there are a FEW things I might want to do that I cannot, I don't have to put up with any bullshit to do everything else.
And let me be clear that this comment from yours truly is coming from a semi-well-known open hardware designer. For me, hacking someone else's hardware is often just too frustrating and limiting. I would much rather design something new that's open to begin with and does specifically what I want.
And you may also find it interesting that, as a hardware designer, I have somewhat of a different take on the whole Free Software thing. To me, software is often a just lot of bullshit required to make the hardware work. I care a bit more about the software being stable and easy to use than about it always being open source. On the other hand, although I'm willing to tollerate closed hardware when it suits me (indeed, the vast majority of computer hardware is closed-design), I find it much more desirable to design circuitry that other people can learn from, repurpose, and reprogram as they see fit. To turn this into a proper analogy, look at all this from the perspective of the mechanical engineer. He doesn't care about circuits OR software. But he hates it when machines he buys don't come with blueprints.
People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed. If you were white and grew up in the ghettos of Detroit, you might get into your head that blacks have a proclivity towards crime, because many of them commit crimes there. However, this would be subject to selective attention, because in fact many of the whites and many people of every other ethnic group are also commiting crimes there. I'm not even trying to be politically correct here. The fact is that the vast majority of negative things that people attribute to blacks (in particular, but also various latin groups as well here in the US) are NOT a function of race but instead a function of SOCIAL CLASS. (Or perhaps other related things like socioeconomic status, etc.) Even if there is some effect of race on behavior (although what it is is probably 100% neutral), it is FAR overshadowed by the effects of class. The main differences between lower-class blacks and lower-class whites (e.g. trailor trash) are minor cultural things that have only superficial effects on their lack of social graces, education, values, and other things (as they are perceived by people of middle and upper classes). Now, it may be, due to residual effects of slavery or any number of other reasons, that a greater proportion of blacks in the US are lower class, but there ARE plenty of upper-class blacks, and they're no different from the upper-class whites. Dave Chappelle even did a show on this, where each ethic group got to recruit people, and the whites wanted Tiger Woods, and the blacks wanted Eminem. Being "black", culturally and dialectically, is so much a function of where and how you grew up that any effects of race (insofar as there is any such thing) completely disappear into the statistical noise.
I was reading somewhere about the IQ differences between caucasians, Africans, and Asians. IIRC, Asians tested slightly high, Africans slightly low, and caucasians in the middle. However, the variance was HUGE compared to the differences in mean. The overlap between races was far greater than the differences. It's hard to infer anything useful from these minor differences. However, the fact that one average may be slightly different from the other MAY indicate some differences due to genetics, but we have to keep in mind that (at the risk again of sounding P.C.) no one race is superior, but in fact, we're all superior in the context of how we are adapted to the environment we evolved in. There are some differences in environment between sub-saharan Africa and northern Europe, with the most obvious thing being skin tone. More sun requires more protection against UV rays, or else you get skin cancer. Less sun requires less protection against UV, or else you'll suffer vitamin D deficiencies, which lead to birth defects, among other things. Well, sun isn't the only environmental difference, and there are of course random mutations that differ between geographically divergent groups, or else natural selection couldn't have selected for skin color in the first place. One thing I have noticed, subject of course to observation bias, is that although I am white, I have a _slightly_ easier time connecting socially with blacks, particularly strangers. (Of course, there could just as well be something I'M doing that might explain this better than race or culture or whatever.) But in fact, sociologists have documented studies of low-IQ children and found that while a 70 IQ white kid will typically be socially retarded, a 70 IQ black kid will be socially normal. (I don't recall if the number they mentioned was actually 70, but you get the idea.) Among other things, there may be some suggestion that Africans have evolved slightly superior social intelligence. IQ doesn't measure social intelligence, and the human brain has tradeoffs, where all of our talents must fit within some total capacity. If some capability is greater, then generally some other capability is reduced. Personality theories like Myers-Briggs at
Honestly, I think that calling someone a "fanboy" is just an ad hominem attack that people use when someone else's favorite thing is different from your favorite thing. The fact is, people come to like things, and they enjoy talking about them. Some people won't shut up about football. It's their thing. They enjoy it. They may seem unwilling to admit that basketball is an equally valid sport, from an objective point of view, because to them, football is the best thing. EVERYONE has this kid of narrow perspective on SOMETHING. However, while they may be narrow about it, calling them a fanboy is nothing but a way to completely dismiss every argument they make, even those that may be perfectly valid and useful. Maybe they are wrong that basketball sucks, but they may be equally correct that football is awesome.
Let's try an example. Richard Dawkins is an atheism fanboy. In fact, he's a great scientist and educator. I understand evolutionary biology very well, but this guy could run rings around me when it comes to depth of knowledge and the ability to explain it clearly to others. On the other hand, he's got a bug up his ass about the evils of religion. Many of his complaints are perfectly legitimate, of course, because various religions have been the cause of massive atrocities. Moreover, our scientific understanding has brought us to the point that the vast majority of things that humans once attributed to gods are in fact the result of completely natural processes that follow consistent physical laws. With regard to the vast majorty of the world, it is completely unnecessary and even perhaps inappropriate to evoke "God" as part of the explanation. That being said, an absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence. For all we know, "God" could be inhabitants of a meta universe wherein our universe is a computer simulation, and they have made occasional tweaks to keep the simulation running right. So, Dawkins has taken his lack of evidence for God and taken a leap of faith that there definitly isn't one, and rather than just being a proponent of atheism, he is vehement about it, attempting to persuade people of the "truth" of his belief. He should stick to being a fantastic scientist and picking at specific problems that religions cause (in any case, religions are human constructs), and stop being so forceful about something he can't really prove. He can prove evolution. He can't prove atheism. Evolution is good science. Atheism is a belief, taken on faith, even if it is in fact highly plausible, with the alternatives having very little support. (I am inclined to think that agnosticism is the only belief without faith, because it doesn't assert anything specific, but I could be wrong about that.)
The point I'm making here is that Dawkins has some errors in his reasoning that might make some people dismiss him. If you're religious and he attacks your religion, then you're not going to want to listen to him talk about evolution. But in fact, he's one of the BEST people to listen to if you want to understand evolution.
I was thinking of going on with some other example about Mac fanboys, but I'm running out of time. For me, I'm just getting old and I prefer the fact that a Mac doesn't make me babysit basic things like connecting to wifi or backing up files. But my idiology places usability concerns first, with issues of "free software" coming second. The point is that many Mac fanboys have religious fervor. Nothing can touch the awesomeness of a Mac. But I'm sure you can anticipate what I'm going to say next: Even if their knowledge of Windows and Linux is completely wrong, they know tons about Macs and you might learn something from that.
The fact that IQ scores, from paper tests, correlate with other paper test scores is almost tautological and does not contradict my assertion that social ability is part of general intelligence. Try again.
Indeed. I've noticed this with regard to IQ in humans. IQ is a useful measure, but it only measures certain things. For instance, it doesn't measure social ability, but social ability is an important cognitive function that is a major part of intelligence.
Actually, I'm not sure it ever HAD relevance, but I think that it could possibly have gained some. But then we got reports about people's bitcoin purses stolen. Now, maybe that was due to lax security on the part of the older of the purse. Or perhaps it was a flaw in the design of the bitcoin system. Either way, all of those organizations that were once dabbling with bitcoins have since changed their minds. They have no real-world monitary value. At one time, I was considering doing a bit of bitcoin creation of my own, on my own computers. Now, what's the point?
Copyright is terribly abused by big corporations and cartels that want to suck money out of everyone. However, copyright's original intent was to encourage creating of original content. IMHO, corporations should have very limited copyright protection, whereas individual artists should have rights bordering on the draconian. This should apply in many cases even when you're paid a salary for what you create, but it's especially applicable if you license your creation to a company after you've completed it, as with the major record labels.
I'm a computer engineer, and let me assure you, most engineers don't know dick about productization. Sadly neither do the bean counter MBAs. Perhaps people in cognitive engineering, which is a subdiscipline of industrial engineering. At least they know something about meeting needs and usability. Rely on the typical engineers for designing products and you'll end up with "clever" bullshit that useful for like three people.
It's not that I mind people looking at my code. In fact, I'd love to show off my skills, if they could appreciate my cleverness. And I wouldn't mind some feedback, if other people understood what I was doing well enough to make creative comments. It's not that other people aren't as smart as me; it's just that we're good at different things, and coding seems to be an area where I excel, better than a lot of engineers I know, and better than the vast majority of academics who specialize in theory instead of practical coding. When I have had people look at my code, typically, I get no feedback at all, and occasionally, I'll get someone making stupid remarks about not enough commenting. In fact, I know that I don't comment enough, and I DO NOT believe that it's easy to make self-documenting code. It's just that their remarks would be vague or demonstrate a general misunderstanding of something more fundamental than the lines of code I write. (E.g. that my nlogn algorithm is bigger and harder to read than an n-squared algorithm.)
You're going to get resistance to code reviews from both ends of the spectrum. The lousy coders know they suck and don't want to be caught. It amazes me how some people can't even freaking indent their code, just to make it half-way readable. Their code looks like viagra spam, with random line breaks, extraneous spacing, and everything. The really good coders don't want to be reviewed because it goes over the heads of the typical reviewers.
This is WHY they resist. But the fact is, I think that if we had a culture of code review, it would be good for everyone. The people at the top would get used to explaining themselves better, with the side-effect that other people might learn something. The coders at the bottom would be forced to at least format their code well, and it would force them to think harder about what they write, because stupidity is going to be caught quickly.
And coders of all skill levels are guilty of just hacking crap together sometimes. Just hacking isn't good design practice. Maybe, for someone with an IQ of 150, it's not such a big deal to make solid working code without advance planning, but good design will make it possible for some mere mortal to maintain that code later, even if it's less clever than you could do.
Something that MOST engineers fail to realize is that the world does not revolve around their code. They are doing a job, which contributes to some larger product, and that product is what fills their paycheck. The lines of code you write are almost valueless in and of themselves, because if you weren't there, someone else would do it. If you're a top, well-respected engineer, it's not because you write clever code. It's because you're reliable at churning out CORRECT code that completes products. You are judged on how well you contribute to the bottom line and how many bugs you introduce into end products. Now, maybe you get some satisfaction out of making this or that more efficient or better designed. (I'll do some clever coding tricks because it's less boring, but mostly I spend my brain cycles coming up with better organization that makes bugs harder to introduce, which is actually useful.) Unfortuantely, any competitive edge clever coding leads to will be marginal at best. With today's computers, there are only certain places where cleverness and efficiency really matter, and those are limited to system software and compute-intensive algorithms. Linux and Photoshop have to be smartly coded. Microsoft Word just has to work correctly. Why do you think Apple took so damn long to make Finder snappy? Because it just doesn't matter more than 1% of the time. They spent their resources in more important areas.
I notice how a lot of people responding to you are going on and on about states and statutes (although I'm not sure they know what statutes are), etc. What they don't seem to know is that, except in certain extreme circumstances, contracts are a civil matter. Although there may be some local laws that make certain kinds of contracts weaker or stronger, when there is a dispute, it is the job of an arbiter or court to decide the matter.
If it were the icons Apple was unhappy about, they'd be suing Google, because that's a function of Android. Rather, Apple's beef is with the bezel of certain Samsung phones looking remarkably like earlier iPhones. And in my opinion, they do look remarkably similar, with minor differences in things like the home button.
But notice that I said "earlier iPhones." None of the Samsung phones look like the iPhone 4, while Apple has left behind the look of the original iPhone. So why is Apple so up in arms about Samsung copying a look they've deprecated? Well, one reason might be that Samsung was selling these phones while Apple was still selling the 3Gs, although I'm not sure if that's true. However, there are design patents and trademarks and copyrights pertaining to this look and feel that Apple legally must defend or else they risk losing exclusive rights to their IP.
It's also pretty lame that Samsung can't be bothered to get their own design team to make their own unique look and feel. Apple spent a lot of R&D on theirs, so it's not right that Samsung just copies it. And don't tell me that the similarities are just coincidence. Of course, copying happens all the time. Even more significant than the look and feel was the concept of the iPhone itself. It was certainly not the first smart phone, but was the first to bring this level of usability to a touch screen without a stylus. THAT's really the hard part.... and it was Google that decided to ride on Apple's coat tails there. Now, it's vital that Apple have competition, to keep Apple on its toes, but that competition has to be innovative in its own right or else Apple will have really nothing to compete against except clones of itself. I saw this one Nokia phone that had a feature that Apple didn't come up with, which was to make the whole display a button that was clickable, so touching was one kind of input, and that was separate from clicking. I thought that was pretty cool.
This pen is laying down particles of silver in a binder. Sadly, the article says nothing about resistance, but it's got to be much higher than what you'd get with a pure silver trace, no?
The creationist tenet that there is no speciation has recently been demonstrated false in fruitflies. Genetic mutations occurred that rendered two different strains unable to interbreed and produce viable offspring. On this basis, they are now two species. Since they cannot share DNA, they are bound to continue diverge significantly after enough generations have passed.
Because corn isn't food. Maybe hundreds of years ago when native americans were selectively breeding it. Even then, it was kinda crappy, and they had to supplement it carefully with other things or else they would suffer malnutrition. In the 20th century, we've genetically engineered all the nutrients out or corn, making it mostly a source of lousy sugar. Corn is more useful to make fuel and biodegradable plastic than it is as a food.
I considered working on automatic speech recognition in grad school, so I took a few courses in it. It drove me crazy for a lot of reasons. First, what they do isn't very linguistically sound because they throw away way too much of the original signal and use what I think are overly-simplistic statistical methods. But what REALLY drove me crazy was the impenetrable resistance to trying anything new. In computer vision, they do all kinda of cool new stuff all the time. But in ASR, it's all cepstral coefficients and Markov random fields. The reason for the stagnation is that you can't get funding for anything more ambitious. The NSA will fund a 1 year project that is likely to get increase recognition rate from 95% to 96% (which is actually quite hard) using existing methods, but turn their nose up at an experimental 10 year project that should bring the recognition rate to 99% but with a lower probability of success. If you look at the economics, it makes sense. But it isn't very interesting science.
I think I may once have referred to my daughter, before I knew she was a daughter, as a zygote, and I did often refer to her as a fetus. However, my wife did the same. Also, since my wife has various health issues (celiac disease and tyroid problems), we were always treating it as a schedule to follow with milestones and all sorts of measurements. None of this seemed conspicuously unusual to either of us, except perhaps for a combination or envy and pity for those people who people who know nothing about any of this.
Season 5 switched from sci fi to fairy tail. For some people, this was great, while for others, it was horrible. Moffat is going out on a limb, trying to be "fresh" and "different". Not everyone likes it.
Season 6 is taking that to a whole new level. Everything is designed to be as shocking as possible. My wife is a fantacy nut and a writer, so she can predict basically any plot twist of any show, which drives me nuts, but there have been one or two plot points this season that she did not anticipate, like Amy being a ganger. (I'll have to ask her if/when she anticipated the Doctor's death in episode 1. I forget if she mentioned it. She probably did since the spoilers said that someone from the TARDIS gang would die, and what would be more shocking than that being the Doctor himself?)
For some people, going out on a limb like this is exciting. For others, they're annoyed that Moffat is trying to one-up M. Knight Shayamalan.
Me? I'll let you know when it's all over. How are we going to get out the hole dug by the Doctor's death? And who is that little girl who regenerates at the end of episode 2? And where is Amy? And why can't we have more episodes like "The Doctor's Wife" and fewer like "The Black Spot"?
Getting a college degree, regardless of the major, requires discipline, persistence, and dedication. Now, it may be that there are many people out there who "didn't leran anything" from college. But if you managed to get a reasonable GPA (3.0 or higher), then you probably learned something, and you actually had to take the time to study for your classes. When I interview someone who has a good GPA, this is evidence (although not proof) to me that they can be given work to do, and they will understand it and get it done. Someone without a college degree lacks that evidence. They MAY have that kind of discipline, but I can't guess that very well from a short interview. (An alternative might be good references from past employers.)
Some claim that it is theoretically possible to do well in classes and then promptly forget everything you crammed. But that's disingenuous and discounts the effects of (a) subconscious learning, and (b) meta-learning. Even if you can't recall things you learned at will, you are often able to recall them in context. You forgot that you learned something. And meta-learning is more of a mind-shaping thing, where spending the time to learn some new subject matter forces you to think about things in an unfamiliar way. Even if you forget all the facts, it creates a broader view that makes you more adaptable. (This is why I prefer interviewees who had diverse minors.)
After 9 years in industry, I decided to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I found the advanced core courses in the grad program to be challenging, but they were not a fundamentally new way of thinking. On the other hand, there were the grad courses I took in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive engineering. Each of those fields has a culture quite different from what I am used to in CS, and taking those courses introduced me to very different perspectives on things. In order to do well in those courses (I did get all A's), I had to learn to think like them. The CS courses made me feel like I had learned some things I didn't know before. The courses in other disciplines made me feel like I had grown intellectually.
As a side note, those aforementioned areas seem to attract more women. Indeed, psychology, at least in grad school, is _dominated_ by women. Now, I'm happily married, so I had no interest in finding anyone to date. But for someone else, this might be something to look into. For me, what I enjoyed was encountering yet another perspective. For various reasons (cultural, genetic, hormonal, etc.), men and women seem to have different perspectives on many things. And in grad school, most of the students are very smart. So taking psych courses had me interacting with women who not only have a different perspective but also have the IQ and meta-cognitiion to be able to convey that perspective well to others. (Some of the differences are due to the different field, while some seemed to be clearly due to gender.) So, I enjoyed very much the things I could learn from them, especially those things that they understood better than the males in their field. On a similar note, I also enjoyed working with women in engineering. The diversity they bring includes not just different approaches to engineering, but also a "softer feel" they bring to the workplace, like how they decorate their offices and interact with others. I would probably feel less of a need to focus on this if there weren't so few women in computer science and engineering.
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Seriously. My wife and I have debt in two places: Revolving on the credit card and a mortgage. We pay off our credit card every month, and we also reserve a portion of our income for savings. If we want to buy an expensive item, we schedule it far enough into the future that we'll have saved for it by then. If we were stupid or unlucky one month, then those expenses get delayed further. This way, we stay out of debt. (BTW, having a mortgage that is in good standing, despite the fact that it's debt, appears to look good for you on your credit score, at least that's how I understand it.)
"Spending beyond their means." We hear this all the time. It's almost cliche. But that's not really the fundamental problem. The fundamental problem is deeper than that and is caused by the fact that we an an entitlement culture. People want stuff and feel that it should be handed to them. When they're finally kicked out of their parents' basement, they run up debt on credit cards and drive themselves into a hole.
Sadly but predictably, this same kind of bad judgement is associated with a lack of ambition and work ethic. We've bred generations (this is not new!) of people who don't believe they should have to WORK for the stuff they own. Those people don't do well in high school, don't do well in college, get low-paying jobs, and yet still expect to own the most expensive 60-inch plasma TVs.
Because we have an entitlement CULTURE, this kind of bad behavior is ubiquitous, and this is why our economy is in the toilet. Communism took away the incentive to work harder, because you couldn't get more by working harder. Now, we have a class of people who are doing this to themselves. And what's more, because of the way the bankruptcy system works, these people can get themselves bailed out (to a certain extent -- they're not completely let off the hook). Once these people are finally forced into a corner, they're either destitute or on a government-controlled budget, basically removing them from the ecomomy. And then they're just dead weight.
If people were just more responsible with their money, our economy would be thriving!
I AM BENDER. INSERT GERDER.
The way some people talk about this, it's like a Jew or Muslim committing suicide after having accidentally eaten some pork they didn't know about. Give me a break.
I realize the FSF is trying to set a good example, but to refer to it as bad mistake and consider taking the programs offline over it? If that's the right thing to do, fine, but don't get so worked up about it. This is what I call an insignificant error, and it's corrected the way any GPL compliance issue is corrected: You go find the source (or the source of the source) and make it available. Fortunately, I'm not seeing anyone pointing fingers or telling people they were bad for making this mistake. I still think it's overblown. Not overblowing it would involve a minor blog post stating that some source is missing and it'll be uploaded soon.
The GPL is a good license. But it is not the Word of God. If you violate it, you will not go to hell.
If you want to look at this in moral terms, those who neglected to provide this small amount of source code MEANT to do the right thing, and moreover, there was no significant neglegence here, because no one was harmed by the omission.
Man, people really like to make a huge deal out of nothing.
(In retrospect, my post here is probably also making a big deal out of nothing. But this is a comment post on Slashdot, and most Slashdot comments are utterly useless, including most of my own.)
The greatest performance limiter of today's top-of-the-line computers is the mechanical hard disk. Although the article may have some concepts screwed up (I assume), the one upgrade that makes the greatest _apparent_ improvement in performance is switching from an HDD to an SSD. Yes, it's true that more DRAM helps, but any decent NEW system today already comes with 4GB of RAM (2GB if you really cheap out). 4GB is overkill for most users, so switching to an SSD will have a greater impact on general performance than upgrading to 8GB of RAM. This is because 4GB of RAM is more than enough cache their most frequently used disk blocks, so the only performance hit people will see is the time to load a program that isn't already cached in RAM. Everything else will _already_ be in RAM.
Now, I'm a power user, and going from 4GB to 8GB makes a huge difference for me. I always have several apps open at once and maybe 50 tabs in Safari. (Also Mac OS X has a shameful VM compard to Linux, so the extra RAM helps even more on a Mac. Linux seems to do a way better job of figuring out what to keep cached and paged in when under memory pressure.) But as it is, because everything else is so fast (Sandy Bridge, all the RAM, etc.), the only thing that limits peformance for me is the mechanical hard drive. It's very noticable, especially after I've rebooted. My problem is that I wanted the larger drive and didn't want to shell out $1500 for the 512GB SSD. I had to make a compromise because I'm still a grad student.
Sadly, I don't understand the explanation or what the patch changes.
https://lkml.org/lkml/2011/7/17/103
Anyone want to post some links/info on what the bug actually was?
Yes, Apple doesn't like jailbreaking, but it would be stupid of them to not patch the flaw now that it's discovered. It would be nice if they were to provide a sanctioned means to jailbreak the device, but that's another matter. If I wanted a device this open, I'd figure out which Android phone was most hackable and buy that.... and put up with the inferior user interface. As it turns out, I HATE inferior user interfaces, which is why I avoid things like Linux and Windows desktops and which is why I bought an iPhone. For all of the things that are commonly done with a smartphone, the iPhone works great without any fuss (AT&T's flaky network aside). I'm content to stay within this walled garden, because although there are a FEW things I might want to do that I cannot, I don't have to put up with any bullshit to do everything else.
And let me be clear that this comment from yours truly is coming from a semi-well-known open hardware designer. For me, hacking someone else's hardware is often just too frustrating and limiting. I would much rather design something new that's open to begin with and does specifically what I want.
And you may also find it interesting that, as a hardware designer, I have somewhat of a different take on the whole Free Software thing. To me, software is often a just lot of bullshit required to make the hardware work. I care a bit more about the software being stable and easy to use than about it always being open source. On the other hand, although I'm willing to tollerate closed hardware when it suits me (indeed, the vast majority of computer hardware is closed-design), I find it much more desirable to design circuitry that other people can learn from, repurpose, and reprogram as they see fit. To turn this into a proper analogy, look at all this from the perspective of the mechanical engineer. He doesn't care about circuits OR software. But he hates it when machines he buys don't come with blueprints.
People generally get their ideas about race from personal experience, and personal experience is often skewed. If you were white and grew up in the ghettos of Detroit, you might get into your head that blacks have a proclivity towards crime, because many of them commit crimes there. However, this would be subject to selective attention, because in fact many of the whites and many people of every other ethnic group are also commiting crimes there. I'm not even trying to be politically correct here. The fact is that the vast majority of negative things that people attribute to blacks (in particular, but also various latin groups as well here in the US) are NOT a function of race but instead a function of SOCIAL CLASS. (Or perhaps other related things like socioeconomic status, etc.) Even if there is some effect of race on behavior (although what it is is probably 100% neutral), it is FAR overshadowed by the effects of class. The main differences between lower-class blacks and lower-class whites (e.g. trailor trash) are minor cultural things that have only superficial effects on their lack of social graces, education, values, and other things (as they are perceived by people of middle and upper classes). Now, it may be, due to residual effects of slavery or any number of other reasons, that a greater proportion of blacks in the US are lower class, but there ARE plenty of upper-class blacks, and they're no different from the upper-class whites. Dave Chappelle even did a show on this, where each ethic group got to recruit people, and the whites wanted Tiger Woods, and the blacks wanted Eminem. Being "black", culturally and dialectically, is so much a function of where and how you grew up that any effects of race (insofar as there is any such thing) completely disappear into the statistical noise.
I was reading somewhere about the IQ differences between caucasians, Africans, and Asians. IIRC, Asians tested slightly high, Africans slightly low, and caucasians in the middle. However, the variance was HUGE compared to the differences in mean. The overlap between races was far greater than the differences. It's hard to infer anything useful from these minor differences. However, the fact that one average may be slightly different from the other MAY indicate some differences due to genetics, but we have to keep in mind that (at the risk again of sounding P.C.) no one race is superior, but in fact, we're all superior in the context of how we are adapted to the environment we evolved in. There are some differences in environment between sub-saharan Africa and northern Europe, with the most obvious thing being skin tone. More sun requires more protection against UV rays, or else you get skin cancer. Less sun requires less protection against UV, or else you'll suffer vitamin D deficiencies, which lead to birth defects, among other things. Well, sun isn't the only environmental difference, and there are of course random mutations that differ between geographically divergent groups, or else natural selection couldn't have selected for skin color in the first place. One thing I have noticed, subject of course to observation bias, is that although I am white, I have a _slightly_ easier time connecting socially with blacks, particularly strangers. (Of course, there could just as well be something I'M doing that might explain this better than race or culture or whatever.) But in fact, sociologists have documented studies of low-IQ children and found that while a 70 IQ white kid will typically be socially retarded, a 70 IQ black kid will be socially normal. (I don't recall if the number they mentioned was actually 70, but you get the idea.) Among other things, there may be some suggestion that Africans have evolved slightly superior social intelligence. IQ doesn't measure social intelligence, and the human brain has tradeoffs, where all of our talents must fit within some total capacity. If some capability is greater, then generally some other capability is reduced. Personality theories like Myers-Briggs at
Honestly, I think that calling someone a "fanboy" is just an ad hominem attack that people use when someone else's favorite thing is different from your favorite thing. The fact is, people come to like things, and they enjoy talking about them. Some people won't shut up about football. It's their thing. They enjoy it. They may seem unwilling to admit that basketball is an equally valid sport, from an objective point of view, because to them, football is the best thing. EVERYONE has this kid of narrow perspective on SOMETHING. However, while they may be narrow about it, calling them a fanboy is nothing but a way to completely dismiss every argument they make, even those that may be perfectly valid and useful. Maybe they are wrong that basketball sucks, but they may be equally correct that football is awesome.
Let's try an example. Richard Dawkins is an atheism fanboy. In fact, he's a great scientist and educator. I understand evolutionary biology very well, but this guy could run rings around me when it comes to depth of knowledge and the ability to explain it clearly to others. On the other hand, he's got a bug up his ass about the evils of religion. Many of his complaints are perfectly legitimate, of course, because various religions have been the cause of massive atrocities. Moreover, our scientific understanding has brought us to the point that the vast majority of things that humans once attributed to gods are in fact the result of completely natural processes that follow consistent physical laws. With regard to the vast majorty of the world, it is completely unnecessary and even perhaps inappropriate to evoke "God" as part of the explanation. That being said, an absence of evidence does not imply evidence of absence. For all we know, "God" could be inhabitants of a meta universe wherein our universe is a computer simulation, and they have made occasional tweaks to keep the simulation running right. So, Dawkins has taken his lack of evidence for God and taken a leap of faith that there definitly isn't one, and rather than just being a proponent of atheism, he is vehement about it, attempting to persuade people of the "truth" of his belief. He should stick to being a fantastic scientist and picking at specific problems that religions cause (in any case, religions are human constructs), and stop being so forceful about something he can't really prove. He can prove evolution. He can't prove atheism. Evolution is good science. Atheism is a belief, taken on faith, even if it is in fact highly plausible, with the alternatives having very little support. (I am inclined to think that agnosticism is the only belief without faith, because it doesn't assert anything specific, but I could be wrong about that.)
The point I'm making here is that Dawkins has some errors in his reasoning that might make some people dismiss him. If you're religious and he attacks your religion, then you're not going to want to listen to him talk about evolution. But in fact, he's one of the BEST people to listen to if you want to understand evolution.
I was thinking of going on with some other example about Mac fanboys, but I'm running out of time. For me, I'm just getting old and I prefer the fact that a Mac doesn't make me babysit basic things like connecting to wifi or backing up files. But my idiology places usability concerns first, with issues of "free software" coming second. The point is that many Mac fanboys have religious fervor. Nothing can touch the awesomeness of a Mac. But I'm sure you can anticipate what I'm going to say next: Even if their knowledge of Windows and Linux is completely wrong, they know tons about Macs and you might learn something from that.
The fact that IQ scores, from paper tests, correlate with other paper test scores is almost tautological and does not contradict my assertion that social ability is part of general intelligence. Try again.
Indeed. I've noticed this with regard to IQ in humans. IQ is a useful measure, but it only measures certain things. For instance, it doesn't measure social ability, but social ability is an important cognitive function that is a major part of intelligence.
Actually, I'm not sure it ever HAD relevance, but I think that it could possibly have gained some. But then we got reports about people's bitcoin purses stolen. Now, maybe that was due to lax security on the part of the older of the purse. Or perhaps it was a flaw in the design of the bitcoin system. Either way, all of those organizations that were once dabbling with bitcoins have since changed their minds. They have no real-world monitary value. At one time, I was considering doing a bit of bitcoin creation of my own, on my own computers. Now, what's the point?
Copyright is terribly abused by big corporations and cartels that want to suck money out of everyone. However, copyright's original intent was to encourage creating of original content. IMHO, corporations should have very limited copyright protection, whereas individual artists should have rights bordering on the draconian. This should apply in many cases even when you're paid a salary for what you create, but it's especially applicable if you license your creation to a company after you've completed it, as with the major record labels.
The same should be true of patents.
But not trademarks. Trademarks are fine.
I'm a computer engineer, and let me assure you, most engineers don't know dick about productization. Sadly neither do the bean counter MBAs. Perhaps people in cognitive engineering, which is a subdiscipline of industrial engineering. At least they know something about meeting needs and usability. Rely on the typical engineers for designing products and you'll end up with "clever" bullshit that useful for like three people.
It's not that I mind people looking at my code. In fact, I'd love to show off my skills, if they could appreciate my cleverness. And I wouldn't mind some feedback, if other people understood what I was doing well enough to make creative comments. It's not that other people aren't as smart as me; it's just that we're good at different things, and coding seems to be an area where I excel, better than a lot of engineers I know, and better than the vast majority of academics who specialize in theory instead of practical coding. When I have had people look at my code, typically, I get no feedback at all, and occasionally, I'll get someone making stupid remarks about not enough commenting. In fact, I know that I don't comment enough, and I DO NOT believe that it's easy to make self-documenting code. It's just that their remarks would be vague or demonstrate a general misunderstanding of something more fundamental than the lines of code I write. (E.g. that my nlogn algorithm is bigger and harder to read than an n-squared algorithm.)
You're going to get resistance to code reviews from both ends of the spectrum. The lousy coders know they suck and don't want to be caught. It amazes me how some people can't even freaking indent their code, just to make it half-way readable. Their code looks like viagra spam, with random line breaks, extraneous spacing, and everything. The really good coders don't want to be reviewed because it goes over the heads of the typical reviewers.
This is WHY they resist. But the fact is, I think that if we had a culture of code review, it would be good for everyone. The people at the top would get used to explaining themselves better, with the side-effect that other people might learn something. The coders at the bottom would be forced to at least format their code well, and it would force them to think harder about what they write, because stupidity is going to be caught quickly.
And coders of all skill levels are guilty of just hacking crap together sometimes. Just hacking isn't good design practice. Maybe, for someone with an IQ of 150, it's not such a big deal to make solid working code without advance planning, but good design will make it possible for some mere mortal to maintain that code later, even if it's less clever than you could do.
Something that MOST engineers fail to realize is that the world does not revolve around their code. They are doing a job, which contributes to some larger product, and that product is what fills their paycheck. The lines of code you write are almost valueless in and of themselves, because if you weren't there, someone else would do it. If you're a top, well-respected engineer, it's not because you write clever code. It's because you're reliable at churning out CORRECT code that completes products. You are judged on how well you contribute to the bottom line and how many bugs you introduce into end products. Now, maybe you get some satisfaction out of making this or that more efficient or better designed. (I'll do some clever coding tricks because it's less boring, but mostly I spend my brain cycles coming up with better organization that makes bugs harder to introduce, which is actually useful.) Unfortuantely, any competitive edge clever coding leads to will be marginal at best. With today's computers, there are only certain places where cleverness and efficiency really matter, and those are limited to system software and compute-intensive algorithms. Linux and Photoshop have to be smartly coded. Microsoft Word just has to work correctly. Why do you think Apple took so damn long to make Finder snappy? Because it just doesn't matter more than 1% of the time. They spent their resources in more important areas.
Thanks for the clarification. Someone should mod you up. :)
I notice how a lot of people responding to you are going on and on about states and statutes (although I'm not sure they know what statutes are), etc. What they don't seem to know is that, except in certain extreme circumstances, contracts are a civil matter. Although there may be some local laws that make certain kinds of contracts weaker or stronger, when there is a dispute, it is the job of an arbiter or court to decide the matter.
If it were the icons Apple was unhappy about, they'd be suing Google, because that's a function of Android. Rather, Apple's beef is with the bezel of certain Samsung phones looking remarkably like earlier iPhones. And in my opinion, they do look remarkably similar, with minor differences in things like the home button.
But notice that I said "earlier iPhones." None of the Samsung phones look like the iPhone 4, while Apple has left behind the look of the original iPhone. So why is Apple so up in arms about Samsung copying a look they've deprecated? Well, one reason might be that Samsung was selling these phones while Apple was still selling the 3Gs, although I'm not sure if that's true. However, there are design patents and trademarks and copyrights pertaining to this look and feel that Apple legally must defend or else they risk losing exclusive rights to their IP.
It's also pretty lame that Samsung can't be bothered to get their own design team to make their own unique look and feel. Apple spent a lot of R&D on theirs, so it's not right that Samsung just copies it. And don't tell me that the similarities are just coincidence. Of course, copying happens all the time. Even more significant than the look and feel was the concept of the iPhone itself. It was certainly not the first smart phone, but was the first to bring this level of usability to a touch screen without a stylus. THAT's really the hard part.... and it was Google that decided to ride on Apple's coat tails there. Now, it's vital that Apple have competition, to keep Apple on its toes, but that competition has to be innovative in its own right or else Apple will have really nothing to compete against except clones of itself. I saw this one Nokia phone that had a feature that Apple didn't come up with, which was to make the whole display a button that was clickable, so touching was one kind of input, and that was separate from clicking. I thought that was pretty cool.
This pen is laying down particles of silver in a binder. Sadly, the article says nothing about resistance, but it's got to be much higher than what you'd get with a pure silver trace, no?
The creationist tenet that there is no speciation has recently been demonstrated false in fruitflies. Genetic mutations occurred that rendered two different strains unable to interbreed and produce viable offspring. On this basis, they are now two species. Since they cannot share DNA, they are bound to continue diverge significantly after enough generations have passed.
Because corn isn't food. Maybe hundreds of years ago when native americans were selectively breeding it. Even then, it was kinda crappy, and they had to supplement it carefully with other things or else they would suffer malnutrition. In the 20th century, we've genetically engineered all the nutrients out or corn, making it mostly a source of lousy sugar. Corn is more useful to make fuel and biodegradable plastic than it is as a food.
I considered working on automatic speech recognition in grad school, so I took a few courses in it. It drove me crazy for a lot of reasons. First, what they do isn't very linguistically sound because they throw away way too much of the original signal and use what I think are overly-simplistic statistical methods. But what REALLY drove me crazy was the impenetrable resistance to trying anything new. In computer vision, they do all kinda of cool new stuff all the time. But in ASR, it's all cepstral coefficients and Markov random fields. The reason for the stagnation is that you can't get funding for anything more ambitious. The NSA will fund a 1 year project that is likely to get increase recognition rate from 95% to 96% (which is actually quite hard) using existing methods, but turn their nose up at an experimental 10 year project that should bring the recognition rate to 99% but with a lower probability of success. If you look at the economics, it makes sense. But it isn't very interesting science.
I think I may once have referred to my daughter, before I knew she was a daughter, as a zygote, and I did often refer to her as a fetus. However, my wife did the same. Also, since my wife has various health issues (celiac disease and tyroid problems), we were always treating it as a schedule to follow with milestones and all sorts of measurements. None of this seemed conspicuously unusual to either of us, except perhaps for a combination or envy and pity for those people who people who know nothing about any of this.
Season 5 switched from sci fi to fairy tail. For some people, this was great, while for others, it was horrible. Moffat is going out on a limb, trying to be "fresh" and "different". Not everyone likes it.
Season 6 is taking that to a whole new level. Everything is designed to be as shocking as possible. My wife is a fantacy nut and a writer, so she can predict basically any plot twist of any show, which drives me nuts, but there have been one or two plot points this season that she did not anticipate, like Amy being a ganger. (I'll have to ask her if/when she anticipated the Doctor's death in episode 1. I forget if she mentioned it. She probably did since the spoilers said that someone from the TARDIS gang would die, and what would be more shocking than that being the Doctor himself?)
For some people, going out on a limb like this is exciting. For others, they're annoyed that Moffat is trying to one-up M. Knight Shayamalan.
Me? I'll let you know when it's all over. How are we going to get out the hole dug by the Doctor's death? And who is that little girl who regenerates at the end of episode 2? And where is Amy? And why can't we have more episodes like "The Doctor's Wife" and fewer like "The Black Spot"?
Getting a college degree, regardless of the major, requires discipline, persistence, and dedication. Now, it may be that there are many people out there who "didn't leran anything" from college. But if you managed to get a reasonable GPA (3.0 or higher), then you probably learned something, and you actually had to take the time to study for your classes. When I interview someone who has a good GPA, this is evidence (although not proof) to me that they can be given work to do, and they will understand it and get it done. Someone without a college degree lacks that evidence. They MAY have that kind of discipline, but I can't guess that very well from a short interview. (An alternative might be good references from past employers.)
Some claim that it is theoretically possible to do well in classes and then promptly forget everything you crammed. But that's disingenuous and discounts the effects of (a) subconscious learning, and (b) meta-learning. Even if you can't recall things you learned at will, you are often able to recall them in context. You forgot that you learned something. And meta-learning is more of a mind-shaping thing, where spending the time to learn some new subject matter forces you to think about things in an unfamiliar way. Even if you forget all the facts, it creates a broader view that makes you more adaptable. (This is why I prefer interviewees who had diverse minors.)
After 9 years in industry, I decided to get a Ph.D. in Computer Science. I found the advanced core courses in the grad program to be challenging, but they were not a fundamentally new way of thinking. On the other hand, there were the grad courses I took in linguistics, psychology, cognitive science, and cognitive engineering. Each of those fields has a culture quite different from what I am used to in CS, and taking those courses introduced me to very different perspectives on things. In order to do well in those courses (I did get all A's), I had to learn to think like them. The CS courses made me feel like I had learned some things I didn't know before. The courses in other disciplines made me feel like I had grown intellectually.
As a side note, those aforementioned areas seem to attract more women. Indeed, psychology, at least in grad school, is _dominated_ by women. Now, I'm happily married, so I had no interest in finding anyone to date. But for someone else, this might be something to look into. For me, what I enjoyed was encountering yet another perspective. For various reasons (cultural, genetic, hormonal, etc.), men and women seem to have different perspectives on many things. And in grad school, most of the students are very smart. So taking psych courses had me interacting with women who not only have a different perspective but also have the IQ and meta-cognitiion to be able to convey that perspective well to others. (Some of the differences are due to the different field, while some seemed to be clearly due to gender.) So, I enjoyed very much the things I could learn from them, especially those things that they understood better than the males in their field. On a similar note, I also enjoyed working with women in engineering. The diversity they bring includes not just different approaches to engineering, but also a "softer feel" they bring to the workplace, like how they decorate their offices and interact with others. I would probably feel less of a need to focus on this if there weren't so few women in computer science and engineering.