Not everyone needs to know how to code. Not everyone has the talent for it. Adding more and more subpar coders is only going to make stuff worse, not better.
Let's rewrite this a bit:
Not everyone needs to know how to write. Not everyone has the talent for it. Adding more and more subpar writers is only going to make stuff worse, not better.
In a sense yes, you are right. Just combing through/. it's becoming obvious that some people are just horrible at writing and this community has suffered from it.
I'm sure this view is based on rigorous scientific studies and you have submitted a meta-analysis paper in Nature. Perhaps you would share with us the scientific articles that have studied the programming abilities of wide range of populations?
If there is no scientific backing of what you said, what you said is hardly credible. You use weasel words all over the place: “unfit to code”, “peculiar genetic mind set”, “really smart people”, “crap at coding”, “code productively”. History is littered with dubious attempts to claim that certain groups of people “just can't do a particular thing”, like “Women are not capable of logical reasoning” or “Negroes are mentally handicapped”. To me, your reasoning looks somewhat like this:
I have been in USA and Canada, and from my experience, Canadians are just better at speaking French. Sure, some Canadians are just hopless at French, but I have hardly met any American who could make a coherent statement in French. Therefore there is no point in teaching French to Americans, since they are just not good at it.
Sure, it makes sense to discuss if programming languages are useful to learn, like any other foreign language, but you should not outright dismiss most of people, especially without evidence.
Perhaps in criminal case. In advertisement you can demonstrate that potential consumer is understanding the message incorrectly. If this is demonstrated, the first sanction is a warning and if the company withdraws its advert claims, no further sanctions are pushed. Usually companies comply, since such tends to get publicized and might hurt the brand.
They're illegal in both places, but only if they catch you
Fair enough, I just assumed that in the context of this discussion law enforcement is follows presumption of innocence and other best practices of non-arbitrary law enforcement.
We didn't lie; we can't be blamed if you drew the wrong conclusions
I don't know about USA, but EU also covers deception in advertisement.
In EU, lying in advertisement is a no-no. In USA, lying is protected by 1. amendment or something. And before you point out that this is a gross oversimplification, Matthew 7:3:
And why worry about a speck in your friend's eye when you have a log in your own?
tendency to political censorship has already pissed off everyone who doesn't subscribe to the progressive world view
Am I missing something? Last time I checked Trump, David Duke and Infowars are still there. I remember one BBC Business daily episode which discussed Twitter growth issues (in the latest quarter number of new users was basically nil IIRC). One possible explanation mentioned was lousy community standards enforcement, or as you people call it, censorship. Somehow I gravitate to believing posh experts on radio than some random slashdot user.
Now it's "We've got our design, if you don't like it..."
I see your concern, but the systemV vs systemd debate in Debian showed that keeping both systems as options was not practical, since the maintainers will have to maintain both systems, which is expensive. It is unreasonable to demand people to maintain options just because you in particular want to. What you need is a momentum of consensus (at least in community projects). It's just that right now I don't see any of the switched distros moving back to SystemV or OpenRC any time soon. What are the long term sans-systemd systems? Devuan looks rather shady, but the FreeBSD system looks pretty nice.
early last month Slashdot reported that the GNOME project was having trouble finding maintainers for its text editor, gedit
In the gedit home page I found this gem:
About gedit maintenance: gedit has been marked as unmaintained recently, now two new developers have proposed their help to become new maintainers. If you want to help, reach us on the IRC channel or the mailing list, thanks!
Perhaps you should get the latest on the breaking news.
You forget that Linux is about choice. It seems you would like to restrict the distributions to choose their preferred init system. I have changed distros because I didn't believe in their technical and political decisions and that is fine.
As for the choice of the poem — trying to compare changing init systems to literal slaughter of millions of people really puts this systemd issue in perspective. Alas, this is trivializing horrors of the Nazi regime.
Gnome 3 and systemd are 7 years old. The vision of both projects haven't changed much and both projects have been slowly and boringly going in those directions. What was the last outrage about in the last GNOME release? Emojis or was it tan suite?
If you just don't those projects, I've heard good things about FreeBSD.
nicotine occurs naturally in tomatoes and peppers and other members of the Solanaceae flowering plant family
Public service announcement: don't eat random plants from Solanaceae family, some of them are deadly. As for the tomatoes, potatoes and such, do not eat the green bits.
isn't the main purpose of vapes to provide a less-unhealthy way to deliver nicotine to addicts
I don't know what vape inventors / manufacturers had in mind when developing this product. But advertisement is not “drop smoking addiction with vaping”, it targets non-smokers as well. I personally don't smoke and have considered vaping. I would prefer to know how it would impact my health outcomes. In this context the study is useful.
I am not advocating for prescription only. I am saying that Tatarize (OP) made unreasonable demand that e-cigarettes should be only compared with ordinary cigarettes. The only scenario where such demand would make sense is where e-cigs are prescription only. Or at very least if the only costumers of e-cigs would be those who want to quit smoking. Since this is very unlikely, comparing them to not smoking anything at all is useful information. If the argument is “Someone at Daily Mail will twist this”, then what can we research safely?
Some people advocate drinking your own urine too, what's your point?
If a researcher would compare drinking urine to drinking water, and someone would criticise this study, because it didn't compare it to drinking battery acid, I would mod it “Funny”
should be compared with cigarettes not with nicotine-less ecigs
You might have a point if e-cigs were prescription only medical device used to treat smoking addiction. It has been hyped as being as benign as coffee.
To most slashdotters of my generation (I must be old), the desktop as it was in Gnome or Windows 20 years ago was indeed completely usable
Indeed. I was converted to Linux in 2007 and I felt it was great. The first doubt I had was when I installed it on computers of friends and saw them trying to use it. When I installed it in classroom setting at work, I saw it get broken on sooo many ways it hurt. The GNOME 3.0 was not ready, but it addressed every single problem I had with GNOME 2.x and this is why I loved it then and love it now. Sure, it may be dumbed down and missing that one cool feature, but if it means my friends and clients are not left with completely shattered desktop by turning on the wrong setting, that is a sacrifice I'm willing to take.
I just don't think [animations] are that important to me personally as a user.
The animation where app icons flow out of the grid icon might be superfluous, but the rest are helpful even for veterans. Another anecdote — in the game XCOM scrolling with mouse wheel is not animated, which made it so disorientating I switched to using scroll bar exclusivity. I just hope GNOME has enough resources to test the usability of the proposed animations, since animations have a fixed costs (user and GPU time), but benefits might or might not be there.
I was responding to the specific claim, and I quote, “The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.”, the Y2K was about two decades ago. 18 years to be precise.
GNOME devs felt the same way, until the Sun Microsystems conducted the usability study of GNOME in 2000. It was not useable, it was a confusing mess. Who do you think the GNOME people are going to believe, some AC on slashdot or actual usability studies? If you in particular prefer different desktop environment, good for you, there are others out there.
Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things.
As for the rest of your rant. I hope you find another desktop that fits your needs. Why you want other people to fail, if they don't serve you for free, is beyond me.
“Lies” are too generic. Compare “Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, where fake news are made” and “Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, where lies are made”. The second one sounds like an advertisement for tourist attraction. “Fake news” are a specific kind of lies.
"Fake news" is not always untrue, sometimes it's just really biased
Nope. One sided, biased news is not fake news. Even deceit by omission is not fake news. This is why Fox News and Daily Mail is not Fake News. It is fake when it is just a fabrication. Those guys in Macedonia are not selectively covering real events, they are making shit up. Remember when Pope Francis endorsed Trump? This is what Fake News is. This is what the friendly article is about.
Dubious or not, the statement of fact is not harassment. You are blaming the victim.
As I pointed out to AC in parallel thread, I don't care about legalities of the situation since there was no official sanction by the manager (at least that is how I read your comment). This is why I don't see you as a victim.
Slashdot Mirror
Not everyone needs to know how to code. Not everyone has the talent for it. Adding more and more subpar coders is only going to make stuff worse, not better.
Let's rewrite this a bit:
In a sense yes, you are right. Just combing through /. it's becoming obvious that some people are just horrible at writing and this community has suffered from it.
the majority of people are totally unfit to code.
I'm sure this view is based on rigorous scientific studies and you have submitted a meta-analysis paper in Nature. Perhaps you would share with us the scientific articles that have studied the programming abilities of wide range of populations?
If there is no scientific backing of what you said, what you said is hardly credible. You use weasel words all over the place: “unfit to code”, “peculiar genetic mind set”, “really smart people”, “crap at coding”, “code productively”. History is littered with dubious attempts to claim that certain groups of people “just can't do a particular thing”, like “Women are not capable of logical reasoning” or “Negroes are mentally handicapped”. To me, your reasoning looks somewhat like this:
Sure, it makes sense to discuss if programming languages are useful to learn, like any other foreign language, but you should not outright dismiss most of people, especially without evidence.
deception requires intent
Perhaps in criminal case. In advertisement you can demonstrate that potential consumer is understanding the message incorrectly. If this is demonstrated, the first sanction is a warning and if the company withdraws its advert claims, no further sanctions are pushed. Usually companies comply, since such tends to get publicized and might hurt the brand.
They're illegal in both places, but only if they catch you
Fair enough, I just assumed that in the context of this discussion law enforcement is follows presumption of innocence and other best practices of non-arbitrary law enforcement.
We didn't lie; we can't be blamed if you drew the wrong conclusions
I don't know about USA, but EU also covers deception in advertisement.
Marketing is legalized lying.
In EU, lying in advertisement is a no-no. In USA, lying is protected by 1. amendment or something. And before you point out that this is a gross oversimplification, Matthew 7:3:
The first issue is somewhat addressed. As for the second one... why would you want to do that?
tendency to political censorship has already pissed off everyone who doesn't subscribe to the progressive world view
Am I missing something? Last time I checked Trump, David Duke and Infowars are still there. I remember one BBC Business daily episode which discussed Twitter growth issues (in the latest quarter number of new users was basically nil IIRC). One possible explanation mentioned was lousy community standards enforcement, or as you people call it, censorship. Somehow I gravitate to believing posh experts on radio than some random slashdot user.
Now it's "We've got our design, if you don't like it..."
I see your concern, but the systemV vs systemd debate in Debian showed that keeping both systems as options was not practical, since the maintainers will have to maintain both systems, which is expensive. It is unreasonable to demand people to maintain options just because you in particular want to. What you need is a momentum of consensus (at least in community projects). It's just that right now I don't see any of the switched distros moving back to SystemV or OpenRC any time soon. What are the long term sans-systemd systems? Devuan looks rather shady, but the FreeBSD system looks pretty nice.
early last month Slashdot reported that the GNOME project was having trouble finding maintainers for its text editor, gedit
In the gedit home page I found this gem:
Perhaps you should get the latest on the breaking news.
and there was no one left to speak for me.
You forget that Linux is about choice. It seems you would like to restrict the distributions to choose their preferred init system. I have changed distros because I didn't believe in their technical and political decisions and that is fine.
As for the choice of the poem — trying to compare changing init systems to literal slaughter of millions of people really puts this systemd issue in perspective. Alas, this is trivializing horrors of the Nazi regime.
Gnome 3 & systemd aren't boring
Gnome 3 and systemd are 7 years old. The vision of both projects haven't changed much and both projects have been slowly and boringly going in those directions. What was the last outrage about in the last GNOME release? Emojis or was it tan suite?
If you just don't those projects, I've heard good things about FreeBSD.
Comparing nicotine vapor to cigarettes is 100% relevant
Yes. It is indeed. And many studies have done that. Why cant we also compare it with not smoking anything at all?
nicotine occurs naturally in tomatoes and peppers and other members of the Solanaceae flowering plant family
Public service announcement: don't eat random plants from Solanaceae family, some of them are deadly. As for the tomatoes, potatoes and such, do not eat the green bits.
isn't the main purpose of vapes to provide a less-unhealthy way to deliver nicotine to addicts
I don't know what vape inventors / manufacturers had in mind when developing this product. But advertisement is not “drop smoking addiction with vaping”, it targets non-smokers as well. I personally don't smoke and have considered vaping. I would prefer to know how it would impact my health outcomes. In this context the study is useful.
What is your justification for prescription only?
I am not advocating for prescription only. I am saying that Tatarize (OP) made unreasonable demand that e-cigarettes should be only compared with ordinary cigarettes. The only scenario where such demand would make sense is where e-cigs are prescription only. Or at very least if the only costumers of e-cigs would be those who want to quit smoking. Since this is very unlikely, comparing them to not smoking anything at all is useful information. If the argument is “Someone at Daily Mail will twist this”, then what can we research safely?
Some people advocate drinking your own urine too, what's your point?
If a researcher would compare drinking urine to drinking water, and someone would criticise this study, because it didn't compare it to drinking battery acid, I would mod it “Funny”
should be compared with cigarettes not with nicotine-less ecigs
You might have a point if e-cigs were prescription only medical device used to treat smoking addiction. It has been hyped as being as benign as coffee.
That is sensationalism. I'm not a fan of it either, bat it is not Fake News.
To most slashdotters of my generation (I must be old), the desktop as it was in Gnome or Windows 20 years ago was indeed completely usable
Indeed. I was converted to Linux in 2007 and I felt it was great. The first doubt I had was when I installed it on computers of friends and saw them trying to use it. When I installed it in classroom setting at work, I saw it get broken on sooo many ways it hurt. The GNOME 3.0 was not ready, but it addressed every single problem I had with GNOME 2.x and this is why I loved it then and love it now. Sure, it may be dumbed down and missing that one cool feature, but if it means my friends and clients are not left with completely shattered desktop by turning on the wrong setting, that is a sacrifice I'm willing to take.
I just don't think [animations] are that important to me personally as a user.
The animation where app icons flow out of the grid icon might be superfluous, but the rest are helpful even for veterans. Another anecdote — in the game XCOM scrolling with mouse wheel is not animated, which made it so disorientating I switched to using scroll bar exclusivity. I just hope GNOME has enough resources to test the usability of the proposed animations, since animations have a fixed costs (user and GPU time), but benefits might or might not be there.
You're using a study done before Y2K
I was responding to the specific claim, and I quote, “The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.”, the Y2K was about two decades ago. 18 years to be precise.
Did you attend the last GUADEC?
The desktop was perfectly usable two decades ago.
GNOME devs felt the same way, until the Sun Microsystems conducted the usability study of GNOME in 2000. It was not useable, it was a confusing mess. Who do you think the GNOME people are going to believe, some AC on slashdot or actual usability studies? If you in particular prefer different desktop environment, good for you, there are others out there.
Only 5 year olds are impressed by whirring, popping up, animated things.
A rather informative presentation on this subject was given in GUADEC by Jakub Steiner, about how animations improve usability.
As for the rest of your rant. I hope you find another desktop that fits your needs. Why you want other people to fail, if they don't serve you for free, is beyond me.
Just call it 'lies'.
“Lies” are too generic. Compare “Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, where fake news are made” and “Veles, riverside town in Macedonia, where lies are made”. The second one sounds like an advertisement for tourist attraction. “Fake news” are a specific kind of lies.
"Fake news" is not always untrue, sometimes it's just really biased
Nope. One sided, biased news is not fake news. Even deceit by omission is not fake news. This is why Fox News and Daily Mail is not Fake News. It is fake when it is just a fabrication. Those guys in Macedonia are not selectively covering real events, they are making shit up. Remember when Pope Francis endorsed Trump? This is what Fake News is. This is what the friendly article is about.
Is it sad that I knew which comic this was before even mousing over the link?
Nah. Which other comic could it possibly be?
Obligatory XKCD
Dubious or not, the statement of fact is not harassment. You are blaming the victim.
As I pointed out to AC in parallel thread, I don't care about legalities of the situation since there was no official sanction by the manager (at least that is how I read your comment). This is why I don't see you as a victim.