Well, for example when I connected my iPod to a USB port to recharge it, fucking iTunes saved my on the go playlist (without my asking for it), meaning if I add any more songs on the go, they go into a different list, so I can't get a continuously growing on the go list without figuring out how to merge playlists in iTunes (is that even possible?). And if I access my iPod from Amarok under Linux and then connect it to iTunes, it wipes playlists. And I can't copy the songs from my ipod to a machine other than the one they were synced from. And, and , and...
With my last ipod, I ended up playing a game seeing how to throw it against the pavement so it bounces as high as possible. I now own a SanDisk Sansa View, and while it has its share of problems, it doesn't stop me from accessing it however I want, and only does things when I tell it to. No more ipods for me.
I almost bought one of those until I realized they can't deal with more than 9999 songs for the HD-based players and something like 3000 songs for the flash-based ones. That's right, a hard limit on number of songs, regardless of actual storage space.
Cowons have great reviews otherwise, but I want _all_ of my music on my player, and the above is a killer.
Actually, a heater can be more than 100% efficient. If you use the energy to run a heat pump, you'll get more heat into your house than if you just use the energy to run a PC or an electric heater.
Re:Please Read _Speaker_!
on
Ender in Exile
·
· Score: 1
How come everybody seems to like Speaker so much? I loved Ender's game but to me, Speaker just blows. The only really interesting part are the pequeninos, but he spends most of the book on the emotions of thoroughly emotionally messed-up people like Novinha and her children - Novinha behaves like a total idiot throughout the book and I'm supposed to empathize, why? In Ender's Game, Ender was learning and making mistakes, here he just comes in and magically finds the right approach to everybody, where's the fun in that? The whole book felt totally contorted in order to make some artificial point Card wanted to make about relationships - thanks but no thanks.
Erm, encouraging people to use Excel for analyzing scientific data should be a hanging offence. It more or less gets it done, so that once they know some excel they'll be reluctant to try other things, but it scales very badly, and anything that is more than a 3-liner becomes hideously painful to modify, test, etc
Anybody who wants to work with scientific data should take a real data-crunching package like R or Matlab, and avoid Excel like the plague.
how do you know what is right and wrong without morals?
'Right' and 'wrong' are not globally well-defined terms, they're purely personal, and different for different people. Abortion is one of the many cases where the deeply felt 'right' and 'wrong' of one person is exactly the opposite of another.
And unless I actually go out and physically harm other people, I'd like folks like you to keep their morals to themselves - I got enough of my own, thank you.
Well to begin with we could simply use the current process for deleting an article to instead take its notability rating down a notch or several.
Someone else in this discussion pointed out that the controversy could well be addressed by using a better source control system. I don't see anything wrong for example with having several versions of an article, an officially approved one and alternates, with separate ratings. For example, in the discussion of the article on Bollinger bands there is a comment from Bollinger himself about how he could have written the article - and I liked his plan, except apparently it was squashed by the wikipedia groupthink and the actual article is much poorer. Allowing him to write an alternate that is linked to from the main article would add substantial value IMO
Basically I'm saying that as soon as you leave subjects like math (and sometimes even there) the current Wikipedia approach that there is one objective viewpoint and one, knowable, best way of deciding which presentation is better and what subject is more important is just no longer tenable. There is certainly value added by rating contributions as trash, and by having the 'official' cleaned-up version, but there is no longer any justification for deleting alternate perspectives, or banning them to somewhere else on the web.
Well, why should I have to convince anybody that the article is notable? My point is precisely that the editors' opinion of notability (as opposed to whether the article is true and referenced) is exactly as irrelevant to whether the article should be visible to the rest of the world as some Mullah's opinion as to whether the same article is disgusting filth.
Both are inherently subjective opinions masquerading as objective and meaning well, and honestly they do look the same to me.
By the way, if you agreed to argue on their terms, you might well succeed in changing a fundamentalist's opinion - they are not insane, just have wilidly different frames of reference. And to me at least, the discussion of whether a fact is 'notable' is just as meaningless as to whether an action is 'sinful' - they are both concepts that lack meaning outside of their proponents' frames of reference.
And there's plenty of emotion in both cases;)
Keep the first two as they incude refernces. Tag them as non-notable if your tastes run that way. If I want to verify reliability I can follow the links.
No, it's the same logic - I don't approve of this content for reasons I deem valid, therefore I will deny the access to this material to everybody else.
Yes, and someone's pet cat is notable to them, and possibly a few other people as well. Following your logic, it's notable enough to warrant inclusion because it's notable to a few people.
Yes, exactly. It is.
Would you endorse the inclusion of an article on my last set of toenail clippings, assuming it were verifiable? If not, why not?
Yes, I would. I would also endorse a 'notability' rating, so that folks like you would be happier and folks like me could ignore it and make up their own minds.
What about Powerpoint? For certain contexts, it's a vital communication tool - and the OpenOffice equivalent is just not good enough, not by a long way. If that's not something _you_ need, fine, but a lot of people do.
If my wife complained that I'm on the computer all the time, I would be at least as likely to see it as a problem with the wife rather than the computer. Fortunately, she's much more of a LOTRO addict that I am;)
It's exactly the 'demonstrable lasting significance' criterion that I have an issue with. I think any _statement of fact_ that is a)true and b)someone thinks is worth mentioning should have a right to be there. That doesn't mean it should have equal status to Napoleon - if you think it's trivial, let's tag it as such and allow people to filter those out if they want to; if it's false, or not a statement of fact at all (such as Viagra spam or random text) by all means let's delete it.
What I disagree with is the idea that value can be added by actually _deleting_ things based on such an inherently subjective criterion as 'notability' or 'lasting significance'. Exactly what is achieved by deleting true but 'insignificant' articles, as opposed to tagging them and giving an option to filter them out?
The fundamental philosophical issue there is that all prevented attacks are, by definition, not observable. You can only observe attacks that very nearly succeeded, and when it comes to those specifically involving liquid explosives, to the best of my knowledge the count is zero.
> There's bazillion of garage bands that can make the same claim >... > Besides, one album isn't enough - unless it got on charts somewhere! Is there a second album? Did they go on national tour? You know, knowing about things like this would make it much easier to know why anyone would care about the band.
That's your problem right there. Why should the article author have to convince you that 'someone would care about the band'? At least one person cares obviously. If the information is accurate, it has a right to be there because someone else might want to know, and it's none of the editors' business to decide if it's 'important enough'.
Damn, I'm so disgusted with this 'notability' crap.
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With my last ipod, I ended up playing a game seeing how to throw it against the pavement so it bounces as high as possible. I now own a SanDisk Sansa View, and while it has its share of problems, it doesn't stop me from accessing it however I want, and only does things when I tell it to. No more ipods for me.
I almost bought one of those until I realized they can't deal with more than 9999 songs for the HD-based players and something like 3000 songs for the flash-based ones. That's right, a hard limit on number of songs, regardless of actual storage space. Cowons have great reviews otherwise, but I want _all_ of my music on my player, and the above is a killer.
Actually, a heater can be more than 100% efficient. If you use the energy to run a heat pump, you'll get more heat into your house than if you just use the energy to run a PC or an electric heater.
How come everybody seems to like Speaker so much? I loved Ender's game but to me, Speaker just blows. The only really interesting part are the pequeninos, but he spends most of the book on the emotions of thoroughly emotionally messed-up people like Novinha and her children - Novinha behaves like a total idiot throughout the book and I'm supposed to empathize, why? In Ender's Game, Ender was learning and making mistakes, here he just comes in and magically finds the right approach to everybody, where's the fun in that? The whole book felt totally contorted in order to make some artificial point Card wanted to make about relationships - thanks but no thanks.
Anybody who wants to work with scientific data should take a real data-crunching package like R or Matlab, and avoid Excel like the plague.
how do you know what is right and wrong without morals?
'Right' and 'wrong' are not globally well-defined terms, they're purely personal, and different for different people. Abortion is one of the many cases where the deeply felt 'right' and 'wrong' of one person is exactly the opposite of another. And unless I actually go out and physically harm other people, I'd like folks like you to keep their morals to themselves - I got enough of my own, thank you.
Someone else in this discussion pointed out that the controversy could well be addressed by using a better source control system. I don't see anything wrong for example with having several versions of an article, an officially approved one and alternates, with separate ratings. For example, in the discussion of the article on Bollinger bands there is a comment from Bollinger himself about how he could have written the article - and I liked his plan, except apparently it was squashed by the wikipedia groupthink and the actual article is much poorer. Allowing him to write an alternate that is linked to from the main article would add substantial value IMO
Basically I'm saying that as soon as you leave subjects like math (and sometimes even there) the current Wikipedia approach that there is one objective viewpoint and one, knowable, best way of deciding which presentation is better and what subject is more important is just no longer tenable. There is certainly value added by rating contributions as trash, and by having the 'official' cleaned-up version, but there is no longer any justification for deleting alternate perspectives, or banning them to somewhere else on the web.
Both are inherently subjective opinions masquerading as objective and meaning well, and honestly they do look the same to me.
By the way, if you agreed to argue on their terms, you might well succeed in changing a fundamentalist's opinion - they are not insane, just have wilidly different frames of reference. And to me at least, the discussion of whether a fact is 'notable' is just as meaningless as to whether an action is 'sinful' - they are both concepts that lack meaning outside of their proponents' frames of reference. And there's plenty of emotion in both cases;)
'Notable' can not be well-defined as a global concept, only as a personal one, and therefore is maybe suitable to use in tagging, but never deletion.
Keep the first two as they incude refernces. Tag them as non-notable if your tastes run that way. If I want to verify reliability I can follow the links.
No, it's the same logic - I don't approve of this content for reasons I deem valid, therefore I will deny the access to this material to everybody else.
While this is of course feasible, it leaves a lot of openings for abuse by administrators
Not as such: it would let the admins get on with their 'notability' power trip and sane people could just ignore it.
Yes, and someone's pet cat is notable to them, and possibly a few other people as well. Following your logic, it's notable enough to warrant inclusion because it's notable to a few people.
Yes, exactly. It is.
Would you endorse the inclusion of an article on my last set of toenail clippings, assuming it were verifiable? If not, why not?
Yes, I would. I would also endorse a 'notability' rating, so that folks like you would be happier and folks like me could ignore it and make up their own minds.
Sorry man, but this 'fun fact' is really common knowledge...
What about Powerpoint? For certain contexts, it's a vital communication tool - and the OpenOffice equivalent is just not good enough, not by a long way. If that's not something _you_ need, fine, but a lot of people do.
If my wife complained that I'm on the computer all the time, I would be at least as likely to see it as a problem with the wife rather than the computer. Fortunately, she's much more of a LOTRO addict that I am ;)
It's exactly the 'demonstrable lasting significance' criterion that I have an issue with. I think any _statement of fact_ that is a)true and b)someone thinks is worth mentioning should have a right to be there. That doesn't mean it should have equal status to Napoleon - if you think it's trivial, let's tag it as such and allow people to filter those out if they want to; if it's false, or not a statement of fact at all (such as Viagra spam or random text) by all means let's delete it. What I disagree with is the idea that value can be added by actually _deleting_ things based on such an inherently subjective criterion as 'notability' or 'lasting significance'. Exactly what is achieved by deleting true but 'insignificant' articles, as opposed to tagging them and giving an option to filter them out?
The fundamental philosophical issue there is that all prevented attacks are, by definition, not observable. You can only observe attacks that very nearly succeeded, and when it comes to those specifically involving liquid explosives, to the best of my knowledge the count is zero.
> There's bazillion of garage bands that can make the same claim ...
>
> Besides, one album isn't enough - unless it got on charts somewhere! Is there a second album? Did they go on national tour? You know, knowing about things like this would make it much easier to know why anyone would care about the band.
That's your problem right there. Why should the article author have to convince you that 'someone would care about the band'? At least one person cares obviously. If the information is accurate, it has a right to be there because someone else might want to know, and it's none of the editors' business to decide if it's 'important enough'.
Damn, I'm so disgusted with this 'notability' crap.