Adrenaline is mostly used for severe asthma attacks and severe allergic reactions. For some reason adrenaline stops both cold, at least for a little while.
I was a psych major until last year, and posts like this are why I switched to CS. The Horoscope study doesn't prove that a person is full of shit EVERY time they say "wow, that descibes me perfectly." It just means there's a tiny innate bias.
The tests that the poster took were not a "survey" off of the Internet. They were probably things like the WAIS (the IQ test for adults) or the MMPI (personality test). These tests were written by psychology PhDs and their results have been corroborated by about a bazillion different studies.
I'd prefer that you didn't strut your stuff just because you got through psych 1. By the time you take psych 405 you'll realize that an educated person doesn't look at an incorrect MMPI result and think it's right on the money.
Notice the complete and accurate information, and the colloquial description of features followed by their branded name ("There are currently two different models of snap-on cameras ("CommuniCam") for these phones.). Not to mention the "informational" links and the subtle sense that the user is waiting impatiently for this service to come to his country. Hell, he even praises how owners of a current model can get a free upgrade!
And I really don't care about the single con. Why? Because the hard drive is almost never the bottleneck affecting you.
This is actually a very misinformed statement, as hard drives are the bottleneck on most computers. Hard drive access time is measured in milliseconds, whereas memory access time is measured in nanoseconds. Do you know what that means when you're using virtual memory? Luckily every memory fault doesn't have to access the disk because of TLBs, but it's still significant.
In my experience, most people go to the computer labs to check email, browse the web, or code. It's much more comfortable writing a paper in your room or at a library.
That said, you could do what they do at my school (where no labs are CS only) -- install Linux on 3/4 or 1/2 of the computers at the front of the lab and make the rest Windows machines. For those who want to check their email or browse the web, there's about a one-minute learning curve. For those who want to write papers, they can go to the quieter back.
First thing I thought when I saw the story was "ooh, I'll click on the event monitoring page." Then, as the page took a while to load up, I suddenly realized that idiots like me were slashdotting a very important resource.
I think the policy's rather draconian, but I can see where they're coming from. The intro CS classes here nail you against the wall, the reasoning being that it's better to weed people out who won't be able to handle it in the beginning rather then let them into the concentration and see them fall apart sophomore or junior year.
The reasoning here is probably the same -- they don't want students collaborating to make sure they can handle the higher level courses on their own.
Being pulled-on by gravity doesn't mean anything. Gravity (according to Einstein) is the warping of space-time, so things that are massless still experience it. According to Newton's equations, that wasn't the case.
IANAP (I am not a psychologist), but I have two points based on what I've learned in psych classes in college:
First, I don't see mention of this guy being manic depressive. Depression is diagnosed in people who have Major Depressive Episodes, while Manic Depression is diagnosed in people who have MDEs in addition to Manic Episodes. The combination of depressive and manic episodes is usually worse than just depressive episodes.
Second, 'schizoid' is a vague term. It suggests schizophrenia, which is absolutely debilitating. A person with schizophrenia doesn't just get addicted to Everquest, he has hallucinations that make him think he IS in Everquest.
What he did have was Schizoid Personality Disorder (or rather, that's what he was diagnosed with; personality disorders are notorious for their poor accuracy in diagnosis). It's important to note how serious this disorder is, since most people have never heard of it. Diagnosis requires four of the following:
Wishes not to have or to enjoy close relationships, family included.
Almost always chooses solitary activities.
Has little, if any, interest in having sexual experiences with another person.
Takes pleasure in few, if any, activities.
Has few if any close friends, other than first-degree relatives.
Is indifferent to criticism or praise.
Displays flattened affect, emotional coldness, or detachment.
AFAIK, personality disorders are thought to be born-in. After reading this, it should be pretty obvious that Everquest was certainly NOT the CAUSE of death here. He had plenty of other problems to worry about. The mother might argue that Everquest made his problems WORSE, but I don't know why Everquest would be any more likely to cause a person to commit suicide than, say, reading or chatting on the internet. You can 'addict' yourself to just about anything, from watching TV to playing golf to reading. Almost any commercial activity that you could get addicted to tries to draw people back for more -- I don't see why, for example, American Airlines should have a sticker next to its frequent flyer program warning about possible addiction simply because the program tempts people to keep flying with American.
Free speech cases are the biggest candidates for pro bono work. That Bnetd is getting attention on Lawmeme is only a good thing -- it means that the legal community is interested.
Who knows, maybe these guys can get some pro bono, or cheap legal help. You never know...
Once you get to the flash panel after typing reload into the keyboard, click on the panel pull-out that's on the far right. Click on the small button to the right of "HTML version" twice. You get a panel asking for binary input. Here are the codes:
11011011: a Quicktime VR of something in some ship
10110110: an interview with the stunt coordinator
00011000: an interview with a concept illustrator
And yes, I did try all 256 codes:-P The interviews are pretty short and the VR totally unrevealing, so this secret was kind of lame.
I agree, and I am not impressed with the high rate of signing of this petition.
FOX cancelled Futurama knowing that it was getting 7 million viewers just a few months ago (according to Nielson, google cache here). If 1 million dedicated viewers sign this petition, I don't see why FOX should care. Just because 1 million of those 7 million viewers are dedicated enough to sign a petition about the show doesn't mean anything -- dedicated viewers don't make FOX any more money than mildly interested viewers.
I just bought a Sony Cyber Shot DSC P50 for $300 (for my girlfriend, actually) and found it well worth the investment. It goes up to 1280 with 1.3 Megapixels and a 3x optical zoom (up to 6x with digital zooming, but that doesn't count).
It takes high-quality JPEGs, which have excellent quality so far as I've seen and you can fit 20 of them on an 8MB memory stick. If you want to be really anal about picture quality and take all of your pictures in TIFF form, they're 3.6 MB a pop, so you should buy a 128MB memory stick (about $130 I think).
With spiffy battery, memory stick, and all, the thing comes out to about $425.
Now, if only I had a Mac so that I could plug this thing into iPhoto...that would be mad cool (this kind of thinking is just what Jobs wanted, I think).
As much as I've been anti-Apple since I was small, I have to say that Apple's new direction is definitely impressing me. I didn't think the iMac was as revolutionary as Jobs thought it was, but it was a good idea and it raised Apple's stock an incredible amount -- which is why after watching the expo streaming in Quicktime I went to my online brokerage and bought stock in the company (not too much in case I'm being taken for the Hyped-Out-Fool).
I also think this "digital hub" idea of Jobs's is very compelling, especially to the average home user. Compare the idea of a BSoD while trying to plug in your digital camera ("Creating a driver database...please wa...*gurgle*) to plugging in your digital camera and having your photos automatically uploaded to your computer and organized in a sensical fashion. And then paying $30 for a book of hard-copy pictures. There's really no comparison.
If these things sell as much as I think they will, I think we might see quite a bit of Apple resurgence...
Wouldn't that open things up to abuse? One person could spend 5/.25 = 20 mod points on an old story. It takes 5 points to bring a 5 post to a 0, so you could destroy 4 5-point posts in one story, with one set of mod points. That's way too much power for random kiddies.
This problem seems kind of ingrained. The only solution I can think of is to implement some sort of flagging of stories/comments with moderation since the last time you viewed. That would make spending mod points on a slightly older story more meaningful since more people would notice it.
From an implementation point of view, a problem in polynomial time and a problem in linear time are pretty much the same compared to a problem in exponential time.
Whoever made the discovery would have to notify Verisign, RSA, the government, and major corporations in secret at least a few weeks before the discovery became public knowledge. If they didn't, the economic hit from loss of privacy would be overwhelmingly staggering. So if we ever see lots of major corporations taking their encrypted systems off of the Internet, then we have an idea of what happened.
The problem is that if somebody solves one NP-complete problem, they've all been solved, since they're all reduceable to each other in P time, so no cryptographic system would be safe.
And, of course, the mathemetician would probably be sued by the RIAA for violating the DMCA.
I think it's kind of funny how this post got modded to a 5 seeing as the second half is pure belligerence.
My first point in response to this is to say that I have no idea where you went to school. I'm a CS student right now, and I know a lot of CS students around the country. Never once have I ever heard of ANYTHING taught except for "Elegance, elegance, elegance." I have yet to have a professor say to me "as long as it works it's fine." More like "hey, I'll give you extra credit if you can use a different algorithm that reduces computation time to n^3 instead of n^6."
My second point is this: you say bullshit rhetoric in college classes led to the BSOD. On the wall in Maxwell Dworkin (our CS building) is pinned a program that Bill Gates wrote when he went to school here. I can assure you that the reason _he_ wrote BSODs was because he went to school in a day when there WAS NO elegant programming language. Now we have the benefit of object orientation and a large body of theory. The kind of programming they taught Bill Gates must be completely different than the computer science they teach us now. The reason the person you're responding to is saying that hardware nullifies the need for elegant programming is because they're probably an MSFT drone. Anybody who takes a modern computational theory class at any major university would never say something like that unless they slept through the class.
The second point I have to make regards your belligerent comments about how "elite people" use Linux. Look, I don't doubt that Linux is a more powerful operating system. Your logic is completely flawed, however. Beta was "better" than VHS, but VHS won out because it won the mass market. Unfortunately for you, MASS MARKET has more sway than the elites ever will. That's the sad fact.
You say that "laws should spring forth from society and not be sent down from above."
That's a vague word, however, "society." You seem to be speaking of the society of the corporation itself. That society is definitely not codified in law. The society that is codified in law is the society of shareholders. Namely, it's not against the law to do something for the worse of the members of your corporation, but it _is_ against the law to do something for the worse of the stockholders.
I agree that this is a problem. Passive shareholders should not have more control over a company than the people who make up the backbone of the company. The two remedies I can see for this are 1) change the law so that stockholders aren't the end all be all, and 2) keep more stock inside the company so that the needs of the shareholders ARE the needs of the members of the corporation.
A great contrast to the American stockholder-centered corporation is the Japanese corporation. If you're interested check out Stock Market Capitalism by Ronald Dore. It shows a very interesting contrast between the American mega-merger mindset that's fostered by our stock market and the Japanese loyalty mindset fostered by their corporate structure.
Btw, IANAL, so please point out any errors I've made.
Re:Beauty for beauty's sake makes crappy software
on
Software Aesthetics
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Can I amend that to:
1. Meet user requirements quickly
When you build a bridge you have plenty of time to design and implement it. And that bridge will last decades, if not centuries.
Software, however, isn't meant to last. It's meant to take advantage of cutting edge technology RIGHT NOW. You don't write a program to last for 100 years. You write it to last a maximum of 5 (longer for sparse exceptions). That's why software is often so ugly.
Maybe after 30 years we'll have an OOPL that will eventually take the cake, and some sort of system where we don't change APIs every month. Then maybe people will be able to write code for the long term, knowing it won't be obsolete in short order.
Slashdot Mirror
Adrenaline is mostly used for severe asthma attacks and severe allergic reactions. For some reason adrenaline stops both cold, at least for a little while.
I was a psych major until last year, and posts like this are why I switched to CS. The Horoscope study doesn't prove that a person is full of shit EVERY time they say "wow, that descibes me perfectly." It just means there's a tiny innate bias.
The tests that the poster took were not a "survey" off of the Internet. They were probably things like the WAIS (the IQ test for adults) or the MMPI (personality test). These tests were written by psychology PhDs and their results have been corroborated by about a bazillion different studies.
I'd prefer that you didn't strut your stuff just because you got through psych 1. By the time you take psych 405 you'll realize that an educated person doesn't look at an incorrect MMPI result and think it's right on the money.
Notice the complete and accurate information, and the colloquial description of features followed by their branded name ("There are currently two different models of snap-on cameras ("CommuniCam") for these phones.). Not to mention the "informational" links and the subtle sense that the user is waiting impatiently for this service to come to his country. Hell, he even praises how owners of a current model can get a free upgrade!
In my experience, most people go to the computer labs to check email, browse the web, or code. It's much more comfortable writing a paper in your room or at a library.
That said, you could do what they do at my school (where no labs are CS only) -- install Linux on 3/4 or 1/2 of the computers at the front of the lab and make the rest Windows machines. For those who want to check their email or browse the web, there's about a one-minute learning curve. For those who want to write papers, they can go to the quieter back.
Maybe Chris Carter is an avid reader of Slashdot and thought he'd get Hemos out of a bind. No need to be prematurely hatin', man.
First thing I thought when I saw the story was "ooh, I'll click on the event monitoring page." Then, as the page took a while to load up, I suddenly realized that idiots like me were slashdotting a very important resource.
I think the policy's rather draconian, but I can see where they're coming from. The intro CS classes here nail you against the wall, the reasoning being that it's better to weed people out who won't be able to handle it in the beginning rather then let them into the concentration and see them fall apart sophomore or junior year.
The reasoning here is probably the same -- they don't want students collaborating to make sure they can handle the higher level courses on their own.
Being pulled-on by gravity doesn't mean anything. Gravity (according to Einstein) is the warping of space-time, so things that are massless still experience it. According to Newton's equations, that wasn't the case.
First, I don't see mention of this guy being manic depressive. Depression is diagnosed in people who have Major Depressive Episodes, while Manic Depression is diagnosed in people who have MDEs in addition to Manic Episodes. The combination of depressive and manic episodes is usually worse than just depressive episodes.
Second, 'schizoid' is a vague term. It suggests schizophrenia, which is absolutely debilitating. A person with schizophrenia doesn't just get addicted to Everquest, he has hallucinations that make him think he IS in Everquest.
What he did have was Schizoid Personality Disorder (or rather, that's what he was diagnosed with; personality disorders are notorious for their poor accuracy in diagnosis). It's important to note how serious this disorder is, since most people have never heard of it. Diagnosis requires four of the following:
AFAIK, personality disorders are thought to be born-in. After reading this, it should be pretty obvious that Everquest was certainly NOT the CAUSE of death here. He had plenty of other problems to worry about. The mother might argue that Everquest made his problems WORSE, but I don't know why Everquest would be any more likely to cause a person to commit suicide than, say, reading or chatting on the internet. You can 'addict' yourself to just about anything, from watching TV to playing golf to reading. Almost any commercial activity that you could get addicted to tries to draw people back for more -- I don't see why, for example, American Airlines should have a sticker next to its frequent flyer program warning about possible addiction simply because the program tempts people to keep flying with American.
Hey man, Be still has 9 days left before dissolving, and I'm still holding out hope.
Free speech cases are the biggest candidates for pro bono work. That Bnetd is getting attention on Lawmeme is only a good thing -- it means that the legal community is interested.
Who knows, maybe these guys can get some pro bono, or cheap legal help. You never know...
And yes, I did try all 256 codes
FOX cancelled Futurama knowing that it was getting 7 million viewers just a few months ago (according to Nielson, google cache here). If 1 million dedicated viewers sign this petition, I don't see why FOX should care. Just because 1 million of those 7 million viewers are dedicated enough to sign a petition about the show doesn't mean anything -- dedicated viewers don't make FOX any more money than mildly interested viewers.
I just bought a Sony Cyber Shot DSC P50 for $300 (for my girlfriend, actually) and found it well worth the investment. It goes up to 1280 with 1.3 Megapixels and a 3x optical zoom (up to 6x with digital zooming, but that doesn't count).
It takes high-quality JPEGs, which have excellent quality so far as I've seen and you can fit 20 of them on an 8MB memory stick. If you want to be really anal about picture quality and take all of your pictures in TIFF form, they're 3.6 MB a pop, so you should buy a 128MB memory stick (about $130 I think).
With spiffy battery, memory stick, and all, the thing comes out to about $425.
Now, if only I had a Mac so that I could plug this thing into iPhoto...that would be mad cool (this kind of thinking is just what Jobs wanted, I think).
As much as I've been anti-Apple since I was small, I have to say that Apple's new direction is definitely impressing me. I didn't think the iMac was as revolutionary as Jobs thought it was, but it was a good idea and it raised Apple's stock an incredible amount -- which is why after watching the expo streaming in Quicktime I went to my online brokerage and bought stock in the company (not too much in case I'm being taken for the Hyped-Out-Fool).
I also think this "digital hub" idea of Jobs's is very compelling, especially to the average home user. Compare the idea of a BSoD while trying to plug in your digital camera ("Creating a driver database...please wa...*gurgle*) to plugging in your digital camera and having your photos automatically uploaded to your computer and organized in a sensical fashion. And then paying $30 for a book of hard-copy pictures. There's really no comparison.
If these things sell as much as I think they will, I think we might see quite a bit of Apple resurgence...
You know, I've been seeing exceedingly annoying posts like his, but I didn't realize they were all from him. Sorry for the stupidity :-P
Heh, I love how CmdrTaco's one foe somehow has -1 for EVERY post listed on his user page (*ahem* bitchslap).
Maybe he's afraid to add his other foes since that would make obvious how much he uses his bitchslap power?
So just don't get on CmdrTaco's bad side! (I love you, Rob!)
Wouldn't that open things up to abuse? One person could spend 5/.25 = 20 mod points on an old story. It takes 5 points to bring a 5 post to a 0, so you could destroy 4 5-point posts in one story, with one set of mod points. That's way too much power for random kiddies.
This problem seems kind of ingrained. The only solution I can think of is to implement some sort of flagging of stories/comments with moderation since the last time you viewed. That would make spending mod points on a slightly older story more meaningful since more people would notice it.
From an implementation point of view, a problem in polynomial time and a problem in linear time are pretty much the same compared to a problem in exponential time.
Whoever made the discovery would have to notify Verisign, RSA, the government, and major corporations in secret at least a few weeks before the discovery became public knowledge. If they didn't, the economic hit from loss of privacy would be overwhelmingly staggering. So if we ever see lots of major corporations taking their encrypted systems off of the Internet, then we have an idea of what happened.
The problem is that if somebody solves one NP-complete problem, they've all been solved, since they're all reduceable to each other in P time, so no cryptographic system would be safe.
And, of course, the mathemetician would probably be sued by the RIAA for violating the DMCA.
I think it's kind of funny how this post got modded to a 5 seeing as the second half is pure belligerence.
My first point in response to this is to say that I have no idea where you went to school. I'm a CS student right now, and I know a lot of CS students around the country. Never once have I ever heard of ANYTHING taught except for "Elegance, elegance, elegance." I have yet to have a professor say to me "as long as it works it's fine." More like "hey, I'll give you extra credit if you can use a different algorithm that reduces computation time to n^3 instead of n^6."
My second point is this: you say bullshit rhetoric in college classes led to the BSOD. On the wall in Maxwell Dworkin (our CS building) is pinned a program that Bill Gates wrote when he went to school here. I can assure you that the reason _he_ wrote BSODs was because he went to school in a day when there WAS NO elegant programming language. Now we have the benefit of object orientation and a large body of theory. The kind of programming they taught Bill Gates must be completely different than the computer science they teach us now. The reason the person you're responding to is saying that hardware nullifies the need for elegant programming is because they're probably an MSFT drone. Anybody who takes a modern computational theory class at any major university would never say something like that unless they slept through the class.
The second point I have to make regards your belligerent comments about how "elite people" use Linux. Look, I don't doubt that Linux is a more powerful operating system. Your logic is completely flawed, however. Beta was "better" than VHS, but VHS won out because it won the mass market. Unfortunately for you, MASS MARKET has more sway than the elites ever will. That's the sad fact.
Criticalupdate is not for server admins. Hotfixes are for server admins.
If you're a server admin and you get your security updates from criticalupdate, your intranet is in big trouble.
You say that "laws should spring forth from society and not be sent down from above."
That's a vague word, however, "society." You seem to be speaking of the society of the corporation itself. That society is definitely not codified in law. The society that is codified in law is the society of shareholders. Namely, it's not against the law to do something for the worse of the members of your corporation, but it _is_ against the law to do something for the worse of the stockholders.
I agree that this is a problem. Passive shareholders should not have more control over a company than the people who make up the backbone of the company. The two remedies I can see for this are 1) change the law so that stockholders aren't the end all be all, and 2) keep more stock inside the company so that the needs of the shareholders ARE the needs of the members of the corporation.
A great contrast to the American stockholder-centered corporation is the Japanese corporation. If you're interested check out Stock Market Capitalism by Ronald Dore. It shows a very interesting contrast between the American mega-merger mindset that's fostered by our stock market and the Japanese loyalty mindset fostered by their corporate structure.
Btw, IANAL, so please point out any errors I've made.
1. Meet user requirements quickly
When you build a bridge you have plenty of time to design and implement it. And that bridge will last decades, if not centuries.
Software, however, isn't meant to last. It's meant to take advantage of cutting edge technology RIGHT NOW. You don't write a program to last for 100 years. You write it to last a maximum of 5 (longer for sparse exceptions). That's why software is often so ugly.
Maybe after 30 years we'll have an OOPL that will eventually take the cake, and some sort of system where we don't change APIs every month. Then maybe people will be able to write code for the long term, knowing it won't be obsolete in short order.