I have a feeling these comments would be completely different if Paul Allen was never associated with Microsoft. He has the right to go after people for violating his patents. Who cares if people are "patent trolling" ? The point of patents are to protect your inventions and ideas, otherwise he may as well just have burned all his money and companies like Microsoft and friends would just be stealing more and more than they already do from people and getting paid.
There has been a number of studies that conclude that being out in nature while learning is most beneficial and suggests that the anxiety of big city life is actually quite bad for nurturing mental growth. I don't have any links for you, I have a few of the philosophy and psychology papers at home, but I'm not there.
Essentially they say that we don't notice the anxiety of city life until we get out of it. Some of the papers encouraged you to try reading (if you're a student) your textbooks in a park away from distractions of the city. I tried it and found that it was much easier to focus. They encourage the readers to remove items with flashing/blinking lights or lights that are constantly on from their bedrooms because the light penetrates through our eyelids while we're sleeping and distracts our brains. Kinda like how you can tell if the light is on, even when you close your eyes.
Anyway, I saw your post and thought you might be interested in those types of studies. Sorry I can't provide you details on the titles or authors. There was a recent study in the news with a group who went into a cell-dead-zone to get away from technology to do a similar study. Maybe if you can find that article, you can find their names and see if they've done any other research on the topic, or email the researchers and ask for more information.
I like that you pointed that out about kids too. When I was little, I was allowed to watch tv, but I spent almost all of my time outside. All the way until I moved to LA for college. But I was shocked to see that people in their teens spend so much time inside, on the computer or watching tv these days. Even in my teens I was outside skateboarding or riding my bike around and going to the river with my friends. Now kids go outside but they look like zombies on their iphones and androids. I use an iphone, but mostly for reading twitter feeds while I poop or looking up bus routes.
For your sleep issues, you're getting older and have to remember that stuff like caffeine starts to affect you differently and that you still need exercise. At my office they encourage us to get up and walk every few hours for about 10 to 15 mins and to stretch every hour. A doctor also told me a few things that helped me with sleep trouble too (I'm a systems test engineer for flight software, so I also stare at computers all day). Wake up everyday at the same time, even if you're gonna be tired. Don't drink caffeine after 2pm ( I think this varies per person). He basically said "only use your bed for sleeping and sex, don't lay on it to watch tv or reading, or whatever." Get moderate exercise and examine my diet. I actually went as far as to get a calorie counter app on my iphone to help me watch what I eat and to keep track of my vitamin intake and so on, it has really helped me, I had no idea that even though I thought I was eating healthy, I wasn't getting my vitamins, etc. I don't rely on it, but it helped me see what was actually good and what I just perceived was good for me.
I feel its in our nature to become anti-social. Especially people in technical fields. And it can be hard to socialize to begin with. All of my peers have had the same experience, if you go to a party and people say, "hey, what do you do?" and you reply "I'm a system test engineer for flight software for spacecrafts" they get a blank look on their face and for some reason they have to go outside or to the kitchen and the conversation just ends. Because they're expecting you to say, "oh I work at some small company doing web design" or something stupid. Because this conversation is ultimately designed to get you to ask them in return what they do so they can go off about how they feel what they do is the best thing in the world. Though I may agree, it dies before it gets there because they have no idea what I'm talking about.
Anyway, I really just wanted to say, "yeah, I hear ya."
Yeah... It would be 15 years old today if it were still alive.
(Coincidentally, 15 years is roughly 95 in IT years.)
Hey I have a Win95 machine in a box under another box in a room in a house that I don't live in. The OS still works, the computer just sucks (mmm, 66Mhz). I told my dad to toss it, but he's one of those electronics guys who says, "you never know when you might need to steal a piece off of that." I said "Dad, I just bought you an iMac, you can throw it away."
That's not true. MS Office on Mac is a bi-product of MS bailing Apple out and putting Steve Jobs back in power after Apple almost went bankrupt. It was almost like a crutch for Apple, because people had to stop saying, "We don't use Apple because it can't run Office."
Linux is not a threat to Microsoft. Linux could only be considered a threat to Apple, if Apple were to be solely a software company. MS dominates the home computer market by a long shot. Its going to take many years for anyone to become a direct threat to Microsoft's livelihood.
I feel they make these announcements on purpose. They want to win back some lost support from people who have fled to the Free and Open Source worlds.
I feel most the time that MS goes after someone, they're just attempting to hurt them financially. Since MS can piss away a few million to financially destroy a competitor if they really felt like it.
I agree, war should be won in less than a year or it is a failure and weapons should be developed that don't kill non-combatant by-standers in a war-zone.
I like your use of "*sigh*" to start your arrogant "I don't care about anyone but myself" post. It didn't make you come across as either:
1) A bad troll
2) A little kid
If your need to exercise your freedom of expression overpowers your ethics, you probably have some serious social disorders. I can tell that you don't share my morals or ethics, because you put yourself ahead of people around you.
Thanks for your reply, this is exactly what I was anticipating in response.
I believe it was right around $1000, looked ridiculously like an iMAC and ran Win 7. I remember touching it at the store and being like "wow, now if this was only useful...."
During vietnam they made movies and tv shows about Korea, but not vietnam (as far as I'm aware). I think making a game about current conflict is stupid. Not only do we not really have the history to fully understand it, its a poor choice for those who are currently involved. Freedom of expression shouldn't overpower ethics they way some people think it should. If you wanna play this war game, go enlist in the Marine Corps. Otherwise, give them 20 years to deal with the trauma.
I did a little bioinformatics in the past, and we were using postgreSql to manage our results. It was nice because you can create meaningful fields to query in the future. It took some time developing the system, but it really helped out in the long run. We had to consider errors in the readings of the results and had to incorporate a little bit of fuzzy logic into the tools we used to run comparisons on the database.
If you are at a university or near a university, the computer science dept may give a few students credit to build you a system that can handle it, so you don't have to.
I don't think you're really disagreeing with me, I think you're presenting another scenario that I actually agree with you on. But I can only speak for myself.
I agree with you. Especially on the topic of the sense of full entitlement by people becoming disturbing. There's a crazy influx of narcissism and egotism in America. Everyone feels they deserve everything because they're so important.
I feel its a very sticky situation, because you're going to get a lot of people taking things like this very differently.
An extreme situation would be groups of troops revolting and ending up fighting other groups of our own troops. Unlikely, but in high stress situations, you can't tell.
I agree with you and I don't think anything I said actually disagrees with you. We just shouldn't be so willing to bring down their morale on purpose.
"So Johnny, you hate yourself for everything you've done over here right now. Well, sorry, but its time to go out again, so get your rifle. Ps, everything you're fighting for is a lie."
The troops know if any warcrimes are happening, they're living in it already. That doesn't warrant the release of documents that, as we're lead to believe, contain names of informants who can now be put at risk (as well as their families) or information that may otherwise get more of our troops killed by any means.
The fact is that wikileaks didn't do it for humanity, they did it for popularity. Warcrimes will be found out no matter what.
You demand immediate action, which is never going to happen. My standpoint is if we have to be there and for however long we have to be there the fewer people dying, for any reason, the better.
Lets pretend your conspiracy theory is correct and the war is a sham.
Lets also pretend that troops get ahold of these documents and lose morale.
Lets also assume that morale affects how well you focus while at war.
Troops will die from lack of morale, is that what you want? More people dying "for nothing."
Even if you don't like what's going on, you really need to think things through a little more thoroughly and think of what will happen as a consequence of your actions. Wikileaks didn't do that. They could easily have waited until the war was over and said "look at all these war-crimes." They want attention. They could have stayed anonymous in their fight against corruption, but they chose to give themselves a face and to get in front of a camera. The US government isn't going to just stop waging war because some guy posted a document.
Morale directly affects the safety of our troops and allies over there. So, its probably true that the military doesn't want them to lose morale, I don't either. I don't know any of the troops personally, but I don't want them to get hurt just as much as their families don't. I also don't want anyone who has helped us out over there to be harmed either. But that's just me talking.
Programming is not computer science. Computer science is pretty much applied mathematics. Some people call it "theoretical" computer science, but you can't call something science if you're not moving forward in the theory. Students who are taught that C++ programming is what CS is all about get to college and find out they're wrong and flunk out when they can't grasp complexity theory or even automata theory.
I've seen a number of students who have no idea what CS is all about come in thinking they're going to design video games by getting a degree in CS. By design I mean, "I think we should have this cool sword with magic powers in the game." The students just have no clue what CS really is. People who don't know what CS is think that we're masters of MS Office and expect us to know how to fix their OS when its full of malware, because that is what most people think we do. So before we blame curriculum for teaching basic computing skills instead of programming, we need to educate these kids on what CS really is and what a computer scientist will most likely do in the real world.
I was the ACM president at my university, and once during a meeting a kid rose his hand and asked, "What classes do they teach you how to hack in?" I laughed, but he was serious.
That's not true. When I was in high school in Oregon, my graduating class was the last class that was allowed to pass a class with a D, everyone after us now has to get Cs or better. No one sued and if they did, it never even made it to the news as far as I'm aware.
You have a false sense of security. Mac and Ubuntu are not nearly as secure as you think. You're just not a target. Once you become a target, you'll be dead in the water.
I believe you need itunes to upgrade your iphone and use the itunes store and update this and that. As far as I know, there's no native way to run itunes on linux. If there is, please let me know.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a feeling these comments would be completely different if Paul Allen was never associated with Microsoft. He has the right to go after people for violating his patents. Who cares if people are "patent trolling" ? The point of patents are to protect your inventions and ideas, otherwise he may as well just have burned all his money and companies like Microsoft and friends would just be stealing more and more than they already do from people and getting paid.
There has been a number of studies that conclude that being out in nature while learning is most beneficial and suggests that the anxiety of big city life is actually quite bad for nurturing mental growth. I don't have any links for you, I have a few of the philosophy and psychology papers at home, but I'm not there.
Essentially they say that we don't notice the anxiety of city life until we get out of it. Some of the papers encouraged you to try reading (if you're a student) your textbooks in a park away from distractions of the city. I tried it and found that it was much easier to focus. They encourage the readers to remove items with flashing/blinking lights or lights that are constantly on from their bedrooms because the light penetrates through our eyelids while we're sleeping and distracts our brains. Kinda like how you can tell if the light is on, even when you close your eyes.
Anyway, I saw your post and thought you might be interested in those types of studies. Sorry I can't provide you details on the titles or authors. There was a recent study in the news with a group who went into a cell-dead-zone to get away from technology to do a similar study. Maybe if you can find that article, you can find their names and see if they've done any other research on the topic, or email the researchers and ask for more information.
I like that you pointed that out about kids too. When I was little, I was allowed to watch tv, but I spent almost all of my time outside. All the way until I moved to LA for college. But I was shocked to see that people in their teens spend so much time inside, on the computer or watching tv these days. Even in my teens I was outside skateboarding or riding my bike around and going to the river with my friends. Now kids go outside but they look like zombies on their iphones and androids. I use an iphone, but mostly for reading twitter feeds while I poop or looking up bus routes.
For your sleep issues, you're getting older and have to remember that stuff like caffeine starts to affect you differently and that you still need exercise. At my office they encourage us to get up and walk every few hours for about 10 to 15 mins and to stretch every hour. A doctor also told me a few things that helped me with sleep trouble too (I'm a systems test engineer for flight software, so I also stare at computers all day). Wake up everyday at the same time, even if you're gonna be tired. Don't drink caffeine after 2pm ( I think this varies per person). He basically said "only use your bed for sleeping and sex, don't lay on it to watch tv or reading, or whatever." Get moderate exercise and examine my diet. I actually went as far as to get a calorie counter app on my iphone to help me watch what I eat and to keep track of my vitamin intake and so on, it has really helped me, I had no idea that even though I thought I was eating healthy, I wasn't getting my vitamins, etc. I don't rely on it, but it helped me see what was actually good and what I just perceived was good for me.
I feel its in our nature to become anti-social. Especially people in technical fields. And it can be hard to socialize to begin with. All of my peers have had the same experience, if you go to a party and people say, "hey, what do you do?" and you reply "I'm a system test engineer for flight software for spacecrafts" they get a blank look on their face and for some reason they have to go outside or to the kitchen and the conversation just ends. Because they're expecting you to say, "oh I work at some small company doing web design" or something stupid. Because this conversation is ultimately designed to get you to ask them in return what they do so they can go off about how they feel what they do is the best thing in the world. Though I may agree, it dies before it gets there because they have no idea what I'm talking about.
Anyway, I really just wanted to say, "yeah, I hear ya."
Yeah... It would be 15 years old today if it were still alive.
(Coincidentally, 15 years is roughly 95 in IT years.)
Hey I have a Win95 machine in a box under another box in a room in a house that I don't live in. The OS still works, the computer just sucks (mmm, 66Mhz). I told my dad to toss it, but he's one of those electronics guys who says, "you never know when you might need to steal a piece off of that." I said "Dad, I just bought you an iMac, you can throw it away."
That's not true. MS Office on Mac is a bi-product of MS bailing Apple out and putting Steve Jobs back in power after Apple almost went bankrupt. It was almost like a crutch for Apple, because people had to stop saying, "We don't use Apple because it can't run Office."
Linux is not a threat to Microsoft. Linux could only be considered a threat to Apple, if Apple were to be solely a software company. MS dominates the home computer market by a long shot. Its going to take many years for anyone to become a direct threat to Microsoft's livelihood.
I feel they make these announcements on purpose. They want to win back some lost support from people who have fled to the Free and Open Source worlds.
I feel most the time that MS goes after someone, they're just attempting to hurt them financially. Since MS can piss away a few million to financially destroy a competitor if they really felt like it.
Support the environment. Drink more whiskey!
This is going to be on a tshirt.
I agree, war should be won in less than a year or it is a failure and weapons should be developed that don't kill non-combatant by-standers in a war-zone.
By "go wrong" do you mean "get people killed"?
Sure, because Faux News is held so terribly accountable whenever they get someone killed.
Why would anyone ever have to be held accountable for getting people killed?
I like your use of "*sigh*" to start your arrogant "I don't care about anyone but myself" post. It didn't make you come across as either:
1) A bad troll
2) A little kid
If your need to exercise your freedom of expression overpowers your ethics, you probably have some serious social disorders. I can tell that you don't share my morals or ethics, because you put yourself ahead of people around you.
Thanks for your reply, this is exactly what I was anticipating in response.
I believe it was right around $1000, looked ridiculously like an iMAC and ran Win 7. I remember touching it at the store and being like "wow, now if this was only useful...."
During vietnam they made movies and tv shows about Korea, but not vietnam (as far as I'm aware). I think making a game about current conflict is stupid. Not only do we not really have the history to fully understand it, its a poor choice for those who are currently involved. Freedom of expression shouldn't overpower ethics they way some people think it should. If you wanna play this war game, go enlist in the Marine Corps. Otherwise, give them 20 years to deal with the trauma.
I did a little bioinformatics in the past, and we were using postgreSql to manage our results. It was nice because you can create meaningful fields to query in the future. It took some time developing the system, but it really helped out in the long run. We had to consider errors in the readings of the results and had to incorporate a little bit of fuzzy logic into the tools we used to run comparisons on the database.
If you are at a university or near a university, the computer science dept may give a few students credit to build you a system that can handle it, so you don't have to.
I don't think you're really disagreeing with me, I think you're presenting another scenario that I actually agree with you on. But I can only speak for myself.
I agree with you. Especially on the topic of the sense of full entitlement by people becoming disturbing. There's a crazy influx of narcissism and egotism in America. Everyone feels they deserve everything because they're so important.
Oh well, nice post.
I feel its a very sticky situation, because you're going to get a lot of people taking things like this very differently.
An extreme situation would be groups of troops revolting and ending up fighting other groups of our own troops. Unlikely, but in high stress situations, you can't tell.
I'm glad we agree for the most part.
I agree with you and I don't think anything I said actually disagrees with you. We just shouldn't be so willing to bring down their morale on purpose.
"So Johnny, you hate yourself for everything you've done over here right now. Well, sorry, but its time to go out again, so get your rifle. Ps, everything you're fighting for is a lie."
The troops know if any warcrimes are happening, they're living in it already. That doesn't warrant the release of documents that, as we're lead to believe, contain names of informants who can now be put at risk (as well as their families) or information that may otherwise get more of our troops killed by any means.
The fact is that wikileaks didn't do it for humanity, they did it for popularity. Warcrimes will be found out no matter what.
You demand immediate action, which is never going to happen. My standpoint is if we have to be there and for however long we have to be there the fewer people dying, for any reason, the better.
Lets pretend your conspiracy theory is correct and the war is a sham.
Lets also pretend that troops get ahold of these documents and lose morale.
Lets also assume that morale affects how well you focus while at war.
Troops will die from lack of morale, is that what you want? More people dying "for nothing."
Even if you don't like what's going on, you really need to think things through a little more thoroughly and think of what will happen as a consequence of your actions. Wikileaks didn't do that. They could easily have waited until the war was over and said "look at all these war-crimes." They want attention. They could have stayed anonymous in their fight against corruption, but they chose to give themselves a face and to get in front of a camera. The US government isn't going to just stop waging war because some guy posted a document.
Morale directly affects the safety of our troops and allies over there. So, its probably true that the military doesn't want them to lose morale, I don't either. I don't know any of the troops personally, but I don't want them to get hurt just as much as their families don't. I also don't want anyone who has helped us out over there to be harmed either. But that's just me talking.
Programming is not computer science. Computer science is pretty much applied mathematics. Some people call it "theoretical" computer science, but you can't call something science if you're not moving forward in the theory. Students who are taught that C++ programming is what CS is all about get to college and find out they're wrong and flunk out when they can't grasp complexity theory or even automata theory.
I've seen a number of students who have no idea what CS is all about come in thinking they're going to design video games by getting a degree in CS. By design I mean, "I think we should have this cool sword with magic powers in the game." The students just have no clue what CS really is. People who don't know what CS is think that we're masters of MS Office and expect us to know how to fix their OS when its full of malware, because that is what most people think we do. So before we blame curriculum for teaching basic computing skills instead of programming, we need to educate these kids on what CS really is and what a computer scientist will most likely do in the real world.
I was the ACM president at my university, and once during a meeting a kid rose his hand and asked, "What classes do they teach you how to hack in?" I laughed, but he was serious.
Sorry. Parents will sue.
"I just have to get a D to pass, so who cares?"
That's not true. When I was in high school in Oregon, my graduating class was the last class that was allowed to pass a class with a D, everyone after us now has to get Cs or better. No one sued and if they did, it never even made it to the news as far as I'm aware.
So Apple and Linux have fewer security holes than Microsoft?
You have a false sense of security. Mac and Ubuntu are not nearly as secure as you think. You're just not a target. Once you become a target, you'll be dead in the water.
I believe you need itunes to upgrade your iphone and use the itunes store and update this and that. As far as I know, there's no native way to run itunes on linux. If there is, please let me know.
- Ubuntu User