I never got that. The click-click-click I mean. Do they honestly imagine people read these ? Much less that people are capable, even if they bothered trying, to determine what is safe and what isn't ?
For that matter, that dialogue mainly comes when the user have *already* double-clicked a exe-file, or similar, at which point the user has -already- decided that -yes- he/she wants to let that app run. (if that is safe or not is an entirely different matter)
I actually think it makes security -worse-. People get even more used to reflexively click "ok" "Yes" "Go away and let me work damnit" at the appearance of any random dialogue. This decreases the chance they'll actually bother reading the messages that *DO* matter.
That's another axis alltogether then. There are both static and dynamically typed languages that allow or disallow this.
I don't know, I've seldom had problems with these, typically you get a crash with some variant of "file.ext: linenum: fooo is undefined", at which point it's usually not hard to see that really, you meant foo.
I'm sure there's some situations where this can bite though.
I've stopped caring. If someone is particularily annoying I tend to suggest we continue the conversation in my native language, Norwegian, see how *they* do. Or, we could just continue in german, a middle ground, as that's a foreign language to both of us.:-)
The worst is certainly american tourists in europe.
It's -ONE- thing (and bad enough!) to poke at European tourists in USA that happen to speak english with an accent and some mistakes here and there. What's however mindblowingly rude is going, as a tourist, to a non-english-speaking country, say Germany. Proceed to talk with natives over something or other (in english offcourse, without even asking if everyone knows english, everyone knows english, right ?) and *then* to poke at whomever speaks english less than perfectly.
99% of english-speakers would certainly NEVER behave like that, but I've seen it twice.
What many of them *will* do though, is assume automatically that everyone knows english. It's not that hard to say: "Excuse me, do you speak english ?"
I'm all with you on Adobe. All their products suck donkey-balls on generating code even close to valid.
Make a Flash in flash-designer and use the "generate flash-snippet" function, you get a snippet of supposed HTML that is valid in NO version of HTML whatsoever. Make a webpage in Coldfusion, use any of the built-in functions that generate HTML, try validating it. You get errors, typically on every single line of generated html.
I agree. If so-called "professional" tools can't get close to doing it right, we can't expect many will get it right.
Are you another one of those guys that confuse -strict- typing with -static- typing ? One ain't the other...
Besides, the problems mentioned in this article, aswell as most hard-to-find errors are *neither* compile-time nor run-time failures of datatypes. They're logic-errors and/or race-conditions.
I think you're overstating the advantage of static typing, and possibly confusing it with *strict* typing. Static, compile-time typing would do diddly-squat to alleviate problems such as these.
AV-scanner fail to recognize "da\0nger" as "danger" is by design. The two *aren't* the same afterall. IE choosing to interpret the second as the first is also not due to a lack of static typing in the language used to write IE. (I'd guess mostly C++)
The dilemma is that the web is horribly broken. A browser that flat-out refused to run non standard-compliant javascript or render non standard-compliant HTML would not be usable, literally 95% of all websites would be blank. Such a browser would have no chance in the marketplace. The frontpage of the site we're on now, for example, has 5 validation errors, and another dozen or so in the CSS. 4 are trivial, failure to url-escape & characters in href attributes, one is a wrongly nested tag, the parser encounters end-of-style at a point where no style tag is open.
The fixable bug though is whatever made it possible to infect a Windows-machine simply as the result of the user viewing a webpage. That shouldn't be possible, and whichever bug caused that could and should be fixed. It'd also be perfectly possible to run the web-browser in some kinda sandbox, and honestly that may actually be a good idea, the way things are going.
And we could do it like the guys which gave name to spectra, they shared it in: Low, Medium and High-frequency. Simple. Only, there's not really an upper bound on frequency, now is there ? The result was inevitable.
We then got VHF - VERY high frequency.
Then UHF - ULTRA high frequency.
Then SHF - SUPER high frequency.
Then EHF - EXTREMELY high frequency.
The only thing that prevented us from running into SPHF - Stupendously High Frequency was the fact that by this time, we where running into IR-territory.
While the original terms where easy to understand, ask your grandma to sort, "very,ultra,super or extremely" high frequency. I'd never have guessed that "super" is more than "ultra" but whatever.
Anyways, with a fixed def for "supercomputer" we'll end up with a low-end palm-device in a few years classed as a "super-ultra-mega-extreme computer", probably shortened to "SUME-class":-)
I've ran into quite a few english-speakers that seem to take it for granted that everyone speaks perfect english, so rather than being positively surprised that you speak their language well, they're disappointed that you don't speak it -perfectly-
My english is better than the second foreign language of 95% of all Americans, I'd wager. Nevertheless nitpicking minor points of grammar or spelling is something I experience regularily.
In contrast, I speak only literally perhaps 100 words of Finnish, but that is enough to positively surprise a Finnish-speaker, since they, unlike some english-speakers, don't come with a built-in assumption that foreigners all speak their language fluently. I've never had a Finn pick on my grammar or spelling, despite the fact that it's truly horrendous in comparison to my english.
Your last point is a good one though. It's quite possible I receive less kind treatment in english online because it may not be obvious to everyone immediately that I'm non-native. In text accents aren't as easy to notice as in voice. (though I'd say if a native english-speaker writes as bad english as I do, he/she isn't in very good command of their language)
Google sucks -BIGTIME- if you attempt to use it in languages other than english, atleast the two where I've regularily attempted it, Norwegian and German.
Indeed, my main *complaint* about Google is that it likes to let its search-results be influenced by the language of the searcher, even when that is explicitly not wished, and it doesn't seem to be possible to turn that off.
You can "Search the web" (default) "Search pages in German" and "Search pages from Germany", which is fine and dandy, whats less fine is that the result you get if you "search the web" are *VERY* different if you happen to be logged in to google (say because you use gmail) compared to what you get if you ain't. And the results you get are *MUCH* worse.
My guess is, they're trying to bias the results so that pages of presumed interest for Germans are ranked higher, which is freaking ANNOYONG if you are like me, and search for terms that really are not local.
Example: Change your interface-language in Google to German, then "search the web" for "ubuntu". The top 4 links are to ubuntuusers.de and de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu the ubuntu homepage is down at 5.
Now, I'd *expect* that if I had said "search german pages" or "search pages from germany", but I explicitly did NOT, I wanted the most relevant pages for the word "ubuntu" regardless of language and domain, if I wanted something different I'd have said so thankyouverymuch.
It's equisitely braindead to FORCE the user to prioritize pages from the same country, or in the same language as the users choosen interface-language, without mentioning that by a word. The option does NOT say "prefer german pages", it says: "Show the google user-interface in German", the two *aren't* the same and shouldn't be treated as such.
As far as I've been able to discover it is IMPOSSIBLE to convince Google that yes, I'd like the user-interface to be Norwegian (or german), but NO, I do -NOT- want those domains or languages given extra emphasis when I search, unless I say so (for which there are options!)
It's bad enough to make google localisation useless for me. I have it set to english. It's the only way to make it deliver sensible results.
This is true if you only consider that single sale.
In a larger setting though, including overall customer-satisfaction, word-of-mouth, repeat-sales and imperfectly informed consumers, it can often be cheaper/easier to make a lojal customer out of a customer than to make a customer out of a non-customer.
Put differently, it can under many circumstances make sense to spend $50 more than you needed to to increase the chance that your customer will be a *happy* customer instead of spending the same $50 for, for example, advertising.
Apple can do as they want, aslong as they conform with law, sure. But negative feelings that result from any action of theirs *is* a cost, even if you still get the damn phone sold.
Sure it's cheaper because they decide to sell it cheaper.
But thing is, when you do that, in general, you run the risk that someone will buy the stuff in the cheaper area, and then re-sell it in the more expensive area, turning a profit in the process.
Just because you migth not -LIKE- that, doesn't give you any right to prevent it. You can't prevent it if it's a carrot, a car or a book. (look up "First sale"), I don't see why there's any rational reason to do that differently just because the thing may be machine-readable. (notice: books are copyrigthed too, *THAT* by itself makes no difference to first sale)
I suspect it would. But remember that copyrighted items are government-granted monopolies. If you want to buy a Harry Potter movie, you need to do it in whatever format the single monopoly-supplier sees fit to provide it in.
Yeah, one could opt to watch something else, and I guess if the restrictions where obnoxious -ENOUGH- more people would.
Read the article -- cattle is already used in this region for stuff like running waterpumps and similar. So we can assume that the problem of enticing the cows to walk in a circle (not on a conveyor belt) is a solved one.
Legally this is pretty obvious: It's artificial barriers to trade.
"region coding" of any sort is not legitimate in a free market economy. The entire *point* of a free market is to benefit society by improving efficiency, efficiency improves since buyers will choose the best supplier for their need, and suppliers will have to make competitive offers, or else not sell anything.
Transporting something from a place where it's cheap, and to a place where it's worth more and sell it there is a fundamental function of trade. We'd all be a lot worse off if that wasn't possible.
Frankly, I don't see why the US govt or the EU hasn't cracked down on this bullshit a long time ago (at the very least when the DVD-standard was launched with artificial barriers to trade baked-in)
Re:Expertise assumed by authors?
on
Learning jQuery
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· Score: 1
Yeah. All with you there.
It was my chief complaint with this jQuery-book (we have it at work).
The actual nuts-and-bolts of jquery are explained clearly and nicely.
Not many people are reading a book on an advanced, abstracted javascript-library, yet unaware that, for example, HTML has tags, tags are wrapped in less-than and greater-than signs, many tags have an opening and a corresponding end-tag, HTML is often transported over http and any number of other basic concepts that the book saw fit to explain.
Indeed, if you didn't know these things already, this book would without shadow of a doubt be the wrong one for you. So I don't see the point of explaining it at all.
Yes. Sure. You can even re-uninstall it. Until it reappears next month. Then you can play whack-a-mole at will. Which is just exactly what admins want to spend their time doing.
Hell, even home-users are annoyed. My wife runs Vista, but ain't really much of a MS-fan, Firefox and Thunderbird otherwise. So, she'd removed IE and put FF on the "quick-start-bar" or whatever the hell the thing is called. Over the last 6 months, IE has reappeared 4 times, whenever she's let windows update some stuff, it seems.
Yes, she can remove it. That doesn't excuse the obnoxious behaviour though.
True. People are strange, more strange than most people imagine, the strangeness is hidden most of the time, so you don't *notice* just how strange they are.
We make, among other things, a CMS-thing. A customer (largish corporate customer, spends $100K/year with us or thereabouts) calls me. He is having a problem with some text from a word-document that he wants to publish using the CMS.
What he does is: Mark all the text in Word. Copy. Paste it into the CMS. Save. Which works perfectly fine.
His problem is this: The text, when published, looks similar to how it looks in Word. Among other things, the font he used in Word is respected, because it is one of the standard web-fonts, arial if I remember correctly. He does, however not *want* arial, but Times.
He continues to explain to me at great length what a lousy product we have and how this is substantially sub-par. To this day I don't have a single clue why, exactly, it is a sign of a lousy product that when you insert some text that is, infact, in arial, then that text stays in arial. No idea whatsoever.
We know pretty accurately how dangerous flying is, on account of having a fairly good record of how many million people fly how many thousand miles a year, and knowing how many end up dead or injuried as a result.
If *almost* crashes where significantly up, you'd expect *actual* crashes to be similarily up. There's more than enough planes in the air that the law of average work just fine.
Sure. Being an immigrant makes a difference. Parents that immigrate are *also* people who, on the average, care about actively doing stuff to improve the future of themselves and their children.
But if you live in a country where it's *easy* to get all the education you want if you just care for it, and have the talent, but you nevertheless opt to (out of lack of interest or lack of talent) not to take advantage of that. Odds are you're *NOT* very passionate about knowledge. Or you're just plain dumb. Since intelligence is partly genetic, that is ALSO a disadvantage you're likely to pass on to your kids.
If you're not educated, not for lack of interest or lack of talent, but simply because you never got the chance, that's obviously not a comparable situation.
Ever wonder why poor natives tend to be the most hostile to immigrants ?
One of the reasons is, the immigrants typically arrive with nothing (or very little), and still regularily demonstrate that starting there and ending up somewhere significantly better is possible and practical. (it's harder in the USA than most other places in the west, despite the "american dream", but it's POSSIBLE)
True. I'm just sick and tired of sentences of the type; "Even moral, religious people...." As if it was any more surprising that -they- do something immoral compared to someone who ain't. I agree, the GGP wasn't particularily bad, I just like to nip it in the bud.
Arguing as if it's a given that religious people is somehow better is... well, it'd be racist if religion was a race. It ain't, so I don't know the rigth word, but IMHO these two sentences are equally acceptable:
Even devout religious people sometimes....
Even well-mannered white people sometimes....
Actually, with most ethical systems it's easy to argue that religious people are by definition less moral, but that's a debate for another day.
I said so numerous times. But ok, again: it is certainly *possible* for parents with no education to nevertheless offer support and help their children get one. It is however not the norm.
Thing is, all the stuff you say uneducated parents -could- do are correct. Sure they *could* some of them even *DO*. But educated parents could do all of those *AND* more. Plus, they're more likely to actually care about education.
This is perfectly logical: who do you think is most likely to themselves get a good education; someone who thinks education is really important, and who is good at it, or someone who -doesn't- think education is important ? Your guess !
There no doubt exists parents who themselves are uneducated, but who nevertheless understand the importance of education, and are able and willing to support their offspring in getting an education (I don't mean primarily financially, there's other forms of support atleast as important!)
But it's not the trend.
For example, in Norway (I doubt USA is much different, but I don't have the numbers handy) overall aproximately 20% of the population has a university-degree.
If *both* your parents have a university-degree, then the odds that you do too are 65%. If *one* of your parents do, odds are 45%, if none of your parents do, 12%.
It's not just a question of finding it important. Being *willing* to support is one thing, being *able* is another. It's a benefit to have parents that are *ABLE* to discuss problems you're having in school and/or university with you and actually contribute. Parents who themselves didn't finish high-school are less likely to be *able* to say anything sensible on whatever problem the children has in school. Furthermore, knowing how to *find* answers is atleast as important as knowing the answers. That's *also* a skill taugth during education.
But perhaps most at all important; people with a passion for knowledge tends to be infectious. Growing up in a home where the newest exploits of Hawking is an average topic of conversation does something to you. I'm sure there's uneducated parents who also has a passion for knowledge, and share it with their kids. But again: it's not the norm.
The PS2 also got integrated networking, optional on the early PS2s. Which undermines your point a little, though I think it still holds. Quite a few PS2-games did infact take advantage of this networking, despite the fact that it's not a standard item that is available on ALL PS2s. A few PS2-games are even "network-play only", meaning you can't use them at all if you don't have the networking-add-on (or a newer PS2 that includes it)
Because even if you create identical access to all parts of the school-system and job-market, having rich parents will still be a great help. It'll allow you to study full-time and not need part-time jobs on the side. More importantly, having *educated* parents means you have the kind of parents who think that education matters. Which transfers to the kids in a million little ways.
The school-system in my part of the world already works pretty close to identical-access. There's still a large (not as large as in USA, but still large) difference between how kids of well-off parents do and how kids of poor parents do.
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I never got that. The click-click-click I mean. Do they honestly imagine people read these ? Much less that people are capable, even if they bothered trying, to determine what is safe and what isn't ?
For that matter, that dialogue mainly comes when the user have *already* double-clicked a exe-file, or similar, at which point the user has -already- decided that -yes- he/she wants to let that app run. (if that is safe or not is an entirely different matter)
I actually think it makes security -worse-. People get even more used to reflexively click "ok" "Yes" "Go away and let me work damnit" at the appearance of any random dialogue. This decreases the chance they'll actually bother reading the messages that *DO* matter.
That's another axis alltogether then. There are both static and dynamically typed languages that allow or disallow this.
I don't know, I've seldom had problems with these, typically you get a crash with some variant of "file.ext: linenum: fooo is undefined", at which point it's usually not hard to see that really, you meant foo.
I'm sure there's some situations where this can bite though.
I've stopped caring. If someone is particularily annoying I tend to suggest we continue the conversation in my native language, Norwegian, see how *they* do. Or, we could just continue in german, a middle ground, as that's a foreign language to both of us. :-)
The worst is certainly american tourists in europe.
It's -ONE- thing (and bad enough!) to poke at European tourists in USA that happen to speak english with an accent and some mistakes here and there. What's however mindblowingly rude is going, as a tourist, to a non-english-speaking country, say Germany. Proceed to talk with natives over something or other (in english offcourse, without even asking if everyone knows english, everyone knows english, right ?) and *then* to poke at whomever speaks english less than perfectly.
99% of english-speakers would certainly NEVER behave like that, but I've seen it twice.
What many of them *will* do though, is assume automatically that everyone knows english. It's not that hard to say: "Excuse me, do you speak english ?"
I'm all with you on Adobe. All their products suck donkey-balls on generating code even close to valid.
Make a Flash in flash-designer and use the "generate flash-snippet" function, you get a snippet of supposed HTML that is valid in NO version of HTML whatsoever. Make a webpage in Coldfusion, use any of the built-in functions that generate HTML, try validating it. You get errors, typically on every single line of generated html.
I agree. If so-called "professional" tools can't get close to doing it right, we can't expect many will get it right.
Are you another one of those guys that confuse -strict- typing with -static- typing ? One ain't the other... Besides, the problems mentioned in this article, aswell as most hard-to-find errors are *neither* compile-time nor run-time failures of datatypes. They're logic-errors and/or race-conditions.
I think you're overstating the advantage of static typing, and possibly confusing it with *strict* typing. Static, compile-time typing would do diddly-squat to alleviate problems such as these.
AV-scanner fail to recognize "da\0nger" as "danger" is by design. The two *aren't* the same afterall. IE choosing to interpret the second as the first is also not due to a lack of static typing in the language used to write IE. (I'd guess mostly C++)
The dilemma is that the web is horribly broken. A browser that flat-out refused to run non standard-compliant javascript or render non standard-compliant HTML would not be usable, literally 95% of all websites would be blank. Such a browser would have no chance in the marketplace. The frontpage of the site we're on now, for example, has 5 validation errors, and another dozen or so in the CSS. 4 are trivial, failure to url-escape & characters in href attributes, one is a wrongly nested tag, the parser encounters end-of-style at a point where no style tag is open.
The fixable bug though is whatever made it possible to infect a Windows-machine simply as the result of the user viewing a webpage. That shouldn't be possible, and whichever bug caused that could and should be fixed. It'd also be perfectly possible to run the web-browser in some kinda sandbox, and honestly that may actually be a good idea, the way things are going.
Yeah !
:-)
And we could do it like the guys which gave name to spectra, they shared it in: Low, Medium and High-frequency. Simple. Only, there's not really an upper bound on frequency, now is there ? The result was inevitable.
We then got VHF - VERY high frequency.
Then UHF - ULTRA high frequency.
Then SHF - SUPER high frequency.
Then EHF - EXTREMELY high frequency.
The only thing that prevented us from running into SPHF - Stupendously High Frequency was the fact that by this time, we where running into IR-territory.
While the original terms where easy to understand, ask your grandma to sort, "very,ultra,super or extremely" high frequency. I'd never have guessed that "super" is more than "ultra" but whatever.
Anyways, with a fixed def for "supercomputer" we'll end up with a low-end palm-device in a few years classed as a "super-ultra-mega-extreme computer", probably shortened to "SUME-class"
Yeah, but the expectations are different.
I've ran into quite a few english-speakers that seem to take it for granted that everyone speaks perfect english, so rather than being positively surprised that you speak their language well, they're disappointed that you don't speak it -perfectly-
My english is better than the second foreign language of 95% of all Americans, I'd wager. Nevertheless nitpicking minor points of grammar or spelling is something I experience regularily.
In contrast, I speak only literally perhaps 100 words of Finnish, but that is enough to positively surprise a Finnish-speaker, since they, unlike some english-speakers, don't come with a built-in assumption that foreigners all speak their language fluently. I've never had a Finn pick on my grammar or spelling, despite the fact that it's truly horrendous in comparison to my english.
Your last point is a good one though. It's quite possible I receive less kind treatment in english online because it may not be obvious to everyone immediately that I'm non-native. In text accents aren't as easy to notice as in voice. (though I'd say if a native english-speaker writes as bad english as I do, he/she isn't in very good command of their language)
Google sucks -BIGTIME- if you attempt to use it in languages other than english, atleast the two where I've regularily attempted it, Norwegian and German.
Indeed, my main *complaint* about Google is that it likes to let its search-results be influenced by the language of the searcher, even when that is explicitly not wished, and it doesn't seem to be possible to turn that off.
You can "Search the web" (default) "Search pages in German" and "Search pages from Germany", which is fine and dandy, whats less fine is that the result you get if you "search the web" are *VERY* different if you happen to be logged in to google (say because you use gmail) compared to what you get if you ain't. And the results you get are *MUCH* worse.
My guess is, they're trying to bias the results so that pages of presumed interest for Germans are ranked higher, which is freaking ANNOYONG if you are like me, and search for terms that really are not local.
Example: Change your interface-language in Google to German, then "search the web" for "ubuntu". The top 4 links are to ubuntuusers.de and de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu the ubuntu homepage is down at 5.
Now, I'd *expect* that if I had said "search german pages" or "search pages from germany", but I explicitly did NOT, I wanted the most relevant pages for the word "ubuntu" regardless of language and domain, if I wanted something different I'd have said so thankyouverymuch.
It's equisitely braindead to FORCE the user to prioritize pages from the same country, or in the same language as the users choosen interface-language, without mentioning that by a word. The option does NOT say "prefer german pages", it says: "Show the google user-interface in German", the two *aren't* the same and shouldn't be treated as such.
As far as I've been able to discover it is IMPOSSIBLE to convince Google that yes, I'd like the user-interface to be Norwegian (or german), but NO, I do -NOT- want those domains or languages given extra emphasis when I search, unless I say so (for which there are options!)
It's bad enough to make google localisation useless for me. I have it set to english. It's the only way to make it deliver sensible results.
This is true if you only consider that single sale.
In a larger setting though, including overall customer-satisfaction, word-of-mouth, repeat-sales and imperfectly informed consumers, it can often be cheaper/easier to make a lojal customer out of a customer than to make a customer out of a non-customer.
Put differently, it can under many circumstances make sense to spend $50 more than you needed to to increase the chance that your customer will be a *happy* customer instead of spending the same $50 for, for example, advertising.
Apple can do as they want, aslong as they conform with law, sure. But negative feelings that result from any action of theirs *is* a cost, even if you still get the damn phone sold.
Sure it's cheaper because they decide to sell it cheaper. But thing is, when you do that, in general, you run the risk that someone will buy the stuff in the cheaper area, and then re-sell it in the more expensive area, turning a profit in the process. Just because you migth not -LIKE- that, doesn't give you any right to prevent it. You can't prevent it if it's a carrot, a car or a book. (look up "First sale"), I don't see why there's any rational reason to do that differently just because the thing may be machine-readable. (notice: books are copyrigthed too, *THAT* by itself makes no difference to first sale)
I suspect it would. But remember that copyrighted items are government-granted monopolies. If you want to buy a Harry Potter movie, you need to do it in whatever format the single monopoly-supplier sees fit to provide it in.
Yeah, one could opt to watch something else, and I guess if the restrictions where obnoxious -ENOUGH- more people would.
Read the article -- cattle is already used in this region for stuff like running waterpumps and similar. So we can assume that the problem of enticing the cows to walk in a circle (not on a conveyor belt) is a solved one.
Legally this is pretty obvious: It's artificial barriers to trade.
"region coding" of any sort is not legitimate in a free market economy. The entire *point* of a free market is to benefit society by improving efficiency, efficiency improves since buyers will choose the best supplier for their need, and suppliers will have to make competitive offers, or else not sell anything.
Transporting something from a place where it's cheap, and to a place where it's worth more and sell it there is a fundamental function of trade. We'd all be a lot worse off if that wasn't possible.
Frankly, I don't see why the US govt or the EU hasn't cracked down on this bullshit a long time ago (at the very least when the DVD-standard was launched with artificial barriers to trade baked-in)
Yeah. All with you there.
It was my chief complaint with this jQuery-book (we have it at work).
The actual nuts-and-bolts of jquery are explained clearly and nicely.
Not many people are reading a book on an advanced, abstracted javascript-library, yet unaware that, for example, HTML has tags, tags are wrapped in less-than and greater-than signs, many tags have an opening and a corresponding end-tag, HTML is often transported over http and any number of other basic concepts that the book saw fit to explain.
Indeed, if you didn't know these things already, this book would without shadow of a doubt be the wrong one for you. So I don't see the point of explaining it at all.
Yes. Sure. You can even re-uninstall it. Until it reappears next month. Then you can play whack-a-mole at will. Which is just exactly what admins want to spend their time doing.
Hell, even home-users are annoyed. My wife runs Vista, but ain't really much of a MS-fan, Firefox and Thunderbird otherwise. So, she'd removed IE and put FF on the "quick-start-bar" or whatever the hell the thing is called. Over the last 6 months, IE has reappeared 4 times, whenever she's let windows update some stuff, it seems.
Yes, she can remove it. That doesn't excuse the obnoxious behaviour though.
True. People are strange, more strange than most people imagine, the strangeness is hidden most of the time, so you don't *notice* just how strange they are.
We make, among other things, a CMS-thing. A customer (largish corporate customer, spends $100K/year with us or thereabouts) calls me. He is having a problem with some text from a word-document that he wants to publish using the CMS.
What he does is: Mark all the text in Word. Copy. Paste it into the CMS. Save. Which works perfectly fine.
His problem is this: The text, when published, looks similar to how it looks in Word. Among other things, the font he used in Word is respected, because it is one of the standard web-fonts, arial if I remember correctly. He does, however not *want* arial, but Times.
He continues to explain to me at great length what a lousy product we have and how this is substantially sub-par. To this day I don't have a single clue why, exactly, it is a sign of a lousy product that when you insert some text that is, infact, in arial, then that text stays in arial. No idea whatsoever.
This is completely silly.
We know pretty accurately how dangerous flying is, on account of having a fairly good record of how many million people fly how many thousand miles a year, and knowing how many end up dead or injuried as a result.
If *almost* crashes where significantly up, you'd expect *actual* crashes to be similarily up. There's more than enough planes in the air that the law of average work just fine.
Yeah, sure. But that's zero-sum games. Having low latency here doesn't help at all. What helps is having lower latency than the *other* traders.
If *everyone* improves their latency equally much, they're all back to square one.
Which is typical of speculation (as opposed to investment) -- its fundamentally stupid playing a zero-sum game when positive-sum games are around.
Sure. Being an immigrant makes a difference. Parents that immigrate are *also* people who, on the average, care about actively doing stuff to improve the future of themselves and their children. But if you live in a country where it's *easy* to get all the education you want if you just care for it, and have the talent, but you nevertheless opt to (out of lack of interest or lack of talent) not to take advantage of that. Odds are you're *NOT* very passionate about knowledge. Or you're just plain dumb. Since intelligence is partly genetic, that is ALSO a disadvantage you're likely to pass on to your kids. If you're not educated, not for lack of interest or lack of talent, but simply because you never got the chance, that's obviously not a comparable situation. Ever wonder why poor natives tend to be the most hostile to immigrants ? One of the reasons is, the immigrants typically arrive with nothing (or very little), and still regularily demonstrate that starting there and ending up somewhere significantly better is possible and practical. (it's harder in the USA than most other places in the west, despite the "american dream", but it's POSSIBLE)
- Even devout religious people sometimes
....
- Even well-mannered white people sometimes
....
Actually, with most ethical systems it's easy to argue that religious people are by definition less moral, but that's a debate for another day.I said so numerous times. But ok, again: it is certainly *possible* for parents with no education to nevertheless offer support and help their children get one. It is however not the norm.
Thing is, all the stuff you say uneducated parents -could- do are correct. Sure they *could* some of them even *DO*. But educated parents could do all of those *AND* more. Plus, they're more likely to actually care about education.
This is perfectly logical: who do you think is most likely to themselves get a good education; someone who thinks education is really important, and who is good at it, or someone who -doesn't- think education is important ? Your guess !
Sorry. The plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
There no doubt exists parents who themselves are uneducated, but who nevertheless understand the importance of education, and are able and willing to support their offspring in getting an education (I don't mean primarily financially, there's other forms of support atleast as important!)
But it's not the trend.
For example, in Norway (I doubt USA is much different, but I don't have the numbers handy) overall aproximately 20% of the population has a university-degree.
If *both* your parents have a university-degree, then the odds that you do too are 65%. If *one* of your parents do, odds are 45%, if none of your parents do, 12%.
It's not just a question of finding it important. Being *willing* to support is one thing, being *able* is another. It's a benefit to have parents that are *ABLE* to discuss problems you're having in school and/or university with you and actually contribute. Parents who themselves didn't finish high-school are less likely to be *able* to say anything sensible on whatever problem the children has in school. Furthermore, knowing how to *find* answers is atleast as important as knowing the answers. That's *also* a skill taugth during education.
But perhaps most at all important; people with a passion for knowledge tends to be infectious. Growing up in a home where the newest exploits of Hawking is an average topic of conversation does something to you. I'm sure there's uneducated parents who also has a passion for knowledge, and share it with their kids. But again: it's not the norm.
The PS2 also got integrated networking, optional on the early PS2s. Which undermines your point a little, though I think it still holds. Quite a few PS2-games did infact take advantage of this networking, despite the fact that it's not a standard item that is available on ALL PS2s. A few PS2-games are even "network-play only", meaning you can't use them at all if you don't have the networking-add-on (or a newer PS2 that includes it)
It helps, sure. It's not really possible though.
Because even if you create identical access to all parts of the school-system and job-market, having rich parents will still be a great help. It'll allow you to study full-time and not need part-time jobs on the side. More importantly, having *educated* parents means you have the kind of parents who think that education matters. Which transfers to the kids in a million little ways.
The school-system in my part of the world already works pretty close to identical-access. There's still a large (not as large as in USA, but still large) difference between how kids of well-off parents do and how kids of poor parents do.