>>There are lots of people with talent that work just as hard that don't succeed - the book tries answer why by examining what else is required, and concludes that circumstance plays a significant part.
It doesn't come off that way. He sort of flippantly says, "Well, of course Bill Joy is smart", but then goes on to minimize his own individual efforts. As I said, it's instructive to think about why Joy and Gates succeeded when other people with equal intelligence, hours of effort, and opportunities succeeded in making billion dollar companies when others didn't.
>>Gladwell is way over-simplifying. 10,000 hours is not something magic.
I've heard the term tossed around in other books and papers.
Personally, my thought is that 'talent' is a modifier to the number of hours to reach expert proficiency in an area. I teach kids martial arts for fun, and there's certainly a difference between kids with how fast they can pick it up. It has to do with a combination of discipline, physical fitness, flexibility, intelligence, and a willingness to learn.
In a sense, then, he did detect gravity waves. And so he was right in saying "I detected gravity waves". However, he may have been right for the wrong reasons. Science works by interpreting data, and convincing others that your interpretation is correct. Not necessarily. There's different things under the title of science, and one of them is black-box science, when you're investigating something that you don't know the slightest thing about, and seeing what happens. We don't know exactly how gravity waves should behaves, so reporting that you detected them (even when the math says you shouldn't be able to), *is* valid science. As Feynman said, experiments trump math.
>>The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Sure, but then you have people like Carnegie, who were able to sell out, and start new a business, and via insight and cunning, form successful businesses over and over. I think Carnegie Steel was his third successful enterprise.
>>Well yeah, but the way the book is described, it sounds a lot to me like a way to excuse not trying at all. "Oh, I'm never going to get my 10,000 hours in because I don't have the good fortune of having a good computer terminal and the societal situation where my skills will be needed."
He surmises that the reason really smart people (people with high IQs) don't do noticeably better than merely smart people (IQs around 120) is that they know how much work it'll take, and choose to not do it. He says they are noticeably happier than the general population, so maybe that's the key.
I finished Outliers last week, and came away with it with the same impression that I get from all of Gladwell's books, which is that it's half insightful, half complete nonsense.
For example, his central thesis is that our heroic model isn't accurate, that Bill Joy and Gates are more the product of their times than anything having to do with their own skills, and that they just happened to be given the necessary 10,000 hours of training before anyone else had access to them, and since they were born at the right time to capitalize on the digital revolution, that's why they're successful.
Personally, I'd flip it around. I'd say, "Sure, training, skill, being born at the right time, and luck in general, are all critical elements of success. But why was it that Joy and Gates became the 'successful' people, when their compatriots, who also had the 10,000 hours of training, early access to computer systems, and were bright and ambitious, did not?"
In other words, Gladwell goes too far in destroying the idea of individual effort in becoming 'successful'. While we might often fail to consider the environment that produced these people, we also have to realize (which Gladwell doesn't) that these guys weren't, by any means, unique in their backgrounds.
I also take some exception with his notion of success, which is to use wealth as a sort of scorecard. I take Benjamin Franklin's point of view on money, which is to say that it's important up to a certain point, and relatively unimportant after that. If you have enough money to do whatever it is you want to do, that's all the money you really need. It's served me pretty well.
Perhaps Gladwell should have dug down a little more on those high IQ people that are "failures" (in the sense that they didn't go out and win Nobels at a significantly higher rate) and figured out why they are indeed happier than the general population, since, in my mind, that is the primary indicator of success.
>>Say it with me: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful" >>Newtonian physics is technically a less accurate model than Einstein's general relativity
Not in the world of economic models that do forecasting. Models of the physical world in various scientific fields are fine. Models that claim they can predict the future or quantify risk are dangerous. As in, they can destroy billions of dollars of wealth and potentially take out an entire nation's economy with it. Would the current downturn be as serious if we didn't have mortgage backed securities that had "quantified risk"? When people bought into the notion that these securities were low risk, it endangered the entire world economy. Iceland's bank has gone bankrupt.
>>They did not adequately consider the risks they were taking.
They *did* consider the risks they were taking. That's the point - the founders of LTCM had Nobel Laureates on this very subject! Everyone involved in the disaster thought that they had risk tamed by a mathematical model. Then they learned that reality trumps math.
It's especially bad when you model things using a Gaussian: LTCM used a Gaussian model for price movements. Essentially, by their model, large price movements (like what killed them) were near-impossible. IMO, Gaussians should only be used when you're looking at processes that really are the sum of large numbers of random events (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem). It's grossly inappropriate to use them when it's not. Sure, short-term fluctuations in price might actually be adequately modeled by a Gaussian, but just one real life event throwing a monkeywrench into your system, and all of your little arbitrage gains are wiped out overnight.
>>Explain to me what Economics looks like without some sort of a model at some level
I'm not talking about models of how things are, but how things will be (1, 5, 10 years from now). All of them are wrong, and simpler models usually do much better at this stuff than the highly complex Nobel-winning ones.
Greenspan said he'd been in the business of predicting the economic future for 30 years, and had never seen the slightest evidence that people could do it.
>>There is nothing wrong with using a model. Models are good.
Not in economics, they're not. The book Black Swan, which should be read by anyone interested in this topic, says that the hideous lie is that people claim that "they're better than nothing", when, in fact, they're worse than not having any model at all.
The LTC crash was caused by the founders (Nobel Laureates in Economics) having a model to quantify risk. IIRC, they used some sort of guassian model, taking the standard deviation of price movement as "risk". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Scholes#Black.E2.80.93Scholes_model) This of course looked good until, quite suddenly, it wasn't and there was an event that their model predicted shouldn't have happened within the lifetime of the universe (that's the problem with using gaussians instead of cauchy curves or other fat-tailed distributions) and the company crashed and burned, and did a lot of collateral damage as well.
From the wikipedia article on LTC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management): Merrill Lynch observed in its annual reports that mathematical risk models, "may provide a greater sense of security than warranted; therefore, reliance on these models should be limited."
Reminds me of a book I read last month, Rainbows End.
People run around with 3d goggles on that overlays 3d graphics over the real world, for work and fun.
The author lives here in San Diego, so it was fun to hear him talking about people overlaying Terry Pratchett-style graphics over the interstates I drive on all the time.
Reminds me of a story that Keith Marzullo told our class in a graduate level reliability class. This was back in the days of using UUCP to send email, and the vendor that he worked for had just released a "failsafe" product they were very proud of -- essentially, it was a mail router that could detect if a path went down, and would try an alternate router instead. The company touted it as a bulletproof solution.
So they go to a conference, and set up some routers, unplug some of them, etc., and everything is going fine until they ask an audience member for his UUCP address. UUCP addresses are in the form of host1!host2!host3!username, with the routing for the username explicitly specified... the addresses could thus get quite long. In this case, the guy's email address was over the buffer limit the company's routers used.
Guess what happened?
The mail server tried sending an email to the next router in the chain. The router buffer overflowed and crashed. The reliable server than tried another router... and crashed it. It then went through the entire network, and crashed every single one of the nodes, turning a bug that would have been a single point of failure into a total network collapse.
>>For your idea to actually be science and not philosophy you'd need a much better grasp of what you're actually saying. Saying something like "we're all constantly entangled" doesn't really mean a lot, since entanglement doesn't occur on a macro-scale.
It means about as much as the "scienfici" theories of consciousness we have from Dennett or Crick. Which is to say, they say it is an "emergent behavior" and then wave their hands frantically, without being able to explain in the slightest how it works, how it emerges, or what the base unit (as it were) of consciousness is.
>>To my knowledge it's never really produced anything approaching science.
Neither has science. That's why the study of consciousness is so much fun. =) We have a mountain of neuroscience papers, and still not the slightest clue how subjective experience could possibly happen.
>>Legitimate question: why is the Libertarian party so marginalized in America?
I voted Libertarian this year, and I did so only because voting for a party that is half pot-smoking hippies was better than voting for Obama or McCain. It's quite an insane party, but I do like Bob Barr (only Republican to vote against a lot of the Bush/1984 laws) more than any of the other candidates.
Some people think that they're marginalized because we don't have an electorial system that supports 3rd party candidates. While that's true to a certain extent, the Libertarian party is still way too whacky to ever win.
>>This is a common practice for software (I think they did the same thing for XP -> Vista); there's really not much to see here.
They said they did, but when I tried to claim the free copy of Vista (I bought an OEM version of XP right before Vista came out) they pretended they'd never heard of the program, or that I didn't qualify or something. (I don't recall, exactly.)
Of course, the silver lining is that this machine is still using XP.
>>Every couple of dozen laps they give you a new streamer, or a thimble of paint, or a sparkly sticker for you to put on your tricycle.
Yeah, that's WoW in a nutshell. I logged on for the first time in ages because I saw that there was some quest that'd put "Elder" in front of your name. Okay, cute, I thought.
>>If the portion of your brain that's supposed to control your left hand is fried, the sort of thing they were doing in this experiment won't help you.
A neat thing about the brain is its incredible ability to rewire itself in response to changes in usage. The section of your brain dedicated to sight, for example, is used to process sound in blind people. Even sighted people, when deprived of all light, begin remapping their brain in this fashion after about a week or so. When exposed to light again, they literally can't see (or not very well at all) until another week has gone by and the functional map is restored. In the meantime, they 'see sound' and have various other interesting things happen to them.
>>Nothing the R's did will help the situation. It was all just a final golden hand job from the government to the bankers.
Yep.
>>Nothing the D's will do will help the situation. It is all just a final golden hand job from the government to the usual dependents.
Yep.
It was depressing enough that I "threw my vote away" this year and voted Libertarian. Even though I don't agree with them on the drug legalization issue (which is half their platform), they seem like the only party in America that actually wants a smaller government. Used to be the Republicans, sorta, in the Reagan days (if you don't count defense). But with Paulson giving out $800B to his friends in an unauditable unaudited fashion, seeing the democrats criticize said unaccountability, then seeing no senators at all sign up for the accountability committee, and then seeing said democrats pass TARP II as soon as they came into power... well, I'd say that I'd lost my faith in government, but I never really had any to begin with.
>>I see the next killer app as part social networking/part barter network. It will likely be craigslist.
Yeah, today I was joking with my friend about switching to a chicken-based economy. We could pay the president 10 chickens a month, which seems pretty fair to me.
>>If a book is already mentioned, adding it's ISBN is never going to be invalid because of context
Right, and all the edit was was the adding of ISBN numbers to the Hoover article. Nothing else. There was absolutely no excuse for the admin to revert it, nor to do so twice. When I complained on his talk page and linked his reverts, he wrote, "I have no clue what you're talking about." Pfft.
>>It was clear from looking at the history the original author created this article but didn't want *anyone* else editing it
Yeah, essentially I think that he had the article in a state that he liked it, and was automatically reverting any changes at all without even looking at it. I think one of the reverts came in 45 seconds after I added the ISBN numbers in.
>>How much of a problem are the "wiki wars," really?
Basically, on any article where people of differing political persuasions would write it differently, there's probably a wiki war going on. I remember editing the NPR article once, and getting dragged into a revision war where people were adding and removing a reference to Fox News being biased. Supporters of the inclusion said it said NPR looked nonbiased by comparison, opposition said the article was not about Fox News and didn't belong. Ended up getting dragged all the way up to the arbitration committee because neither side would compromise on it.
Stupid? Meaningless? Oh, yes. Very.
Seeing that happen on three or four articles I made edits to and added to my watchlist, I basically gave up on trying to contribute to Wikipedia. Actually, the final straw was when I added ISBN numbers to J. Edgar Hoover's wikipedia page -- I noticed they were missing, so I looked them up and put them in. How controversial is that? It got reverted by a wikipedia admin (JayJG) with an ideological axe to grind. Twice.
That was basically it for me. If ISBN numbers aren't politically correct, Wikipedia is nothing more than a ideological cesspool.
I'm also not fond of widescreen monitors since a fullscreen shape is easier to perceive in its entirety, which is important in FPS games. If you have to move your eyes or neck around to check out the action... it's bad times. They also don't make LCD fullscreen monitors bigger than 19" (at least, they don't at Frys or Best Buy), and since I won't buy a monitor I can't test extensively, it basically means I'm going to be using this 4 year old Sony until the day it dies.
>>CRT is still the best display technology we have. It's really a shame that it's being abandoned, just because panel displays are smaller.
I abandoned my CRT television. It weighed 300 pounds. I gave it to the first guys that were willing to haul it out of my 2nd storey apartment. It was also 4:3 and didn't handle widescreen correctly, even though it was a pretty expensive (originally) Sony XBR.
Replaced it with a LCD television - much higher quality images, and it accurately reproduces pixel-for-pixel the signal coming out of the box.
While people are nostalgic for CRTs, I've yet to see one that can draw a pixel-perfect line like an LCD can do by default.
In martial arts, I train to slow down the world, so to speak, when fighting.
A kick that appears to be a blur to most people I can track and dodge or block. It really depends on your mental state of mind if motion appears to be crazy, blurry fast or slow enough to watch.
Slashdot Mirror
>>There are lots of people with talent that work just as hard that don't succeed - the book tries answer why by examining what else is required, and concludes that circumstance plays a significant part.
It doesn't come off that way. He sort of flippantly says, "Well, of course Bill Joy is smart", but then goes on to minimize his own individual efforts. As I said, it's instructive to think about why Joy and Gates succeeded when other people with equal intelligence, hours of effort, and opportunities succeeded in making billion dollar companies when others didn't.
>>Gladwell is way over-simplifying. 10,000 hours is not something magic.
I've heard the term tossed around in other books and papers.
Personally, my thought is that 'talent' is a modifier to the number of hours to reach expert proficiency in an area. I teach kids martial arts for fun, and there's certainly a difference between kids with how fast they can pick it up. It has to do with a combination of discipline, physical fitness, flexibility, intelligence, and a willingness to learn.
>>Isn't California running out of money
It's not called running out of money.
The new term is "stimulus budget".
Please update your Quickbooks, it changes all red ink to a nice glittery rainbow that doesn't look nearly as ominous.
In a sense, then, he did detect gravity waves. And so he was right in saying "I detected gravity waves". However, he may have been right for the wrong reasons. Science works by interpreting data, and convincing others that your interpretation is correct.
Not necessarily. There's different things under the title of science, and one of them is black-box science, when you're investigating something that you don't know the slightest thing about, and seeing what happens. We don't know exactly how gravity waves should behaves, so reporting that you detected them (even when the math says you shouldn't be able to), *is* valid science. As Feynman said, experiments trump math.
It's pointless unless they can blur the buildings in real life too.
But if they could do that... well, that'd be pretty sweet.
Private Jones: "Sir, incoming terrorists!"
Commander Smith: "Activate cloaking shields! Deploy decoy buildings!"
>>The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Sure, but then you have people like Carnegie, who were able to sell out, and start new a business, and via insight and cunning, form successful businesses over and over. I think Carnegie Steel was his third successful enterprise.
>>Well yeah, but the way the book is described, it sounds a lot to me like a way to excuse not trying at all. "Oh, I'm never going to get my 10,000 hours in because I don't have the good fortune of having a good computer terminal and the societal situation where my skills will be needed."
Actually, Gladwell says just that in an interview with Charlie Rose.
http://www.charlierose.com/view/interview/9855
He surmises that the reason really smart people (people with high IQs) don't do noticeably better than merely smart people (IQs around 120) is that they know how much work it'll take, and choose to not do it. He says they are noticeably happier than the general population, so maybe that's the key.
I finished Outliers last week, and came away with it with the same impression that I get from all of Gladwell's books, which is that it's half insightful, half complete nonsense.
For example, his central thesis is that our heroic model isn't accurate, that Bill Joy and Gates are more the product of their times than anything having to do with their own skills, and that they just happened to be given the necessary 10,000 hours of training before anyone else had access to them, and since they were born at the right time to capitalize on the digital revolution, that's why they're successful.
Personally, I'd flip it around. I'd say, "Sure, training, skill, being born at the right time, and luck in general, are all critical elements of success. But why was it that Joy and Gates became the 'successful' people, when their compatriots, who also had the 10,000 hours of training, early access to computer systems, and were bright and ambitious, did not?"
In other words, Gladwell goes too far in destroying the idea of individual effort in becoming 'successful'. While we might often fail to consider the environment that produced these people, we also have to realize (which Gladwell doesn't) that these guys weren't, by any means, unique in their backgrounds.
I also take some exception with his notion of success, which is to use wealth as a sort of scorecard. I take Benjamin Franklin's point of view on money, which is to say that it's important up to a certain point, and relatively unimportant after that. If you have enough money to do whatever it is you want to do, that's all the money you really need. It's served me pretty well.
Perhaps Gladwell should have dug down a little more on those high IQ people that are "failures" (in the sense that they didn't go out and win Nobels at a significantly higher rate) and figured out why they are indeed happier than the general population, since, in my mind, that is the primary indicator of success.
>>Say it with me: "All models are wrong. Some models are useful"
>>Newtonian physics is technically a less accurate model than Einstein's general relativity
Not in the world of economic models that do forecasting. Models of the physical world in various scientific fields are fine. Models that claim they can predict the future or quantify risk are dangerous. As in, they can destroy billions of dollars of wealth and potentially take out an entire nation's economy with it. Would the current downturn be as serious if we didn't have mortgage backed securities that had "quantified risk"? When people bought into the notion that these securities were low risk, it endangered the entire world economy. Iceland's bank has gone bankrupt.
>>They did not adequately consider the risks they were taking.
They *did* consider the risks they were taking. That's the point - the founders of LTCM had Nobel Laureates on this very subject! Everyone involved in the disaster thought that they had risk tamed by a mathematical model. Then they learned that reality trumps math.
It's especially bad when you model things using a Gaussian: LTCM used a Gaussian model for price movements. Essentially, by their model, large price movements (like what killed them) were near-impossible. IMO, Gaussians should only be used when you're looking at processes that really are the sum of large numbers of random events (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_limit_theorem). It's grossly inappropriate to use them when it's not. Sure, short-term fluctuations in price might actually be adequately modeled by a Gaussian, but just one real life event throwing a monkeywrench into your system, and all of your little arbitrage gains are wiped out overnight.
>>Explain to me what Economics looks like without some sort of a model at some level
I'm not talking about models of how things are, but how things will be (1, 5, 10 years from now). All of them are wrong, and simpler models usually do much better at this stuff than the highly complex Nobel-winning ones.
Greenspan said he'd been in the business of predicting the economic future for 30 years, and had never seen the slightest evidence that people could do it.
>>There is nothing wrong with using a model. Models are good.
Not in economics, they're not. The book Black Swan, which should be read by anyone interested in this topic, says that the hideous lie is that people claim that "they're better than nothing", when, in fact, they're worse than not having any model at all.
The LTC crash was caused by the founders (Nobel Laureates in Economics) having a model to quantify risk. IIRC, they used some sort of guassian model, taking the standard deviation of price movement as "risk". (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-Scholes#Black.E2.80.93Scholes_model) This of course looked good until, quite suddenly, it wasn't and there was an event that their model predicted shouldn't have happened within the lifetime of the universe (that's the problem with using gaussians instead of cauchy curves or other fat-tailed distributions) and the company crashed and burned, and did a lot of collateral damage as well.
From the wikipedia article on LTC (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management): Merrill Lynch observed in its annual reports that mathematical risk models, "may provide a greater sense of security than warranted; therefore, reliance on these models should be limited."
Reminds me of a book I read last month, Rainbows End.
People run around with 3d goggles on that overlays 3d graphics over the real world, for work and fun.
The author lives here in San Diego, so it was fun to hear him talking about people overlaying Terry Pratchett-style graphics over the interstates I drive on all the time.
Reminds me of a story that Keith Marzullo told our class in a graduate level reliability class. This was back in the days of using UUCP to send email, and the vendor that he worked for had just released a "failsafe" product they were very proud of -- essentially, it was a mail router that could detect if a path went down, and would try an alternate router instead. The company touted it as a bulletproof solution.
So they go to a conference, and set up some routers, unplug some of them, etc., and everything is going fine until they ask an audience member for his UUCP address. UUCP addresses are in the form of host1!host2!host3!username, with the routing for the username explicitly specified... the addresses could thus get quite long. In this case, the guy's email address was over the buffer limit the company's routers used.
Guess what happened?
The mail server tried sending an email to the next router in the chain. The router buffer overflowed and crashed. The reliable server than tried another router... and crashed it. It then went through the entire network, and crashed every single one of the nodes, turning a bug that would have been a single point of failure into a total network collapse.
=)
Yeah, one of my favorite stories from UCSD.
>>For your idea to actually be science and not philosophy you'd need a much better grasp of what you're actually saying. Saying something like "we're all constantly entangled" doesn't really mean a lot, since entanglement doesn't occur on a macro-scale.
It means about as much as the "scienfici" theories of consciousness we have from Dennett or Crick. Which is to say, they say it is an "emergent behavior" and then wave their hands frantically, without being able to explain in the slightest how it works, how it emerges, or what the base unit (as it were) of consciousness is.
>>To my knowledge it's never really produced anything approaching science.
Neither has science. That's why the study of consciousness is so much fun. =) We have a mountain of neuroscience papers, and still not the slightest clue how subjective experience could possibly happen.
>>Legitimate question: why is the Libertarian party so marginalized in America?
I voted Libertarian this year, and I did so only because voting for a party that is half pot-smoking hippies was better than voting for Obama or McCain. It's quite an insane party, but I do like Bob Barr (only Republican to vote against a lot of the Bush/1984 laws) more than any of the other candidates.
Some people think that they're marginalized because we don't have an electorial system that supports 3rd party candidates. While that's true to a certain extent, the Libertarian party is still way too whacky to ever win.
The Brain that Changes Itself is a good reference on this.
http://www.normandoidge.com/normandoidge/MAIN.html
>>This is a common practice for software (I think they did the same thing for XP -> Vista); there's really not much to see here.
They said they did, but when I tried to claim the free copy of Vista (I bought an OEM version of XP right before Vista came out) they pretended they'd never heard of the program, or that I didn't qualify or something. (I don't recall, exactly.)
Of course, the silver lining is that this machine is still using XP.
>>Every couple of dozen laps they give you a new streamer, or a thimble of paint, or a sparkly sticker for you to put on your tricycle.
Yeah, that's WoW in a nutshell. I logged on for the first time in ages because I saw that there was some quest that'd put "Elder" in front of your name. Okay, cute, I thought.
Then I looked at the requirements to get it.
(http://www.wowwiki.com/To_Honor_One%27s_Elders)
Then I logged off.
>>If the portion of your brain that's supposed to control your left hand is fried, the sort of thing they were doing in this experiment won't help you.
A neat thing about the brain is its incredible ability to rewire itself in response to changes in usage. The section of your brain dedicated to sight, for example, is used to process sound in blind people. Even sighted people, when deprived of all light, begin remapping their brain in this fashion after about a week or so. When exposed to light again, they literally can't see (or not very well at all) until another week has gone by and the functional map is restored. In the meantime, they 'see sound' and have various other interesting things happen to them.
>>Nothing the R's did will help the situation. It was all just a final golden hand job from the government to the bankers.
Yep.
>>Nothing the D's will do will help the situation. It is all just a final golden hand job from the government to the usual dependents.
Yep.
It was depressing enough that I "threw my vote away" this year and voted Libertarian. Even though I don't agree with them on the drug legalization issue (which is half their platform), they seem like the only party in America that actually wants a smaller government. Used to be the Republicans, sorta, in the Reagan days (if you don't count defense). But with Paulson giving out $800B to his friends in an unauditable unaudited fashion, seeing the democrats criticize said unaccountability, then seeing no senators at all sign up for the accountability committee, and then seeing said democrats pass TARP II as soon as they came into power... well, I'd say that I'd lost my faith in government, but I never really had any to begin with.
>>I see the next killer app as part social networking/part barter network. It will likely be craigslist.
Yeah, today I was joking with my friend about switching to a chicken-based economy. We could pay the president 10 chickens a month, which seems pretty fair to me.
>>If a book is already mentioned, adding it's ISBN is never going to be invalid because of context
Right, and all the edit was was the adding of ISBN numbers to the Hoover article. Nothing else. There was absolutely no excuse for the admin to revert it, nor to do so twice. When I complained on his talk page and linked his reverts, he wrote, "I have no clue what you're talking about." Pfft.
>>It was clear from looking at the history the original author created this article but didn't want *anyone* else editing it
Yeah, essentially I think that he had the article in a state that he liked it, and was automatically reverting any changes at all without even looking at it. I think one of the reverts came in 45 seconds after I added the ISBN numbers in.
>>How much of a problem are the "wiki wars," really?
Basically, on any article where people of differing political persuasions would write it differently, there's probably a wiki war going on. I remember editing the NPR article once, and getting dragged into a revision war where people were adding and removing a reference to Fox News being biased. Supporters of the inclusion said it said NPR looked nonbiased by comparison, opposition said the article was not about Fox News and didn't belong. Ended up getting dragged all the way up to the arbitration committee because neither side would compromise on it.
Stupid? Meaningless? Oh, yes. Very.
Seeing that happen on three or four articles I made edits to and added to my watchlist, I basically gave up on trying to contribute to Wikipedia. Actually, the final straw was when I added ISBN numbers to J. Edgar Hoover's wikipedia page -- I noticed they were missing, so I looked them up and put them in. How controversial is that? It got reverted by a wikipedia admin (JayJG) with an ideological axe to grind. Twice.
That was basically it for me. If ISBN numbers aren't politically correct, Wikipedia is nothing more than a ideological cesspool.
>>Maybe they just want to run Quake 3 raytracing at 5fps. I mean who wouldnt?
NVIDIA - for all your sphere and chessboard needs!
Yeah, it's definitely a race to the bottom.
I'm also not fond of widescreen monitors since a fullscreen shape is easier to perceive in its entirety, which is important in FPS games. If you have to move your eyes or neck around to check out the action... it's bad times. They also don't make LCD fullscreen monitors bigger than 19" (at least, they don't at Frys or Best Buy), and since I won't buy a monitor I can't test extensively, it basically means I'm going to be using this 4 year old Sony until the day it dies.
>>CRT is still the best display technology we have. It's really a shame that it's being abandoned, just because panel displays are smaller.
I abandoned my CRT television. It weighed 300 pounds. I gave it to the first guys that were willing to haul it out of my 2nd storey apartment. It was also 4:3 and didn't handle widescreen correctly, even though it was a pretty expensive (originally) Sony XBR.
Replaced it with a LCD television - much higher quality images, and it accurately reproduces pixel-for-pixel the signal coming out of the box.
While people are nostalgic for CRTs, I've yet to see one that can draw a pixel-perfect line like an LCD can do by default.
In martial arts, I train to slow down the world, so to speak, when fighting.
A kick that appears to be a blur to most people I can track and dodge or block. It really depends on your mental state of mind if motion appears to be crazy, blurry fast or slow enough to watch.