You are right. I was wrong. I spoke in ignorence. According to the Wiki article on Duodecimal:
Germanic languages have special words for 11 and 12, such as eleven and twelve in English, which are often misinterpreted as vestiges of a duodecimal system. However, they are considered to come from Proto-Germanic *ainlif and *twalif (respectively one left and two left), both of which were decimal.
I also concede your point that he was referring to positional notation and the concept of zero.
The thing is, decimal didn't make everything simpler and easier to calculate and open up our eyes. It feels that way, because you've spent you're whole life using it and everything else feels weird and foreign. Base 10 feels natural because we have 10 fingers and 10 toes (among other reasons).
But you can see the evidence of our history of using base 12 from our words for numbers (this is the reason eleven and twelve aren't firsteen and seconteen). Base 12 is also very natural because it has so many factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12), making it easy to do calculations in our head. This is also why much of our U.S. measuring system is base 12 (12 inches in a foot, and other conversions using factors of 12). You can also see evidence of base 60 (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour). Computers use base 2, because for computers, binary math more natural than decimal math.
My point is say that our numbering system is a constructed convenience and (as far as I know) no forms of math depend on the decimal numbering system. It is merely a convenience (and I think one could probably argue, the least convenient convenience) to have everyone agree to use a single base for calculations.
And to close with a nitpick, according to Wikipedia at least, Roman numerals are decimal. The numerals for 5 are a shorthand, but don't represent the base unit.
Perhaps the fact that Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds of the last century (if not the most brilliant), has accepted the possibility of a creator until nearly 70, speaks to this not being a matter of superstition. His rational thinking led him to wait for a strong theory that provided actual evidence for a creation without a creator.
How does this compare with young people's enjoyment of negative vs. positive storeis about old people? Because unless such a study shows that young people enjoy reading positive stories about older people more than negative stories, I don't see that this study has shown anything surprising or interesting. In fact, I don't see how this wouldn't boil down to "People in Group A enjoy reading negative stories about opposite Group B". I bet Democratics enjoy reading negative stories about Republics, Atheists about Christians, Children about Parents, Men about Women, Gamers about Non-Gamers, Nerds about Non-Nerds, Straights about Gays, I could go on.
I'm sure yours is a very popular opinion within this community, but I think it is unrealistic and impractical. It's quite reasonable for an average person to fail to understand the magic that can happen in the Internet. And the Internet certainly doesn't behave in an easily understandable, intuitive manner. We are the literate elite of the modern age and the average person is part of the illiterate, unwashed masses. The average person is no more stupid or incapable of intelligent thought than those unfortunate enough to be in the lower class in the middle ages.
Why berate them for failing to understand the subtleties of cookies and caches simply because you happen to have an inhuman interest in the technical depths of your computer? I consider myself to be pretty computer literate and I would be pretty freaked (and disturbed) to find an ad following me around.
I've tried the experiment of flushing cookies and cache and I don't know about you, but I found it to make the browsing experience completely unusable. I went right back to allowing all cookies. There's a reason cookies were developed as a feature of browsing and it's because they offer a useful service. If you disable its use for evil, you also disable its use for good.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (referenced through dictionary.reference.com), the term facebook originated at least as early as 1983 for a directory listing names and headshots among U.S. college students.
So I'm not being a curmudgeonly old jackass when I think this generation is stupid.
I think there's still a chance you are. Is it not more likely that rather than this generation being stupid, it is just being taught poorly by your generation? The article talks about the method students use to solve an equation. Why would a whole generation of students use a different method (and the same method) than the previous generation unless they were taught that method.
India announced a $10 house and a sub-$100 space shuttle. This sounds like the $2500 car (that doesn't exist) and the $10 laptop (that doesn't exist). It seems to be working--they keep ending up in the news. Maybe we could hold off until one of these products exists?
Normally, I'd joke that you're asking a rhetorical question, but in this case I have to agree. This makes no sense to me either. It made sense for movie theaters to push 3D, because they are in constant competition with home theaters to provide a "unique" experience that will convince you that you should leave your home for two hours to spend $12 to watch a movie while eating your $6 bag of popcorn and drink your $5 soda.
It would also make sense if they had pushed 3D at the end of the blu-ray lifecycle because I suspect with blu-ray, we're getting close to the "it's good" level where people won't be as tempted to replace their entire library with the lastest medium.
Maybe it is as has been said by others here, driven by TV manufacturers who are greedy to reproduce the same rush of income they had from HD.
This is admittedly totally of topic, but I thought it was interesting that as a word-for-word transcript (but probably excluding um's) how many times both speakers used "so" and "you know". These are two very articulate adults, one of them a regular radio host.
You can't entirely blame the developers. Developers don't write code based on it in being the most elegant thing to do (at least not in commercial software). Why would they spend extra time on code that users don't even realize they want? For that matter, given how much Microsoft waffles on particular products even benefiting from 64-bit (I remember them justifying 64-bit didn't make sense for Office when they released Office 2007 because it actually made some things *slower*), why would the rest of the development community go to 64-bit when there isn't a real demand for it?.
But one thing that really gets to me about these RPGs is all the damned talking. Talk to the bartender, ask him 20 questions, 15 of which are getting at the same thing only worded slightly differently. Interview the bar patron, ask 20 questions, 15 of which rehash what the bartender said. Interview the barmaid, ask 20 questions.... interview the angry drunkard.... move to the next building and interview 5 more people....
I don't know if that's meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but come on, there's a reason there's the word "roleplaying" in roleplaying game.
I've read this twice (once when it first appeared and once now), and I admit, I still don't understand what is being said. He keeps saying square pixels were a foolish idea. What would have been better that could have been invented at the time? Round pixels? Triangular? Oblong? How would any of those have been better given an equal size, spacing, etc?
Or his he apologizing for storing one bit (or equal bits) per pixel rather than something like run-length encoding? And his description of Los Angelos weather reporting; isn't that just run-length encoding? That's already been invented. Is he saying he can make images appear to have more pixels-per-unit than they actually have? In the examples, it just looks like he's using bigger pixels.
I'm not saying Kirsch is blowing smoke out his ass, I'm just saying the article makes it seem like he is. It really does an injustice to whatever his message really is. Maybe he is just a poor communicater. I'd assume it was just me, but so many comments here and on the original article seem to agree.
Not sure how well researched the studies referred to in the Wiki article on Working time are, but they suggest a 4-day, 32-hour week are even more productive than a 40-hour week when you take enough factors into account (e.g. worker's improved education, worker's improved heatlh, etc).
These comments here could all be waves. Facebook could be based on waves. Forums as well. You would still use the same interfaces as you do now, but you'd have the added benefit of a standard API to access that information, the way email works today.
Not only that, but the big "paradigm shift" I see with Wave is that you don't have the multiple products (even if from the same vendor and "integrated") you typically do. How many times, in a work context at least, do you start a conversation in email, then get going so rapidly that email is silly, then switch to IM, then want to make it available to a group of people to comment on and refine on an ongoing basis (forum)?
How much easier to have one technology that offers those features in one context. The "wave" takes on the characteristics of whatever is most appropriate.
If this fails, it won't be because this wasn't a good idea. It will fail because they can't get the technology right, or they can't market it because it's too new a way of thinking, or because other vendors build competing protocols and confuse the market.
You're missing the point here. Microsoft is not a hardware company, unlike Apple, which is both hardware and software. Microsoft is a software company that invests in hardware research to create Proofs-Of-Concept to convince other hardware companies to build the hardware that Microsoft's NextProduct will depend on for cool-whiz-bang features.
When Microsoft sells a mouse, it's because it's a five-button mouse before five-button mice have caught on and it's not even because it's the first five-button mouse, it's because it defines the specs that Microsoft wants all the other hardware vendors to follow, not because it's innovative but because it makes the hardware work consistently on its OS. When Microsoft sells a keyboard, it's because it wants hardware makers to add that useless Windows key.
I think your analogy is missing a few things. You do not get web-based advertising unless you go to a web site that has that advertising.
If you signed up to get text messages from a news texting service and that news service sent you non-news messages 50% of the time, your complaint would be with that news service, not with AT&T. If you called your bank (long distance on your dime) and they went on and on about time-shares instead of the conversation you wanted, your complaint would be with your bank, not with AT&T.
You have a choice of which web sites you go to. Yes, it's an inconvenience (and maybe even unreasonable to expect) to choose not to visit web sites with advertising, but it is your choice. Your complaint with the advertising is with the site hosting the advertising. You can't receive unsolicited advertising on your data plan without you having initiated the receipt of the advertising.
I mean, they must not have been, because they weren't one of the "few... operating systems for which there are already millions of applications that work" such as "Gmail" and "Facebook."
Seriously, did he think no one would notice that he was saying that Chrome OS is one of the few operating systems that can run web applications?
Interesting that you used elipses on only one word – the word that qualifies operating systems in a way that excludes Windows.
Chrome OS is one of the few future [emphasis mine] operating systems for which there are already millions of applications that work
Pichai is addressing the question of won't a new operating system need to have all it's application rewritten. The answer is that unlike something like the iPhone OS or Android, you don't need to write all new software. He is obviously not saying that Windows and Mac OS and Linux can't run web applications.
The fact you excluded the one word that would make all that clear (and knowingly did it given the elipses) seems to indicate you knew this. One does not use elipses to fundamentally change the meaning of a quote. Revisionist indeed!
You've failed to note one thing: The 6% of the playerbase they are elected by are the 6% that CARE. If the others cared, they could vote, too. They CHOSE not to.
Just like real life voting. And just like real life voting, the people who care are not necessarily the people who need the benefits of accurate representation the most.
Right. Because Google hires geniouses while Microsoft hires stupid noobs.
all they are doing is 'me too' for a long while now.
Why hello there, Captain Obvious.
Why does everyone act surprised or disgusted or flabberghasted that a huge successful company could maintain its success by building on other peoples' innovations? Either their business model is stupid, and their stock will tank and their sales will drop off and they will go bankrupt, or their business model works. I'm not saying I like their business model, or agree with it, or think it's healthy or beneficial to society. I'm just saying it's not such a surprise that this works for them.
Slashdot Mirror
Sounds like WikiLeaks is leaking.
You are right. I was wrong. I spoke in ignorence. According to the Wiki article on Duodecimal:
Germanic languages have special words for 11 and 12, such as eleven and twelve in English, which are often misinterpreted as vestiges of a duodecimal system. However, they are considered to come from Proto-Germanic *ainlif and *twalif (respectively one left and two left), both of which were decimal.
I also concede your point that he was referring to positional notation and the concept of zero.
The thing is, decimal didn't make everything simpler and easier to calculate and open up our eyes. It feels that way, because you've spent you're whole life using it and everything else feels weird and foreign. Base 10 feels natural because we have 10 fingers and 10 toes (among other reasons).
But you can see the evidence of our history of using base 12 from our words for numbers (this is the reason eleven and twelve aren't firsteen and seconteen). Base 12 is also very natural because it has so many factors (1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 12), making it easy to do calculations in our head. This is also why much of our U.S. measuring system is base 12 (12 inches in a foot, and other conversions using factors of 12). You can also see evidence of base 60 (60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour). Computers use base 2, because for computers, binary math more natural than decimal math.
My point is say that our numbering system is a constructed convenience and (as far as I know) no forms of math depend on the decimal numbering system. It is merely a convenience (and I think one could probably argue, the least convenient convenience) to have everyone agree to use a single base for calculations.
And to close with a nitpick, according to Wikipedia at least, Roman numerals are decimal. The numerals for 5 are a shorthand, but don't represent the base unit.
Perhaps the fact that Stephen Hawking, one of the most brilliant minds of the last century (if not the most brilliant), has accepted the possibility of a creator until nearly 70, speaks to this not being a matter of superstition. His rational thinking led him to wait for a strong theory that provided actual evidence for a creation without a creator.
How does this compare with young people's enjoyment of negative vs. positive storeis about old people? Because unless such a study shows that young people enjoy reading positive stories about older people more than negative stories, I don't see that this study has shown anything surprising or interesting. In fact, I don't see how this wouldn't boil down to "People in Group A enjoy reading negative stories about opposite Group B". I bet Democratics enjoy reading negative stories about Republics, Atheists about Christians, Children about Parents, Men about Women, Gamers about Non-Gamers, Nerds about Non-Nerds, Straights about Gays, I could go on.
I'm sure yours is a very popular opinion within this community, but I think it is unrealistic and impractical. It's quite reasonable for an average person to fail to understand the magic that can happen in the Internet. And the Internet certainly doesn't behave in an easily understandable, intuitive manner. We are the literate elite of the modern age and the average person is part of the illiterate, unwashed masses. The average person is no more stupid or incapable of intelligent thought than those unfortunate enough to be in the lower class in the middle ages.
Why berate them for failing to understand the subtleties of cookies and caches simply because you happen to have an inhuman interest in the technical depths of your computer? I consider myself to be pretty computer literate and I would be pretty freaked (and disturbed) to find an ad following me around.
I've tried the experiment of flushing cookies and cache and I don't know about you, but I found it to make the browsing experience completely unusable. I went right back to allowing all cookies. There's a reason cookies were developed as a feature of browsing and it's because they offer a useful service. If you disable its use for evil, you also disable its use for good.
According to the Online Etymology Dictionary (referenced through dictionary.reference.com), the term facebook originated at least as early as 1983 for a directory listing names and headshots among U.S. college students.
What search are you doing that doesn't return relevant results when using the Advanced Search page?
So I'm not being a curmudgeonly old jackass when I think this generation is stupid.
I think there's still a chance you are. Is it not more likely that rather than this generation being stupid, it is just being taught poorly by your generation? The article talks about the method students use to solve an equation. Why would a whole generation of students use a different method (and the same method) than the previous generation unless they were taught that method.
India announced a $10 house and a sub-$100 space shuttle. This sounds like the $2500 car (that doesn't exist) and the $10 laptop (that doesn't exist). It seems to be working--they keep ending up in the news. Maybe we could hold off until one of these products exists?
Normally, I'd joke that you're asking a rhetorical question, but in this case I have to agree. This makes no sense to me either. It made sense for movie theaters to push 3D, because they are in constant competition with home theaters to provide a "unique" experience that will convince you that you should leave your home for two hours to spend $12 to watch a movie while eating your $6 bag of popcorn and drink your $5 soda.
It would also make sense if they had pushed 3D at the end of the blu-ray lifecycle because I suspect with blu-ray, we're getting close to the "it's good" level where people won't be as tempted to replace their entire library with the lastest medium.
Maybe it is as has been said by others here, driven by TV manufacturers who are greedy to reproduce the same rush of income they had from HD.
This is admittedly totally of topic, but I thought it was interesting that as a word-for-word transcript (but probably excluding um's) how many times both speakers used "so" and "you know". These are two very articulate adults, one of them a regular radio host.
You can't entirely blame the developers. Developers don't write code based on it in being the most elegant thing to do (at least not in commercial software). Why would they spend extra time on code that users don't even realize they want? For that matter, given how much Microsoft waffles on particular products even benefiting from 64-bit (I remember them justifying 64-bit didn't make sense for Office when they released Office 2007 because it actually made some things *slower*), why would the rest of the development community go to 64-bit when there isn't a real demand for it?.
But one thing that really gets to me about these RPGs is all the damned talking. Talk to the bartender, ask him 20 questions, 15 of which are getting at the same thing only worded slightly differently. Interview the bar patron, ask 20 questions, 15 of which rehash what the bartender said. Interview the barmaid, ask 20 questions.... interview the angry drunkard.... move to the next building and interview 5 more people....
I don't know if that's meant to be tongue-in-cheek, but come on, there's a reason there's the word "roleplaying" in roleplaying game.
I've read this twice (once when it first appeared and once now), and I admit, I still don't understand what is being said. He keeps saying square pixels were a foolish idea. What would have been better that could have been invented at the time? Round pixels? Triangular? Oblong? How would any of those have been better given an equal size, spacing, etc?
Or his he apologizing for storing one bit (or equal bits) per pixel rather than something like run-length encoding? And his description of Los Angelos weather reporting; isn't that just run-length encoding? That's already been invented. Is he saying he can make images appear to have more pixels-per-unit than they actually have? In the examples, it just looks like he's using bigger pixels.
I'm not saying Kirsch is blowing smoke out his ass, I'm just saying the article makes it seem like he is. It really does an injustice to whatever his message really is. Maybe he is just a poor communicater. I'd assume it was just me, but so many comments here and on the original article seem to agree.
Not sure how well researched the studies referred to in the Wiki article on Working time are, but they suggest a 4-day, 32-hour week are even more productive than a 40-hour week when you take enough factors into account (e.g. worker's improved education, worker's improved heatlh, etc).
These comments here could all be waves. Facebook could be based on waves. Forums as well. You would still use the same interfaces as you do now, but you'd have the added benefit of a standard API to access that information, the way email works today.
Not only that, but the big "paradigm shift" I see with Wave is that you don't have the multiple products (even if from the same vendor and "integrated") you typically do. How many times, in a work context at least, do you start a conversation in email, then get going so rapidly that email is silly, then switch to IM, then want to make it available to a group of people to comment on and refine on an ongoing basis (forum)?
How much easier to have one technology that offers those features in one context. The "wave" takes on the characteristics of whatever is most appropriate.
If this fails, it won't be because this wasn't a good idea. It will fail because they can't get the technology right, or they can't market it because it's too new a way of thinking, or because other vendors build competing protocols and confuse the market.
You're missing the point here. Microsoft is not a hardware company, unlike Apple, which is both hardware and software. Microsoft is a software company that invests in hardware research to create Proofs-Of-Concept to convince other hardware companies to build the hardware that Microsoft's NextProduct will depend on for cool-whiz-bang features.
When Microsoft sells a mouse, it's because it's a five-button mouse before five-button mice have caught on and it's not even because it's the first five-button mouse, it's because it defines the specs that Microsoft wants all the other hardware vendors to follow, not because it's innovative but because it makes the hardware work consistently on its OS. When Microsoft sells a keyboard, it's because it wants hardware makers to add that useless Windows key.
I think your analogy is missing a few things. You do not get web-based advertising unless you go to a web site that has that advertising.
If you signed up to get text messages from a news texting service and that news service sent you non-news messages 50% of the time, your complaint would be with that news service, not with AT&T. If you called your bank (long distance on your dime) and they went on and on about time-shares instead of the conversation you wanted, your complaint would be with your bank, not with AT&T.
You have a choice of which web sites you go to. Yes, it's an inconvenience (and maybe even unreasonable to expect) to choose not to visit web sites with advertising, but it is your choice. Your complaint with the advertising is with the site hosting the advertising. You can't receive unsolicited advertising on your data plan without you having initiated the receipt of the advertising.
I mean, they must not have been, because they weren't one of the "few... operating systems for which there are already millions of applications that work" such as "Gmail" and "Facebook."
Seriously, did he think no one would notice that he was saying that Chrome OS is one of the few operating systems that can run web applications?
Interesting that you used elipses on only one word – the word that qualifies operating systems in a way that excludes Windows.
Chrome OS is one of the few future [emphasis mine] operating systems for which there are already millions of applications that work
Pichai is addressing the question of won't a new operating system need to have all it's application rewritten. The answer is that unlike something like the iPhone OS or Android, you don't need to write all new software. He is obviously not saying that Windows and Mac OS and Linux can't run web applications.
The fact you excluded the one word that would make all that clear (and knowingly did it given the elipses) seems to indicate you knew this. One does not use elipses to fundamentally change the meaning of a quote. Revisionist indeed!
Bernd Marienfeldt updated his blog saying Apple is now able to reproduce the problem and believes they know the cause, but no timing on fix release.
You've failed to note one thing: The 6% of the playerbase they are elected by are the 6% that CARE. If the others cared, they could vote, too. They CHOSE not to.
Just like real life voting. And just like real life voting, the people who care are not necessarily the people who need the benefits of accurate representation the most.
I hear you can use Bing to google for Slashdot articles.
where were they up until google did it ?
Waiting for Google to do it.
they realized to do this just now ?
Right. Because Google hires geniouses while Microsoft hires stupid noobs.
all they are doing is 'me too' for a long while now.
Why hello there, Captain Obvious.
Why does everyone act surprised or disgusted or flabberghasted that a huge successful company could maintain its success by building on other peoples' innovations? Either their business model is stupid, and their stock will tank and their sales will drop off and they will go bankrupt, or their business model works. I'm not saying I like their business model, or agree with it, or think it's healthy or beneficial to society. I'm just saying it's not such a surprise that this works for them.
We just have to work on the flying and furry part and we're all set!