I no longer believe that talent vs effort makes a lot of sense, to me being hardworking and dedicated -is- a kind of talent.
Besides that though, I really don't think you understood the parent poster's point. You took his concept to an extreme and argued against that extreme.
It'd be like me saying to you that I hope you never become a teacher because you'd tell a kid with no legs that he can grow up to be the world's greatest soccer player if he just tries hard enough.
I went an elementary school in the midwest (mid 80s) that never gave out homework, unless you were sick and missing school. Nearly every kid I knew at that school was into some creative or productive thing on their own time.
When I moved to California, where mass homework was king, virtually -no- kids had creative pastimes. The few that did generally did poorly in school as a result and were being led to think they were failures.
The world does realize it needs practical problem solvers. I think it's just the education system that doesn't seem to get it.
Know anybody that works in education? It seems like that for many it's a locked system where credits/degrees/age directly relate to compensation. I suppose it makes sense they'd place such a huge emphasis on their own production values. Fundamentally I think that by living with that philosophy, it poisons their ability to teach people who won't be going into sectors with such rigid systems.
Just because linux is running lots of critical systems doesn't make it high profile. High profile means that people are aware of it. Most people don't care to know the specifics behind critical systems, usually such things become high profile only after something has gone wrong.
I would say that I am mostly in the second camp, but when I really think about it, I'm actually just at one of the levels of fractal recursion within this concept.
I'm a relatively high level programmer that works best directly with people who are relatively computer inclined, but overall business inclined. I have a knack to relate to their fundamental needs when they have a hard time expressing it, and I've been lucky to be able to express my limitations and abilities to their level.
That basically means -they- are the abstraction from the highest levels of the business to me, and -I- am the abstraction from the lower levels of computing to them. This concept basically extends in both directions away from me in a fractal manner.
That is not to say that I work directly with the people at the lower levels though, I've been so fortunate that they worked for me. Linux, perl, apache, gnu.... I am basically the target -user- for so many of these things, I am basically in the first camp overall when all the things I use are taken into consideration.
To even attempt to contemplate all the levels of abstraction that are involved in this line of thinking... Try to really imagine it, all the interdependencies between people in order to operate this modern world.
These sorts of 'there are 2 kinds of people....' classifications that are actually fractal levels of abstraction exist in many dimensions. Teachers.. Doctors.. Construction Workers.. Firemen.. Think about how the personality differences that veer people into the things they do, versus the people that do things that support them, versus things that are seemingly unrelated, but if you gave it a little thought, you'd probably only be a few degrees of seperation to a meaningful dependancy.
Actually he's right... If you are one of the last people to download a torrent, it's just going to sit under 1.0 forever because you had nobody to upload to.
I suspect then they'd want you to keep the tracker active on your system forever until you reached 1.0, even more lame then would be the fact that people who want to seed past 1.0 would be proportionally making it more difficult for you to achieve 1.0.
I'd say that that 1.0 rule would be fair if it said you shouldn't quit out of a torrent when there are more peers then seeds and you aren't yet at 1.0.
People have been selling copies of newly released movies on the streets of cities worldwide since VHS became popular, I don't think the means by which they acquire the movie is really important when you consider they were able to get their hands on it all along.
There's of course no way to know how many people are making hard copies for their friends, but I highly doubt that there is any kind of geometric spread from there, the vast majority of bittorrent downloaders are probably a physical end point.
If the spread were meaningful after the download, then bittorrent would never have needed to exist for this kind of distribution, people would be doing it physically already.
The only half-way ok reconcilation I could make is that Anakin is so tramuatized by the fact he had similar visions of his mother's death that he really doesn't have that sort of logic at his disposal.
Also more importantly I guess is the fact that the sith lord apparently can enter into his head to some extent (he received a telepathic message at one point) so the visions were probably planted. That opens the door for additional subtle mind control.
Sometimes audience participation to the suspension of disbelief is neccesary:)
I don't know, that woulda been cool but I think the emotional impact of anakin killing the 'younglings' (what an annoyingly redundant word) is greater.
Seeing Darth Vader doing it would have just been 'eh, yea, figures'
If you want to feel slightly less pointless about your existence, tell yourself that if the amusements and such didn't exist, you would be less likely to care about having a job and contributing work and therefore your finances to society, thus contributing to somebody else's chances for food and all the things that make reproduction more likely, such as a place to live, medicine, and porn.
So basically you don't even need to breed to contribute to the goal of species survival, infact I'm sure a lot of breeding has been counterproductive in this regard, and especially counterproductive where happiness is a goal.
Without happiness, we'd have virtually no incentive to do anything at all. The fact that we are capable of suicide is a profound indicator of how important the way we feel is to survival.
The thing to me that most sticks out in what I've read about Aspergers is having difficulty with reading peoples' facial expressions and body language.
I can't ever remember a a point where a smiling, frowing or scowling person didn't have an immediate and clear emotional impact on me. Just picture the way babies usually respond when people smile at them.
I felt that it was pretty much straight across the board. Poor HR people, poor management, poor IT personal, poor sales people, poor marketting...
Ultimately though all responsibility does fall on management, and within almost all groups, there were usually a few people that really did know what they were doing would keep things working and moving forward. Because of the fact that management can't really survive that way, I agree with you that poor management is a much bigger issue.
There is the distinct possibility that the big boxes had so many units because the small stores sold more PSPs at launch since they are the place people go for preorders.
Probably an infinite number of people can preorder up to a certain date and that store will likely be guaranteed every unit it needs unless the demand is absolutely ridiculous. After that happens, the big box that doesn't take preorders appears to have a massive stock because all the launch day people already have theirs.
Where I live, the California bay area, every single store sold out it's PSP launch stock and usually it's next couple shipments after that. The big boxes were cleaned out, so if you wanted it on the first day, a small store preorder would be the way to go.
Sadly, I can think of at least clear benefit from "the government" owning my ISP, in that they have little financial incentive to harvest and sell information about my browsing and buying habits as so many ISPs do.
I'm fairly certain the government has a quite a few even less anonymous reasons to be interested in peoples' online habits. Unless that information was specifically protected by law, all kinds of research and law enforcement groups would be interested in getting at it.
I agree that if the Mac at least made a decent showing in the game department that it would increase my likliness of buying one by about ten fold, but I think a cash incentive program could never make sense.
It'd have to be a big enough incentive to practically pay for the development costs of the mac version since the reason companies don't develop their games for the mac is because it's just not nearly as profitable to spend time on doing so.
Kinda like how theatre companies close down theatres that are technically profitable, but hurt the bottom line by making the overall company not look -as- profitable in ratio to it's investments. The more a company looks like it's doing with less, the more investments it will get. Porting games to the mac would have a similar effect.
I think the best thing the mac could ever hope to do is get in on the bottom floor of some future console and share APIs. I can't really imagine which of the current consoles would want to cut into it's own hardware sales that way?
Unless the office is out of control and people are playing games all the time, I really don't think it makes sense to say Macs are more productive inherently simply because they have fewer games.
Based on my experience, in your typical office environment, the web and instant messaging are responsible for around 95% of time wasted, and games would be around 0.2%.
I know the occasional office will have gaming problems with a subset of people, but I havn't seen anything bad since the height of the boom.
The key is the -interaction- the individual will directly have with one of the actors. Being broadcast to is not interaction. I'm guessing this is going to be somewhere in a gray area inbetween, where mostly you'll be talked -at- by these actors, with the main difference they are actually there and can do things.
What'd be particularly goofy though is if they are there, but multipled across instances and can't really interact one on one at all, then it'd be a bit more like live television. The prospects of what that'd be like from the actor's perspective would be awesome, if they could see each instance of themselves simultaneously. It'd be kind of like the architect's room with all the different neos reacting differently to what the architect is saying.
I don't think the point is that he has to be an authority, just a voice within the community. They ask people off the street all the time what they think about things and it's interesting because you get all their eclectic views.
The author of the story, at the bottom, says that he is basically just gathering data across as many kinds of people as possible. Basically this story is one of those samples.
This is really a questionaire, and he sort of explains that at the bottom. I think what he wants to do is ask these same repetitive canned questions to a lot of people and -then- attempt to do something insightful or interesting with the aggregate.
Personally I think, as a stand alone piece, it was terrible. It felt horribly contrived, but I could see how as a piece in a much larger body of information, it would be interesting.
It'd also probably still be very annoying, to have all the repetitive common sense answers stacked up next to the extremist answers but with no dialogue inbetween them. It'd be basically just be a written manifestation of what we already all feel on the issue, a massive disconnect.
What's particularly ironic is that his success mostly stems from getting caught. Had he not failed at the thing he is such an expert on, he'd never have been considered an expert.
Wait, how does not being able to buy cheap singles result in not being able to purchase cds from non-mainstream artists?
Have you been in a music store lately? There's thousands of non-mainstream artists, you aren't being force fed anything.
You're also saying that you like some songs from the big breasted, tiny brained, diva wannabes... If such music is force fed garbage from the industry, how did you end up liking it?
Slashdot Mirror
I no longer believe that talent vs effort makes a lot of sense, to me being hardworking and dedicated -is- a kind of talent.
Besides that though, I really don't think you understood the parent poster's point. You took his concept to an extreme and argued against that extreme.
It'd be like me saying to you that I hope you never become a teacher because you'd tell a kid with no legs that he can grow up to be the world's greatest soccer player if he just tries hard enough.
The dreamcast really was a great system with some great games.. I wish Capcom's Powerstone had found its away to the other consoles.
What were the nintendo failure products?
Virtual boy is the easy one. umm.. what else?
I went an elementary school in the midwest (mid 80s) that never gave out homework, unless you were sick and missing school. Nearly every kid I knew at that school was into some creative or productive thing on their own time.
When I moved to California, where mass homework was king, virtually -no- kids had creative pastimes. The few that did generally did poorly in school as a result and were being led to think they were failures.
The world does realize it needs practical problem solvers. I think it's just the education system that doesn't seem to get it.
Know anybody that works in education? It seems like that for many it's a locked system where credits/degrees/age directly relate to compensation. I suppose it makes sense they'd place such a huge emphasis on their own production values. Fundamentally I think that by living with that philosophy, it poisons their ability to teach people who won't be going into sectors with such rigid systems.
Just because linux is running lots of critical systems doesn't make it high profile. High profile means that people are aware of it. Most people don't care to know the specifics behind critical systems, usually such things become high profile only after something has gone wrong.
I would say that I am mostly in the second camp, but when I really think about it, I'm actually just at one of the levels of fractal recursion within this concept.
I'm a relatively high level programmer that works best directly with people who are relatively computer inclined, but overall business inclined. I have a knack to relate to their fundamental needs when they have a hard time expressing it, and I've been lucky to be able to express my limitations and abilities to their level.
That basically means -they- are the abstraction from the highest levels of the business to me, and -I- am the abstraction from the lower levels of computing to them. This concept basically extends in both directions away from me in a fractal manner.
That is not to say that I work directly with the people at the lower levels though, I've been so fortunate that they worked for me. Linux, perl, apache, gnu.... I am basically the target -user- for so many of these things, I am basically in the first camp overall when all the things I use are taken into consideration.
To even attempt to contemplate all the levels of abstraction that are involved in this line of thinking... Try to really imagine it, all the interdependencies between people in order to operate this modern world.
These sorts of 'there are 2 kinds of people....' classifications that are actually fractal levels of abstraction exist in many dimensions. Teachers.. Doctors.. Construction Workers.. Firemen.. Think about how the personality differences that veer people into the things they do, versus the people that do things that support them, versus things that are seemingly unrelated, but if you gave it a little thought, you'd probably only be a few degrees of seperation to a meaningful dependancy.
An AI strong enough to replace non-trivial support will probably require a pyschologist from time to time.
Luckily an AI strong enough to replace pyschologists has existed for quite a long time.
Actually he's right... If you are one of the last people to download a torrent, it's just going to sit under 1.0 forever because you had nobody to upload to.
I suspect then they'd want you to keep the tracker active on your system forever until you reached 1.0, even more lame then would be the fact that people who want to seed past 1.0 would be proportionally making it more difficult for you to achieve 1.0.
I'd say that that 1.0 rule would be fair if it said you shouldn't quit out of a torrent when there are more peers then seeds and you aren't yet at 1.0.
People have been selling copies of newly released movies on the streets of cities worldwide since VHS became popular, I don't think the means by which they acquire the movie is really important when you consider they were able to get their hands on it all along.
There's of course no way to know how many people are making hard copies for their friends, but I highly doubt that there is any kind of geometric spread from there, the vast majority of bittorrent downloaders are probably a physical end point.
If the spread were meaningful after the download, then bittorrent would never have needed to exist for this kind of distribution, people would be doing it physically already.
Agreed, that annoyed me the entire movie as well.
:)
The only half-way ok reconcilation I could make is that Anakin is so tramuatized by the fact he had similar visions of his mother's death that he really doesn't have that sort of logic at his disposal.
Also more importantly I guess is the fact that the sith lord apparently can enter into his head to some extent (he received a telepathic message at one point) so the visions were probably planted. That opens the door for additional subtle mind control.
Sometimes audience participation to the suspension of disbelief is neccesary
I don't know, that woulda been cool but I think the emotional impact of anakin killing the 'younglings' (what an annoyingly redundant word) is greater.
Seeing Darth Vader doing it would have just been 'eh, yea, figures'
If you want to feel slightly less pointless about your existence, tell yourself that if the amusements and such didn't exist, you would be less likely to care about having a job and contributing work and therefore your finances to society, thus contributing to somebody else's chances for food and all the things that make reproduction more likely, such as a place to live, medicine, and porn.
So basically you don't even need to breed to contribute to the goal of species survival, infact I'm sure a lot of breeding has been counterproductive in this regard, and especially counterproductive where happiness is a goal.
Without happiness, we'd have virtually no incentive to do anything at all. The fact that we are capable of suicide is a profound indicator of how important the way we feel is to survival.
The thing to me that most sticks out in what I've read about Aspergers is having difficulty with reading peoples' facial expressions and body language.
I can't ever remember a a point where a smiling, frowing or scowling person didn't have an immediate and clear emotional impact on me. Just picture the way babies usually respond when people smile at them.
It's miles per gallon, not hours per gallon, the time has no affect on economy, except for the fact that time is money...
I felt that it was pretty much straight across the board. Poor HR people, poor management, poor IT personal, poor sales people, poor marketting...
Ultimately though all responsibility does fall on management, and within almost all groups, there were usually a few people that really did know what they were doing would keep things working and moving forward. Because of the fact that management can't really survive that way, I agree with you that poor management is a much bigger issue.
There is the distinct possibility that the big boxes had so many units because the small stores sold more PSPs at launch since they are the place people go for preorders.
Probably an infinite number of people can preorder up to a certain date and that store will likely be guaranteed every unit it needs unless the demand is absolutely ridiculous. After that happens, the big box that doesn't take preorders appears to have a massive stock because all the launch day people already have theirs.
Where I live, the California bay area, every single store sold out it's PSP launch stock and usually it's next couple shipments after that. The big boxes were cleaned out, so if you wanted it on the first day, a small store preorder would be the way to go.
Sadly, I can think of at least clear benefit from "the government" owning my ISP, in that they have little financial incentive to harvest and sell information about my browsing and buying habits as so many ISPs do.
I'm fairly certain the government has a quite a few even less anonymous reasons to be interested in peoples' online habits. Unless that information was specifically protected by law, all kinds of research and law enforcement groups would be interested in getting at it.
I agree that if the Mac at least made a decent showing in the game department that it would increase my likliness of buying one by about ten fold, but I think a cash incentive program could never make sense.
It'd have to be a big enough incentive to practically pay for the development costs of the mac version since the reason companies don't develop their games for the mac is because it's just not nearly as profitable to spend time on doing so.
Kinda like how theatre companies close down theatres that are technically profitable, but hurt the bottom line by making the overall company not look -as- profitable in ratio to it's investments. The more a company looks like it's doing with less, the more investments it will get. Porting games to the mac would have a similar effect.
I think the best thing the mac could ever hope to do is get in on the bottom floor of some future console and share APIs. I can't really imagine which of the current consoles would want to cut into it's own hardware sales that way?
Unless the office is out of control and people are playing games all the time, I really don't think it makes sense to say Macs are more productive inherently simply because they have fewer games.
Based on my experience, in your typical office environment, the web and instant messaging are responsible for around 95% of time wasted, and games would be around 0.2%.
I know the occasional office will have gaming problems with a subset of people, but I havn't seen anything bad since the height of the boom.
The key is the -interaction- the individual will directly have with one of the actors. Being broadcast to is not interaction. I'm guessing this is going to be somewhere in a gray area inbetween, where mostly you'll be talked -at- by these actors, with the main difference they are actually there and can do things.
What'd be particularly goofy though is if they are there, but multipled across instances and can't really interact one on one at all, then it'd be a bit more like live television. The prospects of what that'd be like from the actor's perspective would be awesome, if they could see each instance of themselves simultaneously. It'd be kind of like the architect's room with all the different neos reacting differently to what the architect is saying.
"It prints a concatenated list of prime numbers between 2 and 100 with no delimiter."
:) The -l command line option gave him implicit delimiter behavior with print.
I'm only gunna correct that tiny little bit
I don't think the point is that he has to be an authority, just a voice within the community. They ask people off the street all the time what they think about things and it's interesting because you get all their eclectic views.
The author of the story, at the bottom, says that he is basically just gathering data across as many kinds of people as possible. Basically this story is one of those samples.
This is really a questionaire, and he sort of explains that at the bottom. I think what he wants to do is ask these same repetitive canned questions to a lot of people and -then- attempt to do something insightful or interesting with the aggregate.
Personally I think, as a stand alone piece, it was terrible. It felt horribly contrived, but I could see how as a piece in a much larger body of information, it would be interesting.
It'd also probably still be very annoying, to have all the repetitive common sense answers stacked up next to the extremist answers but with no dialogue inbetween them. It'd be basically just be a written manifestation of what we already all feel on the issue, a massive disconnect.
What's particularly ironic is that his success mostly stems from getting caught. Had he not failed at the thing he is such an expert on, he'd never have been considered an expert.
Wait, how does not being able to buy cheap singles result in not being able to purchase cds from non-mainstream artists?
Have you been in a music store lately? There's thousands of non-mainstream artists, you aren't being force fed anything.
You're also saying that you like some songs from the big breasted, tiny brained, diva wannabes... If such music is force fed garbage from the industry, how did you end up liking it?