So what? If you have a point, but you're being a dick about it, people are far less likely to notice. And given Ingo at least *tried* to be civil, the least Con could do is return the favour, rather than immediately becoming an offensive asshole. For example, he could've responded with:
"Well, recall, the purpose of the scheduler is to enhance desktop performance. Thus, I've designed it to favour low latency over high throughput, and as a result, it's not really surprising that, in throughput-related tests, which I consider more of a server-style workload, BFS performs less well as compared to other schedulers."
No no. He opted for the far more dickish:
"Do you know what a normal desktop PC looks like? No, a more realistic question based on what you chose to benchmark to prove your point would be: Do you know what normal people actually do on them?"
Honestly, WTF? And he's surprised when he attracts hostility? Please.
Con: Step 1 to becoming a decent human being: try not being an asshole. No, really.
And that's great if your goal is to experience shitty phone calls, shitty pictures, shitty video quality, and shitty audio quality. But if your goal is to perform one of those tasks well (like, say, web browsing), then it makes sense to sacrifice convenience for quality.
'course, that isn't most people's goal. But, again, given that, one shouldn't be surprised when someone doesn't understand a philosophy where it is.
Dude, we're in a world of shitty phones that are also shitty music players, shitty still cameras, shitty video cameras, and shitty PDAs. And you're surprised that people don't understand the idea of a well-designed, single-function device?
For the past few years I have browsed the web with hundreds of tabs at a time. Firefox tends to crash after 50 tabs. Opera tends to crash at about 450 tabs.
No offense, but that's truly idiotic. Seriously. As the doctor once said, if it hurts to do that, *don't do that*.
Honestly, let me introduce you to two concepts: Bookmarks, and Read It Later.
If over 50% of their 2 million employees have no health insurance and average an income of just $1100 per month, that puts almost their entire work force near poverty levels relying on all us other wealthier taxpayers to foot the bill for their medical expenses.
Uhuh. And if there was no Walmart? They might *not having a job at all*. Furthermore, for all those people who *don't* work at Walmart while living on a low income, Walmart has made it possible for them to fund a lifestyle they couldn't otherwise affort, which is a *good* thing. But, of course, you're too blinded in your irrational hatred to consider that Walmart *might* just have some positive effects on the economy.
That is kind of a callous position considering many have little choice because WalMart put local competitors out of business through their cutthroat pricing and megachain distribution agreements.
Uhuh. And those local competitors? a) You have absolutely no evidence proving they would've paid more or provided a better health plan... and in the current economy, the precise opposite would've likely been true, with local businesses firing people or putting them part-time, and cutting or reducing health benefits b) Wouldn't hire as many people as Walmart does, c) Charged higher prices, thus making it more difficult for those poor people you're so worried about to actually support their standard of living.
Thus, in the end, for a local person living near the poverty line, at worst, Walmart is basically a wash... the trade off is a possibly lower salary for definitely lower prices.
I know you're apathetic to the situation because well hell, this is just the way capitalism works right?
Apathetic? No, of course not. I happen to believe that Walmart, while not a perfect corporate citizen, is a net positive force for the economy. They hire millions and they act to stifle inflation by keeping prices down. For the poor that you seem so very deeply concerned with, that's a positive thing, not a negative one.
I originally went with a point-by-point attempt at at rebuttal, but I'm not sure there's much point, so I'll just go with my conclusion:
To sum it up, Walmart is effectively the devil of all corporation
Pure, unadulterated BS. To sum it up, Walmart is a perfectly average corporation. I'm sorry, you didn't cite a single point that is uniquely evil or uniquely Walmart. Sexism? Hiring illegal immigrants? Outsourcing labour? Jebus, you could be describing half the corporations in the US.
Meanwhile, Walmart a) hires millions of people, providing jobs that might otherwise be completely unavailable, and b) has been a driving force in keeping inflation down, allowing the poor to achieve a standard of living they would otherwise be unable to afford.
Look, I'm no fan of US corporations in general. And the statement "Walmart is a perfectly average corporation" is no complement. But your comments are hyperbolic at best. The simple fact is that Walmart is, just like every other US corporation, a profit driven entity that works to enrich it's shareholders. But it's hardly "evil", let alone the pinnacle of it.
The cumulative actions sustain a great evil drain on the US economy, decimating local economies in small towns across the country.
And they do this... how? You mean by providing competition that local businesses can't compete with? Well, I have one thing to say to that: tough shit. That's capitalism in action. What would you rather they do? Deliberately inflate prices to protect those precious little mom-and-pops?
For all the good the free market has done, WalMart is the yardstick for measuring where capitalism goes horribly wrong.
memorizing tables of precalculated numbers does not help you learn math.
And I never said it did. If you got your head out of your ass and listened for a second, you'd see that.
My point is simple: Memorizing things like multiplication tables is *useful*. Is it "math"? No. It's memorization, obviously. But it's still useful information to have buried in the hindbrain where it's quickly and easily accessible when *actually* doing math.
It might make you more efficient at a single task
Precisely. I see you actually *do* get it, you just don't want to admit it. The whole damn point is to provide students with tools they can then later apply. And yes, believe it or not, multiplication tables are, in fact, a pretty useful tool.
Bullshit. it only hurts your understanding of the principles to focus on the data
Oh please, if anything is bullshit, it's that statement. Music has been taught for centuries by having students memorize the scales, despite the fact that they *could* always build them up from first principles, and I don't see anyone claiming that musicians are worse for it.
Hell, by that logic, no one should memorize the periodic table. Or learn spelling or grammar by rote. Hell, the entirety of lower-level physics and engineering is rote memorization of equations, so apparently that's horrible, too, right? No, of course not. That's absurd. Much like your statement.
Indeed. In fact, the 1,000 person sample size is a well-established sweet spot for statistical sampling of a population. Of course, in addition to the munging they did to the final results (rounding up to account for self-reporting errors), there may be issues with how the sample was taken (ie, was it truly a random sample of net-connected households). But on the face of it, I agree, I see very little wrong with their methodology.
it's just adding *really fast*. there is no reason to make kids memorize lists of numbers. If you can memorize the list, you can figure it out.
That's just ridiculous. Of course there is: it makes multiplication faster. One of the most useful skills one can have is the ability to quickly perform mathematical calculations in one's head. Memorizing the multiplication tables from 1 to 10, at minimum, makes that *far* easier, not only because you can easily do basic multiplication rapidly, but also because more complex calculations are easily done by breaking them down into simple ones that you've already memorized, after which you can assemble the result.
In short: your supposition is ridiculous. Teaching the multiplication tables is not teaching multiplication. In that you are correct. But you're horribly mistaken in your belief that teaching the multiplication tables isn't, in and of itself, a useful thing.
a magnetic field is a relationship between a particle and its environment. it begins at the particle, it loops around, it ends on the other side of the particle
Mmm... can we say "begging the question"? You assume a magnetic field like must "[begin] at the particle" and "[end] on the other side of the particle", and then use that as proof that a field line must begin and end at a particle, thereby disproving the existence of magnetic monopoles.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to provide your credentials if you want me to accept that you know more about magnetism than four separate physics research teams, two with articles in Science and two more with draft articles on arXiv.org, all of which show evidence of the existence of magnetic monopoles.
Christ, not to mention Paul fucking Dirac.
circletimessquare, you have one again exceeded yourself at demonstrating your truly incredible arrogance and stupidity.
Well, there's one *very* fundamental difference, here: when people sing at a Karaoke bar, they're still *singing*. ie, they're playing their instrument, even if it's not very well. But Rock Band? Guitar Hero? Like you say, they're simply rhythm games. Just tapping keys to a beat. That's it.
As such, the OP is absolutely right. There's nothing remotely creative at all about playing Rock Band. Of course, there's nothing at all wrong with that.
What I would like to see is a set of sockets on the motherboard, mapped into the main memory address space (not PCI), a physical switch on the board to make them read only and software in the BIOS to make them look like a bootable disk.
The one issue, here, is one of address space. Unless people do a wholesale migration to 64-bit, it won't be possible to simply map the address space of such a device into memory.
The sky is blue because the gases and particles in the atmosphere scatter blue light more effectively than other wavelengths. See this NASA page for more details.
You might want to study whether the sun is bright or if the sky is blue.
Umm... scientists *have* studied those things. Hell, the fact that the sky is blue only makes sense if you understand something about optics, refraction, and so forth, not to mention the composition of the earth's atmosphere. And the fact that the sun is "bright" is something solar scientists, astronomers, and nuclear physicists have been studying since those fields were invented.
In short: Just because you consider something "common sense" doesn't mean it's silly to study. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Studying the edge cases reveals a lot more about the underlying dynamics of a system than studying its average cases.
No offense, but that's BS, plain and simple.:) By that argument, we shouldn't bother studying the Sun. As far as stars go it's extremely average, so why bother, right? Same goes with weather. No point studying regular ol' air masses. We should only study tornados and hurricanes, right?
No, of course not. That's absurd. After all, you can't completely understand something if you don't understand the average *in addition to* the extremes.
So here's the ISP algorithm: Measure a flow, find its nearest cluster, guess that behind the encryption is traffic of the protocol belonging in that cluster. If bittorrent, kill.
Yes, that's a lovely algorithm. Might even work, too. But do you have *any* evidence that it was used to generate the results of this study? Yeah, didn't think so. In which case, the OP's point is still very much valid.
No, he means libre, as in the 'L' in the idiotic acronym FLOSS. Specifically, he means free as in free access to the source, not free as in zero cost. ie, specifically not just "gratis".
Well, TBH, I'm actually looking forward to a few sequels. Iron Man 2, in particular, could be very good. After all, Spider-Man 2 was superior to the first movie in every way, and they were both excellent films. Same goes with X-Men 1 and 2 (pity 3 sucked balls). Hell, last I checked, most people were pretty happed with the Dark Knight sequel (yes yes, I realize that's DC, not Marvel, but the point remains).
In short: Sequels aren't necessarily evil. Heck, even ongoing franchises aren't necessarily evil... though studios have an unfortunate history of sucking the life out of a franchise after the second film.
Ahh, the ol' "It didn't work for you because *you* didn't understand it" argument. The same one trotted out by every snakeoil salesman, con-man, religious leader, and self-proclaimed expert since the dawn of time...
Honestly, I gotta tell ya, all this jargon sounds like the software development equivalent of Scientology... then again, I suppose it wouldn't be unfair to compare Agile followers to religious true-believers.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, he has a point.
So what? If you have a point, but you're being a dick about it, people are far less likely to notice. And given Ingo at least *tried* to be civil, the least Con could do is return the favour, rather than immediately becoming an offensive asshole. For example, he could've responded with:
"Well, recall, the purpose of the scheduler is to enhance desktop performance. Thus, I've designed it to favour low latency over high throughput, and as a result, it's not really surprising that, in throughput-related tests, which I consider more of a server-style workload, BFS performs less well as compared to other schedulers."
No no. He opted for the far more dickish:
"Do you know what a normal desktop PC looks like? No, a more realistic question based on what you chose to benchmark to prove your point would be: Do you know what normal people actually do on them?"
Honestly, WTF? And he's surprised when he attracts hostility? Please.
Con: Step 1 to becoming a decent human being: try not being an asshole. No, really.
And that's great if your goal is to experience shitty phone calls, shitty pictures, shitty video quality, and shitty audio quality. But if your goal is to perform one of those tasks well (like, say, web browsing), then it makes sense to sacrifice convenience for quality.
'course, that isn't most people's goal. But, again, given that, one shouldn't be surprised when someone doesn't understand a philosophy where it is.
Dude, we're in a world of shitty phones that are also shitty music players, shitty still cameras, shitty video cameras, and shitty PDAs. And you're surprised that people don't understand the idea of a well-designed, single-function device?
For the past few years I have browsed the web with hundreds of tabs at a time. Firefox tends to crash after 50 tabs. Opera tends to crash at about 450 tabs.
No offense, but that's truly idiotic. Seriously. As the doctor once said, if it hurts to do that, *don't do that*.
Honestly, let me introduce you to two concepts: Bookmarks, and Read It Later.
If over 50% of their 2 million employees have no health insurance and average an income of just $1100 per month, that puts almost their entire work force near poverty levels relying on all us other wealthier taxpayers to foot the bill for their medical expenses.
Uhuh. And if there was no Walmart? They might *not having a job at all*. Furthermore, for all those people who *don't* work at Walmart while living on a low income, Walmart has made it possible for them to fund a lifestyle they couldn't otherwise affort, which is a *good* thing. But, of course, you're too blinded in your irrational hatred to consider that Walmart *might* just have some positive effects on the economy.
That is kind of a callous position considering many have little choice because WalMart put local competitors out of business through their cutthroat pricing and megachain distribution agreements.
Uhuh. And those local competitors? a) You have absolutely no evidence proving they would've paid more or provided a better health plan... and in the current economy, the precise opposite would've likely been true, with local businesses firing people or putting them part-time, and cutting or reducing health benefits b) Wouldn't hire as many people as Walmart does, c) Charged higher prices, thus making it more difficult for those poor people you're so worried about to actually support their standard of living.
Thus, in the end, for a local person living near the poverty line, at worst, Walmart is basically a wash... the trade off is a possibly lower salary for definitely lower prices.
I know you're apathetic to the situation because well hell, this is just the way capitalism works right?
Apathetic? No, of course not. I happen to believe that Walmart, while not a perfect corporate citizen, is a net positive force for the economy. They hire millions and they act to stifle inflation by keeping prices down. For the poor that you seem so very deeply concerned with, that's a positive thing, not a negative one.
I originally went with a point-by-point attempt at at rebuttal, but I'm not sure there's much point, so I'll just go with my conclusion:
To sum it up, Walmart is effectively the devil of all corporation
Pure, unadulterated BS. To sum it up, Walmart is a perfectly average corporation. I'm sorry, you didn't cite a single point that is uniquely evil or uniquely Walmart. Sexism? Hiring illegal immigrants? Outsourcing labour? Jebus, you could be describing half the corporations in the US.
Meanwhile, Walmart a) hires millions of people, providing jobs that might otherwise be completely unavailable, and b) has been a driving force in keeping inflation down, allowing the poor to achieve a standard of living they would otherwise be unable to afford.
Look, I'm no fan of US corporations in general. And the statement "Walmart is a perfectly average corporation" is no complement. But your comments are hyperbolic at best. The simple fact is that Walmart is, just like every other US corporation, a profit driven entity that works to enrich it's shareholders. But it's hardly "evil", let alone the pinnacle of it.
The cumulative actions sustain a great evil drain on the US economy, decimating local economies in small towns across the country.
And they do this... how? You mean by providing competition that local businesses can't compete with? Well, I have one thing to say to that: tough shit. That's capitalism in action. What would you rather they do? Deliberately inflate prices to protect those precious little mom-and-pops?
For all the good the free market has done, WalMart is the yardstick for measuring where capitalism goes horribly wrong.
Please, tell me: why?
memorizing tables of precalculated numbers does not help you learn math.
And I never said it did. If you got your head out of your ass and listened for a second, you'd see that.
My point is simple: Memorizing things like multiplication tables is *useful*. Is it "math"? No. It's memorization, obviously. But it's still useful information to have buried in the hindbrain where it's quickly and easily accessible when *actually* doing math.
It might make you more efficient at a single task
Precisely. I see you actually *do* get it, you just don't want to admit it. The whole damn point is to provide students with tools they can then later apply. And yes, believe it or not, multiplication tables are, in fact, a pretty useful tool.
Bullshit. it only hurts your understanding of the principles to focus on the data
Oh please, if anything is bullshit, it's that statement. Music has been taught for centuries by having students memorize the scales, despite the fact that they *could* always build them up from first principles, and I don't see anyone claiming that musicians are worse for it.
Hell, by that logic, no one should memorize the periodic table. Or learn spelling or grammar by rote. Hell, the entirety of lower-level physics and engineering is rote memorization of equations, so apparently that's horrible, too, right? No, of course not. That's absurd. Much like your statement.
Indeed. In fact, the 1,000 person sample size is a well-established sweet spot for statistical sampling of a population. Of course, in addition to the munging they did to the final results (rounding up to account for self-reporting errors), there may be issues with how the sample was taken (ie, was it truly a random sample of net-connected households). But on the face of it, I agree, I see very little wrong with their methodology.
it's just adding *really fast*. there is no reason to make kids memorize lists of numbers. If you can memorize the list, you can figure it out.
That's just ridiculous. Of course there is: it makes multiplication faster. One of the most useful skills one can have is the ability to quickly perform mathematical calculations in one's head. Memorizing the multiplication tables from 1 to 10, at minimum, makes that *far* easier, not only because you can easily do basic multiplication rapidly, but also because more complex calculations are easily done by breaking them down into simple ones that you've already memorized, after which you can assemble the result.
In short: your supposition is ridiculous. Teaching the multiplication tables is not teaching multiplication. In that you are correct. But you're horribly mistaken in your belief that teaching the multiplication tables isn't, in and of itself, a useful thing.
a magnetic field is a relationship between a particle and its environment. it begins at the particle, it loops around, it ends on the other side of the particle
Mmm... can we say "begging the question"? You assume a magnetic field like must "[begin] at the particle" and "[end] on the other side of the particle", and then use that as proof that a field line must begin and end at a particle, thereby disproving the existence of magnetic monopoles.
I'm sorry, but you're going to have to provide your credentials if you want me to accept that you know more about magnetism than four separate physics research teams, two with articles in Science and two more with draft articles on arXiv.org, all of which show evidence of the existence of magnetic monopoles.
Christ, not to mention Paul fucking Dirac.
circletimessquare, you have one again exceeded yourself at demonstrating your truly incredible arrogance and stupidity.
Well, there's one *very* fundamental difference, here: when people sing at a Karaoke bar, they're still *singing*. ie, they're playing their instrument, even if it's not very well. But Rock Band? Guitar Hero? Like you say, they're simply rhythm games. Just tapping keys to a beat. That's it.
As such, the OP is absolutely right. There's nothing remotely creative at all about playing Rock Band. Of course, there's nothing at all wrong with that.
What I would like to see is a set of sockets on the motherboard, mapped into the main memory address space (not PCI), a physical switch on the board to make them read only and software in the BIOS to make them look like a bootable disk.
The one issue, here, is one of address space. Unless people do a wholesale migration to 64-bit, it won't be possible to simply map the address space of such a device into memory.
Uh. Not even close. :)
The sky is blue because the gases and particles in the atmosphere scatter blue light more effectively than other wavelengths. See this NASA page for more details.
You might want to study whether the sun is bright or if the sky is blue.
Umm... scientists *have* studied those things. Hell, the fact that the sky is blue only makes sense if you understand something about optics, refraction, and so forth, not to mention the composition of the earth's atmosphere. And the fact that the sun is "bright" is something solar scientists, astronomers, and nuclear physicists have been studying since those fields were invented.
In short: Just because you consider something "common sense" doesn't mean it's silly to study. Quite the opposite, in fact.
Studying the edge cases reveals a lot more about the underlying dynamics of a system than studying its average cases.
No offense, but that's BS, plain and simple. :) By that argument, we shouldn't bother studying the Sun. As far as stars go it's extremely average, so why bother, right? Same goes with weather. No point studying regular ol' air masses. We should only study tornados and hurricanes, right?
No, of course not. That's absurd. After all, you can't completely understand something if you don't understand the average *in addition to* the extremes.
weapons that cause ... phosphorus weapons
Jebus... now we have weapons *creating weapons*? That can't be good...
So here's the ISP algorithm: Measure a flow, find its nearest cluster, guess that behind the encryption is traffic of the protocol belonging in that cluster. If bittorrent, kill.
Yes, that's a lovely algorithm. Might even work, too. But do you have *any* evidence that it was used to generate the results of this study? Yeah, didn't think so. In which case, the OP's point is still very much valid.
Huh. So, Firefox includes an RSS reader, and it's bloat. Opera includes RSS *and* email, and it's the shit? Interesting...
No, he means libre, as in the 'L' in the idiotic acronym FLOSS. Specifically, he means free as in free access to the source, not free as in zero cost. ie, specifically not just "gratis".
Well, TBH, I'm actually looking forward to a few sequels. Iron Man 2, in particular, could be very good. After all, Spider-Man 2 was superior to the first movie in every way, and they were both excellent films. Same goes with X-Men 1 and 2 (pity 3 sucked balls). Hell, last I checked, most people were pretty happed with the Dark Knight sequel (yes yes, I realize that's DC, not Marvel, but the point remains).
In short: Sequels aren't necessarily evil. Heck, even ongoing franchises aren't necessarily evil... though studios have an unfortunate history of sucking the life out of a franchise after the second film.
Ahh, the ol' "It didn't work for you because *you* didn't understand it" argument. The same one trotted out by every snakeoil salesman, con-man, religious leader, and self-proclaimed expert since the dawn of time...
Honestly, I gotta tell ya, all this jargon sounds like the software development equivalent of Scientology... then again, I suppose it wouldn't be unfair to compare Agile followers to religious true-believers.