Dude, I just burned an hour trying to understand the Tuesday Boy problem since I've never heard of it until now. I have two contributions.
1) It's best understood spatially. There's a hit on Google that emphasizes that although two different boys can both be born on Tuesday, the "hit" only counts for one in terms of odds since they must co exist. That's why the answer is close to 50% but not quite 50%.
2) Implicitly distributable attribution. If I say I have a random person here of unknown gender, you immediately think, hey, 50/50 male/female (apologies to the LGBT community). In the question, you read born on a Tuesday. You could interpret the date as meaningless or implicitly distributable. If it had the same social gravity as gender, you could easily see how the solution above applies. But if you think date has nothing to do with birth rates but somehow isn't random, then the answer could very well be anything. 0, 100, 73, i.e. there may be a date (Friday!) where mad babies are born.
It's really hard to chew through at first but those two nuggets have comforted me in settling down on the Internet's correct answer of 13/27.
Have you ever considered maybe such programming would be necessary to its survival or existence? The alternative may be having no Discovery Channel whatsoever.
I'm not saying it's right or in the spirit of the channel. Just food for thought. Nothing is so cut and dry. "High-quality educational programming or bust!"
Showing the user something he probably doesn't need* to see undermines what could have been an automagical experience.
* for varying definitions of need. Slashdot users, in all their technical glory, sure love talking about edge cases that wouldn't apply to the vast majority of people out there...
I find it absolutely disturbing that you don't think "user experience" is an important factor here. Everything Apple does is driven by providing a superior user experience, at any cost, even at the cost of openness.
Openness doesn't really matter that much to normal, average, non-technical users, of which there are vastly more of than very vocal minority here on Slashdot. Compare to a fantastic "user experience" which provides immediate value to everyone.
It's because they *did* reinvent the smartphone industry. When before the iPhone were large, mobile touchscreens in vogue? Which phone before the iPhone had as much social cache? (Maybe the RAZR) Who before the iPhone had an ecosystem as vibrant as the current App Store?
No phone/mobile computing device before the iPhone had "tricorder-like" qualities.
I would hardly call Chrome immature. It has had since its inception features that other browsers are just dying to imitate now. Per process tabs, plug-in sandboxing, site specific browsing, silent updates... And it came out of left field! It's a fast browser popular among the technically literate. And it has its own marketing campaign.
Totally. I asked my dad, what is it that motivates his fellow ethnic friends to be millionaires and he said, they know what the old country is like and they are never, ever going back.*
* In terms of lifestyle. I've heard of lots of ethnic families who make it big in America and retire back home where they can live like kings. Point is, they aren't at the same quality of life when they were younger.
It auto updates silently. You don't "need" to update unless you know a new version is out and you don't have it. You'll get it, eventually and seamlessly.
DYK Google Chrome has the highest adoption rate of latest versions than any other browser? Their ninja update model is so successful even the Mozilla team is considering changing their updates to be just as unobtrusive.
But it's genius marketing. Look how much time we're all spending talking about Apple and the iPad. Plus, the whole history doesn't matter. Only what people remember matters, top of the stack so to speak. "Now we can buy unlimited iPads! We're so fortunate!" Look how they turned a negative into a positive. Like it's not so much the absolute value of the marketing that matters as it is the delta or positive slope.
It's just like that Chris Rock joke. "I take of my kids." That's what you're supposed to be doing, you idiot!
You are so out of touch if you think the two are even remotely similar. One focuses on blogging, the other focuses on being an actual social network. One is vastly more popular than the other. They are not interchangeable.
It's an absolute travesty that you need to point out things like "have good hygiene". Everyone should have good hygiene. If you don't, you should probably kill yourself.
This can't work for everyone. Some developers are horrible, horrible people. Take a stereotypical nerd for example. Poor hygiene, poor social skills, completely out of touch with reality.
If this describes you, consider not being yourself. Although typically people that are described like this probably aren't self-aware of such things.
A lot of nerds value things like talent, transparency, and being tacit when there are no errors. And also are averse to things like small talk, self-promotion, and various shades of lying. These are all great qualities. But they are only valuable to nerds.
If you really want to get in good with someone, and you'll have to, since a work environment is a multi-faceted beast, you'll need to play their game. Am I saying you need to sacrifice the values that make you who you are? Absolutely not. Will you require some tweaking? Probably.
For instance, small talk. If you don't ping people every so often, even if you don't need them for anything work related, you will lose out on social capital. It's good to keep everyone in your sphere, so to speak, so that it's easier to ask them for things as you need. Having a purely work-related relationship with someone is so dry and inorganic. I'm not saying you have to be BFFs. But you can cultivate a personable in-work casual relationship with someone to smooth out those moments that you need them.
I'm sure a lot of other comments in this thread will elaborate on the things I've mentioned. In general, it's about working on your soft skills. To put it in RPG terms, you are an INT hero who graduated from the top of their class. You know all the spells. But guess what, this is a STR and AGI challenge and you need to work on your charisma to rope in some help. No one is taking your INT skills away from you. But you'll have to work extra hard on navigating this new game called office politics that nerds typically aren't used to, exposed to, or want in their lives.
Wrong in one sense. But also lucrative, easy to use, great for business, and free publicity. Really hard to juggle this whole "wrong" thing with so many pluses on the other side of the equation. It isn't black and white. There are many forces at play and right now playing this No-Flash hand has lots of benefits.
Re:Confusion Over Source of Ire
on
Flash Is Not a Right
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
The outcry is not that Apple is revoking a right but simply that they are deliberately crippling a product.
How are they crippling the product? People seem to have this assumption that open is better. I say no. It's just like a gated community. There's a barrier of entry higher than zero. It's to keep the riff raff out.
Oh man, Apple must be doing so badly. Check out the wild, wild success of all those open devices. Get real. Openness is not the end all be all of these types of devices. Is openness important? Sure, to some people. But it's probably not THAT important to the many other people that are willing to spend money.
Why don't YOU prove that the lack of openness correlates to the lack of quality, since that's what you and many other people seem to be implying.
Slowing down the web? Are you serious? The iPhone got us out of that WAP garbage and now people know what real mobile browsing is. And, HTML5 video is on the way. Native playback with native acceleration and native controls!
I don't know what fantasy land you live in where you don't consider any of this progress.
In my opinion, the type of task matters. And I think it has to do with what parts of your brain are used. For example, I can code/refactor and listen to a podcast just fine simultaneously. But if it's two comprehension-based tasks, like reading AND listening, I can't do them. Or lately I've even noticed I can't mentally elaborate on a thought and listen to a podcast at the same time.
The coding and listening thing seems very left brain/right brain to me.
Also, to the poster that mentioned musical multi-tasking... That's really interesting! But I think it helps that we as musicians have been training since a very young age to accept that level of multi-tasking, so the things that become muscle memory do. Fingering, breathing, sight reading, etc. Really the only thing that matters by show time is watching the conductor, the rest should be on semi auto pilot.
They can't/because/ they're big. Sure they can do a lot of things from a resource perspective. But inertia is holding them back. Organizational constraints. More people have to want change and agree to change than a small, agile company.
If it acted like "every other browser out there", it would be just as sucky as "every other browser out there". As the other child poster has colorfully mentioned, you seem to be out of touch with how many people really know what HTML is. Or maybe we have varying definitions for the words "everyone" or "technical".
Re:It's not a computer, it's a living-room applian
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I've never liked being strapped to a desk. Don't get me wrong, I love technology through and through, but having to sit down to harness it is a real bummer. It's not good for your physical health to be sitting down so much! At least with the iPad there's a larger chance of tapping into some tech from a more natural position like on the couch or at the kitchen table. Or even at the john.
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, I just burned an hour trying to understand the Tuesday Boy problem since I've never heard of it until now. I have two contributions.
1) It's best understood spatially. There's a hit on Google that emphasizes that although two different boys can both be born on Tuesday, the "hit" only counts for one in terms of odds since they must co exist. That's why the answer is close to 50% but not quite 50%.
2) Implicitly distributable attribution. If I say I have a random person here of unknown gender, you immediately think, hey, 50/50 male/female (apologies to the LGBT community). In the question, you read born on a Tuesday. You could interpret the date as meaningless or implicitly distributable. If it had the same social gravity as gender, you could easily see how the solution above applies. But if you think date has nothing to do with birth rates but somehow isn't random, then the answer could very well be anything. 0, 100, 73, i.e. there may be a date (Friday!) where mad babies are born.
It's really hard to chew through at first but those two nuggets have comforted me in settling down on the Internet's correct answer of 13/27.
That's kind of stupid. If I told you, hey buddy, you have free rights. And then locked you in a cage. Then you said, hey, where are my free rights?
I'm not limiting your rights, just your access to them. WTF?
Rights quality = access * amount of rights
If your access is limited, the quality of your rightship is also limited.
Have you ever considered maybe such programming would be necessary to its survival or existence? The alternative may be having no Discovery Channel whatsoever.
I'm not saying it's right or in the spirit of the channel. Just food for thought. Nothing is so cut and dry. "High-quality educational programming or bust!"
Showing the user something he probably doesn't need* to see undermines what could have been an automagical experience.
* for varying definitions of need. Slashdot users, in all their technical glory, sure love talking about edge cases that wouldn't apply to the vast majority of people out there...
I find it absolutely disturbing that you don't think "user experience" is an important factor here. Everything Apple does is driven by providing a superior user experience, at any cost, even at the cost of openness.
Openness doesn't really matter that much to normal, average, non-technical users, of which there are vastly more of than very vocal minority here on Slashdot. Compare to a fantastic "user experience" which provides immediate value to everyone.
Learning to write the word Perl instead of PERL would go a long way in adding to your credibility.
Be sure to check out JAVA, PYTHON, RUBY, and LUA...
It's because they *did* reinvent the smartphone industry. When before the iPhone were large, mobile touchscreens in vogue? Which phone before the iPhone had as much social cache? (Maybe the RAZR) Who before the iPhone had an ecosystem as vibrant as the current App Store?
No phone/mobile computing device before the iPhone had "tricorder-like" qualities.
Where are you that you need to keep an eye on your bandwidth?
There are many types of queries (typically those that go beyond CRUD operations or are a little meta) that cannot be parameterized.
I would hardly call Chrome immature. It has had since its inception features that other browsers are just dying to imitate now. Per process tabs, plug-in sandboxing, site specific browsing, silent updates... And it came out of left field! It's a fast browser popular among the technically literate. And it has its own marketing campaign.
Not immature.
Totally. I asked my dad, what is it that motivates his fellow ethnic friends to be millionaires and he said, they know what the old country is like and they are never, ever going back.*
* In terms of lifestyle. I've heard of lots of ethnic families who make it big in America and retire back home where they can live like kings. Point is, they aren't at the same quality of life when they were younger.
It auto updates silently. You don't "need" to update unless you know a new version is out and you don't have it. You'll get it, eventually and seamlessly.
DYK Google Chrome has the highest adoption rate of latest versions than any other browser? Their ninja update model is so successful even the Mozilla team is considering changing their updates to be just as unobtrusive.
But it's genius marketing. Look how much time we're all spending talking about Apple and the iPad. Plus, the whole history doesn't matter. Only what people remember matters, top of the stack so to speak. "Now we can buy unlimited iPads! We're so fortunate!" Look how they turned a negative into a positive. Like it's not so much the absolute value of the marketing that matters as it is the delta or positive slope.
It's just like that Chris Rock joke. "I take of my kids." That's what you're supposed to be doing, you idiot!
You are so out of touch if you think the two are even remotely similar. One focuses on blogging, the other focuses on being an actual social network. One is vastly more popular than the other. They are not interchangeable.
It's an absolute travesty that you need to point out things like "have good hygiene". Everyone should have good hygiene. If you don't, you should probably kill yourself.
This can't work for everyone. Some developers are horrible, horrible people. Take a stereotypical nerd for example. Poor hygiene, poor social skills, completely out of touch with reality.
If this describes you, consider not being yourself. Although typically people that are described like this probably aren't self-aware of such things.
A lot of nerds value things like talent, transparency, and being tacit when there are no errors. And also are averse to things like small talk, self-promotion, and various shades of lying. These are all great qualities. But they are only valuable to nerds.
If you really want to get in good with someone, and you'll have to, since a work environment is a multi-faceted beast, you'll need to play their game. Am I saying you need to sacrifice the values that make you who you are? Absolutely not. Will you require some tweaking? Probably.
For instance, small talk. If you don't ping people every so often, even if you don't need them for anything work related, you will lose out on social capital. It's good to keep everyone in your sphere, so to speak, so that it's easier to ask them for things as you need. Having a purely work-related relationship with someone is so dry and inorganic. I'm not saying you have to be BFFs. But you can cultivate a personable in-work casual relationship with someone to smooth out those moments that you need them.
I'm sure a lot of other comments in this thread will elaborate on the things I've mentioned. In general, it's about working on your soft skills. To put it in RPG terms, you are an INT hero who graduated from the top of their class. You know all the spells. But guess what, this is a STR and AGI challenge and you need to work on your charisma to rope in some help. No one is taking your INT skills away from you. But you'll have to work extra hard on navigating this new game called office politics that nerds typically aren't used to, exposed to, or want in their lives.
Good luck and tread cautiously!
Wrong in one sense. But also lucrative, easy to use, great for business, and free publicity. Really hard to juggle this whole "wrong" thing with so many pluses on the other side of the equation. It isn't black and white. There are many forces at play and right now playing this No-Flash hand has lots of benefits.
How are they crippling the product? People seem to have this assumption that open is better. I say no. It's just like a gated community. There's a barrier of entry higher than zero. It's to keep the riff raff out.
Oh man, Apple must be doing so badly. Check out the wild, wild success of all those open devices. Get real. Openness is not the end all be all of these types of devices. Is openness important? Sure, to some people. But it's probably not THAT important to the many other people that are willing to spend money.
Why don't YOU prove that the lack of openness correlates to the lack of quality, since that's what you and many other people seem to be implying.
Slowing down the web? Are you serious? The iPhone got us out of that WAP garbage and now people know what real mobile browsing is. And, HTML5 video is on the way. Native playback with native acceleration and native controls!
I don't know what fantasy land you live in where you don't consider any of this progress.
It's Gizmodo. With a 'D'.
In my opinion, the type of task matters. And I think it has to do with what parts of your brain are used. For example, I can code/refactor and listen to a podcast just fine simultaneously. But if it's two comprehension-based tasks, like reading AND listening, I can't do them. Or lately I've even noticed I can't mentally elaborate on a thought and listen to a podcast at the same time.
The coding and listening thing seems very left brain/right brain to me.
Also, to the poster that mentioned musical multi-tasking... That's really interesting! But I think it helps that we as musicians have been training since a very young age to accept that level of multi-tasking, so the things that become muscle memory do. Fingering, breathing, sight reading, etc. Really the only thing that matters by show time is watching the conductor, the rest should be on semi auto pilot.
They can't /because/ they're big. Sure they can do a lot of things from a resource perspective. But inertia is holding them back. Organizational constraints. More people have to want change and agree to change than a small, agile company.
It's all about inertia.
If it acted like "every other browser out there", it would be just as sucky as "every other browser out there". As the other child poster has colorfully mentioned, you seem to be out of touch with how many people really know what HTML is. Or maybe we have varying definitions for the words "everyone" or "technical".
I've never liked being strapped to a desk. Don't get me wrong, I love technology through and through, but having to sit down to harness it is a real bummer. It's not good for your physical health to be sitting down so much! At least with the iPad there's a larger chance of tapping into some tech from a more natural position like on the couch or at the kitchen table. Or even at the john.