in an unusually ironic twist, Microsoft has started talking smack about their own products, instead of those of their competitors.
It's not ironic, because Microsoft stands to suffer nothing by pointing out problems with Outlook. And that is because 1) it is still probably the most widely used email program, 2) there are no real significant challenges or competitors to Outlook (or Excel, or Word) out there, and 3) the problems BG is pointing out are relatively trivial and plague every other email program anyways. So MS can make these kinds of knocks on their products as much as they want...they just can't knock Windows.
And, as someone else has already pointed out, it always helps to sell new product. Doesn't almost every new feature set in any product imply there was something wrong with the previous versions ?
Signals should be broadcast at the transmitter's peril. If you don't want somebody listening in, encrypt
So I guess you'd support police forces installing surveillance cameras on the street, right ? Hell, to be consistent, you'd have to allow PRIVATE security companies and other parties from installing HIDDEN surveillance cameras everywhere, and doing with their information whatever they would, seeing as you don't think YOU should be restricted in what you can do with signals that pass through your property.
After all, if you don't want somebody monitoring and recording you, wear a disguise.
So do you object to cell phones that have a little phonebook in them ? Are you opposed to those that have a calendar/datebook in them ? Ones that have digital voice recording ability ?
IMHO, most people DON'T want to have to carry a separate PDA, a separate cell phone, a separate camera, a separate digital voice recorder, and a separate MP3 player. Why NOT combine them all into one unit, that's barely larger than any of the other devices considered sepately ?
For me, the beauty of wrapping them all up in a phone is that I'm always carrying a phone, but when I REALLY need my digital voice recorder, I don't have it handy. And when I see something really cool on the street, I don't have my digital camera on me. Why ? Because the other stuff is just too damn bulky for me to bother carrying most of the time. Sure, I'm not going to be sending my photos to National Geographic, but 1.1 is more than enough for a cute email to a friend showing him the funny expression my dog just made, or whatever.
I'd buy one of these gadgets, but I am just too cheap.
umm, get your attributions straight. Once you do that, you'll see that *I* never claimed that a (statistically significant) correlation implies causality. Such a correlation does, however, imply the variables are co-related, hence related (unless you assume that it was a chance event that just happened even though the likelihood is less than your pre-selected criteria, in which case you're not really interested in this sort of hypothesis testing anyways). The meaningfulness of the relationship is always up for interpretation, of course.
ssassen writes...Very funny, and guaranteed to put a smile on your face!"
Anyone else notice that the guy who made the original post was also the author ? And how he referred to "they" (as in the article author) instead of writing "I" to make it look like it was a third-party review ? Shameless plug, indeed.
Ssassen, I am making a claim on your guarantee. I actually found the article to be extremely smug and condescending. There are people out there who don't know how to install computer hardware. What a newsflash.
If this site really used user-moderation to determine what should show up on the front page, much of the time there wouldn't be much up there. Web sites like these depend on having eyeballs, so the editors need to keep throwing stuff up there. If there's some other more interesting article, people will read those instead. But look at how much time you, and the others who (rightly) hated the article spent reading and then posting about it, and look at how long we spent responding to your posts. And think of all the people who read some of the posts and then just went on without responding. Those constitute a lot of eyeballs. Ever wonder why we keep seeing essentially the same stories about e.g. how Windows/Linux/MacOs is better/worse ? Ever wonder why there are so many dupe stories ? Ever wonder how anyone ever gave Jon Katz a soapbox ? Ever wonder how sometimes the most ridiculous stories/claims get a ton of posts ? Eyeballs are eyeballs, whether they're happy or not. It's not such a bad strategy to purposely put up crappy articles, even if only to make the "angry" readership feel welcome.
Forget your delusions about this being a site for a "community". It's a business.
This stuff is a barely-interesting intellectual parlor-game. AI alone will never be enough to warrant the special legal status accorded by humans to humans, because absent a science that goes far beyond AI alone, the kinds of systems being talked about will be in someway demonstrably not human. As long as we can discriminate between human and not-human, we will, and a legal system created by humans (and ultimately for the benefit of humans) will reflect that.
Completely off-topic, but how the heck could you get 500 hours out of BF1942 single-player ? I don't think I got *5* hours of play out of the single-player mode, it was awful and useful only as a training ground for the real reason you buy BF1942, which is multiplayer.
Do you know where these data centers are located? Didn't think so. "Easier" is relative.
Sorry, but I refuse to believe that if I had the resources, organization, and followers to be able to recruit a group of people, train at least a few of them to be pilots over a length period of time, then get them to hijack at least 3 planes, and THEN get them to give up their lives flying the plane directly into a building, that I couldn't also find out where these super-duper-top-secret data centers are. Do you really think the locations of these centers are unknowable to groups that are able to carry out these attacks in the first place ?
Sorry, but YOU are wrong. The very term corRELATION implies that it DOES test whether a relationship exists. Any signifcant relationship may not be a causal one, and there may not even exist a direct relationship between the two variables, but a statistically significant correlation argues for EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF "an interesting coincidence in similarity of numbers".
In your example, sure there's the possibilty that the relationship you describe might happen by chance (that is ALWAYS possible) but what do you think the likelihood is that such a correlation will be found ? Statistical hypothesis testing of this sort assumes that there is the possibility that the numbers came up by chance, and returns a probability that such a relationship came up by chance, when there really is no such relationship. If someone says a correlation is statistically significant, what they're saying is that the distribution of measurements of the two variables is such that is UNLIKELY (given some arbitrary pre-specified probability) that they happened by "coincidence".
but they do not tell you what the error of that slope is... In reality, the two factors may only be related by numerical coincidence,
I think it's a reasonable assumption that the relationship is statistically significant. Scientists commonly talk about relationships existing, using this as a shorthand for implied significance, without expressing the exact p-values. If you need that data, you often need to go to the source paper, or at least the source's abstract. By saying "the two factors may only be related by numerical coincidence" you're arguing that the result could be due to chance, which is always a possibility (no matter how small the error). But when a finding is statistically significant, it means the results are unlikely to be due to chance - although HOW unlikely is arbitrary, but prespecified.
The notion that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would launch a coordinated strike to take out DNS servers is totally absurd.
I don't see what makes the notion so absurd at all. I'd wager from my layman's perspective that it'd be much easier to take out any given data center, than it should be to take out just ONE of the WTC towers,and we saw how easy THAT was. If such an attack hamstrung Net traffic for at least a few days, it'd do a ton of economic damage, and I'm sure there are more than a few (for lack of a better word) progressive individuals in terrorist organizations who are more interested in doing REAL damage than symbolic damage.
I believe these results have been known for a long time. It is also well known that attractive people make more money. Is anyone really surprised by any of this ??
Obviously *you* don't know that much about statistics yourself. You argue that "Correlation != causation". Where in the original post does is causation implied ? The study only claims to show that taller people earn more money, which is a statement purely about correlation, and which is a well known finding anyways.
The KEY is: does either the Athlon or Pentium run OS X?
If that is the key, then why isn't THAT what Apple is trumpeting when they make performance claims ? If that is the key, why isn't THAT what Apple zealots have been trumpeting recently when talking about G5 performance ?
I wonder what the people skewering SCO would say if, for instance, it turned out that Windows XP contained 200 lines of GPL'ed code. Would they be saying, "hell the difference is trivial, let MS take it out and we'll forget the whole deal " ? Or would they be saying, "licensing terms are licensing terms, and violations are violations, let's get everything we might be entitled to" ?
This is no "strategy", it's a cop-out. If people are sharing files, and they *really* believe they should be allowed to do so, they should fight on the merits of their position, and live or die on said merits. To cook up a tenuous argument that someone might have framed you, is a tacit admission that the arguments people have mostly been using to justify file-sharing are worthless, and that file-sharing itself is indefensible. Show some backbone, people.
Most of his "benefits" seem to have been writing with a smirk. One friend of mine who has been unemployed for about 9 months has been catching all hell from his wife. However, even she has to admit that his being unemployed and his consequent stays at home with their 2-y old son has made them much closer. For instance, before the son never ran to his father for comfort (only ever his mother), now he does. I think my friend has become a much better father largely because he is unemployed. (Of course, that doesn't stop him from wanting to leave the kid alone while he's sleeping so he can go checking out the satellite dish store down the street, because he thinks the baby monitor will reach halfway to the store, but don't tell his wife).
I guess it's the people who are unemployed who also need help finding a good headhunter. I take my amusement at wondering what these articles say about the readership....
After all, they're smart enough to realize that articles about being unemployed are likely to be of great interest to a large proportion of those people spending the most time reading Slashdot.
Make sure the headhunter's incentive structure is in line with serving your interests. Obviously, you want to avoid a company that takes a fee ( in my opinion, even a portion of a fee) on the initial hire. Fee structures where the headhunter takes (say) 50% of its fee if the hire stays (say) 6 months, and takes the remaining portion of its fee if the hire remains for a full year gets you a good chunk of the way to making sure the headhunter's incentives are in line with your own. After all, if they send you (and you hire) a screw-up, there's no way the person should last with you long enough for the headhunter to collect a dime.
Slashdot Mirror
in an unusually ironic twist, Microsoft has started talking smack about their own products, instead of those of their competitors.
It's not ironic, because Microsoft stands to suffer nothing by pointing out problems with Outlook. And that is because 1) it is still probably the most widely used email program, 2) there are no real significant challenges or competitors to Outlook (or Excel, or Word) out there, and 3) the problems BG is pointing out are relatively trivial and plague every other email program anyways. So MS can make these kinds of knocks on their products as much as they want...they just can't knock Windows.
And, as someone else has already pointed out, it always helps to sell new product. Doesn't almost every new feature set in any product imply there was something wrong with the previous versions ?
Signals should be broadcast at the transmitter's peril. If you don't want somebody listening in, encrypt
So I guess you'd support police forces installing surveillance cameras on the street, right ? Hell, to be consistent, you'd have to allow PRIVATE security companies and other parties from installing HIDDEN surveillance cameras everywhere, and doing with their information whatever they would, seeing as you don't think YOU should be restricted in what you can do with signals that pass through your property.
After all, if you don't want somebody monitoring and recording you, wear a disguise.
So do you object to cell phones that have a little phonebook in them ? Are you opposed to those that have a calendar/datebook in them ? Ones that have digital voice recording ability ?
IMHO, most people DON'T want to have to carry a separate PDA, a separate cell phone, a separate camera, a separate digital voice recorder, and a separate MP3 player. Why NOT combine them all into one unit, that's barely larger than any of the other devices considered sepately ?
For me, the beauty of wrapping them all up in a phone is that I'm always carrying a phone, but when I REALLY need my digital voice recorder, I don't have it handy. And when I see something really cool on the street, I don't have my digital camera on me. Why ? Because the other stuff is just too damn bulky for me to bother carrying most of the time. Sure, I'm not going to be sending my photos to National Geographic, but 1.1 is more than enough for a cute email to a friend showing him the funny expression my dog just made, or whatever.
I'd buy one of these gadgets, but I am just too cheap.
from your earlier post and then
umm, get your attributions straight. Once you do that, you'll see that *I* never claimed that a (statistically significant) correlation implies causality. Such a correlation does, however, imply the variables are co-related, hence related (unless you assume that it was a chance event that just happened even though the likelihood is less than your pre-selected criteria, in which case you're not really interested in this sort of hypothesis testing anyways). The meaningfulness of the relationship is always up for interpretation, of course.
Also, to make linux oriented, here is a pice on how it Syncs with Linux
Thank you for that, I had absolutely no interest in reading an article if there isn't some sort of tie-in to Linux.
ssassen writes...Very funny, and guaranteed to put a smile on your face!"
Anyone else notice that the guy who made the original post was also the author ? And how he referred to "they" (as in the article author) instead of writing "I" to make it look like it was a third-party review ? Shameless plug, indeed.
Ssassen, I am making a claim on your guarantee. I actually found the article to be extremely smug and condescending. There are people out there who don't know how to install computer hardware. What a newsflash.
If this site really used user-moderation to determine what should show up on the front page, much of the time there wouldn't be much up there. Web sites like these depend on having eyeballs, so the editors need to keep throwing stuff up there. If there's some other more interesting article, people will read those instead. But look at how much time you, and the others who (rightly) hated the article spent reading and then posting about it, and look at how long we spent responding to your posts. And think of all the people who read some of the posts and then just went on without responding. Those constitute a lot of eyeballs. Ever wonder why we keep seeing essentially the same stories about e.g. how Windows/Linux/MacOs is better/worse ? Ever wonder why there are so many dupe stories ? Ever wonder how anyone ever gave Jon Katz a soapbox ? Ever wonder how sometimes the most ridiculous stories/claims get a ton of posts ? Eyeballs are eyeballs, whether they're happy or not. It's not such a bad strategy to purposely put up crappy articles, even if only to make the "angry" readership feel welcome.
Forget your delusions about this being a site for a "community". It's a business.
This stuff is a barely-interesting intellectual parlor-game. AI alone will never be enough to warrant the special legal status accorded by humans to humans, because absent a science that goes far beyond AI alone, the kinds of systems being talked about will be in someway demonstrably not human. As long as we can discriminate between human and not-human, we will, and a legal system created by humans (and ultimately for the benefit of humans) will reflect that.
Completely off-topic, but how the heck could you get 500 hours out of BF1942 single-player ? I don't think I got *5* hours of play out of the single-player mode, it was awful and useful only as a training ground for the real reason you buy BF1942, which is multiplayer.
Do you know where these data centers are located? Didn't think so. "Easier" is relative.
Sorry, but I refuse to believe that if I had the resources, organization, and followers to be able to recruit a group of people, train at least a few of them to be pilots over a length period of time, then get them to hijack at least 3 planes, and THEN get them to give up their lives flying the plane directly into a building, that I couldn't also find out where these super-duper-top-secret data centers are. Do you really think the locations of these centers are unknowable to groups that are able to carry out these attacks in the first place ?
Sorry, but YOU are wrong. The very term corRELATION implies that it DOES test whether a relationship exists. Any signifcant relationship may not be a causal one, and there may not even exist a direct relationship between the two variables, but a statistically significant correlation argues for EXACTLY THE OPPOSITE OF "an interesting coincidence in similarity of numbers".
In your example, sure there's the possibilty that the relationship you describe might happen by chance (that is ALWAYS possible) but what do you think the likelihood is that such a correlation will be found ? Statistical hypothesis testing of this sort assumes that there is the possibility that the numbers came up by chance, and returns a probability that such a relationship came up by chance, when there really is no such relationship. If someone says a correlation is statistically significant, what they're saying is that the distribution of measurements of the two variables is such that is UNLIKELY (given some arbitrary pre-specified probability) that they happened by "coincidence".
See the problem yet ?
but they do not tell you what the error of that slope is ... In reality, the two factors may only be related by numerical coincidence,
I think it's a reasonable assumption that the relationship is statistically significant. Scientists commonly talk about relationships existing, using this as a shorthand for implied significance, without expressing the exact p-values. If you need that data, you often need to go to the source paper, or at least the source's abstract. By saying "the two factors may only be related by numerical coincidence" you're arguing that the result could be due to chance, which is always a possibility (no matter how small the error). But when a finding is statistically significant, it means the results are unlikely to be due to chance - although HOW unlikely is arbitrary, but prespecified.
The notion that Al Qaeda or some other terrorist group would launch a coordinated strike to take out DNS servers is totally absurd.
I don't see what makes the notion so absurd at all. I'd wager from my layman's perspective that it'd be much easier to take out any given data center, than it should be to take out just ONE of the WTC towers,and we saw how easy THAT was. If such an attack hamstrung Net traffic for at least a few days, it'd do a ton of economic damage, and I'm sure there are more than a few (for lack of a better word) progressive individuals in terrorist organizations who are more interested in doing REAL damage than symbolic damage.
I believe these results have been known for a long time. It is also well known that attractive people make more money. Is anyone really surprised by any of this ??
Obviously *you* don't know that much about statistics yourself. You argue that "Correlation != causation". Where in the original post does is causation implied ? The study only claims to show that taller people earn more money, which is a statement purely about correlation, and which is a well known finding anyways.
From the POST :
And Yes, it tells you how to get the shows off of your TiVo onto your computer's hard drive.
The KEY is: does either the Athlon or Pentium run OS X?
If that is the key, then why isn't THAT what Apple is trumpeting when they make performance claims ? If that is the key, why isn't THAT what Apple zealots have been trumpeting recently when talking about G5 performance ?
the similarities were 'trivial in amount.
I wonder what the people skewering SCO would say if, for instance, it turned out that Windows XP contained 200 lines of GPL'ed code. Would they be saying, "hell the difference is trivial, let MS take it out and we'll forget the whole deal " ? Or would they be saying, "licensing terms are licensing terms, and violations are violations, let's get everything we might be entitled to" ?
This is no "strategy", it's a cop-out. If people are sharing files, and they *really* believe they should be allowed to do so, they should fight on the merits of their position, and live or die on said merits. To cook up a tenuous argument that someone might have framed you, is a tacit admission that the arguments people have mostly been using to justify file-sharing are worthless, and that file-sharing itself is indefensible. Show some backbone, people.
Most of his "benefits" seem to have been writing with a smirk. One friend of mine who has been unemployed for about 9 months has been catching all hell from his wife. However, even she has to admit that his being unemployed and his consequent stays at home with their 2-y old son has made them much closer. For instance, before the son never ran to his father for comfort (only ever his mother), now he does. I think my friend has become a much better father largely because he is unemployed. (Of course, that doesn't stop him from wanting to leave the kid alone while he's sleeping so he can go checking out the satellite dish store down the street, because he thinks the baby monitor will reach halfway to the store, but don't tell his wife).
I guess it's the people who are unemployed who also need help finding a good headhunter. I take my amusement at wondering what these articles say about the readership....
After all, they're smart enough to realize that articles about being unemployed are likely to be of great interest to a large proportion of those people spending the most time reading Slashdot.
Way to go after your core readership guys !
Make sure the headhunter's incentive structure is in line with serving your interests. Obviously, you want to avoid a company that takes a fee ( in my opinion, even a portion of a fee) on the initial hire. Fee structures where the headhunter takes (say) 50% of its fee if the hire stays (say) 6 months, and takes the remaining portion of its fee if the hire remains for a full year gets you a good chunk of the way to making sure the headhunter's incentives are in line with your own. After all, if they send you (and you hire) a screw-up, there's no way the person should last with you long enough for the headhunter to collect a dime.
Emacs !!
That's copyright infringement.
And we know how much regard people here have for copyright law now, don't we ?