Fashion magazines vastly out-sell female-targeted magazines which feature photos of men. Even in the teen market, YM out-sells Tiger Beat by a long shot. This is simple economics pointing out that women like looking at pretty women.
This is actually very insightful, although probably not in the way you meant it.
Consider this: how does a magazine make money? By selling pages to advertisers; subscriptions and newsstand sales rarely cover all costs, let alone give a profit.
Consider also who advertises in fashion magazines: companies selling beauty products, from fashion through cosmetics to plastic surgery.
Consider finally who is the target market for these products: the women that already look like the cover models, or the ones that aspire to look like that.
The current beauty ideal is set by marketing, and that most women will fall short of that ideal is a feature thereof. If this marketing didn't work, advertisers wouldn't advertise in the magazines, and they'd go bust. Ipso facto, the Western (American) beauty ideal is manufactured, and not an innate desire of women in general.
I wonder why these articles don't shut up the "Slashdot is shilling for Microsoft" whiners.
Because it is not Slashdot (aka the editorial staff) that is shilling?
If you want to see real shilling, you have to look at the comments on any Microsoft-related story. That's where you will find the shills, and plenty of them too.
Hell, they even have a nice little cabal of moderators and metamoderators to make sure they retain their +1 bonus. The amount of positive moderation on pro-MS posts and the aggressive metamoderation on any kind of negative moderation on such posts is obvious to all but the most oblivious.
But then, you live for trolling on Slashdot, don't you?
Unless of course there is a access restricition on your audio recording. The DMCA (and from what I remember the EUCD as well) doesn't have a Fair Use exemption for circumventing access restrictions. So even though it would be perfectly legal to copy the audio itself, it is illegal to break the access restriction.
I should, for honesty's sake retract a bit: if you as a private person figure out on your own how to circumvent the access restriction, you might have a defense (jurisprudence to this effect does not exist yet, however). However, it is illegal to then disseminate your method. Effectively, this means that copying your own CDs to your iPod has been effectively outlawed, as it is illegal to write software that would make it possible.
So, effectively, with the DMCA and the EUCD and the new access-restricted audio discs (they're not CDs), making copies of audio recordings is flat out illegal, despite what use you intend for those copies.
Know that people are greedy, "absolute power corrupts, absolutely", and everything you ever heard about anything is either "really true" or it's something they *want* to be true, and will attempt to make it so through their belief. Steve Jobs knows this, it's the foundation of his RDF. The President of the US knows it, Karl Rove knows it, Dick Cheney, and the entire leadership of this country know it.
Someone's self-defined "truth" is the same "Secret of Success" used as the foundation of every motivational speaker, preacher, pastor, and evangelist in the world. It's "believing in yourself" or what you have to say. Seeing power in your convictions. It's also what powers Jihadist thinking, suicidal martyrs, and all types of religious zealoutry.
In short, it's Magic.
Magic: the Art and Science of causing Change in conformity to Will.
Thank Aleister Crowley for that definition, because if what you above described is not trying to cause reality to conform to the will of the people using those techniques, I wouldn't know what is.
not exactly userfriendly when I can fire up excel and produce a nice graph.
A nice graph does not equal a correct analysis of the data.
In order to perform correct analysis of data, one requires a decent grounding in mathematics, specifically statistics. That by itself is not userfriendly. Any moron can produce a graph using the Excel wizards. It takes some education and training to get something meaningful out of the numbers.
And since we should expect the analyst to have some training already, I fail to see why we shouldn't expect them to have the training necessary to use real analysis software.
So around the time that young adults got into video games in earnest, crime rate in young adults was on the decline.
Allow me to say: "Well d'oh!".
A prime motivation for petty crime among young adults is simple boredom. It turns out time and time again that giving youth something to do cuts back on juvenile delinquency rate.
Why bother with flood defenses since we are not in control of the forces of nature?
Why bother with improving agriculture since we cannot rule out droughts and pests 100%?
Heck, why even bother with building houses?
Had your attitude existed 10.000 years ago, we wouldn't have had a civilisation to begin with.
Ultimately, risk management is about severity v.s. chance of occurence. If flood defenses can reduce a once-in-a-lifetime event to a minor irritation instead of a disaster, they may be worth it. The mere fact that storms occur is no reason to not try to do something about their consequences.
And given that, why look the other way if human behaviour stands a strong chance of worsening the conditions under which a disaster may occur? Of course we cannot defend against 100% of the forces of nature, but why take the risk of reducing our chances?
Remember that Bill Clinton and 95 Senators also told the world to take Kyoto and shove it up their ass?
Yes I remember. I don't remember them calling for massive government subisidies to their cronies in industry for 'technological innovation'. When I see folks like Bush and Blair calling for this, I remember Blair sucking up to Microsoft and giving them cushy contracts, or the Bush cabinet giving out no-contest contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq.
In short, while I think that technological innovation is necessary to bring down our negative impact on the environment, a lot depends on who is calling for it. I have very little trust in folks that have a track record of spending billions on projects by their cronies that show no noticable improvements to the citizens (like the billions the US spent on the Department of Homeland Security, only to see incompetent cabinet cronies appointed under its aegis, like the head of FEMA).
And why do you think this was an attack on Bush exclusively? I specifically mentioned Blair as well. And for that matter, our own Prime Minister Balkenende and his cabinet are of the same ilk: all money for their cronies, no real improvements. Not everything is about the United States and its village idiot, you know.
the same industrial and financial firms who wished to maintain their status quo by resisting change and financing PR fake science will shift gears in the new warm world and find massive profit in the meltdown. It's all the same to them.
Already happening. Remember Bush and Blair's position at the G8 summit regarding climate change? No to Kyoto CO2 reduction, yes to technological innovation.
Somehow in my ears that sounded suspiciously like two heads of state setting up a new pork barrel for their corporate cronies. In the meantime, I can live in fear everytime the winter storms come around; fear that another 1953 will wipe out all that I own (I live in the Netherlands. We know what happens when flood barriers are not up to the task).
I would lay the blame at the feet of the new CEO. He may have inherited a mess from Carly, but if his policy of dealing with this mess is exactly the same as Fiorina's, he is to blame, fair and square. And it does seem like he is using the same old recipe of a CEO who wants to keep his bonus: just downsize the lot. No obvious strategy, just blind cost-cutting.
The company will fail in the end with nitwits running it like this. However, in the meantime, it is the workers that are suffering, and if the company fails, the failed CEOs won't suffer. Just look at the cushy jobs that were offered to Fiorina barely months after she was fired (and yes, she was fired, no matter what she or the HP Board wants to call it).
Honestly, why do the sheep on Slashdot keep apologising for the wolves?
I know how much slashdotters love to rag on MS for not including Monad and WinFS - but the reality is that very few desktop users care [...]
People rightly rag on MS for that, because before dropping them MS presented these features as Unique Selling Points for what was then called Longhorn.
Vista fixes the two of the most common complaints with XP: the vunerability to spyware (by implementing, to some extent, the 30-year old UNIX concept of least permissions)
And even that is implemented in such a half-assed fashion that most software, probably including MS' own, will still require full admin privs to run. For one, they are including a database for old applications, granting them full admin privileges silently, if I read the MSDN article correctly. Secondly, the implementation is bass-ackwards: instead of making it easier to run specific applications with elevated privileges from a limited user account, they are implementing a system making it easier to run limited applications under an administrator-level account. In other words, the default assumption is still going to be an elevated-privileges account.
And how strong an incentive to write least-privilege code is this all going to be for third-party developers?
First, why would you want multimedia in a public document? What is the added value of multimedia in deeds, law texts, minutes of government meetings?
Second, by focusing on that minor point, Microsoft is trying to sweep the main point under the table: even if their format can handle more functionality, if not everyone can read it, the state is disenfranchising people, which simple cannot be in a democratic society. The ultimate implication of their argument is disenfranchisement though.
Horrible unrecoverable lockups used to occur. They may still occur.
Yup. They still occur.
Anybody else have comments?
Yes, but you won't like it: RTFM. nfs(5) and mount(8) will tell you all you need, especially the description of the hard and intr options.
The fact that people do not read the documentation provided is not Linux' fault. Linux NFS may behave differently from Sun NFS by default, but it can be set up to behave the same way, and client lockups due to failing servers is not a failure of the NFS implementation, it is a configuration issue.
However, if you're IDSes get hammered with Windows exploit attempts to the tune that it takes you 25-50% of your working day to track down administrators to check the patchlevels of their boxes, then I'd say Linux is still ahead.
Yes, theoretically Windows has better security than any Unix-a-like, with its ACLs and finer-grained user permission levels.
In actual practice, any scheme in managing ACLS that is any more complex than Unix' UGO permissions tends to be an administrative nightmare, so many Windows admins don't even try it.
And as for finer-grained user access levels, if I do a ps aux on my Linux box, I see several different UserIDs running system processes. On my XP workstation at work, a decently locked down system, I see only two users: myself and SYSTEM, aka root. Any break in those SYSTEM-owned processes, and my workstation is toast.
And all this is before I discount the MS marketing slogans that you don't need an expensive sysadmin to set up and maintain Windows.
In short, Windows' theoretical superiority is destroyed by its complexity and the fact that the vendor keeps insisting that it is not complex at all. Practice therefore does not seem to bear out theory.
Does the name Winston Churchill ring a bell? This is what he had to say about Chamberlain:
It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man.
But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart -- the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour.
Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged. This alone will stand him in good stead as far as what is called the verdict of history is concerned.
Actually, Linux & other Open Source communityies are something that never before happened in human history.
The weavers of Lyons, the Paris Commune and the Catalan factory workers beg to differ.
The Free Software and Open Source movements closely parallel the spontaneously formed associations of skilled craftsmen and labourers that were at the core of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century Anarchist movements, most closely the Syndicalist Anarchists.
gconf2 still uses self-contained config files. Only differences with normal *nix config files are:
gconf files are XML.
gconf files are not managed by the applications themselves, but centrally served up by the gconf daemon.
Despite the superficial similarity with the registry, your entire desktop does not break when a single gconf file goes wrong. Only when the gconf daemon itself b0rks do you have a minor problem.
Yeah, I'm following up to my own post. But as soon as I hit "Submit", it occurred to me that I don't even know what an evolutionary psychologist IS!
Oh, that's easy. It's just the Politically-Correct term for Ye Olde Social Darwinist. You know, the ones that want to use science as an excuse to perpetuate some social status quo, like unequal treatment between men and women.
As such, I wonder why mainstream science isn't harder on them. By the conventions of modern science, evolutionary psychologists should be shunned as Cold Fusion researchers are. Yet I hear no outcry. Strange.
Slashdot Mirror
This is actually very insightful, although probably not in the way you meant it.
Consider this: how does a magazine make money? By selling pages to advertisers; subscriptions and newsstand sales rarely cover all costs, let alone give a profit.
Consider also who advertises in fashion magazines: companies selling beauty products, from fashion through cosmetics to plastic surgery.
Consider finally who is the target market for these products: the women that already look like the cover models, or the ones that aspire to look like that.
The current beauty ideal is set by marketing, and that most women will fall short of that ideal is a feature thereof. If this marketing didn't work, advertisers wouldn't advertise in the magazines, and they'd go bust. Ipso facto, the Western (American) beauty ideal is manufactured, and not an innate desire of women in general.
MartBecause it is not Slashdot (aka the editorial staff) that is shilling?
If you want to see real shilling, you have to look at the comments on any Microsoft-related story. That's where you will find the shills, and plenty of them too.
Hell, they even have a nice little cabal of moderators and metamoderators to make sure they retain their +1 bonus. The amount of positive moderation on pro-MS posts and the aggressive metamoderation on any kind of negative moderation on such posts is obvious to all but the most oblivious.
But then, you live for trolling on Slashdot, don't you?
MartUnless of course there is a access restricition on your audio recording. The DMCA (and from what I remember the EUCD as well) doesn't have a Fair Use exemption for circumventing access restrictions. So even though it would be perfectly legal to copy the audio itself, it is illegal to break the access restriction.
I should, for honesty's sake retract a bit: if you as a private person figure out on your own how to circumvent the access restriction, you might have a defense (jurisprudence to this effect does not exist yet, however). However, it is illegal to then disseminate your method. Effectively, this means that copying your own CDs to your iPod has been effectively outlawed, as it is illegal to write software that would make it possible.
So, effectively, with the DMCA and the EUCD and the new access-restricted audio discs (they're not CDs), making copies of audio recordings is flat out illegal, despite what use you intend for those copies.
MartIn short, it's Magic.
Magic: the Art and Science of causing Change in conformity to Will.
Thank Aleister Crowley for that definition, because if what you above described is not trying to cause reality to conform to the will of the people using those techniques, I wouldn't know what is.
MartBut now you are moving the goalposts. The original discussion was whether or not Excel was any good as a tool for scientific analysis.
MartA nice graph does not equal a correct analysis of the data.
In order to perform correct analysis of data, one requires a decent grounding in mathematics, specifically statistics. That by itself is not userfriendly. Any moron can produce a graph using the Excel wizards. It takes some education and training to get something meaningful out of the numbers.
And since we should expect the analyst to have some training already, I fail to see why we shouldn't expect them to have the training necessary to use real analysis software.
MartAllow me to say: "Well d'oh!".
A prime motivation for petty crime among young adults is simple boredom. It turns out time and time again that giving youth something to do cuts back on juvenile delinquency rate.
MartIn effect, Microsoft is accusing the BDA of promoting vapourware.
The irony is delicious.
MartOh dear.
- Why bother with flood defenses since we are not in control of the forces of nature?
- Why bother with improving agriculture since we cannot rule out droughts and pests 100%?
- Heck, why even bother with building houses?
Had your attitude existed 10.000 years ago, we wouldn't have had a civilisation to begin with.Ultimately, risk management is about severity v.s. chance of occurence. If flood defenses can reduce a once-in-a-lifetime event to a minor irritation instead of a disaster, they may be worth it. The mere fact that storms occur is no reason to not try to do something about their consequences.
And given that, why look the other way if human behaviour stands a strong chance of worsening the conditions under which a disaster may occur? Of course we cannot defend against 100% of the forces of nature, but why take the risk of reducing our chances?
MartYes I remember. I don't remember them calling for massive government subisidies to their cronies in industry for 'technological innovation'. When I see folks like Bush and Blair calling for this, I remember Blair sucking up to Microsoft and giving them cushy contracts, or the Bush cabinet giving out no-contest contracts for the reconstruction of Iraq.
In short, while I think that technological innovation is necessary to bring down our negative impact on the environment, a lot depends on who is calling for it. I have very little trust in folks that have a track record of spending billions on projects by their cronies that show no noticable improvements to the citizens (like the billions the US spent on the Department of Homeland Security, only to see incompetent cabinet cronies appointed under its aegis, like the head of FEMA).
And why do you think this was an attack on Bush exclusively? I specifically mentioned Blair as well. And for that matter, our own Prime Minister Balkenende and his cabinet are of the same ilk: all money for their cronies, no real improvements. Not everything is about the United States and its village idiot, you know.
MartAlready happening. Remember Bush and Blair's position at the G8 summit regarding climate change? No to Kyoto CO2 reduction, yes to technological innovation.
Somehow in my ears that sounded suspiciously like two heads of state setting up a new pork barrel for their corporate cronies. In the meantime, I can live in fear everytime the winter storms come around; fear that another 1953 will wipe out all that I own (I live in the Netherlands. We know what happens when flood barriers are not up to the task).
MartI would lay the blame at the feet of the new CEO. He may have inherited a mess from Carly, but if his policy of dealing with this mess is exactly the same as Fiorina's, he is to blame, fair and square. And it does seem like he is using the same old recipe of a CEO who wants to keep his bonus: just downsize the lot. No obvious strategy, just blind cost-cutting.
The company will fail in the end with nitwits running it like this. However, in the meantime, it is the workers that are suffering, and if the company fails, the failed CEOs won't suffer. Just look at the cushy jobs that were offered to Fiorina barely months after she was fired (and yes, she was fired, no matter what she or the HP Board wants to call it).
Honestly, why do the sheep on Slashdot keep apologising for the wolves?
MartOr if you really have the room, get a LaserJet 4Si. Built like a tank, heavy (40 kg or so), damn near indestructable, and easy to service yourself.
I bought mine for EUR 125 two years ago, it was discarded by the local tax office. It still runs, but damn, it is big.
MartPeople rightly rag on MS for that, because before dropping them MS presented these features as Unique Selling Points for what was then called Longhorn.
And even that is implemented in such a half-assed fashion that most software, probably including MS' own, will still require full admin privs to run. For one, they are including a database for old applications, granting them full admin privileges silently, if I read the MSDN article correctly. Secondly, the implementation is bass-ackwards: instead of making it easier to run specific applications with elevated privileges from a limited user account, they are implementing a system making it easier to run limited applications under an administrator-level account. In other words, the default assumption is still going to be an elevated-privileges account.
And how strong an incentive to write least-privilege code is this all going to be for third-party developers?
MartI'm sorry, but you're full of shit.
First, why would you want multimedia in a public document? What is the added value of multimedia in deeds, law texts, minutes of government meetings?
Second, by focusing on that minor point, Microsoft is trying to sweep the main point under the table: even if their format can handle more functionality, if not everyone can read it, the state is disenfranchising people, which simple cannot be in a democratic society. The ultimate implication of their argument is disenfranchisement though.
Now go shill somewhere else.
MartSo Microsoft's official position is that a format for public documents that is readable for everyone without exceptions is a bad thing?
Nice to see that they believe in one of the fundamentals of democracy: open access to government information for all citizens.
MartYup. They still occur.
Yes, but you won't like it: RTFM. nfs(5) and mount(8) will tell you all you need, especially the description of the hard and intr options.
The fact that people do not read the documentation provided is not Linux' fault. Linux NFS may behave differently from Sun NFS by default, but it can be set up to behave the same way, and client lockups due to failing servers is not a failure of the NFS implementation, it is a configuration issue.
MartHowever, if you're IDSes get hammered with Windows exploit attempts to the tune that it takes you 25-50% of your working day to track down administrators to check the patchlevels of their boxes, then I'd say Linux is still ahead.
MartYes, theoretically Windows has better security than any Unix-a-like, with its ACLs and finer-grained user permission levels.
In actual practice, any scheme in managing ACLS that is any more complex than Unix' UGO permissions tends to be an administrative nightmare, so many Windows admins don't even try it.
And as for finer-grained user access levels, if I do a ps aux on my Linux box, I see several different UserIDs running system processes. On my XP workstation at work, a decently locked down system, I see only two users: myself and SYSTEM, aka root. Any break in those SYSTEM-owned processes, and my workstation is toast.
And all this is before I discount the MS marketing slogans that you don't need an expensive sysadmin to set up and maintain Windows.
In short, Windows' theoretical superiority is destroyed by its complexity and the fact that the vendor keeps insisting that it is not complex at all. Practice therefore does not seem to bear out theory.
MartThey're afraid of water? That would fit with the common Irish stereotype of them preferring whiskey or stout, but I don't think you meant that.
Of course with a nick like Guppy06 you would have water on the brain.
MartAnd that would be different from current U.S. foreign policy how?
MartThe weavers of Lyons, the Paris Commune and the Catalan factory workers beg to differ.
The Free Software and Open Source movements closely parallel the spontaneously formed associations of skilled craftsmen and labourers that were at the core of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century Anarchist movements, most closely the Syndicalist Anarchists.
Martgconf2 still uses self-contained config files. Only differences with normal *nix config files are:
Despite the superficial similarity with the registry, your entire desktop does not break when a single gconf file goes wrong. Only when the gconf daemon itself b0rks do you have a minor problem.
MartOh, that's easy. It's just the Politically-Correct term for Ye Olde Social Darwinist. You know, the ones that want to use science as an excuse to perpetuate some social status quo, like unequal treatment between men and women.
As such, I wonder why mainstream science isn't harder on them. By the conventions of modern science, evolutionary psychologists should be shunned as Cold Fusion researchers are. Yet I hear no outcry. Strange.
Mart