Ask 20 different web company CEOs to complete that sentence. Then ask 20 different I.T. professionals. Then take the 45-55 different answers you received, and try to sort them into less than a dozen piles of more or less compatible answers.
I also walk across lawns when I don't even know who owns them. It could be public land, or it could be someone's private property and I'm stealing time on their grass every time I do it! I'm utterly unrepentant about this, too. Someone should arrest me, and soon, who knows how many lawns I'm going to step on if I'm not stopped.
What's really funny is, the summary is completely written by "An anonymous reader" with no additional commentary by the editor.
So, apparently, if I want to submit a pack of lies an distortions to Slashdot on hopes of getting it posted on the main page, I can do it anonymously, and even then, the editors won't bother to do any fact checking, but just post my slanders verbatim without comment.
How do I moderate the editors? I need to mod down samzenpus, he's clearly either an idiot or a troll himself. Probably a PostgreSQL fan looking for ways to get people to switch, even if it's for the wrong reasons. (I will be looking at PostgreSQL, merely because I've been reminded of the fact that I haven't looked at it in years and don't really know the state of it, but if I switch, it'll be for valid reasons, not FUD from/. trolls.)
Thanks for that. I switched from PostgreSQL to MySQL in 2001 due to some problems I was having at the time, and haven't looked at it since. For a few years I would explain why I thought MySQL was better, but in the last few years I've just pleaded ignorance when asked, since my reason now for using MySQL is just that I've been using it for years and it's what I'm familiar with and had no compelling reason to change. But with this happening, and knowing that PostgreSQL has improved since I last looked at it... looks like it's time to take a fresh look at PostgreSQL.
1. Service providers find something humans can do that computers can't do well, and exploit it as a means of distinguishing real people from bots.
2. Spammers work on improving their computer's ability to perform whatever task is required. Eventually, they do it well enough to be indistinguishable from humans.
3. Service providers find something else computers don't do well. Goto line 1.
Iterate this enough times. We will have true AI -- and it will have been created by spammers.
I'm not sure whether to be overjoyed or scared shitless...
But they want the benefits of living in a society with none of the responsibilities.
Actually, Libertarians are generally supporters of use taxes, tolls and other schemes where you explicitly pay for the resources you use. That's hardly the viewpoint of someone looking for a free ride.
Heh. Your response to that statement is quite a telling example of how Libertarians think. There's a lot more to responsibility than "who pays the bill".
A lot of what libertarians say makes sense (I for one am a big advocate of use taxes), but I can never get past their apparent insistence on the idea that they lack any kind of moral responsibility to their fellow human beings. As far as I can tell, most libertarians are just flat-out amoral, which explains why a statement about the responsibilities to society gets reduced in their minds to a statement merely about financial responsibility -- they don't believe in any other kind, so that's the only sense they can make out of the statement, stripping away the larger meaning it has for most of us. In a sense, we're not really speaking the same language, words like "responsibility" don't mean the same thing to us. Thus, the parent's response seemed entirely on target to him, whereas to me it looks like he's trying to dodge the main thrust of the statement, talking instead about one narrow slice of the pie. I used to see responses like his and say they were intentionally missing the point, but they're really living in an alternate linguistic universe than me. The statement means something entirely different to us, and so the response appears to me to be on an unrelated or only marginally related point.
Funny how communication works. It utterly amazes me sometimes that we can actually communicate with each other at all, considering the radically different universes we all live in.
Because different people don't agree on the subject, it must be subjective? It follows from that that the age of the Earth is subjective. Different people believe it's anywhere from six thousand to five billion years old.
It does not follow from the fact that different people hold different views on something that it's subjective. It could be subjective, or it could be some people are just plain wrong.
You may not want to know it, but according to Pew Research, "Few in China Complain About Internet Controls"
o.O
Wow! In a country where you can be thrown in jail for criticizing the government, few complain about it! I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! (Literally, if they ever catch me posting like this in China.)
To say that this puts "the climatic behaviour of both planets into a common framework of understanding" is gross exaggeration to the point of being just so much hogwash.
Actually, it is hogwash, but only because of the wildly silly implication that they ever weren't in a common framework of understanding. The laws of physics are the same there are they are here. The same chemicals in the same conditions don't magically behave differently because it's a different planet.
Shouldn't we take a closer look at corporations that specifically say, "we do no evil"?
Yes. However, it should be noted that Google doesn't say that. They say they have a goal of "Do no evil", they have never, to the best of my knowledge, claimed that they never do.
Of course, that's a point in there favor. It's easier to trust a person who says they try not to sin than one who says they've never sinned. The first assertion is much more believable. The second one is probably lying.
I'm not sure why it's considered so amazing to discover...
Science writing is frustrating if you know anything at all about what's being discussed. It's dumbed down to the point that you feel less informed for having read it. They invariably leave out the "trivial" little detail that makes it all make sense. They might as well just write, "Something new and nifty and important has been discovered! But it's too complicated to explain it to you, so we'll spare you the boring, complicated details."
Yup. Last time we invaded Canada, they kicked out asses back across the border. Although we did manage to burn down the Parliament in York (now Toronto) before leaving.:)
It's interesting, what they do and don't teach you about the War of 1812 in American schools. Like the fact that, oh, you know, we lost? Sure, we won a few nifty battles, but overall we lost the war. They didn't stop impressing our sailors or interfering with our trade because we fought a war over it, they stopped because they'd only been doing it as part of their war against Napoleon, and that war ended. In the treaty that ended the war, we agreed to a return to status quo ante bellum -- basically a big undo button: things were to return to exactly the state they were in before the war. But the British had been fine with the state of things before the war, we're the ones that had a list of demands for things to change. In the end, we agreed to no change. We did that because the alternative being argued by the other side was for the US to make territorial concessions to Britain. We were lucky we managed to get everyone to agree to just forget the whole thing, and doubly-lucky that the changing circumstances of the world basically obsoleted our original demands.
OK, who modded as "insightful" a post that suggested we stop using the scientific method? o.O
It's called a "hypothesis", and it's necessary for the process. We can't "actually find/make/detect" a new particle if we don't first hypothesize it, and then come up with an experiment to test the hypothesis.
By the way, can you name one physicist who insists that all unexplained affects MUST be the result of undiscovered particles? You said there were "some", implying there's multiples of them, so you shouldn't have any difficulty naming just one, unless you were talking out your ass. I'd suggest you "keep it real" from now on. Such people don't exist unless you can actually name one.
Ok, perhaps it is true, but if Microsoft were investing so much time and energy being evil in every move they make, don't you think they wouldn't be the #1 company in the field? (profits wise). I'd have thought they'd have slipped a while back.
Err, no. All of the the above would make sense if it were true that being evil is bad for business. Alas, the reason companies usually behave in an evil manner is because it helps them financially. You can't point to financial success as evidence they're not evil. It doesn't necessarily prove they are, either, despite popular perception. Classically, though, the temptation to do evil is almost always because you do better materially when you do, so your contention above flies in the face of classical reasoning on the subject.
IBM used to be right evil buggers, and it cost them their lead in a big way
IBM's evil is was sustained it as long as it did. It was IBM's arrogance that brought them down.
For those who care, the "SOLar System" is named because of the system of stars around... (wait for it) Sol (the name of our Sun).
On a similar note, the word "galaxy" comes from the Greek word for "milky", and is so called because it referred to the Milky Way, the visible part of our own galaxy (once commonly referred to simply as "The Galaxy" with a big "G").
To find another Solar System would indicate that they've found that our Sun occipies two points in space and time and has another seperate group of stars associated with it.
Actually, it would more likely indicate that, just as we used to use the word "galaxy" to refer to our galaxy when we only knew about the one, but started applying it to other such structures when we discovered them, despite the fact that the etymology of the name intimately links it with our own, it would indicate that we're following a similar path with the phrase "solar system" now that we've found similar structures elsewhere, despite the fact that the etymology intimately links it with our sun. It may or may not eventually happen, but I suspect it probably will. It seems to be the way the natural evolution of our language goes.
It's only misleading to people who have a tendency to read into things more than is actually there, which is really more the fault of the reader, not the writer, and ultimately can't be helped. For example, "like ours" does not mean "identical to ours in every way", but merely that it has some common characteristics. An earth-like planet is only one of many possible characteristics that two solar systems might have in common, so although "identical to ours" would imply the existence of an earth-like plant, "like ours" in no way implies that. It doesn't even imply that such a planet is more likely in the system. A more complete description of what ways the two systems are alike would be required to conclude that. Luckily, the summary provides just such a description: the other system is like ours in the distribution and relative sizes of its gas giants relative to our own system. It correctly says the system is like ours, and correctly identifies precisely in what way it is like ours. It would take quite a bit of talent at misreading things to be misled here.
A bit like all these communist places calling themselves "The people's republic of this and that".
You forgot "democratic", e.g. DPRK - Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea must be a true democracy, it says so right in the name!;)
Sort of a self-antonym where you call something the opposite of what it is in order to fool and manipulate people.
Aka "newspeak" (cf. Orwell, 1984). Mr. Orwell didn't make all this stuff up -- he didn't have to. "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives." In the latter part, I think Mr. Orwell underestimated both of them, or credited them with nobler intentions than I suspect they had.
Re:So when do we get its successor?
on
X Power Tools
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The general defense I keep seeing for X seems to be that people "aren't criticizing it properly". As if to say that just having problems with X isnt sufficient if you don't fully understand and can vocalize on those problems in a tech-savvy manner.
Not being psychic, if the best vocalization of your problem is "I have a problem", but refuse to say any more detail at all than that, then yes, you can't be helped, sorry. You appear to be inserting words into the OP's mouth beyond that -- the OP didn't even say they had a problem! They merely said X is old, and had no actual criticism to offer at all. Being old isn't in and of itself a problem, but it's the only issue that poster appeared to have. You don't have to be tech-savvy to say you have a problem, and to try to explain as best you can what the problem is, but OP didn't even get as far as saying they had a problem, much less even offer a clue as to what the problem might be.
If the problem is bugs, then the bugs need to be fixed. If the problem is inherent in the design, then the design needs to be redone. But if the problem is "it's over X years old and running software over X years old is uncool" then the software doesn't need fixing, the user's attiude needs fixing. Since OP appears to have no problems other than age (no complaint was made other than the age of the software), then frankly his comment should have been modded as the obvious troll that it is. Even if it's true that X actually needs fixing or replacing, that doesn't justify pointless trolling.
I think this is a great post, in spite of the backlash against it. I support your cause, and fully agree. If I had mod points, I'd give them to you rather than posting here.
It's a sad commentary on the rampant abuse of the mod system that you admit you'd give him mod points merely because you agree with him, rather than objectively mod him down, not because you agree or disagree, but because it was a bad, content-less post. Your own post was actually interesting and informative of what the actual issues are that people have with X (unlike the post you're replying to, which was in fact nothing but a troll). Mod points shouldn't be handed out because you support a cause, they should be handed out because the post is a good one, whether you agree with it not. (Or negative points given if it's a bad post, whether you agree with it or not.)
Rush? Leopard was originally targeted for June '07. They did anything but rush, but you've got to ship at some point and users are always a bit better at finding bugs.
Huh? What does the original target date have to do with it?
Whether it was released early, on time, or late is one fact. Whether it was rushed or released when good and ready is another fact. Whether it was shipped in a Monday or a Friday or some other day is a third fact. Despite the fact that all there of these facts are related to time and the release date, they're pretty much independent of one another. Knowing the release date will tell you the third, knowing also the original target date will tell you the first, but neither tells you anything at all about the second, since the second fact has nothing to do with either the first or the third.
Slashdot Mirror
lol
Ask 20 different web company CEOs to complete that sentence. Then ask 20 different I.T. professionals. Then take the 45-55 different answers you received, and try to sort them into less than a dozen piles of more or less compatible answers.
Go on, I dare ya. :p
I also walk across lawns when I don't even know who owns them. It could be public land, or it could be someone's private property and I'm stealing time on their grass every time I do it! I'm utterly unrepentant about this, too. Someone should arrest me, and soon, who knows how many lawns I'm going to step on if I'm not stopped.
What's really funny is, the summary is completely written by "An anonymous reader" with no additional commentary by the editor.
So, apparently, if I want to submit a pack of lies an distortions to Slashdot on hopes of getting it posted on the main page, I can do it anonymously, and even then, the editors won't bother to do any fact checking, but just post my slanders verbatim without comment.
How do I moderate the editors? I need to mod down samzenpus, he's clearly either an idiot or a troll himself. Probably a PostgreSQL fan looking for ways to get people to switch, even if it's for the wrong reasons. (I will be looking at PostgreSQL, merely because I've been reminded of the fact that I haven't looked at it in years and don't really know the state of it, but if I switch, it'll be for valid reasons, not FUD from /. trolls.)
Thanks for that. I switched from PostgreSQL to MySQL in 2001 due to some problems I was having at the time, and haven't looked at it since. For a few years I would explain why I thought MySQL was better, but in the last few years I've just pleaded ignorance when asked, since my reason now for using MySQL is just that I've been using it for years and it's what I'm familiar with and had no compelling reason to change. But with this happening, and knowing that PostgreSQL has improved since I last looked at it... looks like it's time to take a fresh look at PostgreSQL.
1. Service providers find something humans can do that computers can't do well, and exploit it as a means of distinguishing real people from bots.
2. Spammers work on improving their computer's ability to perform whatever task is required. Eventually, they do it well enough to be indistinguishable from humans.
3. Service providers find something else computers don't do well. Goto line 1.
Iterate this enough times. We will have true AI -- and it will have been created by spammers.
I'm not sure whether to be overjoyed or scared shitless...
Heh. Your response to that statement is quite a telling example of how Libertarians think. There's a lot more to responsibility than "who pays the bill".
A lot of what libertarians say makes sense (I for one am a big advocate of use taxes), but I can never get past their apparent insistence on the idea that they lack any kind of moral responsibility to their fellow human beings. As far as I can tell, most libertarians are just flat-out amoral, which explains why a statement about the responsibilities to society gets reduced in their minds to a statement merely about financial responsibility -- they don't believe in any other kind, so that's the only sense they can make out of the statement, stripping away the larger meaning it has for most of us. In a sense, we're not really speaking the same language, words like "responsibility" don't mean the same thing to us. Thus, the parent's response seemed entirely on target to him, whereas to me it looks like he's trying to dodge the main thrust of the statement, talking instead about one narrow slice of the pie. I used to see responses like his and say they were intentionally missing the point, but they're really living in an alternate linguistic universe than me. The statement means something entirely different to us, and so the response appears to me to be on an unrelated or only marginally related point.
Funny how communication works. It utterly amazes me sometimes that we can actually communicate with each other at all, considering the radically different universes we all live in.
Because different people don't agree on the subject, it must be subjective? It follows from that that the age of the Earth is subjective. Different people believe it's anywhere from six thousand to five billion years old.
It does not follow from the fact that different people hold different views on something that it's subjective. It could be subjective, or it could be some people are just plain wrong.
o.O
Wow! In a country where you can be thrown in jail for criticizing the government, few complain about it! I'm shocked! Shocked, I tell you! (Literally, if they ever catch me posting like this in China.)
Actually, it is hogwash, but only because of the wildly silly implication that they ever weren't in a common framework of understanding. The laws of physics are the same there are they are here. The same chemicals in the same conditions don't magically behave differently because it's a different planet.
Yes. However, it should be noted that Google doesn't say that. They say they have a goal of "Do no evil", they have never, to the best of my knowledge, claimed that they never do.
Of course, that's a point in there favor. It's easier to trust a person who says they try not to sin than one who says they've never sinned. The first assertion is much more believable. The second one is probably lying.
I'm not sure why it's considered so amazing to discover...
Science writing is frustrating if you know anything at all about what's being discussed. It's dumbed down to the point that you feel less informed for having read it. They invariably leave out the "trivial" little detail that makes it all make sense. They might as well just write, "Something new and nifty and important has been discovered! But it's too complicated to explain it to you, so we'll spare you the boring, complicated details."
*notes that the previous administration had budget surpluses*
Yup. Last time we invaded Canada, they kicked out asses back across the border. Although we did manage to burn down the Parliament in York (now Toronto) before leaving. :)
It's interesting, what they do and don't teach you about the War of 1812 in American schools. Like the fact that, oh, you know, we lost? Sure, we won a few nifty battles, but overall we lost the war. They didn't stop impressing our sailors or interfering with our trade because we fought a war over it, they stopped because they'd only been doing it as part of their war against Napoleon, and that war ended. In the treaty that ended the war, we agreed to a return to status quo ante bellum -- basically a big undo button: things were to return to exactly the state they were in before the war. But the British had been fine with the state of things before the war, we're the ones that had a list of demands for things to change. In the end, we agreed to no change. We did that because the alternative being argued by the other side was for the US to make territorial concessions to Britain. We were lucky we managed to get everyone to agree to just forget the whole thing, and doubly-lucky that the changing circumstances of the world basically obsoleted our original demands.
OK, who modded as "insightful" a post that suggested we stop using the scientific method? o.O
It's called a "hypothesis", and it's necessary for the process. We can't "actually find/make/detect" a new particle if we don't first hypothesize it, and then come up with an experiment to test the hypothesis.
By the way, can you name one physicist who insists that all unexplained affects MUST be the result of undiscovered particles? You said there were "some", implying there's multiples of them, so you shouldn't have any difficulty naming just one, unless you were talking out your ass. I'd suggest you "keep it real" from now on. Such people don't exist unless you can actually name one.
Yes, but they're substantially less functional operating systems than Emacs.
Old Slashdotters never die, they just get modded away. ;)
Yup, and later, THINK C. I used to use it. It was better before Symantec got ahold of it.
That's prima facie evidence for an insanity defense.
Err, no. All of the the above would make sense if it were true that being evil is bad for business. Alas, the reason companies usually behave in an evil manner is because it helps them financially. You can't point to financial success as evidence they're not evil. It doesn't necessarily prove they are, either, despite popular perception. Classically, though, the temptation to do evil is almost always because you do better materially when you do, so your contention above flies in the face of classical reasoning on the subject.
IBM's evil is was sustained it as long as it did. It was IBM's arrogance that brought them down.
On a similar note, the word "galaxy" comes from the Greek word for "milky", and is so called because it referred to the Milky Way, the visible part of our own galaxy (once commonly referred to simply as "The Galaxy" with a big "G").
Actually, it would more likely indicate that, just as we used to use the word "galaxy" to refer to our galaxy when we only knew about the one, but started applying it to other such structures when we discovered them, despite the fact that the etymology of the name intimately links it with our own, it would indicate that we're following a similar path with the phrase "solar system" now that we've found similar structures elsewhere, despite the fact that the etymology intimately links it with our sun. It may or may not eventually happen, but I suspect it probably will. It seems to be the way the natural evolution of our language goes.
It's only misleading to people who have a tendency to read into things more than is actually there, which is really more the fault of the reader, not the writer, and ultimately can't be helped. For example, "like ours" does not mean "identical to ours in every way", but merely that it has some common characteristics. An earth-like planet is only one of many possible characteristics that two solar systems might have in common, so although "identical to ours" would imply the existence of an earth-like plant, "like ours" in no way implies that. It doesn't even imply that such a planet is more likely in the system. A more complete description of what ways the two systems are alike would be required to conclude that. Luckily, the summary provides just such a description: the other system is like ours in the distribution and relative sizes of its gas giants relative to our own system. It correctly says the system is like ours, and correctly identifies precisely in what way it is like ours. It would take quite a bit of talent at misreading things to be misled here.
You forgot "democratic", e.g. DPRK - Democratic People's Republic of Korea. North Korea must be a true democracy, it says so right in the name! ;)
Aka "newspeak" (cf. Orwell, 1984). Mr. Orwell didn't make all this stuff up -- he didn't have to. "The German Nazis and the Russian Communists came very close to us in their methods, but they never had the courage to recognize their own motives." In the latter part, I think Mr. Orwell underestimated both of them, or credited them with nobler intentions than I suspect they had.
Not being psychic, if the best vocalization of your problem is "I have a problem", but refuse to say any more detail at all than that, then yes, you can't be helped, sorry. You appear to be inserting words into the OP's mouth beyond that -- the OP didn't even say they had a problem! They merely said X is old, and had no actual criticism to offer at all. Being old isn't in and of itself a problem, but it's the only issue that poster appeared to have. You don't have to be tech-savvy to say you have a problem, and to try to explain as best you can what the problem is, but OP didn't even get as far as saying they had a problem, much less even offer a clue as to what the problem might be.
If the problem is bugs, then the bugs need to be fixed. If the problem is inherent in the design, then the design needs to be redone. But if the problem is "it's over X years old and running software over X years old is uncool" then the software doesn't need fixing, the user's attiude needs fixing. Since OP appears to have no problems other than age (no complaint was made other than the age of the software), then frankly his comment should have been modded as the obvious troll that it is. Even if it's true that X actually needs fixing or replacing, that doesn't justify pointless trolling.
It's a sad commentary on the rampant abuse of the mod system that you admit you'd give him mod points merely because you agree with him, rather than objectively mod him down, not because you agree or disagree, but because it was a bad, content-less post. Your own post was actually interesting and informative of what the actual issues are that people have with X (unlike the post you're replying to, which was in fact nothing but a troll). Mod points shouldn't be handed out because you support a cause, they should be handed out because the post is a good one, whether you agree with it not. (Or negative points given if it's a bad post, whether you agree with it or not.)
Um... you understand where the ozone comes from when you're welding something in an oxygen atmosphere, right?
Huh? What does the original target date have to do with it?
Whether it was released early, on time, or late is one fact. Whether it was rushed or released when good and ready is another fact. Whether it was shipped in a Monday or a Friday or some other day is a third fact. Despite the fact that all there of these facts are related to time and the release date, they're pretty much independent of one another. Knowing the release date will tell you the third, knowing also the original target date will tell you the first, but neither tells you anything at all about the second, since the second fact has nothing to do with either the first or the third.