I thought the same. But on the other hand, there's also a tendency that once people figure how to do something previously thought to be requiring fancy intelligence, people diss it with a but that's just...
I have a ph.d. friend (in psychology) who was working on a pattern recognition problem. Basically show people some patterns, scan their brain to see how they react, then do the same while keeping the patterns secret to the researchers and try to figure out which patterns people are looking at. He ended his long explanation with: and then we're, well, reading people's mind.
I don't think Opportunist meant it as a joke. I think it was meant as a critique. And I don't think you fully understood it. Although I do think it's applaudable you're trying to measure how happy the customers are.
Good science could be: find a correlation an proof the causality. But a lot of studies stop at the correlation. That's what fills newspapers nowadays. 'You get fat from diet coke since most people that drink diet coke are fat'.
You cannot prove things. You can only show that reasonable alternative explanations appear to be false.
Some scientist try to eliminate all other reasons and then decide that their causality is the only one that explains the correlation. But in effect they say: those things correlate and I 'the superintelligent scientist with multiple PhD's' cannot find another explanation and that is why my explanation must be true.
Now you're being inconsequential. First you don't want people to publish interesting findings before they have an explanation, next you say that if they just come up with their own explanations, they need to shut up.
I think one thing you're forgetting is bad reporting. On the scientific side, someone finds something interesting, publishes it, there's discussion, it is found to be not really that relevant anyway, case is closed. In the public eye, however, the interesting tidbit is announced, misquoted grossly, taken out of context several times, end of story. Nobody reports on the later dismissal by the scientific community. People still think it's true.
Dear sir, what you need to do is not go to Mars. What you need to do is ask your family what they think about the idea. And then get your head examined. Perhaps in reverse order.
It's not up to us to judge you, though. Lots of people do really stupid things that eventually get them killed, like this guy. I personally think you have a responsibility towards your daughters, and to some extent also towards your wife, but hey, people get divorced and move to another continent. So it's not as if losing a father is unheard of.
Agreed on the coolness of LED-integrated lamps. I recently bought 50 0.5 W LEDs from Ebay plus two power converters. Cost me 6 USD or so. Next year it would probably be 3 USD. Let's see what we can build with them.:)
assuming you have a bank account that pays about 4% interest as mine does
Where do you live? Where I live, they give around 0.1% annual interest at the moment. If you're lucky. That amounts to somewhere between -2 to -4% if you adjust for inflation. I would really like to hear where a simple bank account can give you a 4% annual income after inflation.
In your careful analysis, you also seem to have forgotten that prices of electricity are going up (well, at least they are in my part of the world).
But none of this matters because at the moment LED bulbs are expensive because they are new - and also silly if you think about it. They are a replacement for yesterdays tech. The lamps of tomorrow don't need a bulky bulb, instead they'll have the lighting integrated. You can already buy some funny designs. This will also help with the heat issue.
Until a heat pump efficient enough to heat your oven is invented, I don't think it makes terribly much sense to try to find a design for an oven lamp that's more efficient at emitting lightt.
Some people have been working on it in GIMP for some years (that's the GEGL thing). It looks like that recently got a tremendous boost, so it may actually land in the next version.
Yeah, it's slow, but remember that these people aren't getting paid and changing the image format in an image editor is a really big change, basically a rewrite.
For the same reason that libraries exist. It is in the best interest of society that people read and learn as much as possible, and it is a paywall, even a small one, has a huge effect. Imagine you had to pay a dollar to view a web page. How much web browsing would you do then?
Research is expensive in the first place. With the current model, the losers are everyone outside research circles, that is people who do not have easy access to university libraries.
Of course, if you're a researcher, you don't see this. But I tell you that it doesn't really help dissemination of information when you can't even access a possibly interesting paper without paying 35$. Maybe you don't think that's a problem, but you aren't going to pay out of your own pocket either, are you?
When I was setting up scale (aka Expose) on Compiz I could drag the speed slider all the way from 0 to 50.
It's funny you mention this because GNOME 2 set out to fix these silly configuration choices, and did just fine, although perhaps cutting some corners with the first release. Federico summed up some of the history here. Compiz has largely been developed by people outside the GNOME sphere as far as I know. The thing is that some people learned this lesson ten years ago, and some still haven't learned it. If you want to have your software free and have it your way, you either need to start educating those people or just go with the GNOME guys.
There's your problem. You decided to go with the hacker solution that is mplayer. mplayer is not friendly. mplayer is a powerful and sharp tool. When you use it to break your system, you get to collect the pieces.
What most consumers want is to know that for the next several years, they'll be able to get new apps without having to upgrade their OS, and that those apps will be simple, drag-and-drop binary blobs that "just work". Anything less than that, and Linux won't go anywhere.
You can do that with the package manager. I have not compiled anything non-dev related in 10 years. Just saying...
Not saying that package managers are perfect or currently the best way to discover software. The technical stuff is good, but the presentation has traditionally been awful, although that's starting to change with things like Ubuntu's software center.
In the end, most people probably just get some help from a friend and go with that.
Regarding Wine, I think those of us who run Linux daily are more like, OMG, it works! It's a miracle!, when we start up something and it works without checking hacks on the Wine appdb.:)
Not going to argue with you, but just for your information:
For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command. There was no GUI way to do some things (as far as I know). And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line. That got to really be annoying.
You don't need root for moving files around, as long as it's not system files. And you shouldn't need to move system files around. There's a file manager that works pretty much the same was as Explorer in Windows, except it's a little neater.:) It's true that many guides only use the command line but that probably a) speaks to the quality of the advice, b) is because it's easier to explain and copy-paste than a long recipe of click here, then there, then there...
Regarding mistakes at the command line, you can type the up arrow to get the previous command or the TAB key to complete a filename. Those of us who use the command line daily aren't really masochists, so these kinds of problems have been fixed decades ago.:)
Drivers and proprietary web stuff can be a problem. It's gotten much better over the years, and arguably more hardware is supported out of the box than on other operating systems, but still seasoned Linux users tend to check compatibility before they buy.
I may be wrong, but I was under the impression the 80% part is supposed to be secure because you can auction off the house if needed? That's how it works in Denmark.
Of course, it's not secure against correlated failures where the whole housing market crashes. Financial institutions appear to be too slow to react to that kind of writing on the wall.
It's wrong if it leads to dictatorship and ensuing madness. Like for instance mass-murdering of un-likeminded people? Is it not self-evident that there's overhead in democracy as government? Even if it may lead to a more efficient society because it's harder for the ruling structure to keep a lid on new developments? Some people forget the big picture.
I don't know what happened where you went to school, but where I did, most of the feedback was a couple of red underlines for spelling/grammar mistakes, and a "good essay" at the end. I wouldn't have noticed if they were produced by a robot.
I do think essay writing is mostly for your own sake, unless you really have something interesting to say. But then you should be blogging or writing for a newspaper or similar.
. You need to put about 10% of your income into a long-term retirement fund, and have (ideally) six months of living expenses in a money-market or savings account (Must have).
If we're discussed being financially sound, here's another tip I recently discussed with a coworker. if you own the place you live, consider setting aside some money for renovating said place. The housing association I live in (it's a group of rented houses) does this, and it actually makes a lot of sense.
If you think about it, many things in a house needs periodical replacements, e.g. windows (20-30 years?), roof (50 years?), bathroom and kitchen (30 years?). If you set aside the money when you're planning your income, you won't have to think hard about whether you deserve a new kitchen or not, and your property will stay up-to-date and not lose value over time. Long-term, it may make you more happy than most other ways of burning the money. I don't think it's really that hard to do, and if nothing else will probably give a much more precise idea of the real cost of owning a place besides mortgage and housing tax.
Unfortunately, cellphone service is very expensive here compared to, say, Europe, and since there isn't much competition there's not much we can do about it.
Don't chat in the phone? In fact, don't buy a phone at all? Works for me.:)
I think that needs to be qualified with "knowledgeable in the field". A standard lawyer approach when facing uncertainty is: don't do it. With that mentality, you're going nowhere. You need to talk to someone who understands what this is about.
Slashdot Mirror
I thought the same. But on the other hand, there's also a tendency that once people figure how to do something previously thought to be requiring fancy intelligence, people diss it with a but that's just ...
I have a ph.d. friend (in psychology) who was working on a pattern recognition problem. Basically show people some patterns, scan their brain to see how they react, then do the same while keeping the patterns secret to the researchers and try to figure out which patterns people are looking at. He ended his long explanation with: and then we're, well, reading people's mind.
If you think about it, it is quite awesome.
I don't think Opportunist meant it as a joke. I think it was meant as a critique. And I don't think you fully understood it. Although I do think it's applaudable you're trying to measure how happy the customers are.
Good science could be: find a correlation an proof the causality. But a lot of studies stop at the correlation. That's what fills newspapers nowadays. 'You get fat from diet coke since most people that drink diet coke are fat'.
You cannot prove things. You can only show that reasonable alternative explanations appear to be false.
Some scientist try to eliminate all other reasons and then decide that their causality is the only one that explains the correlation. But in effect they say: those things correlate and I 'the superintelligent scientist with multiple PhD's' cannot find another explanation and that is why my explanation must be true.
Now you're being inconsequential. First you don't want people to publish interesting findings before they have an explanation, next you say that if they just come up with their own explanations, they need to shut up.
I think one thing you're forgetting is bad reporting. On the scientific side, someone finds something interesting, publishes it, there's discussion, it is found to be not really that relevant anyway, case is closed. In the public eye, however, the interesting tidbit is announced, misquoted grossly, taken out of context several times, end of story. Nobody reports on the later dismissal by the scientific community. People still think it's true.
Perhaps they just spent less resources on the thing. Planning for almost everything is much more expensive than just planning for a lot.
Dear sir, what you need to do is not go to Mars. What you need to do is ask your family what they think about the idea. And then get your head examined. Perhaps in reverse order.
It's not up to us to judge you, though. Lots of people do really stupid things that eventually get them killed, like this guy. I personally think you have a responsibility towards your daughters, and to some extent also towards your wife, but hey, people get divorced and move to another continent. So it's not as if losing a father is unheard of.
You forgot one point: awesomeness!
Agreed on the coolness of LED-integrated lamps. I recently bought 50 0.5 W LEDs from Ebay plus two power converters. Cost me 6 USD or so. Next year it would probably be 3 USD. Let's see what we can build with them. :)
assuming you have a bank account that pays about 4% interest as mine does
Where do you live? Where I live, they give around 0.1% annual interest at the moment. If you're lucky. That amounts to somewhere between -2 to -4% if you adjust for inflation. I would really like to hear where a simple bank account can give you a 4% annual income after inflation.
In your careful analysis, you also seem to have forgotten that prices of electricity are going up (well, at least they are in my part of the world).
But none of this matters because at the moment LED bulbs are expensive because they are new - and also silly if you think about it. They are a replacement for yesterdays tech. The lamps of tomorrow don't need a bulky bulb, instead they'll have the lighting integrated. You can already buy some funny designs. This will also help with the heat issue.
And which LED or CFL can I use inside an oven?
Until a heat pump efficient enough to heat your oven is invented, I don't think it makes terribly much sense to try to find a design for an oven lamp that's more efficient at emitting lightt.
Cutting edge? Lisp? Really?
(This is not just for fun, I'd like to hear what parts of Clojure make you think it's the cutting edge.)
Some people have been working on it in GIMP for some years (that's the GEGL thing). It looks like that recently got a tremendous boost, so it may actually land in the next version.
Yeah, it's slow, but remember that these people aren't getting paid and changing the image format in an image editor is a really big change, basically a rewrite.
For the same reason that libraries exist. It is in the best interest of society that people read and learn as much as possible, and it is a paywall, even a small one, has a huge effect. Imagine you had to pay a dollar to view a web page. How much web browsing would you do then?
Research is expensive in the first place. With the current model, the losers are everyone outside research circles, that is people who do not have easy access to university libraries.
Of course, if you're a researcher, you don't see this. But I tell you that it doesn't really help dissemination of information when you can't even access a possibly interesting paper without paying 35$. Maybe you don't think that's a problem, but you aren't going to pay out of your own pocket either, are you?
Here are some answers Why Linux Does Not Suck from a guy who regularly holds a "Why Linux Sucks" talk.
When I was setting up scale (aka Expose) on Compiz I could drag the speed slider all the way from 0 to 50.
It's funny you mention this because GNOME 2 set out to fix these silly configuration choices, and did just fine, although perhaps cutting some corners with the first release. Federico summed up some of the history here. Compiz has largely been developed by people outside the GNOME sphere as far as I know. The thing is that some people learned this lesson ten years ago, and some still haven't learned it. If you want to have your software free and have it your way, you either need to start educating those people or just go with the GNOME guys.
Somehow mplayer decides it wants to grab ALSA
There's your problem. You decided to go with the hacker solution that is mplayer. mplayer is not friendly. mplayer is a powerful and sharp tool. When you use it to break your system, you get to collect the pieces.
What most consumers want is to know that for the next several years, they'll be able to get new apps without having to upgrade their OS, and that those apps will be simple, drag-and-drop binary blobs that "just work". Anything less than that, and Linux won't go anywhere.
You can do that with the package manager. I have not compiled anything non-dev related in 10 years. Just saying...
Not saying that package managers are perfect or currently the best way to discover software. The technical stuff is good, but the presentation has traditionally been awful, although that's starting to change with things like Ubuntu's software center.
In the end, most people probably just get some help from a friend and go with that.
Regarding Wine, I think those of us who run Linux daily are more like, OMG, it works! It's a miracle!, when we start up something and it works without checking hacks on the Wine appdb. :)
Not going to argue with you, but just for your information:
For every little file move or copying of files, I HAD to get root access and type in a command. There was no GUI way to do some things (as far as I know). And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line. That got to really be annoying.
You don't need root for moving files around, as long as it's not system files. And you shouldn't need to move system files around. There's a file manager that works pretty much the same was as Explorer in Windows, except it's a little neater. :) It's true that many guides only use the command line but that probably a) speaks to the quality of the advice, b) is because it's easier to explain and copy-paste than a long recipe of click here, then there, then there...
Regarding mistakes at the command line, you can type the up arrow to get the previous command or the TAB key to complete a filename. Those of us who use the command line daily aren't really masochists, so these kinds of problems have been fixed decades ago. :)
Drivers and proprietary web stuff can be a problem. It's gotten much better over the years, and arguably more hardware is supported out of the box than on other operating systems, but still seasoned Linux users tend to check compatibility before they buy.
I may be wrong, but I was under the impression the 80% part is supposed to be secure because you can auction off the house if needed? That's how it works in Denmark.
Of course, it's not secure against correlated failures where the whole housing market crashes. Financial institutions appear to be too slow to react to that kind of writing on the wall.
It's wrong if it leads to dictatorship and ensuing madness. Like for instance mass-murdering of un-likeminded people? Is it not self-evident that there's overhead in democracy as government? Even if it may lead to a more efficient society because it's harder for the ruling structure to keep a lid on new developments? Some people forget the big picture.
I don't know what happened where you went to school, but where I did, most of the feedback was a couple of red underlines for spelling/grammar mistakes, and a "good essay" at the end. I wouldn't have noticed if they were produced by a robot.
I do think essay writing is mostly for your own sake, unless you really have something interesting to say. But then you should be blogging or writing for a newspaper or similar.
. You need to put about 10% of your income into a long-term retirement fund, and have (ideally) six months of living expenses in a money-market or savings account (Must have).
If we're discussed being financially sound, here's another tip I recently discussed with a coworker. if you own the place you live, consider setting aside some money for renovating said place. The housing association I live in (it's a group of rented houses) does this, and it actually makes a lot of sense.
If you think about it, many things in a house needs periodical replacements, e.g. windows (20-30 years?), roof (50 years?), bathroom and kitchen (30 years?). If you set aside the money when you're planning your income, you won't have to think hard about whether you deserve a new kitchen or not, and your property will stay up-to-date and not lose value over time. Long-term, it may make you more happy than most other ways of burning the money. I don't think it's really that hard to do, and if nothing else will probably give a much more precise idea of the real cost of owning a place besides mortgage and housing tax.
Unfortunately, cellphone service is very expensive here compared to, say, Europe, and since there isn't much competition there's not much we can do about it.
Don't chat in the phone? In fact, don't buy a phone at all? Works for me. :)
I think that needs to be qualified with "knowledgeable in the field". A standard lawyer approach when facing uncertainty is: don't do it. With that mentality, you're going nowhere. You need to talk to someone who understands what this is about.