Right, so I'm feeling bored on a Sunday afternoon, as we said. How is this "VCR" going to deliver content to me? I hear you can't even get one with an Ethernet port!
Like most Americans, I will not be purchasing a VCR in the future; it is a colossally useless device. It never worked right with cable, and besides, it's really quite a pain to use. Why muck about with a remote and a 1-line LCD display when I can just point and click? $2 barely buys a Coke these days, you know.
People aren't going to browse iTunes looking for good TV shows to watch.
On the contrary, it's one of the best ways to try out new TV shows. You are feeling bored on a Sunday afternoon so you browse for something that looks interesting and sink $2 on the first episode. If you like it you watch more, and if you don't you aren't out much.
Contrast to conventional TV, where if you want to try a show you have to figure out when it is on and arrange to be at a TV at that particular time -- and forget about starting from the beginning.
We all know that a very important part of system security is the lack of fatal security bugs. This is a problem that has been very large with Microsoft products in the past, and is reflective of code quality. Fixing these bugs is crucial.
However, even when a security system doesn't have any bugs, it can still be very insecure. We can define "security" in a more general sense as "the extent to which a system is doing what the owner or user expects". The problem is not that the system is capable of malice so much as that the system is capable of malice of which the user is unaware.
How is Microsoft in the future going to design their systems so that users know what is really going on?
Nope. The article is about search engine advertising. The gist is that if you improve your site to make more money, your competition improves too, so you both have to bid higher for placement in paid search listings.
The summary failed to capture the article's thesis, which is mostly Nielsen's fault, as he refers to "value" in his own summary and he really means "cash".
Personally I think the link words should always be a noun phrase that refers to the target of the link itself. So "article", "interesting commentary", etc and NOT "tilting in favor of the search engines", "CNN", or "three times lower".
That is my opinion, though, and I admit it makes the text less interesting.
I know this one... we'll make our elements in our nuclear reactors! That's just an interim plan, though, while we work to develop bacteria that can transmute moon rocks to useful elements in -- get this -- their NUCLEUS! A nuclear nucleus, isn't it great? It's amazing how evolution and breeding can solve any conceivable problem, like the lack of water or an atmosphere.
The US/Euro exchange rate has been quite stable for the past two years. Your statement, "US currency is dropping like a rock", is not correct, though it would have been reasonable in 2003.
Further, China's announcement that it will peg the value of its currency to a "basket" of foreign currencies instead of the USD alone does not mean that the Chinese are about to sell dollars in large amounts, although it's possible that they will do so and some expect it.
The 640K barrier disappears as soon as the processor switches into protected mode, which is basically the first thing your bootloader does. Real mode still exists, but only for historical reasons.
Limited IRQs and I/O channels went the way of the dodo many years ago with the unveiling of PCI, though support for PCI in Windows was surprisingly poor until Windows 2000.
We had that schism already. The problem is that Slashdot is popular because of the balance of content it offers, and that balance is carefully designed by the editors. If you turn that over to the most active and vocal users, the site would be less likely to attract the (essentially more profitable) casual readers.
While we're on the topic of Slashdot: I'm pretty sure that's not a bug, but rather a feature. It's always complained about as if it were some sort of error, but I suspect it's part of a system designed to reduce the GNAA-style first posts. Anybody know?
Re:My C64 floppy could do that!
on
Scanjet Music
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· Score: 2
OK, I can't trust anyone with total access to all the data in my entire corporation, so I just fired my entire IT staff as per your instructions. What do I do now?
Actually, I think you might be slightly confused as to what "means" means. I think your argument changed in mid-post.
When Rei says "this is not plausible" (paraphrased to simplify) she means exactly what "plausible" means -- that it does not appear that this is reasonable or valid. Your statement that some things might be valid even though they do not appear to be so does not address the statement that this claim is not plausible.
I would advise you not to rely upon the dictionary in an argument with Rei.
Re:No Privacy Implications Since It Resides Locall
on
Yahoo IM Translator
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· Score: 1
Whaaa? You can't update posts on Slashdot, so you must have written that "UPDATED" part in before you clicked Submit... but by the time you started to write the update, you comment was pointless, right?
Apple sold 4.5 million iPods last fiscal year. Obviously that doesn't include the most recent Christmas season, during which they probably sold at least another 7 million.
Why are you assuming that the only kind of bias is that people with problems will report more often? How can you show that there are no model-specific biases with these data?
The answer is that you can't -- you can't even begin to show that. Every single possible conclusion that one might seek to draw from this study could very well be illusory.
Even if those numbers are high, one would expect them to both be high by roughly the same amount.
One might expect that, but not in a statistically sound way. For instance, it's possible that the machine with a higher reported failure rate had some widely-publicized (but not necessarily very prevalent) problem that caused people who had that specific problem to discuss it on message boards and find out about the survey. Or perhaps the problem was complicated, and required discussion on message boards to diagnose. Maybe the machine with a lower reported failure rate was simply more aesthetically pleasing, and caused users to mentally discount the severity of problems or forget them altogether. For instance, the owner of a beautiful 1954 Jaguar is likely to praise the car even though it breaks down every other week, whereas the owner of a 2004 Civic is likely to be furious if the CD player skips.
The point is that there are numerous entry points for sampling error, and it's not possible to correct for them or even know what they all are. That's why scientific experiments include a control group, and why surveys must be a random sampling to be meaningful. There is very little that can be determined from a self-selected study like this one.
As much as people like to quote the macintouch surveys, they are still self-selected unverified Internet studies. As such, they are not useful for any real-world decision making, any more than Slashdot polls.
Macintouch claims that this is not a problem, but they have no way to support that claim.
Here I feel constrained by moderation, which has raised my words up on high as if they had some particular merit. I really only wrote the post for the joke in the last sentence (which was not actually all that funny, and I didn't even get a Funny mod).
In response to your serious objection, though, I think there are two answers here. In a Grade 7 sense, I think we need to teach some brand of strictness and prescriptivism to create passable writers from the massive stock of naturally terrible ones. On the other hand, prescriptivism is at best an incomplete tool for helping us understand the difference between clear and unclear writing.
So it is with Dead English Guys -- there's not so much of a reason why we would study that particular tiny subset of literature, but that doesn't mean it was all a waste. At one time I understand that the English-speaking educated had a kind of cultural unity that could only be realized by having that common background. I fear, though, that the modern world simply makes cultural unity a completely false hope.
The rule against splitting infinitives was invented out of whole cloth by someone who liked Latin better. There has never legitimately been any such rule in English.
That being said, it is not advisable to pointlessly, carelessly, verbosely, and excessively, causing people to start wondering where the verb is, split an infinitive.
Besides, the premise is nonsense. All iPods except the Shuffle support Apple Lossless, which makes lossless audio a very well supported feature in the market.
Slashdot Mirror
Right, so I'm feeling bored on a Sunday afternoon, as we said. How is this "VCR" going to deliver content to me? I hear you can't even get one with an Ethernet port!
Like most Americans, I will not be purchasing a VCR in the future; it is a colossally useless device. It never worked right with cable, and besides, it's really quite a pain to use. Why muck about with a remote and a 1-line LCD display when I can just point and click? $2 barely buys a Coke these days, you know.
People aren't going to browse iTunes looking for good TV shows to watch.
On the contrary, it's one of the best ways to try out new TV shows. You are feeling bored on a Sunday afternoon so you browse for something that looks interesting and sink $2 on the first episode. If you like it you watch more, and if you don't you aren't out much.
Contrast to conventional TV, where if you want to try a show you have to figure out when it is on and arrange to be at a TV at that particular time -- and forget about starting from the beginning.
We all know that a very important part of system security is the lack of fatal security bugs. This is a problem that has been very large with Microsoft products in the past, and is reflective of code quality. Fixing these bugs is crucial.
However, even when a security system doesn't have any bugs, it can still be very insecure. We can define "security" in a more general sense as "the extent to which a system is doing what the owner or user expects". The problem is not that the system is capable of malice so much as that the system is capable of malice of which the user is unaware.
How is Microsoft in the future going to design their systems so that users know what is really going on?
Nope. The article is about search engine advertising. The gist is that if you improve your site to make more money, your competition improves too, so you both have to bid higher for placement in paid search listings.
The summary failed to capture the article's thesis, which is mostly Nielsen's fault, as he refers to "value" in his own summary and he really means "cash".
Personally I think the link words should always be a noun phrase that refers to the target of the link itself. So "article", "interesting commentary", etc and NOT "tilting in favor of the search engines", "CNN", or "three times lower".
That is my opinion, though, and I admit it makes the text less interesting.
Don't have anything useful to say? Then RTFA.
I think a better platitude would be "the market has no clue when it comes to lawsuits."
I know this one... we'll make our elements in our nuclear reactors! That's just an interim plan, though, while we work to develop bacteria that can transmute moon rocks to useful elements in -- get this -- their NUCLEUS! A nuclear nucleus, isn't it great? It's amazing how evolution and breeding can solve any conceivable problem, like the lack of water or an atmosphere.
Take a look at the five year graph.
n &z=m&q=l&c=
http://finance.yahoo.com/q/bc?s=USDEUR=X&t=5y&l=o
The US/Euro exchange rate has been quite stable for the past two years. Your statement, "US currency is dropping like a rock", is not correct, though it would have been reasonable in 2003.
Further, China's announcement that it will peg the value of its currency to a "basket" of foreign currencies instead of the USD alone does not mean that the Chinese are about to sell dollars in large amounts, although it's possible that they will do so and some expect it.
Excuse me, are you from 1995?
The 640K barrier disappears as soon as the processor switches into protected mode, which is basically the first thing your bootloader does. Real mode still exists, but only for historical reasons.
Limited IRQs and I/O channels went the way of the dodo many years ago with the unveiling of PCI, though support for PCI in Windows was surprisingly poor until Windows 2000.
We had that schism already. The problem is that Slashdot is popular because of the balance of content it offers, and that balance is carefully designed by the editors. If you turn that over to the most active and vocal users, the site would be less likely to attract the (essentially more profitable) casual readers.
While we're on the topic of Slashdot: I'm pretty sure that's not a bug, but rather a feature. It's always complained about as if it were some sort of error, but I suspect it's part of a system designed to reduce the GNAA-style first posts. Anybody know?
Or maybe you have bad taste in scanners.
OK, I can't trust anyone with total access to all the data in my entire corporation, so I just fired my entire IT staff as per your instructions. What do I do now?
Actually, my error was worse -- I was looking at the dollar amount and not the unit amount. FY2005 was 4.5 billion dollars on 22.5 million units.
Actually, I think you might be slightly confused as to what "means" means. I think your argument changed in mid-post.
When Rei says "this is not plausible" (paraphrased to simplify) she means exactly what "plausible" means -- that it does not appear that this is reasonable or valid. Your statement that some things might be valid even though they do not appear to be so does not address the statement that this claim is not plausible.
I would advise you not to rely upon the dictionary in an argument with Rei.
Whaaa? You can't update posts on Slashdot, so you must have written that "UPDATED" part in before you clicked Submit... but by the time you started to write the update, you comment was pointless, right?
Maybe it was a joke... never mind.
Apple sold 4.5 million iPods last fiscal year. Obviously that doesn't include the most recent Christmas season, during which they probably sold at least another 7 million.
Momentum is mv. Not squared.
Why are you assuming that the only kind of bias is that people with problems will report more often? How can you show that there are no model-specific biases with these data?
The answer is that you can't -- you can't even begin to show that. Every single possible conclusion that one might seek to draw from this study could very well be illusory.
Even if those numbers are high, one would expect them to both be high by roughly the same amount.
One might expect that, but not in a statistically sound way. For instance, it's possible that the machine with a higher reported failure rate had some widely-publicized (but not necessarily very prevalent) problem that caused people who had that specific problem to discuss it on message boards and find out about the survey. Or perhaps the problem was complicated, and required discussion on message boards to diagnose. Maybe the machine with a lower reported failure rate was simply more aesthetically pleasing, and caused users to mentally discount the severity of problems or forget them altogether. For instance, the owner of a beautiful 1954 Jaguar is likely to praise the car even though it breaks down every other week, whereas the owner of a 2004 Civic is likely to be furious if the CD player skips.
The point is that there are numerous entry points for sampling error, and it's not possible to correct for them or even know what they all are. That's why scientific experiments include a control group, and why surveys must be a random sampling to be meaningful. There is very little that can be determined from a self-selected study like this one.
As much as people like to quote the macintouch surveys, they are still self-selected unverified Internet studies. As such, they are not useful for any real-world decision making, any more than Slashdot polls.
Macintouch claims that this is not a problem, but they have no way to support that claim.
Here I feel constrained by moderation, which has raised my words up on high as if they had some particular merit. I really only wrote the post for the joke in the last sentence (which was not actually all that funny, and I didn't even get a Funny mod).
In response to your serious objection, though, I think there are two answers here. In a Grade 7 sense, I think we need to teach some brand of strictness and prescriptivism to create passable writers from the massive stock of naturally terrible ones. On the other hand, prescriptivism is at best an incomplete tool for helping us understand the difference between clear and unclear writing.
So it is with Dead English Guys -- there's not so much of a reason why we would study that particular tiny subset of literature, but that doesn't mean it was all a waste. At one time I understand that the English-speaking educated had a kind of cultural unity that could only be realized by having that common background. I fear, though, that the modern world simply makes cultural unity a completely false hope.
The rule against splitting infinitives was invented out of whole cloth by someone who liked Latin better. There has never legitimately been any such rule in English.
That being said, it is not advisable to pointlessly, carelessly, verbosely, and excessively, causing people to start wondering where the verb is, split an infinitive.
Besides, the premise is nonsense. All iPods except the Shuffle support Apple Lossless, which makes lossless audio a very well supported feature in the market.