It obviously had learned this should be said by someone before clamping down on their hair and pulling.
Most of what my macaw and my parents' african grey falls into this catagory. Obviously, they learned "Hello" and "good morning" because those things are said to them. It is even clear that their understanding of these sounds is different from the literal meaning; our birds will use these comments any time they want to greet you or initiate contact.
What is more interesting is the novel constructions and novel useage; i.e. the new uses they find for an existing word or phrase and the entirely new phrases make by combining words in new ways. Examples:
They grey often says, "Want chip" when he wants you to bring him a corn chip (or any other snack). He knows what cats are, because if my sister is visiting and is bringing cats, we tell him to go in the cage because the cats will be here. One time my sister brought a kitten with her. He had never seen a kitten, and wanted to look at it. He walked to the edge of his cage and yelled, "Want cat" so we would bring the kitten to him. He had never heard those words used together.
All our birds have had previous owners, so they have different vocal repertoires from their past. They grey was used to saying "good night" when he wanted to be put into his cage and have the lights turned out. The macaw used "night-night" when he wanted this to happen. The grey understood that these two sequences of sounds had equivalent meaning, and changed his phrase to "good night-night".
Whenever one of the birds is running around on the floor causing mischief, someone in the family will yell "get the bird!". The grey started using this phrase in a novel context; when he is locked in the cage and wants out he now yells "get the bird!" This usage of the phrase was never modeled for him, but he knows that the sequence of sounds will cause someone to pick him up.
Once when he was chewing on woodwork in the house and getting scolded for it, the grey stopped, looked at the human and asked, "Are you mad?" None of us recall having said that near him before.
I wish they had mentioned Live For Speed. It doesn't have as many cars or tracks as the big name games, but it is a REALLY impressive offering for a development team of only three people. They appear to be putting a lot more effort into the physics than into flashy features, and it is the only racing simulator I know of that has an autocross editor so you can build your own autocross tracks.
They win brownie points with me by using ogg vorbis for their sound files.:)
Of course a fun work environment is more enjoyable. I've worked in an IT company though, that was lots of fun, without being very productive. The company doesn't exist anymore.
Fun doesn't pay the bills. Think of it as a nice fringe benefit, but not something more than that. I
sardiskan confidently, but erroneously, stated the following
If you look at the whole picture, evolution is unprovable and ID is unprovable, which means that to whichever wing you choose, you choose so on a BELIEF. ID vs Evolution is not about proving the origin of man anyway, its about TRYING to prove that there is or is not a God.
Evolution is not "about" anything. It is a description of a process. This process has NO bearing on the existence or non-existence of god. Your belief that this IS about religion mirrors that of the board members from dover who the judge said "repeatedly lied to cover their motives even while professing religious beliefs".
You urge us to go to the website of Kent Hovind, a tax evading Young Earth Creationist who's favorite arguments are so weak that even other creationists say he makes "mistakes in facts and logic which do the creationist cause no good".
Hovind is a professional debater who depends primarily on one tactic; he throws out questions (most of which are irrelevant) so quickly that his opponents cannot answer all of the within the alloted time. He This tactic would fail in a written debate where the opposition had time to answer all his questions. That's probably why hovind dislikes standard debate formats and refuses to participate in online debates.
On 12/12/05, Linus Torvalds wrote: > The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of > is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different > mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor > users? Here's a hint: it's not the small and fast one.
Just for the record, since I made this decision I can tell you that "might confuse people" was not the reason. More evidence for my point that "might confuse people" is the reason made up by others, not the reason given by the decision makers.
First some context. The overall metacity plan was to first get all the defaults right as priority one, and then add more configurability and options consistent with keeping the defaults right. This was the driving "principle" if there was a principle at all. (The weekend I started on metacity the motivation was more "my # %$ WM doesn't work, I'm just going to write one that works how I like")
On the specific feature of arbitrary button bindings, the full discussion is archived in bugzilla. But my memory of this feature is:
- I put in a lot of special cases to get the default behavior exactly right;
the event handlers for mouse buttons do not look like "run the action associated with
this button," they are more complicated
- I spent a few days trying to code a patch that made button actions configurable
while preserving all the detailed behaviors I had coded, and I just kind of gave
up because the patch was too hard/complicated/big and I wasn't willing to
break the default behavior in order to simplify the code.
- I did put in configuration of the most common stuff people wanted to change,
like double click action and alt+click modifier key, and this made most people
happy (based on reduction in bugzilla/email traffic)
My patch is still in bugzilla, if anyone wants to start from it and find the simple and elegant way to code it. The patch as I left it is buggy though and had a couple "hard to fix" problems. Plus it's against a pretty old version of metacity I guess.
BTW, though I confess that I like to reject window manager patches, I also spent a ton of time getting EWMH usable and supporting it in GNOME. The only purpose of EWMH is to make the window manager replaceable.
You may be noticing that I like the idea of "choice of two well-focused designs" better than "single choice of one nobody-hates-it design."
Anyway. The primary issue with preferences in metacity was never confusing users - that would only be an issue with displaying prefs in the dialog, i.e. unlimited prefs would be OK, as long as they were hidden. The more important issue I always had in my mind was the quality of the defaults, and ability to spend time polishing the defaults. The tradeoff came from amount of personal time I had, code complexity, and interdependencies among prefs.
But, I pretty often flamed people complaining about lack of prefs in bugzilla, so I can't really whine about being misunderstood:-P
> Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users > just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection > thing, never mind that it's a million times slower.
I don't think "too confusing" was the reason here either, though I can't speak authoritatively since I didn't design this.
There was also a bad rap here since in the original design spec (and current file selector) you can in fact just type the filename. The text entry box appears as soon as you press a key. You can also press Ctrl+L to get a text box with autocomplete. But version 1.0 didn't have this since the c
IQ does not change significantly after age 7 or so. I wouldn't get my hopes up about things "leveling out".
Got a reference handy? I may be reading this incorrectly, but Psychology Today published an article that appears to disagree with you.
FACT 5: IQ evens out with age
Imagine interviewing two biological siblings, adopted by two different middle class families, at age five and again at 18. Will their IQs be more alike when they are younger and living in the homes of their adoptive parents, or when they are older and living on their own? Many people reason that IQs will be more alike when they're younger because they are under the influence of their respective middle class parents. Once they are on their own, they may diverge as they become exposed to different experiences that may influence their intelligence differently.
But according to data, this isn't true. As these siblings go out on their own, their IQ scores become more similar. The apparent reason is that once they are away from the dictates of their adoptive parents, they are free to let their genotypes express themselves. Because they share approximately 50% of their segregating genes, they will become more alike because they are propelled to seek similar sorts of environments. Genes may be more potent in making siblings alike than similarities in home environments.
You didn't even respond to the relevant point of my post: I believe SVO is more beneficial to the environment than biodiesel. Worse, you didn't seem to understand what you did respond to. You said
OTOH if you had even Googled "biodiesel carcinogens" you would know that one of the benefits of BD is exhaust that is 90% less carcinogenic than exhaust from petro-diesel.
I'm already aware of the benefits of bio-fuels over petroleum diesel. I'm even aware of the CO2 benefits of bio-fueled diesel engines over gasoline engines. It would be difficult to read slashdot without being aware of the benefits, but that's not what I was commenting on. I was pointing out a negative that is seldom mentioned on slashdot; diesel engines, even when they run on biofuels, have more soot particles in their exhaust than gasoline engines. If you google "biodiesel particulate emissions" you will see that even biodiesel advocates admit this.
Those soot particles are the main reason why the EPA gives the 2006 Jetta diesel a horrible air pollution score even though it gets over 40 mpg. The difference in particulate (soot) emissions for diesel and gasoline engines is so great that it is very difficult - perhaps impossible - to get light duty diesel vehicles (i.e. cars) Tier II certified in California.
Right now, every gasoline burning car that is replaced by a biodiesel or SVO burning car causes us to have higher levels of soot in the air. From my original link:
Diesel-powered cars will always produce more particulate matter. The particulate matter, now a known carcinogen, will contribute to immediate health problems if breathed in. [...]
Bad for lungs, better for the ozone layer
Granolas are split: some think the soot from diesels does more damage to people and animals here and now, while others want to minimize reliance on fuel resources and oil drilling, and to slow climatic change.
That was the problem I was commenting on, and you responded with something totally off topic (a comparison of biodiesel and petroleum diesel.)
Now, it is actually possible to clean up the exhaust on diesels quite a bit. That same article goes on to mention a way to solve the sooty particulate emmissions:
Diesel engines can be clean, as clean as comparable gasoline engines if the right measures are taken to reduce particulate matter. Advanced engine controls, particulate-matter traps, and new-design catalysts have helped all but eliminate particulate matter.
Unfortunately, the article does NOT explain the drawbacks of this process; the extra emmissions control equipment costs a LOT, and it reduces the power and fuel efficiency of the diesel engine. That's a problem, since fuel efficiency is one of the main reasons we are considering diesels in the first place, which is probably why most of these methods are still not used on new diesel vehicles. Besides using oxidizing-type particulate filters to get rid of soot can even increase the levels of carbon monoxide: http://www.fleetguard.com/fl
You still have to play with nasty chemicals when you convert veggie oil to biodiesel. If you are dead set on producing huge amounts of particulate emmisions (i.e. running a diesel) it might be better to use one of the conversion kits and run straight veggie oil.
Everyone on/. likes to complain about microsoft security, and microsoft PR people like to point out their improvements. Here's a chance to give ammunition to both sides. What do you think are the three biggest security improvements microsoft has made in the past two years, and what are the three biggest security-related issues that still remain?
What a nifty plan....it is even cheaper than buying the rights to the name. All you need is a few threatening letters...I don't welcome our borg^H^H^H^Hbill gates overlord
The menaing of day is somewhat muddleded by time....the "day's" from the bible are not to be translated literally...but more a spans of time while "god" or whatever you beleive in calling a supreme being worked on creation. So Day can equal Millions of years... From: Chris Thompson
Response: The day-age hypothesis has been put forward numerous times as support for the biblical account of creation. While it solves the time issue, it does nothing to solve the glaring inconsistencies in astronomy and paleontology. For example, light seems to appear before the sun is created, and birds are created before sea creatures.
It seems impossible to reconcile the biblical account of creation with scientific evidence. It demeans both to make the attempt.
This is a little off-topic, but the new issue of discover magazine has an article on people trying to brew stone age beer. They used a mix of rice, honey, malt, grapes and berries. It was supposed to taste rather nasty.
http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/features/sto ne-age-beer/
The really scarey part is that they had to interview the staff and give them lie detector tests to see if anyone had liberate^H^H^H^H^Hstolen the mice....
Why does Slashdot link to BN.com? They sell it for $20.00 ($18.00 if you pay to become a member), but Amazon.com sells it for $16.50.
For quite a while, slashdotters disliked amazon.com because of the software patents they were getting that were for techniques everyone was already using....
Soon I'm sure we'll see a Microsoft funded comparison between Office and OpenOffice."
They might do that eventually, but right now they will just give the software away to the state for free.....IT managers like free, and it avoids TCO arguments.
Pardon me, but how is it activist to actually discuss the law in terms that the founding fathers intended?
Our founding fathers intended for the only people allowed to vote to be white men who owned land. Are you really sure that the original intent of the founding fathers is more important than the modern needs of our country?
It makes sense. They were in a winged, rocket powered craft that was dropped from an airplane. If they actually got to the same height as the guys from Scaled Composites, they deserve the same astronaut wings.
Get into the real world, of detailed data though -- suddenly, all the detailed data is in the literature.
Well put, but I'll even go one further. All the detailed date is in literature (books) and peer reviewed journals. That's one of the biggest problems.
Lots of those journals with the latest research DO have websites that contain their articles, but the websites usually partially or fully restrict access to their information....they want paying customers (the people and organizations who already have the paper copies of the journals) to have access to the online version, but limit others.
Example: go to the New England Journal of Medicine website, sign up for one of their free accounts, and see how limited you are in what you can look at. Paying customers get a LOT more access.
Now, that should not be a problem for a university, even if the website costs an additional fee, they can afford to buy access to a website. Unfortunately, that means students will need to go through another step of authentication to get to the information on the website. If you add too many levels of authentication, the average user gets annoyed and stops using the service.
We must find a way to expose that data to the new mechanisms of search
Amen! PubMed is a step in the right direction, and abstracts are useful, but we need to make the process of getting complete text seamless.
Is your "rice in the pudding" line from some book or what? Or, are you just insane?
It is an obscure piece of dialog from the schoolmaster of a boys orphanage that was on used during the fade-out at the end of the song the Wall, part 2 off the Pink Floyd album The Wall. This is the song famous for the line "We don't need no education, we don't need no thought control"
It is the signature file of the grandparent, and was not part of their post.
Slashdot Mirror
no he has it right
Most of what my macaw and my parents' african grey falls into this catagory. Obviously, they learned "Hello" and "good morning" because those things are said to them. It is even clear that their understanding of these sounds is different from the literal meaning; our birds will use these comments any time they want to greet you or initiate contact.
What is more interesting is the novel constructions and novel useage; i.e. the new uses they find for an existing word or phrase and the entirely new phrases make by combining words in new ways. Examples:
You can play at defcon, but the level of the competition would probably be a bit intimidating for people who attend a boot camp.
They win brownie points with me by using ogg vorbis for their sound files. :)
That chocolate cake analogy is good. Just like a cake you can mix all the right ingredients and still make a big mess of it instead of something good.
Of course a fun work environment is more enjoyable. I've worked in an IT company though, that was lots of fun, without being very productive. The company doesn't exist anymore.
Fun doesn't pay the bills. Think of it as a nice fringe benefit, but not something more than that. I
You urge us to go to the website of Kent Hovind, a tax evading Young Earth Creationist who's favorite arguments are so weak that even other creationists say he makes "mistakes in facts and logic which do the creationist cause no good". Hovind is a professional debater who depends primarily on one tactic; he throws out questions (most of which are irrelevant) so quickly that his opponents cannot answer all of the within the alloted time. He This tactic would fail in a written debate where the opposition had time to answer all his questions. That's probably why hovind dislikes standard debate formats and refuses to participate in online debates.
They were not trolling. They were engaging in the most blatant karma whoring I've seen in a while.
Higher EAL levels do not necessarily imply "better security", they only mean that the claimed security assurance of the TOE has been more extensively validated.
This just means that it does what they claim. I'd be more interested in seeing what the security claims were....
Hi,
;-)
:-P
Tangent fest
On 12/12/05, Linus Torvalds wrote:
> The reason I don't use Gnome: every single other window manager I know of
> is very powerfully extensible, where you can switch actions to different
> mouse buttons. Guess which one is not, because it might confuse the poor
> users? Here's a hint: it's not the small and fast one.
Just for the record, since I made this decision I can tell you that
"might confuse people" was not the reason. More evidence for my point
that "might confuse people" is the reason made up by others, not the
reason given by the decision makers.
First some context. The overall metacity plan was to first get all the
defaults right as priority one, and then add more configurability and
options consistent with keeping the defaults right. This was the
driving "principle" if there was a principle at all. (The weekend I
started on metacity the motivation was more "my # %$ WM doesn't work,
I'm just going to write one that works how I like")
On the specific feature of arbitrary button bindings, the full
discussion is archived in bugzilla. But my memory of this feature is:
- I put in a lot of special cases to get the default behavior exactly right;
the event handlers for mouse buttons do not look like "run the
action associated with
this button," they are more complicated
- I spent a few days trying to code a patch that made button actions
configurable
while preserving all the detailed behaviors I had coded, and I just
kind of gave
up because the patch was too hard/complicated/big and I wasn't willing to
break the default behavior in order to simplify the code.
- I did put in configuration of the most common stuff people wanted to change,
like double click action and alt+click modifier key, and this made
most people
happy (based on reduction in bugzilla/email traffic)
My patch is still in bugzilla, if anyone wants to start from it and
find the simple and elegant way to code it. The patch as I left it is
buggy though and had a couple "hard to fix" problems. Plus it's
against a pretty old version of metacity I guess.
BTW, though I confess that I like to reject window manager patches, I
also spent a ton of time getting EWMH usable and supporting it in
GNOME. The only purpose of EWMH is to make the window manager
replaceable.
You may be noticing that I like the idea of "choice of two
well-focused designs" better than "single choice of one
nobody-hates-it design."
Anyway. The primary issue with preferences in metacity was never
confusing users - that would only be an issue with displaying prefs in
the dialog, i.e. unlimited prefs would be OK, as long as they were
hidden. The more important issue I always had in my mind was the
quality of the defaults, and ability to spend time polishing the
defaults. The tradeoff came from amount of personal time I had, code
complexity, and interdependencies among prefs.
But, I pretty often flamed people complaining about lack of prefs in
bugzilla, so I can't really whine about being misunderstood
> Same with the file dialog. Apparently it's too "confusing" to let users
> just type the filename. So gnome forces you to do the icon selection
> thing, never mind that it's a million times slower.
I don't think "too confusing" was the reason here either, though I
can't speak authoritatively since I didn't design this.
There was also a bad rap here since in the original design spec (and
current file selector) you can in fact just type the filename. The
text entry box appears as soon as you press a key. You can also press
Ctrl+L to get a text box with autocomplete. But version 1.0 didn't
have this since the c
Got a reference handy? I may be reading this incorrectly, but Psychology Today published an article that appears to disagree with you.
I'm already aware of the benefits of bio-fuels over petroleum diesel. I'm even aware of the CO2 benefits of bio-fueled diesel engines over gasoline engines. It would be difficult to read slashdot without being aware of the benefits, but that's not what I was commenting on. I was pointing out a negative that is seldom mentioned on slashdot; diesel engines, even when they run on biofuels, have more soot particles in their exhaust than gasoline engines. If you google "biodiesel particulate emissions" you will see that even biodiesel advocates admit this.
Those soot particles are the main reason why the EPA gives the 2006 Jetta diesel a horrible air pollution score even though it gets over 40 mpg. The difference in particulate (soot) emissions for diesel and gasoline engines is so great that it is very difficult - perhaps impossible - to get light duty diesel vehicles (i.e. cars) Tier II certified in California.
Right now, every gasoline burning car that is replaced by a biodiesel or SVO burning car causes us to have higher levels of soot in the air. From my original link:
That was the problem I was commenting on, and you responded with something totally off topic (a comparison of biodiesel and petroleum diesel.) Now, it is actually possible to clean up the exhaust on diesels quite a bit. That same article goes on to mention a way to solve the sooty particulate emmissions:
Unfortunately, the article does NOT explain the drawbacks of this process; the extra emmissions control equipment costs a LOT, and it reduces the power and fuel efficiency of the diesel engine. That's a problem, since fuel efficiency is one of the main reasons we are considering diesels in the first place, which is probably why most of these methods are still not used on new diesel vehicles. Besides using oxidizing-type particulate filters to get rid of soot can even increase the levels of carbon monoxide:
http://www.fleetguard.com/fl
Don't mod me into oblivion for pointing out a negative to biodiesel. I know about the benefits: http://www.thecarconnection.com/Auto_News/Green_Ma chines/Diesels_Clean_Green_Illegal.S196.A3569.html
Everyone on /. likes to complain about microsoft security, and microsoft PR people like to point out their improvements. Here's a chance to give ammunition to both sides. What do you think are the three biggest security improvements microsoft has made in the past two years, and what are the three biggest security-related issues that still remain?
What a nifty plan....it is even cheaper than buying the rights to the name. All you need is a few threatening letters...I don't welcome our borg^H^H^H^Hbill gates overlord
From: Chris Thompson
Response: The day-age hypothesis has been put forward numerous times as support for the biblical account of creation. While it solves the time issue, it does nothing to solve the glaring inconsistencies in astronomy and paleontology. For example, light seems to appear before the sun is created, and birds are created before sea creatures.
It seems impossible to reconcile the biblical account of creation with scientific evidence. It demeans both to make the attempt.
It could be far worse....just be happy they didn't hire someone in New Delhi to administer your servers.
This is a little off-topic, but the new issue of discover magazine has an article on people trying to brew stone age beer. They used a mix of rice, honey, malt, grapes and berries. It was supposed to taste rather nasty. http://www.discover.com/issues/nov-05/features/sto ne-age-beer/
I don't get those PETA/ALF types....
Why does Slashdot link to BN.com? They sell it for $20.00 ($18.00 if you pay to become a member), but Amazon.com sells it for $16.50.
For quite a while, slashdotters disliked amazon.com because of the software patents they were getting that were for techniques everyone was already using....
They might do that eventually, but right now they will just give the software away to the state for free.....IT managers like free, and it avoids TCO arguments.
It makes sense. They were in a winged, rocket powered craft that was dropped from an airplane. If they actually got to the same height as the guys from Scaled Composites, they deserve the same astronaut wings.
Example: go to the New England Journal of Medicine website, sign up for one of their free accounts, and see how limited you are in what you can look at. Paying customers get a LOT more access. Now, that should not be a problem for a university, even if the website costs an additional fee, they can afford to buy access to a website. Unfortunately, that means students will need to go through another step of authentication to get to the information on the website. If you add too many levels of authentication, the average user gets annoyed and stops using the service.
Amen! PubMed is a step in the right direction, and abstracts are useful, but we need to make the process of getting complete text seamless.