The article claims that they recorded the brain patterns of jugglers imagining the act of juggling, and then had a non-juggler imagine doing the same thing and rewarded them if they matched those brain patterns, thereby teaching them how to juggle.
That's absurd on its face. But then the article tucks away the fact that what the study really only dealt with visual imagery. It used fMRI, which has been around for years and "decodes" the visual process of the brain. So what this study is really about is figuring out visual perceptual learning, not a physical skill like juggling. Using fMRI, they can "improve performance on visual tasks".
It says right in the article that they have yet to test if this process works with any other type of learning. It's more likely that it may have uses in rehabilitation and memory learning, or at least provide insight into those processes. There's no Matrix learning here.
The "Google" Action will be if/what we see from google as a result of this reflecting on them going forward, which could be entirely nothing.
So far, it is nothing. And that's very telling. Motorola is acting as Google's personal patent troll, which is what people recently criticized Apple for.
It's obvious to anyone with common sense viewing Samsung's designs that Samsung is deliberately aping Apple's designs. The dimensions are the same, the look is the same, the chargers and cables are the same, the packaging is the same. They even stole Apple artwork and used it on the walls of their retail stores. Defenders argue that there's no other way to design a tablet, but that's an example of success bias, where things that weren't obvious are only argued to be such after something successful adopts those attributes. They certainly didn't appear to be obvious before the iPad, because there was a much greater variety of tablet designs back then.
However, Slashdot historically has had a bias against things that are popular--a common quality of al tech crowds, really. Because Apple is a huge, influential player now after the success of the iPhone, Slashdot has decided that they don't like Apple anymore and that they deserve to either have their designs ripped off by Asian companies whose business models are designed around exploiting customer confusion or that they should get injunctions issued against them as "payback" for daring to protect their design work from low-quality knock-offs that risk damaging their brand.
It's stupid. And because of the steady bleed of fair-minded Slashdot readers to more relevant communities like Hacker News and Reddit, the Slashdot community has become more and more absolutist, tribalist, and bitter. It's also become hilariously out-of-touch with industry trends. Most importantly, editors have discovered how to tap into predictable emotional reactions from the readership by posting articles about designated bogeymen. Piracy articles portraying the RIAA in a negative light, for example. And a recent one is patent articles--everyone here has decided that all patents are evil and that nobody is allowed to protect anything. Forum lawyers opine constantly about the need for patent reform without any legal background or industry experience, and they're modded up as validation for their opinions.
What's really head-scratching is that Google bought Motorola, and Slashdotters have insisted that Google's patent acquisitions were purely for defensive purposes. Well, Motorola is now seeking injunctions. Even though this is hypocritical behavior, Slashdotters will cheer it because Apple has been designated a bogeyman, a "big corporation" for everyone to rally against and feel emotionally good about beating down for being popular.
This community has just become so incredibly bitter. It used to be that you even saw contrarian opinions get modded up for being interesting, such as the token Microsoft defenders or the Apple folks talking about product design. You can no longer get modded up for that anymore, or at least it's very rare that it occurs. The accepted viewpoints have become so black-and-white that it's almost comical how predictable the site has become.
Well, just throwing all that out there. Slashdot discussion has become so boring in the last few years. Even the trolls used to be more interesting. Unfortunately, because Slashdot's news posting is so behind everyone else's, the community discussions are really the only factor the site had going for it. I wish it at least adopted Reddit's moderation system, where everyone could vote, which would at least allow a lot more people with opposing opinions to give voice to others.
Slashdotters told me over and over that Google would never use patents offensively and that their acquisitions were purely for defensive purposes. You sure can't make that claim anymore.
Have you actually used the version of iCal being discussed? The animation is less than half a second, and if you need to visit a month immediately, you can do that other ways without manually clicking through every month--which is inefficient in the first place!
This is another example where horrific UI mistakes by OS designers are "OK" because there is no competition or choice, but a website would be laughed off the internet if it tried to implement something that awful.
This is absurd. These paradigms aren't successful because of some evil monopoly. Websites have implemented custom, animation-heavy interfaces for decades via Flash and now HTML5.
No, but it makes it more fun and pleasing to use, much like the color of your car or the feel of its leather interior doesn't make it drive any easier.
I look at it like training wheels on 2-wheel bicycles. They definitely make it easier for a beginner to make it down the driveway and back, but at some point they become a hindrance and you'll want them off.
This is a bad analogy because it's not applicable. The training wheels exist because the person on the bike hasn't developed a physical sense of balance yet and will fall onto the street without them. They're not hiding some part of the interface of a bike. You still pedal the bike with or without training wheels. The success of these new UI paradigms in the market suggests that they are not considered a hindrance to most people.
This isn't about old geezers pining for the UI they used back in the day; they're used to changing UIs and have been through many.
And yet, like the author of this submission switching to Windows Classic, they disable new features so that they get a behavior similar to the specific UI they're used to.
You didn't actually refute anything he said. You just accused him of being a shill and then explained your experience of disabling everything that behaves differently from how it used to, providing an example of the very type of person he was describing.
So if companies would quit playing Proprietary Lockdown games, we really do need "Basic / Advanced" versions of a UI at the click of a button.
This would be one of the worst things you could do. Departments would have to support two versions of the interface and would have to figure out which version an uninformed user stumbled into.
You don't explain what makes it a mistake. Much of the resistance to these new interfaces comes from nerds--people who are well-known for being crotchety, resistant to change, and attached to obsolete realms of knowledge that they invested time in.
But how many prefer the 10.7 version of iCal to the 10.6 one? With 10.6 I could quickly skip to any given month. With the 10.7 one, it decides to show me that it's like a real calendar by showing a page-flipping animation on every transition.
If you click the Year view, you can see all the months at once.
Many nerds suffer from a condition known as Early Crotchety Syndrome. Any change from a previous paradigm is met with extreme hostility and a perception of being condescended to, and frustration results from time invested in learning a previous thing being rendered obsolete by a new thing.
I got used to the ribbon in less than a day. It's absolutely not a big deal.
I realize I risk a modbombing of epic proportions by saying this, but you people have completely missed the point of a tablet. The world is moving away from the "tweak everything" mindset of 80s/90s PCs. Tablets are supposed to be the escape from that maintenance nightmare, and you people are trying your damnedest to turn it back into a spec-obsessed nerd playground.
Are you dense? The study is comparing vanilla browsers in the default configuration that the majority of users will be running. It doesn't matter if every installation you use has NoScript and AdBlock installed. It's your personal opinion that Firefox by itself is not what people mean by Firefox. If you have to install plug-ins to secure your browser, that's a mark against your browser.
Claiming that comparing Firefox without plug-ins is a "slanted study" is like claiming Windows XP was never insecure because you could always install antivirus and antispyware software. Firefox should be secure by default.
First of all, subscribers get early access to stories. Second of all, it isn't the high ID or the +5 score that makes you want to believe it's a paid account. It's the fact that it praises a Microsoft product. You even acknowledge that he has a valid point, but apparently, the sight of Microsoft praise is so shocking and unbelievable to you that you immediately accuse anyone posting it of being a paid shill. You come off like a stereotypical Slashdot poster, the kind that other tech communities are referring to when they tell a biased poster to "go back to Slashdot."
I just wanted to note that, even though your post is modded +4 Insightful, none of your performance claims have any citations or other evidence proving that XUL is the cause of performance issues, excessive memory usage, and "various other problems."
He didn't blindly dismiss your evidence. He directly refuted it by pointing out there are in fact vulnerabilities for Chrome, contrary to your claim that there are zero, and that you have to compare vulnerabilities within the same timeframe, which is entirely logical or else you could cite vulnerabilities from years ago in comparison to browsers today.
No, it won't. Because if it hasn't been proven good someplace that has the freedom to implement new things without the legacy concerns that -- for very good reasons -- established languages carry, maintainers of established languages won't take the risk associated with implementing it.
I have to respectfully disagree that progress would stall if there weren't new languages all the time. One can't help but wonder what progress would be made if the effort spent in trendy languages was invested in established languages. If a concept is good, it will appear in whatever the languages the industry is actually using, regardless of whether or not a trendy new language implemented it first. That said, testbeds are certainly a good thing to have.
Slashdot Mirror
The article claims that they recorded the brain patterns of jugglers imagining the act of juggling, and then had a non-juggler imagine doing the same thing and rewarded them if they matched those brain patterns, thereby teaching them how to juggle.
That's absurd on its face. But then the article tucks away the fact that what the study really only dealt with visual imagery. It used fMRI, which has been around for years and "decodes" the visual process of the brain. So what this study is really about is figuring out visual perceptual learning, not a physical skill like juggling. Using fMRI, they can "improve performance on visual tasks".
It says right in the article that they have yet to test if this process works with any other type of learning. It's more likely that it may have uses in rehabilitation and memory learning, or at least provide insight into those processes. There's no Matrix learning here.
So far, it is nothing. And that's very telling. Motorola is acting as Google's personal patent troll, which is what people recently criticized Apple for.
It's obvious to anyone with common sense viewing Samsung's designs that Samsung is deliberately aping Apple's designs. The dimensions are the same, the look is the same, the chargers and cables are the same, the packaging is the same. They even stole Apple artwork and used it on the walls of their retail stores. Defenders argue that there's no other way to design a tablet, but that's an example of success bias, where things that weren't obvious are only argued to be such after something successful adopts those attributes. They certainly didn't appear to be obvious before the iPad, because there was a much greater variety of tablet designs back then.
However, Slashdot historically has had a bias against things that are popular--a common quality of al tech crowds, really. Because Apple is a huge, influential player now after the success of the iPhone, Slashdot has decided that they don't like Apple anymore and that they deserve to either have their designs ripped off by Asian companies whose business models are designed around exploiting customer confusion or that they should get injunctions issued against them as "payback" for daring to protect their design work from low-quality knock-offs that risk damaging their brand.
It's stupid. And because of the steady bleed of fair-minded Slashdot readers to more relevant communities like Hacker News and Reddit, the Slashdot community has become more and more absolutist, tribalist, and bitter. It's also become hilariously out-of-touch with industry trends. Most importantly, editors have discovered how to tap into predictable emotional reactions from the readership by posting articles about designated bogeymen. Piracy articles portraying the RIAA in a negative light, for example. And a recent one is patent articles--everyone here has decided that all patents are evil and that nobody is allowed to protect anything. Forum lawyers opine constantly about the need for patent reform without any legal background or industry experience, and they're modded up as validation for their opinions.
What's really head-scratching is that Google bought Motorola, and Slashdotters have insisted that Google's patent acquisitions were purely for defensive purposes. Well, Motorola is now seeking injunctions. Even though this is hypocritical behavior, Slashdotters will cheer it because Apple has been designated a bogeyman, a "big corporation" for everyone to rally against and feel emotionally good about beating down for being popular.
This community has just become so incredibly bitter. It used to be that you even saw contrarian opinions get modded up for being interesting, such as the token Microsoft defenders or the Apple folks talking about product design. You can no longer get modded up for that anymore, or at least it's very rare that it occurs. The accepted viewpoints have become so black-and-white that it's almost comical how predictable the site has become.
Well, just throwing all that out there. Slashdot discussion has become so boring in the last few years. Even the trolls used to be more interesting. Unfortunately, because Slashdot's news posting is so behind everyone else's, the community discussions are really the only factor the site had going for it. I wish it at least adopted Reddit's moderation system, where everyone could vote, which would at least allow a lot more people with opposing opinions to give voice to others.
Slashdotters told me over and over that Google would never use patents offensively and that their acquisitions were purely for defensive purposes. You sure can't make that claim anymore.
Well, yeah, that's exactly how it works. Sorry to shatter the illusion of harmony.
Have you actually used the version of iCal being discussed? The animation is less than half a second, and if you need to visit a month immediately, you can do that other ways without manually clicking through every month--which is inefficient in the first place!
This is absurd. These paradigms aren't successful because of some evil monopoly. Websites have implemented custom, animation-heavy interfaces for decades via Flash and now HTML5.
No, but it makes it more fun and pleasing to use, much like the color of your car or the feel of its leather interior doesn't make it drive any easier.
This is a bad analogy because it's not applicable. The training wheels exist because the person on the bike hasn't developed a physical sense of balance yet and will fall onto the street without them. They're not hiding some part of the interface of a bike. You still pedal the bike with or without training wheels. The success of these new UI paradigms in the market suggests that they are not considered a hindrance to most people.
And yet, like the author of this submission switching to Windows Classic, they disable new features so that they get a behavior similar to the specific UI they're used to.
You didn't actually refute anything he said. You just accused him of being a shill and then explained your experience of disabling everything that behaves differently from how it used to, providing an example of the very type of person he was describing.
This would be one of the worst things you could do. Departments would have to support two versions of the interface and would have to figure out which version an uninformed user stumbled into.
You don't explain what makes it a mistake. Much of the resistance to these new interfaces comes from nerds--people who are well-known for being crotchety, resistant to change, and attached to obsolete realms of knowledge that they invested time in.
For fuck's sake. Just get an iPad.
If you click the Year view, you can see all the months at once.
Many nerds suffer from a condition known as Early Crotchety Syndrome. Any change from a previous paradigm is met with extreme hostility and a perception of being condescended to, and frustration results from time invested in learning a previous thing being rendered obsolete by a new thing.
I got used to the ribbon in less than a day. It's absolutely not a big deal.
I realize I risk a modbombing of epic proportions by saying this, but you people have completely missed the point of a tablet. The world is moving away from the "tweak everything" mindset of 80s/90s PCs. Tablets are supposed to be the escape from that maintenance nightmare, and you people are trying your damnedest to turn it back into a spec-obsessed nerd playground.
Are you dense? The study is comparing vanilla browsers in the default configuration that the majority of users will be running. It doesn't matter if every installation you use has NoScript and AdBlock installed. It's your personal opinion that Firefox by itself is not what people mean by Firefox. If you have to install plug-ins to secure your browser, that's a mark against your browser.
Claiming that comparing Firefox without plug-ins is a "slanted study" is like claiming Windows XP was never insecure because you could always install antivirus and antispyware software. Firefox should be secure by default.
First of all, subscribers get early access to stories. Second of all, it isn't the high ID or the +5 score that makes you want to believe it's a paid account. It's the fact that it praises a Microsoft product. You even acknowledge that he has a valid point, but apparently, the sight of Microsoft praise is so shocking and unbelievable to you that you immediately accuse anyone posting it of being a paid shill. You come off like a stereotypical Slashdot poster, the kind that other tech communities are referring to when they tell a biased poster to "go back to Slashdot."
I just wanted to note that, even though your post is modded +4 Insightful, none of your performance claims have any citations or other evidence proving that XUL is the cause of performance issues, excessive memory usage, and "various other problems."
He didn't blindly dismiss your evidence. He directly refuted it by pointing out there are in fact vulnerabilities for Chrome, contrary to your claim that there are zero, and that you have to compare vulnerabilities within the same timeframe, which is entirely logical or else you could cite vulnerabilities from years ago in comparison to browsers today.
Well, "normal users" just gave the Linux Journal's Readers' Choice Award to GNOME3.
Ah, yes, the valuable consensus of Slashdot. The same community that decided both the original iPod and the iPod mini would flop.
Yes, nothing ever goes obsolete in the PC world, and you never have to fuck around with it.
Post brought to you from Bizarro World.
You declare this with an unwarranted certainty.
Oh, well fuck his opinion then.
I have to respectfully disagree that progress would stall if there weren't new languages all the time. One can't help but wonder what progress would be made if the effort spent in trendy languages was invested in established languages. If a concept is good, it will appear in whatever the languages the industry is actually using, regardless of whether or not a trendy new language implemented it first. That said, testbeds are certainly a good thing to have.