Many people who would normally watch 6 hours of TV a day are now using Slashdot for a similar amount of time.
I'd say Slashdot has already disrupted television and will continue to do so, since a large portion of hours of television watched are these dorks who are now using Slashdot.
Comparing the two, it's hard to say which is worse. Customizing your Slashdot homepage and/or writing in a blog can help one practice essential computer savvy and writing skills, whereas TV has the benefit of not being plagued with nerds.
It also could be argued that Slashdot 'comments'--which take up most of the average Slashdot user's time--actually diminish writing skills and intelligence (seriously, read somebody's comments; anybody).
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to comb my hair over my forehead at an angle and take subtly sad photos of myself from a downward angle and blog about how 'Linux' (gnu) is 'the only joy in my desilate, sole-crushing, nitemarish, interminible, bleak, black, life.' [sic.]
Think about it this way. In a bookstore or grocery the company is negligent if they put the wrong price on something and then let it be sold as such. However obtaining items under such situations do not result in criminal prosecutions.
However, as I understand it, if you tell an ATM machine you want $40 and $400 comes out, but only $40 is debited from your account, and you keep the money, you can be prosecuted.
Seems to me, though, that if this gaming-machine thing does go to court, the defendant should file a counter-suit right away. If everybody who won money off this machine has to either give the money back or go to court, then in effect it was a game with zero chance of winning. To the best of my knowledge, Three-card Monte is illegal even in Las Vegas.
apparently two out of three pinch downloads was infected with "Win32/PSW.LdPinch.P4 trojan"
Did you stop to think that maybe the construction set was identified as a Trojan because it... you know... contained the code for a Trojan? As in... if it tripped your antivirus then you probably had the right one.
All these comments about free speech and yadda yadda are at least partially on the money, but you know, the technology required to put a couple seconds of delay on live broadcasts so that engineers can beep out swear words is decades old. Networks apparently aren't using it, either because they are not being diligent in their observance of FCC rules, or maybe -- maybe -- because they are trying to get more profanity on the air as a way to titillate consumers. The latter would be a slippery slope, societally speaking.
Yes, yes, free speech is good. But part of me feels that arguing for the right to scream "fuck" in a crowded movie theater sort of dilutes the argument in favor of free speech in general. Saying "fuck" really isn't what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. Yeah, yeah, if you start banning one kind of sentence then it's only a matter of time before some other kind of sentence gets banned -- I get that. But forget thinking about the children, some grown adults would like to live in a society where they aren't subjected to people cursing like sailors all day.
So what are you saying? I need to have sex with 9 women this month in order to optimize overall baby production?
Not exactly. The Mythical Man Month teaches us that when you're having woman problems, throwing more women at the problem is never the solution.
The formula is n(n-1)/2... that is, for each group of women n, the number of channels of communication in the group is equal to n times n-1 (where the 1 is you), divided by two.
Because of this, Fred Brooks recommends that you not engage any baby-producers until the overall system of women is well architected. Note that this process can take an incredibly long time. Another solution is to employ women with off-the-shelf babies, which often come with a third-party support contract.
a) The post you responded to was inquiring about tic-tac-toe, not checkers.
No it wasn't. Every game of tic-tac-toe I've ever played used Xs and Os, not black and white pieces.
b) Checkers is deceivingly complicated...the article mentions somewhere that it is very likely that checkers is likely more complicated than chess.
Uhhhh... no it most certainly doesn't. It states quite plainly that "chess is even harder to solve than checkers, with a state-space complexity of 10^46," and furthermore that "chess and Go cannot be solved with the type of technology that we have today," but that they might be solved "between 2060 and 2070" (A.D., to you).
Damn, man. That's got to be the most pathetic example of not reading TFA, or the post you're responding to, or the post before that... or anything... that I've seen on Slashdot so far. You might want to look into vocational school.
Just as 9 women can't make a baby in 1 month, adding more people to a project rarely speeds it up and almost always slows it down.
Just remember, though -- while 9 women may not be able to make a baby in 1 month, they most certainly can make 9 babies in 9 months, while even the most talented woman would have a hard time producing more than 2.
Being American of British descent, I'd never heard of a version of draughts played on a 10x10 board. According to this history of checkers, the 10x10 variant was not actually introduced until the 18th century (the 8x8 version having been popularized around the 12th). If Wikipedia is to be believed, however, it's apparently become the most popular version, in terms of raw worldwide numbers. Who knew?
According to the article, checkers has been "solved" to the extent that they've developed a mathematical proof showing that it's impossible to beat the checkers software the researchers wrote. Even if the human plays a "perfect" game against the computer, the result will be a draw.
So, in answer to your first question, none. Checkers might be "solved," but the computer is not guaranteed to win. (It is, however, quite likely.)
In answer to your second question, if both sides play perfect games then you'll always draw. A "perfect" move yields no advantage to the opponent. In other words, you might lose a piece, but you've still played a perfect game if the piece is only lost in such a way that your opponent is guaranteed to lose one of his own in a subsequent move.
Please note that checkers is a considerably less complex game than chess, for example, or Go.
In this case, the OP's assumption was that the equation might not apply to a Moebius strip produced with stereolithography because a Moebius strip produced using stereolithography wouldn't have the properties that the equation describes. That is begging the question.
If VoIP services on mobile phones are going to succeed and we're all going to be calling each other for free, the networks have to allow it.
That's right! It's all going to be free. Just like the other basic human rights, after phone calls: Food and shelter. We're such an enlightened society that it's all going to cost nothing. I am so glad that we live in this golden age.
Suffice it to say that if you were having a couple beers in a bar with the people who work in this very demanding profession you would not be as insulting as you have been in this Internet forum. Seriously. I don't think you really know what you are talking about.
And P.S. an 11-year-old can program a computer. Believe me, I know.
Yours is a reasonable opinion, but at the same time a little unfair. Take Slashdot, for example. Everybody is always complaining about the lack of editorial quality, yadda yadda yadda. But very few people recognize the fact that Slashdot doesn't break any news.
Slashdot is really a glorified blog. It aggregates news sources from all over, stories that its members think are interesting. But without the original sources that generate these stories -- media outlets who pay writers to produce stories -- outlets like Slashdot disappear.
You claim that readers want "a little fucking truth." Fair enough. But, by definition, Slashdot isn't in a position to generate anything but "a little fucking opinion." And you can't hate on it for doing so. That's what it's here for.
I spent three years as a senior editor at InfoWorld, and I certainly have a lot of criticisms to offer about the tech trade media industry. But I can say, with absolute certainty, that when trade media outlets like InfoWorld disappear you will all be sorry.
It goes against almost every fiber of my cynical being to say this, but your subject heading is full of shit. The problem is one hundred percent structural, zero percent editorial.
There has never been a tech reporter who has picked his baggy-eyed head up off a table and blurted out, "You know what? We need to do more stories about the iPhone." Not one. Editors might think that a 300-story onslaught about the iPhone sounds like a good idea, but only because we have people breathing down our necks, too -- people who are beholden to bullshit metrics like hit counts, which look a whole like hard statistics, but are infinitely less reliable than the reader surveys that they used to conduct on newspaper readers.
The good tech reporters who have stuck with this industry know what they're talking about. They write the stories that blogs like Slashdot link to. They might get it wrong from time to time -- fine. You're all there to call them on it. But they're still providing a valuable service.
What's really wrong with this industry is the same thing that's wrong with every industry -- the willingness to suck cock for money. If you're putting out a blog, and somebody offers you an opportunity to make a lot of money -- money, you gloatingly think, that won't be spent on a mainstream tech media outlet -- shame on you. The only reason that company was able to buy a story is because you sold it to them. Hope you brushed your teeth afterward.
You can pull a statistic out your ass that says the readership is all going to blogs. Fine. But can you really blame the management of the media outlets when they hear something like that? The answer is predictable: More blogs.
Blogs on blogs on blogs. It's great! Blogs don't cost us anything and readers trust blogs more than they do reporters, so screw the reporters' salaries and let's hire more bloggers. The answer is more corporate blogs. And folks like you eat it up.
Yeah, you heard me right. Is the media industry going to shit? Corporate media is on the blame list, for sure. But first on the list is you. Have you ever written your Congressman? Probably not. But even if you have, it's probably futile to ask that you write to your favorite media outlets and ask -- even beg -- them to cover real news, and not just fluff pieces and fake stories.
Media outlets cover bullshit because the metrics tell them that bullshit is what people want, plain and simple.
Hell, the only reason that I still read Slashdot (check out my user ID) is because the demographic of the stories is so narrow that I can guarantee that 5/6 of the stories posted are about something I'm at least slightly interested in. I bet that's not true for half the Slashdot readers, though.
Yes, the world of media is going to shit. Yes, I hate it. Damned if I can do anything about it on my own, though.
Sure. And when some script kiddies launch a DoS attack that takes out your router, leaving you completely without connectivity, that's not a Cisco problem either. It's obviously a script kiddie problem.
Yes it is dumb. Run some cable and leave the wireless for students with laptops and shit. Cables are the best method for mission critical things anyways.
Yeah. Unless you're a university, and your "mission critical things" (remember the definition of "mission"?) include things like... ohhh, I dunno... students with laptops and shit?
So, who cares? So he submits stories from Network World. He probably works for Network World. Does that fact alone make the story less valuable or interesting? If someone else had submitted the same story, it would be OK then? Slashdot has editors and a moderation system. There's nothing inherently deceptive in submitting your company's (or your own) stories.
The "thank you" in this case would be that they are being paid.
The point, if you read between the lines there, is that they're hardly getting paid. The entry-level salary for a degreed newspaper journalist is maybe $30,000. Less in many markets. But hey, the money's green -- and since it's so easy to do I'm surprised you're not picking up a little extra cash on the side.
Copyright law is no threat to libraries. And book publishers certainly aren't looking to close them down.
The truth of the book publishing business today is that the American public, on the whole, just doesn't read very much. Libraries, on the other hand, stock books -- multiple copies of books, in many cases. And there are thousands of libraries in America.
How do they get all those books? They buy them.
Each year, public libraries buy thousands and thousands of books -- books that individual readers aren't buying. As a result, public libraries are hardly the enemy of the book publishing business that you might assume they are. In fact, they may be the publishers' best friends. Libraries mean a certain amount of guaranteed sales, up front, in a market where so many other factors are uncertain.
Where is the concern about sullying the reputation of real technical writers, of which I am one?
By "tech writers" he means technology writers, not technical writers.
I in fact use this term to describe myself. I don't call myself a journalist because I have friends who are journalists. These people spent tens of thousands of dollars to go to journalism school, then graduated and got themselves jobs making tens of thousands of dollars a year writing up real news about real things happening in their communities -- things that are important to real people -- and without so much as a "thank you." They do a job that's far more important than blabbering about the freakin iPhone. I don't envy them, but I respect them -- enough to allow them the privilege of keeping the term "journalist" for themselves.
That said, I read TFA and I would not call the author a journalist either, not by a long shot.
Here's one for starters: Any article that includes blanket generalizations such as "many tech writers are putting down the GPLv3" -- and then fails to give so much as a single example -- is just page filler. This guy is the purest example of a crap-hound tech writer with nothing to say. I have no idea how this made the homepage.
The "Mythical Man Month" is a project management concept.
Yes, but it's a concept from a book that was written specifically about software development projects.
What's more, even a "code jockey" is going to be expected to give reasonable estimates of how much time it will take his team to complete a particular task. That's kind of what the MMM is all about.
So, thanks for playing, but if you can't be bothered to read one of the oldest and most respected books about your chosen career then I think it's fair for the recruiter to note that, at the very least, you don't read much.
Slashdot Mirror
Many people who would normally watch 6 hours of TV a day are now using Slashdot for a similar amount of time.
I'd say Slashdot has already disrupted television and will continue to do so, since a large portion of hours of television watched are these dorks who are now using Slashdot.
Comparing the two, it's hard to say which is worse. Customizing your Slashdot homepage and/or writing in a blog can help one practice essential computer savvy and writing skills, whereas TV has the benefit of not being plagued with nerds.
It also could be argued that Slashdot 'comments'--which take up most of the average Slashdot user's time--actually diminish writing skills and intelligence (seriously, read somebody's comments; anybody).
Now if you'll excuse me, I have to comb my hair over my forehead at an angle and take subtly sad photos of myself from a downward angle and blog about how 'Linux' (gnu) is 'the only joy in my desilate, sole-crushing, nitemarish, interminible, bleak, black, life.' [sic.]
However, as I understand it, if you tell an ATM machine you want $40 and $400 comes out, but only $40 is debited from your account, and you keep the money, you can be prosecuted.
Seems to me, though, that if this gaming-machine thing does go to court, the defendant should file a counter-suit right away. If everybody who won money off this machine has to either give the money back or go to court, then in effect it was a game with zero chance of winning. To the best of my knowledge, Three-card Monte is illegal even in Las Vegas.
Did you stop to think that maybe the construction set was identified as a Trojan because it ... you know ... contained the code for a Trojan? As in ... if it tripped your antivirus then you probably had the right one.
You have a right to pay for that privilege. It's called cable.
All these comments about free speech and yadda yadda are at least partially on the money, but you know, the technology required to put a couple seconds of delay on live broadcasts so that engineers can beep out swear words is decades old. Networks apparently aren't using it, either because they are not being diligent in their observance of FCC rules, or maybe -- maybe -- because they are trying to get more profanity on the air as a way to titillate consumers. The latter would be a slippery slope, societally speaking.
Yes, yes, free speech is good. But part of me feels that arguing for the right to scream "fuck" in a crowded movie theater sort of dilutes the argument in favor of free speech in general. Saying "fuck" really isn't what the framers of the Constitution had in mind. Yeah, yeah, if you start banning one kind of sentence then it's only a matter of time before some other kind of sentence gets banned -- I get that. But forget thinking about the children, some grown adults would like to live in a society where they aren't subjected to people cursing like sailors all day.
Not exactly. The Mythical Man Month teaches us that when you're having woman problems, throwing more women at the problem is never the solution.
The formula is n(n-1)/2 ... that is, for each group of women n, the number of channels of communication in the group is equal to n times n-1 (where the 1 is you), divided by two.
Because of this, Fred Brooks recommends that you not engage any baby-producers until the overall system of women is well architected. Note that this process can take an incredibly long time. Another solution is to employ women with off-the-shelf babies, which often come with a third-party support contract.
Not if they're foreign babies! Clearly, the high cost of American babies is the problem here, not procreation in general.
Uhhhh... no it most certainly doesn't. It states quite plainly that "chess is even harder to solve than checkers, with a state-space complexity of 10^46," and furthermore that "chess and Go cannot be solved with the type of technology that we have today," but that they might be solved "between 2060 and 2070" (A.D., to you).
Damn, man. That's got to be the most pathetic example of not reading TFA, or the post you're responding to, or the post before that ... or anything ... that I've seen on Slashdot so far. You might want to look into vocational school.
Just remember, though -- while 9 women may not be able to make a baby in 1 month, they most certainly can make 9 babies in 9 months, while even the most talented woman would have a hard time producing more than 2.
Being American of British descent, I'd never heard of a version of draughts played on a 10x10 board. According to this history of checkers, the 10x10 variant was not actually introduced until the 18th century (the 8x8 version having been popularized around the 12th). If Wikipedia is to be believed, however, it's apparently become the most popular version, in terms of raw worldwide numbers. Who knew?
According to the article, checkers has been "solved" to the extent that they've developed a mathematical proof showing that it's impossible to beat the checkers software the researchers wrote. Even if the human plays a "perfect" game against the computer, the result will be a draw.
So, in answer to your first question, none. Checkers might be "solved," but the computer is not guaranteed to win. (It is, however, quite likely.)
In answer to your second question, if both sides play perfect games then you'll always draw. A "perfect" move yields no advantage to the opponent. In other words, you might lose a piece, but you've still played a perfect game if the piece is only lost in such a way that your opponent is guaranteed to lose one of his own in a subsequent move.
Please note that checkers is a considerably less complex game than chess, for example, or Go.
In this case, the OP's assumption was that the equation might not apply to a Moebius strip produced with stereolithography because a Moebius strip produced using stereolithography wouldn't have the properties that the equation describes. That is begging the question.
Nice rant, AC, but maybe you want to pick up a dictionary next time you feel like playing Word Nazi.
I don't have an answer to your question, but your assumption certainly begs the question: Are you sure about that?
Suffice it to say that if you were having a couple beers in a bar with the people who work in this very demanding profession you would not be as insulting as you have been in this Internet forum. Seriously. I don't think you really know what you are talking about.
And P.S. an 11-year-old can program a computer. Believe me, I know.
It is funny, but s/he also has a point. I dunno. Maybe something for the principals of Slashdot to think about?
Yours is a reasonable opinion, but at the same time a little unfair. Take Slashdot, for example. Everybody is always complaining about the lack of editorial quality, yadda yadda yadda. But very few people recognize the fact that Slashdot doesn't break any news.
Slashdot is really a glorified blog. It aggregates news sources from all over, stories that its members think are interesting. But without the original sources that generate these stories -- media outlets who pay writers to produce stories -- outlets like Slashdot disappear.
You claim that readers want "a little fucking truth." Fair enough. But, by definition, Slashdot isn't in a position to generate anything but "a little fucking opinion." And you can't hate on it for doing so. That's what it's here for.
I spent three years as a senior editor at InfoWorld, and I certainly have a lot of criticisms to offer about the tech trade media industry. But I can say, with absolute certainty, that when trade media outlets like InfoWorld disappear you will all be sorry.
It goes against almost every fiber of my cynical being to say this, but your subject heading is full of shit. The problem is one hundred percent structural, zero percent editorial.
There has never been a tech reporter who has picked his baggy-eyed head up off a table and blurted out, "You know what? We need to do more stories about the iPhone." Not one. Editors might think that a 300-story onslaught about the iPhone sounds like a good idea, but only because we have people breathing down our necks, too -- people who are beholden to bullshit metrics like hit counts, which look a whole like hard statistics, but are infinitely less reliable than the reader surveys that they used to conduct on newspaper readers.
The good tech reporters who have stuck with this industry know what they're talking about. They write the stories that blogs like Slashdot link to. They might get it wrong from time to time -- fine. You're all there to call them on it. But they're still providing a valuable service.
What's really wrong with this industry is the same thing that's wrong with every industry -- the willingness to suck cock for money. If you're putting out a blog, and somebody offers you an opportunity to make a lot of money -- money, you gloatingly think, that won't be spent on a mainstream tech media outlet -- shame on you. The only reason that company was able to buy a story is because you sold it to them. Hope you brushed your teeth afterward.
You can pull a statistic out your ass that says the readership is all going to blogs. Fine. But can you really blame the management of the media outlets when they hear something like that? The answer is predictable: More blogs.
Blogs on blogs on blogs. It's great! Blogs don't cost us anything and readers trust blogs more than they do reporters, so screw the reporters' salaries and let's hire more bloggers. The answer is more corporate blogs. And folks like you eat it up.
Yeah, you heard me right. Is the media industry going to shit? Corporate media is on the blame list, for sure. But first on the list is you. Have you ever written your Congressman? Probably not. But even if you have, it's probably futile to ask that you write to your favorite media outlets and ask -- even beg -- them to cover real news, and not just fluff pieces and fake stories.
Media outlets cover bullshit because the metrics tell them that bullshit is what people want, plain and simple.
Hell, the only reason that I still read Slashdot (check out my user ID) is because the demographic of the stories is so narrow that I can guarantee that 5/6 of the stories posted are about something I'm at least slightly interested in. I bet that's not true for half the Slashdot readers, though.
Yes, the world of media is going to shit. Yes, I hate it. Damned if I can do anything about it on my own, though.
Sure. And when some script kiddies launch a DoS attack that takes out your router, leaving you completely without connectivity, that's not a Cisco problem either. It's obviously a script kiddie problem.
Yeah. Unless you're a university, and your "mission critical things" (remember the definition of "mission"?) include things like ... ohhh, I dunno ... students with laptops and shit?
So, who cares? So he submits stories from Network World. He probably works for Network World. Does that fact alone make the story less valuable or interesting? If someone else had submitted the same story, it would be OK then? Slashdot has editors and a moderation system. There's nothing inherently deceptive in submitting your company's (or your own) stories.
The point, if you read between the lines there, is that they're hardly getting paid. The entry-level salary for a degreed newspaper journalist is maybe $30,000. Less in many markets. But hey, the money's green -- and since it's so easy to do I'm surprised you're not picking up a little extra cash on the side.
Copyright law is no threat to libraries. And book publishers certainly aren't looking to close them down.
The truth of the book publishing business today is that the American public, on the whole, just doesn't read very much. Libraries, on the other hand, stock books -- multiple copies of books, in many cases. And there are thousands of libraries in America.
How do they get all those books? They buy them.
Each year, public libraries buy thousands and thousands of books -- books that individual readers aren't buying. As a result, public libraries are hardly the enemy of the book publishing business that you might assume they are. In fact, they may be the publishers' best friends. Libraries mean a certain amount of guaranteed sales, up front, in a market where so many other factors are uncertain.
By "tech writers" he means technology writers, not technical writers.
I in fact use this term to describe myself. I don't call myself a journalist because I have friends who are journalists. These people spent tens of thousands of dollars to go to journalism school, then graduated and got themselves jobs making tens of thousands of dollars a year writing up real news about real things happening in their communities -- things that are important to real people -- and without so much as a "thank you." They do a job that's far more important than blabbering about the freakin iPhone. I don't envy them, but I respect them -- enough to allow them the privilege of keeping the term "journalist" for themselves.
That said, I read TFA and I would not call the author a journalist either, not by a long shot.
Here's one for starters: Any article that includes blanket generalizations such as "many tech writers are putting down the GPLv3" -- and then fails to give so much as a single example -- is just page filler. This guy is the purest example of a crap-hound tech writer with nothing to say. I have no idea how this made the homepage.
Yes, but it's a concept from a book that was written specifically about software development projects.
What's more, even a "code jockey" is going to be expected to give reasonable estimates of how much time it will take his team to complete a particular task. That's kind of what the MMM is all about.
So, thanks for playing, but if you can't be bothered to read one of the oldest and most respected books about your chosen career then I think it's fair for the recruiter to note that, at the very least, you don't read much.