Dasani (a brand of water) has had quite a bit of trouble in the UK. Their "pure" water was found to be tap water, their "highly sophisticated purification process" turned out to be just reverse osmosis, and they actually had to recall a lot of bottles that didn't meet drinking water standards.
That said, it's nice to get a bottle once in a while. You can use it to carry tap water in.
Alright, so now I have two things I agree with Valenti on. I don't like the "decency crackdown" (I consider it indecent), and I agree that obfuscated Perl code that can decode DVDs is "Un-fucking-believable".
BTW, Look at the picture of JV in your article. It's scary.
If your boss catches you writing such atrocious code, you won't have your job in six months. And in C/C++, your replacement can fix things up some with a source-code formatter.
Better yet, how about a word processor which is aware of the semantics of paragraphs, and allows you to mess with them? Right-click somewhere in the paragraph, click "Indent", and poof! Like fucking magic! It's really not that hard to determine where paragraphs are. Drag them around, toss them into columns, whatever. Bundle the thing with popular STANDARD formatting layouts for essays and screenplays and shit. If you can follow the Chicago Manual of Style without breaking a sweat in a word processor, then fuck yes, bring that shit on.
Actually, that part was almost exactly what I was thinking of. Thanks for the criticism; it's nice having bad ideas attacked before they're implemented. You seem to have found a good number of them.:-)
If you cached JIT compilation (which would probably be a lot easier), I don't think you would find such a pressing need to migrate features to hardware. It's generally easier to do complex things like that in software.
There's a cool library called GNU Lightning which will generate machine code at runtime, which is good for JITs and such. It isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it illustrates that having a standard assembly language (or, much more likely, several standard assembly languages!) isn't all that far off.
I know people who can't even use Word the right way. People who use spaces instead of aligning text, etc. And you want to add more "complexity"? No, that won't work for most users.
If we want a genuinely user-friendly word processor (as opposed to one that gives the illusion of user-friendliness by imitating MS Word---which is still a useful goal, kudos to those doing it), we should not add more complexity. We should have a simple, nice looking word processor that does the basics that most people use and does not let you do more. I know that's controversial, but I think if you let it export to formats readble by more fully-featured editors it can be acceptable. You won't need to worry about people aligning things with spaces, you just need to configure the thing (by default) not to put in more than one space, and to provide an unobtrusive explanation for this odd behavior.
I'm not talking about adding complexity, I'm talking about concealing it. I wouldn't want to use it for everything, but I know some people who would love to have an easy text editor that produced good-looking output.
Here's an idea that I wish I were competent enough to write (I'll try it soon anyway): a word processor that was easy to use, didn't have lots of features everywhere, and used LaTeX as the back end. If we could sell people on thinking in terms of sections, titles, paragraphs, and such, word processing would be easier and the output would look nicer. TeXmacs and LyX are close, but they're for people willing to invest a bit more time learning them, so they aren't wuite what I'm looking for.
Therefore, I propose this naming scheme: the GNU stuff will be called "GNU", the kernel will be called "Linux" or "the Linux kernel", and the OS will be called "insert distro name here". RMS's foo/bar naming system gets too complicated if you really try for accuracy, and people will make fun of you if you use it, so perhaps we can appease him by throwing random links to the GNU project in our discussions of what OS we're running.
With Gmail, Google can collect massive amounts of social networking info---Fred has Betty in his address book, or has once replied to Betty, or something, so Betty gets whiter-listed. Google can gather a massive amount of training for adaptive spam filters. Really, I think they stand a chance of killing spam for people with Gmail accounts. I want one.
Just as I suspected. I made no mention at all of my intelligence---for all you know, I could be a slow learner bordering on ratardation, but you fall back on your usual method: unsubstantiated and mean-spirited personal attacks.
This is suprisingly easy to do. In fact if you are actually as smart as you think you are, then your teachers, counselors and school administrators will happily write you letters of reccomendation, help you with the paperwork, and even explain to you the implications of the choices facing you.
At my school, the administrators and teachers have a nasty tendency to be opposed to this sort of thing on principle and generally make asses of themselves. The guidence councilor is an exception, though; she's generally as helpful as you make them all out to be.
Furthermore, not everyone is over the age of 16. To them, your advice is profoundly unhelpful. Again, you dismiss an actual problem and pin it on those complaining about it.
Yes, that does sound like a bullshit course. You've topped me, consarnit.
Our prof also claimed he once failed somebody for doodling on their book, because it was unprofessional.
I consider doing stupid-ass stuff like that to someone who is paying good money for your bullshit course and then having the idiotic gall to brag about it to be highly unprofessional.
When you say "meta-smart", do you mean "posessing Larry Wall's virtue of lazyness"?
That extra assignment story is really bad, but I can give an example of a similar de-motivator. My brother had an english class where he got a poor grade on an assignment early in the class (he turned it in late). The weighting of the grades was so wonky that this pulled his grade from an A to an F, and there was nothing he could do to change this. No matter how well he did, or how hard he tried, there was no way he could pass that class, simply because he handed in a major assignment late. That's almost as bad as the chemistry teacher who allegedly failed everyone as an incentive to work harder, and for the exact same reason.
Read the posts on Slashdot that say, "Women just aren't as good as X as men are." Pay attention to the comments that say, "Male minds are drawn more to Y than female minds." Pay even closer attention to the posts that say, "Natalie Portman" and "hot grits!" No, there's no objectification in here. No, there's no abusive generalization in here. No, there's no ambivalence or outright animosity.
Don't those generally get modded down to 0 or -1? I haven't seen any of those except the Natalie Portman and Hot Grits ones, and those are just annoying.
The "Women just aren't as good as X as men are." crap is talked about a lot when this comes up, but for some reason I've never seen someone use that argument. Maybe I should lower my threshold.
This isn't an "ego" thing, hatfucker. This is an "education" thing. There are people who are forced to go to school for much more time than they need, to just sit there when they could be doing something constructive if they were allowed to, and when comeone complains about this, naturally you mett this with sarcasm and personal attacks. God forbid that you should actually respond to problems by fixing them, rather than telling the people afftected to get over themselves.
He's in 9th grade and he's learning to add and subtract decimal numbers? A great thing about math is that different areas can be applied to each other. Let's say that he knows how to add and subtract whole numbers. He should also learn soon that 2x/2=x, and that kx/k=x where k is constant, and the distributive property (it's being taught earlier than that, I've seen), so if you want to add, say, 12.2 and 13.3, you can do something like this:
10(12.2+13.3)/10 = (122+133)/10 = 255/10 = 25.5
That's understanding concepts so he doesn't have to memorize a method that he'll just forget soon anyway. Just my beef with a lot of math teaching: they don't teach why any of those things are true, so when people become calculator-dependant, they're crippled.
I remember taking a standardized test in high school which had a mathematics computation section---no calculators allowed. I had been using my calculator for so long that I felt naked without it. It was always very helpful when I needed to do some arithmetic, but it wasn't there to help me. I vaguely remembered long division, but I couldn't do it. And there were division problems.
Feel a tragedy coming? Fortunately, I got through that section pretty well. I'm not sure how I did it, but I managed to pull out various algebraic tricks, estimate things, do problems backwards, and generally go wild with devising methods all over the place. I came up with an alternate method to do division, which I promptly forgot afterwards.
The moral of the story is that good algebra and general mathematical thinking skills can pull you through even if your arithmetic skills are so rusty you should get a tetanus shot, and that calculators do not automatically make you a mathematical cripple.
I would never be able to write convincingly for this. I would always sound like a low-key knockoff of Landover Baptist.
Priest: Oh God, we long for your light.
Congregation: In the darkness of our lives, you are a candle.
Priest: You call out to us, but we turn away to the bleakness of our daily lives.
All: Boy, we stink!
Priest: Show us your will, that we may blindly obey!
Congregation: We are dumb.
I figured it might be something like that. *scowls darkly*
The "logic" behind that I've heard is something like, "If you're sooo smart (damn uppity kids these days), then you should be able to whiz right through these problems! What's the problem?"
Long live good teachers---and may the bad ones be feasts for buzzards in Angband.
Yes, there is an undeniable benefit to having these things memorized. But there is also a cost, and I think that too much emphasis is placed on memorization and not on getting the concepts and figuring out how to apply this. If you have a limited time, you need to apportion that, and many teachers seem to give rote memorization too much time. Worse, some give off the idea that rote memorization and mindless drill is all there is to math. Coincidentally, that's what a lot of people think after they've suffered through such classes. Worse, some teachers even believe that.
And finally, don't assume that the people who have done all that memorization are always faster than I am at the same problems. Being able to quickly figure out what to do counts for a lot; I generally finish quickly. Sure, a combination of the two would be hard to beat, but I don't see many of those walking around.
Funny; I know only about half of the multiplication tables up to 9, and yet I'm doing very well in math. I've even almost forgotten how to do long division (I have a calculator, and I can fake this stuff on standardized tests of math computation).
I think that far too much time is spent on the dull early parts, although you do need to learn them. It's funny, in a sad way, to look at people who can multiply numbers at incredible speeds but who boggle at a simple quadratic equation.
I thought proofs were pretty fun. Sure, they can be boring sometimes, but the nicer ones can be pretty clever, and you get basically walked through some reasoning about a rather complex problem. It excercises the brain.
A) It would be nice if classes were split into about three different versions, all going at different speeds. It sounds like a dream come true, and most likely it would be. Two problems, though. First, cost. Second, I'm sure that some teachers could find a way to butcher "advanced" classes by just giving out extra homework that has the word "enrichment" written on it somewhere.
B) There's no easy answer here. The best I can think of is to try to change the atmosphere one person at a time. My parents did this for me.
C) I have no idea. I liked Physics partly because it let us apply math to concrete things (like point masses;-)).
Slashdot Mirror
That said, it's nice to get a bottle once in a while. You can use it to carry tap water in.
BTW, Look at the picture of JV in your article. It's scary.
If your boss catches you writing such atrocious code, you won't have your job in six months. And in C/C++, your replacement can fix things up some with a source-code formatter.
Actually, that part was almost exactly what I was thinking of. Thanks for the criticism; it's nice having bad ideas attacked before they're implemented. You seem to have found a good number of them. :-)
If you cached JIT compilation (which would probably be a lot easier), I don't think you would find such a pressing need to migrate features to hardware. It's generally easier to do complex things like that in software.
There's a cool library called GNU Lightning which will generate machine code at runtime, which is good for JITs and such. It isn't exactly what you're looking for, but it illustrates that having a standard assembly language (or, much more likely, several standard assembly languages!) isn't all that far off.
If we want a genuinely user-friendly word processor (as opposed to one that gives the illusion of user-friendliness by imitating MS Word---which is still a useful goal, kudos to those doing it), we should not add more complexity. We should have a simple, nice looking word processor that does the basics that most people use and does not let you do more. I know that's controversial, but I think if you let it export to formats readble by more fully-featured editors it can be acceptable. You won't need to worry about people aligning things with spaces, you just need to configure the thing (by default) not to put in more than one space, and to provide an unobtrusive explanation for this odd behavior.
I'm not talking about adding complexity, I'm talking about concealing it. I wouldn't want to use it for everything, but I know some people who would love to have an easy text editor that produced good-looking output.
Here's an idea that I wish I were competent enough to write (I'll try it soon anyway): a word processor that was easy to use, didn't have lots of features everywhere, and used LaTeX as the back end. If we could sell people on thinking in terms of sections, titles, paragraphs, and such, word processing would be easier and the output would look nicer. TeXmacs and LyX are close, but they're for people willing to invest a bit more time learning them, so they aren't wuite what I'm looking for.
Therefore, I propose this naming scheme: the GNU stuff will be called "GNU", the kernel will be called "Linux" or "the Linux kernel", and the OS will be called "insert distro name here". RMS's foo/bar naming system gets too complicated if you really try for accuracy, and people will make fun of you if you use it, so perhaps we can appease him by throwing random links to the GNU project in our discussions of what OS we're running.
With Gmail, Google can collect massive amounts of social networking info---Fred has Betty in his address book, or has once replied to Betty, or something, so Betty gets whiter-listed. Google can gather a massive amount of training for adaptive spam filters. Really, I think they stand a chance of killing spam for people with Gmail accounts. I want one.
At my school, the administrators and teachers have a nasty tendency to be opposed to this sort of thing on principle and generally make asses of themselves. The guidence councilor is an exception, though; she's generally as helpful as you make them all out to be.
Furthermore, not everyone is over the age of 16. To them, your advice is profoundly unhelpful. Again, you dismiss an actual problem and pin it on those complaining about it.
;-)
I consider doing stupid-ass stuff like that to someone who is paying good money for your bullshit course and then having the idiotic gall to brag about it to be highly unprofessional.
That extra assignment story is really bad, but I can give an example of a similar de-motivator. My brother had an english class where he got a poor grade on an assignment early in the class (he turned it in late). The weighting of the grades was so wonky that this pulled his grade from an A to an F, and there was nothing he could do to change this. No matter how well he did, or how hard he tried, there was no way he could pass that class, simply because he handed in a major assignment late. That's almost as bad as the chemistry teacher who allegedly failed everyone as an incentive to work harder, and for the exact same reason.
Don't those generally get modded down to 0 or -1? I haven't seen any of those except the Natalie Portman and Hot Grits ones, and those are just annoying.
The "Women just aren't as good as X as men are." crap is talked about a lot when this comes up, but for some reason I've never seen someone use that argument. Maybe I should lower my threshold.
This isn't an "ego" thing, hatfucker. This is an "education" thing. There are people who are forced to go to school for much more time than they need, to just sit there when they could be doing something constructive if they were allowed to, and when comeone complains about this, naturally you mett this with sarcasm and personal attacks. God forbid that you should actually respond to problems by fixing them, rather than telling the people afftected to get over themselves.
10(12.2+13.3)/10 = (122+133)/10 = 255/10 = 25.5
That's understanding concepts so he doesn't have to memorize a method that he'll just forget soon anyway. Just my beef with a lot of math teaching: they don't teach why any of those things are true, so when people become calculator-dependant, they're crippled.
Feel a tragedy coming? Fortunately, I got through that section pretty well. I'm not sure how I did it, but I managed to pull out various algebraic tricks, estimate things, do problems backwards, and generally go wild with devising methods all over the place. I came up with an alternate method to do division, which I promptly forgot afterwards.
The moral of the story is that good algebra and general mathematical thinking skills can pull you through even if your arithmetic skills are so rusty you should get a tetanus shot, and that calculators do not automatically make you a mathematical cripple.
Well, it is from the best-title-evah department. You would expect a good title.
Priest: Oh God, we long for your light.
Congregation: In the darkness of our lives, you are a candle.
Priest: You call out to us, but we turn away to the bleakness of our daily lives.
All: Boy, we stink!
Priest: Show us your will, that we may blindly obey!
Congregation: We are dumb.
;-)
The "logic" behind that I've heard is something like, "If you're sooo smart (damn uppity kids these days), then you should be able to whiz right through these problems! What's the problem?"
Long live good teachers---and may the bad ones be feasts for buzzards in Angband.
And finally, don't assume that the people who have done all that memorization are always faster than I am at the same problems. Being able to quickly figure out what to do counts for a lot; I generally finish quickly. Sure, a combination of the two would be hard to beat, but I don't see many of those walking around.
I think that far too much time is spent on the dull early parts, although you do need to learn them. It's funny, in a sad way, to look at people who can multiply numbers at incredible speeds but who boggle at a simple quadratic equation.
I thought proofs were pretty fun. Sure, they can be boring sometimes, but the nicer ones can be pretty clever, and you get basically walked through some reasoning about a rather complex problem. It excercises the brain.
B) There's no easy answer here. The best I can think of is to try to change the atmosphere one person at a time. My parents did this for me.
C) I have no idea. I liked Physics partly because it let us apply math to concrete things (like point masses ;-)).