I'm not a biologist, but I've always believed that humans are very hypocritical with environmental issues. Sure, diversity is good and all, but are we saving the whales because they're cute or because they're actually a useful part of the ecosystem? It seems that everyone wories about cute little pandas and dolphins while exterminating valuable insects en masse just because they're ugly.
You mean like Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, Bush, Blair, the Israelis and Palestines are supposed to be able to know how to temper their actions? Please. If we have to rely on people being mature and acting responsibly we'll never get anywhere, except maybe to a Tragedy of the Commons scenario. People are selfish, greedy and corrupt. They will ALWAYS abuse the system and they will ALWAYS do what's best for THEM. We're only animals, dammit.
10.) Have any of you ever thought about maybe bringing on some "professional" journalism type people? Someone who knows how to write the news and doesn't abuse the editor function as a place to put comments (michael comes to mind).
You mean like they did with Jon Katz? Seriously, Slashdot's fine as it is and lately every time it has been tweaked it has only gotten worse. First it was the karma cap and then the demise of numeric karma, the zoo system is sheer idiocy, etc. "Slashdot is not a game" Fuck that! Everything2 is not a game either and yet it has Experience Points and Levels, and far higher quality of content than slashdot. The way you get quality user contributions is by providing incentive to them, not continually eliminating it. If you don't like it, you can leave. Given your user id, if you're not having fun here, it's about time you did. Having said that, my only gripe about slashdot is that it seems the rate of appearance of new stories has greatly diminished. The editors here should really try to let more stories in since I have all categories selected and still sometimes find myself without anything to read.
You know, the rest of the world, unlike America, has no serious high-tech unemployment problems... I'm not out of college yet and I make a fair bit of money. Not an awful lot, but enough to pay for college and books, with some left after that for vacations and movies or gifts for my girl. I don't think I would have any problem getting a steady job if I graduated tomorrow - in fact, most colleges around here PROVIDE you with jobs (internships) after you graduate, and everyone ends up staying at their place of internship as a permanent employee. Of course it would be kinda hard to start over in a new country when you're that deeply in debt. I wish you luck.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Machines don't bleed and they don't go around falling in love with ugly women or making babies in totally unrealistic sex scenes. Thanks for playing, though!
Why should I care about the "value" of my car, if I can still drive it to where I please? Anyway, it's a bad analogy since not everyone can make a car, and cars cost a lot to produce instead of being easily replicable. Anyone can sing or play an instrument. Even if you sing poorly odds are that you can improve with some training. If we dump the RIAA and its megacorp labels, and instead we sit back and let the Internet's enormous potential do its magic, the end result would be the same. I think that if a musician is truly great and people love what he does they would have no problem sending him a dollar through paypal. Multiply this by the billions of Internet users worldwide and what you get is that it suddenly becomes feasible to make a living as an artist without needing any major labels. Added bonus, you get less exposure to annoyingly talentless manufactured pop stars that never make it to their second CD, and more exposure to the kind of music that you love. Of course it doesnt have to be entirely voluntary. Highly successful singers could very well demand a fee before letting ppl listen to their new album.
Why would anyone use that crappy winzip program when there are so much better ones like WinRAR that are able to compress a lot better and are fully compatible with zip and most other compression formats? I havent had a copy of winzip since the glorious days of windows 3.1, and even then I converted everything to RAR, which I've been using since 1994. Of course, there are even better programs than RAR in terms of raw compression, but I'm a rabid RAR zealot:^)
I'm 23. I don't use cursive, it makes the little muscle between my thumb and index fingers hurt a LOT. I was never too good at it, and switched to using print whenever I can at the ripe age of 10 or 11, without ever looking back. I can basically write forever unless I am forced to use cursive. Writing is a means of transmitting information. Any iota of energy spent decorating your writing with fancy curvey thingies and dotting Is and Js is a ridiculous waste. What you need is to get information across to someone, not to make a work of art out of it.
Breaking news: Scientist reinvent the wheel again
on
Camouflage in Motion
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Well duh. Didn't they ever catch flies when they were young? The way to do it is to take two fingers and follow the fly with them, maintaining the distance between your hand and the fly. after a while the fly will think your fingers are part of the background and will easily let you catch it.
Clearly you haven't been dealing with a lot of CEOs lately. Your average CEO is incapable of defining "software", let alone installing it. They also think Windows comes indelebly embedded on the computer hardware, or that it IS the computer. If their computer breaks they say "windows is broken", or "windows has been acting up lately". If you ask them to point to the computer they will point to the monitor and not the tower. Some will even move the mouse around the desktop, indicating that the desktop IS the computer. They will refer to the tower as either the "disk" or the "cpu" if they want to sound tech-savvy. Of course if you want to talk about management and finance with them, they will probably 0wNz0r j00 with their very own kind of jargon. I actually asked a CEO friend of mine for a bit of banking advice... christ. My head started spinning very quickly and I gained a newfound respect for the "clueless luser" CEO type.
I'm a programmer. I don't know anything about Fourier/Laplace transforms. I learned a lot of different languages and technologies, and never really bothered writing down anything since I can pick up a new language or API in minutes (a requirement in any company that forces you to use the flavour-of-the-week technology) just by looking at some reference material while coding.
My professors usually picked a book, usually a Tannenbaum book, "recited" (in their own words) a subset of it in class, and at the end of the semester, if we passed the practical (programming project) side of the class, we'd take an exam on the theoretical one.
Teachers were mostly crap since they worried too much about getting the message through and ended up boring me with their unnecessary stream of explanatory analogies.
I have found that, while classes totally numbed my brain due to their awfully slow-pacedness, reading up on the subject matter was much more interesting and could be done in 2 or 4 days instead of months.
I got pretty good grades in the classes that interested me. Why, in my last year I studied for my security exam in only 2 days and I still remember most of it. Not that I'll ever need it.
I'll have to admit, though, that some people just don't know how to learn. Learning how to learn better and faster should be everyone's primary goal in college... if you have a good method for organizing things in your head and are good at picking out the juicy bits from a few hundred pages, you can learn anything in less than a week.
When I started working, I was forced to learn all about XML, XSLT, ASP, ADO, ActionScript and a veritable cornucopia of web programming technologies all by myself and in my spare time. I got sick of learning and using technologies (in my "spare", unpaid time!!) just because they were there and left that job for a quieter one, which pays more for less work, and where I get to pick the technologies I want to use in my programming projects (and I now invariably pick Linux/open-source tools and technologies).
Allow me to ammend that: If a company can churn out the crappiest possible software at the cheapest possible price in the least amount of time, and then have their marketing department convince Joe CEO that their software is the "LEADING!!", "BEST-OF-BREED!!", "INNOVATIVE!!" solution... *shrugs* Will someone please illegalize marketing? kthxbye.
Computers can replicate information indefinitely. One person's notes can be spread to 350 computers in less than a minute. I don't even know why people bother taking notes, it's all in the book.
Uh... the content on that site is made by a horde of volunteer gamers. How on Earth can you charge for access to a site whose content isn't yours? Are they going to charge ME for access to the very FAQs that *I* made?
You know, I never got this whole graphics engine thing. Why is the graphics quality of a game so limited by its engine? I know that nowadays we have fancier shading and lighting effects but shouldnt any decently-coded graphics engine be capable of, at the very least, accepting any kind of mesh or texture, no matter how low or high its resolution is? IMHO polygon count and texture resolution are the main factors in graphics quality, the rest is mostly icing on the cake. Especially with so many ppl turning off all the fancy shading and lighting effects to get a better framerate.
Why on earth do people bother to expand speed and size if the reliability penalty is so great? Look... I got a "new" computer 3 years ago and kept my 486's HD. Since windows 98 only takes up 120 megs, you can do a lot with an HD that is smaller than a CD. I had some games, mp3s, pr0n, the works... i kept my 33.6 modem and only bought a 56k 'cause the 33 fell on the floor and my dog pissed on it before i could be arsed to pick it up. There wasnt such a big boost in performance anyways... The HD died, but it was my fault. I got a 4 gig disk for free off of a friend and I couldnt fill it up either for a loooong time... and then I got broadband, and P2P apps, and I only bought my present 40 gig HD so I could stop burning CDs on a daily basis. No one really needs a lot of disk space unless they're a pirate (like me:) or some sort of professional person... reliability is far more important. The average joe never really downloads anything. The average joe doesnt do games and doesnt know what P2P is. The average joe thinks computer freaks like us are deities and honestly believes that all problems are Windows Problems, being ignorant that the hardware inside the box is highly fallible. I believe there is a huge market for reliability-oriented parts. Many graphics cards these days are passively cooled because people dont care about graphics power, but rather silence and reliability: Every card made in the past 5 years is just as good at running MS Office and IE as a Ti4600 or FX5900. Many people have specifically asked me to get them a graphics card without a fan, whatever it may be, since their former card's fan failed. Every single computer that I fixed had the hard drive nearly empty. A doctor friend of mine has had 30 free gigs of space on her "data partition" (that i made) for as long as she's had her computer. So HD makers, read this: Shove your shiny 320gig HDs up the nearest a-hole. Make things that will last.
I dunno about you, but I'm from Lisbon, Portugal and I had to learn the british and american currency system in high school. English classes are mandatory for everyone, and British/American "culture" is part of their syllabus. A second foreign language is also mandatory, with French and German being most common, and also including "cultural" lessons.
Re:EXACTLY! MOD UP PARENT, PLEASE!
on
Build Your Own ECG
·
· Score: 1, Interesting
Only one volt? You mean with the fancy gel thingy I could kill a person with an innocent little AA cell? I gotta get me summa dat gel >:)
Some people just revel in pointing out the obvious. You think I don't know about training wheels? Been there, done that. Find me a bike that can take a 300 pound adult, and not only has training wheels but ones that will be able to withstand my weight for more than a week without breaking in half. Now find a place where I can ride my properly-balanced vehicle without being laughed at. I can't imagine why anyone would ever make or use an inherently unstable vehicle, let alone why the hell it became so popular. I'm sticking with jogging thank you very much. My l33t balance skills have never been sufficient for the xxxxtr33m sport of bycicle riding and thats not about to change.
But... I don't know how to ride a bike:| Bikes aren't self-balancing. I have enough trouble balancing myself without being on top of a poorly thought-out outdated vehicle. Now if this guy could just come up with a self-balancing bike, I would surely get a lot more exercise since the whole concept of bike riding sounds like heaps of fun:)
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not a biologist, but I've always believed that humans are very hypocritical with environmental issues. Sure, diversity is good and all, but are we saving the whales because they're cute or because they're actually a useful part of the ecosystem?
It seems that everyone wories about cute little pandas and dolphins while exterminating valuable insects en masse just because they're ugly.
You mean like Milosevic, Bin Laden, Saddam, Bush, Blair, the Israelis and Palestines are supposed to be able to know how to temper their actions?
Please. If we have to rely on people being mature and acting responsibly we'll never get anywhere, except maybe to a Tragedy of the Commons scenario.
People are selfish, greedy and corrupt. They will ALWAYS abuse the system and they will ALWAYS do what's best for THEM.
We're only animals, dammit.
Wikipedia
How Stuff Works
10.) Have any of you ever thought about maybe bringing on some "professional" journalism type people? Someone who knows how to write the news and doesn't abuse the editor function as a place to put comments (michael comes to mind).
You mean like they did with Jon Katz?
Seriously, Slashdot's fine as it is and lately every time it has been tweaked it has only gotten worse. First it was the karma cap and then the demise of numeric karma, the zoo system is sheer idiocy, etc.
"Slashdot is not a game" Fuck that! Everything2 is not a game either and yet it has Experience Points and Levels, and far higher quality of content than slashdot. The way you get quality user contributions is by providing incentive to them, not continually eliminating it.
If you don't like it, you can leave. Given your user id, if you're not having fun here, it's about time you did.
Having said that, my only gripe about slashdot is that it seems the rate of appearance of new stories has greatly diminished. The editors here should really try to let more stories in since I have all categories selected and still sometimes find myself without anything to read.
You know, the rest of the world, unlike America, has no serious high-tech unemployment problems... I'm not out of college yet and I make a fair bit of money. Not an awful lot, but enough to pay for college and books, with some left after that for vacations and movies or gifts for my girl.
I don't think I would have any problem getting a steady job if I graduated tomorrow - in fact, most colleges around here PROVIDE you with jobs (internships) after you graduate, and everyone ends up staying at their place of internship as a permanent employee.
Of course it would be kinda hard to start over in a new country when you're that deeply in debt. I wish you luck.
Are you sure about that?
apÂroÂpos ( P ) Pronunciation Key (pr-p)
adj.
Being at once opportune and to the point. See Synonyms at relevant.
adv.
1. At an appropriate time; opportunely.
2. By the way; incidentally: Apropos, where were you yesterday?
prep.
With regard to; concerning: Apropos our date for lunch, I can't go.
Bzzzt. Wrong. Machines don't bleed and they don't go around falling in love with ugly women or making babies in totally unrealistic sex scenes.
Thanks for playing, though!
Why should I care about the "value" of my car, if I can still drive it to where I please?
Anyway, it's a bad analogy since not everyone can make a car, and cars cost a lot to produce instead of being easily replicable.
Anyone can sing or play an instrument. Even if you sing poorly odds are that you can improve with some training.
If we dump the RIAA and its megacorp labels, and instead we sit back and let the Internet's enormous potential do its magic, the end result would be the same.
I think that if a musician is truly great and people love what he does they would have no problem sending him a dollar through paypal.
Multiply this by the billions of Internet users worldwide and what you get is that it suddenly becomes feasible to make a living as an artist without needing any major labels.
Added bonus, you get less exposure to annoyingly talentless manufactured pop stars that never make it to their second CD, and more exposure to the kind of music that you love.
Of course it doesnt have to be entirely voluntary. Highly successful singers could very well demand a fee before letting ppl listen to their new album.
I'd say it's cheaper and more profitable to set up your businness in countries that have sane laws.
I'm positively shocked that you have to pay outrageous sums just for having a TV in your bar.
Every café and restaurant here in Portugal has one or more TVs and there's no one asking the owners for money.
I don't care if it's legal or not, everyone does it, everyone's done it for DECADES, and much like in the American P2P users article, even if it IS technically illegal there is no room to put 43 million people in jail.
Oh, and have I mentioned that we have a lot less taxes?
Million year old farts? Now that's what I call an OLD fart! ;^)
Why would anyone use that crappy winzip program when there are so much better ones like WinRAR that are able to compress a lot better and are fully compatible with zip and most other compression formats? :^)
I havent had a copy of winzip since the glorious days of windows 3.1, and even then I converted everything to RAR, which I've been using since 1994.
Of course, there are even better programs than RAR in terms of raw compression, but I'm a rabid RAR zealot
I'm 23. I don't use cursive, it makes the little muscle between my thumb and index fingers hurt a LOT. I was never too good at it, and switched to using print whenever I can at the ripe age of 10 or 11, without ever looking back. I can basically write forever unless I am forced to use cursive.
Writing is a means of transmitting information.
Any iota of energy spent decorating your writing with fancy curvey thingies and dotting Is and Js is a ridiculous waste. What you need is to get information across to someone, not to make a work of art out of it.
Well duh. Didn't they ever catch flies when they were young? The way to do it is to take two fingers and follow the fly with them, maintaining the distance between your hand and the fly. after a while the fly will think your fingers are part of the background and will easily let you catch it.
Clearly you haven't been dealing with a lot of CEOs lately. Your average CEO is incapable of defining "software", let alone installing it.
They also think Windows comes indelebly embedded on the computer hardware, or that it IS the computer.
If their computer breaks they say "windows is broken", or "windows has been acting up lately".
If you ask them to point to the computer they will point to the monitor and not the tower. Some will even move the mouse around the desktop, indicating that the desktop IS the computer.
They will refer to the tower as either the "disk" or the "cpu" if they want to sound tech-savvy.
Of course if you want to talk about management and finance with them, they will probably 0wNz0r j00 with their very own kind of jargon.
I actually asked a CEO friend of mine for a bit of banking advice... christ. My head started spinning very quickly and I gained a newfound respect for the "clueless luser" CEO type.
I'm a programmer. I don't know anything about Fourier/Laplace transforms. I learned a lot of different languages and technologies, and never really bothered writing down anything since I can pick up a new language or API in minutes (a requirement in any company that forces you to use the flavour-of-the-week technology) just by looking at some reference material while coding.
My professors usually picked a book, usually a Tannenbaum book, "recited" (in their own words) a subset of it in class, and at the end of the semester, if we passed the practical (programming project) side of the class, we'd take an exam on the theoretical one.
Teachers were mostly crap since they worried too much about getting the message through and ended up boring me with their unnecessary stream of explanatory analogies.
I have found that, while classes totally numbed my brain due to their awfully slow-pacedness, reading up on the subject matter was much more interesting and could be done in 2 or 4 days instead of months.
I got pretty good grades in the classes that interested me. Why, in my last year I studied for my security exam in only 2 days and I still remember most of it. Not that I'll ever need it.
I'll have to admit, though, that some people just don't know how to learn. Learning how to learn better and faster should be everyone's primary goal in college... if you have a good method for organizing things in your head and are good at picking out the juicy bits from a few hundred pages, you can learn anything in less than a week.
When I started working, I was forced to learn all about XML, XSLT, ASP, ADO, ActionScript and a veritable cornucopia of web programming technologies all by myself and in my spare time.
I got sick of learning and using technologies (in my "spare", unpaid time!!) just because they were there and left that job for a quieter one, which pays more for less work, and where I get to pick the technologies I want to use in my programming projects (and I now invariably pick Linux/open-source tools and technologies).
Allow me to ammend that:
If a company can churn out the crappiest possible software at the cheapest possible price in the least amount of time, and then have their marketing department convince Joe CEO that their software is the "LEADING!!", "BEST-OF-BREED!!", "INNOVATIVE!!" solution... *shrugs*
Will someone please illegalize marketing? kthxbye.
Computers can replicate information indefinitely. One person's notes can be spread to 350 computers in less than a minute.
I don't even know why people bother taking notes, it's all in the book.
Uh... the content on that site is made by a horde of volunteer gamers. How on Earth can you charge for access to a site whose content isn't yours?
Are they going to charge ME for access to the very FAQs that *I* made?
You know, I never got this whole graphics engine thing. Why is the graphics quality of a game so limited by its engine?
I know that nowadays we have fancier shading and lighting effects but shouldnt any decently-coded graphics engine be capable of, at the very least, accepting any kind of mesh or texture, no matter how low or high its resolution is?
IMHO polygon count and texture resolution are the main factors in graphics quality, the rest is mostly icing on the cake.
Especially with so many ppl turning off all the fancy shading and lighting effects to get a better framerate.
Time is actually a cube.
Why on earth do people bother to expand speed and size if the reliability penalty is so great? :) or some sort of professional person... reliability is far more important. The average joe never really downloads anything. The average joe doesnt do games and doesnt know what P2P is. The average joe thinks computer freaks like us are deities and honestly believes that all problems are Windows Problems, being ignorant that the hardware inside the box is highly fallible.
Look... I got a "new" computer 3 years ago and kept my 486's HD. Since windows 98 only takes up 120 megs, you can do a lot with an HD that is smaller than a CD. I had some games, mp3s, pr0n, the works... i kept my 33.6 modem and only bought a 56k 'cause the 33 fell on the floor and my dog pissed on it before i could be arsed to pick it up. There wasnt such a big boost in performance anyways...
The HD died, but it was my fault. I got a 4 gig disk for free off of a friend and I couldnt fill it up either for a loooong time... and then I got broadband, and P2P apps, and I only bought my present 40 gig HD so I could stop burning CDs on a daily basis. No one really needs a lot of disk space unless they're a pirate (like me
I believe there is a huge market for reliability-oriented parts.
Many graphics cards these days are passively cooled because people dont care about graphics power, but rather silence and reliability: Every card made in the past 5 years is just as good at running MS Office and IE as a Ti4600 or FX5900.
Many people have specifically asked me to get them a graphics card without a fan, whatever it may be, since their former card's fan failed.
Every single computer that I fixed had the hard drive nearly empty. A doctor friend of mine has had 30 free gigs of space on her "data partition" (that i made) for as long as she's had her computer.
So HD makers, read this:
Shove your shiny 320gig HDs up the nearest a-hole.
Make things that will last.
Thank you.
I dunno about you, but I'm from Lisbon, Portugal and I had to learn the british and american currency system in high school. English classes are mandatory for everyone, and British/American "culture" is part of their syllabus.
A second foreign language is also mandatory, with French and German being most common, and also including "cultural" lessons.
Only one volt? You mean with the fancy gel thingy I could kill a person with an innocent little AA cell?
I gotta get me summa dat gel >:)
Some people just revel in pointing out the obvious.
You think I don't know about training wheels? Been there, done that.
Find me a bike that can take a 300 pound adult, and not only has training wheels but ones that will be able to withstand my weight for more than a week without breaking in half.
Now find a place where I can ride my properly-balanced vehicle without being laughed at.
I can't imagine why anyone would ever make or use an inherently unstable vehicle, let alone why the hell it became so popular.
I'm sticking with jogging thank you very much. My l33t balance skills have never been sufficient for the xxxxtr33m sport of bycicle riding and thats not about to change.
But... I don't know how to ride a bike :| :)
Bikes aren't self-balancing. I have enough trouble balancing myself without being on top of a poorly thought-out outdated vehicle.
Now if this guy could just come up with a self-balancing bike, I would surely get a lot more exercise since the whole concept of bike riding sounds like heaps of fun