I live in Australia. Not a 3rd world country, or so we like to think. The standard of medical care here has been on the decline for a long time. I have seen some of it first hand. I won't repeat my first hand accounts here again because the last time I did I got called a liar.
That's not to say there are no good doctors and that no one cares. They're just few and far between working under a system starved of resources. Wose, the medical profession tends to work against the patient - if you self diagnose you're thought of as a crackpot. As if giving a damn about your own well being makes you a hypochondriac. I fear it's only going to get worse.
In which case 0.02237 is (very) roughly twice as good as 0.00854. In actual fact it's closer to three times as good, but let's not split hairs.
Yeah, double, triple, who needs precision?
Math : 10/10 (for the division to 5 decimal places) English : 0/10 (for the comprehension fail)...Says the man who doesn't comprehend the term double.
Did I ask you for a grade you arrogant twit?
His English was imprecise. His meaning ambiguous, and his math was terrible, but you have time to defend him and put me down? Since we're handing out grades here are yours
Social skills: 0/10 Precision: 0/10 Fairness: 0/10 Pendantry: 10/10
One is to get him replaced. The other is to get him to change his mind. Getting him replaced is going to be really, really hard.
Actually not so hard as you might think, depending on how far you're willing to go, which is of and in itself a problem. The real trouble is that getting him replaced accomplishes nothing if he's replaced with someone else who can be paid to hold the same opinion.
The other possibility is that you could get him to come around to seeing how much economic damage the RIAA and MPAA positions are doing to our economy. I think that's pretty hard too. But maybe not impossible.
You don't need to convince him of anything. You need to have deeper pockets and give him more money than these people are offering. That's not even remotely possible.
I was waiting for USB3 support! Now all my USB3 devices will work in Linux but not in Windows. Drivers? What are they? Oh and when can I buy a USB4 powered reading light?
Lately it's like all the countries of the world are engaged in an Olympic competition to see who can screw themselves up the most through acts of extreme stupidity and greed. What the fuck is wrong with people?
News flash: Writing on an imaginary whiteboard is not as efficient as typing in text.
Did you not even read the part where I said it might be good for drawing?
That's not dismissive. I swear slashdot has gone to the fucking dogs lately. Anything remotely unpopular is shouted down as trolling. Makes Digg look like intelligentsia.
Having said that, it looks like a Wiimote for everyone, and the possibilities are mind boggling. Think of Smart houses, in which by moving your mobile you can raise or lower the air conditioning and such.
No! No! No! No! and No!
This is a fantastic geeky little project. Please do not try to make it into something truely practical. It's a gimmick. A new technology needs to improve on the old. I could imagine using this to draw for example, but how does this slow method of entry beat the keypads we currently have on phones? Have you ever seen the speed with which a phone addicted teenage girl texts??? A new technology is only practical and should only be pushed if it actually makes things easier! Compared to a simple keyboard this method is ass.
Intentional slowdowns while remaining professional? This is impossible as being professional means you aren't going to slow down your work because someone wasn't nice to you.
Actually it's perfectly possible. You can refuse to do work altogether and remain professional. "I'm sorry but I won't be spoken to that way. Please stop being rude and I'll gladly help you with your problem".
If you're being professional, you shouldn't have to worry about who can have you fired
Are you seriously telling me that being a professional entails grovelling to rude people, but not worrying about what can and can't get you fired?
Do away with publishers, or at least replace them with companies that provide a service editing but do not hoarde the content once it's created and sell it at the highest price.
Yes you should do away with the RIAA/MPAA and all such dinosaurs.
Science - There have been no scientific advances in the last twenty years that will actually be covered in secondary school. The old scientific literature, combined with a few periodicals for some of the "wow" factor of modern science, should be fine.
Yeah, who needs to know about Dark Matter/Energy, Optical disks, LCD technology, Computing, Mobile Telephony, Advances in Medical Science (trivial stuff like heart transplants and sight saving eye surgery)
Could you have said anything more foolish?
For a lot of subjects, yes, the latest and greatest is not that important and the state of the art does not appear at primary or high school level. Access to that material for advanced students would still be a good thing, but you can get away with less. However science is one area where the pace doesn't quit and the advances aren't always covered well in popular magazines. (Sure you could get subscriptions to Scientific American, Astronomy etc. but they're expensive too and the information is then scattered).
The other thing is that language itself changes. Download an 18th Century math or science text from Gutenberg and tell me if you'd want to give that to YOUR child to learn with.
When they're nice to you, make an effort to fix their problem as quickly and offer suggestions. Be friendly and personable.
When they're not nice to you, everything takes twice as long. Get everything in writing. Do it all formally. REMAIN professional. Acting like a child will only make your own life stressful and miserable and ultimately get you fired.
Now there are exceptions. Anyone in a sufficiently high position is going to be able to have you fired if they think you're stalling. So do tread carefully.
The above advice might SEEM unprofessional - not always doing your best - but in the long run you're doing the business a favour. You'll be surprised how much more respect you get once your users learn that giving respects gets them the result they wanted. At which point everything runs more efficiently.
You'll never get anywhere in business by being seen as a doormat.
I've seen patches - especially security patches - that break functionality in the past. Ones from MS that come to mind include breaking the ability to open older versions of Office documents and transmitting certain file extensions in Outlook. Both of those were in an Office Service pack. I have a vague recollection of other problems caused by patches but I don't have solid links. Google the phrase "windows update breaks" without the quotes.
Given the percentage of Chinese coders in comparison to US, they still did roughly twice as good. (Cue the math pedants)
You mean cue those of us that can do basic math.
China: 20/894 = 0.02237
USA: 2/234 = 0.00854
If you are claiming that 0.00854 is greater than 0.02237, you needn't look far at why the US isn't doing so well. On a board like slashdot, your poor math just got moderated informative. Who exactly is moderating? Mathematically challenged Monkeys?
We already know Windows has vulnerabilities and that there are exploits in the wild. The design isn't going to magically change. So the fact that we're getting more patches is a good thing. We can't whine when we don't get patches then whine when we do! My only question is do these patches break any existing functionality, and if so is this clearly documented?
The difference is that with computers you can eventually refine them to a point where mistakes happen extremely rarely - with humans you'll never get beyond a certain point.
This would only be true if you could forsee every set of circumstances. That doesn't happen in a commercial environment. For a start you don't have an infinite amount of time to discover the infinite possibilities. You're limited with the cost and thus the number of sensors or data input points. (I wonder how many heuristics assign the more probable meaning to a situation represented by a set of inputs, when a pilot could actually determine between the 2 situations easily).
A computer is just a machine. What you're essentially saying is that you can build a perfect machine. I disagree. You can no more create a perfect autopilot than you can train a pilot to behave perfectly.
I'm just saying that putting passengers lives in the hands of a computer isn't any more inherently dangerous than putting them in the hands of a pilot.
On the other hand, the flight computer has the experience of every simulated and real emergency any plane has ever been through. Sure, humans can practice in the simulator as well, but the reality is that costs mean that no individual gets that much time in the simulator
What utter nonsense! All the computer has is a set of heuristics derived from various situations that have been selected by its human programmers to represent the set of scenarios likely to be encountered. The heuristics aren't perfect. The choices made by the programmers aren't perfect. The computer has no magic database of all accidents that you describe. How the FUCK does this lame bullshit get modded up?
Due to the magic of software when one flight computer knows how to handle some situation, they all do.
Are you even paying attention to what you're typing? You're trying to be clever by using the term "magic" to encompass all the knowledge the computers encapsulate, but you've done so in such a way that it makes you sound like a fool who believes there's literally something magical about the software.
Computers can ONLY do what they're programmed to do. If the situation encountered is not one that was planned for and tested, the computer can make stupid nonsensical judgements that no human of sound mind would ever contemplate making. There's no sophisticated AI flying the computer that understands the context of the flight (even if there are "AI" components in the flight programming).
It's also an incredibly shallow triumph of an Olympic grade platitudinous pandering politically correct aphorism. The kid's teacher says he can "see right through the complications," but he's still been brainwashed into thinking that he's not unusual. What a shame. And how typical.
He knows he's special. He's just learnt that people resent it if he doesn't display a fake humility. In other words he's learnt that to fit in socially, one soemtimes has to lie in order to make others comfortable. A lesson a few slashdotters could probably learn. Not a shame at all. Smart kid.
So we've got guns. I wonder how intimidated a civilization that has the technology to traverse light-years through space would be of our bullets and bombs.
I wonder how intimidated Captain Cook was by the primative weapons that killed him?
HTML5 is a new scripting language? Or a plugin that does something "cool"?
Misrepresenting what I was saying in order to ridicule it is just weak. You know perfectly well I was giving examples of what I consider developer candy and that I was not saying HTML5 is a scripting language.
That's user candy fella.
An Eclipse plugin is user candy?
I pretty clearly was not describing a paradigm, I was simply pointing out that things developers like tend towards faster development leading towards faster roi.
You're not clear about anything "fella".
Developers like lots of different things. Some developers love complex awful frameworks. See most J2EE frameworks.
Slashdot Mirror
I live in Australia. Not a 3rd world country, or so we like to think. The standard of medical care here has been on the decline for a long time. I have seen some of it first hand. I won't repeat my first hand accounts here again because the last time I did I got called a liar.
That's not to say there are no good doctors and that no one cares. They're just few and far between working under a system starved of resources. Wose, the medical profession tends to work against the patient - if you self diagnose you're thought of as a crackpot. As if giving a damn about your own well being makes you a hypochondriac. I fear it's only going to get worse.
...are candidates
You get a lot of talk about how spectacular Eta Carinae would be if it went up. There's already been a Supernova "imposter" event... ..and here's some analysis of whether it's a danger. ...or has done so already
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eta_Carinae
http://stupendous.rit.edu/richmond/answers/snrisks.txt
http://cdsweb.cern.ch/record/246576/files/th-6805-93.ps.gz
In which case 0.02237 is (very) roughly twice as good as 0.00854. In actual fact it's closer to three times as good, but let's not split hairs.
Yeah, double, triple, who needs precision?
Math : 10/10 (for the division to 5 decimal places) ...Says the man who doesn't comprehend the term double.
English : 0/10 (for the comprehension fail)
Did I ask you for a grade you arrogant twit?
His English was imprecise. His meaning ambiguous, and his math was terrible, but you have time to defend him and put me down? Since we're handing out grades here are yours
Social skills: 0/10
Precision: 0/10
Fairness: 0/10
Pendantry: 10/10
One is to get him replaced. The other is to get him to change his mind. Getting him replaced is going to be really, really hard.
Actually not so hard as you might think, depending on how far you're willing to go, which is of and in itself a problem. The real trouble is that getting him replaced accomplishes nothing if he's replaced with someone else who can be paid to hold the same opinion.
The other possibility is that you could get him to come around to seeing how much economic damage the RIAA and MPAA positions are doing to our economy. I think that's pretty hard too. But maybe not impossible.
You don't need to convince him of anything. You need to have deeper pockets and give him more money than these people are offering. That's not even remotely possible.
I was waiting for USB3 support! Now all my USB3 devices will work in Linux but not in Windows. Drivers? What are they? Oh and when can I buy a USB4 powered reading light?
Yeah sure. Now let's see how quick imaginary whiteboard is?
By the way are you talking about this?
http://www.engadget.com/2005/05/06/morse-code-trumps-sms-in-head-to-head-speed-texting-combat/
If so a 13 year old girl with maybe 5 years maximum experience vs someone with around 8 decades of experience is no fair match.
Lately it's like all the countries of the world are engaged in an Olympic competition to see who can screw themselves up the most through acts of extreme stupidity and greed. What the fuck is wrong with people?
News flash: Writing on an imaginary whiteboard is not as efficient as typing in text.
Did you not even read the part where I said it might be good for drawing?
That's not dismissive. I swear slashdot has gone to the fucking dogs lately. Anything remotely unpopular is shouted down as trolling. Makes Digg look like intelligentsia.
Having said that, it looks like a Wiimote for everyone, and the possibilities are mind boggling. Think of Smart houses, in which by moving your mobile you can raise or lower the air conditioning and such.
No! No! No! No! and No!
This is a fantastic geeky little project. Please do not try to make it into something truely practical. It's a gimmick. A new technology needs to improve on the old. I could imagine using this to draw for example, but how does this slow method of entry beat the keypads we currently have on phones? Have you ever seen the speed with which a phone addicted teenage girl texts??? A new technology is only practical and should only be pushed if it actually makes things easier! Compared to a simple keyboard this method is ass.
End of transmission...
Saying that Microsoft products are buggy, etc., is not a whisper campaign, because we can and do say this publicly without fear of contradiction.
"It's a feature, not a bug."
That's PROOF by contradiction by the way.
Intentional slowdowns while remaining professional? This is impossible as being professional means you aren't going to slow down your work because someone wasn't nice to you.
Actually it's perfectly possible. You can refuse to do work altogether and remain professional. "I'm sorry but I won't be spoken to that way. Please stop being rude and I'll gladly help you with your problem".
If you're being professional, you shouldn't have to worry about who can have you fired
Are you seriously telling me that being a professional entails grovelling to rude people, but not worrying about what can and can't get you fired?
Do away with publishers, or at least replace them with companies that provide a service editing but do not hoarde the content once it's created and sell it at the highest price.
Yes you should do away with the RIAA/MPAA and all such dinosaurs.
Science - There have been no scientific advances in the last twenty years that will actually be covered in secondary school. The old scientific literature, combined with a few periodicals for some of the "wow" factor of modern science, should be fine.
Yeah, who needs to know about Dark Matter/Energy, Optical disks, LCD technology, Computing, Mobile Telephony, Advances in Medical Science (trivial stuff like heart transplants and sight saving eye surgery)
Could you have said anything more foolish?
For a lot of subjects, yes, the latest and greatest is not that important and the state of the art does not appear at primary or high school level. Access to that material for advanced students would still be a good thing, but you can get away with less. However science is one area where the pace doesn't quit and the advances aren't always covered well in popular magazines. (Sure you could get subscriptions to Scientific American, Astronomy etc. but they're expensive too and the information is then scattered).
The other thing is that language itself changes. Download an 18th Century math or science text from Gutenberg and tell me if you'd want to give that to YOUR child to learn with.
When they're nice to you, make an effort to fix their problem as quickly and offer suggestions. Be friendly and personable.
When they're not nice to you, everything takes twice as long. Get everything in writing. Do it all formally. REMAIN professional. Acting like a child will only make your own life stressful and miserable and ultimately get you fired.
Now there are exceptions. Anyone in a sufficiently high position is going to be able to have you fired if they think you're stalling. So do tread carefully.
The above advice might SEEM unprofessional - not always doing your best - but in the long run you're doing the business a favour. You'll be surprised how much more respect you get once your users learn that giving respects gets them the result they wanted. At which point everything runs more efficiently.
You'll never get anywhere in business by being seen as a doormat.
I've seen patches - especially security patches - that break functionality in the past. Ones from MS that come to mind include breaking the ability to open older versions of Office documents and transmitting certain file extensions in Outlook. Both of those were in an Office Service pack. I have a vague recollection of other problems caused by patches but I don't have solid links. Google the phrase "windows update breaks" without the quotes.
...and if they remember to put them on they'll be mugged for their expensive GPS shoes. "Quick, roll grandpa! He's wearing a Garmin"
Given the percentage of Chinese coders in comparison to US, they still did roughly twice as good. (Cue the math pedants)
You mean cue those of us that can do basic math.
China: 20/894 = 0.02237
USA: 2/234 = 0.00854
If you are claiming that 0.00854 is greater than 0.02237, you needn't look far at why the US isn't doing so well. On a board like slashdot, your poor math just got moderated informative. Who exactly is moderating? Mathematically challenged Monkeys?
Actually, as an openly gay mac user, I have to say...
There's a special version of Mac based on your sexual orientation? Damn! I knew Apple's DRM was getting restrictive but this is ridiculous!
We already know Windows has vulnerabilities and that there are exploits in the wild. The design isn't going to magically change. So the fact that we're getting more patches is a good thing. We can't whine when we don't get patches then whine when we do! My only question is do these patches break any existing functionality, and if so is this clearly documented?
The difference is that with computers you can eventually refine them to a point where mistakes happen extremely rarely - with humans you'll never get beyond a certain point.
This would only be true if you could forsee every set of circumstances. That doesn't happen in a commercial environment. For a start you don't have an infinite amount of time to discover the infinite possibilities. You're limited with the cost and thus the number of sensors or data input points. (I wonder how many heuristics assign the more probable meaning to a situation represented by a set of inputs, when a pilot could actually determine between the 2 situations easily).
A computer is just a machine. What you're essentially saying is that you can build a perfect machine. I disagree. You can no more create a perfect autopilot than you can train a pilot to behave perfectly.
I'm just saying that putting passengers lives in the hands of a computer isn't any more inherently dangerous than putting them in the hands of a pilot.
...and I'm saying that you're dead wrong.
On the other hand, the flight computer has the experience of every simulated and real emergency any plane has ever been through. Sure, humans can practice in the simulator as well, but the reality is that costs mean that no individual gets that much time in the simulator
What utter nonsense! All the computer has is a set of heuristics derived from various situations that have been selected by its human programmers to represent the set of scenarios likely to be encountered. The heuristics aren't perfect. The choices made by the programmers aren't perfect. The computer has no magic database of all accidents that you describe. How the FUCK does this lame bullshit get modded up?
Due to the magic of software when one flight computer knows how to handle some situation, they all do.
Are you even paying attention to what you're typing? You're trying to be clever by using the term "magic" to encompass all the knowledge the computers encapsulate, but you've done so in such a way that it makes you sound like a fool who believes there's literally something magical about the software.
Computers can ONLY do what they're programmed to do. If the situation encountered is not one that was planned for and tested, the computer can make stupid nonsensical judgements that no human of sound mind would ever contemplate making. There's no sophisticated AI flying the computer that understands the context of the flight (even if there are "AI" components in the flight programming).
It's also an incredibly shallow triumph of an Olympic grade platitudinous pandering politically correct aphorism. The kid's teacher says he can "see right through the complications," but he's still been brainwashed into thinking that he's not unusual. What a shame. And how typical.
He knows he's special. He's just learnt that people resent it if he doesn't display a fake humility. In other words he's learnt that to fit in socially, one soemtimes has to lie in order to make others comfortable. A lesson a few slashdotters could probably learn. Not a shame at all. Smart kid.
So we've got guns. I wonder how intimidated a civilization that has the technology to traverse light-years through space would be of our bullets and bombs.
I wonder how intimidated Captain Cook was by the primative weapons that killed him?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Cook#Third_voyage_.281776.E2.80.9379.29_and_death
HTML5 is a new scripting language? Or a plugin that does something "cool"?
Misrepresenting what I was saying in order to ridicule it is just weak. You know perfectly well I was giving examples of what I consider developer candy and that I was not saying HTML5 is a scripting language.
That's user candy fella.
An Eclipse plugin is user candy?
I pretty clearly was not describing a paradigm, I was simply pointing out that things developers like tend towards faster development leading towards faster roi.
You're not clear about anything "fella".
Developers like lots of different things. Some developers love complex awful frameworks. See most J2EE frameworks.