"Most things we "know" we have no direct evidence of."
Right. Just remember that it wasn't all that long ago that people knew the sun revolved around the Earth. You may be right about Mars not having any apple trees, but that'd only be a coincidence. (or a conclusion you drew from seeing data on Mars.)
"The town near my aunt's cottage went totally wireless when some drunk driver knocked over the pole that connected them to everything else... I didn't rtfa though..."
Hey, at least he's got an excuse. I usually just blame slashdotting.
" If I told you that I did my Ph.D. on our ability to see the color black, what would you think? "For this you got a Ph.D.?"
Hehe. I'm one of those people. I'm a digital artist. I make pretty colored pixels for a living. As such, I've been exposed to a LOT of information about visual perception, including 'seeing black'. If you caught me at a different point in my life, there's a real chance I would have said "duh" and I would have told you (what I thought was...) the answer.
But you know what? That would not have been very scientific of me. What can I say? I'm a jackass know-it-all. The funny thing is, I don't know that I'm right because I never explored it. Rather, I drew conclusions based on my observations. The reality is, even if this project you did restates precisely what I think, I still wouldn't actually know until I read your report. (Note: I haven't read your work, that's why I'm being vague...)
In a roundabout way, what I'm saying is that you're right and maybe now I'll be less of a jackass know-it-all.;)
"And like the parent poster says, you can't just go around saying "Why research that? It's obvious?" We get proved wrong on "obvious" shit all the time."
Part of the problem is that some people assume they know stuff when they really don't. They believe, but they don't actually know. For example, somebody was saying the other day that he knew all along that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Um, no, he didn't. He hadn't ever even been to Iraq. Heh.
Anyway, the point is that 'obvious' isn't scientific. I can't help but think the dude who wrote this story was inspired by watching Myth Busters. Sometimes they 'bust' myths that seem pretty darn obvious. They had an episode not too long ago that was about whether or not a frozen chicken could do more damage to a plane than a thawed one. I remember thinking "duh" through the whole thing. It seemed pretty obvious to me that yes, of course, a frozen chicken will do more damage. Still, the experiments were surprising. They had a seriously difficult time proving it. In the end, they did, but not before falsely declaring TWICE that freezing the chicken had no change in effect. Since I had never experimented with this, what call do I have shouting 'duh!'? Heck, one of them thought it was 'duh!' that a frozen chicken wouldn't do any more damage than a thawed one.
I'm a big fan of the "there's no such thing as a stupid question" philosophy. Given how much we base our lives on assumptions and 'conventional wisdom', I'm not very eager to shake my pitchfork at conducting an obvious or redundant experiment. Sometimes it's worth it just to refine the testing process. Going back to my Myth Busters example, that's exactly what happened. They cooked up a better test despite thinking they had come to a solid conclusion before.
"And now that finally there's competition they get off their lazy a$$es and steal other people's ideas once again."
So.. did FireFox 'steal' their ideas from Opera, then? They don't get your repsect, either?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not thrilled with MS's laziness with IE either, but 'stealing' tabs? Please. It's a standard feature for web browsing and has been for years. It'd be really dumb of MS NOT to include it. FireFox did a good job of, pardon the expression, lighting a fire under MS. Now the FireFox team is going to have to work harder. This means a better browser for you.
"IIRC, didn't MS say that tabs really weren't a useful feature in browsers?"
Microsoft may sound like they're on crack, but I remember long drawn out debates about the usefulness of tabs when Opera started using them. The basic gist of the argument was something like "What do you think the task bar is for?!?!?!?"
In other words, yes, it is confusing to the uninitiated. Heck, I've been using Opera with its tabs (and before that, an MDI interface) for years. I recently started using FireFox as well, and I it took me a few "DOh!" moments to get used to its tabs. It's easy to forget about something when it's simplified down to a little box on the screen.
"1996 called, they want their whining back. if these people haven't figured out where these things are by now perhaps they shouldn't be using computers."
Heh. I realize you're being funny, but the whole reason 'Start' is there in the first place is because it gives people the idea that there's something to click. "Okay, it's on. Now wtf do I do?"
It's fun to make fun of Microsoft's distinct choices, but really that wasn't a bad one.
"And it's been done. And GNU/Linux won. And it was something like RedHat 7.3 with Gnome 1.4."
Was 'finding and installing new apps' part of the test?
I ask not so much as a challenge, but rather because I think being able to do more than what's vanilla installed on the OS is important factor. When I tried this (with Redhat 7.3 actually) that was a big slowdown in my progress with it. Maybe I'm just a dumb-ass, but what newb isn't?
"That's great. Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to enjoy what rights we have left, ok?"
Meanwhile, some would call that a knee-jerk reaction.
Frankly, I don't understand why you guys are worried about your 'freedom' to get on a plane. I mean, it's one thing for the gubment to want extra ID info and all that, it's another to bitch about whether or not you'd be seen naked at the security checkpoint. Big fucking deal. You should have the freedom to conceal your shame (and, in turn, weapons...) then board a pressurized metal tube with 300 other people travelling at ridiculous speeds?
I'm sorry, but I can't get on-board with this mindset, not with the lives of that many people at stake.
"Poor little Sony, their 'hype' isn't fooling smart guys like you..."
Yeah, the games just didn't live up to their claims.
"BTW, I can't seem to find any of those 100-125 million poly/sec games on the store shelves that Microsoft claimed the xbox could pump out...got any recommendations?"
That's an interesting rebuttal. (That's what I would have said if I said MS wasn't guilty of it.)
"SNES because it had great music capability, and high colour depth. It was a little slower than the Genesis, but more capable in other ways. It resulted in a better LOOKING picture than the Genesis."
It's sort of like comparing a 300 mhz PC with a 3DFX card to a 600mhz PC running games only in software mode.
"Xbox fans, if you want to dispute this, please provide evidence beyond clock speeds"
I'm a Nintendo zealot. To me, Nintendo can do no wrong. However, the graphics on the XBOX are often better than they are on the GameCube. The XBOX tends to do more shadow work than the GameCube.
This isn't to say that the GameCube couldn't pull the same effects off, but the fact that game developers aren't taking advantage of it makes the spec discussion pretty academic.
In defense of the GameCube, it also came out $100 cheaper than the XBOX did without being sold at a loss. Go Nintendo.
" It's not a resolution, but it is a deterent, not to mention if the justice righted the wrongs and we were already "done with the matter" the vigilantes wouldn't have fake sites to deface."
A similar argument could be made for vigilantism. The problem is is that the line has to be drawn somewhere. What if defacing the sites isn't good enough? What if somebody thinks it's funny to put goatse or something on their site? What if they DoS attack the site with zombie computers? Etc.
I can imagine you're shaking your head reading this. That's fine. Just consider that there are a lot of show-offs out there with no real code-of-conduct to follow.
Slashdot Mirror
"Why can't we point an infrared camera at it?"
There's an obelisk in the way.
"It's good to know we've got our brightest people on this."
I bet you're just beaming over your funny mod.
"Most things we "know" we have no direct evidence of."
Right. Just remember that it wasn't all that long ago that people knew the sun revolved around the Earth. You may be right about Mars not having any apple trees, but that'd only be a coincidence. (or a conclusion you drew from seeing data on Mars.)
"Are you gay?"
Your interest is flattering, but no.
"The town near my aunt's cottage went totally wireless when some drunk driver knocked over the pole that connected them to everything else...
I didn't rtfa though..."
Hey, at least he's got an excuse. I usually just blame slashdotting.
" If I told you that I did my Ph.D. on our ability to see the color black, what would you think? "For this you got a Ph.D.?"
;)
Hehe. I'm one of those people. I'm a digital artist. I make pretty colored pixels for a living. As such, I've been exposed to a LOT of information about visual perception, including 'seeing black'. If you caught me at a different point in my life, there's a real chance I would have said "duh" and I would have told you (what I thought was...) the answer.
But you know what? That would not have been very scientific of me. What can I say? I'm a jackass know-it-all. The funny thing is, I don't know that I'm right because I never explored it. Rather, I drew conclusions based on my observations. The reality is, even if this project you did restates precisely what I think, I still wouldn't actually know until I read your report. (Note: I haven't read your work, that's why I'm being vague...)
In a roundabout way, what I'm saying is that you're right and maybe now I'll be less of a jackass know-it-all.
"Why can't someone pay me to prove something like 'People don't like being burned' or some other research like that..."
Have you come up with a reasonable hypothesis that has the potential to disprove conventional wisdom?
"And like the parent poster says, you can't just go around saying "Why research that? It's obvious?" We get proved wrong on "obvious" shit all the time."
Part of the problem is that some people assume they know stuff when they really don't. They believe, but they don't actually know. For example, somebody was saying the other day that he knew all along that Iraq didn't have WMDs. Um, no, he didn't. He hadn't ever even been to Iraq. Heh.
Anyway, the point is that 'obvious' isn't scientific. I can't help but think the dude who wrote this story was inspired by watching Myth Busters. Sometimes they 'bust' myths that seem pretty darn obvious. They had an episode not too long ago that was about whether or not a frozen chicken could do more damage to a plane than a thawed one. I remember thinking "duh" through the whole thing. It seemed pretty obvious to me that yes, of course, a frozen chicken will do more damage. Still, the experiments were surprising. They had a seriously difficult time proving it. In the end, they did, but not before falsely declaring TWICE that freezing the chicken had no change in effect. Since I had never experimented with this, what call do I have shouting 'duh!'? Heck, one of them thought it was 'duh!' that a frozen chicken wouldn't do any more damage than a thawed one.
I'm a big fan of the "there's no such thing as a stupid question" philosophy. Given how much we base our lives on assumptions and 'conventional wisdom', I'm not very eager to shake my pitchfork at conducting an obvious or redundant experiment. Sometimes it's worth it just to refine the testing process. Going back to my Myth Busters example, that's exactly what happened. They cooked up a better test despite thinking they had come to a solid conclusion before.
"And now that finally there's competition they get off their lazy a$$es and steal other people's ideas once again."
So.. did FireFox 'steal' their ideas from Opera, then? They don't get your repsect, either?
Don't get me wrong, I'm not thrilled with MS's laziness with IE either, but 'stealing' tabs? Please. It's a standard feature for web browsing and has been for years. It'd be really dumb of MS NOT to include it. FireFox did a good job of, pardon the expression, lighting a fire under MS. Now the FireFox team is going to have to work harder. This means a better browser for you.
Both FireFox and IE get better. Oh the horror.
"IIRC, didn't MS say that tabs really weren't a useful feature in browsers?"
Microsoft may sound like they're on crack, but I remember long drawn out debates about the usefulness of tabs when Opera started using them. The basic gist of the argument was something like "What do you think the task bar is for?!?!?!?"
In other words, yes, it is confusing to the uninitiated. Heck, I've been using Opera with its tabs (and before that, an MDI interface) for years. I recently started using FireFox as well, and I it took me a few "DOh!" moments to get used to its tabs. It's easy to forget about something when it's simplified down to a little box on the screen.
"What's the point of having tabs if you still have your pop-up windows?"
Err maybe I'm just missing your point, here, but why wouldn't pop-ups benefit from tabs?
"fair enough, but firefox is the first browser in a long time to threaten m$ft's monopoly... so "their" features are being "borrowed""
Ah, but when Apple does it, the terms are a lot less colorful.
"1996 called, they want their whining back. if these people haven't figured out where these things are by now perhaps they shouldn't be using computers."
Heh. I realize you're being funny, but the whole reason 'Start' is there in the first place is because it gives people the idea that there's something to click. "Okay, it's on. Now wtf do I do?"
It's fun to make fun of Microsoft's distinct choices, but really that wasn't a bad one.
"And it's been done. And GNU/Linux won. And it was something like RedHat 7.3 with Gnome 1.4."
Was 'finding and installing new apps' part of the test?
I ask not so much as a challenge, but rather because I think being able to do more than what's vanilla installed on the OS is important factor. When I tried this (with Redhat 7.3 actually) that was a big slowdown in my progress with it. Maybe I'm just a dumb-ass, but what newb isn't?
"And IE was last updated when?"
April 15, 2005. There may be newer ones, but that's the most recent auto-update I recieved.
"That's great. Meanwhile, the rest of us are trying to enjoy what rights we have left, ok?"
Meanwhile, some would call that a knee-jerk reaction.
Frankly, I don't understand why you guys are worried about your 'freedom' to get on a plane. I mean, it's one thing for the gubment to want extra ID info and all that, it's another to bitch about whether or not you'd be seen naked at the security checkpoint. Big fucking deal. You should have the freedom to conceal your shame (and, in turn, weapons...) then board a pressurized metal tube with 300 other people travelling at ridiculous speeds?
I'm sorry, but I can't get on-board with this mindset, not with the lives of that many people at stake.
"Ice."
Watch Myth Busters.
"Poor little Sony, their 'hype' isn't fooling smart guys like you..."
Yeah, the games just didn't live up to their claims.
"BTW, I can't seem to find any of those 100-125 million poly/sec games on the store shelves that Microsoft claimed the xbox could pump out...got any recommendations?"
That's an interesting rebuttal. (That's what I would have said if I said MS wasn't guilty of it.)
" I doubt Factor 5 will be the only console developer to come right out and say they are not even going to bother with the 360 difficult to program,"
It'd be interesting to see developers that don't have an exclusive arrangement with Sony say that.
"It can't really be that good..."
Given Sony's boasts in the past and the fact that we've seen little video actually rendered on the hardware, skepticism is warranted.
"SNES because it had great music capability, and high colour depth. It was a little slower than the Genesis, but more capable in other ways. It resulted in a better LOOKING picture than the Genesis."
It's sort of like comparing a 300 mhz PC with a 3DFX card to a 600mhz PC running games only in software mode.
"Xbox fans, if you want to dispute this, please provide evidence beyond clock speeds"
I'm a Nintendo zealot. To me, Nintendo can do no wrong. However, the graphics on the XBOX are often better than they are on the GameCube. The XBOX tends to do more shadow work than the GameCube.
This isn't to say that the GameCube couldn't pull the same effects off, but the fact that game developers aren't taking advantage of it makes the spec discussion pretty academic.
In defense of the GameCube, it also came out $100 cheaper than the XBOX did without being sold at a loss. Go Nintendo.
" It's not a resolution, but it is a deterent, not to mention if the justice righted the wrongs and we were already "done with the matter" the vigilantes wouldn't have fake sites to deface."
A similar argument could be made for vigilantism. The problem is is that the line has to be drawn somewhere. What if defacing the sites isn't good enough? What if somebody thinks it's funny to put goatse or something on their site? What if they DoS attack the site with zombie computers? Etc.
I can imagine you're shaking your head reading this. That's fine. Just consider that there are a lot of show-offs out there with no real code-of-conduct to follow.
There's a reason why vigilantism is illegal.
"They missed a spot: http://www.microsoft.com/"
Giggle giggle *SNORT* tee hee.
Thanks for the laugh! My anti-M$ bias needed a little stroking today.
"I truly often wish that sort of justice were legal... When the law can't back itself up and the people can..."
I might agree with you if I thought people generally had a good sense of proportion.
"I am looking for solutions for my enterprise level e-synergy. Can Google help me actualize this?"
Bingo, sir.