Nothing like resorting to insults - well it's your software that's shit if it requires the user to have his preferences set up in a specific way. I write software that handles different user preferences.
Your comment doesn't make sense anyway - firstly, not having themes doesn't make software shit. Why should say, a word processor be "themed"? The look and feel should be an OS choice. It's bad when software tries to insist on a custom look - this is only appropriate in special cases (e.g., games, or perhaps a media player like Winamp). Having every piece of software have its own custom theme looks stupid (as you admit yourself), makes it harder to configure the look and feel (as every application is set differently, ignoring OS preferences) and results in a less useable UI (due to every application's interface looking and working differently). Even if it does have a theme, why does that require OS preferences to be set up in a particular way? Surely the whole point of a theme is it overrides the OS look and feel?
Preferences are mine to decide - if your application can't deal with my choice of preferences, yes, it's shit.
Talking of sound, my parents' Vista laptop is too quiet be useable. It's not just the speakers, I've compared it to my laptop when using headphones. I've tried turning all the sound settings to max, but perhaps there's one I missed...
I'm not agreeing with them, but what on earth do views on economics have to do with this? I don't see that this issue is dependent on being left or right wing.
When people say Java is slower or more bloated, they obviously don't mean that every Java program is slower or takes up more memory than every single C++ program. For heaven's sake, think!
(Although the reason I finally gave up on Java was because the GUI toolkit was so damn buggy. This was a few years ago, though.)
Although Commodore didn't go bust because they lost control over the Amiga - in fact, they were probably too controlling of it. (They did however also produce PCs, which probably didn't help their business.)
No. Apple is just like any other business that seeks to hold onto a monopoly. MS, Comcast, Cox, OPEC... they all act alike because they all share the same fundamental fear of loss. They don't want to lose the market, or the money that comes with it. It's basic human instinct made manifest at the mega-corporate level.
But hang on - even if it's just "human instinct", that applies to MS too (as you note). So it's still true to say that Apple are the new MS.
And I take it that there will be no more slagging off of MS on Slashdot, ever. If anyone does, they can just be referred to your post. "It's okay for MS to act as they do, it's just basic human instinct!"
Nitpicking, but that credit goes to IBM, not MS. MS are still promoting their proprietary product. Whilst computer hardware is now standardised, we are nowhere near that situation with operating systems (and I'd argue that the hardware still has some way to being "free" - for example, the hardware relies on an x86 CPU, and whilst there are clones such as AMD, my understanding that this is only legally possible due to mutual licencing agreements between Intel and AMD, and in general other companies couldn't make their on x86 clone).
This is a common Apple defence, and of course what you say is true - but it makes no sense as a defence.
Consider, when there's a Microsoft story about them doing something bad, imagine people crawling out of the woodwork to say "But they're a corporation, all they're doing is making decisions to make as much profit as possible, and screw over consumers and their competitors. What's wrong with that? If companies didn't do that, you wouldn't have cheap hardware to run your choice of OS and software. So you should be thankful to Microsoft for screwing you over." No, I don't think that would make people change their minds about Microsoft. So why is it different for Apple?
Yes, clearly the reason why mankind didn't fly until so very recently is because, for so many generations, no one thought to themselves "I know, let's have winged flight, and call it an airplane. Eureka!"
Of course, it wasn't anywhere near as simple as having the idea. And a quick glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_flying_machine shows that flight came about as a progression of developments, not one single idea in 1903.
Do a poor man's copyright on the idea (mail it to yourself in a sealed envelope and don't open). If someone you share it with steals it, you have a smoking gun to prove you had it first.
Irrelevant. Ideas can't be copyrighted (thank god). You'd need a patent to be able to have any chance at suing people. And to be honest, I'd thought Slashdot would be the last place for us to encourage people to become patent trolls - if you have the idea, implement it, rather than doing nothing and just suing others who implement it.
Yes - Gamedev.net is a classic for this. "I've got a brilliant idea for an MMORPG, but I'm not going to tell you what it is! Can someone write it for me?" or "I've got a brilliant idea or a game, how do I go about selling my idea to a company?"
(Obligatory car analogy - it's like me, someone who has no clue about building cars, saying I've got an "idea" for a new car, and I want a car company to buy my idea...)
I'm as much of a "reputable professional" as anyone else - but why would I sign myself into a legal contract with a stranger just so he can tell me his idea that I'm then not allowed to use anyway?
But the problem is, who would be willing to sign one, unless there's something in it for them? They're the ones offering their advice, yet they get nothing in return - they can't use the idea, after all. Worse, even if they honestly had the idea, or a similar one, if they ever use it, they're now at risk of being sued.
I've (anecdotally) heard this with companies, when people send in demos/etc - the story goes that a lot of the time, they chuck them in bin. The last thing they want is being sued, because some random guy claims that their new product is similar to some idea that he sent in...
The OP said "Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face." and I think basically he's right. People are only going to sign an NDA if they're actually going to be working with you to deliver a product.
Facebook is a good example - if someone travelled back in time and gave me the idea of Facebook 10 years ago, would I now be a billionaire? Unlikely. Firstly I've got to write the damn thing - even if it's within my skills, I may simply not be bothered to, and for many people, it would be beyond them. But on top of that, there's all sorts of factors, such as the details of the implementation, as well as marketing, as you say.
The most obvious point is that the idea of social networking wasn't new when Facebook appeared - it'd been around for years. There've been loads of less successful sites before Facebook, so the idea alone is pretty much worthless.
On a related note, this is what irks me about the "million dollar website" story - the story is spread as if the idea alone is what made him a million, and it's a tale that people love to tell, as it props up the myth that an ordinary person can make a million, just so long as he has the right idea one day. But you never hear the real story of how that website became a success - how it was advertised, how it was picked up by the media who gave him free advertising, whether it was skillful marketing or just luck. We've all had these "get rich quick" ideas - whether they succeed or fail is often little to do with the idea itself. There are many other factors.
Most inventions are not simply "ideas". I do not know what a burp-tank is (and Googling doesn't seem to help) - was it a case of someone saying one day, "I know, let's put a burp-tank into cars"?
Consider, it's a bit like me saying "I know, I'll invent a time-machine". And then not having a clue how to do it. Ideas are cheap, it's actualling managing to do it - to solve the problems in the way and so on - that counts.
Now yes, to be pedantic the process of solving problems involves lots of little "ideas" along the way, but I'm not sure that this is what is being discussed here - a single "idea" on its own is still pretty much worthless.
Having said that, yes I do concede that ideas can be worth something, but that's only a result of our patent system. Just because we have a broken patent system that awards people millions just for thinking something first, and then allows them to prevent others from doing so, doesn't mean that those ideas are inherently worth something. Indeed, the fact that they have to be propped up by an artificial legal system of patents suggests that ideas are alone aren't worth much at all.
It's trivially true that things happen in our bodies, and even our brains, without ourselves being conscious of it. But how on earth does this support your original question of "How can science can't imitate what it can't yet explain and measure?"
Just because we aren't conscious of it doesn't mean it can't be measured. Those white blood cells can obviously be measured - how else would we know about them?
In addition, this process was undocumented & "unknown" for almost all know human history, but it always existed. How many brain processes do you think are still undocumented & unmeasured - but exist?
Who knows - perhaps the people doing this project will find out as a result of their research? I'm sure they'll have more luck than the people sitting around criticising them on Slashdot.
Since psychology doesn't comply as "real science", how can "scientists" duplicate the machine that controls most of human behaviour?
We can't yet. That doesn't mean that we can never scientifically analyse the brain, whether it's in 10 years' time, 100 years, or whatever.
I'm sure there are examples of computers doing art, btw (apologies for not adding some Google links). They're not very good at it, but no one is claiming that AI is easy. But this doesn't mean that there is some fundamental limitation of science.
I believe and embrace science, but I am also aware of it's own limitations. Science, like computers, is merely a tool - good for some jobs but not for all.
What "tool" do you propose in place of science, for understanding the brain?
You've answered your own question. The reason why third degree burns is significant, is because that is what was caused by the coffee being hotter than it should have.
If I bought a piece of wood and dropped it on my toe causing me pain, I shouldn't be able to sue. But if it turns out that it was actually glass hidden inside that, which then slices off my toes, you're damn right I'd sue. The fact that I shouldn't have been clumsy, or that I wouldn't have sued if it'd only caused me mild pain like an ordinary piece of wood would, is neither here nor there.
Slashdot Mirror
Nothing like resorting to insults - well it's your software that's shit if it requires the user to have his preferences set up in a specific way. I write software that handles different user preferences.
Your comment doesn't make sense anyway - firstly, not having themes doesn't make software shit. Why should say, a word processor be "themed"? The look and feel should be an OS choice. It's bad when software tries to insist on a custom look - this is only appropriate in special cases (e.g., games, or perhaps a media player like Winamp). Having every piece of software have its own custom theme looks stupid (as you admit yourself), makes it harder to configure the look and feel (as every application is set differently, ignoring OS preferences) and results in a less useable UI (due to every application's interface looking and working differently). Even if it does have a theme, why does that require OS preferences to be set up in a particular way? Surely the whole point of a theme is it overrides the OS look and feel?
Preferences are mine to decide - if your application can't deal with my choice of preferences, yes, it's shit.
I have to laugh that "It found my graphics card, but not my CPU" is considered good these days :)
(What is the consequence if the CPU isn't found? How does anything run?)
Talking of sound, my parents' Vista laptop is too quiet be useable. It's not just the speakers, I've compared it to my laptop when using headphones. I've tried turning all the sound settings to max, but perhaps there's one I missed...
I write software, but I still use Windows 2000 style.
If your GUI is dependent on the user preferences, you're doing it wrong.
Look closely sometime at a GUI (minus the window borders) in both the WinXP and Classic styles, and the difference is plain as day.
Can you give some examples?
I'm not agreeing with them, but what on earth do views on economics have to do with this? I don't see that this issue is dependent on being left or right wing.
Yes, I can't stand what they've done with it. Facebook and Slashdot are competing for "Website most unusable in any browser"...
(Facebook is unusable in Opera, so I fall back to IE which it struggles on.)
Well yes, if you'd actually managed to build something, then sure. But I wouldn't call that simply having an "idea".
As opposed to every Iphone Slashvertisement we get every few days?
Except you can still end up with memory leaks in Java, if there's a reference to the memory somewhere.
I'd take C++ over C. And you might just as well say "between C++ with assembler, Haskell, and Python & co, there is no space left to be filled by C".
In other words, your point was a straw man.
When people say Java is slower or more bloated, they obviously don't mean that every Java program is slower or takes up more memory than every single C++ program. For heaven's sake, think!
(Although the reason I finally gave up on Java was because the GUI toolkit was so damn buggy. This was a few years ago, though.)
Although Commodore didn't go bust because they lost control over the Amiga - in fact, they were probably too controlling of it. (They did however also produce PCs, which probably didn't help their business.)
No. Apple is just like any other business that seeks to hold onto a monopoly. MS, Comcast, Cox, OPEC... they all act alike because they all share the same fundamental fear of loss. They don't want to lose the market, or the money that comes with it. It's basic human instinct made manifest at the mega-corporate level.
But hang on - even if it's just "human instinct", that applies to MS too (as you note). So it's still true to say that Apple are the new MS.
And I take it that there will be no more slagging off of MS on Slashdot, ever. If anyone does, they can just be referred to your post. "It's okay for MS to act as they do, it's just basic human instinct!"
Nitpicking, but that credit goes to IBM, not MS. MS are still promoting their proprietary product. Whilst computer hardware is now standardised, we are nowhere near that situation with operating systems (and I'd argue that the hardware still has some way to being "free" - for example, the hardware relies on an x86 CPU, and whilst there are clones such as AMD, my understanding that this is only legally possible due to mutual licencing agreements between Intel and AMD, and in general other companies couldn't make their on x86 clone).
This is a common Apple defence, and of course what you say is true - but it makes no sense as a defence.
Consider, when there's a Microsoft story about them doing something bad, imagine people crawling out of the woodwork to say "But they're a corporation, all they're doing is making decisions to make as much profit as possible, and screw over consumers and their competitors. What's wrong with that? If companies didn't do that, you wouldn't have cheap hardware to run your choice of OS and software. So you should be thankful to Microsoft for screwing you over." No, I don't think that would make people change their minds about Microsoft. So why is it different for Apple?
Yes, clearly the reason why mankind didn't fly until so very recently is because, for so many generations, no one thought to themselves "I know, let's have winged flight, and call it an airplane. Eureka!"
Of course, it wasn't anywhere near as simple as having the idea. And a quick glance at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_flying_machine shows that flight came about as a progression of developments, not one single idea in 1903.
Do a poor man's copyright on the idea (mail it to yourself in a sealed envelope and don't open). If someone you share it with steals it, you have a smoking gun to prove you had it first.
Irrelevant. Ideas can't be copyrighted (thank god). You'd need a patent to be able to have any chance at suing people. And to be honest, I'd thought Slashdot would be the last place for us to encourage people to become patent trolls - if you have the idea, implement it, rather than doing nothing and just suing others who implement it.
Yes - Gamedev.net is a classic for this. "I've got a brilliant idea for an MMORPG, but I'm not going to tell you what it is! Can someone write it for me?" or "I've got a brilliant idea or a game, how do I go about selling my idea to a company?"
(Obligatory car analogy - it's like me, someone who has no clue about building cars, saying I've got an "idea" for a new car, and I want a car company to buy my idea...)
I'm as much of a "reputable professional" as anyone else - but why would I sign myself into a legal contract with a stranger just so he can tell me his idea that I'm then not allowed to use anyway?
I agree that an NDA is the right tool here.
But the problem is, who would be willing to sign one, unless there's something in it for them? They're the ones offering their advice, yet they get nothing in return - they can't use the idea, after all. Worse, even if they honestly had the idea, or a similar one, if they ever use it, they're now at risk of being sued.
I've (anecdotally) heard this with companies, when people send in demos/etc - the story goes that a lot of the time, they chuck them in bin. The last thing they want is being sued, because some random guy claims that their new product is similar to some idea that he sent in...
The OP said "Asking a stranger to sign a contract before discussing an idea seems like a good way to get a door closed on my face." and I think basically he's right. People are only going to sign an NDA if they're actually going to be working with you to deliver a product.
Facebook is a good example - if someone travelled back in time and gave me the idea of Facebook 10 years ago, would I now be a billionaire? Unlikely. Firstly I've got to write the damn thing - even if it's within my skills, I may simply not be bothered to, and for many people, it would be beyond them. But on top of that, there's all sorts of factors, such as the details of the implementation, as well as marketing, as you say.
The most obvious point is that the idea of social networking wasn't new when Facebook appeared - it'd been around for years. There've been loads of less successful sites before Facebook, so the idea alone is pretty much worthless.
On a related note, this is what irks me about the "million dollar website" story - the story is spread as if the idea alone is what made him a million, and it's a tale that people love to tell, as it props up the myth that an ordinary person can make a million, just so long as he has the right idea one day. But you never hear the real story of how that website became a success - how it was advertised, how it was picked up by the media who gave him free advertising, whether it was skillful marketing or just luck. We've all had these "get rich quick" ideas - whether they succeed or fail is often little to do with the idea itself. There are many other factors.
Most inventions are not simply "ideas". I do not know what a burp-tank is (and Googling doesn't seem to help) - was it a case of someone saying one day, "I know, let's put a burp-tank into cars"?
Consider, it's a bit like me saying "I know, I'll invent a time-machine". And then not having a clue how to do it. Ideas are cheap, it's actualling managing to do it - to solve the problems in the way and so on - that counts.
Now yes, to be pedantic the process of solving problems involves lots of little "ideas" along the way, but I'm not sure that this is what is being discussed here - a single "idea" on its own is still pretty much worthless.
Having said that, yes I do concede that ideas can be worth something, but that's only a result of our patent system. Just because we have a broken patent system that awards people millions just for thinking something first, and then allows them to prevent others from doing so, doesn't mean that those ideas are inherently worth something. Indeed, the fact that they have to be propped up by an artificial legal system of patents suggests that ideas are alone aren't worth much at all.
How does "I can't control some processes in my body" lead to "Therefore we don't know anything about the Universe"?
Here, let me try - "Can you eat your own head? No? Well, you obviously don't know anything".
It's trivially true that things happen in our bodies, and even our brains, without ourselves being conscious of it. But how on earth does this support your original question of "How can science can't imitate what it can't yet explain and measure?"
Just because we aren't conscious of it doesn't mean it can't be measured. Those white blood cells can obviously be measured - how else would we know about them?
In addition, this process was undocumented & "unknown" for almost all know human history, but it always existed. How many brain processes do you think are still undocumented & unmeasured - but exist?
Who knows - perhaps the people doing this project will find out as a result of their research? I'm sure they'll have more luck than the people sitting around criticising them on Slashdot.
Since psychology doesn't comply as "real science", how can "scientists" duplicate the machine that controls most of human behaviour?
We can't yet. That doesn't mean that we can never scientifically analyse the brain, whether it's in 10 years' time, 100 years, or whatever.
I'm sure there are examples of computers doing art, btw (apologies for not adding some Google links). They're not very good at it, but no one is claiming that AI is easy. But this doesn't mean that there is some fundamental limitation of science.
I believe and embrace science, but I am also aware of it's own limitations. Science, like computers, is merely a tool - good for some jobs but not for all.
What "tool" do you propose in place of science, for understanding the brain?
You've answered your own question. The reason why third degree burns is significant, is because that is what was caused by the coffee being hotter than it should have.
If I bought a piece of wood and dropped it on my toe causing me pain, I shouldn't be able to sue. But if it turns out that it was actually glass hidden inside that, which then slices off my toes, you're damn right I'd sue. The fact that I shouldn't have been clumsy, or that I wouldn't have sued if it'd only caused me mild pain like an ordinary piece of wood would, is neither here nor there.