Substitute "idiot user" with "user who has more important things to worry about".
I'm pretty tech-savvy (like most people here). I do a lot of stuff on the command line, use (and develop) Emacs, and I have a lot of different applications that I use every now and then.
I have a reasonably challenging job, and I'm absolutely not interested in reconfiguring my desktop so it behaves in the way I expect it to.
Honestly... I actually like the comments. Reading Slashdot is not just entertainment - I see keeping up to date as part of my job. The original stories on Slashdot are often one-sided, and their summary posted here is often mediocre at best. But when there's a story about a new virus, you'll find an immunologist explain why it won't the human body hurt as much as the big headline suggests. The number of sources and the moderation system is what helps and turns Slashdot into a viable alternative to proper journalism (even though it usually doesn't beat it!). But then, I'm pretty good at digging through crap...
The machine-readable passport requirement is no big deal - most people have one of these anyways. This is just about the code of numbers at the bottom of the picture page.
Actually, very few people survive the acidy environment of the stomach. That's why people didn't believe in H.P. in the beginning. Further down, in the colon, you'll find a variety of bacteria that take care of most of the digestion, and yes, a lot of them get destroyed during long-term treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics (my own experience). This is well-known. The symptoms of (chronic) gastritis on the one hand and various forms of dyspepsia related to the problems you are describing differ, however, so the problems seem distinguishable to me.
Hey, Aquamacs doesn't use Gnome icons in the toolbar. It uses the original ones from the main GNU Emacs distro.
Apart from that, I agree that they're a bit ugly.
they ask me to install fink, which is a problem per se - fink is the package distribution system that usually breaks when you install a package, due to some compilation error or difficult dependencies, right?
Then they want me to get rid of Apple X11 in favor of Xfree86. That'll probably have consequences for other X11 applications.
In the end, I can run a sub-optimal GUI environment which doesn't really do anything useful I couldn't do otherwise, whose utilities/applications - in my experience - crash regularly. From a user-perspective: lost of wasted time.
It's not surprising that it runs on OS X -- OS X is Unix.
Sorry, but have you actually worked as a researcher somewhere?
Science is pretty much open source, in most fields. The Nanotech people might be a little more secretive because the commercial application is so close, and of course the commercial research and development groups don't publish a lot of papers, but in general I wonder how you've come to think that.
I don't know of anyone who was been working on something for 10 years secretly. I don't know anyone who would have a name in the field, attend conferences and get research grants without publishing one's work.
And pretty much every researcher already works by building on the works of others. Science has used the open source principle ages before any software engineer was even feeding a machine with punchcards.
First, this is outstanding; Google, unsatisfied with traditional machine translation techniques, pioneers their own design. I'm certain their advertisers will be pleased to have their adds auto-translated to whatever language is necessary.
Where did you get that? Google bought one of the well-known people in statistical MT, who had been working at USC ISI (leading in MT research), and he probably has a team of people taking care of scaling it up.
Saying that they're pioneering a new design seems like conjecture to me. A more educated guess IMHO would be that they're using phrase-based statistical MT... But even for that I'd have to look things up or talk to the researchers working on it:)
Similar story with Virgin Broadband, who is re-selling DSL via BT end-points and the NTL network. It was absolutely awful, and I was without a connection for more than a month, after it worked initially.
Call center agents were incompetent and simply didn't do their job. In the end I had to send them a 3-page letter, mentioning the telecoms watchdog (they are member of some ombudsman service and Virgin would get charged a case fee in case it's used), to get them to apologize and refund some money.
The only way I got my broadband back was by re-ordering on a different line, and waiting for two weeks.
Unfortunately, I don't see why other services would be any better.
Not quite. Last time I updated an XP machine I had to go through all sorts of screens to download the files - it always asked me to "update the update function". Well I guess I know what it meant, but I didn't want to be bothered with it.
Red Hat, tried that a year ago or two, was much easier to understand (updates needed are listed on one screen), but then there were some unhappy dependencies between kernel and packages to be installed.
On OS X, software update pops up, it allows to download and install and when its done (with all of them) I am supposed to do a restart, once. That's it. Honestly, I don't think we live in the same world just yet.
If this is all true, it is pretty ridiculous. I'm pretty confident that Aachen has a MediaMarkt, Münster has a Saturn, and your next ProMarkt might be somewhere up north.
It's a short hop over from pretty much anywhere in the Netherlands to Germany (or Belgium or France), and if people don't like to go there, they can simply mail order stuff (there is no duty to pay within the EU).
That's why the Dutch government is simply destroying a huge market; I would find it extremely unlikely that they'd be stupid enough to implement something like that.
Cool, you're giving a couple of good reasons that illustrate that even a statistically significant correlation does not imply a certain direct causality:-)
Did he change his web site?
What I had said:
"This is the full list of the current search words/phrases used by the validator"
and he gave some 20-30 searches.
If you use 1000*K observations and you get the same results, it's a different story.
Sounds plausible at first, but if you look at his figures you see that the author didn't run a lot of queries, and that the difference between the google/Netcraft and the MSN ratios for Apache vs. IIS is not huge (68:20 vs 64:26).
Leads me to think: is it significant? That is, can we exclude (to a reasonable certainty, that is, p>0.95) the possibility that the effect seen cannot be attributed to chance or some other criterion MSN uses?
Ivor says at some point The initial set of words indeed showed a significant difference between the results from Google and the results from the Beta MSN search..
But what does he mean? I would be interested in what kind of significance test was applied, what the exact results were. Just looking at the ratio of percentages doesn't tell me enough... One should go back at the original data (seems provided, good) and check if the effect is actually trustworthy or just, in Ivor's words, "Odd. Pure coincidence perhaps."
Before seeing some analysis of significance, I don't believe anything...
I just read their paper. You'll notice, there are pretty much no pronouns apart from the omni-present "we" (and words that only non-linguists would call a referring expression), so the text is not in-cohesive (but not cohesive either!). It's totally incoherent, obviously, so it would have been easy to spot that this is not human-written.
Again, it's a funny statement, but they didn't get it into a tough conference. And the point that they might be trying to make (that there is a lot of nonsense in computer science) is hard to prove. That was different for Sokal, because there is or was a lot of gibberish and hiding-behind-big-words in literature on postmodernism. But that's just my humble and certainly not well-verified opinion.
Hmm, it made it to the conference, but it's non-reviewed. So what? The server is/.ed, can't read the correspondence, however, there's little merit for an author to get a paper into a non-refereed publication, I guess.
Alan Sokal did better back then, when the NY-based physicist wrote up an article that got published in a journal (Social Text, IIRC) - journals are supposed to be rather strict in what they accept.
The nice thing here is that they wrote a probably neat NLG (natural language generation) system to write the paper - it seems to be more practical than previous multimodal NLG systems that are much more domain/application-dependent, but generate stuff that makes sense.
i share your suspicions about the legal system.
but my major frustration with the legal system is that it doesn't protect me from petty crime. if they had finger prints on file, they could have caught the guy that broke into my place last year. or maybe the person that stole my brand-new road bike in Dublin, from the finger-prints on a broken lock left behind.
obviously, such measures will have to be accompanied by better protection of citizens against things going wrong at courts.
AFAIK the days when IBM supplied hardware (or software) doing B2C are long gone. They have focused on business-to-business for many years now. And secondly, if someone says that "the future is in service" (future = IBM's future), then that's anti-news. I remember reading Lou Gerstner's book about IBM's turn-around (I think the title was "Who says Elephants can't dance?") and hey, service is what this is all about. But that's a transition that IBM made, heck, more than a decade ago if I remember correctly, even though I admit the transition of their research labs comes surprisingly late.
Nowadays, IBM is doing excellent research and I would doubt they can turn researchers into business consultants or business "researchers" (whatever that is).
The rest of the company are already business / IT consultants, and I assume they implement solutions (as opposed to specific software or hardware). I understand they have a revived chip business (Power4... ) and also sell servers, but again it's no news that this is not their core business.
Didn't check this registrar and don't know what country you're from, but in case you have a small claims court, I think this would be the way to go. Very often, companies would intervene before they have to send a representative to court. And you can do it without a lawyer and with minimal cost.
Again, these things depend on your local situation.
Why not?
Can we force people to live in this world?
Can we force people to forego instant and cheap gratification by means of this kind of 'electrical drug'?
The question will be whether people should be allowed 'off the hook', so to speak... whether society can afford to let people go like that, after it has invested so much in their education, health, whatever? Do games like the ones shown in 'eXistenZ' actually hurt people like drugs do?
I hope you realize the only reason so many useful settings have been stripped from Firefox is because they think its users are too stupid to handle them. I don't know about you, but this is insulting to me.
1. You seem to be making the very common mistake to think that you are representative of the general population (potential users). The IQ is distributed normally, that is, it follows a bell curve. That entails that on average, people have an IQ of 100, and the largest number of people have exactly 100. (It's not their fault, and it's not a problem. No need to pity them, no need to be arrogant about it.)
2. Even as people gifted with an above-average intelligence, I'm not sure if we want to waste our time learning about configuration options of our applications. We're not the boy scouts. Your browser is a tool. It's not a goal in itself. That's essentially why I like OS X, and it's a criticism that applies to a large proportion of open source software coming from Linuxland.
It might be useful to look at studies in learning / psychology. I don't find it surprising that children learn by interacting with their environment - the technological equivalent might be reinforcement learning, or simply put, trial and error. That, of course, stipulates that there they need an environment! If the environment contains colored bricks and other physical objects, that's fine and it'll help children develop motor and perception-related skills. But both the linguistic and the social development might be considered far more important at some stages. For language acquisition, interaction with a parent (dialogue!) is assumed to be vital (radio, TV or recordings don't do the job).
And that's where merely watching the child and avoiding accidents and the like isn't enough - child-minding means interacting with the children. A robot won't do this.
Maybe, for evolutionary reasons, parents love to interact with their kids, because it secures the proper development and thus survival of their offspring. (I don't enjoy it that much - that's why I don't have kids yet! And I certainly won't get kids and have a robot take care of them!)
Slashdot Mirror
Substitute "idiot user" with "user who has more important things to worry about".
I'm pretty tech-savvy (like most people here). I do a lot of stuff on the command line, use (and develop) Emacs, and I have a lot of different applications that I use every now and then.
I have a reasonably challenging job, and I'm absolutely not interested in reconfiguring my desktop so it behaves in the way I expect it to.
Honestly... I actually like the comments. Reading Slashdot is not just entertainment - I see keeping up to date as part of my job. The original stories on Slashdot are often one-sided, and their summary posted here is often mediocre at best. But when there's a story about a new virus, you'll find an immunologist explain why it won't the human body hurt as much as the big headline suggests. The number of sources and the moderation system is what helps and turns Slashdot into a viable alternative to proper journalism (even though it usually doesn't beat it!). But then, I'm pretty good at digging through crap...
The machine-readable passport requirement is no big deal - most people have one of these anyways. This is just about the code of numbers at the bottom of the picture page.
:-) True, indeed. Ever spent the night in a whale's stomach? Must be deadly! People --> bacteria, obviously...
Actually, very few people survive the acidy environment of the stomach. That's why people didn't believe in H.P. in the beginning.
:-(
Further down, in the colon, you'll find a variety of bacteria that take care of most of the digestion, and yes, a lot of them get destroyed during long-term treatment with broad-spectrum antibiotics (my own experience). This is well-known.
The symptoms of (chronic) gastritis on the one hand and various forms of dyspepsia related to the problems you are describing differ, however, so the problems seem distinguishable to me.
Greetings from a long-term H.P. patient
Hey, Aquamacs doesn't use Gnome icons in the toolbar. It uses the original ones from the main GNU Emacs distro. Apart from that, I agree that they're a bit ugly.
they ask me to install fink, which is a problem per se - fink is the package distribution system that usually breaks when you install a package, due to some compilation error or difficult dependencies, right?
Then they want me to get rid of Apple X11 in favor of Xfree86. That'll probably have consequences for other X11 applications.
In the end, I can run a sub-optimal GUI environment which doesn't really do anything useful I couldn't do otherwise, whose utilities/applications - in my experience - crash regularly. From a user-perspective: lost of wasted time.
It's not surprising that it runs on OS X -- OS X is Unix.
Sorry, but have you actually worked as a researcher somewhere?
Science is pretty much open source, in most fields. The Nanotech people might be a little more secretive because the commercial application is so close, and of course the commercial research and development groups don't publish a lot of papers, but in general I wonder how you've come to think that.
I don't know of anyone who was been working on something for 10 years secretly. I don't know anyone who would have a name in the field, attend conferences and get research grants without publishing one's work.
And pretty much every researcher already works by building on the works of others. Science has used the open source principle ages before any software engineer was even feeding a machine with punchcards.
First, this is outstanding; Google, unsatisfied with traditional machine translation techniques, pioneers their own design. I'm certain their advertisers will be pleased to have their adds auto-translated to whatever language is necessary.
:)
Where did you get that?
Google bought one of the well-known people in statistical MT, who had been working at USC ISI (leading in MT research), and he probably has a team of people taking care of scaling it up.
Saying that they're pioneering a new design seems like conjecture to me. A more educated guess IMHO would be that they're using phrase-based statistical MT... But even for that I'd have to look things up or talk to the researchers working on it
Similar story with Virgin Broadband, who is re-selling DSL via BT end-points and the NTL network. It was absolutely awful, and I was without a connection for more than a month, after it worked initially.
Call center agents were incompetent and simply didn't do their job. In the end I had to send them a 3-page letter, mentioning the telecoms watchdog (they are member of some ombudsman service and Virgin would get charged a case fee in case it's used), to get them to apologize and refund some money.
The only way I got my broadband back was by re-ordering on a different line, and waiting for two weeks.
Unfortunately, I don't see why other services would be any better.
Not quite. Last time I updated an XP machine I had to go through all sorts of screens to download the files - it always asked me to "update the update function". Well I guess I know what it meant, but I didn't want to be bothered with it.
Red Hat, tried that a year ago or two, was much easier to understand (updates needed are listed on one screen), but then there were some unhappy dependencies between kernel and packages to be installed.
On OS X, software update pops up, it allows to download and install and when its done (with all of them) I am supposed to do a restart, once. That's it. Honestly, I don't think we live in the same world just yet.
If this is all true, it is pretty ridiculous. I'm pretty confident that Aachen has a MediaMarkt, Münster has a Saturn, and your next ProMarkt might be somewhere up north. It's a short hop over from pretty much anywhere in the Netherlands to Germany (or Belgium or France), and if people don't like to go there, they can simply mail order stuff (there is no duty to pay within the EU). That's why the Dutch government is simply destroying a huge market; I would find it extremely unlikely that they'd be stupid enough to implement something like that.
Cool, you're giving a couple of good reasons that illustrate that even a statistically significant correlation does not imply a certain direct causality :-)
Did he change his web site? What I had said: "This is the full list of the current search words/phrases used by the validator" and he gave some 20-30 searches. If you use 1000*K observations and you get the same results, it's a different story.
Leads me to think: is it significant? That is, can we exclude (to a reasonable certainty, that is, p>0.95) the possibility that the effect seen cannot be attributed to chance or some other criterion MSN uses?
Ivor says at some point The initial set of words indeed showed a significant difference between the results from Google and the results from the Beta MSN search..
But what does he mean? I would be interested in what kind of significance test was applied, what the exact results were. Just looking at the ratio of percentages doesn't tell me enough... One should go back at the original data (seems provided, good) and check if the effect is actually trustworthy or just, in Ivor's words, "Odd. Pure coincidence perhaps."
Before seeing some analysis of significance, I don't believe anything...
Again, it's a funny statement, but they didn't get it into a tough conference. And the point that they might be trying to make (that there is a lot of nonsense in computer science) is hard to prove. That was different for Sokal, because there is or was a lot of gibberish and hiding-behind-big-words in literature on postmodernism. But that's just my humble and certainly not well-verified opinion.
Hmm, it made it to the conference, but it's non-reviewed. So what? The server is /.ed, can't read the correspondence, however, there's little merit for an author to get a paper into a non-refereed publication, I guess.
Alan Sokal did better back then, when the NY-based physicist wrote up an article that got published in a journal (Social Text, IIRC) - journals are supposed to be rather strict in what they accept.
The nice thing here is that they wrote a probably neat NLG (natural language generation) system to write the paper - it seems to be more practical than previous multimodal NLG systems that are much more domain/application-dependent, but generate stuff that makes sense.
Looking forward to that random talk...
i share your suspicions about the legal system. but my major frustration with the legal system is that it doesn't protect me from petty crime. if they had finger prints on file, they could have caught the guy that broke into my place last year. or maybe the person that stole my brand-new road bike in Dublin, from the finger-prints on a broken lock left behind. obviously, such measures will have to be accompanied by better protection of citizens against things going wrong at courts.
Nowadays, IBM is doing excellent research and I would doubt they can turn researchers into business consultants or business "researchers" (whatever that is).
The rest of the company are already business / IT consultants, and I assume they implement solutions (as opposed to specific software or hardware). I understand they have a revived chip business (Power4 ... ) and also sell servers, but again it's no news that this is not their core business.
Didn't check this registrar and don't know what country you're from, but in case you have a small claims court, I think this would be the way to go. Very often, companies would intervene before they have to send a representative to court. And you can do it without a lawyer and with minimal cost. Again, these things depend on your local situation.
It seems to me that D.C. scores high on the list of lawless places, no need to go to Hungary, which has joined the European Union recently.
Why not? Can we force people to live in this world? Can we force people to forego instant and cheap gratification by means of this kind of 'electrical drug'? The question will be whether people should be allowed 'off the hook', so to speak... whether society can afford to let people go like that, after it has invested so much in their education, health, whatever? Do games like the ones shown in 'eXistenZ' actually hurt people like drugs do?
1. You seem to be making the very common mistake to think that you are representative of the general population (potential users). The IQ is distributed normally, that is, it follows a bell curve. That entails that on average, people have an IQ of 100, and the largest number of people have exactly 100. (It's not their fault, and it's not a problem. No need to pity them, no need to be arrogant about it.)
2. Even as people gifted with an above-average intelligence, I'm not sure if we want to waste our time learning about configuration options of our applications. We're not the boy scouts. Your browser is a tool. It's not a goal in itself. That's essentially why I like OS X, and it's a criticism that applies to a large proportion of open source software coming from Linuxland.
And that's where merely watching the child and avoiding accidents and the like isn't enough - child-minding means interacting with the children. A robot won't do this.
Maybe, for evolutionary reasons, parents love to interact with their kids, because it secures the proper development and thus survival of their offspring. (I don't enjoy it that much - that's why I don't have kids yet! And I certainly won't get kids and have a robot take care of them!)
Far from free though - local calls here in the UK (0845 number) cost almost 4p (about 6 eur cent) per minute during day-time.