Shhh...Don't argue with religious people! Fanatics of the Church of Stallman aren't capable of logic. Besides, they think that "freedom" refers to objects and not to people.
Shouldn't violence statistics show a massive increase in reported cases of violence in youth?
Just a thought: since when did school-shootouts become a problem? We never heard of that in the 60s, did we? Now, people had access to guns (in the US and other countries - in fact, when I was 12 I would just pick up a rifle and tell Grandma that I'd be back soon with some birds for supper - good vacations...). Now, this apparently-American trend seems to have been exported, or emulated, or has cropped-up, even in countries that are very different, culturally speaking, from the US (such as Finland). What's the common thread? Columbine, for instance, was straight out of a video game. Why not? Kids are being infected with the idea that violence for violence sake's is justifiable, as long as you get a kick out of it. The high of the thrill is what counts. Just recently, in my town, a friend of my wife was randomly assaulted with knife-throwing, on the sidewalk, by some punk kids in a drive-by car. That's all it was for them - Friday night. The fact is, young kids mix fantasy and reality. They just do. We did too. Except now they're exposed to a lot more graphic shit - with tints of cruelty.
Generally, people think all brain fucntions decline with age. However, this isn't true. As one grows older, the ability to refrain one's self is increased. This is one cognitive aspect that gets better (in a healthy adult). The point being that it is debatable, in light if current research, to postulate that this self-control is a "nature versus nurture" thing. It might well just be nature.
It's about the derivative. Terrorism deaths are growing geometrically. The other causes of death you mention are essentially steady-state.
They are? I don't know about that, have you read the recent numbers on hemorrhagic Dengue fever in Brazil, for instance? Did you consider the recent Bangladesh cyclone? I'd like to see how you treated the 1970 one that killed 500,000 people.
LOL:-)
Anyways, didn't the US military say terrorist attacks in Iraq were going down?
I'd like you to meet my close personal friend, Osama Bin Laden, a leading terrorist. He thinks we're all infidels, that this country is full of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury.
Man, that sounds so...neo-con. LOL:-)
Re:Openness is Fundamental to Mathematics
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
Anyways, when number-crunching gets tough, when you got a huge amount of data to process, neither MATLAB nor Mathematica aren't gonna cut it anyway and, typically, engineers, physicists and applied mathematicians will drop down to that mighty working horse called Fortran and use routines from something like LAPACK that are, indeed, open source.
In fact, this leads to a further point: not only it's important that this mathematical software be open source, but that it not be released under a restrictive license such as the GPL. Releasing code under licenses like BSD or putting code in the public domain allow the incorporation of these openly tested, scrutinized and widely used routines even in commercial code thereby garanteeing quality through and through the user's experience and choices, whether he/she be using proprietary software or not. In this way, the complaints made in the article disappear.
Re:Python is part of the answer
on
Open Source Math
·
· Score: 1
There are a lot of Mathematica haters out there that'll point out to you the history of many. many bugs in it (this is from reading some lists and Usenet). AFAIK, Mathematica is written in C - as opposed to Maple that has a small kernel written in C and the rest written in Maple. Or Axiom, or Maxima - none of these are in C. We all know how easy it is to write buggy software in C. What we'll probably all agree on is that it has gorgeous graphics and a good marketing machine.
The fact that Apple has had consistently better design can maybe be supported by these 2 facts: 1) Microsoft copied Apple UI; 2) For years, the HI guidelines at Gnome were just a blatant copy of the Mac HI guidelines (in fact, IIRC, they even mentioned that) - are you aware of that? Or are you a recent Linux fanboy?
I'm not saying Apple has the last word, but face it, spinning cubes and wobbly windows may be cool-looking, but they ain't improvements in usability (I'm not sure you guys even grasp the concept...)
Now, the OP claimed UI design was just pulling ideas out of one's ass, and that no objective measure could be done. Which clearly showed we were dealing with an ignorant fuck, a lumpenproletariat of the mind, a vagabond of objective evidence, a punk drifter in the road of numbers. That's the point.
PS: Oh, as for the part on "expensive" - hey, here's an idea: read books so that you become more knowledgeable and get a raise. Maybe then the OP will be able to afford machines that are not low-end.
Dude, good GUI design is done with statistical testing and - gasp - even some theory of cognitive science thrown in. Measuring response times, irritation, how many times and how easily the user gets a task right. Etc. For instance, Microsoft Vista beta was tested on families for an extended period of time. This goes for an average user, the Ion-3 user doesn't count, does it?
You display a total lack of knowledge in the field. You gotta stop talking out of your ass. I don't work in the field either, but you're just thick...You've never even skimmed over a book or publications about the subject. If anything, the lack of progress in Linux land is startling. I'm talking usability. You're talking aesthetics/taste. You know what's aesthetics? The current fixation on spinning cubes and wobbly windows by the Linux crowd that adds nothing or near nothing to usability.
Now you prove me wrong and mention a slew of testing Gnome has conducted. I can only one or two remember small-samples tests. For years, in fact, the interface guidelines for Gnome were "stolen" straight out of Apple. KDE doesn't fare much better with its track record but, at least, they have talked about it and come to the conclusion that they needed testing and take the mattter more seriously.
I don't hate Linux...I don't give a damn about Linux because, in fact, I prefer FreeBSD (wanna see a real FOSS usability improvements? - go see what the people at PC-BSD are doing). What I hate is this fucking ignorant and stupid navel-gazing you displayed.
Everyone else is happy running a Mac OS wanna be, or a Unix that's still stuck in the 90s(*) that has proved consistently that their developers are unable to forge a decent user desktop experience. Gnome, huh?
$ 129,00 for not breaking X in my box every 6 months? I'm in.
I predict it'll take a minimum of 50 years before Russia even starts resembling anything like a Western democracy. Right now, on can say they went from Stalinism to Putinism, and are practically a petrostate, with no hope of regaining the technological edge they had, because of their bandit-capitalistic ways.
The reason most Dutch understand and speak English so well is: 1) Dutch is the language most similar to English; 2) Dutch TV runs shows in English and Dutch subtitles and they pick up naturally, as would a Portuguese/Spanish-speaking population. Or Danish/Norwegian, I guess.
Yeah, I got your point. A common language. Like the one I'm using to communicate with you.
However, it looks to me as a rosy picture from American lenses. AFAIK, in Africa, I would say Yoruba and Banto would be much more widepsread as "common" languages than the examples you gave (and as someone pointed out, you forgot the whole buch of Francophones that, I'm under the impression, are a much bigger group in Africa than Anglophones).
As I pointed out, for a variety of historical reasons a working knowledge of English is actually a fairly common skill around the world: should such utility simply be disposed of because you find English "distasteful" or the Anglo-Saxon history unattractive (I don't fully grasp the relevance of your comment there, but okay)? That's ridiculous on the face of it: get over any anti-American bias you may have and accept that people (scientists and otherwise) speak English (of whatever variety) because it's often the only method they have to talk to each other.
Don't put words in my mouth, dude. I don't have any anti-American bias. I just don't think the USA is the pinnacle of culture, that's all. Oh, I guess that's might be called a bias...towards other foods, accents, and ways I find more pleasant, easy going and urbane.
Also, you might be aware that the predominance of English in some areas of the world has to do with colonization, no? So, it's not like it was a choice. But, hey, if it's a tool and they use it, fine. But when you look at the numbers: 90% of the Western European population can't understand a simple sample of everyday usage of English...The example you gave are all biased towards places where, yes, people can speak English in Africa, etc. Anyways, it'll be fun to watch if English becomes a truly new Latin (which, right now, it really isn't - just because people pop a DVD from a Hollywood flic doens't mean that culture really gets to them - more like something from Bizarroworld).
But just so you know, as a tool I find English imprecise and it has often given me (and a lot of other people I've translated stuff with) headaches in translation, by having to depend so much on context. I find that French, for instance, is more precise (and, no, I'm not French). In fact, it makes sense because Latin was a very precise language. No wonder our science vocabulary borrows so much from it. German is also very precise, I think (my impression from some of my Physics books).
I find the number of people that spend quite a lot of money in English school for 6 years (or more) and speak but a mediocre English staggering. I wonder why that is? Maybe it has to do with English being hard. Yes. Hard. It might be easy for you, but I have dozens of English books around me so that I don't screw up too badly.
As for "refusing" to learn English, I think it's absolutely justifiable. I take Russian classes with a buch of people that are in the import/export sector. Learing English for them to do business in Russia would be nonsense. At least, it seems all their firms have come to that conclusion. It's absolutely justifiable that one spends his her time learning French, German, or Greek. If I were to specialize in Aristotle, why sould I invest my time in English. Again, the TI sector is not the world. And what about this funny scene: 20 Germans in a meeting, they all speak English because of this one guy (American) who can't speak German. 40 min. later, they're fed up with the mental effort and turn to their language. The monolingual guy looks stupid and isolated - because he is. So chauvinism can be embarassing, you know?
As for the predominance of English in science, you might be aware that, before WW I all the relevant literature was in German. So that this change has a lot do with external events. In fact, the whole ex-Eastern block preferred German as the second language (until the Glasnost, I suppose). Science magazine once comissioned the Interlingua comittee a study about the feasibility of using it as an alternative.
Realistically, I think English will take over the world (by which I mean, 6% of the population:-)), there's just too much cultural dominance. Which will be sort of ironic, because "everybody" will start speaking this mangled English...Myself, I have no problem with the English language as you can see for yourself.
That's real mature, evoking WW II where grandpa fought. Anyways, that's old school. The new paradigm is invading countries pre-emptively. Sorta like Hitler.
Here, go watch this hilarious clip about two Canadians in a gas station - one speaks English - sort of - the other one doesn't speak French (I guess that about sums up the situation with English as a lingua franca.)
In my experience, I find that Babelfish varies in quality depending on which languages are being mapped to. For instance, I find that German -> French is better (less nonsense) than German -> English, which is odd, since German and English are supposed to be more related.
Oh my God! I used to think Babelfish was, like, state-of-the-art... Now I realize we're not better off than stupid dictionary look-ups people do all the time - and for which the 1855 book is famous for. What a fucking shame the state of machine-translation.
Slashdot Mirror
Shhh...Don't argue with religious people!
Fanatics of the Church of Stallman aren't capable of logic.
Besides, they think that "freedom" refers to objects and not to people.
Shouldn't violence statistics show a massive increase in reported cases of violence in youth?
Just a thought: since when did school-shootouts become a problem?
We never heard of that in the 60s, did we? Now, people had access to guns (in the US and other countries - in fact, when I was 12 I would just pick up a rifle and tell Grandma that I'd be back soon with some birds for supper - good vacations...).
Now, this apparently-American trend seems to have been exported, or emulated, or has cropped-up, even in countries that are very different, culturally speaking, from the US (such as Finland).
What's the common thread? Columbine, for instance, was straight out of a video game. Why not? Kids are being infected with the idea that violence for violence sake's is justifiable, as long as you get a kick out of it. The high of the thrill is what counts. Just recently, in my town, a friend of my wife was randomly assaulted with knife-throwing, on the sidewalk, by some punk kids in a drive-by car. That's all it was for them - Friday night.
The fact is, young kids mix fantasy and reality. They just do. We did too. Except now they're exposed to a lot more graphic shit - with tints of cruelty.
Generally, people think all brain fucntions decline with age.
However, this isn't true. As one grows older, the ability to refrain one's self is increased. This is one cognitive aspect that gets better (in a healthy adult).
The point being that it is debatable, in light if current research, to postulate that this self-control is a "nature versus nurture" thing.
It might well just be nature.
No, no, no, no, no. You see, this is GNUspeak: restriction=freedom.
It's about the derivative. Terrorism deaths are growing geometrically. The other causes of death you mention are essentially steady-state.
:-)
They are? I don't know about that, have you read the recent numbers on hemorrhagic Dengue fever in Brazil, for instance? Did you consider the recent Bangladesh cyclone? I'd like to see how you treated the 1970 one that killed 500,000 people.
LOL
Anyways, didn't the US military say terrorist attacks in Iraq were going down?
Where the hell do you get your facts from?
I'd like you to meet my close personal friend, Osama Bin Laden, a leading terrorist. He thinks we're all infidels, that this country is full of fornication, homosexuality, intoxicants, gambling, and usury.
:-)
Man, that sounds so...neo-con. LOL
Anyways, when number-crunching gets tough, when you got a huge amount of data to process, neither MATLAB nor Mathematica aren't gonna cut it anyway and, typically, engineers, physicists and applied mathematicians will drop down to that mighty working horse called Fortran and use routines from something like LAPACK that are, indeed, open source.
In fact, this leads to a further point: not only it's important that this mathematical software be open source, but that it not be released under a restrictive license such as the GPL. Releasing code under licenses like BSD or putting code in the public domain allow the incorporation of these openly tested, scrutinized and widely used routines even in commercial code thereby garanteeing quality through and through the user's experience and choices, whether he/she be using proprietary software or not. In this way, the complaints made in the article disappear.
There are a lot of Mathematica haters out there that'll point out to you the history of many. many bugs in it (this is from reading some lists and Usenet). AFAIK, Mathematica is written in C - as opposed to Maple that has a small kernel written in C and the rest written in Maple. Or Axiom, or Maxima - none of these are in C. We all know how easy it is to write buggy software in C. What we'll probably all agree on is that it has gorgeous graphics and a good marketing machine.
I meant the OP of stupidity, of course.
The fact that Apple has had consistently better design can maybe be supported by these 2 facts: 1) Microsoft copied Apple UI; 2) For years, the HI guidelines at Gnome were just a blatant copy of the Mac HI guidelines (in fact, IIRC, they even mentioned that) - are you aware of that? Or are you a recent Linux fanboy?
I'm not saying Apple has the last word, but face it, spinning cubes and wobbly windows may be cool-looking, but they ain't improvements in usability (I'm not sure you guys even grasp the concept...)
Now, the OP claimed UI design was just pulling ideas out of one's ass, and that no objective measure could be done. Which clearly showed we were dealing with an ignorant fuck, a lumpenproletariat of the mind, a vagabond of objective evidence, a punk drifter in the road of numbers. That's the point.
PS: Oh, as for the part on "expensive" - hey, here's an idea: read books so that you become more knowledgeable and get a raise. Maybe then the OP will be able to afford machines that are not low-end.
Everyone does things differently? Are you sure about that or is it you brainspasm talking again?
Do you mean to say people don't minimize/maximize windows, move things to folder, click on an item?
Yeah, a whole lot of difference...
Just shows how uneducated the Linux crowd can be.
Go read some books, ok? You need to.
Mac OS is very language-friendly. Esperanto, Russian a and Japanese are just a clickity-click away for me.
Dude, good GUI design is done with statistical testing and - gasp - even some theory of cognitive science thrown in. Measuring response times, irritation, how many times and how easily the user gets a task right. Etc. For instance, Microsoft Vista beta was tested on families for an extended period of time. This goes for an average user, the Ion-3 user doesn't count, does it?
You display a total lack of knowledge in the field. You gotta stop talking out of your ass. I don't work in the field either, but you're just thick...You've never even skimmed over a book or publications about the subject. If anything, the lack of progress in Linux land is startling. I'm talking usability. You're talking aesthetics/taste. You know what's aesthetics? The current fixation on spinning cubes and wobbly windows by the Linux crowd that adds nothing or near nothing to usability.
Now you prove me wrong and mention a slew of testing Gnome has conducted. I can only one or two remember small-samples tests. For years, in fact, the interface guidelines for Gnome were "stolen" straight out of Apple. KDE doesn't fare much better with its track record but, at least, they have talked about it and come to the conclusion that they needed testing and take the mattter more seriously.
I don't hate Linux...I don't give a damn about Linux because, in fact, I prefer FreeBSD (wanna see a real FOSS usability improvements? - go see what the people at PC-BSD are doing). What I hate is this fucking ignorant and stupid navel-gazing you displayed.
Everyone else is happy running a Mac OS wanna be, or a Unix that's still stuck in the 90s(*) that has proved consistently that their developers are unable to forge a decent user desktop experience. Gnome, huh?
$ 129,00 for not breaking X in my box every 6 months? I'm in.
(*) PS: Mac OS is a certified Unix.
I predict it'll take a minimum of 50 years before Russia even starts resembling anything like a Western democracy. Right now, on can say they went from Stalinism to Putinism, and are practically a petrostate, with no hope of regaining the technological edge they had, because of their bandit-capitalistic ways.
Hey, got your irony rolling, baby!
And try to make sense.
Holy shit, talk about prejudice!
Anyways, the situation looks like it's improved a bit, they even have Inuktitut search engines.
The reason most Dutch understand and speak English so well is: 1) Dutch is the language most similar to English; 2) Dutch TV runs shows in English and Dutch subtitles and they pick up naturally, as would a Portuguese/Spanish-speaking population. Or Danish/Norwegian, I guess.
Yeah, I got your point. A common language. Like the one I'm using to communicate with you.
However, it looks to me as a rosy picture from American lenses. AFAIK, in Africa, I would say Yoruba and Banto would be much more widepsread as "common" languages than the examples you gave (and as someone pointed out, you forgot the whole buch of Francophones that, I'm under the impression, are a much bigger group in Africa than Anglophones).
As I pointed out, for a variety of historical reasons a working knowledge of English is actually a fairly common skill around the world: should such utility simply be disposed of because you find English "distasteful" or the Anglo-Saxon history unattractive (I don't fully grasp the relevance of your comment there, but okay)? That's ridiculous on the face of it: get over any anti-American bias you may have and accept that people (scientists and otherwise) speak English (of whatever variety) because it's often the only method they have to talk to each other.
:-)), there's just too much cultural dominance. Which will be sort of ironic, because "everybody" will start speaking this mangled English...Myself, I have no problem with the English language as you can see for yourself.
Don't put words in my mouth, dude. I don't have any anti-American bias. I just don't think the USA is the pinnacle of culture, that's all. Oh, I guess that's might be called a bias...towards other foods, accents, and ways I find more pleasant, easy going and urbane.
Also, you might be aware that the predominance of English in some areas of the world has to do with colonization, no? So, it's not like it was a choice. But, hey, if it's a tool and they use it, fine. But when you look at the numbers: 90% of the Western European population can't understand a simple sample of everyday usage of English...The example you gave are all biased towards places where, yes, people can speak English in Africa, etc. Anyways, it'll be fun to watch if English becomes a truly new Latin (which, right now, it really isn't - just because people pop a DVD from a Hollywood flic doens't mean that culture really gets to them - more like something from Bizarroworld).
But just so you know, as a tool I find English imprecise and it has often given me (and a lot of other people I've translated stuff with) headaches in translation, by having to depend so much on context. I find that French, for instance, is more precise (and, no, I'm not French). In fact, it makes sense because Latin was a very precise language. No wonder our science vocabulary borrows so much from it. German is also very precise, I think (my impression from some of my Physics books).
I find the number of people that spend quite a lot of money in English school for 6 years (or more) and speak but a mediocre English staggering. I wonder why that is? Maybe it has to do with English being hard. Yes. Hard. It might be easy for you, but I have dozens of English books around me so that I don't screw up too badly.
As for "refusing" to learn English, I think it's absolutely justifiable. I take Russian classes with a buch of people that are in the import/export sector. Learing English for them to do business in Russia would be nonsense. At least, it seems all their firms have come to that conclusion. It's absolutely justifiable that one spends his her time learning French, German, or Greek. If I were to specialize in Aristotle, why sould I invest my time in English. Again, the TI sector is not the world. And what about this funny scene: 20 Germans in a meeting, they all speak English because of this one guy (American) who can't speak German. 40 min. later, they're fed up with the mental effort and turn to their language. The monolingual guy looks stupid and isolated - because he is. So chauvinism can be embarassing, you know?
As for the predominance of English in science, you might be aware that, before WW I all the relevant literature was in German. So that this change has a lot do with external events. In fact, the whole ex-Eastern block preferred German as the second language (until the Glasnost, I suppose). Science magazine once comissioned the Interlingua comittee a study about the feasibility of using it as an alternative.
Realistically, I think English will take over the world (by which I mean, 6% of the population
Inuktitut, the coolest looking alphabet in the world:
.
.
.
Beats Klingon.
(Slashdot just borked on Inuktitut fonts).
That's real mature, evoking WW II where grandpa fought. Anyways, that's old school. The new paradigm is invading countries pre-emptively. Sorta like Hitler.
Guys, loosen up.
Here, go watch this hilarious clip about two Canadians in a gas station - one speaks English - sort of - the other one doesn't speak French (I guess that about sums up the situation with English as a lingua franca.)
http://de.youtube.com/watch?v=5gwXD41swgw
In my experience, I find that Babelfish varies in quality depending on which languages are being mapped to. For instance, I find that German -> French is better (less nonsense) than German -> English, which is odd, since German and English are supposed to be more related.
Oh my God!
I used to think Babelfish was, like, state-of-the-art...
Now I realize we're not better off than stupid dictionary look-ups people do all the time - and for which the 1855 book is famous for.
What a fucking shame the state of machine-translation.
Now's the time for the Esperanto plug - a better tool.
I guess brains still beat computers when it comes to languages.