I have not recently visited Slashdot -- but I was ardent reader from 2002 to 2004 -- spending hours everyday here. I used to be so excited to get mod points! I learned a lot here, and importantly laughed a lot.:-) CmdrTaco -- thanks for making this website, and for giving readers like us information and enjoyment! All the best for the future!
Typing is easier if you use the Case
on
iPad Review
·
· Score: 1
If you use the Apple Case for the iPad's protection, the case can hold the ipad in a typable angle on a desk or even on your lap. The case can also hold it for movie watching (straight up).
I dont know about statistics, but in my current job as a software engineer I have to work 10+ hours a day, and it has gotten me rethinking about whether I want to continue in my technical career or not.
There must be something about the productivity statistics that you are getting horrendously wrong here. If the productivity would have been increasing 50% a year, then you are talking it increasing 1000 times (2^10) in a span of 10 years. Well, I myself beleive that my personal productivity has been going down, I can no longer code as much as I can a few years ago (and I am still in 20s).
If you beleive that we will start taking 6-month vacations in a year, please dont actually enact on your whim, since there will be lot others who would be willing to replace you in your 6-month and work for less, to make your return to the job difficult.
I think you have a wrong idea of religion. I know you got that from the majority of the people that believe that way.
But religion is associated around spirituality and love and faith. These are three things which make one's life peaceful, meaningful, and end up making the person more happy with himself and with others... thus spreading the happiness.
I come from India, and our Hindu religion is also a covering over the inner spirituality that is sometimes lost on the outside. But, look deeper and you will find the true essence of religion.
I see some DavidTC give an insightful post on how Christianity's better part is what Jesus himself said, which was to love god, and love everyone.
You could also look at Buddhism. Give me an example of how Buddhism caused any wars? And even Hindu religion has been mostly war-free, never did it pro-actively took on war!
Hey, I very much concur. I was going to write this in reply to the parent, and saw your post. Just wanted to say you have at least one partner in crime.
I too beleive that religion's soul is spirituality, and that spirituality is the one thing we should follow. Rest of religion was mostly there to sustain spirituality, but those means are not true through all space and time.
Thanks for the nice comment DrJimbo. Yours is probably the best comment in this story. It reminded me of a blog entry that I had made a few months back:
One must clearly understand the basic assumptions he makes in evaluating anything in his life. In order to even perform basic things, one needs to evaluate what he likes, and what is better according to him; and doing this involves making many underlying assumptions -- which are not very obvious.
For example, every morning you wake up and think that -- "Lets go to work". Why do you think that? Why is that "good"? Why did you choose it?
Or you think that "Tit for tat. He didnt help me -- now handle this."
Or "He doesnt even respond to me. What a jerk."
All these thoughts and decisions, if understood to a depth, give us a better understanding of this human world, and lets us more deftly adapt to changing space and time as regards to society.
Even assuming that life is better than death without specific deliberate thought is closed-mindedness.
Even assuming closed-mindedness is bad without sufficient logical reasons that satisfy self, is blindly following it.
The basic subconscious that society creates in us, is most of the times sufficiently correct, and you dont need to question fundamental assumptions. But often, it can misguide you, especially when the world is becoming a global village, and societies with very different fundamentals are trying to play along with each other, and when technology is slowly but steadily changing basic social machinery.
The primary activity that leads us to heightened awareness is trying to climb "meta" levels. (Level, sort of indicating a realm consisting of particular thoughts and their logical connections)
A meta level being one which is a level higher, and can "observe" the level below it from a distance, thus having the ability to understand and analyze it; in other words, gives you the ability to ask "Why" to it...
Take the basic social layer; which everyone is very familiar with. Now add a layer on top, which asks "why" to everything on the lower layer. The most important things in the lower layer to which you should ask these questions apart from other things are your own judgements, actions, and your general behavior.
Now to this second layer, which will collect all the answers to the first questions, add another layer, and ask "why" to that. Reason should be pursued for the answers as well as the action of pursuing answers. Thats how it works -- you ask "Why" to even the act of asking "Why".
The more layers/levels we climb, we tend to become more aware.
After doing this process for a few months, when you reach some concepts/answers which now become more or less stable, and dont give in to any questions; you will start understanding life more closely.
Sometimes, I feel that, all it takes to becoming a spiritual master (like say Asaramji Bapu) is climbing to higher and higher levels of meta-layers for a very wide variety of concepts and actions. (among other secondary things like: knowledge, etc)
Is Enlightenment (as in Gautama Buddha) just a very high form of such awareness?
Assuming safari is based off firefox, maybe you can customize slashdot recolor greasemonkey plugin? Thats the best I can say, or you can contact its author maybe.
Nautipolis by Alfred Kayser -- Never seen Firefox looking better.
Extensions:
SessionSaver -- backs up your session in case of normal shutdown, crash, or manual save
Bookmarks Synchronizer -- will synchronize your bookmarks vias FTP/SFTP, and save it in XBEL format, which you can by adding a XSL sheet, make a pretty looking webpage (and also convert it into HTML if you want)
Tabbrowser Preferences -- gives you "tab" power
GreaseMonkey -- will allow javascript plugins which modify behavior of pages
GreaseMonkey Scripts which I use: Slashdot recolor, google maps zooming use mousewheel, and moveable-type stylecatcher.
Since life is easy in the US, people tend to not work harder than required.
And engineering in general requires more effort (since it doesnt fit in very naturally with the emotional, or fun-loving human mind).
Once the US starts having a hard time in competing with other countries in science/math/technology, the culture might change, and people might start "respecting" those careers, and more people might start choosing it.
Once more people will start choosing, it will result in even more people going this way.
Culture does make a difference -- your choices/interests get influenced by it -- whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not.
Keep in mind that sometimes you have no choice but to buy Samsung memory, if you want a particular device. We're not just talking some RAM you slap into your desktop box, we're talking the DRAM inside of cellphones, MP3 players, etc-- almost every consumer electronic device that you want to name off.
I dont understand much about this flash/RAM stuff, but are you sure about that?
I thought the memories inside the devices like MP3 players, cell phones was NAND/NOR FLASH Memory... is that the same as DRAM?
And yes, the memory we install into the PC's, isnt it DRAM (dynamic RAM)?
People bitch about their spouse, kids, friends, and how miserable their life is. But that doesn't mean the current situation is worse than a divorce. There is no glorious rainbow, pot of gold, or greener grass. If there were, they wouldn't be complaining.
Couldnt agree more.
the C. P. Snow Divide of Sciences and Humanities
on
Flash, Meet Sparkle
·
· Score: 1, Funny
It is strange to see so many comments in this story criticizing Microsoft, even though they are making a commendable, and somewhat innovative product.
It seems like Slashdot has become completely blind to its prejudices, and will criticize Microsoft whatever it does.
Commenting that "Flash and Powerpoint are bad things" is to me indicative of a parochial, extremely narrow-minded worldview; a view that is completely ignorant of half of the world's desires and life-cultures.
If people really think that Microsoft makes crappy products, do you think Bill Gates would have been the richest man in the world for 11 straight years? (And also the biggest philanthropist the world has ever seen?) Can you do that for me please? Why do you think the whole world uses Microsoft products? Do you think that if Microsoft would have used fairer marketing strategies giving fair chance to each competitor, their products would have died out, and the company wiped out because of their low quality products?
This anti-flash, anti-ease-of-use, anti-glamour, anti-aesthetic, anti-comfort, anti-authoritian attitude reminds me of the C.P.Snow divide between the Sciences and Humanities.
Exactly. Just because your external senses tell you something, doesn't mean you can always trust them. And with God, no external sense will tell you anything, it's all in your own mind. Do you trust your own brain to be infallible?
Isnt it your mind that is saying this?
Anyway, look at it this way.
Your trust in external senses more than mind lies in the fact that senses dont lie, while mind can imagine anything it wants to.
But, you will agree, that we are beings of the mind. "We" exist in the mind; we decide, we feel; we think; we judge; whatever we do, culminates in the mind.
If the mind feels something; it is more important for us than anything that external sense or logic can ever provide.
If you beleive in God, and find bliss, then there is nothing else that is important.
My personal experience has been that my highest moments of happiness have come when I was one with God, or completely submitted to him.
> Theology is like being in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn't there and shouting "I found it!"
If it's a completely dark room. How do you know there is no cat in there? Of course randomly shouting "I found it!" is stupid. But just because someone finds the cat and you can't see it... that doesn't mean it's not there.
I completely agree. The onlooker normally is not able to decipher whether the finder actually found the cat or not, because the room is dark. And this room's darkness makes the only way possible to decipher is to experience it yourself.
I don't expect to be able to convince them- that's the beauty of distributism- I don't have to. All I need to do is convince enough people to change the tax structure to make small, completely autonomous communities possible. From there- everyone gets to be their own government.
For those who dont know, the ACM programming competition that is held on a world wide scale is the de-facto programming competition for bachelors (other than TopCoder, which is not limited to college students I think, but it is not organized on such a massive scale as ACM)
Yes, you are right. I just found out that they use Navteq and TeleAtlas map data, and NavTeq has info on 40 countries. So probably I would say "its just a matter of time".
As I understand, all these services like Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, Mappoint, and Google Maps might be using United States Postal Service (USPS) (or some other such govt org) data on street level maps and coordinates. (This is only my understanding, it MIGHT BE COMPLETELY WRONG).
And the problem is that, such data is not easily available for other countries. Hence, we can not expect Google to go and map out all the countries in the world when they start their beta service.
Even if such data exists for other countries compiled by their respective organizations, it will possibly take more effort and time to integerate with "n" number of organizations' data in various formats. Just like Yahoo Maps and Mapquest provide very less coverage of other countries.
Making cell phones use WiFi might not be a very good choice, when people will start ceasing to have WiFi connections in the first place. Flarion has come up with OFDM technology which provides real broadband speeds on wireless networks (scaleable to cellular networks level), much faster than forthcoming CDMA2000-EvDO (or whatever), and any other technology available in the forthcoming future. Nextel has already started a successful trial network.
Though not directly related to what you said, what I think is that kids should not be given a lot of freedom in selection of their education (selecting courses, say), after all, they are kids. I think that students upto high school should be given rigorous math and science education whether they like it or not. This is what will "build" more brilliant scientists and engineers who can actually "do" stuff.
In short, raising the bar of education currently offered, is what I would go for.
This Slashdot post was rather unnecessary and pointless. Mostly it seems that this Mary Anne Mohanraj's friend has written this to plug the site's various pages. And, believe it or not, also includes links to erotic stories on and off that site. This post, in my opinion, shouldnt have been selected at all.
Indian space program is painfully put together with many setbacks. Let's give credit to a developing nation that has built it's own launch vehicles and satellites that are very good.
What sort of objective statement is this...????
"You know, that guy has had some real trouble passing the exam. Lets give credit to that guy that has passed the exam on his own, and has written some very good answers."
Slashdot Mirror
I have not recently visited Slashdot -- but I was ardent reader from 2002 to 2004 -- spending hours everyday here. I used to be so excited to get mod points! I learned a lot here, and importantly laughed a lot. :-) CmdrTaco -- thanks for making this website, and for giving readers like us information and enjoyment!
All the best for the future!
If you use the Apple Case for the iPad's protection, the case can hold the ipad in a typable angle on a desk or even on your lap. The case can also hold it for movie watching (straight up).
Look at the 3rd pic here:
http://store.apple.com/us/product/IPAD_CASE
I know -- its one more thing to buy and have at one's disposal, but if you want to type a bit then it makes sense to have that case around...
I dont know about statistics, but in my current job as a software engineer I have to work 10+ hours a day, and it has gotten me rethinking about whether I want to continue in my technical career or not.
There must be something about the productivity statistics that you are getting horrendously wrong here. If the productivity would have been increasing 50% a year, then you are talking it increasing 1000 times (2^10) in a span of 10 years. Well, I myself beleive that my personal productivity has been going down, I can no longer code as much as I can a few years ago (and I am still in 20s).
If you beleive that we will start taking 6-month vacations in a year, please dont actually enact on your whim, since there will be lot others who would be willing to replace you in your 6-month and work for less, to make your return to the job difficult.
Beg your pardon, but who are Bill and Ted? :)
Hey Devnull17,
I think you have a wrong idea of religion. I know you got that from the majority of the people that believe that way.
But religion is associated around spirituality and love and faith. These are three things which make one's life peaceful, meaningful, and end up making the person more happy with himself and with others... thus spreading the happiness.
I come from India, and our Hindu religion is also a covering over the inner spirituality that is sometimes lost on the outside. But, look deeper and you will find the true essence of religion.
I see some DavidTC give an insightful post on how Christianity's better part is what Jesus himself said, which was to love god, and love everyone.
You could also look at Buddhism. Give me an example of how Buddhism caused any wars? And even Hindu religion has been mostly war-free, never did it pro-actively took on war!
Hey, I very much concur. I was going to write this in reply to the parent, and saw your post. Just wanted to say you have at least one partner in crime.
I too beleive that religion's soul is spirituality, and that spirituality is the one thing we should follow. Rest of religion was mostly there to sustain spirituality, but those means are not true through all space and time.
Thanks for the nice comment DrJimbo. Yours is probably the best comment in this story. It reminded me of a blog entry that I had made a few months back:
i ng_ass.html
http://gaurang.org/blog/archives/2005/05/question
I will paste it here:
"Questioning assumptions and becoming more aware"
One must clearly understand the basic assumptions he makes in evaluating anything in his life. In order to even perform basic things, one needs to evaluate what he likes, and what is better according to him; and doing this involves making many underlying assumptions -- which are not very obvious.
For example, every morning you wake up and think that -- "Lets go to work". Why do you think that? Why is that "good"? Why did you choose it?
Or you think that "Tit for tat. He didnt help me -- now handle this."
Or "He doesnt even respond to me. What a jerk."
All these thoughts and decisions, if understood to a depth, give us a better understanding of this human world, and lets us more deftly adapt to changing space and time as regards to society.
Even assuming that life is better than death without specific deliberate thought is closed-mindedness.
Even assuming closed-mindedness is bad without sufficient logical reasons that satisfy self, is blindly following it.
The basic subconscious that society creates in us, is most of the times sufficiently correct, and you dont need to question fundamental assumptions. But often, it can misguide you, especially when the world is becoming a global village, and societies with very different fundamentals are trying to play along with each other, and when technology is slowly but steadily changing basic social machinery.
The primary activity that leads us to heightened awareness is trying to climb "meta" levels. (Level, sort of indicating a realm consisting of particular thoughts and their logical connections)
A meta level being one which is a level higher, and can "observe" the level below it from a distance, thus having the ability to understand and analyze it; in other words, gives you the ability to ask "Why" to it...
Take the basic social layer; which everyone is very familiar with. Now add a layer on top, which asks "why" to everything on the lower layer. The most important things in the lower layer to which you should ask these questions apart from other things are your own judgements, actions, and your general behavior.
Now to this second layer, which will collect all the answers to the first questions, add another layer, and ask "why" to that. Reason should be pursued for the answers as well as the action of pursuing answers. Thats how it works -- you ask "Why" to even the act of asking "Why".
The more layers/levels we climb, we tend to become more aware.
After doing this process for a few months, when you reach some concepts/answers which now become more or less stable, and dont give in to any questions; you will start understanding life more closely.
Sometimes, I feel that, all it takes to becoming a spiritual master (like say Asaramji Bapu) is climbing to higher and higher levels of meta-layers for a very wide variety of concepts and actions. (among other secondary things like: knowledge, etc)
Is Enlightenment (as in Gautama Buddha) just a very high form of such awareness?
Assuming safari is based off firefox, maybe you can customize slashdot recolor greasemonkey plugin? Thats the best I can say, or you can contact its author maybe.
Thanks.
The ones I use:
Themes:
Nautipolis by Alfred Kayser -- Never seen Firefox looking better.
Extensions:
SessionSaver -- backs up your session in case of normal shutdown, crash, or manual save
Bookmarks Synchronizer -- will synchronize your bookmarks vias FTP/SFTP, and save it in XBEL format, which you can by adding a XSL sheet, make a pretty looking webpage (and also convert it into HTML if you want)
Tabbrowser Preferences -- gives you "tab" power
GreaseMonkey -- will allow javascript plugins which modify behavior of pages
GreaseMonkey Scripts which I use:
Slashdot recolor, google maps zooming use mousewheel, and moveable-type stylecatcher.
Since life is easy in the US, people tend to not work harder than required.
And engineering in general requires more effort (since it doesnt fit in very naturally with the emotional, or fun-loving human mind).
Once the US starts having a hard time in competing with other countries in science/math/technology, the culture might change, and people might start "respecting" those careers, and more people might start choosing it.
Once more people will start choosing, it will result in even more people going this way.
Culture does make a difference -- your choices/interests get influenced by it -- whether you like it or not, whether you want it or not.
Keep in mind that sometimes you have no choice but to buy Samsung memory, if you want a particular device. We're not just talking some RAM you slap into your desktop box, we're talking the DRAM inside of cellphones, MP3 players, etc-- almost every consumer electronic device that you want to name off.
... is that the same as DRAM?
I dont understand much about this flash/RAM stuff, but are you sure about that?
I thought the memories inside the devices like MP3 players, cell phones was NAND/NOR FLASH Memory
And yes, the memory we install into the PC's, isnt it DRAM (dynamic RAM)?
People bitch about their spouse, kids, friends, and how miserable their life is. But that doesn't mean the current situation is worse than a divorce. There is no glorious rainbow, pot of gold, or greener grass. If there were, they wouldn't be complaining.
Couldnt agree more.
It is strange to see so many comments in this story criticizing Microsoft, even though they are making a commendable, and somewhat innovative product.
It seems like Slashdot has become completely blind to its prejudices, and will criticize Microsoft whatever it does.
Commenting that "Flash and Powerpoint are bad things" is to me indicative of a parochial, extremely narrow-minded worldview; a view that is completely ignorant of half of the world's desires and life-cultures.
If people really think that Microsoft makes crappy products, do you think Bill Gates would have been the richest man in the world for 11 straight years? (And also the biggest philanthropist the world has ever seen?) Can you do that for me please? Why do you think the whole world uses Microsoft products? Do you think that if Microsoft would have used fairer marketing strategies giving fair chance to each competitor, their products would have died out, and the company wiped out because of their low quality products?
This anti-flash, anti-ease-of-use, anti-glamour, anti-aesthetic, anti-comfort, anti-authoritian attitude reminds me of the C.P.Snow divide between the Sciences and Humanities.
I feel the need for our coming together.
Exactly. Just because your external senses tell you something, doesn't mean you can always trust them. And with God, no external sense will tell you anything, it's all in your own mind. Do you trust your own brain to be infallible?
Isnt it your mind that is saying this?
Anyway, look at it this way.
Your trust in external senses more than mind lies in the fact that senses dont lie, while mind can imagine anything it wants to.
But, you will agree, that we are beings of the mind. "We" exist in the mind; we decide, we feel; we think; we judge; whatever we do, culminates in the mind.
If the mind feels something; it is more important for us than anything that external sense or logic can ever provide.
If you beleive in God, and find bliss, then there is nothing else that is important.
My personal experience has been that my highest moments of happiness have come when I was one with God, or completely submitted to him.
YMMV.
> Theology is like being in a dark room, looking for a black cat that isn't there and shouting "I found it!"
... that doesn't mean it's not there.
If it's a completely dark room. How do you know there is no cat in there? Of course randomly shouting "I found it!" is stupid. But just because someone finds the cat and you can't see it
I completely agree. The onlooker normally is not able to decipher whether the finder actually found the cat or not, because the room is dark. And this room's darkness makes the only way possible to decipher is to experience it yourself.
I don't expect to be able to convince them- that's the beauty of distributism- I don't have to. All I need to do is convince enough people to change the tax structure to make small, completely autonomous communities possible. From there- everyone gets to be their own government.
This is where we started from.
Why did we change?
Hey, thanks for the joke ..;-)
I laughed for a while....:)
For those who dont know, the ACM programming competition that is held on a world wide scale is the de-facto programming competition for bachelors (other than TopCoder, which is not limited to college students I think, but it is not organized on such a massive scale as ACM)
http://icpc.baylor.edu/icpc/
Hi,
My webhost has cPanel, and it provides one similar sservice in the cPanel for remote file management.
Maybe you would want to have a look at that.
Yes, you are right. I just found out that they use Navteq and TeleAtlas map data, and NavTeq has info on 40 countries. So probably I would say "its just a matter of time".
As I understand, all these services like Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, Mappoint, and Google Maps might be using United States Postal Service (USPS) (or some other such govt org) data on street level maps and coordinates. (This is only my understanding, it MIGHT BE COMPLETELY WRONG).
And the problem is that, such data is not easily available for other countries. Hence, we can not expect Google to go and map out all the countries in the world when they start their beta service.
Even if such data exists for other countries compiled by their respective organizations, it will possibly take more effort and time to integerate with "n" number of organizations' data in various formats. Just like Yahoo Maps and Mapquest provide very less coverage of other countries.
Making cell phones use WiFi might not be a very good choice, when people will start ceasing to have WiFi connections in the first place. Flarion has come up with OFDM technology which provides real broadband speeds on wireless networks (scaleable to cellular networks level), much faster than forthcoming CDMA2000-EvDO (or whatever), and any other technology available in the forthcoming future. Nextel has already started a successful trial network.
Wired WiFi services have limited life, it seems.
You are quite right.
Though not directly related to what you said, what I think is that kids should not be given a lot of freedom in selection of their education (selecting courses, say), after all, they are kids. I think that students upto high school should be given rigorous math and science education whether they like it or not. This is what will "build" more brilliant scientists and engineers who can actually "do" stuff.
In short, raising the bar of education currently offered, is what I would go for.
This Slashdot post was rather unnecessary and pointless. Mostly it seems that this Mary Anne Mohanraj's friend has written this to plug the site's various pages. And, believe it or not, also includes links to erotic stories on and off that site. This post, in my opinion, shouldnt have been selected at all.
Indian space program is painfully put together with many setbacks. Let's give credit to a developing nation that has built it's own launch vehicles and satellites that are very good.
What sort of objective statement is this...????
"You know, that guy has had some real trouble passing the exam. Lets give credit to that guy that has passed the exam on his own, and has written some very good answers."