Processors that provide different output for the same input cannot be used for anything that wants predictable output.
They can not be used for ANY result that is later used by anything else -- after all, data based on bad data yields bad results.
I think you're conflating "unpredictable output" with "bad output". There's lot of applications where unpredictable output is tolerable, if not outright desirable. Games is one obvious example. Decoding any lossy data (pictures, music, video, etc.) is another.
VoIP applications, for example INTENTIONALLY add random noise to the voice calls being transmitted to enhance user experience. See Comfort Noise. This is a situation where we WANT random errors to occur in the output.
More importantly, how do you ensure that only data is messed up? Flipping a bit of data might be acceptable. Flipping a bit of code probably isn't.
Presumably, the probabilistic CPU still functions on the basic principles of the "fetch-execute cycle". That is, it has a dedicated instruction register (IR) and a dedicated program counter (PC), and several other registers for actually performing the calculations.
By putting different electromagnetic noise standards on different registers, you can ensure that only certain registers suffer from errors.
Obviously, there's a lot of handwaving and missing details here, but hopefully it's a bit clearer how to ensure only data has inaccuracies, and instructions won't.
Bits are bits. There's no guarantee that a "low power" chip will only mess up the low-order bits of a number.
Any Turing-computable algorithm you can implement in software, you can also implement in hardware
Isaac Newton, John Carmak, and others, have implemented various Turing-computable algorithms which approximate values of square roots, integrals, etc. which only mess up the "low-order" bits of a number.
Therefore, it is possible to design in hardware a chip which implements instructions that only mess up the low order bits of a number.
But I think that most of us are OK with accurate hardware.
If there exist some people for whom probabilistic computers are useful, then I wouldn't call the research "silly".
Seymour Cray is known for saying "Do you want fast or accurate?" because back then there was no IEEE 754 spec (which is not infinitely precise) for floating point numbers at the time and machines were pretty primitive then and his machine did Newtonian approximations of many numeric calculations that were accurate to a point, just like John Carmack did (in software) with Doom's inverse square root.
Perhaps this "probabilistic square root" algorithm could be implemented as a single instruction in the probabilistic CPU, thus speeding this up for everyone.
The moral of the story is that in 2009 and beyond its probably best to have hardware continue to be accurate.
It's probably best, or deterministically best? Sorry, that was a bit of a "mean jab" there, but perhaps it's enough to give you an intuition that there are applications where "probably" is good enough (depending on what the exact probabilities are).
Even more so: we intentionally gather entropy to improve the pseudo random numbers. With intentionally inaccurate CPU cores, we could scrap all that and gather entropy en-passant AND be much faster anyway.
There are many different types of Random Number Generators (RNGs). We might desire that the RNG be cryptographically secure for example, or we might desire that the RNG has a "nice spread" over all possible values for simulation/game purposes.
Plus, who's to say that the errors generated by these probabilistic CPUs are not deterministic? (i.e. given the same input, it always generates the same errors).
Random algorithms are used all the time. In RSA for example, random primes must be generated. This is done with an algorithm that probably gives the right answer, which is good enough. The chance that it would fail is so tiny as to not matter.
To get a bit pedantic...
An "algorithm" in "Turing-computable" (i.e. all algorithms you are running on your x86 processors) sense, cannot be random. These algorithms are always deterministic, but may use as input data which is random or pseudo-random (such as the current system time).
1: The algorithm you are referring to is "probabilistic", but still deterministic. It takes as input a number and a random seed, and it returns a boolean. "true" means the number provided is definitely prime, and "false" means that the number is nonprime with some (known) non-zero probability.
2: Further, the algorithm has the property that by repeatedly running that algorithm with a different random seed, you can combine the probabilities such as to reduce the probability that the number is prime arbitrarily as close to zero as you want (but it can never actually reach zero).
It's this last property which is important for the RSA program: being able to control the computation-time/probability tradeoff. Contrast that with the following algorithm which has the property described in [1], but not in [2]:
boolean isPrime(int number, random seed) {
const knownPrimes = [2,3,5,7];
if (number in knownPrimes) {
return true;
}
return false;
}
Rerunning this algorithm with a different seed doesn't allow you to increase your confidence in the primeness of the given number.
It's not clear whether the proposed CPU has the analogous property of "2": Is there a way to control the computation-time/probability tradeoff? If not, the applications may be more limited than you think.
With regards to music, they're not talking about skips and pops, they're talking about extremely slight modulations in pitch or, in the case of video, a very slight difference in color. If these differences are random and small enough (say, 300 per second), then it averages out to the same thing and our minds can't tell the difference. Hell, if the differences are small enough you wouldn't really notice them anyway. If I could get 30x the battery life out of my laptop by accepting imperfections in the video it displays and in the audio it plays (and I know it wouldn't, but this is a hypothetical), then I'd gladly go for it.
Not to mention that the vast majority of people (I'd easily wager for 99% or higher) store their music in a lossy format such as mp3, so they are already experiencing small random errors.
I'd wager an even higher proportion of people (99.99%?) store their video in a lossy format. In fact, while I have no problem naming lossy video compression schemes (DivX/XviD, Mpeg-4, Ogg Theora, Indeo, Quicktime, etc.), I can't come up with a single lossless video codec besides "raw".
one prime assumption is that alien life would communicate on the EM spectrum someplace using technology similar enough to ours to be in a form that we would understand or recognize.
The assumption that they would send on the EM spectrum seems reasonable to me: Given the distances we're considering, low-latency messages is a very important concern, and our current theories indicate that nothing travels faster than light. So it'd make sense to use light to communicate.
The assumption that we'd recognize it also seems reasonable because Mathematics does seem to be universal in the sense that it does not seem to depend on any aspect of our development (e.g. does not depend on being a carbon-based lifeform, or having your genetic material be DNA based, etc.) There are branches of mathematical theory that allow us to measure the complexity (or "negentropy", i.e. "negative entropy") of a signal. Something with very high negentropy is almost certainly created by some intelligent source (perhaps a more accurate term than "intelligence source" is "optimizing force").
That they would use similar technology is a strawman, I think. We don't really need to assume that at all.
Yet dolphins are quite intelligent, and we have no idea what they are saying.
And yet, you seem to be able to recognize that the dolphins are, indeed, intelligent. That's all we're trying to do with SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence): We're trying to recognize a signal sent from an "intelligent" source. We can worry about trying to understand it later, once we've actually found such a signal.
If we can't decipher communication in a biological form that's based on the same exact biology as ourselves, that is 99% identical at the cellular level, how can we justify our arrogance in believing that we'd know truly alien communication if we saw it?
We can actually already, decypher a lot of what animals from our planet are trying to communicate. I can tell when my dog is happy, sad, hungry, scared, sleepy, etc. I think most scientists would already be ecstatic if they could recognize when an alien was happy, sad, hungry, scared, etc. For one, it would show that these emotions seem to be universal.
Also, you seem to be conflating "recognizing that a message is being sent" with "understanding a message that was sent" again.
Obviously, if we did come across some communication on the EM spectrum that we were to show wasn't some mere physical process, we'd have proof of alien communication or related phenomena.
Obviously. =)
But there's no evidence at all that they would. In fact, it's rather unlikely that we will ourselves, in just a few years: take a look at spread spectrum transmission for a method that we already use today in many uses that would be virtually undetectable by SETI.
Frequency hopping was specifically invented to make it HARD to intercept the message. It's a military security practice. Just as we don't try to RSA-encrypt any messages we send out into space, we also don't do anything "fancy" that would make it harder to pick up the message like frequency hopping. Hopefully, any aliens that wish to communicate with us will realize that they can more easily achieve their goal if they make it easy to receive their message, and realize that frequency hoping does not make things easier.
Fermi's paradox is based on a large number of assumptions of scale that are, quite frankly pulled from Fermi's backside, and aren't even well supported by technological developments since its inception. They are the best assumptions available, but they demonstrate nothing other than a weak foundation for conjecture.
And if some of those assumptions are already demonstrated irrelevant with applicable technology HERE, TODAY, how can we give Fermi's paradox any more than the time of day?
I'm not a big fan of Fermi's paradox, but I think detecting alien signals, if they exist, isn't as insurmountable as you make it sound.
This is analgous to the way in QM the details are not predictcable till you look, and when you do the details of other things not simultaneously observed can change at a distance.
Back when people didn't know about macroscopic decoherence aka many-worlds - before it occurred to anyone that the laws deduced with such precision for microscopic physics, might apply universally at all levels - what did people think was going on?
The initial reasoning seems to have gone something like:
"When my calculations showed an amplitude of -1/3i for this
photon to get absorbed, my experimental statistics showed that the photon was
absorbed around 107 times out of 1000, which is a good fit to 1/9, the
square of the modulus."
to
"The amplitude is the probability (by way of the squared modulus)."
to
"Once you measure something and know it didn't happen, its probability goes to zero."
Read
literally, this implies that knowledge itself - or even conscious
awareness - causes the collapse. Which was in fact the form of
the theory put forth by Werner Heisenberg!
[...]
If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:
The only non-linear evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
The only non-unitary evolution in all of quantum mechanics.
The only non-differentiable (in fact, discontinuous) phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics.
The only phenomenon in all of quantum mechanics that is non-local in the configuration space.
The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates CPT symmetry.
The only phenomenon in all of physics that violates Liouville's Theorem (has a many-to-one mapping from initial conditions to outcomes).
The only phenomenon in all of physics that is acausal / non-deterministic / inherently random.
The only phenomenon in all of physics that is non-local in spacetime and propagates an influence faster than light.
I doubt that the first thing that you do when you get a computer is to create a Facebook page, or am I too old-fashion ?
Perhaps she already had a Facebook account from before she purchased this particular computer from Dell.
So I guess she was computer literate from the beginning, but I guess also that she is one of the people who never say no.
I'm not sure exactly what your mental model is of the correlation between using Facebook and various computer-related knowledge, so I can't comment on what parts of your model I disagree with. I'll just say that I bet the vast majority of Facebook users (say over 80%) do not know what an Operating System is.
Have you joined #ubuntu and #debian on irc.freenode.net? The former talks so much that my 24" screen can barely handle the message throughput.. kudos to those brave souls that give support in that channel. 50% of those questions are, why doesn't ubuntu work like windows..:(
Maybe Ubuntu could include a bot which would recognize frequently asked questions and provide pre-written answers, thus saving the real live humans some time and effort in supporting newbie questions.
They could even have the bot have a spiffy avatar that sits in the bottom right corner of the screen, like a talking paper clip or something!
Having *just* installed Hardy Heron, I also note that upon first booting the machine and logging in, an icon shows up next to the "updates available" icon that looks like a little graphics card, and when you click on it, it points out that you have *not* installed the proprietary nvidia driver, but by golly, click here and we'll do it right now! Which I did. Which helped performance. So while it may not be done by default, it's something any user would notice immediately (any user of Ubuntu).
Every day, man is making bigger and better fool-proof things, and every day, nature is making bigger and better fools. So far, I think nature is winning.
Clearly the journalist what no tech expert, which obviously the Linux community has no patience for. So next time you're in getting your car fixed and you don't know what a lower control arm is, I hope they call you an idiot.
This was moderated "insightful"?
Maybe it's my Buddhist influence speaking, but personally, I think the world could learn more patience. The next time you're in getting your car fixed, and you don't know what a lower control arm is, I hope they try their best to be courteous and helpful, and try explaining what a lower control arm is to you (assuming this knowledge is even at all relevant to solving whatever problem your car is having).
That's also when the comments - many of them angry, rude, and hateful - started pouring in.
Some Ubuntu users accused 27 News of "unscrupulous reporting," hitting a "new low for local news," and writing an "atrocious article."
Many Ubuntu users also wrote very personal attacks about the young lady who was having trouble using the operating system. They called her "lazy," "a dumb girl," and "not worthy of a college degree."
The young woman also contacted 27 News to report she's being harassed on her Facebook account by Ubuntu users.
Way to go. I'm sure this is the optimal way of converting her and other Windows user onto Linux. Hooray for Freedom. </sarcasm>.
This is pretty awesome *for* linux. Because it is major egg on Verizon's face. [...] Hopefully she isn't going into a technical degree area with this little knowledge of computers at that age.
Honestly, I don't think Verizon is too concerned about the "negative publicity" that this article may have caused, and the possibility of losing the "compute-illiterate Linux users" demographics.
She also can't install Microsoft Word, which she says is a requirement for MATC's online classes... MATC also says it promises to accept any of Schubert's papers or class documents using whatever software she has installed.
Sounds like somebody doesn't have their story straight. FUD should be consistent within an article if you want people to believe it.
You're a bit too paranoid if that's sufficient evidence for you to believe that the article is pro-Microsoft FUD. This type of situation is so common in real life, there's a term specifically crafted to refer to it. It's called "he-said-she-said."
The article says that the woman claims she needs to install Microsoft Word.
The article says that the university claims they will accept papers using whatever software she has installed.
From this, it does not necessarily follow that the article is lying.
It also does not follow that there was any malicious pro-Microsoft conspiracy from any of the involved parties:
The university says the you can submit documents using any software, but probably strongly implies that it must be submitted via *some* software, i.e. they don't accept hand written submissions that are snail-mailed in.
The woman hears that she needs to write papers using some software, and thus immediately translates that to mean she needs to write papers using Microsoft Word, because the two are equivalent to her.
The woman asks Dell to install Microsoft Windows, and uses as justification for why she wants Windows "I need Microsoft Word to write my papers".
I'd much more likely attribute the factually false statements the woman made to ignorance, than malice.
maybe we just can't expect everyone to finish college, some people are just not bright. serioulsy, do you want this person to be a doctor or manage your finances if she can't be bothered to click on the "network" icon in the top right corner of the screen? what kind of problem solving skills does she have.
IMHO, knowing enough about computers to set up a network (even with OS guidance) is not strongly correlated with medical or financial advisory skills.
For all I care, the doctor/financial advisor can be a luddite, using pen and paper for all his/her records, as long as they do the job well.
I've seen 8 year olds riding Tokyo's subway system solo. The instant any of them show any signs of confusion or distress -- and that's very rare, since their parents teach them how to ride -- any number of genuinely helpful adults (plural) in the vicinity come to their rescue. This is all perfectly normal, and it's entirely within the physical world. Everyone is safe.
The Internet is not even physical. There's always a wire (or wireless connection) separating its participants. Simply combine the Internet with a parent or responsible adult and it's safer (psychologically) than even the Tokyo Metro. (And it's always physically safer.)
While I agree that the Internet is physically safer than the Tokyo Metro, it does not follow that the Internet is psychologically safer. It's easier to be an asshole (and thus abusive towards others) on the Internet thanks to anonymity and near-zero chance of repercussion, which you don't have in the physical world (whether that be in the Tokyo Metro or elsewhere).
Type in "tubgirl" and click the "Search Images" button.
You'll get a 7x3 grid of images. On the first page, bottom row, second from the left, is an image of tubgirl (http://tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:OaMvNa_Q2NhgnM:http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1743/tubskit5ev.jpg).
And this is with Google Moderate SafeSearch enabled.
Repeat similar steps for any of the other images you are curious about.
"How do you work in a team situation when all the other team members are fools and idiots?"
"How well do you program under the influence of hard drugs?"
"Have you ever beaten or killed a co-worker?"
"Give me a rough estimate of the maximum dollar amount that you've stolen from each of your previous employers."
"Do you object to bullwhips in the workplace?"
"Emacs or vi?"
I was blasting through these questions, with no hesitation bullshit answers that I knew would please the interviewer until I hit this one. What does it say about my personality that it's only here that I start sweating bullets?
Slashdot Mirror
Processors that provide different output for the same input cannot be used for anything that wants predictable output.
They can not be used for ANY result that is later used by anything else -- after all, data based on bad data yields bad results.
I think you're conflating "unpredictable output" with "bad output". There's lot of applications where unpredictable output is tolerable, if not outright desirable. Games is one obvious example. Decoding any lossy data (pictures, music, video, etc.) is another.
VoIP applications, for example INTENTIONALLY add random noise to the voice calls being transmitted to enhance user experience. See Comfort Noise. This is a situation where we WANT random errors to occur in the output.
More importantly, how do you ensure that only data is messed up? Flipping a bit of data might be acceptable. Flipping a bit of code probably isn't.
Presumably, the probabilistic CPU still functions on the basic principles of the "fetch-execute cycle". That is, it has a dedicated instruction register (IR) and a dedicated program counter (PC), and several other registers for actually performing the calculations.
By putting different electromagnetic noise standards on different registers, you can ensure that only certain registers suffer from errors.
Obviously, there's a lot of handwaving and missing details here, but hopefully it's a bit clearer how to ensure only data has inaccuracies, and instructions won't.
Bits are bits. There's no guarantee that a "low power" chip will only mess up the low-order bits of a number.
This whole thing is old and silly.
[...]
But I think that most of us are OK with accurate hardware.
If there exist some people for whom probabilistic computers are useful, then I wouldn't call the research "silly".
Seymour Cray is known for saying "Do you want fast or accurate?" because back then there was no IEEE 754 spec (which is not infinitely precise) for floating point numbers at the time and machines were pretty primitive then and his machine did Newtonian approximations of many numeric calculations that were accurate to a point, just like John Carmack did (in software) with Doom's inverse square root.
Perhaps this "probabilistic square root" algorithm could be implemented as a single instruction in the probabilistic CPU, thus speeding this up for everyone.
The moral of the story is that in 2009 and beyond its probably best to have hardware continue to be accurate.
It's probably best, or deterministically best? Sorry, that was a bit of a "mean jab" there, but perhaps it's enough to give you an intuition that there are applications where "probably" is good enough (depending on what the exact probabilities are).
Even more so: we intentionally gather entropy to improve the pseudo random numbers. With intentionally inaccurate CPU cores, we could scrap all that and gather entropy en-passant AND be much faster anyway.
There are many different types of Random Number Generators (RNGs). We might desire that the RNG be cryptographically secure for example, or we might desire that the RNG has a "nice spread" over all possible values for simulation/game purposes.
Plus, who's to say that the errors generated by these probabilistic CPUs are not deterministic? (i.e. given the same input, it always generates the same errors).
Random algorithms are used all the time. In RSA for example, random primes must be generated. This is done with an algorithm that probably gives the right answer, which is good enough. The chance that it would fail is so tiny as to not matter.
To get a bit pedantic...
An "algorithm" in "Turing-computable" (i.e. all algorithms you are running on your x86 processors) sense, cannot be random. These algorithms are always deterministic, but may use as input data which is random or pseudo-random (such as the current system time).
1: The algorithm you are referring to is "probabilistic", but still deterministic. It takes as input a number and a random seed, and it returns a boolean. "true" means the number provided is definitely prime, and "false" means that the number is nonprime with some (known) non-zero probability.
2: Further, the algorithm has the property that by repeatedly running that algorithm with a different random seed, you can combine the probabilities such as to reduce the probability that the number is prime arbitrarily as close to zero as you want (but it can never actually reach zero).
It's this last property which is important for the RSA program: being able to control the computation-time/probability tradeoff. Contrast that with the following algorithm which has the property described in [1], but not in [2]:
boolean isPrime(int number, random seed) { const knownPrimes = [2,3,5,7]; if (number in knownPrimes) { return true; } return false; }
Rerunning this algorithm with a different seed doesn't allow you to increase your confidence in the primeness of the given number.
It's not clear whether the proposed CPU has the analogous property of "2": Is there a way to control the computation-time/probability tradeoff? If not, the applications may be more limited than you think.
With regards to music, they're not talking about skips and pops, they're talking about extremely slight modulations in pitch or, in the case of video, a very slight difference in color. If these differences are random and small enough (say, 300 per second), then it averages out to the same thing and our minds can't tell the difference. Hell, if the differences are small enough you wouldn't really notice them anyway. If I could get 30x the battery life out of my laptop by accepting imperfections in the video it displays and in the audio it plays (and I know it wouldn't, but this is a hypothetical), then I'd gladly go for it.
Not to mention that the vast majority of people (I'd easily wager for 99% or higher) store their music in a lossy format such as mp3, so they are already experiencing small random errors.
I'd wager an even higher proportion of people (99.99%?) store their video in a lossy format. In fact, while I have no problem naming lossy video compression schemes (DivX/XviD, Mpeg-4, Ogg Theora, Indeo, Quicktime, etc.), I can't come up with a single lossless video codec besides "raw".
Cutting off at the cents place isn't arbitrary--it's done because the cent is the smallest unit of currency produced by the US.
But it might not be for long; see Microtransaction.
one prime assumption is that alien life would communicate on the EM spectrum someplace using technology similar enough to ours to be in a form that we would understand or recognize.
The assumption that they would send on the EM spectrum seems reasonable to me: Given the distances we're considering, low-latency messages is a very important concern, and our current theories indicate that nothing travels faster than light. So it'd make sense to use light to communicate.
The assumption that we'd recognize it also seems reasonable because Mathematics does seem to be universal in the sense that it does not seem to depend on any aspect of our development (e.g. does not depend on being a carbon-based lifeform, or having your genetic material be DNA based, etc.) There are branches of mathematical theory that allow us to measure the complexity (or "negentropy", i.e. "negative entropy") of a signal. Something with very high negentropy is almost certainly created by some intelligent source (perhaps a more accurate term than "intelligence source" is "optimizing force").
That they would use similar technology is a strawman, I think. We don't really need to assume that at all.
Yet dolphins are quite intelligent, and we have no idea what they are saying.
And yet, you seem to be able to recognize that the dolphins are, indeed, intelligent. That's all we're trying to do with SETI (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence): We're trying to recognize a signal sent from an "intelligent" source. We can worry about trying to understand it later, once we've actually found such a signal.
If we can't decipher communication in a biological form that's based on the same exact biology as ourselves, that is 99% identical at the cellular level, how can we justify our arrogance in believing that we'd know truly alien communication if we saw it?
We can actually already, decypher a lot of what animals from our planet are trying to communicate. I can tell when my dog is happy, sad, hungry, scared, sleepy, etc. I think most scientists would already be ecstatic if they could recognize when an alien was happy, sad, hungry, scared, etc. For one, it would show that these emotions seem to be universal.
Also, you seem to be conflating "recognizing that a message is being sent" with "understanding a message that was sent" again.
Obviously, if we did come across some communication on the EM spectrum that we were to show wasn't some mere physical process, we'd have proof of alien communication or related phenomena.
Obviously. =)
But there's no evidence at all that they would. In fact, it's rather unlikely that we will ourselves, in just a few years: take a look at spread spectrum transmission for a method that we already use today in many uses that would be virtually undetectable by SETI.
Frequency hopping was specifically invented to make it HARD to intercept the message. It's a military security practice. Just as we don't try to RSA-encrypt any messages we send out into space, we also don't do anything "fancy" that would make it harder to pick up the message like frequency hopping. Hopefully, any aliens that wish to communicate with us will realize that they can more easily achieve their goal if they make it easy to receive their message, and realize that frequency hoping does not make things easier.
Fermi's paradox is based on a large number of assumptions of scale that are, quite frankly pulled from Fermi's backside, and aren't even well supported by technological developments since its inception. They are the best assumptions available, but they demonstrate nothing other than a weak foundation for conjecture.
And if some of those assumptions are already demonstrated irrelevant with applicable technology HERE, TODAY, how can we give Fermi's paradox any more than the time of day?
I'm not a big fan of Fermi's paradox, but I think detecting alien signals, if they exist, isn't as insurmountable as you make it sound.
the quality will be laughable. Like I always say: cheap, quality, expandable: pick two.
If the two they picked were "cheap" and "quality", I would be satisfied. I don't care about "expandability" for a $10 laptop.
This is analgous to the way in QM the details are not predictcable till you look, and when you do the details of other things not simultaneously observed can change at a distance.
See http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/05/collapse-postul.html
Back when people didn't know about macroscopic decoherence aka many-worlds - before it occurred to anyone that the laws deduced with such precision for microscopic physics, might apply universally at all levels - what did people think was going on?
The initial reasoning seems to have gone something like:
to
to
Read literally, this implies that knowledge itself - or even conscious awareness - causes the collapse. Which was in fact the form of the theory put forth by Werner Heisenberg!
[...]
If collapse actually worked the way its adherents say it does, it would be:
I doubt that the first thing that you do when you get a computer is to create a Facebook page, or am I too old-fashion ?
Perhaps she already had a Facebook account from before she purchased this particular computer from Dell.
So I guess she was computer literate from the beginning, but I guess also that she is one of the people who never say no.
I'm not sure exactly what your mental model is of the correlation between using Facebook and various computer-related knowledge, so I can't comment on what parts of your model I disagree with. I'll just say that I bet the vast majority of Facebook users (say over 80%) do not know what an Operating System is.
Have you joined #ubuntu and #debian on irc.freenode.net? The former talks so much that my 24" screen can barely handle the message throughput.. kudos to those brave souls that give support in that channel. 50% of those questions are, why doesn't ubuntu work like windows.. :(
Maybe Ubuntu could include a bot which would recognize frequently asked questions and provide pre-written answers, thus saving the real live humans some time and effort in supporting newbie questions.
They could even have the bot have a spiffy avatar that sits in the bottom right corner of the screen, like a talking paper clip or something!
Having *just* installed Hardy Heron, I also note that upon first booting the machine and logging in, an icon shows up next to the "updates available" icon that looks like a little graphics card, and when you click on it, it points out that you have *not* installed the proprietary nvidia driver, but by golly, click here and we'll do it right now! Which I did. Which helped performance. So while it may not be done by default, it's something any user would notice immediately (any user of Ubuntu).
Every day, man is making bigger and better fool-proof things, and every day, nature is making bigger and better fools. So far, I think nature is winning.
Clearly the journalist what no tech expert, which obviously the Linux community has no patience for. So next time you're in getting your car fixed and you don't know what a lower control arm is, I hope they call you an idiot.
This was moderated "insightful"?
Maybe it's my Buddhist influence speaking, but personally, I think the world could learn more patience. The next time you're in getting your car fixed, and you don't know what a lower control arm is, I hope they try their best to be courteous and helpful, and try explaining what a lower control arm is to you (assuming this knowledge is even at all relevant to solving whatever problem your car is having).
She doesn't know how to access Internet with Ubuntu but she has a Facebook account ? Did I miss something ?
Perhaps she finally managed to get a Windows PC and thus was able to use her Verizon CD to get online?
That's also when the comments - many of them angry, rude, and hateful - started pouring in.
Some Ubuntu users accused 27 News of "unscrupulous reporting," hitting a "new low for local news," and writing an "atrocious article."
Many Ubuntu users also wrote very personal attacks about the young lady who was having trouble using the operating system. They called her "lazy," "a dumb girl," and "not worthy of a college degree."
The young woman also contacted 27 News to report she's being harassed on her Facebook account by Ubuntu users.
Way to go. I'm sure this is the optimal way of converting her and other Windows user onto Linux. Hooray for Freedom. </sarcasm>.
This is pretty awesome *for* linux. Because it is major egg on Verizon's face. [...] Hopefully she isn't going into a technical degree area with this little knowledge of computers at that age.
Honestly, I don't think Verizon is too concerned about the "negative publicity" that this article may have caused, and the possibility of losing the "compute-illiterate Linux users" demographics.
Sounds like somebody doesn't have their story straight. FUD should be consistent within an article if you want people to believe it.
You're a bit too paranoid if that's sufficient evidence for you to believe that the article is pro-Microsoft FUD. This type of situation is so common in real life, there's a term specifically crafted to refer to it. It's called "he-said-she-said."
From this, it does not necessarily follow that the article is lying.
It also does not follow that there was any malicious pro-Microsoft conspiracy from any of the involved parties:
The university says the you can submit documents using any software, but probably strongly implies that it must be submitted via *some* software, i.e. they don't accept hand written submissions that are snail-mailed in.
The woman hears that she needs to write papers using some software, and thus immediately translates that to mean she needs to write papers using Microsoft Word, because the two are equivalent to her.
The woman asks Dell to install Microsoft Windows, and uses as justification for why she wants Windows "I need Microsoft Word to write my papers".
I'd much more likely attribute the factually false statements the woman made to ignorance, than malice.
maybe we just can't expect everyone to finish college, some people are just not bright. serioulsy, do you want this person to be a doctor or manage your finances if she can't be bothered to click on the "network" icon in the top right corner of the screen? what kind of problem solving skills does she have.
IMHO, knowing enough about computers to set up a network (even with OS guidance) is not strongly correlated with medical or financial advisory skills.
For all I care, the doctor/financial advisor can be a luddite, using pen and paper for all his/her records, as long as they do the job well.
fun games are those which are easy to learn, but hard to master, with a long and smooth learning curve.
Best example for this is Chess. Easy to learn but takes many years to master.
Maybe not such a great example, 'cause I find, e.g. Gears of War and Guitar Hero to be more fun than chess.
I've seen 8 year olds riding Tokyo's subway system solo. The instant any of them show any signs of confusion or distress -- and that's very rare, since their parents teach them how to ride -- any number of genuinely helpful adults (plural) in the vicinity come to their rescue. This is all perfectly normal, and it's entirely within the physical world. Everyone is safe.
The Internet is not even physical. There's always a wire (or wireless connection) separating its participants. Simply combine the Internet with a parent or responsible adult and it's safer (psychologically) than even the Tokyo Metro. (And it's always physically safer.)
While I agree that the Internet is physically safer than the Tokyo Metro, it does not follow that the Internet is psychologically safer. It's easier to be an asshole (and thus abusive towards others) on the Internet thanks to anonymity and near-zero chance of repercussion, which you don't have in the physical world (whether that be in the Tokyo Metro or elsewhere).
lemonparty meatspin mr. hands
Hey, thanks! Those were new to me! Got any more?
This genre of content is generally referred to as "shocksite", so google for that term and you'll find tons more.
I went out to look for them. I am a 27 year old IT guy, mind you, and I had trouble finding anything BUT yet more references to how sick they were.
Hate to break this to you, but you suck at searching.
You'll get a 7x3 grid of images. On the first page, bottom row, second from the left, is an image of tubgirl (http://tbn3.google.com/images?q=tbn:OaMvNa_Q2NhgnM:http://img35.imageshack.us/img35/1743/tubskit5ev.jpg).
And this is with Google Moderate SafeSearch enabled.
Repeat similar steps for any of the other images you are curious about.
I was blasting through these questions, with no hesitation bullshit answers that I knew would please the interviewer until I hit this one. What does it say about my personality that it's only here that I start sweating bullets?