In other words only if they are next door right this minute and not past the noisy stage we're starting to get out of.
If you're assesment of our current detection abilities isn't shy at least an order of magnitude seti would have to be pretty lucky indeed (lottery levels at least) to pick up anything.
The thing about space is it's not big, but mindshatteringly hugely enormously big.*
Your hypothesis implies that complexity is a function of intelligence. This is not so.
Also order/dissorder(entropy), you keep using that word I don't think it means what you think it means.
Some say the universe is to awesome not to be created, I say it's to awsome to be created.
Another way of saying it is that your arguing infinities, which of course is like trying to define x/0.
I can't understand it therefore god is not good logic.
Another to notice is that we are getting more and more effecient with our communications meaning less wasted energy broadcast into space.
Most radio transmissions meant for surface to surface to surface communications go out in a donut pattern that broadcasts mostly along the ground, this way most of the eneregy goes out to recievers rather than up into space and you need less total wattage to reach a given distance.
Also a lot of communication now goes out on fiber optics, not radio waves.
We also use techniques like spread spectrum and others that cause many transmissions to look like noise if you don't know the settings to recieve them.
So even if other civilisations develope the kinds of communications we did you still only have a small exapanding sphere of easily detected radio wave, perhaps a shell no more than 100 light years thick. This is a pretty thing slice of time and space as things go.
When you take into account that this shell of emmisions is more easilly detected by a more advanced civilization than the one emiting them it becomes less likely for us to get an 'answer' as we have nothing much to offer a more advanced civilization other than mere contact which may have no value at all to them.
Malformed data representation may not be a security breach per se, but if your security relies on correct data it can lead to one. Though one might argue it's stupid thing to do in this case you must remember people frequently do stupid things.
There is also the potential safty or economic issues that misrepresented data can cause.
While the various web-script languages may not be markup themselves they are often used to generate them or are used integraly with them, faulty rendering behaviour or faulty use of markup in conjunction with them can create issues. Couple this with the fact that most web designers simply don't treat them as destinct classes, but rather as part of the whole. Also you have the fact that markup lanuages are gaining more and more functionality and rapidly approaching the sophistication of a programming language the language is blurring.
As far as gracefull degradation, yes dropping the unknown markup elements is part of html's original design and makes some sense. However html is outgrowing that to some extent and the silent part of the drop no longer makes sense in all cases. But IE just doesn't 'skip' the parts it fails to understand, it guesses without warning the user. And it's more than that it's malformed html in some cases where IE's not makeing a guesse at newer elements, but actively supporting WRONG elements used in a manner not supported by the standard nor even used by logical extension of standard but simply done incorrectly.
For most cases this issue is largely one keeping the web useable. The big problem is IE doesn't tell you when a site's broken and it actively encourages broken sites by not always rendering correct markup correctly. If IE gave some sort of warning when a site was malformed, and allowed you to shut off it's guesswork for some sites (in a small percentage NO data is preferable to BAD data) and didn't misshandle good data it wouldn't be an issue.
All this is ingoring the security issues with using IE, though those have improved quite a bit with sp2. I've cleaned far fewer computer of malware infestions that had sp2 installed.
IE is simply not a good thing to use for anything other internal webpages where malformed data is acceptable.
Yeah I thought of a few myself in responses later.
Actualy it's o.k. if a browser makes a best guess, WHEN TOLD TO DO SO, not silently like ie does. And never for a 'secure' page as errors in pages that take credit card data or other important info should have zero tolerance.
The problem is showing that man causes global warming, that we understand how to effect it even.
The earth is a complex set of systems, mostly poorly understood.
The contention that man causes global warming/climate change is currently just a popular opinion with some interesting correlations, but no proven causations that I'm aware of.
Science requires the ability to test theories in a way that they can show the theory false by failing to do what theory predicts. Currently they mostly have models of thier theories, which oddly enough seem to produce the results thier theories indicate.
I do agree reducing polution is general a good thing. I doubt anyone enjoys smog or toxic streams. Pollution has proven negative local effect. But most global warming hypothesis assume that the net effect of industrial processes is to raise global temperature averages, but we currently have no way adequately test the hypothesis.
Now if I'm wrong and someone can show how scientist have been able to do controlled experiments on the earth as a whole and demonstrate that each time they do it where mankind puts out high co2 temps go up but not each time they do it without a co2 increase temps are stable I'll be very interested in reading about it.
Sofar we've seen temperature variation comparable with pre-industrialized variations as best we can determine from various sources (anlysis of ancient trees, antartic ice, etc.) and nothing more.
Also look at how all the aerosols and a.c. units put a hole in the ozone denfinately mans fault and if we didn't act fast it would soon cover most of the northern hemisphere. Oh wait that's right, it's been there for at least a far back as we can find evidence for it, and grows and shrinks on it's on. The scientific community was pretty shure of itself on that one as well, not to mention a few other things before then that would be laughed at today.
Frankly I want hard science, not a populist agreement among scientist.
IIRC that only worked on older versions of the drivers, and then was only tested on the older AIWS up to about the 8500 with the older capture chipset.
I'll check again to see if they've made progress on a recend driver set and current chipsets, the newest drivers they had working last time I looked wouldn't work with some games I play Morrowind for one. Also Freedom Force (which also uses some of the same engine components). A couple others I can't recall off the top of my head.
I was thinking of Andromeda and Bablyon 5, the first was just over $200 a season and the second was around 150 at Borders. Most of the tv shows they had there were over $5 an episode.
Definately an amusingly appropriate mod. Perhaps a rare case where redundant should net the moderator and poster positive karma (in a tiny amount however)
I don't have any problems with slashdot's rendering with firefox 1.0 on xp-pro, but I turn off most of slashdot's 'eye-candy'
I do have trouble with some sites if I don't accept thier default font size. Stupid web designers design a site with an exact layout like it was page in a magazine. As far as I'm concerned simply increasing the font size to something readable shouldn't create huge text overlaps and waste 1/3 of screen real estate to blank zones on one or both sides.
One of the original points to html is to be viewable on a wide variety of display setups and to leave the web browswer the ability to figure text sizes and wrapping to fit the screen. For tables and such I can see being able to provide a more strict layout, but not that strict.
FWIW I've got a 19" monitor set to 1024x768 about 3 feet from my eyes. And my vision isn't THAT bad.
As long as your not relying on the data provided in the html document.
And unfortunately the lines between code and simple markup are getting very blurry, especially with things like Java, Java script, flash and such becoming more and more integral to site for base functionality.
I wouldn't mind so much if a browser was willing to try and guesse at broken code, IF it would warn me the page is broken and thus I MAY not be see-ing the data correctly, and would allow me to dissable the guessework on some sites and take other measures related to known broken pages (like refusing to use any sort of scripting or load off server items). But that is NOT what IE does, it quitely throws out a guesse that may be close enough to not be noticed and opens the end user all sorts of mischief without any warning.
Yep, I don't have mod-points today so please accept applause. Seems most have modded you funny, and while it makes sense in the general for no karma to accrue to funny, this one deserves it IMHO.
How many people write webpages entirely by hand as begginners?
Sorry your argument assumes the very rare case to be the norm.
MOST people who've put up web pages did not do thier first one by hand, except those that are the sort who LIKE to figure these things out and dig in (geeks and proto-geeks), and perhaps some of those taking classes or otherwise desiring to become web-designers. In eigther case if they can be stoped by getting it wrong the first time then they aren't the type to do much of it anyway.
I seriously doubt the web would be smaller by more than your.1%, let alone reduced to that size.
He didn't say all broken webpages should simply fail in a web browser, just that in SOME cases this can be preferable. Such as when improperly served data could screw things up worse than NO data.
Suppose you were watching stock prices to decide what to buy and sell and the table showing prices and changes was in a malformed table and your browser tried to fix it and as a result you saw the wrong data in the wrong place and lost money because of a faulty decision based on that data? It'd be alot beter to get an error from the browser than bad data.
Or suppose your hospital has an internal only system that uses dynamic web pages for doctors to look up your medical history, do you really want a malformed htm giving your doctor the wrong data in the wrong place and take out a kidney instead of your appendix, or would you rather have him see an error message and dig out your paper files and yell at the it people?
Hasn't the continual extension of copyright in the us prevented any movies (at least talkies) from going public domain through expiration? I seem to remember it being pointed out that copy-right always seems to get extended just before steamboat willie (very early B&W, first 'talkie' with Micky Mouse) goes into the public domain.
More likely these movies are so cheap because most wouldn't even take them for free.
Doesn't sound silly to me. I can't think of specific examples for web pages (except maybe an instance where broken code could cause your private data to NOT be secure in transmission).
But there are places where you'd rather have have an erroneous bad reading shut down something that's hazardous rather than continue. Say you a nuclear reactor with four different sensors to tell if a specific part in a safty system is working. The fault tolerent method would keep it running with just one sensor saying the system is bad as it's likely a bad sensor. But do you really want it to keep going long if thier is ANY chance of something really bad going on, even if it would require three of four sensors to get stuck reading good?
Not all television capture cards will work. ATI's products currently look for macrovision (at least thier vhs version) and scramble the pic when it detects it (looks like scrambled premium cable channels).
Rather anoys me as I bought my All-In-Wonder in part to watch some of my vhs tapes on my computer while doing other things and found out a bit more than half can't be watched. The only consistant pattern to watchable movies vs not I could find was stuff with Bruce Willis in it was usually watchable (only 1 out of 6 or 7 was not displayed properly).
So definately check into it if you're buying a capture card.
And I'd probably pay about $30-$50 for a full season of some shows, mostly ones now off the air. But last time I went to do just that (about 3-5 months ago IIRC) the cost PER episode was more than the cost of a full length movie at full theatre prices, something like $15. For both series I was thinking of buying. They were chargeing $45 per dvd with usually 3 episodes per disc.
I WON'T pay that much, and not because I can download them eigther, I can't really, not at 26.4-28.8 on dialup.
I don't mind paying what I paid for the LOTR trillogy extended editions, but over $200 a season for an ok, not great just ok, tv series.
But games are one of the two main things joe does with his computer, the other is the internet.
I deal with a fair number of joes on thier computers, most do both, some only do one or the other, only a few fail to be in one or the other or both categories for the major use of thier computers.
Games are a multi-billion dollar a year industry, on par with movie releases for income.
Where you got the strange notion that games are a 'niche' market on the desktop is beyond me.
Happens to me all the time. Sometimes I get the failure the first time, but usually by the third try it's working fine even though I've done nothing to fix it (yet), or anything the person who CAN'T get it to work hasn't tried.
Most common scenario is I ask to see what (s)he's doing that causes the error, they do it, it errors, I do the exact same thing and NO problem.
I just assume the computer knows I can and will take it apart piece by piece and MAKE it work somehow and it gives up trying to be lazy (well not really, but humanizing it is so much more fun than being frustrated over intermittent errors).
Actually it's more a UK thing. google for Douglass Adams and "The Hitchiker's Guid to The Galaxy".
Or you could wait for the movie, but I recomend reading the entire Trillogy (all 5? of them) in case they screw it up in translation as hollywood often does.
It's a really good series of SF-comedy books.
As you said correlation is not causation. It's even more likely that the two share a common causality.
I have no clue what that could be, but both being influenced by the same thing seems more likely.
I was under the impression the Rambus people were just an IP company, they don't make anything at all and derive thier income from licenses on patents they hold and litigation where they believe (or at least want believed) thier patents have been infringed.
I think you just described my main method for doing math, reduce to simpler problems and solve. Of course what may be simpler for me isn't for others, but most people don't even think to do it that way.
Take counting more than a few coins of some denomination. I count how many coins then convert to dollars and cents. Everyone else I've ever seen count coins tries to count in terms of the coins value tracking exact amount as they go. If I get interupted in the middle all I have to remember is ONE simple number (ie 32 or 16) whereas anyone else has to try and remember a dollar and cents amount (ie $1.60 or $.80 if it's nickles). Plust you know how fast you count the number of a coin type if your only worried about the value of one coin AFTER you know how many you got. I can count about 3 times faster and be more often right with my total. And that's just coins.
Some people think I'm some sort of low level math wiz (I don't do instant answers to square roots thank you!). I try explaining it to them but thier eyes just glaze over and they go back to 1,2,3....20 ONE dollar 1,2,3...20 TWO dollar.
I'm fairly good at the troubleshooting and problem solving in the short term just so so for long term so I usually break down a problem into the short term components. Saddly all to often 'inovator' == 'troublemaker' or 'boatrocker'.
Nope, it's called a defficit dissorder because it was named before it was understood, by a society that treats any mental difference as a 'dissorder'.
When I'm focused I'm MORE focused than most people can easily understand, but it must reach a threshold. This is very common with add.
It's really a different sort of survival mechanism vs. 'normal'.
A 'normal' person is more suited to long term action with removed (temporally) feedback.
An add person is actualy geared more to the here and now and can respond to changes in enviroment more readily.
The reason add people have troubles is because our culture is more geared towards start now finish much later.
You'll find add people thrive much better in jobs such as police or fireman or even military.
An add person can track and manage many more ongoing events than a non-add person typically.
So if you have add (barring medication) you should look for jobs where things change alot or require constant adaptation.
On of the easiest analogies I've read is the hunter vs. farmer analogie. If your a farmer you need to do something in the spring, piddle with it hours on end for months and then you get results, this is most of our current society.
Now if your a hunter you need to sit patiently for a while without getting bored then be able to suddenly act and react and reason as you do so for results you eat that night.
Each has it's place, but the add personality is at a dissadvantage in modern times because most jobs and such are geared more for the farmer. In the past when hunting and simular activities were more common the add mind was of more value.
When add/adhd was first being identified it was mostly becuase those with it were different and at odds with a mostly 'farmer' type society.
And just like many differences in mindset/outlook add people were assumed to have something 'wrong' with them because they were different. Homosexuality was once considered a mental dissorder as well.
Do some studying beyond the common missconceptions (no doubt re-inforced by the constant difficulties our current society creates for those with add) and you'll find a whole host of ways add can be usefull.
That said we DO live in a 'farmer' society, so the medication that exists has it's uses and I'm not against it, just not in favor of 24/7 use of it in most cases. Use it where it helps, skip it where it doesn't, especially in those cases where add is pure advantage. Give me an emergency in situation where I'm on familiar turf and I'll be solving the problems faster than most people can identify them, let alone form a commitie to discuss possible a study to determine if a solution should be investigated on a tentative basis or not (That's how SLOW others seem to be going in those situations).
Slashdot Mirror
In other words only if they are next door right this minute and not past the noisy stage we're starting to get out of.
If you're assesment of our current detection abilities isn't shy at least an order of magnitude seti would have to be pretty lucky indeed (lottery levels at least) to pick up anything.
The thing about space is it's not big, but mindshatteringly hugely enormously big.*
Mycroft
*my appologies to Mr Adams may he rest in peace.
Your hypothesis implies that complexity is a function of intelligence. This is not so.
Also order/dissorder(entropy), you keep using that word I don't think it means what you think it means.
Some say the universe is to awesome not to be created, I say it's to awsome to be created.
Another way of saying it is that your arguing infinities, which of course is like trying to define x/0.
I can't understand it therefore god is not good logic.
Mycroft
Another to notice is that we are getting more and more effecient with our communications meaning less wasted energy broadcast into space.
Most radio transmissions meant for surface to surface to surface communications go out in a donut pattern that broadcasts mostly along the ground, this way most of the eneregy goes out to recievers rather than up into space and you need less total wattage to reach a given distance.
Also a lot of communication now goes out on fiber optics, not radio waves.
We also use techniques like spread spectrum and others that cause many transmissions to look like noise if you don't know the settings to recieve them.
So even if other civilisations develope the kinds of communications we did you still only have a small exapanding sphere of easily detected radio wave, perhaps a shell no more than 100 light years thick. This is a pretty thing slice of time and space as things go.
When you take into account that this shell of emmisions is more easilly detected by a more advanced civilization than the one emiting them it becomes less likely for us to get an 'answer' as we have nothing much to offer a more advanced civilization other than mere contact which may have no value at all to them.
Mycroft
Malformed data representation may not be a security breach per se, but if your security relies on correct data it can lead to one. Though one might argue it's stupid thing to do in this case you must remember people frequently do stupid things.
There is also the potential safty or economic issues that misrepresented data can cause.
While the various web-script languages may not be markup themselves they are often used to generate them or are used integraly with them, faulty rendering behaviour or faulty use of markup in conjunction with them can create issues. Couple this with the fact that most web designers simply don't treat them as destinct classes, but rather as part of the whole. Also you have the fact that markup lanuages are gaining more and more functionality and rapidly approaching the sophistication of a programming language the language is blurring.
As far as gracefull degradation, yes dropping the unknown markup elements is part of html's original design and makes some sense. However html is outgrowing that to some extent and the silent part of the drop no longer makes sense in all cases. But IE just doesn't 'skip' the parts it fails to understand, it guesses without warning the user. And it's more than that it's malformed html in some cases where IE's not makeing a guesse at newer elements, but actively supporting WRONG elements used in a manner not supported by the standard nor even used by logical extension of standard but simply done incorrectly.
For most cases this issue is largely one keeping the web useable. The big problem is IE doesn't tell you when a site's broken and it actively encourages broken sites by not always rendering correct markup correctly. If IE gave some sort of warning when a site was malformed, and allowed you to shut off it's guesswork for some sites (in a small percentage NO data is preferable to BAD data) and didn't misshandle good data it wouldn't be an issue.
All this is ingoring the security issues with using IE, though those have improved quite a bit with sp2. I've cleaned far fewer computer of malware infestions that had sp2 installed.
IE is simply not a good thing to use for anything other internal webpages where malformed data is acceptable.
Mycroft
Yeah I thought of a few myself in responses later.
Actualy it's o.k. if a browser makes a best guess, WHEN TOLD TO DO SO, not silently like ie does. And never for a 'secure' page as errors in pages that take credit card data or other important info should have zero tolerance.
Mycroft
The problem is showing that man causes global warming, that we understand how to effect it even.
The earth is a complex set of systems, mostly poorly understood.
The contention that man causes global warming/climate change is currently just a popular opinion with some interesting correlations, but no proven causations that I'm aware of.
Science requires the ability to test theories in a way that they can show the theory false by failing to do what theory predicts. Currently they mostly have models of thier theories, which oddly enough seem to produce the results thier theories indicate.
I do agree reducing polution is general a good thing. I doubt anyone enjoys smog or toxic streams. Pollution has proven negative local effect. But most global warming hypothesis assume that the net effect of industrial processes is to raise global temperature averages, but we currently have no way adequately test the hypothesis.
Now if I'm wrong and someone can show how scientist have been able to do controlled experiments on the earth as a whole and demonstrate that each time they do it where mankind puts out high co2 temps go up but not each time they do it without a co2 increase temps are stable I'll be very interested in reading about it.
Sofar we've seen temperature variation comparable with pre-industrialized variations as best we can determine from various sources (anlysis of ancient trees, antartic ice, etc.) and nothing more.
Also look at how all the aerosols and a.c. units put a hole in the ozone denfinately mans fault and if we didn't act fast it would soon cover most of the northern hemisphere. Oh wait that's right, it's been there for at least a far back as we can find evidence for it, and grows and shrinks on it's on. The scientific community was pretty shure of itself on that one as well, not to mention a few other things before then that would be laughed at today.
Frankly I want hard science, not a populist agreement among scientist.
Mycroft
IIRC that only worked on older versions of the drivers, and then was only tested on the older AIWS up to about the 8500 with the older capture chipset.
I'll check again to see if they've made progress on a recend driver set and current chipsets, the newest drivers they had working last time I looked wouldn't work with some games I play Morrowind for one. Also Freedom Force (which also uses some of the same engine components). A couple others I can't recall off the top of my head.
Mycroft
I was thinking of Andromeda and Bablyon 5, the first was just over $200 a season and the second was around 150 at Borders. Most of the tv shows they had there were over $5 an episode.
Mycroft
Definately an amusingly appropriate mod. Perhaps a rare case where redundant should net the moderator and poster positive karma (in a tiny amount however)
Mycroft
I don't have any problems with slashdot's rendering with firefox 1.0 on xp-pro, but I turn off most of slashdot's 'eye-candy'
I do have trouble with some sites if I don't accept thier default font size. Stupid web designers design a site with an exact layout like it was page in a magazine. As far as I'm concerned simply increasing the font size to something readable shouldn't create huge text overlaps and waste 1/3 of screen real estate to blank zones on one or both sides.
One of the original points to html is to be viewable on a wide variety of display setups and to leave the web browswer the ability to figure text sizes and wrapping to fit the screen. For tables and such I can see being able to provide a more strict layout, but not that strict.
FWIW I've got a 19" monitor set to 1024x768 about 3 feet from my eyes. And my vision isn't THAT bad.
Mycroft
As long as your not relying on the data provided in the html document.
And unfortunately the lines between code and simple markup are getting very blurry, especially with things like Java, Java script, flash and such becoming more and more integral to site for base functionality.
I wouldn't mind so much if a browser was willing to try and guesse at broken code, IF it would warn me the page is broken and thus I MAY not be see-ing the data correctly, and would allow me to dissable the guessework on some sites and take other measures related to known broken pages (like refusing to use any sort of scripting or load off server items). But that is NOT what IE does, it quitely throws out a guesse that may be close enough to not be noticed and opens the end user all sorts of mischief without any warning.
Mycroft
Yep, I don't have mod-points today so please accept applause. Seems most have modded you funny, and while it makes sense in the general for no karma to accrue to funny, this one deserves it IMHO.
How many people write webpages entirely by hand as begginners? .1%, let alone reduced to that size.
Sorry your argument assumes the very rare case to be the norm.
MOST people who've put up web pages did not do thier first one by hand, except those that are the sort who LIKE to figure these things out and dig in (geeks and proto-geeks), and perhaps some of those taking classes or otherwise desiring to become web-designers. In eigther case if they can be stoped by getting it wrong the first time then they aren't the type to do much of it anyway.
I seriously doubt the web would be smaller by more than your
Mycroft
He didn't say all broken webpages should simply fail in a web browser, just that in SOME cases this can be preferable. Such as when improperly served data could screw things up worse than NO data.
Suppose you were watching stock prices to decide what to buy and sell and the table showing prices and changes was in a malformed table and your browser tried to fix it and as a result you saw the wrong data in the wrong place and lost money because of a faulty decision based on that data? It'd be alot beter to get an error from the browser than bad data.
Or suppose your hospital has an internal only system that uses dynamic web pages for doctors to look up your medical history, do you really want a malformed htm giving your doctor the wrong data in the wrong place and take out a kidney instead of your appendix, or would you rather have him see an error message and dig out your paper files and yell at the it people?
Mycroft
Hasn't the continual extension of copyright in the us prevented any movies (at least talkies) from going public domain through expiration? I seem to remember it being pointed out that copy-right always seems to get extended just before steamboat willie (very early B&W, first 'talkie' with Micky Mouse) goes into the public domain.
More likely these movies are so cheap because most wouldn't even take them for free.
Mycroft
Doesn't sound silly to me. I can't think of specific examples for web pages (except maybe an instance where broken code could cause your private data to NOT be secure in transmission).
But there are places where you'd rather have have an erroneous bad reading shut down something that's hazardous rather than continue. Say you a nuclear reactor with four different sensors to tell if a specific part in a safty system is working. The fault tolerent method would keep it running with just one sensor saying the system is bad as it's likely a bad sensor. But do you really want it to keep going long if thier is ANY chance of something really bad going on, even if it would require three of four sensors to get stuck reading good?
Mycroft
Not all television capture cards will work. ATI's products currently look for macrovision (at least thier vhs version) and scramble the pic when it detects it (looks like scrambled premium cable channels).
Rather anoys me as I bought my All-In-Wonder in part to watch some of my vhs tapes on my computer while doing other things and found out a bit more than half can't be watched. The only consistant pattern to watchable movies vs not I could find was stuff with Bruce Willis in it was usually watchable (only 1 out of 6 or 7 was not displayed properly).
So definately check into it if you're buying a capture card.
Mycroft
And I'd probably pay about $30-$50 for a full season of some shows, mostly ones now off the air. But last time I went to do just that (about 3-5 months ago IIRC) the cost PER episode was more than the cost of a full length movie at full theatre prices, something like $15. For both series I was thinking of buying. They were chargeing $45 per dvd with usually 3 episodes per disc.
I WON'T pay that much, and not because I can download them eigther, I can't really, not at 26.4-28.8 on dialup.
I don't mind paying what I paid for the LOTR trillogy extended editions, but over $200 a season for an ok, not great just ok, tv series.
Mycroft
But games are one of the two main things joe does with his computer, the other is the internet.
I deal with a fair number of joes on thier computers, most do both, some only do one or the other, only a few fail to be in one or the other or both categories for the major use of thier computers.
Games are a multi-billion dollar a year industry, on par with movie releases for income.
Where you got the strange notion that games are a 'niche' market on the desktop is beyond me.
Mycroft
Happens to me all the time. Sometimes I get the failure the first time, but usually by the third try it's working fine even though I've done nothing to fix it (yet), or anything the person who CAN'T get it to work hasn't tried.
Most common scenario is I ask to see what (s)he's doing that causes the error, they do it, it errors, I do the exact same thing and NO problem.
I just assume the computer knows I can and will take it apart piece by piece and MAKE it work somehow and it gives up trying to be lazy (well not really, but humanizing it is so much more fun than being frustrated over intermittent errors).
Mycroft
Actually it's more a UK thing. google for Douglass Adams and "The Hitchiker's Guid to The Galaxy".
Or you could wait for the movie, but I recomend reading the entire Trillogy (all 5? of them) in case they screw it up in translation as hollywood often does.
It's a really good series of SF-comedy books.
Mycroft
As you said correlation is not causation. It's even more likely that the two share a common causality.
I have no clue what that could be, but both being influenced by the same thing seems more likely.
Mycroft
I was under the impression the Rambus people were just an IP company, they don't make anything at all and derive thier income from licenses on patents they hold and litigation where they believe (or at least want believed) thier patents have been infringed.
Mycroft
I think you just described my main method for doing math, reduce to simpler problems and solve. Of course what may be simpler for me isn't for others, but most people don't even think to do it that way.
Take counting more than a few coins of some denomination. I count how many coins then convert to dollars and cents. Everyone else I've ever seen count coins tries to count in terms of the coins value tracking exact amount as they go. If I get interupted in the middle all I have to remember is ONE simple number (ie 32 or 16) whereas anyone else has to try and remember a dollar and cents amount (ie $1.60 or $.80 if it's nickles). Plust you know how fast you count the number of a coin type if your only worried about the value of one coin AFTER you know how many you got. I can count about 3 times faster and be more often right with my total. And that's just coins.
Some people think I'm some sort of low level math wiz (I don't do instant answers to square roots thank you!). I try explaining it to them but thier eyes just glaze over and they go back to 1,2,3....20 ONE dollar 1,2,3...20 TWO dollar.
I'm fairly good at the troubleshooting and problem solving in the short term just so so for long term so I usually break down a problem into the short term components. Saddly all to often 'inovator' == 'troublemaker' or 'boatrocker'.
Mycroft
Nope, it's called a defficit dissorder because it was named before it was understood, by a society that treats any mental difference as a 'dissorder'.
When I'm focused I'm MORE focused than most people can easily understand, but it must reach a threshold. This is very common with add.
It's really a different sort of survival mechanism vs. 'normal'.
A 'normal' person is more suited to long term action with removed (temporally) feedback.
An add person is actualy geared more to the here and now and can respond to changes in enviroment more readily.
The reason add people have troubles is because our culture is more geared towards start now finish much later.
You'll find add people thrive much better in jobs such as police or fireman or even military.
An add person can track and manage many more ongoing events than a non-add person typically.
So if you have add (barring medication) you should look for jobs where things change alot or require constant adaptation.
On of the easiest analogies I've read is the hunter vs. farmer analogie. If your a farmer you need to do something in the spring, piddle with it hours on end for months and then you get results, this is most of our current society.
Now if your a hunter you need to sit patiently for a while without getting bored then be able to suddenly act and react and reason as you do so for results you eat that night.
Each has it's place, but the add personality is at a dissadvantage in modern times because most jobs and such are geared more for the farmer. In the past when hunting and simular activities were more common the add mind was of more value.
When add/adhd was first being identified it was mostly becuase those with it were different and at odds with a mostly 'farmer' type society.
And just like many differences in mindset/outlook add people were assumed to have something 'wrong' with them because they were different. Homosexuality was once considered a mental dissorder as well.
Do some studying beyond the common missconceptions (no doubt re-inforced by the constant difficulties our current society creates for those with add) and you'll find a whole host of ways add can be usefull.
That said we DO live in a 'farmer' society, so the medication that exists has it's uses and I'm not against it, just not in favor of 24/7 use of it in most cases. Use it where it helps, skip it where it doesn't, especially in those cases where add is pure advantage. Give me an emergency in situation where I'm on familiar turf and I'll be solving the problems faster than most people can identify them, let alone form a commitie to discuss possible a study to determine if a solution should be investigated on a tentative basis or not (That's how SLOW others seem to be going in those situations).
Mycroft