Slashdot Mirror


User: stoborrobots

stoborrobots's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
891
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 891

  1. Re:But reasonable disclosure is important on Google Photos Uploading Your Pics, Even If You Don't Want It To · · Score: 1

    Warnings are useless.

    Very important point.

    For a good explanation of why this is, Joel Spolsky's article back in 2000: "Designing for People Who Have Better Things To Do With Their Lives" summarised it down to "users don't read anything", and broke it down into three simple points:

    • * Advanced users skip over the instructions. They assume they know how to use things and don't have time to read complicated instructions
    • * Most novice users skip over the instructions. They don't like reading too much and hope that the defaults will be OK
    • * The remaining novice users who do, earnestly, try to read the instructions (some of whom are only reading them because it's a usability test and they feel obliged) are often confused by the sheer number of words and concepts. So even if they were pretty confident that they would be able to use the dialog when it first came up, the instructions actually confused them even more.
  2. Re:Wtf?! on Online At Last: Comet Lander Philae Wakes Up · · Score: 1

    What i don't get is how and why these people then tryto talk back to it.

    For the same reason that people talk to Eliza, Alice, and other such entities - because it makes us feel good.

    We intuitively associate the machines with humanness... Even when we know we shouldn't:

      * https://philosopherdeveloper.wordpress.com/2011/02/05/the-anthropomorphization-of-computers/
      * http://www.therefinedgeek.com.au/index.php/2010/09/22/dont-anthropomorphize-computers-they-hate-it-when-you-do-that/
      * http://www.dwheeler.com/blog/2013/08/06/

    Also: you get to feel like part of history if the social media flunky at the the other end of the feed decides to reply to your post.

  3. Also-ran? on Nokia Shifts To Selling Back-End Systems To Mobile Networks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Ericsson was a key provider of telecomunication equipment long before it was a mobile handset manufacturer - in the same way as Alcatel, Lucent and Nokia long provided back-end hardware. For all of them, handset production was a short-term dalliance in the late 90s and early 2000s, not the entire history of the company...

  4. Re:"This plugin is vulnerable" on Indicted Ex-FIFA Executive Cites Onion Article In Rant Slamming US · · Score: 2

    Go to https://www.youtube.com/html5 and click the "Request the html5 player" button.

  5. Re:poaching?! on Carnegie Mellon Struggles After Uber Poaches Top Robotics Researchers · · Score: 1

    Competitors only? Not, for example, in a joint venture?

    http://www.cmu.edu/cie/news/20...

    http://blog.uber.com/carnegie-...

  6. Re:Edward Tufte on Why PowerPoint Should Be Banned · · Score: 1

    Indeed - here's essentially the same article from 2003: http://archive.wired.com/wired...

  7. Re:I'm confused: aren't these common already? on World-First Remote Air Traffic Control System Lands In Sweden · · Score: 1

    This is having the person "actually looking at the airplanes in question" being remote as well.

  8. Re:sage on The Future Deconstruction of the K-12 Teacher · · Score: 1

    Derek Muller elaborates further in this video: "This will revolutionize education"

  9. Re:Dell, HP, Panasonic on We'll Be the Last PC Company Standing, Acer CEO Says · · Score: 1

    Then you're not really looking, or you're trolling.

    http://www.sagernotebook.com/Notebook-NP8652-S.html

  10. Re:Back to the future on Facebook's "Hello" Tells You Who's Calling Before You Pick Up · · Score: 1

    third party apps aren't allowed to steal information from you typically on iOS

    lolwut?

  11. Re:Simple on Ask Slashdot: What Features Would You Like In a Search Engine? · · Score: 1

    Reminds me of this old chestnut...

  12. Re:Too many pixels = slooooooow on LG Accidentally Leaks Apple iMac 8K Is Coming Later This Year · · Score: 1

    ... but 8K strikes me as two 4K displays "in one" so [just] two 4K controllers side-by-side...

    Check that: 8k is equivalent to FOUR 4k displays: two wide and two high...

  13. Re:Autocomplete on Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error · · Score: 1

    Sounds like you need a faster computer or faster internet connection...

    No, he needs software where the autocomplete lookup is asynchronous and keyboard input has interrupt priority. But not all software is built sanely....

  14. Re:the 8 ball was right! on Oops: World Leaders' Personal Data Mistakenly Released By Autofill Error · · Score: 2

    For sending, Ctrl+Enter is your friend.

    I think they mean "check" as in "verify".

    I'm guessing the guy typed "Michael", clicked on the name that came up, and hit send. He didn't notice that it autofilled the name "Michael Brown" from the Asian Football Cup organising committe rather than, say, "Michael Smith" the internal employee who was supposed to update the approved official visitor database.

  15. Re:Don't know if what you say is true ... on Photo First: Light Captured As Both Particle and Wave · · Score: 1

    I don't think the term is quite that bad, but the way we talk about it is. That said, my choice to use the term "puff" was specifically to avoid any pre-conceived notions about the duality.

    The term "wave-particle duality" was coined because we can imagine waves, and we can imagine particles, and when we realised that we couldn't force light and electrons to be one or the other, that they must be, in some sense "both".

    The term is not wave particle alternation, conversion, collapse, or any thing which implies that it is sometimes one and sometimes the other. However, the elementary examples we give people learning about QM might mislead people to believe that.

    The "duality" is expressed specifically to indicate that it has both aspects at all times.

  16. Re:not the first time on Photo First: Light Captured As Both Particle and Wave · · Score: 1

    Close - you're mixing up the wavefunction of a puff of light with the wave-like nature of a puff of light.

    The wavefunction gives you the probability distribution of any properties you want to measure.

    The wave-like nature is what gives it colour and allows diffraction.

    But the wave-like properties (wavelength, etc) are not the properties of it's position wavefunction.

    You make reference to the electron double-slit experiment. It's tempting to think that electrons are particles - except that they're not. The fact that they exhibit the same "particle-wave duality" indicates that they too are "puffs" of matter, not particles, not waves, but something with properties of both.

    There are no particles at quantum scale. Particles only exist at human scales. The struggle comes in accepting that the thing we are talking about is not analgous to any specific thing in our experience. It's convenient to talk about particles, and waves, because we can conceive of what they are. We imagine that particles are like incredibly small billiard balls, and waves are like ripples on a pond and that light is sometimes one and sometimes the other - because we can imagine these things. But puffs of light and puffs of matter don't behave like tiny billiard balls or tiny ripples - they behave like a combination of them. You can simultaneously measure both wave-like and particle-like behaviour.

  17. Re:not the first time on Photo First: Light Captured As Both Particle and Wave · · Score: 1

    Who's outlawing any words? I think we agree - I'm suggesting we need a new word, because the words we have (wave, particle) are perfectly good but don't describe the thing we want (nature of light)...

  18. Re:not the first time on Photo First: Light Captured As Both Particle and Wave · · Score: 5, Informative

    The wave-particle duality is not a quantum superposition like you're describing (which would break down under measurement), although the caricatured manner in which we teach it might lead you believe that. It's a little more simple than that.

    In our world, we are used to two kinds of things: particles, and waves. We are used to this distinction, and describe most things in one of these manners. Sound is a wave, a billiard ball is a particle, vibrations are waves, bricks are particles. If something is a particle, it has certain properties, like position, size, and shape. If it is a wave, it has certain other properties like wavelength, frequency, and amplitude. In addition, there are some common properties like velocity and direction.

    When it came to studying light (and many other quantum stuffs), we can't directly see what it's made of. But we can take measurements of each "puff" of light, and infer its properties that way. When we do this, we notice that puffs of light have some properties which are particle-like, and some which are wave-like. So the term "particle-wave duality" became popular to describe this new material that was behaving simultaneously like a particle and a wave. It doesn't make sense to ask which one it is - a "puff" of light is neither a particle, nor a wave, but a different kind of stuff which has some properties of each.

  19. Re: ignorant hypocrites on The Programmers Who Want To Get Rid of Software Estimates · · Score: 1

    writing the article is a DIRECT response to being asked to provide estimates for ACTUAL WORK ... writing the article was most certainly done in lieu of that actual work...

    .. assuming, of course, that the article wasn't written after the "actual work" was completed...

  20. Re: [1]=overhead? Not always on Nim Programming Language Gaining Traction · · Score: 1

    If you're storing the length, then "iterate over array and perform this operation" (for example, for a search or a "double every element" transformation) can use the known length to set up a for loop, rather than having to check "am I at the last element of the array" for every element... This could be a good reason to store the length even if you don't want the cost of bounds-checking.

  21. Re:[1]=overhead? Not always on Nim Programming Language Gaining Traction · · Score: 1

    (or what's the length for?)

    Bounds checking is one option, but it could also be used for iteration.

  22. Re:Nonsense on Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds · · Score: 1

    I agree with you on the idea and behaviour of the control classes, but have generally found it handy to have some guarantees of well-formedness in the data objects.

    Otherwise, every control object which uses the data object needs to verify every detail about the data object before it uses it - which leads to the duplication of validation code issue you were concerned about in the first place...

  23. Re:Nonsense on Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds · · Score: 1

    So if you are not doing your field validation at creation time, how do you enforce the "interface contract"?

    Something somewhere has to verify that the address is a valid address, and the port is a valid port (why would you accept a socket request for port 67890?) - why allow a non-conformant data object to exist?

    What domains have such wide-ranging field values that validated data is not a reasonable idea?

  24. Re:Nonsense on Your Java Code Is Mostly Fluff, New Research Finds · · Score: 1

    Data classes like this?

    class TCPSocketAddress
    {
    private long ipaddress;
    private int port;
     
    string getAddress()
    {
      return long2ip(ipaddress);
    }
     
    void setAddress(string addr)
    {
      if (addr.matches("/^\d{1,3}.\d{1,3}.\d{1,3}.\d{1,3)$/")) ipaddress = ip2long(addr);
      else throw InvalidIPAddressException;
    }
     
    int getPort()
    {
      return port;
    }
     
    void setPort(string addr)
    {
      if (newport > 0 && newport < 65536) port = newport;
      else throw InvalidTCPPortException;
    }
     
    }

  25. Re:System Bug? on Tracking System Bug Delays SpaceX's DSCOVR Launch · · Score: 1

    On the one hand I was confused how systemD was involved in the launch.

    Then you haven't been paying attention - all the systemd supporters are adamant that it is descended from launchd!