Many of us here are the people described in the article, and we hold "being smart" as the highest possible attribute. We worship "smart" here. Ironically, of course, since one can't claim any more honor from being born smart than from being born handsome or good at sports, traits that are scorned here.
Well, that's the focus of the article, isn't it? I totally agree with you, by the way - there's nothing to be proud of in relying on abliity alone to outperform the less talented if you're still underachieving.
I was certainly one of the ones that got the 'wow, that kid's smart' a lot. Probably more in school than from my parents, who emphasized work over talent. And I was an underachiever (relatively) until I realized how shameful it was that I was getting grades without any effort that my friends had to work their asses off for. And some of them resented it. I came to realize that a great deal of unused talent isn't something to be proud of; it's something to be ashamed of, if anything.
I've got kids now, and they're young, but they seem pretty sharp. And while I'll never tell them that they're dumb, praise comes through recognition of hard work - not talent.
Consistently telling a kid that (s)he is stupid will cause the kid to believe he is stupid. Wow! such insight!
Wrong-o. Consistently telling a kid that successes are due to being smart will cause them to believe the opposite as well - namely, that failures are due to *not* being smart. On the other hand, telling a kid that successes are due to hard work will lead them to believe that failure can be turned around through diligence.
Also, getting sloshed while on your cell phone will better allow you to divulge your contents to anyone unlucky enough to be in your address book.
Yeah, that's fun. I have a buddy who tends to call his ex-girlfriend whenever he gets tanked. It got to the point where I had to take his cellphone from him before we hit the bars.
Assuming the original author wrote the entire thing from scratch, true. But if he used any GNU material (or other GPL licensed libraries) himself, then you're right back where you started.
It's even worse than you'd imagined. On the top left is a video of some idiot babbling unintelligibly about some device no one uses; on the top right is some live chat thing with yet more idiots babbling about each other's blogs and periodically spamming about OEM software. On the bottom left is some contemptible list of blogs, each worse than the last. The bottom right is my favorite part of the site; it shows a blank white rectangle.
Sheevus. Glad I got the Javascript nastygram then.
That device (puck-mouse) should be listed as a torture device. It hurts your hands, it is counter-inuitive, it clicks sometimes for no reason, and it is the ULTIMATE nightmare in function follows for
Almost. Steve Job's wet dream is a 0-button mouse that you don't actually touch. It knows what you need to do better than you do.
Which is why, in all likelihood, this thing has no chance of surviving judicial scrutiny. But some congressman somewhere in Jersey can claim he's tough on sex offenders come the next election.
O.K. if I encode the opening chords of Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" into a barcode and have it tatooed on my schlong, then sleep around, and then the RIAA comes after me, do I have a leg to stand on?
Also, nanotechnology is a buzzword. It is not a single material, and as such there really aren't any properties that are consistent among all the many things that are considered nanotechnology. With these new materials as with *any* material, rigorous testing is the key to safety. Period. That includes determining levels of acute as well as chronic toxicity, and delivery mechanisms of the material to key organ systems within the body.
What we have here is failure to communicate. There is always fear of the unknown and exotic, and that's now nanotech. 50 years ago it was anything with the word 'nuclear' in it. Now it's nanotech, genetic engineering, etc.
How about this for fearmongering - tell a reporter that scientists are developing technologies for manipulating materials that are barely a single nanometer long. Now, tell them that these materials are present in every product we buy. Crazy, right? It's called chemistry - the original nanoscience. The stuff that's now considered 'nanotech' is less 'nano' than technology we've developed for a long time. Nanotech is just an extension of fields of study that currently exist and have existed for centuries. This is no big deal.
So the assumption that I would select yes, because I am dumb and always click yes, is retarded. I only click yes when I trust the source (I assume a reputable business to be trustworthy).
That's why the phrasing of the question is important, which the author takes as implicit but I think you're glossing over. The question posed isn't asked to give the customer choice, nor does it reflect at a literal level what the company is intending to do. It's designed to distinguish morons from non-morons, and as such you have to have a question that is well-designed for that specific purpose. That's why the question they'd use is far more similar to the first one you mention than the second (though it needs to be more vague); only morons would say 'yes' to the first, while some smart people would say 'yes' to the second.
This is basically a Turing test for humans. The fact that you're overthinking it proves that you pass.;)
This has been debunked many times, you can use a clean install of FF, no extensions, and after a week it's crapped up. I could also contend that's a failure of the extension system, that they can 'leak' or otherwise lose memory.
If it's the pages I'm viewing, FF should handle that. Anything else is a poor excuse.
The developers who have contempt for users have it because they get bitched out by people who they're supporting for free.
Another myth. Most developers (certainly the main ones) have jobs sponsored by the mozilla foundation, which is donated to by...users. There's simply no excuse for the behavior. On the positive note, I'm hoping it's coming to an end. Because otherwise, with an improved IE and other alternatives, FF doesn't have that much going for it.
Let's not kid ourselves. FF beats Opera in terms of market share because it's theoretically a community effort. It certainly isn't because of its features or superior memory handling. If the devs want to isolate themselves and make it really clear that they don't care about the community, they might get what they've always wanted - the ability to work on a dead project that attracts no user interest.
The actual amount of memory used is very low. The problem is fragmentation. [pavlov.net] If Mozilla would actually tackle the real problem instead of focusing on what know-nothing users continuously claim is the problem, it would probably be fixed already.
See, this is in fact the problem - the contempt for the user community. From a user's perspective, this debate of semantics is aggravating and pointless. You see, I don't care what the hell you call it, or even what the root cause is - memory leaking, fragmentation, whatever. In the end, it's simply ridiculous that a damned web browser ends up occupying 2GB of memory. This needs to stop now, and it should have stopped 5 years ago.
I can't actually believe that a group of developers would have a problem where their programs memory usage gradually increased from 10 MB to 2GB over a few days, and actually release it. And not only release it, but carry it over from alpha all the way through to version 2.0.
That's a long time to wait for a birthday for the poor kid born on Feb 30th!No shit. It'll take him over 200,000 years before he's allowed to go to bars in the US.
"Because it looks like Mozilla have gone back to basics and worked on what really matters to users -- security, speed and ease of use"
Well, thank the Spaghetti Monster. Why did it take so damned long to convince them that was more important than constantly fiddling with the widget layer and whatever else they were doing? Why the nearly 5 year flame war over whether a browser that takes up 2 GB of memory is technically leaking it or not?
Who would have ever thought that having a secure browser that quickly loads pages and doesn't crash your machine would be enticing to users?
Corrosion isn't going to be an issue for most. Unless you're wiring up a boat.
Over time, it can create a noticeable effect. A relatively thin oxide layer can degrade performance of the connection well before the point that one sees green copper oxide. There's a reason that gold is generally used for the conductor in semiconductor devices.
Not to mention which, as already pointed out, electroplating with a thin layer of gold is cheap as hell.
Read 'The Emperor's New Clothes' sometime, you might learn something.
To test the effect you're describing you need to have a control group, which is prominently missing from your discussion. You notice that sometimes the rod moves, and sometimes there's water there. What you don't know is how prevalent water is in that area. If it's fairly common, digging randomly (a control) would be illustrative to determine whether the dowser actually has any ability.
Dowsing has been tested many times in double blind experiments - ie, the dowser doesn't know where the water is, and neither does the experimenter working with the dowser. Only a third observer, hidden from the person being tested, knows where it is. In rigorous testing like that, dowsing goes down with spoonbending and ESP.
Things like this are popular with people who haven't studied physics. There's simply no physical effect that would account for water exhibiting that sort of attraction to a rod.
Slashdot Mirror
Many of us here are the people described in the article, and we hold "being smart" as the highest possible attribute. We worship "smart" here. Ironically, of course, since one can't claim any more honor from being born smart than from being born handsome or good at sports, traits that are scorned here.
Well, that's the focus of the article, isn't it? I totally agree with you, by the way - there's nothing to be proud of in relying on abliity alone to outperform the less talented if you're still underachieving.
I was certainly one of the ones that got the 'wow, that kid's smart' a lot. Probably more in school than from my parents, who emphasized work over talent. And I was an underachiever (relatively) until I realized how shameful it was that I was getting grades without any effort that my friends had to work their asses off for. And some of them resented it. I came to realize that a great deal of unused talent isn't something to be proud of; it's something to be ashamed of, if anything.
I've got kids now, and they're young, but they seem pretty sharp. And while I'll never tell them that they're dumb, praise comes through recognition of hard work - not talent.
Consistently telling a kid that (s)he is stupid will cause the kid to believe he is stupid. Wow! such insight!
Wrong-o. Consistently telling a kid that successes are due to being smart will cause them to believe the opposite as well - namely, that failures are due to *not* being smart. On the other hand, telling a kid that successes are due to hard work will lead them to believe that failure can be turned around through diligence.
Read it slower next time.
Was he old?
Yes. However, he will no longer be using email.
Fear teh penguin!!!!!
Also, getting sloshed while on your cell phone will better allow you to divulge your contents to anyone unlucky enough to be in your address book.
Yeah, that's fun. I have a buddy who tends to call his ex-girlfriend whenever he gets tanked. It got to the point where I had to take his cellphone from him before we hit the bars.
Assuming the original author wrote the entire thing from scratch, true. But if he used any GNU material (or other GPL licensed libraries) himself, then you're right back where you started.
OP: "Few can argue that Columbus is the first non-native person to set foot on the Americas since the original migration"
English, motherfucker. Do you speak it? Your point agrees with his.
I realize that now, thanks Samuel L Jackson. His post was long and vague so I zoned out when I read the above, grammatically-vague gem.
Oh, and give me my wallet out of that bag. You know which one it is.
It's even worse than you'd imagined. On the top left is a video of some idiot babbling unintelligibly about some device no one uses; on the top right is some live chat thing with yet more idiots babbling about each other's blogs and periodically spamming about OEM software. On the bottom left is some contemptible list of blogs, each worse than the last. The bottom right is my favorite part of the site; it shows a blank white rectangle.
Sheevus. Glad I got the Javascript nastygram then.
It's plausible, but is there any actual Archeological evidence of Norsemen getting to the US?
Pretty solid evidence. Archaelolgical evidence as well as recorded documents by Icelanders and others. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vinland
. Few can argue that Columbus is the first non-native person to set foot on the Americas since the original migration
Actually, there's a pretty solid chance the Vikings made it to Canada for a bit. So they beat Chris by almost 500 years.
But it's a 14 minute video! Linked from the front page of Slashdot!! Oh my.
I wouldn't know. All I saw of the idiot's page was a message telling me I needed to have Javascript installed to see his page.
No thanks. If you need Javascript to make a point, I'm pretty sure I'm not interested.
That device (puck-mouse) should be listed as a torture device. It hurts your hands, it is counter-inuitive, it clicks sometimes for no reason, and it is the ULTIMATE nightmare in function follows for
Almost. Steve Job's wet dream is a 0-button mouse that you don't actually touch. It knows what you need to do better than you do.
Which is why, in all likelihood, this thing has no chance of surviving judicial scrutiny. But some congressman somewhere in Jersey can claim he's tough on sex offenders come the next election.
Problem with fonts isn't the copyright so much as the patent encumbrance of scaled fonts, such as TrueType.
O.K. if I encode the opening chords of Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" into a barcode and have it tatooed on my schlong, then sleep around, and then the RIAA comes after me, do I have a leg to stand on?
Sounds like you have three.
Also, nanotechnology is a buzzword. It is not a single material, and as such there really aren't any properties that are consistent among all the many things that are considered nanotechnology. With these new materials as with *any* material, rigorous testing is the key to safety. Period. That includes determining levels of acute as well as chronic toxicity, and delivery mechanisms of the material to key organ systems within the body.
What we have here is failure to communicate. There is always fear of the unknown and exotic, and that's now nanotech. 50 years ago it was anything with the word 'nuclear' in it. Now it's nanotech, genetic engineering, etc.
How about this for fearmongering - tell a reporter that scientists are developing technologies for manipulating materials that are barely a single nanometer long. Now, tell them that these materials are present in every product we buy. Crazy, right? It's called chemistry - the original nanoscience. The stuff that's now considered 'nanotech' is less 'nano' than technology we've developed for a long time. Nanotech is just an extension of fields of study that currently exist and have existed for centuries. This is no big deal.
So the assumption that I would select yes, because I am dumb and always click yes, is retarded. I only click yes when I trust the source (I assume a reputable business to be trustworthy).
That's why the phrasing of the question is important, which the author takes as implicit but I think you're glossing over. The question posed isn't asked to give the customer choice, nor does it reflect at a literal level what the company is intending to do. It's designed to distinguish morons from non-morons, and as such you have to have a question that is well-designed for that specific purpose. That's why the question they'd use is far more similar to the first one you mention than the second (though it needs to be more vague); only morons would say 'yes' to the first, while some smart people would say 'yes' to the second.
This is basically a Turing test for humans. The fact that you're overthinking it proves that you pass. ;)
last i checked it was plugin writers who were blamed for all the memory issues by Mozilla
Which to me sounds eerily similar to Microsoft blaming 3rd party software for taking down the operating system.
This has been debunked many times, you can use a clean install of FF, no extensions, and after a week it's crapped up. I could also contend that's a failure of the extension system, that they can 'leak' or otherwise lose memory.
If it's the pages I'm viewing, FF should handle that. Anything else is a poor excuse.
The developers who have contempt for users have it because they get bitched out by people who they're supporting for free.
Another myth. Most developers (certainly the main ones) have jobs sponsored by the mozilla foundation, which is donated to by...users. There's simply no excuse for the behavior. On the positive note, I'm hoping it's coming to an end. Because otherwise, with an improved IE and other alternatives, FF doesn't have that much going for it.
Let's not kid ourselves. FF beats Opera in terms of market share because it's theoretically a community effort. It certainly isn't because of its features or superior memory handling. If the devs want to isolate themselves and make it really clear that they don't care about the community, they might get what they've always wanted - the ability to work on a dead project that attracts no user interest.
If you think that was bad, have a look at this... The amusement starts round about comment #38, two years in...
Wow. Thanks for the entertainment. That's exactly the sort of issue I'm talking about - utter contempt for anyone outside their little circle.
The actual amount of memory used is very low. The problem is fragmentation. [pavlov.net] If Mozilla would actually tackle the real problem instead of focusing on what know-nothing users continuously claim is the problem, it would probably be fixed already.
See, this is in fact the problem - the contempt for the user community. From a user's perspective, this debate of semantics is aggravating and pointless. You see, I don't care what the hell you call it, or even what the root cause is - memory leaking, fragmentation, whatever. In the end, it's simply ridiculous that a damned web browser ends up occupying 2GB of memory. This needs to stop now, and it should have stopped 5 years ago.
I can't actually believe that a group of developers would have a problem where their programs memory usage gradually increased from 10 MB to 2GB over a few days, and actually release it. And not only release it, but carry it over from alpha all the way through to version 2.0.
That's a long time to wait for a birthday for the poor kid born on Feb 30th! No shit. It'll take him over 200,000 years before he's allowed to go to bars in the US.
"Because it looks like Mozilla have gone back to basics and worked on what really matters to users -- security, speed and ease of use"
Well, thank the Spaghetti Monster. Why did it take so damned long to convince them that was more important than constantly fiddling with the widget layer and whatever else they were doing? Why the nearly 5 year flame war over whether a browser that takes up 2 GB of memory is technically leaking it or not?
Who would have ever thought that having a secure browser that quickly loads pages and doesn't crash your machine would be enticing to users?
Corrosion isn't going to be an issue for most. Unless you're wiring up a boat.
Over time, it can create a noticeable effect. A relatively thin oxide layer can degrade performance of the connection well before the point that one sees green copper oxide. There's a reason that gold is generally used for the conductor in semiconductor devices.
Not to mention which, as already pointed out, electroplating with a thin layer of gold is cheap as hell.
Read 'The Emperor's New Clothes' sometime, you might learn something.
To test the effect you're describing you need to have a control group, which is prominently missing from your discussion. You notice that sometimes the rod moves, and sometimes there's water there. What you don't know is how prevalent water is in that area. If it's fairly common, digging randomly (a control) would be illustrative to determine whether the dowser actually has any ability.
Dowsing has been tested many times in double blind experiments - ie, the dowser doesn't know where the water is, and neither does the experimenter working with the dowser. Only a third observer, hidden from the person being tested, knows where it is. In rigorous testing like that, dowsing goes down with spoonbending and ESP.
Things like this are popular with people who haven't studied physics. There's simply no physical effect that would account for water exhibiting that sort of attraction to a rod.