I wouldn't bet that. I'd bet that the so-called "unskilled laborer" of 50 years ago was better educated than the typical burger-flipper, low-level corporate or government bureaucrat, first-teir tech support or Congressman is today.
What are you talking about? A bottom-rung, unskilled laborer is someone who never reads a book or listens to a lecture and possesses no book knowledge whatsoever. Even a first-tier tech support guy is more educated than that. And there is no doubt that there are much fewer such people today than 50 years ago.
If 50 years ago people really were more educated than we are today, how do you explain the fact that our productivity is an order of magnitude greater?
1.) Logging in. You would think that since I already typed hotmail.com in the address bar, I wouldn't have to type "@hotmail.com" in the log-in form, but alas, the solution has aluded them. In fact, it seems to have escaped them altogether, since it used to be that way. Apparently having seperate hotmail.com and msnmail.com, storing a cookie, or even just having a radio button is beyond the limits of their servers. The extra 12 characters I have to type wouldn't bug me so much, except for the fact that there's no logical reason for it.
I would think this has to do with the fact that your email address is an MS Passport account now, and potentially people could have passport accounts not named after email addresses (so the system needs to distinguish between the two users "bobdole" and "bobdole@hotmail.com"). Hurray for Passport...
Speaking of Passport stupidity, remember the time a few years ago Hotmail stopped working for about a day because MS let their Passport domain name expire? Some slashdotter figured it out, wrote a post about it, paid the ~30$ to the registrar for them using his credit card and it immediately went back up. MS later sent him a 500$ thank you check, which he of course sold on ebay for thousands of dollars.
Of course, that was a Maxtor, which has a notoriously bad reputation.
Meh, every hard drive manufacturer has a "notoriously bad reputation" to somebody. Specific lines of hard drives can be lemons if there's some small defect in the production process, and no manufacturer has always been immune to this. IBM had its DeathStar, etc.
Quantum algorithms are so hard to write that the main part of computers will always be conventional; at best we'll have a "quantum coprocessor" to perform certain tasks that quantum computers are very fast at. I wouldn't be surprised if quantum computing never made it into consumer/business stuff and only remained in supercomputer land.
Much longer life span in principle, but if you get a lemon it might crash 2 weeks after you buy it... At least the flash memory will be able to warn you before it is close to expiry.
Pshaw, unix variants crash all the time when you try to use them for desktop (i.e. graphical) applications. If not the whole kernel than at least X. Yes, in server/command line land it's rock-solid but that's not the whole story.
Sure it produces power. It takes power of one type and produces power of another type out of it. Do manufacturing plants not "produce" anything either because they need raw materials instead of generating matter out of thin air?
Sure, but obviously the literal Latin meaning was meant in this case.
Re:Words Matter
on
Spam is Dead
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· Score: 2, Insightful
I wonder, too, if most spammers actually manage to turn a profit out of their stuff. I've heard many people say, "well some people must send money to the spammers, or they would give up", but I'm not so sure.
Small-time white-collar crooks like spammers tend not to be too bright, and are always trying harebrained schemes to get rich quick. I think it's perfectly possible that most spammers spam just because everyone else is doing it, and they wrongly believe it's an easy scheme to make money.
Re:Someone Forgot To Tell The Spammers
on
Spam is Dead
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· Score: 2, Informative
Usenet is such an old and well-standardised technology that all the address harvesting programs have support for it. You are opening yourself up to massive spam if you make so much as a single post there. It's not really representative of the state of most of the Internet.
1. Dominance in entertainment (graphic artists, movie makers, etc). So when most journalists who interact with their geeky movie making counterparts, odds are they're going to see a Mac, no matter what they may be using.
Yeah, I've noticed TV commercials involving mouse cursors often have the black Mac cursor instead of the white Windows one. A little strange considering most people will be more familiar with a white cursor. I've wondered whether they used the black cursor because they lived entirely in Mac-land and didn't know better, or as a subtle plug.
but only in that it would allow us to evolve virtual neural networks complex enough to approach the level of the human brain.
If we did that, we'd get an "alien" intelligence with little resemblance to our own. It might be sentient but it would unable to pass the Turing test (= able to fool someone into thinking it's human).
I don't know; I care a great deal about my privacy as well, but provided the information is only used in the aggregate I don't see it as a privacy violation. Just like I wouldn't necessarily like my school grades to be known, but I have no problem with the class average (of which my grade is one component) being known.
Yeah, this was acceptable back when Thunderbird was in beta, but I expect better from production software. To be fair though, it is much less serious than random crashes or security vulnerabilities.
Honestly, if you want to run Windows, just get a second, generic computer of the same power for about 1/3 of the cost of your Mac. I don't think this is of much interest to anybody.
Re:Death by subscription? Please.
on
Demise of C++?
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· Score: 1
These print magazines on programming are particularly dumb since virtually all people who might subscribe to it have Internet access and are skilled enough to find their information online. It was just a weak market to begin with.
I can't think of any software of theirs that I would consider putting on a system, so I can't say I'm surprised by stuff like this.
Exactly. I'm not too sure at which point their software became counterproductive trash, but lately on every system I've seen it on it seems to do more harm than good. I've lately seen a lot of XP computers with quite a lot of power and RAM which are slowed to an absolute crawl (as in, takes 5 minutes of thrashing to start IE), and the common thread is that they all seem to run Symantec anti-virus software. Now I'm not sure if it's because they're infested with malware and Symantec completely failed to offer any protection, or if actually Symantec itself is directly causing the problem with all its hooks into system functions, but at any rate I would never install that crap.
Actually, I purposely made a claim I thought might be false in the hope of prodding someone into replying with information on the topic:). Sorry, I guess that's technically trolling but it works rather well.
Sure, but if he had happened to choose his slashdot nickname to be "hashmap" instead of "ExoticMandibles" then the end result would've been exactly the same. Where is the breach of ethics? It really makes no difference whether some writing is attributed to one symbol or another when there is no associated monetary or other tangible benefit of any kind.
I'm saying I don't get people who get all worked up about writing being copied; it's an irrational extension of the concept of physical property.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't South Korea, like China, a place where lots of piracy goes on without being taken seriously? If so, we can't expect the reverse-copyright jujitsu of the GPL to be taken seriously in their legal system either.
Slashdot Mirror
And you should read The Bell Curve, to get an idea of what it is actually claiming --- because it certainly isn't what you just said.
I don't believe that the great-grandparent was implying it was a desirable thing. He was just pointing out that that's where many poor people end up.
What are you talking about? A bottom-rung, unskilled laborer is someone who never reads a book or listens to a lecture and possesses no book knowledge whatsoever. Even a first-tier tech support guy is more educated than that. And there is no doubt that there are much fewer such people today than 50 years ago.
If 50 years ago people really were more educated than we are today, how do you explain the fact that our productivity is an order of magnitude greater?
I would think this has to do with the fact that your email address is an MS Passport account now, and potentially people could have passport accounts not named after email addresses (so the system needs to distinguish between the two users "bobdole" and "bobdole@hotmail.com"). Hurray for Passport...
Speaking of Passport stupidity, remember the time a few years ago Hotmail stopped working for about a day because MS let their Passport domain name expire? Some slashdotter figured it out, wrote a post about it, paid the ~30$ to the registrar for them using his credit card and it immediately went back up. MS later sent him a 500$ thank you check, which he of course sold on ebay for thousands of dollars.
Meh, every hard drive manufacturer has a "notoriously bad reputation" to somebody. Specific lines of hard drives can be lemons if there's some small defect in the production process, and no manufacturer has always been immune to this. IBM had its DeathStar, etc.
Hard drives are still about 300x bigger for the same price. Flash is only going to edge forward in lightweight portable applications.
Quantum algorithms are so hard to write that the main part of computers will always be conventional; at best we'll have a "quantum coprocessor" to perform certain tasks that quantum computers are very fast at. I wouldn't be surprised if quantum computing never made it into consumer/business stuff and only remained in supercomputer land.
Much longer life span in principle, but if you get a lemon it might crash 2 weeks after you buy it... At least the flash memory will be able to warn you before it is close to expiry.
You could just as well blame the application developers for providing no autosave feature.
Pshaw, unix variants crash all the time when you try to use them for desktop (i.e. graphical) applications. If not the whole kernel than at least X. Yes, in server/command line land it's rock-solid but that's not the whole story.
Sure it produces power. It takes power of one type and produces power of another type out of it. Do manufacturing plants not "produce" anything either because they need raw materials instead of generating matter out of thin air?
Sure, but obviously the literal Latin meaning was meant in this case.
Small-time white-collar crooks like spammers tend not to be too bright, and are always trying harebrained schemes to get rich quick. I think it's perfectly possible that most spammers spam just because everyone else is doing it, and they wrongly believe it's an easy scheme to make money.
Usenet is such an old and well-standardised technology that all the address harvesting programs have support for it. You are opening yourself up to massive spam if you make so much as a single post there. It's not really representative of the state of most of the Internet.
Yeah, I've noticed TV commercials involving mouse cursors often have the black Mac cursor instead of the white Windows one. A little strange considering most people will be more familiar with a white cursor. I've wondered whether they used the black cursor because they lived entirely in Mac-land and didn't know better, or as a subtle plug.
If we did that, we'd get an "alien" intelligence with little resemblance to our own. It might be sentient but it would unable to pass the Turing test (= able to fool someone into thinking it's human).
I don't know; I care a great deal about my privacy as well, but provided the information is only used in the aggregate I don't see it as a privacy violation. Just like I wouldn't necessarily like my school grades to be known, but I have no problem with the class average (of which my grade is one component) being known.
Yeah, this was acceptable back when Thunderbird was in beta, but I expect better from production software. To be fair though, it is much less serious than random crashes or security vulnerabilities.
Honestly, if you want to run Windows, just get a second, generic computer of the same power for about 1/3 of the cost of your Mac. I don't think this is of much interest to anybody.
These print magazines on programming are particularly dumb since virtually all people who might subscribe to it have Internet access and are skilled enough to find their information online. It was just a weak market to begin with.
Exactly. I'm not too sure at which point their software became counterproductive trash, but lately on every system I've seen it on it seems to do more harm than good. I've lately seen a lot of XP computers with quite a lot of power and RAM which are slowed to an absolute crawl (as in, takes 5 minutes of thrashing to start IE), and the common thread is that they all seem to run Symantec anti-virus software. Now I'm not sure if it's because they're infested with malware and Symantec completely failed to offer any protection, or if actually Symantec itself is directly causing the problem with all its hooks into system functions, but at any rate I would never install that crap.
Actually, I purposely made a claim I thought might be false in the hope of prodding someone into replying with information on the topic :). Sorry, I guess that's technically trolling but it works rather well.
I'm saying I don't get people who get all worked up about writing being copied; it's an irrational extension of the concept of physical property.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't South Korea, like China, a place where lots of piracy goes on without being taken seriously? If so, we can't expect the reverse-copyright jujitsu of the GPL to be taken seriously in their legal system either.
They can claim that until they turn blue, but it ain't going to happen unless they like losing money on every sale.