Gotta admit, after starting to read a bit more about what lkcl is on about at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it's actually a pretty amazing rabbit hole.
If I am not totally mistaken, there was a TED talk a while back that tried to summarize up some of this? https://www.ted.com/talks/garr...
As HuskyDog pointed out above, both these studies are using results from military screening I.Q. tests. A few decades back, afaik, military careers were held in higher esteem.. Perhaps more people these days just don't care as much about trying to look fantastic to the military, so when taking the tests, they just don't put in as much effort as they used to.
Oh, and another thing: it could also be that any trend towards lower expediency, even if accuracy improved by some factor, would appear as a I.Q. score decline. I bet people are gradually forgetting and/or not being informed that I.Q. tests are timed severely, and are taking more time to answer each question, and/or wasting more time on a tricky problem instead of making a best guess and quickly moving onto the next.. Too bad the paper is behind a paywall. I'd be very curious to see if only the final score was used, or if its components (accuracy / time) were also analysed for trends.
Anyways, until these scores are compared with another, properly administered, test dataset that is not within the context of military force, I'd prefer to remain a sceptic of these results.
This. For fun I threw a VR VNC app onto my phone and put it into a cardboard to try it out. Being able to head-track a cursor felt pretty clumsy at first, but after about 5 minutes was really something that I would want to get used to, and got pretty good at swiftly.
Admittedly, having the camera poorly reproduce RL in the background was a bit nauseating, but getting a huge forward facing screen that left nothing for distraction was truly revolutionary. (If only they could fix the slow side drift...) I could seriously see general purpose computing to be improved by this, which is to say nothing of the specific use applications like the Unreal4 in-VR VR building demo posted recently.
I for one am looking forward to our wild and crazy VR future.
I don't know about this. Barring any sort of tragic world shaking event, what April 1st means to me is getting a solid chuckle by visiting Slashdot. It is the prime aggregation of unfunny things companies are doing trying to be funny.
Hey, I'm late to the party, but speaking of parties: Slashdot has traditionally hosted massively distributed meet up events every 5 years. Please don't forget about this as another one is due for 2017!
I've been to two previously now, and they have been great and are an awesome way to meet interesting people that one would otherwise never get a chance to.
If this goes through, It could provoke more play of local (i.e. 'less expensive') artists. That would a good thing, yes? Or, does music get cheaper when bought in bulk... is Coldplay is 1 cent a spin, and local group USS is a dollar a spin? What bothers me the most is how any control over the pricing here results in upper level control of what songs get played. Only if somehow the artists themselves get to pick royalty pricing could I see this working.
Dewey: You want me to teach you something? [most of the students nod] Here's a useful lesson for you: give up. Just quit. Because in this life, you can't win. Sure, you can try. [really getting angry] But in the end you're just gonna lose, BIG TIME. Because THE WORLD is run by the Man.
Frankie: Who?
Dewey: The Man. Oh, you don't know the Man? [class shakes their heads] He's everywhere. In the White House, down the hall, MISS MULLINS, she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, and he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! Okay? And there used to be a way to stick it to The Man. It was called rock ‘n’ roll. But guess what. Oh, no. The Man ruined that too with a little thing called MTV! So don’t waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome, because The Man’s just going to call you a fat, washed up loser and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just GIVE UP!!!
I would highly recommend Tiki ( http://tiki.org/ ) as an option as it will probably have every feature you need ready to go. Wiki for main content, forums, article publishing, blogs, forums, chat, calender, data trackers, tons of starter themes, video conferencing, file/image galleries.. the works. The v10 beta is very stable and although it is a bit of a pain to configure initially since the number of options are overwhelming, once it is set up it really rocks. Getting good performance can be a bit tricky, however if you set up the APC module, enable the minify js/css features, and get gzip and proper caching set up on the web server it can be very very fast even on a budget VPS.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I'll bite. here's an example, I'm 90% sure that learning to drive stick improved my quality of driving overall. One of my friends even remarked that I was driving a lot smoother, namely the braking and acceleration rates. It effectively stamped the model of the car engine switching through gears into my brain that carried over even when driving automatic. I always felt more in tune with cars thereafter and naturally drove the car with gears in my mind, translating to smoother takeoffs and, well I use to gear down with standard; I miss that functionality driving automatic.
I tried dvorak once and tried hard to grapple it. While trying out the new layout I was very conscious of using the home row - for eventual maximal speed. As a side effect of learning it, I ended up with much better adherence to good typing when having to return to qwerty.
I know some instruments, and I'm fairly sure that as I learn to play new ones.. working on guitar and lyra right now.. generalizations and cross applicative senses of things form such as chord theory, rhythms and melody, moods of music..
As for numpads.. It would be best to only ever have one layout.. right?
I RTFA, and it looks like they have compelling evidence of water and carbon in some very stunning places: http://www.esa.int/images/SPIRE_01_H.jpg -- Scientists used Herschelâ€(TM)s Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) on 22 June to look for warm molecular gas heated by newborn massive stars in the DR21 star-forming region in Cygnus. HIFI provided excellent data in two different observing modes, returning information on the composition of the region with unprecedented accuracy and resolution. Scientists observed ionised carbon, carbon monoxide, and water.
<html> <head> <title>Abstract of a usable design</title> <style type="text/css"> @media print { body { margin: 2.5cm; } } @media screen { body { margin: 50px; width: 50%; } } body { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; } </style> </head> <body> <h1>It's so crazy it just might work</h2> <h2>and other html inspired musings</h2> <p>Why not just use css?</p> <p>Also, don't worry about page numbering. that's the browser's job.</p> </body> </html>
Sun released JavaFX 1.0 today, in a bid to take on Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight technologies.
JavaFX, a technology by sun which will let developers write "rich internet applications" using a Java-esq language which has been in development for quite some time now has finally been released, joining rather late to the game. Also it requires it's own plugin which will be a hefty barrier to entry.
It is Sun's first Java release to include standardized, cross-platform audio and video playback code (in the form of On2 licensed codecs).
So, it will include Audio/Video support, and it is using codecs from On2. I don't think that this means the codecs are free in any sense of the term, just that Sun is paying the cost of licensing these codecs for the developers using JavaFX. Nevertheless, good codec support is always a good thing.
The lack of a Linux or Solaris release is a notable absence.
Kind of deflates the "standardized, cross-platform" claim...
The development kit currently consists of the base run-time, a NetBeans/Eclipse plug-in and a set of artifact exporters for Adobe CS 3&4."
So, the download they offer you includes the software to run the software you write, a plugin for eclipse and netbeans which are the two leading Java development environments, and some plugins for a few Adobe products to move stuff from them into the JavaFX world.
Indeed. An Unfortunate Truth. New question I guess now. Can a Gattaca future be avoided? Is it for or against humanities best interest? Genetics is such a smelly can of worms.
I would like to point out that in general, the FSF is historically quite competent at spotting issues before they become a real problem. As far as I can tell, one of the large issues that this campaign is trying to address is Apple's overzealous use of DRM its products. This is IMHO a perfectly legitimate criticism and worth making at least a little fuss about. Fortunately that is exactly the path that it seems they seem to be pursuing.
Quite frankly I simply cannot see this translating into much more than a handful of zealots that randomly poke their head in and raise (hopefully) completely valid and fair questions, thus making it a talking point within the Apple employee structure. If enough of the bottom/middle rung employees start buzzing on about it, then that eventually bubbles up to the higher levels. Not to mention that it probably gives the "Apple Geniuses" something other than the endless queries of "why doesn't my ipod work anymore?" to discuss with their "customers".
In short, I'm a bit disappointed to see such an overly serious stance taken against the FSF for this move. Let's not forget that they are also making many many POSITIVE changes to the software industry as a whole, and to claim that they are shortsighted may be a bit shortsighted itself.;-) Then again, the FSF have given me many a facepalm moment as well. The bottom line though is that although I may not believe this to be the single most worthy cause of the FSF or the perfect way to be doing going about it, it isn't necessarily the wrong way of going about it.
Congratulations on admitting what you actually think. I know where you're coming from, and you're right that you shouldn't give a damn what others think about it. That's the whole point. Thinking about something doesn't hurt. Only the actions do. As a poster above said, "committing vile acts is wrong, however the expression of vile ideas, is both forewarning and proof of freedom. The inability to recognize the difference is ignorance, and the first step towards tragedy." Sadly, watching laws like this roll in day after day, I fear that ignorance is far too widespead. And how will it be accepted in? With applause and cheers.
Nice call on that. Just wanted to say thanks for reminding me of Privateer. It very well might have been my gateway to the world of the command line. Damn thing would refuse to run on my old 486Dx2 (mind you when I did get it to run, it felt like I was cheating the gameplay was so smooth) because the game "Required 564kb of Conventinal memory". I had hit the 640k limit hard. So I self-learned my way through the dark world of EMM386, Himem.sys, Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. Played with memmaker a lot and watched how it modified config.sys. Read through the help(man?) pages. and after what was loterally weeks of messing around, one time I typed priv.exe and by god it worked. And it was so worth it (Privateer is an awesome game, I highly recommend checking out the remake if interested). But since I somehow managed all that when I was 4-5 years old, I developed a keen intrest in the 'cool' things I could do with DOS. I eventually moved onto QBasic and got to play with things like screen modes. (13 is the funnest for making random screansaver type programs). When I first heard about this linux thing when I was 14 I was really interested and my science teacher thought it was kind of neat too and he let me set up a version of Corel Linux that I had bought at stables (this was before CD burners were common) on one of the classroom computers (I imagine this would be very rarely allowed today, if at all). Anyways, it was actually a pretty big hit with a fair slice of the school population, and getting to be able to use the 'penguin computer' was a treat. (No doubt also because it came with some pretty fun games).
Anyways, just thought I would share in my little 'the root of how I became a shell user'. Thank you Privateer for being not just a great game, but for forcing me to learn the prompt.:)
Well, first of all, it will be primarily the same team that worked on the last project, which, if you havn't seen it you really are missing out. You can download it here if you want. If even a little bit of the passion and brilliance that went into that can be carried over to Apricot and Peach, then I highly doubt we will be disapointed. Keep in mind that Elephant's Dream was a project which aim was to further the tools in Blender for larger scale movie production work with a focus on it's post-production toolset. I have high expectations for Apricot and Peach, and I think that they can pull it off.
Have you seen the last project the blender foundation made that was 'designed by committee', "Elephants Dream", aka Project Orange? In my opinion it was absolutely brilliant, so I am still holding my breath and looking forward to whatever gets pushed out of their doors. I assure you, passion is something that they are _not_ lacking.
I found something interesting a while back, when playing with Ubuntu. It came with Firefox preinstalled, and me, being an Opera user, not using Firefox, wanted to remove it. Why have it installed, when it's not being used, right?
Well, guess again. Marking Firefox for uninstallation informed me that a *lot* of other packages depended on it being there, and if I wanted to remove Firefox, I would have to remove those as well. Packages like ubuntu-desktop, and a few other that seemed pretty important.
Result? Unable to remove Firefox without severely breaking things. How is this any better than Microsoft integrating IE deeply within Windows? Because it's Firefox and Ubuntu, the community favorites, it's okay? The fact that if you did uninstall it, it would in fact _not_ break your system. I use seamonky instead of firefox, so I uninstalled firefox from synaptic and added in sea monkey. No issues at all. The ubuntu-desktop package is just a meta package that contains all of the default applications added at install time. Makes it so that if you made an oopsie and accidently removed some system packages and can't remember what they were, you can just do an install on ubuntu-desktop to repair.
Slashdot Mirror
Gotta admit, after starting to read a bit more about what lkcl is on about at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - it's actually a pretty amazing rabbit hole.
If I am not totally mistaken, there was a TED talk a while back that tried to summarize up some of this?
https://www.ted.com/talks/garr...
As HuskyDog pointed out above, both these studies are using results from military screening I.Q. tests. A few decades back, afaik, military careers were held in higher esteem.. Perhaps more people these days just don't care as much about trying to look fantastic to the military, so when taking the tests, they just don't put in as much effort as they used to.
Oh, and another thing: it could also be that any trend towards lower expediency, even if accuracy improved by some factor, would appear as a I.Q. score decline. I bet people are gradually forgetting and/or not being informed that I.Q. tests are timed severely, and are taking more time to answer each question, and/or wasting more time on a tricky problem instead of making a best guess and quickly moving onto the next.. Too bad the paper is behind a paywall. I'd be very curious to see if only the final score was used, or if its components (accuracy / time) were also analysed for trends.
Anyways, until these scores are compared with another, properly administered, test dataset that is not within the context of military force, I'd prefer to remain a sceptic of these results.
"Seeketh ye not affirmation from others, for content is the man who seeketh not, but hath affirmation within himself."
http://www.psmag.com/health-an...
According to the above content, drinking is awesome. I affirm this by drinking. Unfortunately, my girlfriend broke up with me.
Morale: sometimes you gotta dance as though there are a few people watching.
This. For fun I threw a VR VNC app onto my phone and put it into a cardboard to try it out. Being able to head-track a cursor felt pretty clumsy at first, but after about 5 minutes was really something that I would want to get used to, and got pretty good at swiftly.
Admittedly, having the camera poorly reproduce RL in the background was a bit nauseating, but getting a huge forward facing screen that left nothing for distraction was truly revolutionary. (If only they could fix the slow side drift...) I could seriously see general purpose computing to be improved by this, which is to say nothing of the specific use applications like the Unreal4 in-VR VR building demo posted recently.
I for one am looking forward to our wild and crazy VR future.
I don't know about this. Barring any sort of tragic world shaking event, what April 1st means to me is getting a solid chuckle by visiting Slashdot. It is the prime aggregation of unfunny things companies are doing trying to be funny.
Hey, I'm late to the party, but speaking of parties: Slashdot has traditionally hosted massively distributed meet up events every 5 years. Please don't forget about this as another one is due for 2017!
I've been to two previously now, and they have been great and are an awesome way to meet interesting people that one would otherwise never get a chance to.
Right, and self-respecting local bands would also offer local radio play for free... so...
If this goes through, It could provoke more play of local (i.e. 'less expensive') artists. That would a good thing, yes? Or, does music get cheaper when bought in bulk... is Coldplay is 1 cent a spin, and local group USS is a dollar a spin? What bothers me the most is how any control over the pricing here results in upper level control of what songs get played. Only if somehow the artists themselves get to pick royalty pricing could I see this working.
Dewey: Oh, you wanna learn something?
Summer: Yes, I do.
Dewey: You want me to teach you something? [most of the students nod] Here's a useful lesson for you: give up. Just quit. Because in this life, you can't win. Sure, you can try. [really getting angry] But in the end you're just gonna lose, BIG TIME. Because THE WORLD is run by the Man.
Frankie: Who?
Dewey: The Man. Oh, you don't know the Man? [class shakes their heads] He's everywhere. In the White House, down the hall, MISS MULLINS, she's the Man. And the Man ruined the ozone, and he's burning down the Amazon, and he kidnapped Shamu and put her in a chlorine tank! Okay? And there used to be a way to stick it to The Man. It was called rock ‘n’ roll. But guess what. Oh, no. The Man ruined that too with a little thing called MTV! So don’t waste your time trying to make anything cool or pure or awesome, because The Man’s just going to call you a fat, washed up loser and crush your soul. So do yourselves a favor and just GIVE UP!!!
I would highly recommend Tiki ( http://tiki.org/ ) as an option as it will probably have every feature you need ready to go. Wiki for main content, forums, article publishing, blogs, forums, chat, calender, data trackers, tons of starter themes, video conferencing, file/image galleries.. the works. The v10 beta is very stable and although it is a bit of a pain to configure initially since the number of options are overwhelming, once it is set up it really rocks. Getting good performance can be a bit tricky, however if you set up the APC module, enable the minify js/css features, and get gzip and proper caching set up on the web server it can be very very fast even on a budget VPS.
I'm not entirely sure about this, but I'll bite. here's an example, I'm 90% sure that learning to drive stick improved my quality of driving overall. One of my friends even remarked that I was driving a lot smoother, namely the braking and acceleration rates. It effectively stamped the model of the car engine switching through gears into my brain that carried over even when driving automatic. I always felt more in tune with cars thereafter and naturally drove the car with gears in my mind, translating to smoother takeoffs and, well I use to gear down with standard; I miss that functionality driving automatic.
I tried dvorak once and tried hard to grapple it. While trying out the new layout I was very conscious of using the home row - for eventual maximal speed. As a side effect of learning it, I ended up with much better adherence to good typing when having to return to qwerty.
I know some instruments, and I'm fairly sure that as I learn to play new ones.. working on guitar and lyra right now.. generalizations and cross applicative senses of things form such as chord theory, rhythms and melody, moods of music..
As for numpads.. It would be best to only ever have one layout.. right?
I RTFA, and it looks like they have compelling evidence of water and carbon in some very stunning places:
http://www.esa.int/images/SPIRE_01_H.jpg
--
Scientists used Herschelâ€(TM)s Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) on 22 June to look for warm molecular gas heated by newborn massive stars in the DR21 star-forming region in Cygnus. HIFI provided excellent data in two different observing modes, returning information on the composition of the region with unprecedented accuracy and resolution. Scientists observed ionised carbon, carbon monoxide, and water.
Neat.
<html>
<head>
<title>Abstract of a usable design</title>
<style type="text/css">
@media print {
body { margin: 2.5cm; }
}
@media screen {
body { margin: 50px; width: 50%; }
}
body { font-family: sans-serif; font-size: 12pt; }
</style>
</head>
<body>
<h1>It's so crazy it just might work</h2>
<h2>and other html inspired musings</h2>
<p>Why not just use css?</p>
<p>Also, don't worry about page numbering. that's the browser's job.</p>
</body>
</html>
Sun released JavaFX 1.0 today, in a bid to take on Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight technologies.
JavaFX, a technology by sun which will let developers write "rich internet applications" using a Java-esq language which has been in development for quite some time now has finally been released, joining rather late to the game. Also it requires it's own plugin which will be a hefty barrier to entry.
It is Sun's first Java release to include standardized, cross-platform audio and video playback code (in the form of On2 licensed codecs).
So, it will include Audio/Video support, and it is using codecs from On2. I don't think that this means the codecs are free in any sense of the term, just that Sun is paying the cost of licensing these codecs for the developers using JavaFX. Nevertheless, good codec support is always a good thing.
The lack of a Linux or Solaris release is a notable absence.
Kind of deflates the "standardized, cross-platform" claim...
The development kit currently consists of the base run-time, a NetBeans/Eclipse plug-in and a set of artifact exporters for Adobe CS 3&4."
So, the download they offer you includes the software to run the software you write, a plugin for eclipse and netbeans which are the two leading Java development environments, and some plugins for a few Adobe products to move stuff from them into the JavaFX world.
ISP = Internet Service Provider. Youtube sounds like an ISP to me. *shrugs*
Indeed. An Unfortunate Truth. New question I guess now. Can a Gattaca future be avoided? Is it for or against humanities best interest? Genetics is such a smelly can of worms.
I would like to point out that in general, the FSF is historically quite competent at spotting issues before they become a real problem. As far as I can tell, one of the large issues that this campaign is trying to address is Apple's overzealous use of DRM its products. This is IMHO a perfectly legitimate criticism and worth making at least a little fuss about. Fortunately that is exactly the path that it seems they seem to be pursuing.
Quite frankly I simply cannot see this translating into much more than a handful of zealots that randomly poke their head in and raise (hopefully) completely valid and fair questions, thus making it a talking point within the Apple employee structure. If enough of the bottom/middle rung employees start buzzing on about it, then that eventually bubbles up to the higher levels. Not to mention that it probably gives the "Apple Geniuses" something other than the endless queries of "why doesn't my ipod work anymore?" to discuss with their "customers".
In short, I'm a bit disappointed to see such an overly serious stance taken against the FSF for this move. Let's not forget that they are also making many many POSITIVE changes to the software industry as a whole, and to claim that they are shortsighted may be a bit shortsighted itself. ;-) Then again, the FSF have given me many a facepalm moment as well. The bottom line though is that although I may not believe this to be the single most worthy cause of the FSF or the perfect way to be doing going about it, it isn't necessarily the wrong way of going about it.
Congratulations on admitting what you actually think. I know where you're coming from, and you're right that you shouldn't give a damn what others think about it. That's the whole point. Thinking about something doesn't hurt. Only the actions do. As a poster above said, "committing vile acts is wrong, however the expression of vile ideas, is both forewarning and proof of freedom. The inability to recognize the difference is ignorance, and the first step towards tragedy." Sadly, watching laws like this roll in day after day, I fear that ignorance is far too widespead. And how will it be accepted in? With applause and cheers.
It's commonly known that too much perspective can be a downer. :(
I wish I had mod points to congratulate you for leading me to that gem. I guess this reply will have to suffice.
Nice call on that. Just wanted to say thanks for reminding me of Privateer. It very well might have been my gateway to the world of the command line. Damn thing would refuse to run on my old 486Dx2 (mind you when I did get it to run, it felt like I was cheating the gameplay was so smooth) because the game "Required 564kb of Conventinal memory". I had hit the 640k limit hard. So I self-learned my way through the dark world of EMM386, Himem.sys, Autoexec.bat and Config.sys. Played with memmaker a lot and watched how it modified config.sys. Read through the help(man?) pages. and after what was loterally weeks of messing around, one time I typed priv.exe and by god it worked. And it was so worth it (Privateer is an awesome game, I highly recommend checking out the remake if interested). But since I somehow managed all that when I was 4-5 years old, I developed a keen intrest in the 'cool' things I could do with DOS. I eventually moved onto QBasic and got to play with things like screen modes. (13 is the funnest for making random screansaver type programs). When I first heard about this linux thing when I was 14 I was really interested and my science teacher thought it was kind of neat too and he let me set up a version of Corel Linux that I had bought at stables (this was before CD burners were common) on one of the classroom computers (I imagine this would be very rarely allowed today, if at all). Anyways, it was actually a pretty big hit with a fair slice of the school population, and getting to be able to use the 'penguin computer' was a treat. (No doubt also because it came with some pretty fun games). Anyways, just thought I would share in my little 'the root of how I became a shell user'. Thank you Privateer for being not just a great game, but for forcing me to learn the prompt. :)
Well, first of all, it will be primarily the same team that worked on the last project, which, if you havn't seen it you really are missing out. You can download it here if you want. If even a little bit of the passion and brilliance that went into that can be carried over to Apricot and Peach, then I highly doubt we will be disapointed. Keep in mind that Elephant's Dream was a project which aim was to further the tools in Blender for larger scale movie production work with a focus on it's post-production toolset. I have high expectations for Apricot and Peach, and I think that they can pull it off.
Have you seen the last project the blender foundation made that was 'designed by committee', "Elephants Dream", aka Project Orange? In my opinion it was absolutely brilliant, so I am still holding my breath and looking forward to whatever gets pushed out of their doors. I assure you, passion is something that they are _not_ lacking.
Apricot will be the open source companion game (built in blender) to the short movie that is also underway called Peach (also built in blender).
Well, guess again. Marking Firefox for uninstallation informed me that a *lot* of other packages depended on it being there, and if I wanted to remove Firefox, I would have to remove those as well. Packages like ubuntu-desktop, and a few other that seemed pretty important.
Result? Unable to remove Firefox without severely breaking things. How is this any better than Microsoft integrating IE deeply within Windows? Because it's Firefox and Ubuntu, the community favorites, it's okay? The fact that if you did uninstall it, it would in fact _not_ break your system. I use seamonky instead of firefox, so I uninstalled firefox from synaptic and added in sea monkey. No issues at all. The ubuntu-desktop package is just a meta package that contains all of the default applications added at install time. Makes it so that if you made an oopsie and accidently removed some system packages and can't remember what they were, you can just do an install on ubuntu-desktop to repair.