Well of course, if you want to convert pre-existing religions, you start out by telling them they're on the right track, but *really* there's this other new stuff that they'll learn about in *your* religion.
Aka embrace, extend... extinguish
You don't see too many religions go the other way, do you? Where they take an established religion, throw out parts, and get a smaller dogma. Oh people try it, but it never sticks because it's not "backward compatible" to incoming converts;)
Anyway, this is just evolution of a social meme, like one of those stupid chain letters zipping around the internet. Just because people like to tell themselves fairy tales doesn't make it true. Your parents probably did the whole Santa Claus and Easter Bunny thing when you were a kid, but you grew out of it. Funny how a lot of people don't see the obvious extension to the rest of religion from that...
it led those who believed in it to survival where those who believed differently are no longer with us Oh, I'd say quite the opposite is often true. Religious and superstitious people tend to believe in all kinds of crazy notions, such as refusing medical care, or "honor" killings, which tend to reduce their fertility. On the other hand, (successful) religions tend to preach for large families and against birth control, which can balance this evolutionary pressure. So it's far from clear which way the species might be evolving on the whole.
But regardless of the direction our species is heading, animals have been shown to form superstitions [1]. You are correct this is a characteristic of learning systems, as we are all born ignorant and must learn about the world, but it's essentially a primitive bug of overfitting random data, far from a "survival mechanism".
At best religion is a coping and approximation technique, at worst it's simply lazy and weak minded. As people become affluent, religion becomes more and more an indication of the latter.
lead into a third when the intervention occurs Actually, he *finishes* the third, and is already stepping away from the mic when they move in on him. *Completely* unnecessary. Disgraceful police action.
Did you *read* the comment I was replying to? Protections like "they must give refunds, not credit notes", or requiring replacement of a product regardless of whether you have a receipt. Sure stores will claim whatever rules they want, but when push comes to shove, that's moot if there are contradictory laws on the books. For instance, an earlier post pointed out if it breaks within 6 months he can return it as a defective product, regardless of whatever warrantee (or lack thereof) they want to claim (or try to sell) And to partially answer my own question, here's some of the consumer protections in the US: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/menus/consumer/shop/rights.shtm However, I was particularly curious which of the particular protections listed in the post I was originally responding to might also apply in the US.
As it happens, a quick blackboard pace is just slow enough to let students critically evaluate the material (with respect to note taking importance), formulate questions, and try to anticipate answers. Go any faster, and all you get is a class full of people fervently copying the slideshow verbatim.
That's funny, when I'm in a lecture where they've printed the notes from the slides, I can actually pay attention to the lecture instead of fervently copy notes from the blackboard. I agree that slides can let you go too fast, but blackboards run the risk of getting lazy and not writing important points down. You can always go too fast if that's your style, blackboards don't prevent it.
Some of the advantages of electronic slides:
* students who are out sick can get a copy of the "full" notes instead of just another student's filtered interpretation.
* easier for teacher to make improvements that stick the next year
* sharper, more precise graphics/figures/diagrams (not all teachers can draw very well, of course that's true digitally too, but they can get graphics from elsewhere...)
Disadvantages:
* can facilitate presentation laziness -- reading from slides, not being interactive/adapting to each class's strengths and weaknesses
given how much of the world runs Windows without a problem Oh, I think there are quite a few people who would disagree that they're running "without a problem". There's lots of people who have been locked in by Microsoft's anticompetitive practices, and now they're stuck with the results of their predecessor's kickbacks. And lots more who just don't know there's any other options, thanks to MS strongarming manufacturers to pre-install Windows (and nothing else) on everything they sell.
So I think there's as much a pent-up dissatisfaction with MS and Windows issues (security/spyware, bad interfaces, incompatibility, prices, DRM, etc.) that as people get choices, either by changing of the guard or by better information, they're changing the status quo.
Oh, I also wanted to point out that just because someone installs windows for access to legacy apps doesn't mean they aren't *also* using OS X (or linux) the rest of the time. You can have more than one partition on your hard drive...
I don't meet one stupid developer who I have to explain to what NAT, proxies or TCP options are That's because we already studied them in our Networking class and wrote our own implementations from scratch for homework assignments while we were getting four-year degrees...;-P
Just pulling your leg (mostly);) I have a feeling you know a lot more by now than anyone finishing a one semester course... and a lot of CS grads get through without taking a networking course in the first place... but the trick is, we both know a lot more than the new recruits wearing their certification diapers and intoning "cisco can do no wrong, buy nothing but cisco, cisco or bust" (because of course, the certified on a specific brand's interface, and have no idea what they're actually doing.)
For example, I love the story of when we visited a university with a cisco-sycophant net admin, and we wanted to put up a linksys wireless access point in the lab for the robots to connect to, and he was resistant until we pointed out cisco had recently bought linksys, so it was actually a cisco device too, and then it was OK. Siiiigh.
No one's suggesting using entire sentences for symbol names (well, except those making unrealistic strawman arguments). There's always a happy medium, and it's nice to be succinct without sacrificing readability.
Variables are probably good for abbreviation, because they're often local in scope, but functions should tend to be more verbose, since they wind up being used sparsely and thus need to be more self-documenting.
80 columns was for another era. I'd rather have longer lines with readable words than abbreviated crap squeezed through a straw of visual bandwidth. We have huge displays now, and I'm not using it to view the same 80-column width at 40-point size!
In case you hadn't noticed, newspaper columns are much narrower. For prose, our eyes are optimal for quite a few less columns. Code is not prose, and the 80 column thing is an arbitrary technical limitation which should be dropped like a bad habit.
On the (small) up side, at least if you're talking with someone who's actually *in* the car, that's an extra set of eyes... one would hope they'll yell something if they guy in front of you slams on the brakes. Not that that's a replacement for concentrating on the road, but it's better than talking to someone who's not there at all.
Are there any specs for the roboDS? I don't see them anywhere, not to mention it isn't shipping yet.
Qwerk info here: http://www.charmedlabs.com/index.php?option=com_co ntent&task=view&id=29
In short, 200 MHz ARM9, 32 MB RAM, 16 servo ports, 4 motor ports, 16 digital inputs, 8 analog inputs. And it's actually supported for this purpose instead of relying on Nintendo putting up with your hacking.
But, in the DS's defense, having a builtin screen *is* kind of cute.
From someone who does go to CMU, (well parent might too) -- really, it's not that bad! I wouldn't want potential applicants to worry there's a basis in reality for this story;) I've actually been impressed at how the CS program manages to get great talent who isn't smelly and socially broken. (well, 99% anyway)
And that was before they went on this yay-diversity, anti-{geek,nerd} kick, which I'm not necessarily a huge fan of, since I thought we were doing pretty well to begin with, and certainly makes share people's concerns about effects on lowering the bar.
I'm sure it's not the solution you want, but you might want to invest in a dedicated wireless access point... they're "only" ~$50, but you'll probably get a bonus of better signal strength and could upgrade the networking protocol too (802.11n?)... if you get a linksys WRT54GL, you can flash the firmware with open source replacements and do any fancy routing stuff onboard if you like.
I think there was something wrong with that machine... my wife's XP laptop didn't bat an eye at iTunes/iPod setup.
Just saying you're right -- if it was usually that bad I'm sure it wouldn't be so popular.
However, it is popular, so therefore you can conclude it's usually not that bad;)
but this is also the sort of story that we tend to never see a followup on.
I think it sounds like it would make a cool movie actually... survival/war story (for the guys) ending up with a happy inter-cultural understanding love story (for the ladies)
I claim a portion of the royalties! (hmm, I wonder if I can get a software patent on a movie plot... it's kind of the same idea, a series of actions to perform...)
Hehe, she's actually considering doing an Ubuntu installation -- and this is of her own volition I might add! Her insistance on doing it herself is going to be an interesting test. (and some nice reassurance I did well in choosing her:) She was a business major I might add, so although she's got a good geek streak, it's not her core skill set. I think the only hesitation at this point is data safety during partitioning.
But yeah, I think the key here was giving her full day-to-day exposure after we got married to what a computing experience *should* be, vs. what she was actually getting. I thought about mentioning that in my original post, but didn't want to come off as a shill;)
I could definitely see someone going crash-free, while doing real work. I'm in a CS program at a university, and you can bet I bang on my machine pretty heavily. In the 4 years I had my iBook, I saw about 4 kernel panics. I upgraded to a Macbook Pro in December, haven't seen one yet.
Oh, and I only ever reboot when required by system patches.:)
Of course, I'll add that my Linux experience is equally as good, so certainly not claiming any records here. Except, perhaps, in comparison to Windows, which my wife has to reboot on a regular basis, and all she does is surf the web and some occassional graphics...
Giving a windows machine a public ip address is a death sentence isn't it? If not now eventually? What keeps a fresh install of windows from getting blasterized the second you hook it up to download updates? (assuming not everyone has a nice copy of sp2 with their windows xp)
Hahahah, ahhhh, thanks for once again reminding me why it's so nice to run a machine that *isn't* windows.
Our school also gives public IP address to all our machines. It's so nice to be able to directly ssh/scp/sftp to your lab machine from home -- no tunnels, no firewalls, no VPN. Just you and your encrypted password. And then we go to some other institution and wonder why they take forever to load a web page -- and discover all the traffic for the entire network is being funneled through some machine which is trying desperately to NAT the entire campus's network. Siiiigh.
Yes I'm spoiled. It's good to be at a university that doesn't need to baby its users. If you run Windows and it's not up to date, it's kicked off the network until you patch it. Don't like that? Then run your *own* firewall, or switch to a system that doesn't leak like a sieve. Don't expect to ruin it for the rest of us because *you* choose to run insecure software.
50,000 will pay one low level programmer with no testers, no marketing, [...]
It would pay a low-level programmer for a *year*.
The key is you have to select your OS interfaces to be portable from the start. If you plan on being portable, i.e. using OpenGL and other standards instead of Microsoft lock-ins, it should only add a few days of your dev team to handle platform-specific issues as they crop up. You can easily turn a profit from that perspective, especially if you assume that only a subset of the dev team would actually be handling low-level issues, since most of them should be working on the custom game mechanics that don't rely on any particular OS interface.
but regardless, thanks to NewYorkCountryLawyer for all the information and news they have provided -- maybe you didn't really want to do the interview or were short on time, that's understandable. Who are we to complain, it's not like we're paying you for it, yet generally you obviously do put time and effort into informing people, and I applaud you for it.
Right, and my reply, particularly if I was doing an *interview*, would not be just "i don't know, need more information." and that's it.
It was supposed to be an interview -- you discuss the question, give some of the main issues involved. It's not an yes/no answer that's needed, it's some kind of insight or information about what's involved in answering the question, to introduce people and enable them to follow up on their own. Even if it *were* just yes/no, you should still give a bit of background/analysis because thousands of people are going to read it.
So to continue your analogy, here's how I would answer your question:
"Doing funny things" isn't very descriptive. If you're getting popup windows when you're not doing anything, it's probably because you accidentally installed some adware [provide links for removal]. If the mouse is moving on it's own, someone is probably pranking you or remote controlling your computer [disconnect internet, etc.] If files are being corrupted, you hard disk may be going bad [how to test]. etc. Or if it's something else you'll need to provide more information, but those are commong problems.
Slashdot Mirror
Well of course, if you want to convert pre-existing religions, you start out by telling them they're on the right track, but *really* there's this other new stuff that they'll learn about in *your* religion.
;)
Aka embrace, extend... extinguish
You don't see too many religions go the other way, do you? Where they take an established religion, throw out parts, and get a smaller dogma. Oh people try it, but it never sticks because it's not "backward compatible" to incoming converts
Anyway, this is just evolution of a social meme, like one of those stupid chain letters zipping around the internet. Just because people like to tell themselves fairy tales doesn't make it true. Your parents probably did the whole Santa Claus and Easter Bunny thing when you were a kid, but you grew out of it. Funny how a lot of people don't see the obvious extension to the rest of religion from that...
But regardless of the direction our species is heading, animals have been shown to form superstitions [1]. You are correct this is a characteristic of learning systems, as we are all born ignorant and must learn about the world, but it's essentially a primitive bug of overfitting random data, far from a "survival mechanism".
At best religion is a coping and approximation technique, at worst it's simply lazy and weak minded. As people become affluent, religion becomes more and more an indication of the latter.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B._F._Skinner#Superstition_in_the_Pigeon
Once you experience the two-finger scroll feature, you might change your tune ;)
Did you *read* the comment I was replying to?
Protections like "they must give refunds, not credit notes", or requiring replacement of a product regardless of whether you have a receipt.
Sure stores will claim whatever rules they want, but when push comes to shove, that's moot if there are contradictory laws on the books.
For instance, an earlier post pointed out if it breaks within 6 months he can return it as a defective product, regardless of whatever warrantee (or lack thereof) they want to claim (or try to sell)
And to partially answer my own question, here's some of the consumer protections in the US: http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/menus/consumer/shop/rights.shtm
However, I was particularly curious which of the particular protections listed in the post I was originally responding to might also apply in the US.
Wow, that's awesome. Do we have consumer protections like that in the US?
That's funny, when I'm in a lecture where they've printed the notes from the slides, I can actually pay attention to the lecture instead of fervently copy notes from the blackboard. I agree that slides can let you go too fast, but blackboards run the risk of getting lazy and not writing important points down. You can always go too fast if that's your style, blackboards don't prevent it.
Some of the advantages of electronic slides:
* students who are out sick can get a copy of the "full" notes instead of just another student's filtered interpretation.
* easier for teacher to make improvements that stick the next year
* sharper, more precise graphics/figures/diagrams (not all teachers can draw very well, of course that's true digitally too, but they can get graphics from elsewhere...)
Disadvantages:
* can facilitate presentation laziness -- reading from slides, not being interactive/adapting to each class's strengths and weaknesses
So I think there's as much a pent-up dissatisfaction with MS and Windows issues (security/spyware, bad interfaces, incompatibility, prices, DRM, etc.) that as people get choices, either by changing of the guard or by better information, they're changing the status quo.
Oh, I also wanted to point out that just because someone installs windows for access to legacy apps doesn't mean they aren't *also* using OS X (or linux) the rest of the time. You can have more than one partition on your hard drive...
Just pulling your leg (mostly)
For example, I love the story of when we visited a university with a cisco-sycophant net admin, and we wanted to put up a linksys wireless access point in the lab for the robots to connect to, and he was resistant until we pointed out cisco had recently bought linksys, so it was actually a cisco device too, and then it was OK. Siiiigh.
But anyway, 15-441 ftw!
No one's suggesting using entire sentences for symbol names (well, except those making unrealistic strawman arguments). There's always a happy medium, and it's nice to be succinct without sacrificing readability.
Variables are probably good for abbreviation, because they're often local in scope, but functions should tend to be more verbose, since they wind up being used sparsely and thus need to be more self-documenting.
Hear, hear!
80 columns was for another era. I'd rather have longer lines with readable words than abbreviated crap squeezed through a straw of visual bandwidth. We have huge displays now, and I'm not using it to view the same 80-column width at 40-point size!
In case you hadn't noticed, newspaper columns are much narrower. For prose, our eyes are optimal for quite a few less columns. Code is not prose, and the 80 column thing is an arbitrary technical limitation which should be dropped like a bad habit.
On the (small) up side, at least if you're talking with someone who's actually *in* the car, that's an extra set of eyes... one would hope they'll yell something if they guy in front of you slams on the brakes. Not that that's a replacement for concentrating on the road, but it's better than talking to someone who's not there at all.
Are there any specs for the roboDS? I don't see them anywhere, not to mention it isn't shipping yet.
o ntent&task=view&id=29
Qwerk info here:
http://www.charmedlabs.com/index.php?option=com_c
In short, 200 MHz ARM9, 32 MB RAM, 16 servo ports, 4 motor ports, 16 digital inputs, 8 analog inputs. And it's actually supported for this purpose instead of relying on Nintendo putting up with your hacking.
But, in the DS's defense, having a builtin screen *is* kind of cute.
From someone who does go to CMU, (well parent might too) -- really, it's not that bad! I wouldn't want potential applicants to worry there's a basis in reality for this story ;) I've actually been impressed at how the CS program manages to get great talent who isn't smelly and socially broken. (well, 99% anyway)
And that was before they went on this yay-diversity, anti-{geek,nerd} kick, which I'm not necessarily a huge fan of, since I thought we were doing pretty well to begin with, and certainly makes share people's concerns about effects on lowering the bar.
I'm sure it's not the solution you want, but you might want to invest in a dedicated wireless access point... they're "only" ~$50, but you'll probably get a bonus of better signal strength and could upgrade the networking protocol too (802.11n?)... if you get a linksys WRT54GL, you can flash the firmware with open source replacements and do any fancy routing stuff onboard if you like.
I'm pretty sure they both know the reference. :)
Or at least I really hope they do because that's one of my favorite lines ever!
I think there was something wrong with that machine... my wife's XP laptop didn't bat an eye at iTunes/iPod setup. ;)
Just saying you're right -- if it was usually that bad I'm sure it wouldn't be so popular.
However, it is popular, so therefore you can conclude it's usually not that bad
Hehe, she's actually considering doing an Ubuntu installation -- and this is of her own volition I might add! Her insistance on doing it herself is going to be an interesting test. (and some nice reassurance I did well in choosing her :) She was a business major I might add, so although she's got a good geek streak, it's not her core skill set. I think the only hesitation at this point is data safety during partitioning.
;)
But yeah, I think the key here was giving her full day-to-day exposure after we got married to what a computing experience *should* be, vs. what she was actually getting. I thought about mentioning that in my original post, but didn't want to come off as a shill
I could definitely see someone going crash-free, while doing real work. I'm in a CS program at a university, and you can bet I bang on my machine pretty heavily. In the 4 years I had my iBook, I saw about 4 kernel panics. I upgraded to a Macbook Pro in December, haven't seen one yet.
:)
Oh, and I only ever reboot when required by system patches.
Of course, I'll add that my Linux experience is equally as good, so certainly not claiming any records here. Except, perhaps, in comparison to Windows, which my wife has to reboot on a regular basis, and all she does is surf the web and some occassional graphics...
Our school also gives public IP address to all our machines. It's so nice to be able to directly ssh/scp/sftp to your lab machine from home -- no tunnels, no firewalls, no VPN. Just you and your encrypted password. And then we go to some other institution and wonder why they take forever to load a web page -- and discover all the traffic for the entire network is being funneled through some machine which is trying desperately to NAT the entire campus's network. Siiiigh.
Yes I'm spoiled. It's good to be at a university that doesn't need to baby its users. If you run Windows and it's not up to date, it's kicked off the network until you patch it. Don't like that? Then run your *own* firewall, or switch to a system that doesn't leak like a sieve. Don't expect to ruin it for the rest of us because *you* choose to run insecure software.
The key is you have to select your OS interfaces to be portable from the start. If you plan on being portable, i.e. using OpenGL and other standards instead of Microsoft lock-ins, it should only add a few days of your dev team to handle platform-specific issues as they crop up. You can easily turn a profit from that perspective, especially if you assume that only a subset of the dev team would actually be handling low-level issues, since most of them should be working on the custom game mechanics that don't rely on any particular OS interface.
but regardless, thanks to NewYorkCountryLawyer for all the information and news they have provided -- maybe you didn't really want to do the interview or were short on time, that's understandable. Who are we to complain, it's not like we're paying you for it, yet generally you obviously do put time and effort into informing people, and I applaud you for it.
Right, and my reply, particularly if I was doing an *interview*, would not be just "i don't know, need more information." and that's it.
It was supposed to be an interview -- you discuss the question, give some of the main issues involved. It's not an yes/no answer that's needed, it's some kind of insight or information about what's involved in answering the question, to introduce people and enable them to follow up on their own. Even if it *were* just yes/no, you should still give a bit of background/analysis because thousands of people are going to read it.
So to continue your analogy, here's how I would answer your question:
"Doing funny things" isn't very descriptive. If you're getting popup windows when you're not doing anything, it's probably because you accidentally installed some adware [provide links for removal]. If the mouse is moving on it's own, someone is probably pranking you or remote controlling your computer [disconnect internet, etc.] If files are being corrupted, you hard disk may be going bad [how to test]. etc. Or if it's something else you'll need to provide more information, but those are commong problems.