I have seen a great number of posts where 'then' has been substituted for 'than'. What really surprises me is the writer is quite clearly of above average intelligence...
There are also a lot of idiots doing it too.
Hopefully unrelated, recall that just a couple of days ago someone substituted "women" for "woman" in the title of a Slashdot article submission. As I read down the comments to see how quickly someone would call it, I saw plenty of other phonetic substitutions, spelling and grammar problems in the posts that follow. Yet, nobody seemed to take note (or I suppose mention) the error in the title.
I used to think "at least the members of Slashdot will continue to be functionally literate, even if the rest of the web goes to shit." Unfortunately, in the last couple of years I've discovered I was wrong.
Hopefully, we're all over this now. Could we just put this all behind us and continue to bash the rest of the huge decline in literacy amongst modern youth?
I still have the first "PC Compatible" machine that I ever owned. My yellowed but trusty K6-II that I built myself after about a year's worth of internet research on how to build a computer, on the library's computers. I always regretted giving away my NES and my Commodore Plus/4, so I vowed to keep this one as long as it worked, and repair it as long as I could. It still chugs along @ 300mhz, with 128MB of RAM (which was expensive back in the day) and the 6.4GB hard drive. I put it together over the summer of 1999 from parts I bought at egghead auctions.
I wanted to run this fascinating thing I read about, called UNIX.
I initially ran Solaris 7 on it, because I hadn't heard of the BSDs at the time and someone convinced me that Linux was garbage. It has run pretty much everything that I could download since. I've had piles of other computers since then, but I still have this one. Truth be told, it's getting tough to run modern OSes on it these days. Even ArchLinux, who is otherwise the champion of "linux on old hardware" doesn't support it. It can run vanilla Debian 6.0 or the base install of the latest Free/Net/OpenBSD, but X or Xorg ist verboten. I tried to see if it would function as a MineCraft server but it doesn't have enough memory.
Mainly, I use it as a console-only FreeBSD development box (I'm relearning C after about 10+ years) and for some time it was a web and file server as well as my internet firewall. It also dual-boots Windows95 so I can play CnC Red Alert and DaggerFall.
Sometimes I consider digging out my old linux disks (Caldera 2.2, Slackware 7, Debian Potato etc, when I was trying them all out) and giving them a whirl. Why not?
Another angle to look at, that maybe the population on/. is now too young to have experienced:
The Cold War.
Part of what the Shuttle Program represented was American ingenuity, pride, craftsmanship and patriotism. At the time, the Shuttle was top titty when it came to LEO and space exploration. The Soviet Mir was great too, but the Shuttle is what America had. Many here have mentioned the youth that was inspired by the Shuttle Program to become scientists and engineers. This is true (and good, really) and it is complemented by a big fat "we're still beating those Commie Reds" as well.
Intelligence can be optimized with effort, but I think it's more something you're born with or not. I hate to be like that, but I think that some people are just smarter than others. (There is a HUGE difference between just being smart and what you do with it, however- nature vs. nurture, etc).
Nowadays, it is a pop-culture trend. Dumb chicks running around with the horn rimmed glasses because they want to look smart. Everyone THINKS they are geniuses. The self-esteem boosting tactics of the 90s have worked tremendously. Loads of Dunning-Kreuger effect abounds. The younger kids are calling themselves "nerds", which is something I or people my age probably never would have done. You didn't *want* to be a nerd in the 1980s. You hated yourself for it. The only solace you got out of it was watching NOVA or reruns of the original Star Trek with your friends, if you had any.
Same here. I was correcting the BitchX article (it pointed to Bitchx.com as the IRC Client's website, which is a domain squatter. BitchX.org is the real site). Within minutes, it was reverted. I corrected it again with a better description (assuming I wasn't clear enough the first time), same thing. Finally, someone else corrected it, and all history of the battle disappeared.
However, I did look at the history and saw that this has been done several times by several other people, only to get reverted back to the wrong website each time.
The only thing this really does is make me sad though. Wikipedia could be (and sometimes still is) a great resource, but bullshit like this is what ruins it for everyone.
... I, a 36 year old of average intelligence is astounded by the total dreck that my 20-something classmates hand in for college papers. Poor spelling, horrible grammar, inappropriate apostrophe use. Prose that smacks of illiteracy. Yet all of them seem to believe they are "brilliant geniuses" and "exceptional students."
I'm willing to bet that if you were their age, you'd be handing in the same "dreck" that they hand in.
I recently found a bunch of old college essay papers I'd written in my junior and senior years of college. I was appalled at my spelling and grammar. I, was a genius when I was 20, too.
I wish it were true, but it isn't. I thought this too, until I dug up some old stuff I had written in high school. I'm pretty sure that I read and write about the same as then, and I seem to remember all my classmates being on the same level.
When I first got into college and started to see this sort of thing in group projects and peer reviews, I figured "oh, the gradebook will shake these idiots out". What surprises me is that it doesn't.
One of the neatest things in my lifetime was when I got my first "computer-related" job in a small industrial park a few doors down from the old TSR Hobbies. They still had a sign out on the end of the road.
I don't expect anyone to be impressed by that, but I sure found it to be cool.
Now, show me someone twenty or under with an extensive paper book collection. People will stop buying paper books and people with paper book collections will die eventually.
Considering that most of them can't read beyond a 3rd grade level that's a bit unfair...
I really wish I could laugh at this, but I, a 36 year old of average intelligence is astounded by the total dreck that my 20-something classmates hand in for college papers. Poor spelling, horrible grammar, inappropriate apostrophe use. Prose that smacks of illiteracy. Yet all of them seem to believe they are "brilliant geniuses" and "exceptional students."
May Sauron help us all when these kids enter the workforce.
I'm happy just building shit. Just make building shit easier. (maybe build in some of the mod capabilities...)
Me too. Sometimes, after a long day of work trudging the brain through a bunch of technical or stressful stuff, it's somehow relaxing just to break blocks and stack them somewhere else. I can even do it with a beer in the other hand.
If you want to build something, you can build it. If you just want to saunter along with no tangible goal for awhile, that's ok too. The stuff you collect will fuel the building later.
My biggest complaint is that I wish there was an easier way to dump large quantities of stuff into bins or your 'on person' inventory. You know, one or two clicks and "all cobblestone goes into the storage bin". Two more clicks and "you pick up all pickaxes".
Well that and lava. I've lost so much cool stuff by falling into lava lately.
My computer's BIOS has this ability as well. I believe it is called "Splashtop". I can surf the web, watch porn^H^H^H^HYoutube videos, or make skype calls without spinning up any drives. I've used this feature to solve unbootable OSes (namely Ubuntu when GRUB gets hosed... again...)
I think this has been common on a lot of ASUS motherboards since about 2005. Hmm... Doesn't Apple farm their logic board designs out to ASUS?
I turn 37 this year. I figured I was written off as "completely irrelevant" as a gamer, a hacker, a consumer, as.... anything.... probably more than a decade ago.
I've watched the level of literacy and general acknowledgement of grammar, spelling, correct use of apostrophes and such decline over the last 5 years on the web. I even see it here. I thought this would be the last place it would happen, but it's occurring more and more every time I come back.
What frightens me more than anything are the new crop of 20-somethings I see in college every day. So many of them can't spell, can't read, can't write, are completely incompetent, yet they are so narcissistic and full of themselves and feel they're the most brilliant kids to ever grace the halls of the institution. College-level kids turning in 4th-grade level work in college courses. In some classes, the gradebook shakes them out pretty quick, in others it doesn't, to my surprise.
These are the ones that put on the dark-rimmed glasses and go around claiming to be the "genius by birth, slacker by choice" geeks. It's not all of them, but enough of them to where I have lost a lot of hope.
These are your future doctors, engineers, politicians and teachers.
In the 90s I remember IRC, ICQ and Usenet. I'm kind of a late-comer, as I have a 7-digit ICQ UIN. However, I think most of the fun or destruction came from scrolling chat rooms later on, such as HotelChat.
I do find it interesting that there are all these nostalgic "back in the day" stories on Slashdot of late. I have a feeling that this completes the passing of the Geek Torch from Gen X to Gen Y.
Aside from the historical and entertainment value, I've actually found old Usenet posts useful... I've found specs and configuration info on old hardware, howtos on old software and other great insight on numerous occasions.
Also, it's nice to remember when The Internet knew how to spell, use apostrophes and assemble sentences within some form of grammar.
I used to say that google's caching of Usenet was a great service to all of mankind.
Now I really wish they hadn't. The ability to dig through the archives (from a historical standpoint) is amazing, but what "google groups" has been doing to Usenet in the present is... sad.
Around 06 or so Ubuntu was pretty cool. I had high hopes for it, and expected it to become the "linux on the desktop" that we've been ranting about for years.
But slowly, yet methodically it just got more sluggish, buggier, dumbed down and overcomplicated. It seemed like every release had a different set of apps for everything, and things like network configuration kept jumping between the "preferences" menu and the "system administration" menu. Not a huge deal, but having to relearn the layouts ever time wasn't enjoyable. Finally, it got where the standard gnome interface of ubuntu was nearly unuseable on my hardware (too slow). I switched to Xubuntu, and found NO change in performance. It felt like it was just an XFCE theme on top of gnome.
I tried gold old Debian for a bit (it was my main squeeze for years and years) but finally just went back to Slackware (what I started with back in the 90s)
.....I want to say it was around 2003 or so around here, when there were all sorts of discussions about "the cost of hardware and bandwidth is so cheap now, we don't need to optimize for the machine, we should instead optimize for the programmer". This came up again and again, and all the n00b programmers danced around their shiny Powermacs and sang and held hands and ratified it.
Notice how everything has exploded exponentially in size, and each revision of any bit of software has been noticeably more sluggish than the last?
Slashdot Mirror
Not a Google+ member, so I might be off a bit. However, in regards to manually opting out of email updates... should the GP have to?
I have seen a great number of posts where 'then' has been substituted for 'than'. What really surprises me is the writer is quite clearly of above average intelligence...
There are also a lot of idiots doing it too.
Hopefully unrelated, recall that just a couple of days ago someone substituted "women" for "woman" in the title of a Slashdot article submission. As I read down the comments to see how quickly someone would call it, I saw plenty of other phonetic substitutions, spelling and grammar problems in the posts that follow. Yet, nobody seemed to take note (or I suppose mention) the error in the title.
I used to think "at least the members of Slashdot will continue to be functionally literate, even if the rest of the web goes to shit." Unfortunately, in the last couple of years I've discovered I was wrong.
Hopefully, we're all over this now. Could we just put this all behind us and continue to bash the rest of the huge decline in literacy amongst modern youth?
I still have the first "PC Compatible" machine that I ever owned. My yellowed but trusty K6-II that I built myself after about a year's worth of internet research on how to build a computer, on the library's computers. I always regretted giving away my NES and my Commodore Plus/4, so I vowed to keep this one as long as it worked, and repair it as long as I could. It still chugs along @ 300mhz, with 128MB of RAM (which was expensive back in the day) and the 6.4GB hard drive. I put it together over the summer of 1999 from parts I bought at egghead auctions.
I wanted to run this fascinating thing I read about, called UNIX.
I initially ran Solaris 7 on it, because I hadn't heard of the BSDs at the time and someone convinced me that Linux was garbage. It has run pretty much everything that I could download since. I've had piles of other computers since then, but I still have this one. Truth be told, it's getting tough to run modern OSes on it these days. Even ArchLinux, who is otherwise the champion of "linux on old hardware" doesn't support it. It can run vanilla Debian 6.0 or the base install of the latest Free/Net/OpenBSD, but X or Xorg ist verboten. I tried to see if it would function as a MineCraft server but it doesn't have enough memory.
Mainly, I use it as a console-only FreeBSD development box (I'm relearning C after about 10+ years) and for some time it was a web and file server as well as my internet firewall. It also dual-boots Windows95 so I can play CnC Red Alert and DaggerFall.
Sometimes I consider digging out my old linux disks (Caldera 2.2, Slackware 7, Debian Potato etc, when I was trying them all out) and giving them a whirl. Why not?
Another angle to look at, that maybe the population on /. is now too young to have experienced:
The Cold War.
Part of what the Shuttle Program represented was American ingenuity, pride, craftsmanship and patriotism. At the time, the Shuttle was top titty when it came to LEO and space exploration. The Soviet Mir was great too, but the Shuttle is what America had. Many here have mentioned the youth that was inspired by the Shuttle Program to become scientists and engineers. This is true (and good, really) and it is complemented by a big fat "we're still beating those Commie Reds" as well.
But I'm pretty sure I forgot about any sensations of my body when my bedroom stretched out and became a rollercoaster.
Intelligence can be optimized with effort, but I think it's more something you're born with or not. I hate to be like that, but I think that some people are just smarter than others. (There is a HUGE difference between just being smart and what you do with it, however- nature vs. nurture, etc).
Nowadays, it is a pop-culture trend. Dumb chicks running around with the horn rimmed glasses because they want to look smart. Everyone THINKS they are geniuses. The self-esteem boosting tactics of the 90s have worked tremendously. Loads of Dunning-Kreuger effect abounds. The younger kids are calling themselves "nerds", which is something I or people my age probably never would have done. You didn't *want* to be a nerd in the 1980s. You hated yourself for it. The only solace you got out of it was watching NOVA or reruns of the original Star Trek with your friends, if you had any.
Okay... I'll stop here before I get bitter.
Same here. I was correcting the BitchX article (it pointed to Bitchx.com as the IRC Client's website, which is a domain squatter. BitchX.org is the real site). Within minutes, it was reverted. I corrected it again with a better description (assuming I wasn't clear enough the first time), same thing. Finally, someone else corrected it, and all history of the battle disappeared.
However, I did look at the history and saw that this has been done several times by several other people, only to get reverted back to the wrong website each time.
The only thing this really does is make me sad though. Wikipedia could be (and sometimes still is) a great resource, but bullshit like this is what ruins it for everyone.
I've personally got an M Series- a 1956 M3 (the Baby B3)
This was the first thing I thought about regarding frequency changes.
They say that it's been 60hz since the 1930s, but IIRC it was 50hz up into just after WWII
... I, a 36 year old of average intelligence is astounded by the total dreck that my 20-something classmates hand in for college papers. Poor spelling, horrible grammar, inappropriate apostrophe use. Prose that smacks of illiteracy. Yet all of them seem to believe they are "brilliant geniuses" and "exceptional students."
I'm willing to bet that if you were their age, you'd be handing in the same "dreck" that they hand in.
I recently found a bunch of old college essay papers I'd written in my junior and senior years of college. I was appalled at my spelling and grammar. I, was a genius when I was 20, too.
I wish it were true, but it isn't. I thought this too, until I dug up some old stuff I had written in high school. I'm pretty sure that I read and write about the same as then, and I seem to remember all my classmates being on the same level.
When I first got into college and started to see this sort of thing in group projects and peer reviews, I figured "oh, the gradebook will shake these idiots out". What surprises me is that it doesn't.
I grew up playing plenty of DnD in the 1980s.
One of the neatest things in my lifetime was when I got my first "computer-related" job in a small industrial park a few doors down from the old TSR Hobbies. They still had a sign out on the end of the road.
I don't expect anyone to be impressed by that, but I sure found it to be cool.
I actually went to a zoo today. We have a free one in our city.
The Lion didn't do much, just sat around on a huge rock in the sun. I told my girlfriend that he's got the privilege, because today is Father's Day.
Now, show me someone twenty or under with an extensive paper book collection. People will stop buying paper books and people with paper book collections will die eventually.
Considering that most of them can't read beyond a 3rd grade level that's a bit unfair...
I really wish I could laugh at this, but I, a 36 year old of average intelligence is astounded by the total dreck that my 20-something classmates hand in for college papers. Poor spelling, horrible grammar, inappropriate apostrophe use. Prose that smacks of illiteracy. Yet all of them seem to believe they are "brilliant geniuses" and "exceptional students."
May Sauron help us all when these kids enter the workforce.
I'm happy just building shit. Just make building shit easier. (maybe build in some of the mod capabilities...)
Me too. Sometimes, after a long day of work trudging the brain through a bunch of technical or stressful stuff, it's somehow relaxing just to break blocks and stack them somewhere else. I can even do it with a beer in the other hand.
If you want to build something, you can build it. If you just want to saunter along with no tangible goal for awhile, that's ok too. The stuff you collect will fuel the building later.
My biggest complaint is that I wish there was an easier way to dump large quantities of stuff into bins or your 'on person' inventory. You know, one or two clicks and "all cobblestone goes into the storage bin". Two more clicks and "you pick up all pickaxes".
Well that and lava. I've lost so much cool stuff by falling into lava lately.
Fuck yeah!
Gimme Lego Technic and Minecraft!
My computer's BIOS has this ability as well. I believe it is called "Splashtop". I can surf the web, watch porn^H^H^H^HYoutube videos, or make skype calls without spinning up any drives. I've used this feature to solve unbootable OSes (namely Ubuntu when GRUB gets hosed... again...)
I think this has been common on a lot of ASUS motherboards since about 2005. Hmm... Doesn't Apple farm their logic board designs out to ASUS?
Is there anything the government can't keep it's paws out of?
"it's" as in "it is" or "its"?
I turn 37 this year. I figured I was written off as "completely irrelevant" as a gamer, a hacker, a consumer, as.... anything.... probably more than a decade ago.
37 is an awkward age to be.
It actually goes deeper than this.
I've watched the level of literacy and general acknowledgement of grammar, spelling, correct use of apostrophes and such decline over the last 5 years on the web. I even see it here. I thought this would be the last place it would happen, but it's occurring more and more every time I come back.
What frightens me more than anything are the new crop of 20-somethings I see in college every day. So many of them can't spell, can't read, can't write, are completely incompetent, yet they are so narcissistic and full of themselves and feel they're the most brilliant kids to ever grace the halls of the institution. College-level kids turning in 4th-grade level work in college courses. In some classes, the gradebook shakes them out pretty quick, in others it doesn't, to my surprise.
These are the ones that put on the dark-rimmed glasses and go around claiming to be the "genius by birth, slacker by choice" geeks. It's not all of them, but enough of them to where I have lost a lot of hope.
These are your future doctors, engineers, politicians and teachers.
In the 90s I remember IRC, ICQ and Usenet. I'm kind of a late-comer, as I have a 7-digit ICQ UIN. However, I think most of the fun or destruction came from scrolling chat rooms later on, such as HotelChat.
I do find it interesting that there are all these nostalgic "back in the day" stories on Slashdot of late. I have a feeling that this completes the passing of the Geek Torch from Gen X to Gen Y.
Aside from the historical and entertainment value, I've actually found old Usenet posts useful... I've found specs and configuration info on old hardware, howtos on old software and other great insight on numerous occasions.
Also, it's nice to remember when The Internet knew how to spell, use apostrophes and assemble sentences within some form of grammar.
*sighs at those Gen Y kids*
I used to say that google's caching of Usenet was a great service to all of mankind.
Now I really wish they hadn't. The ability to dig through the archives (from a historical standpoint) is amazing, but what "google groups" has been doing to Usenet in the present is... sad.
Around 06 or so Ubuntu was pretty cool. I had high hopes for it, and expected it to become the "linux on the desktop" that we've been ranting about for years.
But slowly, yet methodically it just got more sluggish, buggier, dumbed down and overcomplicated. It seemed like every release had a different set of apps for everything, and things like network configuration kept jumping between the "preferences" menu and the "system administration" menu. Not a huge deal, but having to relearn the layouts ever time wasn't enjoyable. Finally, it got where the standard gnome interface of ubuntu was nearly unuseable on my hardware (too slow). I switched to Xubuntu, and found NO change in performance. It felt like it was just an XFCE theme on top of gnome.
I tried gold old Debian for a bit (it was my main squeeze for years and years) but finally just went back to Slackware (what I started with back in the 90s)
Linux is linux again :-)
.....I want to say it was around 2003 or so around here, when there were all sorts of discussions about "the cost of hardware and bandwidth is so cheap now, we don't need to optimize for the machine, we should instead optimize for the programmer". This came up again and again, and all the n00b programmers danced around their shiny Powermacs and sang and held hands and ratified it.
Notice how everything has exploded exponentially in size, and each revision of any bit of software has been noticeably more sluggish than the last?
This is why. Don't say I didn't warn you.
...er extra 'k' on the 70 km/h there, but you know what I mean.