These studies are very reliable indicators of whether the researchers are of the computer gaming generation or not. Whether a study indicates that violent computer games are bad is very closely correlated with whether the researcher plays violent computer games. It does not tell you much about the children studied though.
You can be sure that the control group in this study was sitting still doing nothing. Well, with some confidence I predict that violent tendencies and heart rate are closely correlated, as are violent tendencies and adrenaline. Send the children out to play dodgeball, with a control group consisting of children sitting in a room doing nothing, and you will find that dodgeball leads to increased acts of aggression. I am sure you will find correlations between playing on the jungle gym and aggression, playing on a waterslide and aggression, playing anything that raises the heartrate and adrenaline and aggression, so long as your control group is sitting still in a room doing nothing.
What this is about is hatred of the male. This is oppression of the new generation's expression of traditional male culture. There is no science here, only cultural warfare masquerading as it.
I don't understand why they went for soybean oil. It isn't cost effective yet, so why? A car that can do 0 to 60 in 4 seconds and gets 50 mpg is worth buying, even if it does not have anti-lock brakes, etc. Using soybean oil before gas becomes more expensive than soybean oil is a premature optimization. Of course, if gas prices double in the next few years, all sorts of alternative fuels may become reasonable, and it is possible that could happen according to some forecasts.
As for open sourcing the design, why do you begrudge them a profit? You think these kids don't need the money? I do free software because I choose to, but the data don't support the hypothesis that it is a practical way to make a living.
If I was an auto company, I would hire these kids pretty quick. And their teacher too.;-)
One of the things I still remember from when I was 16 and in ROTC basic training was the feeling of a tank firing near you. When it fires, the wave of sound goes through your body, and you are intensely aware of what a frail thing you are. The feeling of being tissue paper, I still remember it. Nobody will ever make speakers that sound quite like a real tank.
You may understand intellectually that you are tissue paper, but until you feel it via the shockwave of sound, it will never be entirely real to you emotionally.
All that said, videogames do a lot to help one understand one's mortality.
Did you notice the change in government in Russia? Did you notice that the average person on the street in Russia, when surveyed by the press in Russia, just does not care about censorship?
The reason Putin can censor is that the only people who really care are talkers not doers.
Go out and shoot him, and I will not only apologize, I will spend time living there again. I went there thinking that democracy was going to win --- I did not expect to be told stories that the KGB had secretly funded Yeltsin, and find myself thinking how it explains a lot (like how the KGB was picked to succeed him, or how his first couple of successor picks, as soon as they threatened to fix things, were dumped).
Oh, and regarding Soviet culture, maybe at big universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg they understand the ideas in the US bill of rights, but most of Russia still believes in Soviet culture. In the 80's the streets were safe, people tell me stories that people seeing people sing and smile in the streets was common, cops did good work, soviet film making was much better in quality than it is now, etc.
The big failing of the Russian academic elites is that they think they are too good to have to be bothered with educating the masses on things like why a free press matters. The masses in Russia hate the elites in Russia more than is true in the US, and the elites are at least half of the reason why.
What can I say, most of the elites that were bold enough to support freedom got shot. There are still a few though, and maybe they will pull off a return to democracy.
Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that most of the democratic forces are depressed and discouraged. People need hope to be free.
Sharp readers will note that most Americans, when asked about the various things in the bill of rights, oppose them when asked about concrete situations rather than being told they are being asked about the bill of rights.
So freedom has always been an elitist abstraction, and it has been eroding lately in the US also.
Please remember that one of the founders of Google is Russian, and in Russian culture censorship is just not evil. Censorship is what you do if you have the power to do it. Nothing more.
So, when Google says don't be evil, they mean it sincerely. They just don't mean what us Americans mean.
Also, keep in mind that the US government is doing nothing, repeat, nothing, to prevent foreign governments from pressuring US based companies into censorship. If you want there to be no censorship by China, then pass a law stating that any company that censors material based on the request of a foreign government which is not also censorable under US law may not do business in the US.
If you aren't willing to pass such a law, which will have a price, then don't complain about Google.
Please consider the enormous strategic importance of the Chinese market for Google. China is growing FAST. Also consider that Google most likely does not consider themselves to be irreplaceable for China, and that there is really not a lot they can do (unless the US Government pushes back against China in this culture war). Then consider one last time that in Russian culture this is just not evil.
This is a job for the US Government, not Google or Microsoft. Oh dear. Sigh.:-/
In any discussion of whether a new medium of expression is a good thing, never pay any attention to the disparaging remarks of anyone who is old enough that the medium is new to them. It does not matter how they dress it up as a study, they are too old to be unprejudiced.
If you don't agree, read about the furors over dime store novels, talking movies, or, greatest horror of horrors, the dramas that Plato complained of.
I don't do instant messaging, but at least I have the wisdom to know that it is because I am old and not because I am wise.
Hmm. Ok, I will go login to gaim, out of shame at being so old, it just doesn't excite me though....
If someone does not know that filesystem benchmarks that take less than a tenth of a second are meaningless, it makes you wonder if they made errors in other aspects as well. These results are not consistent with the results that we have had. I bet he did not make an effort to ensure that you had to read the disk for these benchmarks, that he did not copy his file set from the same fs as he was measuring (makes a HUGE difference to performance and it is the mistake every beginner makes), etc. You'll note that the way he makes his graphs makes 1% differences look huge, etc.
You fail to understand the reality of our legal system if you think you have any legal rights when you lack an attorney. We live in a caste system. Judges simply do not read briefs unless they are written by lawyers. As soon as someone goes pro per, the lawyer on the other side always starts writing its briefs so that the judge does not need to read the other side's briefs, you can see the shift in language. Then, when you read the decisions, it is clear that the judge did not read the brief of the pro per party. Judges are former attorneys. They defend the interests of the legal caste. It is completely irrelevant what the merits of a case are when you lack an attorney. People who think otherwise think that the law is more than the ritual of language by which the herd enforces social position.
Being in court without a lawyer is no different from being black in court in the South in the 1920's. They will find some way of explaining that it is your fault that you lost, some way to justify their legal decision, but there is no chance you will not lose.
Considering the impact of free software on the industry, $144 million is pretty small stuff. If a bubble that size bursts, will anyone notice? People will notice if Google goes under with their $15 billion dollar valuation based on a free service, or if the "network" television companies go under as a result of the Internet. Calling $144 million a bubble of significance is just headline hunting.
Free software is maturing and growing still. In ten years....
The legitimate thing that I can imagine is if it was a cost based contract that was given out before the cost of the hardware was known.
Was it?
Backstabbing within Free Software Community is Bad
on
Governments & Open Source
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
We need to wait until MS is defeated before we start publicly fighting among ourselves. When the audience is persons considering free vs. MS software, we need to convey that all the distros are good guys, and save the XYZ distro is evil stuff for those who are converted already. Besides, it is true, every one of the Gnu/Linux distros is staffed by far nicer human beings than MS has, even the ones that steal the credits from those who write the stuff.
Given how few schools are privately owned, I can see why consolidation might be necessary in the "enterprise software for the education industry" market.
Sorry, but Stallman of www.fsf.org was the one, and Linus made an important contribution (the kernel was only one of many pieces needed by the OS), but not as important as those made by the guy who failed to name anything after himself.
First we needed an editor (emacs), then a compiler (gcc), a bunch of utilities (things like cp got written by the fsf), a license (the GPL), and only after all that Stallman originated stuff was in place were we ready for a kernel.
It seems to me that using a robot is a way too fancy technology that is not very functional. My children have a leap pad which teaches them to read when they move a wand over it. Costs about $30 each if I remember right. They play $10-$30 dollar computer games on my computer that I use for my work. It's all functional. Robots are not.
Robots are for when you need the robot to move around. That functionality is utterly irrelevant to teaching children to read, thus a robot is irrelevant to teaching technology in its fundamental nature (ok, someday robots can usefully teach gym class, but not today).
What Aspects of Shadow Magic Make It More Playable
on
Ask Sid Meier
·
· Score: 1
Have you looked at why Shadow Magic is somehow more playable as a game? Do you think the manual combat feature it has is a lot of fun? Do you think more elaborate combat would allow units to have more attributes than attack and defense and hitpoints, and thereby make the impact of technological advances "feel" right? Isn't it a lot more satisfying to use technological improvements when you can move the unit around in combat to use it?
Thanks for giving me a great game to use in inspiring my son to read! Your game is one of the more educational ones out there for kids.
Not some, I pay almost all.:-/ Unfortunately a lot of the debt is to the people whose salaries are overdue. I thank uhoreg for understanding that funding not budgeting is the problem. Budgeting is easy to do, it is funding that is not so easy.
Regarding how to compute it, the standard algorithm traditional to boolean algebra works reasonably well, in which you take the intersection of all of the sets matching the subnames, starting the computation with the smallest of those sets.
Ah that's hilarious, ok, yeah, it was Linus saying it. Apologies for not remembering and thinking it was someone at MS.:-))) Can't imagine why the poster put my name on it though.....
I never said the above words attributed to "Rieser".
I am sure of it becuase I would absolutely never say that "Linux kernel developers do what's right because it is _right_, not because somebody else does it.".
I am just not that nice a guy that I would say such a thing.:-/ I am guilty of saying the opposite at various times. I am known for this, and not particularly liked for it.:-)
This is a forged quote. Note the false defensiveness put into it in the sentence "So there's really no point in trying to push your agenda by trying to scare people with MS activities." That really sounds like someone at MS posted this.
It does not matter so deeply that MS put it into or out of the kernel, what matters is how they layered the code relative to itself --- that is, do they use the FS API, which lacks an insert or excise operation, to repack small objects that they squished together within a file, and does that layering make things slow. I think it almost certainly does make it slow, and it definitely is inelegant.
Reiser4 is technologically ahead of WinFS as a high performance storage layer, see www.namesys.com for details on its design. When you do this layering the way they did it, with the metadata stored in a layer above the FS rather than integrated into it, you lose a lot of performance while gain the advantage of successfully avoiding dealing with a host of technical issues. We are at least 5 years ahead of them technically in the storage layer.
That said, semantic enhancements matter more than performance, and it is better to do something semantically than to do nothing, and what Linux currently is doing is nothing.
The political support for adding semantic enhancements to Linux namespaces is mixed at best. I worry we will see that death by committee rules, and there will be no belief that each FS should try to innovate in its own way and compete with the others until one is proven the right solution. We are in serious danger of having MS implement bad technology, and Linux having to devote large amounts of resources to copying it in 5 years because we were late and chose to trail rather than lead. If the filesystems were free to compete in semantics, we could have one or several of the Linux filesystems leading them instead.
SQL and the relational model is fundamentally the wrong model for semi-structured data. See www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html for why.
Technically, I would worry much more about Apple. Dominic Giampaolo is very bright, and well funded. His chances of delivering on a good set of semantics are high because he and Jobs are very sharp, and neither of them is afraid to go where no one has gone before. Our chances of losing technically to Giampaolo and Jobs are high, because we are frankly not well funded, and a lot of us are complacent with semantics that are still pretty much the same as their father's Unix box.
So, in summary, I would say that we are still ahead but losing speed fast.
Go to country with no controls on pirates (Russia, China, etc.), buy a pirated copy for all your users, get a receipt, write down their street address, tell Microsoft, suddenly you have free windows legal copies for all your users. If you have 20 users, it more than pays for the airfare.....
Can you imagine, ring, ring, "Hello, is this Sheila? What an odd hissing noise. Sheila, are you there? I can hear faint noises.... Sheila, is there a man in your house? I hear him yelling. Pick up the phone! Oh dear, some man is crying, I can hear it.... Why doesn't anyone pick up the phone? I wonder if I dialed right."
Slashdot Mirror
These studies are very reliable indicators of whether the researchers are of the computer gaming generation or not. Whether a study indicates that violent computer games are bad is very closely correlated with whether the researcher plays violent computer games. It does not tell you much about the children studied though.
You can be sure that the control group in this study was sitting still doing nothing. Well, with some confidence I predict that violent tendencies and heart rate are closely correlated, as are violent tendencies and adrenaline. Send the children out to play dodgeball, with a control group consisting of children sitting in a room doing nothing, and you will find that dodgeball leads to increased acts of aggression. I am sure you will find correlations between playing on the jungle gym and aggression, playing on a waterslide and aggression, playing anything that raises the heartrate and adrenaline and aggression, so long as your control group is sitting still in a room doing nothing.
What this is about is hatred of the male. This is oppression of the new generation's expression of traditional male culture. There is no science here, only cultural warfare masquerading as it.
I don't understand why they went for soybean oil. It isn't cost effective yet, so why? A car that can do 0 to 60 in 4 seconds and gets 50 mpg is worth buying, even if it does not have anti-lock brakes, etc. Using soybean oil before gas becomes more expensive than soybean oil is a premature optimization. Of course, if gas prices double in the next few years, all sorts of alternative fuels may become reasonable, and it is possible that could happen according to some forecasts.
As for open sourcing the design, why do you begrudge them a profit? You think these kids don't need the money? I do free software because I choose to, but the data don't support the hypothesis that it is a practical way to make a living.
If I was an auto company, I would hire these kids pretty quick. And their teacher too.;-)
One of the things I still remember from when I was 16 and in ROTC basic training was the feeling of a tank firing near you. When it fires, the wave of sound goes through your body, and you are intensely aware of what a frail thing you are. The feeling of being tissue paper, I still remember it. Nobody will ever make speakers that sound quite like a real tank.
You may understand intellectually that you are tissue paper, but until you feel it via the shockwave of sound, it will never be entirely real to you emotionally.
All that said, videogames do a lot to help one understand one's mortality.
Did you notice the change in government in Russia? Did you notice that the average person on the street in Russia, when surveyed by the press in Russia, just does not care about censorship?
The reason Putin can censor is that the only people who really care are talkers not doers.
Go out and shoot him, and I will not only apologize, I will spend time living there again. I went there thinking that democracy was going to win --- I did not expect to be told stories that the KGB had secretly funded Yeltsin, and find myself thinking how it explains a lot (like how the KGB was picked to succeed him, or how his first couple of successor picks, as soon as they threatened to fix things, were dumped).
Oh, and regarding Soviet culture, maybe at big universities in Moscow and St. Petersburg they understand the ideas in the US bill of rights, but most of Russia still believes in Soviet culture. In the 80's the streets were safe, people tell me stories that people seeing people sing and smile in the streets was common, cops did good work, soviet film making was much better in quality than it is now, etc.
The big failing of the Russian academic elites is that they think they are too good to have to be bothered with educating the masses on things like why a free press matters. The masses in Russia hate the elites in Russia more than is true in the US, and the elites are at least half of the reason why.
What can I say, most of the elites that were bold enough to support freedom got shot. There are still a few though, and maybe they will pull off a return to democracy.
Unfortunately, I think the biggest problem is that most of the democratic forces are depressed and discouraged. People need hope to be free.
Sharp readers will note that most Americans, when asked about the various things in the bill of rights, oppose them when asked about concrete situations rather than being told they are being asked about the bill of rights.
So freedom has always been an elitist abstraction, and it has been eroding lately in the US also.
Please remember that one of the founders of Google is Russian, and in Russian culture censorship is just not evil. Censorship is what you do if you have the power to do it. Nothing more.
So, when Google says don't be evil, they mean it sincerely. They just don't mean what us Americans mean.
Also, keep in mind that the US government is doing nothing, repeat, nothing, to prevent foreign governments from pressuring US based companies into censorship. If you want there to be no censorship by China, then pass a law stating that any company that censors material based on the request of a foreign government which is not also censorable under US law may not do business in the US.
If you aren't willing to pass such a law, which will have a price, then don't complain about Google.
Please consider the enormous strategic importance of the Chinese market for Google. China is growing FAST. Also consider that Google most likely does not consider themselves to be irreplaceable for China, and that there is really not a lot they can do (unless the US Government pushes back against China in this culture war). Then consider one last time that in Russian culture this is just not evil.
This is a job for the US Government, not Google or Microsoft. Oh dear. Sigh.:-/
In any discussion of whether a new medium of expression is a good thing, never pay any attention to the disparaging remarks of anyone who is old enough that the medium is new to them. It does not matter how they dress it up as a study, they are too old to be unprejudiced.
If you don't agree, read about the furors over dime store novels, talking movies, or, greatest horror of horrors, the dramas that Plato complained of.
I don't do instant messaging, but at least I have the wisdom to know that it is because I am old and not because I am wise.
Hmm. Ok, I will go login to gaim, out of shame at being so old, it just doesn't excite me though....
Hans
If someone does not know that filesystem benchmarks that take less than a tenth of a second are meaningless, it makes you wonder if they made errors in other aspects as well. These results are not consistent with the results that we have had. I bet he did not make an effort to ensure that you had to read the disk for these benchmarks, that he did not copy his file set from the same fs as he was measuring (makes a HUGE difference to performance and it is the mistake every beginner makes), etc. You'll note that the way he makes his graphs makes 1% differences look huge, etc.
You fail to understand the reality of our legal system if you think you have any legal rights when you lack an attorney. We live in a caste system. Judges simply do not read briefs unless they are written by lawyers. As soon as someone goes pro per, the lawyer on the other side always starts writing its briefs so that the judge does not need to read the other side's briefs, you can see the shift in language. Then, when you read the decisions, it is clear that the judge did not read the brief of the pro per party. Judges are former attorneys. They defend the interests of the legal caste. It is completely irrelevant what the merits of a case are when you lack an attorney. People who think otherwise think that the law is more than the ritual of language by which the herd enforces social position.
Being in court without a lawyer is no different from being black in court in the South in the 1920's. They will find some way of explaining that it is your fault that you lost, some way to justify their legal decision, but there is no chance you will not lose.
Google's service is indeed free. As is network television. Do not confuse free and profitless please.
Considering the impact of free software on the industry, $144 million is pretty small stuff. If a bubble that size bursts, will anyone notice? People will notice if Google goes under with their $15 billion dollar valuation based on a free service, or if the "network" television companies go under as a result of the Internet. Calling $144 million a bubble of significance is just headline hunting.
Free software is maturing and growing still. In ten years....
Hans
The legitimate thing that I can imagine is if it was a cost based contract that was given out before the cost of the hardware was known.
Was it?
We need to wait until MS is defeated before we start publicly fighting among ourselves. When the audience is persons considering free vs. MS software, we need to convey that all the distros are good guys, and save the XYZ distro is evil stuff for those who are converted already. Besides, it is true, every one of the Gnu/Linux distros is staffed by far nicer human beings than MS has, even the ones that steal the credits from those who write the stuff.
See the shades of grey please people.
Given how few schools are privately owned, I can see why consolidation might be necessary in the "enterprise software for the education industry" market.
Or did I miss something?
Sorry, but Stallman of www.fsf.org was the one, and Linus made an important contribution (the kernel was only one of many pieces needed by the OS), but not as important as those made by the guy who failed to name anything after himself.
First we needed an editor (emacs), then a compiler (gcc), a bunch of utilities (things like cp got written by the fsf), a license (the GPL), and only after all that Stallman originated stuff was in place were we ready for a kernel.
Hans
It seems to me that using a robot is a way too fancy technology that is not very functional. My children have a leap pad which teaches them to read when they move a wand over it. Costs about $30 each if I remember right. They play $10-$30 dollar computer games on my computer that I use for my work. It's all functional. Robots are not.
Robots are for when you need the robot to move around. That functionality is utterly irrelevant to teaching children to read, thus a robot is irrelevant to teaching technology in its fundamental nature (ok, someday robots can usefully teach gym class, but not today).
Have you looked at why Shadow Magic is somehow more playable as a game? Do you think the manual combat feature it has is a lot of fun? Do you think more elaborate combat would allow units to have more attributes than attack and defense and hitpoints, and thereby make the impact of technological advances "feel" right? Isn't it a lot more satisfying to use technological improvements when you can move the unit around in combat to use it?
Thanks for giving me a great game to use in inspiring my son to read! Your game is one of the more educational ones out there for kids.
Not some, I pay almost all.:-/ Unfortunately a lot of the debt is to the people whose salaries are overdue. I thank uhoreg for understanding that funding not budgeting is the problem. Budgeting is easy to do, it is funding that is not so easy.
How about the semantics described in The ReiserFS Future Vision Whitepaper
Regarding how to compute it, the standard algorithm traditional to boolean algebra works reasonably well, in which you take the intersection of all of the sets matching the subnames, starting the computation with the smallest of those sets.
Hans
Well, that makes a lot more sense now, and surely the poster was just confused rather than malicious.
Linus and I disagree on this point, a pity that.
Ah that's hilarious, ok, yeah, it was Linus saying it. Apologies for not remembering and thinking it was someone at MS.:-))) Can't imagine why the poster put my name on it though.....
Hans Reiser
I never said the above words attributed to "Rieser".
I am sure of it becuase I would absolutely never say that "Linux kernel developers do what's right because it is _right_, not because somebody else does it.".
I am just not that nice a guy that I would say such a thing.:-/ I am guilty of saying the opposite at various times. I am known for this, and not particularly liked for it.:-)
This is a forged quote. Note the false defensiveness put into it in the sentence "So there's really no point in trying to push your agenda by trying to scare people with MS activities." That really sounds like someone at MS posted this.
It does not matter so deeply that MS put it into or out of the kernel, what matters is how they layered the code relative to itself --- that is, do they use the FS API, which lacks an insert or excise operation, to repack small objects that they squished together within a file, and does that layering make things slow. I think it almost certainly does make it slow, and it definitely is inelegant.
Hans Reiser
Reiser4 Architect
Namesys
Reiser4 is technologically ahead of WinFS as a high performance storage layer, see www.namesys.com for details on its design. When you do this layering the way they did it, with the metadata stored in a layer above the FS rather than integrated into it, you lose a lot of performance while gain the advantage of successfully avoiding dealing with a host of technical issues. We are at least 5 years ahead of them technically in the storage layer.
That said, semantic enhancements matter more than performance, and it is better to do something semantically than to do nothing, and what Linux currently is doing is nothing.
The political support for adding semantic enhancements to Linux namespaces is mixed at best. I worry we will see that death by committee rules, and there will be no belief that each FS should try to innovate in its own way and compete with the others until one is proven the right solution. We are in serious danger of having MS implement bad technology, and Linux having to devote large amounts of resources to copying it in 5 years because we were late and chose to trail rather than lead. If the filesystems were free to compete in semantics, we could have one or several of the Linux filesystems leading them instead.
SQL and the relational model is fundamentally the wrong model for semi-structured data. See www.namesys.com/whitepaper.html for why.
Technically, I would worry much more about Apple. Dominic Giampaolo is very bright, and well funded. His chances of delivering on a good set of semantics are high because he and Jobs are very sharp, and neither of them is afraid to go where no one has gone before. Our chances of losing technically to Giampaolo and Jobs are high, because we are frankly not well funded, and a lot of us are complacent with semantics that are still pretty much the same as their father's Unix box.
So, in summary, I would say that we are still ahead but losing speed fast.
Thanks for your kind words Hisham.
Go to country with no controls on pirates (Russia, China, etc.), buy a pirated copy for all your users, get a receipt, write down their street address, tell Microsoft, suddenly you have free windows legal copies for all your users. If you have 20 users, it more than pays for the airfare.....
Kind of amusing....
Hans
Can you imagine, ring, ring, "Hello, is this Sheila? What an odd hissing noise. Sheila, are you there? I can hear faint noises.... Sheila, is there a man in your house? I hear him yelling. Pick up the phone! Oh dear, some man is crying, I can hear it.... Why doesn't anyone pick up the phone? I wonder if I dialed right."
I doubt very much that it is purely a mental illusion, and I favor the atmosperic lens distortion explanation.
If someone has the right tool (still thinking about what that is) we can measure it tonight and prove the hypothesis....
Err, except that I see clouds out my window....