There is a very significant distinction between admitting that people are different, some are worse and some are better, and actually discriminating people. The first is rational, logical and justified. The second is usually stupid.
When you are hiring a mathematician, you can make a prediction about the candidate's skills based on his/her gender. But a reasonable hiring process must evaluate the candidate's abilities slightly better than just looking at his name. And it is entirely possible to have a fair selection (by using a defined set of standards), while admitting that women are generally not as good.
A recruiter who hires men when there are better female candidates is simply a moron, but the one who hires the best human for the job and it just so happens that it's usually the best man is not.
Yeah. Of course, a serious researcher would just ask random people what is their IQ and then conclude that women have lower IQ, because many of them never took the test and were assigned a value of zero. Sure.
And it would never occur to that researcher to find N women and N men, ask them to pass an IQ test in a controlled environment, with necessary adjustements for their familiarity with IQ tests, and then make conclusions. That would be unscientific.
but that doesn't mean I don't know women that couldn't kick Danny DeVito's butt.
But that explains why construction companies employ more men than women. And that fact would justify a top construction official speaking at a conference suggesting that may be women are not as successful in construction because of innate differences...
This is a really stupid attitude from the employers, a remnant of simplier times perhaps, when the employee was supposed to have ONE career in ONE company for the whole life. But it's now much more common for people to switch jobs on a whim, just because they want to do something new. Why should it make much difference now whether you are a woman or not? In any case in 5 years you would probably be gone.
As for the innate differences, there probably are more than you admit. Personally (that's just my personal experience recently, not representative of all females) I can't stand all the women I am talking with not being able to admit they made a small error a minute ago and insisting I must be making that up (a wrong word used, a different number, etc.). Often I intentionally make a mental note of the mistake right when it is being made, only to have that woman (and I don't recall this happening with men) deny it. But all those differences should not be perceived as purely negative. Men and women think differently, but people of a same gender think differently too.
The answers to the question "do you think it was offensive?" at Local6 were Yes (43%) and No (52%). I wonder if there is any correlation between the answer given and the gender of the respondent.
You are definitely a Luddite and a human chauvinist. You are a disgrace to human race. And the idea of shortsighted people like you being allowed to post online really freaks me out.
P.S. Not to mention that you have serious problems with logic, probably caused by your sub-par intelligence. Just a few months ago the work was finished on restoring documentary films about early 20th century Britain. Do you think that the British cultural heritage should not have been preserved by film cameras? Do you think it has lost its meaning? We humans use technology, deal with it.
P.P.S. And don't you dare post your opinion on an Internet forum ever again. That's disgusting, go to a park or a public square, and share your opinions with others, don't hide behind a computer. Communications between humans should never be done via a computer or a telephone, otherwise they lose their meaning.
This was noted a long time ago. I remember reading something by Mark Twain (don't remember the book now, I was a REALLY young kid then) where he spoke about rich people paying money so that they could basically drive a stage-coach, that is doing something, which other people consider "work". The difference is, of course, in whether you HAVE to do it or CHOSE to do it.
As for reality shows, you are completely right (but you misspelled "all"). When I catch a glimpse of them (sadly, the women in my family are strangly fond of one), I am completely amazed at how it is possible to fill 60 minutes with absolutely no content, besides some morons speaking about their BOOOOOORING attempts at relationships to each others. Some people must find it fascinating. I find it fascinating that they do.:-|
This idea looks horrible only because you are an ardent Sims fan. I am not a huge Sims fan, although I sometimes play Sims 2, and I would be happy if this show was created (even though I would have no chances seeing it, as I don't intend to come to US). Even if it would have only a passing resemblance to the game. The merging of several forms of entertainment (TV, films, games) is ultimately a good thing, but it can only be gradual. I don't expect the borders disappearing for at least 5-15 years, but for it to happen, we need small steps such as Sims reality show. As Bolz said, "It's a generational question. The world is changing and no one can stop it." So good luck to EA.
Another great demonstration of your point could be this screenshot. You can skin a Windows desktop, remove menus from Explorer and use a bunch of icons ripped from OS X, but it would still be a Windows desktop.
Still, a properly Aqua-skinned application is better than one which is not even skinned. I don't understand why it's so hard to port OO.o even at that level.
I find that one of the most striking features of his films is the abundance of details. Quite often (most of the time, actually), animated films omit a lot of background activity, irrelevant details, robbing the fictional world of it believability. In Miyazaki films, however, I always notice how details such as hand movement when opening a door always appear well thought out and natural. Instead of glossing over such trivialities and using overly broad strokes (just to tell the story and set the general tone for scenes) he (and his artists, of course) enjoys details, which really makes the world feel real and interesting.
I already don't have enough time to watch all films I want to watch and read all books I want to read (much worse with the books, as they take longer than 90 minutes to finish and there are more of them). And you want me to waste more of my time on organising my collection and "wanted" list? No way.:) That, and I don't have a Mac, sadly.
The industrialized world has worked out a basically mixed system
This mixed system was developed to a very large degree BECAUSE of Soviet Union. Socialist and communist parties, labour and human rights movements were supported by Moscow to a large extent. Furthermore, the capitalists saw a very vivid example of what can happen to them if they do not share their wealth with workers.
Communism is better than capitalism because it can a) provide greater wealth (if done right) by eliminating the class of capitalists (billionaires like Gates) and b) support the knowledge economy and the future abundance economy (with nanotech, robots, AI) better.
Communism is not incompatible with free market elements either. It's just the centrally planned economies that are. As for safety nets, they are great, but its still better to have a country where the constitution says the primary goal of the country is personal development of each person.
Soviet Union was not "a poverty-laden murder-fest". In 1960s-1980s the quality of life was relatively high (lower than in the richest capitalist countries, but comparable with average capitalist countries) an there was no murder-fest.
The truth is that you don't need exceptional tools to fight terrorists. You just need funding and good people. The legal aspects can usually be taken care of afterwards. Everyone is willing to overlook the abuse of power, when the abused are obviously bad guys. Supplying arms to Iran contra was illegal, but the government managed to do it anyway. I don't believe there is anything they can't already do when they need to combat real terrorists (including pissing on their legal rights). There is absolutely no need to pass laws that allow ignoring rights of everybody else.
But 3D framework for the windows shell is what is most needed. Special effects are just a bonus. With 3D acceleration you get easy to move and resize (smoothly) windows. You get Expose-like functionality for free. You get the ability to work with many windows on the same 1600x1200 display. You get extra ways to organise your workspace (with transparency, depth sorting, minimize-to-thumbnail, etc.) All these features are relatively hard to implement today (without losing performance, stability or compatibility), but rather easy when you create the 3D framework.
At that stage adding eye-candy is trivial. You don't need to worry about the effect on other applications, like you do today (when the top window affects the window below by determining which areas need to be redrawn), you can easily apply your shader-based translucenct ripple-glass effect to the window and let the 3D shell worry about it.
I agree that Explorer windows suck. But we just need let them go and hope that MS will do it right this time.
I'm not interested in eye candy at the expense of any of the above OK. How about we increase the eye candy of your system 5 times, while decreasing the performance 10%. At the same time we would increaes the performance 20% improving the system in other respects and your new computer would provide additional 100% improvement. What would you choose? A computer with the same bland look and 120% better performance or a computer with 5 times more eye candy and 110% better performance?
There is no demand for a 3D Windows on a Pentium Pro with Riva TNT. People with old hardware are happy running Win 98. It simply makes no sense to design 3D accelerated shell for old computers - the majority of the potential market have decent cards.
You should also not forget that making things as pretty as possible is important too. It's not just about accelerating moving windows and switching between applications. From the very beginning people were concerned about interface appearance. In 1981 Steve Jobs was pushing for rounded rectangles and was really happy when a solution for fast drawing of roundrecs was found.
It makes no sense to make things ugly, no sense at all. And while I am currently happy using Windows 2000 in classic 9x mode (even on a good computer with a Radeon 9600PRO) and even though I removed all shell customizations apps I tried (Object Desktop, various docks, Entbloss (Expose analog for Windows)), I would still appreciate a decent looking environment to replace this boring shell, be it Mac Mini with Tiger or not-yet-created desktop Linux system. I do not hold my breath for Longhorn, though... Especially since it's likely to include more DRM crap.
The difference is that buying drugs or having sex with prostitutes is illegal (only in fascist states, but I digress). It doesn't matter who are you buying them from or who are you paying for sex. The act is illegal.
With copyrighted materials it is illegal to distribute them without permission. You can argue that by providing that copy **AA gives you implicit permission to download it. That automatically makes it legal.
However, we must realise that downloading is de facto legal (in in places like Canada legal de jure). It's uploading that can get you a lawsuit. So the question of what is entrapment is moot. **AA only needs to find a sharer, get (part of) a file from him and send his ISP a nastygram.
I just don't understand why people keep trying these "basically it's a crippled PC" business models.
You know the difference between a good salesman and a bad salesman? The bad salesman comes to Alaska, sees that Eskimos don't use refrigerators and says: "Noone is using fridges here, it's hopeless, I can't sell any." A good one comes afterwards and says "Noone is using fridges here! OMFG! What a huge potential market!"
There is a market of tens of millions of people, who don't own and don't use PCs. If you find a way to sell PCs (or PC replacements) to them, you can make tons of money with your unique product. So it makes sense to try again and again, even though all previous attempts only barely managed to break-even if at all.
Congratulations, you are officially smarter than 100 Microsoft programmers. That's not much, though.:)
Seriously, I don't understand why such an obvious idea hadn't occured to a bunch of highly-paid professionals... A video about using a mouse. You are absolutely right, making it an interactive sandbox would be MUCH more efficient and one Flash programmer would be able to create it and tune to perfection in a month.
You start the computer for the first time, it opens the sandbox. There you can move the pointer, click on things, double-click on things, move things, use menus, etc. When you feel you have learned that, solve a small challenge and you can move to the next level (real Windows).:)
Slashdot Mirror
There is a very significant distinction between admitting that people are different, some are worse and some are better, and actually discriminating people. The first is rational, logical and justified. The second is usually stupid.
When you are hiring a mathematician, you can make a prediction about the candidate's skills based on his/her gender. But a reasonable hiring process must evaluate the candidate's abilities slightly better than just looking at his name. And it is entirely possible to have a fair selection (by using a defined set of standards), while admitting that women are generally not as good.
A recruiter who hires men when there are better female candidates is simply a moron, but the one who hires the best human for the job and it just so happens that it's usually the best man is not.
Yeah. Of course, a serious researcher would just ask random people what is their IQ and then conclude that women have lower IQ, because many of them never took the test and were assigned a value of zero. Sure.
And it would never occur to that researcher to find N women and N men, ask them to pass an IQ test in a controlled environment, with necessary adjustements for their familiarity with IQ tests, and then make conclusions. That would be unscientific.
but that doesn't mean I don't know women that couldn't kick Danny DeVito's butt.
But that explains why construction companies employ more men than women. And that fact would justify a top construction official speaking at a conference suggesting that may be women are not as successful in construction because of innate differences...
And it's also possible that women are better at math, but math education is designed for boys and so they end up better despite having worse skills.
We should research the differences, not just blindly defend 100% equality.
This is a really stupid attitude from the employers, a remnant of simplier times perhaps, when the employee was supposed to have ONE career in ONE company for the whole life. But it's now much more common for people to switch jobs on a whim, just because they want to do something new. Why should it make much difference now whether you are a woman or not? In any case in 5 years you would probably be gone.
As for the innate differences, there probably are more than you admit. Personally (that's just my personal experience recently, not representative of all females) I can't stand all the women I am talking with not being able to admit they made a small error a minute ago and insisting I must be making that up (a wrong word used, a different number, etc.). Often I intentionally make a mental note of the mistake right when it is being made, only to have that woman (and I don't recall this happening with men) deny it. But all those differences should not be perceived as purely negative. Men and women think differently, but people of a same gender think differently too.
The answers to the question "do you think it was offensive?" at Local6 were Yes (43%) and No (52%). I wonder if there is any correlation between the answer given and the gender of the respondent.
You are definitely a Luddite and a human chauvinist. You are a disgrace to human race. And the idea of shortsighted people like you being allowed to post online really freaks me out.
P.S. Not to mention that you have serious problems with logic, probably caused by your sub-par intelligence. Just a few months ago the work was finished on restoring documentary films about early 20th century Britain. Do you think that the British cultural heritage should not have been preserved by film cameras? Do you think it has lost its meaning? We humans use technology, deal with it.
P.P.S. And don't you dare post your opinion on an Internet forum ever again. That's disgusting, go to a park or a public square, and share your opinions with others, don't hide behind a computer. Communications between humans should never be done via a computer or a telephone, otherwise they lose their meaning.
This was noted a long time ago. I remember reading something by Mark Twain (don't remember the book now, I was a REALLY young kid then) where he spoke about rich people paying money so that they could basically drive a stage-coach, that is doing something, which other people consider "work". The difference is, of course, in whether you HAVE to do it or CHOSE to do it.
:-|
As for reality shows, you are completely right (but you misspelled "all"). When I catch a glimpse of them (sadly, the women in my family are strangly fond of one), I am completely amazed at how it is possible to fill 60 minutes with absolutely no content, besides some morons speaking about their BOOOOOORING attempts at relationships to each others. Some people must find it fascinating. I find it fascinating that they do.
You might be interested in the movie eXistenZ by David Cronenberg. It has basically the same plot, except there are no reality shows. :)
This idea looks horrible only because you are an ardent Sims fan. I am not a huge Sims fan, although I sometimes play Sims 2, and I would be happy if this show was created (even though I would have no chances seeing it, as I don't intend to come to US). Even if it would have only a passing resemblance to the game. The merging of several forms of entertainment (TV, films, games) is ultimately a good thing, but it can only be gradual. I don't expect the borders disappearing for at least 5-15 years, but for it to happen, we need small steps such as Sims reality show. As Bolz said, "It's a generational question. The world is changing and no one can stop it." So good luck to EA.
Another great demonstration of your point could be this screenshot. You can skin a Windows desktop, remove menus from Explorer and use a bunch of icons ripped from OS X, but it would still be a Windows desktop.
Still, a properly Aqua-skinned application is better than one which is not even skinned. I don't understand why it's so hard to port OO.o even at that level.
I find that one of the most striking features of his films is the abundance of details. Quite often (most of the time, actually), animated films omit a lot of background activity, irrelevant details, robbing the fictional world of it believability. In Miyazaki films, however, I always notice how details such as hand movement when opening a door always appear well thought out and natural. Instead of glossing over such trivialities and using overly broad strokes (just to tell the story and set the general tone for scenes) he (and his artists, of course) enjoys details, which really makes the world feel real and interesting.
I already don't have enough time to watch all films I want to watch and read all books I want to read (much worse with the books, as they take longer than 90 minutes to finish and there are more of them). And you want me to waste more of my time on organising my collection and "wanted" list? No way. :) That, and I don't have a Mac, sadly.
The industrialized world has worked out a basically mixed system
This mixed system was developed to a very large degree BECAUSE of Soviet Union. Socialist and communist parties, labour and human rights movements were supported by Moscow to a large extent. Furthermore, the capitalists saw a very vivid example of what can happen to them if they do not share their wealth with workers.
Communism is better than capitalism because it can a) provide greater wealth (if done right) by eliminating the class of capitalists (billionaires like Gates) and b) support the knowledge economy and the future abundance economy (with nanotech, robots, AI) better.
Communism is not incompatible with free market elements either. It's just the centrally planned economies that are. As for safety nets, they are great, but its still better to have a country where the constitution says the primary goal of the country is personal development of each person.
Soviet Union was not "a poverty-laden murder-fest". In 1960s-1980s the quality of life was relatively high (lower than in the richest capitalist countries, but comparable with average capitalist countries) an there was no murder-fest.
The truth is that you don't need exceptional tools to fight terrorists. You just need funding and good people. The legal aspects can usually be taken care of afterwards. Everyone is willing to overlook the abuse of power, when the abused are obviously bad guys. Supplying arms to Iran contra was illegal, but the government managed to do it anyway. I don't believe there is anything they can't already do when they need to combat real terrorists (including pissing on their legal rights). There is absolutely no need to pass laws that allow ignoring rights of everybody else.
But 3D framework for the windows shell is what is most needed. Special effects are just a bonus. With 3D acceleration you get easy to move and resize (smoothly) windows. You get Expose-like functionality for free. You get the ability to work with many windows on the same 1600x1200 display. You get extra ways to organise your workspace (with transparency, depth sorting, minimize-to-thumbnail, etc.) All these features are relatively hard to implement today (without losing performance, stability or compatibility), but rather easy when you create the 3D framework.
At that stage adding eye-candy is trivial. You don't need to worry about the effect on other applications, like you do today (when the top window affects the window below by determining which areas need to be redrawn), you can easily apply your shader-based translucenct ripple-glass effect to the window and let the 3D shell worry about it.
I agree that Explorer windows suck. But we just need let them go and hope that MS will do it right this time.
nt
I'm not interested in eye candy at the expense of any of the above
OK. How about we increase the eye candy of your system 5 times, while decreasing the performance 10%. At the same time we would increaes the performance 20% improving the system in other respects and your new computer would provide additional 100% improvement. What would you choose? A computer with the same bland look and 120% better performance or a computer with 5 times more eye candy and 110% better performance?
There is no demand for a 3D Windows on a Pentium Pro with Riva TNT. People with old hardware are happy running Win 98. It simply makes no sense to design 3D accelerated shell for old computers - the majority of the potential market have decent cards.
You should also not forget that making things as pretty as possible is important too. It's not just about accelerating moving windows and switching between applications. From the very beginning people were concerned about interface appearance. In 1981 Steve Jobs was pushing for rounded rectangles and was really happy when a solution for fast drawing of roundrecs was found.
It makes no sense to make things ugly, no sense at all. And while I am currently happy using Windows 2000 in classic 9x mode (even on a good computer with a Radeon 9600PRO) and even though I removed all shell customizations apps I tried (Object Desktop, various docks, Entbloss (Expose analog for Windows)), I would still appreciate a decent looking environment to replace this boring shell, be it Mac Mini with Tiger or not-yet-created desktop Linux system. I do not hold my breath for Longhorn, though... Especially since it's likely to include more DRM crap.
I think there is no difference between the courthouse and the space outside. Both are public spaces. A courtroom would be different though.
The difference is that buying drugs or having sex with prostitutes is illegal (only in fascist states, but I digress). It doesn't matter who are you buying them from or who are you paying for sex. The act is illegal.
With copyrighted materials it is illegal to distribute them without permission. You can argue that by providing that copy **AA gives you implicit permission to download it. That automatically makes it legal.
However, we must realise that downloading is de facto legal (in in places like Canada legal de jure). It's uploading that can get you a lawsuit. So the question of what is entrapment is moot. **AA only needs to find a sharer, get (part of) a file from him and send his ISP a nastygram.
I just don't understand why people keep trying these "basically it's a crippled PC" business models.
You know the difference between a good salesman and a bad salesman? The bad salesman comes to Alaska, sees that Eskimos don't use refrigerators and says: "Noone is using fridges here, it's hopeless, I can't sell any." A good one comes afterwards and says "Noone is using fridges here! OMFG! What a huge potential market!"
There is a market of tens of millions of people, who don't own and don't use PCs. If you find a way to sell PCs (or PC replacements) to them, you can make tons of money with your unique product. So it makes sense to try again and again, even though all previous attempts only barely managed to break-even if at all.
Ironically, these simple games turned out to be the most useful applications in Windows... Surely the most popular.
Congratulations, you are officially smarter than 100 Microsoft programmers. That's not much, though. :)
:)
Seriously, I don't understand why such an obvious idea hadn't occured to a bunch of highly-paid professionals... A video about using a mouse. You are absolutely right, making it an interactive sandbox would be MUCH more efficient and one Flash programmer would be able to create it and tune to perfection in a month.
You start the computer for the first time, it opens the sandbox. There you can move the pointer, click on things, double-click on things, move things, use menus, etc. When you feel you have learned that, solve a small challenge and you can move to the next level (real Windows).