I'm not saying that they should stop posting this tripe (though they should). Just please label it so that I know to move along.
They don't want you to be able to skip the flamebaits, they want you to read them and be compelled to post a comment or, preferably, comments, thereby creating content for their website. That was my point.
Could we start tagging articles as flamebait? Please?
No. Please remember what flamebait is: a message that is likely to receive emotionally charged or otherwise strongly opionated responses. Just look at the reply numbers listed at the front page: it's the flamebait articles that get hundreds if not thousands of replies.
Slashdot is not a news source, it is a conversation forum and needs replies to survive. For that reason it must have plenty of flamebait articles to keep people posting. It cannot survive posting stories that don't bring emotions worth; the story has to have emotional significance to people for them to comment on it.
Slashdot is a bonfire and flamebait articles are the fuel.
The GP just needed to add the parents' attitude. It's not the student who would care that someone works harder than they do, it's the parents (and I am one) who can't stand the thought that their child is somehow lazy. That would mean that the parents aren't teaching their kids to work hard, etc.
What's wrong with laziness ? Having a "strong work ethic" is simply another way of saying that someone is obsessed with his work to the point of neglecting his personal life and wishes. The only reward you get from that is dying from stress-induced heart attack on your 50th birthday.
Life is for living, not running around like a headless chicken terrified that you waste a single second that could be used "productively". Sure, you can do so, but you're sure going to feel stupid when your life flashes before your eyes.
Re:The supply and demand of knowledge
on
The Expert Mind
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
As you progress it becomes harder and harder to find the information nesessary to progress so progress plateus. Extraordinary drive and motivation is necessary to search out those extra 0.5% and 0.1% bits of skill/knowledge because you have to search/train constantly for little reward.
This of course assumes that not only is there a finite amount of information relevant to a given field, but also that this amount is limited enough that you can master a significant proportion of it in your lifetime.
It might simply be that as you progress, for example as a chess player, the only people who can still give you a real challenge are other obsessed players, and they are advancing just as fast as you are, so your skills - as determined by the ratio of won and lost games - seems to stay the same. In reality you're improving, but there's no way to measure it - you win against casual gamers every time, and you and your peers are all improving at the same pace so you keep on winning and losing against them as often as before.
Same thing applies for example to arts. It is easy to tell a stickman from a realistic drawing - but once you achieve that level, how is anyone going to tell your process ? You may draw faster, and make less errors you have to correct later - but how is anyone watching the finished drawing going to know ? Or music - once your playing is perfect, it's perfect, and no one can know how much or little effort it takes on your part. Or mathemathics - in most cases I can't tell which one of two arbitrarily picked mathemathical problems is harder to solve.
Where's flash or animated GIF's? The technoliges that allow annoying ad's to exist as well as internet classics like hamster dance and badger badger badger.
Did you know that the picture and music in badger lose synchronization noticeably in about 10 minutes ? Pathetic...
Dude: it is a minor mistake in a long article, with no relevance to the article's overall point. The author uses a correct analogy about "open" research. According to your OWN estimation, the article was worth reading except for this one sentence. Get a grip.
If an author writes a long article about many things, some of which you know well and some of which you don't, and you catch him giving inaccurate or outright false information about one of the things you do know well, then why should you trust him to be accurate about things you don't know well, where you can't say if he is ?
Only a fool trusts a known liar.
You are in thrall to an ideology.
Your statement is just a way of stating that someone is being an idealist and imply that this is because of lack of strength of character or intelligence. Since such lack can't possible be determined from a Slashdot post, and since the grandparent post didn't even state that he believes in Stallman's ideology (or any ideology for that matter), your statement comes down to nonsensical name-calling.
Instead of Java I would choose C. Modern RISC machines are built to run C fast. What CPUs are designed to run Java.
They are ? Then why do we need to compile it to the presumably slower assembly ?
Please understand that both Java and C compile to very similar machine code in the end, and that machine code is not likely to look much like the original program, thanks to the needs of out-of-order and parallel execution. The only real differences are that:
You can't play around with pointer math in Java.
You can't overflow a buffer in Java, due to the mandatory range checking.
You can't have a pointer to a memory area that's already freed.
In short, C gives a "clever" programmer plenty of opportunities to shoot the users of his program in the foot, and Java gives them reinforced kevlar boots. I know which language I prefer.
Cue a hundred messages claiming how mandatory range checking is the devil that takes speed out of everything, with automated memory management his second-in-command, and how hand-coding those same features - adding manual range checks everywhere you use an array and using "smart pointers" or something similar - is magically faster. Oh, and only stupid incompetent programmers make programs that segfault.
oh grow up. So who is the lucky indidivual who shells out the billion dollars then? you? I dont think so.
As there are quite a lot of people suffering from AIDS, I'd imagine the governments of the hardest-hit countries would pool their resources together and pay the required sum. Which would likely not be that high - the "one hundred billion dollars" was from Austin Powers.
If you create something that brings benefit to a million people and costs ten million dollars to develop, whats your model? to not bother unless you find some idiot to pay 10 million so everyone else gets to be slashdot-style freeloaders?
Maybe I could inform those million people, and they could then form an organization and pool the money for the purchase ? It's only 10 dollars per person.
This is how Blender became free software, BTW.
nice business model you got there.
Yup. It's called "selling for profit". You may have heard about it concerning physical goods; it works just as well with ideas. The key steps are:
Create something (a tangible product or an idea), costing you X dollars.
Sell it for X + Y dollars, where Y is a positive rational number.
Receive Y dollars of profit.
The part where various "intellectual property" laws go wrong is letting you repeat steps 2 and 3 forever without having to repeat step 1. To accomplish this they also seriously limit everyone else's ability to perform step 1, since they cannot use the thing they purchased at step 2, or any other thing like it.
Intellectual property laws not only discourage continuous creation of new ideas of someone who has created one, but they actively harm other peoples ability to do so. We must get rid of them, or they will keep on slowing our cultural, technological and scientific development.
But the system -- bad though it is -- works after a fashion and this is a case (and the only one I can think of) where simply closing all the world's patent offices, voiding all existing patents, and retraining all the patent lawyers as garbage collectors will not make the world a better place. Yes, we pay way too much for drugs until the patents expire. But in this one case, the patent-mongers are probably right. No patents, no new non-recreational drugs.
Unless the government pays for the research. That's one of the reasons why it exists, you know - to do public works that are too expensive for individuals to undertake, and don't have high enough profit margins for the private industry to become interested.
Abolish patents and socialize medical research. It solves the problem, and gives incentives for developing drugs that cure the patient instead of just keeping him alive, since the government that pays for the research also pays for the treatment of the patient, at least in countries that have resisted the privatization hysteria.
It also allows the poor countries to treat their people with copied drugs without risking trade sanctions, solving another nasty problem in the current model. It is insane that we allow corporations to deny people life-saving treatment in the name of their own profits. And don't forget that those people could very well be us, if the current trends of decreasing welfare and social responsibility and declining economy continue.
Socialize medical research, fund it with government funds - it is much too important to be left in the hands of private profit-driven industry. Do you want to die because the funds that could have been used to develop a cure for cancer were used to develop and advertize a new form of Viagra instead ?
Private industry has it place, but that place is nowhere near matters of life and death, since it simply cannot be trusted. That has been proven time and again.
And I don't think most people can handle the death of a character. Too much stress. When you spend weeks or months working on a character, it can be pretty traumatic to have it die... especially if the death was "unfair." Too much like real life.;-P
Add an afterlife. When your character dies, it goes to the great beyond, and if you want it back, you'll have to work for it, and maybe even subdue your former body, now an undead monster. Some quests could even require you to die first.
You could even go the route of having different afterlifes for different alignments. Like D&D - or real life;).
Hmm... I have Nethack's sources and a bit of free time on my hands. Maybe I should try this out.
...oh, come on. Like I'm the only person here who looks exactly like George Washington.
You poor bastard, sharing the face of a known insurgent and terrorist:(. Maybe you should consider plastic surgery, least you get confused with this infamous rebel who used tactics of harassment and attrition and kept his troops hidden - a strategy favored by terrorists !
Yes, this infamous leader of the treacherous insurgency which murdered several British soldiers - wait, you use dollars so you're an American, so Washington would be a hero to you, right ? Sorry, my bad.
So you should not pay for ideas any more at all then. Thats interesting. Kiss goodbye to all new pharmaceutical drugs. If someone has an idea for curing Aids, he might as well go learn plumbing by your system. Nice one.
"I know how to cure AIDS and I'll tell you for one hundred billion dollars !"
You can sell ideas, but you can't keep control of them once you've sold them. You can't stop the people who you've told about them from telling them to others. That means that you'll have to keep coming up with new ideas if you want to keep on making money, instead of getting more and more money without doing anything. Oh the horror.
All of which you knew perfectly well, since it's pretty self-obvious. So why did you bring up a strawman ?
Nope. He should be a capitalist, like myself. He needs to make use of the fact that he has ownership of the means of production and charge the most the market will bear for its employment. I do well, very well, selling the use of my expertise to people who want software developed. If he's any good at all, he could do the same.
If he spent 50 hours writing a Notepad equivalent and thought that people would pay $25 for it, then he isn't likely to be very good at all, in either business or programming;).
Then we finally found out the details of the accident. It seems a portly man was in a cherry-picker, changing a light bulb in a warehouse. When he leaned over the controls to disconnect one end of the light bulb, his belly moved the lever and raised the platform on which we was standing. Of course, he was now squished between the ceiling and the control, and unable to turn off the lift.
Hmm... Maybe you could alter the controls so they can't be easily operated accidentally; for example, most cars have a limiter that requires you to pull the shifting stick in order to get it to go to reverse ?
Seems to me like this kind of accident could be easily avoided by a simple change in the UI.
Only when you want to read critism of things other than the government. Government critism wouldn't be even handed and fair if things really get bad.
No information source is even-handed and fair when things get really bad. They're all propaganda at that point, either for or against something. Don't believe anyone at wartime or during a crisis, they all lie, every one of them.
Not that they tell the truth at times of peace, either - it's either the libertarian "the government is the source of all evil and there would be paradise on Earth if we could just overthrow it" -style nonsense or the authoritarian "it is unpatriotic to criticize the government" -style bullshit.
I can write the most secure web application known to man, purchase a digital certificate, require users to set passwords to optimal lengths and character combinations, but if they write down their username and password on a sticky attached to their monitor (I walk around the office here in the morning and see it all the time), then does that mean we have failed as programmers?
Yes. You created an user authentication scheme which requires the user to memorize a long, meaningless list of characters, and in the worst case change that reqularly. Humans are very bad memorizing such lists, so the users have little choice but to write them down. In other words, the security problem of sticky notes comes from your failure to implement an authentication shceme that functions properly within the user's limitations.
Your failure is essentially similar to requiring such horribly complex and processor-intensive crypto algorithm to secure the channel that the user's machine is incapable of doing it fast enough so he has to use telnet instead. The overcomplex crypto might make the system secure in theory, but in practice it's an impediment to security.
Learn your craft, and don't expect your users to suddenly get photographic memory, any more than you would expect an 8088 to magically get a gigabyte of memory. A bolt that's screwed too tight breaks, and security is no different: when it becomes too inconvenient, it gets broken, since getting work done takes priority. The trick is finding the maximum security you can have in practice, and not turn the screw any tighter than that.
"Best Practices" are nice, but show a distinct lack of maturity in the technologies used. "Codes" and "Standards" set over time with hard numbers to back them up are the world most "real" Engineers live in.
Most "real" engineers live in a world where the laws of physics don't change overnight, so hard numbers you calculate today have some meaning tomorrow. Software engineers, on the other hand, live in a world where not only are they not told how much load the thing they're building has to bear, but the very fundamental laws of physics - development goes on, after all - keep on changing and some maniacal black hats keep on trying to sabotage the whole thing so it falls down.
Comparing sofware and "real" engineers is stupid, since they just don't live in the same world, or even in the same Prime Material Plane.
Why would the mass of gamers suddenly stop wanting fighting games now?
Why would anyone who leaves WoW because it's nothing but endless grind want another grind game instead of staying in WoW ?
Besides, you grind so you can get better equipment and can show your l33tn3ss so you can pick up girls. Why not switch to a game where you really can ?
No, I want it to work. I don't care what bootloader I use. I installed that STRONGLY RECOMMENDED bootloader only to get "error 25", a hard drive read error on a hard drive that works perfectly fine in Windows.
Error 25 is a disk read error, says the all-seeing eye of Google. It may be caused by bad sectors in the disk. Now, most Linux installers I've seen don't bother checking the disk for bad sectors during creation of file system since that takes a lot of time, so it's entirely possible that either grub.conf or the kernel happens to be sitting on a bad sector, leading to the error you described.
Windows could still be able to use the disk just fine, by either marking the bad sectors as such in the file allocation table or by simply not storing anything important there.
As for a solution, the command "fsck.ext2 -c/dev/hda1" will search and mark bad blocks as such (assuming your boot partition is/dev/hda1, change that if needed), but of course it requires getting the system running first. The OS installer likely has an option of checking the disk for errors as well, but I can't tell for sure since I've never installed Ubuntu. Finally, make sure that the boot partition is located at the beginning of the disk and is less than 500 MB in size, since otherwise the BIOS of the machine can cause problems.
Occam's Razor says GRUB genuinely failed on me.
Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation that fits all known facts is likely to be most usefull. And the simplest explanation that fits "disk read error" is that the disk is faulty.
Slashdot Mirror
But it is the government's job to slap a ball and chain to their feet to stop them from harrassing others.
They don't want you to be able to skip the flamebaits, they want you to read them and be compelled to post a comment or, preferably, comments, thereby creating content for their website. That was my point.
No. Please remember what flamebait is: a message that is likely to receive emotionally charged or otherwise strongly opionated responses. Just look at the reply numbers listed at the front page: it's the flamebait articles that get hundreds if not thousands of replies.
Slashdot is not a news source, it is a conversation forum and needs replies to survive. For that reason it must have plenty of flamebait articles to keep people posting. It cannot survive posting stories that don't bring emotions worth; the story has to have emotional significance to people for them to comment on it.
Slashdot is a bonfire and flamebait articles are the fuel.
What's wrong with laziness ? Having a "strong work ethic" is simply another way of saying that someone is obsessed with his work to the point of neglecting his personal life and wishes. The only reward you get from that is dying from stress-induced heart attack on your 50th birthday.
Life is for living, not running around like a headless chicken terrified that you waste a single second that could be used "productively". Sure, you can do so, but you're sure going to feel stupid when your life flashes before your eyes.
This of course assumes that not only is there a finite amount of information relevant to a given field, but also that this amount is limited enough that you can master a significant proportion of it in your lifetime.
It might simply be that as you progress, for example as a chess player, the only people who can still give you a real challenge are other obsessed players, and they are advancing just as fast as you are, so your skills - as determined by the ratio of won and lost games - seems to stay the same. In reality you're improving, but there's no way to measure it - you win against casual gamers every time, and you and your peers are all improving at the same pace so you keep on winning and losing against them as often as before.
Same thing applies for example to arts. It is easy to tell a stickman from a realistic drawing - but once you achieve that level, how is anyone going to tell your process ? You may draw faster, and make less errors you have to correct later - but how is anyone watching the finished drawing going to know ? Or music - once your playing is perfect, it's perfect, and no one can know how much or little effort it takes on your part. Or mathemathics - in most cases I can't tell which one of two arbitrarily picked mathemathical problems is harder to solve.
Did you know that the picture and music in badger lose synchronization noticeably in about 10 minutes ? Pathetic...
If an author writes a long article about many things, some of which you know well and some of which you don't, and you catch him giving inaccurate or outright false information about one of the things you do know well, then why should you trust him to be accurate about things you don't know well, where you can't say if he is ?
Only a fool trusts a known liar.
Your statement is just a way of stating that someone is being an idealist and imply that this is because of lack of strength of character or intelligence. Since such lack can't possible be determined from a Slashdot post, and since the grandparent post didn't even state that he believes in Stallman's ideology (or any ideology for that matter), your statement comes down to nonsensical name-calling.
So up yours, you arrogant doodoo head.
They are ? Then why do we need to compile it to the presumably slower assembly ?
Please understand that both Java and C compile to very similar machine code in the end, and that machine code is not likely to look much like the original program, thanks to the needs of out-of-order and parallel execution. The only real differences are that:
In short, C gives a "clever" programmer plenty of opportunities to shoot the users of his program in the foot, and Java gives them reinforced kevlar boots. I know which language I prefer.
Cue a hundred messages claiming how mandatory range checking is the devil that takes speed out of everything, with automated memory management his second-in-command, and how hand-coding those same features - adding manual range checks everywhere you use an array and using "smart pointers" or something similar - is magically faster. Oh, and only stupid incompetent programmers make programs that segfault.
"Free, non-propriety standards compliance."
As there are quite a lot of people suffering from AIDS, I'd imagine the governments of the hardest-hit countries would pool their resources together and pay the required sum. Which would likely not be that high - the "one hundred billion dollars" was from Austin Powers.
Maybe I could inform those million people, and they could then form an organization and pool the money for the purchase ? It's only 10 dollars per person.
This is how Blender became free software, BTW.
Yup. It's called "selling for profit". You may have heard about it concerning physical goods; it works just as well with ideas. The key steps are:
The part where various "intellectual property" laws go wrong is letting you repeat steps 2 and 3 forever without having to repeat step 1. To accomplish this they also seriously limit everyone else's ability to perform step 1, since they cannot use the thing they purchased at step 2, or any other thing like it.
Intellectual property laws not only discourage continuous creation of new ideas of someone who has created one, but they actively harm other peoples ability to do so. We must get rid of them, or they will keep on slowing our cultural, technological and scientific development.
Unless the government pays for the research. That's one of the reasons why it exists, you know - to do public works that are too expensive for individuals to undertake, and don't have high enough profit margins for the private industry to become interested.
Abolish patents and socialize medical research. It solves the problem, and gives incentives for developing drugs that cure the patient instead of just keeping him alive, since the government that pays for the research also pays for the treatment of the patient, at least in countries that have resisted the privatization hysteria.
It also allows the poor countries to treat their people with copied drugs without risking trade sanctions, solving another nasty problem in the current model. It is insane that we allow corporations to deny people life-saving treatment in the name of their own profits. And don't forget that those people could very well be us, if the current trends of decreasing welfare and social responsibility and declining economy continue.
Socialize medical research, fund it with government funds - it is much too important to be left in the hands of private profit-driven industry. Do you want to die because the funds that could have been used to develop a cure for cancer were used to develop and advertize a new form of Viagra instead ?
Private industry has it place, but that place is nowhere near matters of life and death, since it simply cannot be trusted. That has been proven time and again.
Add an afterlife. When your character dies, it goes to the great beyond, and if you want it back, you'll have to work for it, and maybe even subdue your former body, now an undead monster. Some quests could even require you to die first.
You could even go the route of having different afterlifes for different alignments. Like D&D - or real life ;).
Hmm... I have Nethack's sources and a bit of free time on my hands. Maybe I should try this out.
I tried it. It works, but is horribly slow to scroll. And would likely be horrible to use too, due to the sheer amount of buttons.
Don't make rich UIs, make usable UIs. Keep it simple, stupid !
Doesn't matter, it's not like the MEP is going to read it. Or care, even if he was feeling bored enough to read it.
You poor bastard, sharing the face of a known insurgent and terrorist :(. Maybe you should consider plastic surgery, least you get confused with this infamous rebel who used tactics of harassment and attrition and kept his troops hidden - a strategy favored by terrorists !
Yes, this infamous leader of the treacherous insurgency which murdered several British soldiers - wait, you use dollars so you're an American, so Washington would be a hero to you, right ? Sorry, my bad.
"I know how to cure AIDS and I'll tell you for one hundred billion dollars !"
You can sell ideas, but you can't keep control of them once you've sold them. You can't stop the people who you've told about them from telling them to others. That means that you'll have to keep coming up with new ideas if you want to keep on making money, instead of getting more and more money without doing anything. Oh the horror.
All of which you knew perfectly well, since it's pretty self-obvious. So why did you bring up a strawman ?
If he spent 50 hours writing a Notepad equivalent and thought that people would pay $25 for it, then he isn't likely to be very good at all, in either business or programming ;).
Or just use cash. You know, the green rectangular pieces of paper and the small round metal things ?
Hmm... Maybe you could alter the controls so they can't be easily operated accidentally; for example, most cars have a limiter that requires you to pull the shifting stick in order to get it to go to reverse ?
Seems to me like this kind of accident could be easily avoided by a simple change in the UI.
No information source is even-handed and fair when things get really bad. They're all propaganda at that point, either for or against something. Don't believe anyone at wartime or during a crisis, they all lie, every one of them.
Not that they tell the truth at times of peace, either - it's either the libertarian "the government is the source of all evil and there would be paradise on Earth if we could just overthrow it" -style nonsense or the authoritarian "it is unpatriotic to criticize the government" -style bullshit.
Trust no one. That's as good an advice as any...
Yes. You created an user authentication scheme which requires the user to memorize a long, meaningless list of characters, and in the worst case change that reqularly. Humans are very bad memorizing such lists, so the users have little choice but to write them down. In other words, the security problem of sticky notes comes from your failure to implement an authentication shceme that functions properly within the user's limitations.
Your failure is essentially similar to requiring such horribly complex and processor-intensive crypto algorithm to secure the channel that the user's machine is incapable of doing it fast enough so he has to use telnet instead. The overcomplex crypto might make the system secure in theory, but in practice it's an impediment to security.
Learn your craft, and don't expect your users to suddenly get photographic memory, any more than you would expect an 8088 to magically get a gigabyte of memory. A bolt that's screwed too tight breaks, and security is no different: when it becomes too inconvenient, it gets broken, since getting work done takes priority. The trick is finding the maximum security you can have in practice, and not turn the screw any tighter than that.
Most "real" engineers live in a world where the laws of physics don't change overnight, so hard numbers you calculate today have some meaning tomorrow. Software engineers, on the other hand, live in a world where not only are they not told how much load the thing they're building has to bear, but the very fundamental laws of physics - development goes on, after all - keep on changing and some maniacal black hats keep on trying to sabotage the whole thing so it falls down.
Comparing sofware and "real" engineers is stupid, since they just don't live in the same world, or even in the same Prime Material Plane.
Why would anyone who leaves WoW because it's nothing but endless grind want another grind game instead of staying in WoW ?
Besides, you grind so you can get better equipment and can show your l33tn3ss so you can pick up girls. Why not switch to a game where you really can ?
I'd say Sociolotron. You can't beat sex as an attractor, and after grinding WoW for a few years I doubt they're looking for another fighting game.
Error 25 is a disk read error, says the all-seeing eye of Google. It may be caused by bad sectors in the disk. Now, most Linux installers I've seen don't bother checking the disk for bad sectors during creation of file system since that takes a lot of time, so it's entirely possible that either grub.conf or the kernel happens to be sitting on a bad sector, leading to the error you described.
Windows could still be able to use the disk just fine, by either marking the bad sectors as such in the file allocation table or by simply not storing anything important there.
As for a solution, the command "fsck.ext2 -c /dev/hda1" will search and mark bad blocks as such (assuming your boot partition is /dev/hda1, change that if needed), but of course it requires getting the system running first. The OS installer likely has an option of checking the disk for errors as well, but I can't tell for sure since I've never installed Ubuntu. Finally, make sure that the boot partition is located at the beginning of the disk and is less than 500 MB in size, since otherwise the BIOS of the machine can cause problems.
Occam's Razor says that the simplest explanation that fits all known facts is likely to be most usefull. And the simplest explanation that fits "disk read error" is that the disk is faulty.