Ok, ok, universities are mighty beacons of pure knowledge, whose purpose has mischievously been misrepresented, by...er... someone, to the ignorant masses, who in turn have tried to drag the glorious aforementioned institution through the mud of a money driven wrongheaded collectivist dream of prosperity. But the institution itself stands, pure and hard as diamond, turning a benign look upon the few that can appreciate its true timeless goal. If the obtuse and the greedy are being trodden upon in their sordid, misguided quest for reasonable employment, that is just their desert: the institution has'nt got anything to do with it.
You happy now? Good, now you can go back to prepare your lesson.
Yes, idiots savant do exist. OTOH - Not being able to recall will not to do much to improve your thinking - it may very well make it impossible, depending on how severe it is.
As an Engineering grad, I can see his method massively *NOT* working for math and science subjects: Let's interleave here: I'll do a little limits, a little derivatives, a little integrals, a little tensor algebra. (BTW, that ought to make history - of anything - quite interesting also)
Or: Yeah, I know tht was discussed in class, but I was NOT taking notes, cuz I was focused on understanding, and when I tried to recall, I thought that you said stres, but it's deformation instead, uh?
Seconded. And, probably because of/.'s readership median age, I notice nobody has even addressed the superiority of liquid design for text reading when the reader needs to change font (usually to get a larger font size). The inability to reflow is what makes PDF suck on the Kindle for instance. Ando no, that does not spell "for the visually impaired" - as anybody approaching the 45-yr-old mark knows. Note that one can still scroll "and" flip while preserving liquid design.
You are the first person I ever run into that just does not care.
I, for one, don't care. I did install the block extensions (NoScript, AdBlocks) tried them a couple of days, turned them off. The hassle of building whitelists vastly outpaced the convenience of having no flash ads, which I don't look at anyway (not to mention messing with the hosts file to block popunders - which I close as soon as they pop) . Never caught malware from that vector (running linux as my desktop, but also in my windows days).
[...] you literally can lose all your money in a matter of hours in a rough market - on days like that you are grateful that there's someone around willing to trade with you. [...]
Now, in my view, that is exactly the problem we are facing today. The speed of trading is vastly outpacing the speed of most human activities, and specifically of all decision-taking and political processes. Frictionless systems tend to be intrinsically instable - that is why friction is a good thing. So too much liquidity is actually BAD - it speeds things up beyond the point where people/communities/nations can think clearly.
The idea of taxing transactions based on their speed (cited elsewhere in this thread) looks terrific under this standpoint (how feasible, I know not). The 6 ms advantage would remain elusive tho'.
Not really. Understanding the "why" is way more deeper than being able to do the math, and I do not think anybody has worked it out yet. "Why" does the universe behave as it does? Math Will not tell you that. Math, will however, enable you to do the quantitative stuff, without which you would not be able to decide which theory is wrong, and (roughly) by how much. Cheers, alf
I'm using "full democracy" to describe a situation where you need less representation because the decisions are all put to a vote.
Agreed, that would be folly - for gazillions of reasons - having informed voters would at that point be the least of them. This is not Athens anymore. As for federal level ballots in the US (where I lived for a while 20 years ago, so y knowledge may be dated), wouldn't that be a good way to put issues like Roe v. Wade to rest? (may be not a good idea, jus' wonderin')
You conveniently glossed right over the fact that I proposed the solution being better public education. Nowhere did I propose restrictions on voting rights.
Well, that's what you did say:
Full democracy is folly, since no population is fully educated enough to make every decision involved in governing.
That is assuming, I infer, that some other (governing) body is informed enough. But ultimately, the legitimacy of any organisation, and of its actions, must rest with the people and the people must have the power to decide on *any* such action. Ideally after an information process has taken place. In democratic settings of course. Otherwise you better have sizeable and trustworthy police and army forces available, in which case we do not call it democracy anymore.
I'd happily require an 800 SAT score in order to vote. If you can't meet that pathetically low bar, you aren't intellectually qualified to make any decision that might affect others.
Right. I thereby propose that people that can't meet that pathetically low bar be sterilised in order to improve... Darn, we already tried that, also.
Look, buddy, Italy may not have much in the way of oil or coal.... but it does'n t have much in the way of uranium, either, and last time I looked, uranium rich countries were not exactly your "reliable suppliers" type.
Education is essential to making an informed decision. Full democracy is folly,...
Right. I thereby propose that voting right be subjected to a test to ascertain that the perspective voter can read and write and understand the difference between a pressurized water nuclear reactor and... Oh, wait, we tried that already, didn't we?
It can't happen again because... o)...it won't happen again in Chernobyl o)... it won't happen to the same model and make of plant o)... it won't even melt, for God's sake, it'll blow up.
Cross all that apply. Seriously, the "It won't happen again" argument does not hold much water (not as much as Fukushima's plant). In a way or the other, it always assume that some - if not all - of the safety subsystems will continue to work. We are dealing with stuff that, unless continuously cooled, keeps giving huge headaches. Which means that, every time some shit hits some fan in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant there is a strong chance that a major shitstorm ensues unless: (i) no stupid errors are made (ii) no emergency generators decide to malfunction (iii) and so on. But, sorry, stupid errors will happen and safety subsystems will malfunction. OTOH, Even when things go horribly wrong, conventional power plants have a way of just cease functioning... compare with "keep burning for a few thousand years". And, speaking of Italy, sorry to rain on everybody's bucholic view of our peninsual, but consider that it is a country which experiences frequent earthquakes, has had a major tsunami about a hundred and ten years ago, and has interesting way of experinecing all manners of floods almost yearly.
Why is the article - and this thread - making a big fuss about what is basically a trick questio.? The cries about innumeracy are predictable, but wrong. Given the nature of the question almost anybody is bound to understand it as "Which will be more fuel efficient: 20 MPG or 50 MPG?".
I am pretty sure that other trick questions can devised to foil similarly the consumption based rating.
The two comments you quote have been posted by the developer that appears to have made the change in the first place. In his blog, he also explains how that is part of the "philosophy" of the application, and somesuch.
It is also of interest that other developers on the same thread appear to be on a similar short fuse (see comment #144). There is a very annoying tendency (on the bug coments and the ML) to simply tell people who argue against this behavior to either add more justifications (as if they were actaully needed) until they are blue in the face or to shut up (or, sometimes, just the latest).
It has basically turned into an ideological war, and it's ugly to behold.
Obviously, if the new model does show good predictive power, and an increasing number of investors start using it, it will create a bubble (everybody doing the same thing). Unless it so good to also predicts this, in which case I guess it will generate wildly obscillating predictions and possibly become unstable.
I wonder if that proves that predictive economic models are unfeasible.
"The reason for MS's success (specifically, with Windows) is due to developers targeting the dominant system"
And how did MS become the dominant system?
Two words: cheaper boxes.
Back in the days, Macs commanded and integer multiple of the price of an x86. Unixes, think tenfold and more. This does not even begin to address the idiotic API wars Unixes were waging: System V vs. BSD idioms, vastly incompatible (not to mention ugly) GUI toolkits.
But all that is irrelevant compared to the price tag issue.
You realize that preprocessor "orgy" happens anyways, just behind the scenes?
Yup, it does. So does conversion to machine code and conversion of logical information to electrical signals. What's your point?
And that if you used a proper IDE, you get the same "blinders" that MS-VS gives you?
Taken at face value, the OP is complaining of poor IDEs on LAMP platforms, so I would say he understands this, also.
And if that is your only complaint - the tools, then I challenge how you can call yourself a developer.
As a complaint, it is not trivial (it has also been beaten to death over the years, but that is a different matter). Developers spend most of their time inside tools. Masons are less effective if deprived of a good hammer. Having used both Eclipse and VS, I have (and hate) to admit the the latter is (was: it's been a couple of years) still a frontrunner. Intellisense, just to name a feature, is a huge time saver for anybody not knowing the docs by heart.
Yes, you can 'vi foobar.c'. Even cat > foobar.c is known to work. As is do-it-yourself eye surgery using an old pen and a rusty can opener. Most of these practices are not advisable, though.
Have you SEEN the Windows API?
I don't know about you, but, to SEE APIs, I require some amount of controlled substances, heavy drinking, or possibly both.
Having RTFA, I have to ask: "What in Cthulu's name have APIs got to do with all this?".
The author broadly complains of the current status of networking at the OS level (copying bytes, connecting to/from multihomed hosts, etc.). APIs don't get into it.
The title of the article appears to be an attention grabbing device, it could well have been titled "Does Britney Spears carry my baby?".
(The incipit would be "No. Now, in a world of low latency and high bandwidth...")
It is a fundamental step of separation. (take it further: build an automatic listener, then ask it "Was it good?")
Even if recordings tend to make us forgetful about that, music is as much about performance as it is about listening. This is especially true about jazz.
I am not much interested in machine-generated music because - save byte shuffling - nothing humanly interesting happens in the "performer". If I dance with a woman. something might happen; if I dance by myself, nothing will happen.
(And BTW, by briefly perusing the web site quoted in the OP, I believe that performance was involved in the production of the posted excerpts, which i STILL don't like).
... Sometimes code and technology is art in itself.
Which is beside the point: while the design of trash compactor may be artistic, the compacted trash it outputs will not be.
Now, now. While I do take exception from the grandparent post I cannot agree with statemnts like:
Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out",... are very far from improvisation.
Oh, come on. That does not even agree with Bill Evans' liner notes for Kind of Blue, and Bill was one of the players. Coltrane's and Cannonball's solos in "So what" (and the rest of Kind Of Blue, for that matters) are clearly improvised, as are Evans' and Chambers'. Miles' solo may have been written (or planned, which is much the same) at least to these ears.
Beethoven was a strong keyboard improviser. So were Bach, Haendel and Liszt. Baroque pieces often included "cadenzas", open sequences that were meant for the soloist improvisation (though many cadenzas were also written).
Nothing of this was random, or even just haphazard. That's fairly obvious, since: Improvisation != Randomness, as anybody who has ever tried to blow a couple of choruses of a standard knows.
As much as I dislike them, the best free jazz pieces are not random at all. Of course freeloading is much easier in free then it is in mainstream, and at some point the intellectual apparatus needed for appreciation becomes such a burden that - IMHO - it's no longer worth the effort (this also happens - to me - with modern classical music).
Having said that, the records I've mentioned have been "Understood" by millions of people the world over, and still it's great jazz.
Claiming that good jazz can't be understood by the masses is a fairly pretentious and elitist statement that really has no merit.
Given that jazz record sales cover a 3% of the total world music sales, the statement has got to have some merit. The fact that roughly 95% of said sales happens to be utter rubbish perhaps implies that what I would term good, or even just interesting, music does not interest most people.
It's basically a bunch of white free-jazz and fusion cats giving the genre a bad name.
Quit that.
Agreed. I wouldn't make it a black-and-white issue tho', KennyG notwithstanding.
I can imagine a computer producing Jazz tunes on the run (as in Jazz mostly different instruments are in individual harmony, there is no collaborative rhythm / harmony).
WTF??? You need to do lots of jazz listening...and I mean LOTS. Oh, and just what is "individual harmony" supposed to mean?
Come to think of it, I'd say you have LOTS of listening to do (periond). Some remedial music heory would also help.
Slashdot Mirror
A clumsy essay gets totally hysterical reactions
Ok, ok, universities are mighty beacons of pure knowledge, whose purpose has mischievously been misrepresented, by ...er... someone, to the ignorant masses, who in turn have tried to drag the glorious aforementioned institution through the mud of a money driven wrongheaded collectivist dream of prosperity.
But the institution itself stands, pure and hard as diamond, turning a benign look upon the few that can appreciate its true timeless goal. If the obtuse and the greedy are being trodden upon in their sordid, misguided quest for reasonable employment, that is just their desert: the institution has'nt got anything to do with it.
You happy now? Good, now you can go back to prepare your lesson.
Yes, idiots savant do exist. OTOH - Not being able to recall will not to do much to improve your thinking - it may very well make it impossible, depending on how severe it is.
As an Engineering grad, I can see his method massively *NOT* working for math and science subjects: Let's interleave here: I'll do a little limits, a little derivatives, a little integrals, a little tensor algebra. (BTW, that ought to make history - of anything - quite interesting also)
Or: Yeah, I know tht was discussed in class, but I was NOT taking notes, cuz I was focused on understanding, and when I tried to recall, I thought that you said stres, but it's deformation instead, uh?
That'll make for really interesting exams.
Seconded. And, probably because of /.'s readership median age, I notice nobody has even addressed the superiority of liquid design for text reading when the reader needs to change font (usually to get a larger font size). The inability to reflow is what makes PDF suck on the Kindle for instance. Ando no, that does not spell "for the visually impaired" - as anybody approaching the 45-yr-old mark knows. Note that one can still scroll "and" flip while preserving liquid design.
You are the first person I ever run into that just does not care.
I, for one, don't care. I did install the block extensions (NoScript, AdBlocks) tried them a couple of days, turned them off. The hassle of building whitelists vastly outpaced the convenience of having no flash ads, which I don't look at anyway (not to mention messing with the hosts file to block popunders - which I close as soon as they pop) . Never caught malware from that vector (running linux as my desktop, but also in my windows days).
Cheers-
[...] you literally can lose all your money in a matter of hours in a rough market - on days like that you are grateful that there's someone around willing to trade with you. [...]
Now, in my view, that is exactly the problem we are facing today. The speed of trading is vastly outpacing the speed of most human activities, and specifically of all decision-taking and political processes. Frictionless systems tend to be intrinsically instable - that is why friction is a good thing. So too much liquidity is actually BAD - it speeds things up beyond the point where people/communities/nations can think clearly.
The idea of taxing transactions based on their speed (cited elsewhere in this thread) looks terrific under this standpoint (how feasible, I know not). The 6 ms advantage would remain elusive tho'.
So your ideal economic landscape is circa the XVIII/XIX century, in London?
Greetings.
[...]The math itself is the science. There is no way around the equations.
This is so wrong. By this token, Faraday - not famous for is math skills - was a clueless git.
Cheers.
Not really. Understanding the "why" is way more deeper than being able to do the math, and I do not think anybody has worked it out yet. "Why" does the universe behave as it does? Math Will not tell you that. Math, will however, enable you to do the quantitative stuff, without which you would not be able to decide which theory is wrong, and (roughly) by how much.
Cheers,
alf
We're just using different definitions.
I'm using "full democracy" to describe a situation where you need less representation because the decisions are all put to a vote.
Agreed, that would be folly - for gazillions of reasons - having informed voters would at that point be the least of them. This is not Athens anymore.
As for federal level ballots in the US (where I lived for a while 20 years ago, so y knowledge may be dated), wouldn't that be a good way to put issues like Roe v. Wade to rest? (may be not a good idea, jus' wonderin')
Cheers,
alf
You conveniently glossed right over the fact that I proposed the solution being better public education. Nowhere did I propose restrictions on voting rights.
Well, that's what you did say:
Full democracy is folly, since no population is fully educated enough to make every decision involved in governing.
That is assuming, I infer, that some other (governing) body is informed enough. But ultimately, the legitimacy of any organisation, and of its actions, must rest with the people and the people must have the power to decide on *any* such action. Ideally after an information process has taken place. In democratic settings of course. Otherwise you better have sizeable and trustworthy police and army forces available, in which case we do not call it democracy anymore.
I'd happily require an 800 SAT score in order to vote. If you can't meet that pathetically low bar, you aren't intellectually qualified to make any decision that might affect others.
Right. I thereby propose that people that can't meet that pathetically low bar be sterilised in order to improve... Darn, we already tried that, also.
Look, buddy, Italy may not have much in the way of oil or coal.... but it does'n t have much in the way of uranium, either, and last time I looked, uranium rich countries were not exactly your "reliable suppliers" type.
Education is essential to making an informed decision. Full democracy is folly, ...
Right. I thereby propose that voting right be subjected to a test to ascertain that the perspective voter can read and write and understand the difference between a pressurized water nuclear reactor and... Oh, wait, we tried that already, didn't we?
It can't happen again because... ...it won't happen again in Chernobyl ... it won't happen to the same model and make of plant ... it won't even melt, for God's sake, it'll blow up.
o)
o)
o)
Cross all that apply. Seriously, the "It won't happen again" argument does not hold much water (not as much as Fukushima's plant). In a way or the other, it always assume that some - if not all - of the safety subsystems will continue to work.
We are dealing with stuff that, unless continuously cooled, keeps giving huge headaches. Which means that, every time some shit hits some fan in the vicinity of a nuclear power plant there is a strong chance that a major shitstorm ensues unless: (i) no stupid errors are made (ii) no emergency generators decide to malfunction (iii) and so on. But, sorry, stupid errors will happen and safety subsystems will malfunction.
OTOH, Even when things go horribly wrong, conventional power plants have a way of just cease functioning... compare with "keep burning for a few thousand years". And, speaking of Italy, sorry to rain on everybody's bucholic view of our peninsual, but consider that it is a country which experiences frequent earthquakes, has had a major tsunami about a hundred and ten years ago, and has interesting way of experinecing all manners of floods almost yearly.
Why is the article - and this thread - making a big fuss about what is basically a trick questio.? The cries about innumeracy are predictable, but wrong. Given the nature of the question almost anybody is bound to understand it as "Which will be more fuel efficient: 20 MPG or 50 MPG?".
I am pretty sure that other trick questions can devised to foil similarly the consumption based rating.
cheers,
alf
Greetings.
The two comments you quote have been posted by the developer that appears to have made the change in the first place. In his blog, he also explains how that is part of the "philosophy" of the application, and somesuch.
It is also of interest that other developers on the same thread appear to be on a similar short fuse (see comment #144). There is a very annoying tendency (on the bug coments and the ML) to simply tell people who argue against this behavior to either add more justifications (as if they were actaully needed) until they are blue in the face or to shut up (or, sometimes, just the latest).
It has basically turned into an ideological war, and it's ugly to behold.
Cheers,
alf
Obviously, if the new model does show good predictive power, and an increasing number of investors start using it, it will create a bubble (everybody doing the same thing). Unless it so good to also predicts this, in which case I guess it will generate wildly obscillating predictions and possibly become unstable.
I wonder if that proves that predictive economic models are unfeasible.
Cheers,
alf
"The reason for MS's success (specifically, with Windows) is due to developers targeting the dominant system"
And how did MS become the dominant system?
Two words: cheaper boxes.
Back in the days, Macs commanded and integer multiple of the price of an x86. Unixes, think tenfold and more. This does not even begin to address the idiotic API wars Unixes were waging: System V vs. BSD idioms, vastly incompatible (not to mention ugly) GUI toolkits.
But all that is irrelevant compared to the price tag issue.
Cheeers,
alf
You realize that preprocessor "orgy" happens anyways, just behind the scenes?
Yup, it does. So does conversion to machine code and conversion of logical information to electrical signals. What's your point?
And that if you used a proper IDE, you get the same "blinders" that MS-VS gives you?
Taken at face value, the OP is complaining of poor IDEs on LAMP platforms, so I would say he understands this, also.
And if that is your only complaint - the tools, then I challenge how you can call yourself a developer.
As a complaint, it is not trivial (it has also been beaten to death over the years, but that is a different matter). Developers spend most of their time inside tools. Masons are less effective if deprived of a good hammer. Having used both Eclipse and VS, I have (and hate) to admit the the latter is (was: it's been a couple of years) still a frontrunner. Intellisense, just to name a feature, is a huge time saver for anybody not knowing the docs by heart.
Yes, you can 'vi foobar.c'. Even cat > foobar.c is known to work. As is do-it-yourself eye surgery using an old pen and a rusty can opener. Most of these practices are not advisable, though.
Have you SEEN the Windows API?
I don't know about you, but, to SEE APIs, I require some amount of controlled substances, heavy drinking, or possibly both.
Cheers,
alf
Having RTFA, I have to ask: "What in Cthulu's name have APIs got to do with all this?".
The author broadly complains of the current status of networking at the OS level (copying bytes, connecting to/from multihomed hosts, etc.). APIs don't get into it.
The title of the article appears to be an attention grabbing device, it could well have been titled "Does Britney Spears carry my baby?".
(The incipit would be "No. Now, in a world of low latency and high bandwidth...")
Cheers,
alf
Its only one step of separation.
It is a fundamental step of separation. (take it further: build an automatic listener, then ask it "Was it good?")
Even if recordings tend to make us forgetful about that, music is as much about performance as it is about listening. This is especially true about jazz.
I am not much interested in machine-generated music because - save byte shuffling - nothing humanly interesting happens in the "performer". If I dance with a woman. something might happen; if I dance by myself, nothing will happen.
(And BTW, by briefly perusing the web site quoted in the OP, I believe that performance was involved in the production of the posted excerpts, which i STILL don't like).
... Sometimes code and technology is art in itself.
Which is beside the point: while the design of trash compactor may be artistic, the compacted trash it outputs will not be.
Cheers,
alf
Now, now.
While I do take exception from the grandparent post I cannot agree with statemnts like:
Miles Davis' "Kind of Blue", Dave Brubeck's "Time Out", ... are very far from improvisation.
Oh, come on. That does not even agree with Bill Evans' liner notes for Kind of Blue, and Bill was one of the players. Coltrane's and Cannonball's solos in "So what" (and the rest of Kind Of Blue, for that matters) are clearly improvised, as are Evans' and Chambers'. Miles' solo may have been written (or planned, which is much the same) at least to these ears.
Beethoven was a strong keyboard improviser. So were Bach, Haendel and Liszt. Baroque pieces often included "cadenzas", open sequences that were meant for the soloist improvisation (though many cadenzas were also written).
Nothing of this was random, or even just haphazard. That's fairly obvious, since: Improvisation != Randomness, as anybody who has ever tried to blow a couple of choruses of a standard knows.
As much as I dislike them, the best free jazz pieces are not random at all. Of course freeloading is much easier in free then it is in mainstream, and at some point the intellectual apparatus needed for appreciation becomes such a burden that - IMHO - it's no longer worth the effort (this also happens - to me - with modern classical music).
Having said that, the records I've mentioned have been "Understood" by millions of people the world over, and still it's great jazz.
Claiming that good jazz can't be understood by the masses is a fairly pretentious and elitist statement that really has no merit.
Given that jazz record sales cover a 3% of the total world music sales, the statement has got to have some merit. The fact that roughly 95% of said sales happens to be utter rubbish perhaps implies that what I would term good, or even just interesting, music does not interest most people.
It's basically a bunch of white free-jazz and fusion cats giving the genre a bad name.
Quit that.
Agreed. I wouldn't make it a black-and-white issue tho', KennyG notwithstanding.
Cheers,
alf
I
I can imagine a computer producing Jazz tunes on the run (as in Jazz mostly different instruments are in individual harmony, there is no collaborative rhythm / harmony).
WTF??? You need to do lots of jazz listening...and I mean LOTS. Oh, and just what is "individual harmony" supposed to mean?
Come to think of it, I'd say you have LOTS of listening to do (periond). Some remedial music heory would also help.