Not to sound elitist, but I don't care for Linux to be way too easy. People need to know fundamentals about computers, and frankly, I don't care if all they want to do is to check email once a day.
This is a sentiment that I will never understand from open source advocates. Nearly by definition open source allows you huge numbers of options. Why can't one option be an easy to use desktop with just common functionality available (email, web, wordprocessing, etc.)? I'm positive the desktop environment that you use is personalized, this is only another degree of personalization. And it's not like you'd be forced to use it!
Don't complain about knowing the fundamentals of things, since I'm sure you don't know the basics of most of the things you use every day. How about how your tv works, from the broadcast signal down to the way it displays? If not, according to your argument, you shouldn't be allowed to watch it, turn it off. Do you even know how your power is generated? Is it nuclear, coal, hydro, wind? If you don't know that you probably should cut yourself off from the powergrid. How about something more basic than that? Do you know how you work? How is the signal generated in your brain to move your eyes to read this post?
People have different needs and they don't want to know how everything works. Open source can easily provide for everyone because of its diversity. There are two major completely separate desktop environments in general use and a huge number of distributions, would a simplified distribution really be so horrible?
It's not the so-called infallibility of computer records that worries me, it's the fact that they're using non-realtime data to prove a realtime problem.
If someone slips on the floor and they regularly buy beer, even in vast quantities, how does this prove that he was drunk at the time of the accident? At least a video camera can leave it to the judgement of the viewer as to whether the guy was acting drunk and even that doesn't prove that he was.
Historical data about buying habits does not indicate a particular behavior.
However, that would have left us with 300 baud modems the size of a PC.
This is nearly the definition of pioneer. Have you ever seen pictures of the first transister? It was about the size of a walnut! That was a pioneering feat and all transisters since then have been based on that first working concept.
You seem to think the major innovation is the miniaturization of a product, but that's only an evolution, not an pioneering innovation. Yes, it is necessary to make these things useful, but without that PC sized modem, there wouldn't have been anything to be refined in the first place.
They each hold a belief based on their own thought process, experience, and the evidence to which they've been exposed.
Okay, I was more or less agreeing with you until this point. In my experience, I've found that evidence doesn't seem to faze them. And for those that are converts, experience and evidence prior to their conversion seems to be forgotten or ignored as well.
Remember, the majority of religious belief is based on faith. Faith, by definition, is "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence." (second definition American Heritage Dictionary) Evidence has nothing to do with it; they want to believe it, so they do.
Sony units are PalmOS devices. As far as I know, all of them are, no exceptions.
I'm currently interested in switching up from my Palm TT to a new Clie TJ37. Same form factor, 802.11b, more memory, same screen size, PalmOS 5.2, etc. It's also got one of those crappy little cameras, but I can ignore that flaw. The only problem I have with it is the memory stick expansion. I've got a total of 768megs of SD cards and I'm not happy that I'd have to go with memory stick.
I truly doubt there's such a thing as a truly original story. We've been writing stories for something like 6000 years. We've been telling them for about as long as we could string ideas together far longer than that.
Retelling and interpreting themes has been the bread and butter of writers for as long as there has been writing. We humans still enjoy them. We still react to the same things that we've reacted to over the course of our history and our individual lives. There is nothing wrong with telling a story over again; it's how it's done.
My impression of the whole idea was that somebody dropped the ball. I don't even what to think of the number of former employees that still have access to systems at their former employers.
The pursuit happened so fast that a little human error could definitely have worked its way into the system.
Television is stupid because there are very few types of progamming that meet those exact requirements, and all the possible plots and scenarios were already developed and aired twenty years ago.
I think you'll find that all possible plots and scenarios were well and truly covered prior to the invention of television. Oh, and radio. And the printing press. And probably writing, but we don't have records that go back that far.
Considering all this, the fact that plots are rehashing old ideas is nothing new and probably has been going on for as long as human beings could tell stories. Heck, "oral tradition" basically involves telling stories over and over again to be remembered from generation to generation. And they not only were the same plots, they were the same stories!
You actually can stand Law and Order? Their formula is so simple it can nearly boil down to a drinking game. I used to watch the show regularly until my wife and I started having discussion, not about the actual content of the show, but how soon in the episode we managed to correctly predict the outcome.
I find SVU to be much more interesting. At least they manage to change their formula on a regular basis. Criminal Intent I've only watched once and found, like you, I couldn't stand the lead.
I'm not sure what country you're from, but my wife, who recently got her PhD in physics, makes just over 50k a year as a postdoc and her salary is far, far above average for a postdoc in the US.
And, yes, her's is an entry level research position.
Actually, this is very different from me getting into my car and looking at a map to find a route. Even the best local atlases do not show where every pothole in the road is or what the elevation is at better than 1 meter resolution.
What Sandstorm will be doing is no easy task, just given the speed that is necessary, but it will have its route plotted around every major and minor obstacle. In fact, it will have knowledge of the course better than any human driver would in its place. A human driver does not know exactly how deep the next ravine is or if the path he's taking over it is passable, while this preplanned route already tells the vehicle all of this.
Sandstorm will not be pathfinding, it will only avoid local obstacles; it will have its path marked for it down to the meter, if not better.
Actually, I think that you're view of how organized the government is is completely wrong. I will agree that the data is nowhere near as dynamic as that handled by google, but if you think that the data is in the same form, etc., you've never worked with any big organization.
Basically, the government is probably lucky if any two databases have the same set of keys, much less the same data format. Every separate department of ever single governmental organization tends to store data in different formats, possibly on different types of databases entirely.
All large organizations are like this. In the past, I did work for a major US automobile manufacturer. Not only didn't they have the same format across the boards, but the marketting databases used a completely different set of keys than the engineering/manufacturing departments when referring to the same vehicle package. So cars sold (handled by marketting) was very difficult to match up with cars produced (handled by engineering/manufacturing) because it was very hard to match the number of cars of a certain package between the different data formats. At least these were all in the same database (DB2), so you didn't have to make sure that your date formats matched from one field to another.
Actually, from what I've read, most EULAs for software basically state that they aren't designed to do what they're designed to do. I've read in several that any data lost, etc., even if caused by the application is the user's fault, not the software's.
Yes, using a snowmobile over water is definitely not within the standard use of the vehicle and both the riders and the companies realize this. What Microsoft (and just about every other software company out there) is saying is that Microsoft Word is not guaranteed to perform well when using it to process words, its main use, even to the point of data lost.
It's not just some companies when it comes to software; it's all companies who are large enough to have a legal department.
On a 1ghz PB? On my 1.25ghz Al, it runs wonderfully. In fact, I run it in window mode, instead of fullscreen, so that I can actually monitor things in the background, such as chats or remote processes. Of course, those background items can't be very CPU intensive.
Also, your performance may increase if you go into Power Management and switch it off of "Automatic." There's some CPU sleeping that goes on when in "Automatic" mode that directly impacts high performance computing.
Society does not reward intellectual achievement. It simply does not care. It is not sexy. It is not chic. There are (ignoring the Nobel and other prizes), no Science Oscars.
We as scientists have done a piss-poor job at explaining why what we do is valuable to society at large. We have not made the case.
This is only partially the problem. Society (at least here in the US) seems to actively dislike intelligence. I don't know the reasons for it, but I see the evidence everywhere. People support the high school football team, but not the chess club. Parents don't want their kids to be associated with many intellectual activities.
Possibly the evidence that most infuriates me is a church sermon I sat through a few years back. The topic was "Do you want your children to be good or smart?" There was an implication throughout the sermon that it was an exclusive or; being smart made children evil. To say the least, after using that church to get married in, I haven't gone to a church for anything except various friends' weddings since.
Actually, in the US, educators in general get screwed. If you teach in a public school, you'll make less that just about any plumber. Higher education is a little better, but still not great and the sheer about of crap you have to go through to get tenure is getting worse all the time.
In the devs position, I've been kind to any users that have written in wanting new features, etc. Maybe he expected something resembling politeness? Curtesy?
It's not that he wanted them to say, "I'll have that feature for you in an hour, sir!" He just expects them to not act like arrogant pricks.
When purchasing, something of equivalent worth, but a cheaper price is generally considered better. Thus, AMD is better.
Personally, I like AMD's architecture and hardware philosophy better than Intel's as well, but the big selling point for me is the fact that I can get an AMD for far less the the equivalently performing Intel.
"Traditionally?" How far does your tradition go back? I'd guess not much farther than a century.
If we really go with tradition, we'd pay all of our soldiers the easy way: plunder. It was very simple a few hundred years ago, you'd get your army together and march on the enemy. On the way there, you'd feed off what you carried and your civilians until you got to the enemy's territory, then you'd feed their civilians, along with some nice stealing and raping.
The fun really started when you got to any major city, where you'd kill anyone who resisted and steal anything not nailed down (and nice things that were) so that the troops could get paid. Not to mention any slaves taken and women raped.
Of course, when you were really pissed off, you'd kill everyone in the city, except for desirable women, destroy every structure and the salt the ground around it so that nothing would grow.
Yes, Shockley is a counterexample. Now get 19 more of them to agree to the same thing. This was not just a single Nobel winner, this was 20.
I don't know if you've ever been in an a discussion with 20 scientists, but generally they can't even agree on the time of day, much less something of this scope.
No Child Left Behind is a bad idea overall. It makes sure that children can answer a known set of questions with a known set of answers. They might as well be memorizing the first 1000 primes without knowing what a prime is.
It doesn't answer the "why" questions that are necessary to answer in the learning process. It will definitely make a nice population of mindless drones though, which seems to be what most conservatives want anyway; for everyone to be like them.
Don't even start in on teachers unless you know what they go through. Next time you handle 30 13 year olds for an hour get back to me, then I'll toss you to 30 6 year olds for 6 hours. Oh, and make sure that they learn something during the course of the period.
And it's not about the system either. If parents actually gave a damn about what their kids were doing during the day, learning would go on, but parents treat school as day care. Education is not valued. Blame the parents, not the teachers.
It's not about being violent or hateful of people in general. I'm kind overall and very forgiving unless you start killing my neighbors. It's about realizing that some people cannot be rehabilitated. There are such things as lost causes.
I disagree with the ancestor post about who should be removed from society, I think it was too stringent, but I do agree with the sentiment. I generally only stick with multiple murderers. Killing another person can be an accident or caused by a controllable condition. Killing on multiple occasions and/or through premeditation is basically unforgiveable.
I also disagree that it should be gruesome. We're talking about removal from society because of the danger that this person poses; it's not about rehab in any sense.
Also, as an aside, I'm both pro-choice and in favor of the death penalty. I also think that we put too many people into prisons to begin with. An addict does not need to go to prison for possessing his drug of choice, he needs help, not punishment.
Pepsi and Apple are clearly targeting people who already like Pepsi products and would find a free song a nice prize in addition to their drink of choice.
Actually, this would make no sense at all. The people that currently like Pepsi products would buy Pepsi in any case, free song or not.
This campaign is targeted at people who don't normally buy Pepsi for one reason or another or who are planning on switching to something else, thus increasing Pepsi's sales by giving them a reason to buy Pepsi.
Personally, I only buy Pepsi over Coke when it's on sale and then I usually buy Mt. Dew or Dr. Pepper since they go on sale along with the rest of Pepsi's products.
While I'm bashing everyone anyway...Not putting a floppy drive on the Imac has got to be one of the stupidest moves Apple has ever made. It reminds me of that "everyone will be on broadband anyway" statement that some moron made quite a few years ago.
My floppy drives have done one thing in the last five years: gathered dust. All my machines can boot from CD. I've had a CD burner for the last five years, so if I need to make a bootable CD, I can (though I've never needed to).
My wife got a Powerbook about 5 years ago, it was the first computer I had that didn't come with a floppy drive. We got an external USB floppy for it so she could move data from an unnetworked PC (which at the time was already 5 years old) to it. Since she stopped doing research there, we haven't used it at all. In fact, at this point, I'm not even sure where it is.
The only machine that I have in my house that has a floppy drive is my PC. It's never been used. All the emergency software for it is on CD. It has a burner, so if I need to, I can burn backups and such.
Truthfully, not only are floppies fragile and bit rot prone, but they hold nearly nothing in today's world. So they can't even be used for quick "sneaker net" transfers anymore. I can't remember the last time that I need to transfer less than 5 megs from one computer to another. At my place of work, there are word docs that would easily swamp a floppy.
Currently, my "sneaker net" is powered by a single USB zip drive. When I need to move something, I just write it to disk and then move the whole unit to the new machine (everything I own has USB ports). Now that I think of it, I've never had to use it either, since I have a robust home network attached to a cable modem.
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This is a sentiment that I will never understand from open source advocates. Nearly by definition open source allows you huge numbers of options. Why can't one option be an easy to use desktop with just common functionality available (email, web, wordprocessing, etc.)? I'm positive the desktop environment that you use is personalized, this is only another degree of personalization. And it's not like you'd be forced to use it!
Don't complain about knowing the fundamentals of things, since I'm sure you don't know the basics of most of the things you use every day. How about how your tv works, from the broadcast signal down to the way it displays? If not, according to your argument, you shouldn't be allowed to watch it, turn it off. Do you even know how your power is generated? Is it nuclear, coal, hydro, wind? If you don't know that you probably should cut yourself off from the powergrid. How about something more basic than that? Do you know how you work? How is the signal generated in your brain to move your eyes to read this post?
People have different needs and they don't want to know how everything works. Open source can easily provide for everyone because of its diversity. There are two major completely separate desktop environments in general use and a huge number of distributions, would a simplified distribution really be so horrible?
If someone slips on the floor and they regularly buy beer, even in vast quantities, how does this prove that he was drunk at the time of the accident? At least a video camera can leave it to the judgement of the viewer as to whether the guy was acting drunk and even that doesn't prove that he was.
Historical data about buying habits does not indicate a particular behavior.
This is nearly the definition of pioneer. Have you ever seen pictures of the first transister? It was about the size of a walnut! That was a pioneering feat and all transisters since then have been based on that first working concept.
You seem to think the major innovation is the miniaturization of a product, but that's only an evolution, not an pioneering innovation. Yes, it is necessary to make these things useful, but without that PC sized modem, there wouldn't have been anything to be refined in the first place.
Okay, I was more or less agreeing with you until this point. In my experience, I've found that evidence doesn't seem to faze them. And for those that are converts, experience and evidence prior to their conversion seems to be forgotten or ignored as well.
Remember, the majority of religious belief is based on faith. Faith, by definition, is "Belief that does not rest on logical proof or material evidence." (second definition American Heritage Dictionary) Evidence has nothing to do with it; they want to believe it, so they do.
I'm currently interested in switching up from my Palm TT to a new Clie TJ37. Same form factor, 802.11b, more memory, same screen size, PalmOS 5.2, etc. It's also got one of those crappy little cameras, but I can ignore that flaw. The only problem I have with it is the memory stick expansion. I've got a total of 768megs of SD cards and I'm not happy that I'd have to go with memory stick.
I truly doubt there's such a thing as a truly original story. We've been writing stories for something like 6000 years. We've been telling them for about as long as we could string ideas together far longer than that.
Retelling and interpreting themes has been the bread and butter of writers for as long as there has been writing. We humans still enjoy them. We still react to the same things that we've reacted to over the course of our history and our individual lives. There is nothing wrong with telling a story over again; it's how it's done.
The pursuit happened so fast that a little human error could definitely have worked its way into the system.
I think you'll find that all possible plots and scenarios were well and truly covered prior to the invention of television. Oh, and radio. And the printing press. And probably writing, but we don't have records that go back that far.
Considering all this, the fact that plots are rehashing old ideas is nothing new and probably has been going on for as long as human beings could tell stories. Heck, "oral tradition" basically involves telling stories over and over again to be remembered from generation to generation. And they not only were the same plots, they were the same stories!
I find SVU to be much more interesting. At least they manage to change their formula on a regular basis. Criminal Intent I've only watched once and found, like you, I couldn't stand the lead.
And, yes, her's is an entry level research position.
What Sandstorm will be doing is no easy task, just given the speed that is necessary, but it will have its route plotted around every major and minor obstacle. In fact, it will have knowledge of the course better than any human driver would in its place. A human driver does not know exactly how deep the next ravine is or if the path he's taking over it is passable, while this preplanned route already tells the vehicle all of this.
Sandstorm will not be pathfinding, it will only avoid local obstacles; it will have its path marked for it down to the meter, if not better.
Basically, the government is probably lucky if any two databases have the same set of keys, much less the same data format. Every separate department of ever single governmental organization tends to store data in different formats, possibly on different types of databases entirely.
All large organizations are like this. In the past, I did work for a major US automobile manufacturer. Not only didn't they have the same format across the boards, but the marketting databases used a completely different set of keys than the engineering/manufacturing departments when referring to the same vehicle package. So cars sold (handled by marketting) was very difficult to match up with cars produced (handled by engineering/manufacturing) because it was very hard to match the number of cars of a certain package between the different data formats. At least these were all in the same database (DB2), so you didn't have to make sure that your date formats matched from one field to another.
Yes, using a snowmobile over water is definitely not within the standard use of the vehicle and both the riders and the companies realize this. What Microsoft (and just about every other software company out there) is saying is that Microsoft Word is not guaranteed to perform well when using it to process words, its main use, even to the point of data lost.
It's not just some companies when it comes to software; it's all companies who are large enough to have a legal department.
Also, your performance may increase if you go into Power Management and switch it off of "Automatic." There's some CPU sleeping that goes on when in "Automatic" mode that directly impacts high performance computing.
This is only partially the problem. Society (at least here in the US) seems to actively dislike intelligence. I don't know the reasons for it, but I see the evidence everywhere. People support the high school football team, but not the chess club. Parents don't want their kids to be associated with many intellectual activities.
Possibly the evidence that most infuriates me is a church sermon I sat through a few years back. The topic was "Do you want your children to be good or smart?" There was an implication throughout the sermon that it was an exclusive or; being smart made children evil. To say the least, after using that church to get married in, I haven't gone to a church for anything except various friends' weddings since.
Actually, in the US, educators in general get screwed. If you teach in a public school, you'll make less that just about any plumber. Higher education is a little better, but still not great and the sheer about of crap you have to go through to get tenure is getting worse all the time.
It's not that he wanted them to say, "I'll have that feature for you in an hour, sir!" He just expects them to not act like arrogant pricks.
I don't think that's too much to ask.
Personally, I like AMD's architecture and hardware philosophy better than Intel's as well, but the big selling point for me is the fact that I can get an AMD for far less the the equivalently performing Intel.
If we really go with tradition, we'd pay all of our soldiers the easy way: plunder. It was very simple a few hundred years ago, you'd get your army together and march on the enemy. On the way there, you'd feed off what you carried and your civilians until you got to the enemy's territory, then you'd feed their civilians, along with some nice stealing and raping.
The fun really started when you got to any major city, where you'd kill anyone who resisted and steal anything not nailed down (and nice things that were) so that the troops could get paid. Not to mention any slaves taken and women raped.
Of course, when you were really pissed off, you'd kill everyone in the city, except for desirable women, destroy every structure and the salt the ground around it so that nothing would grow.
Now that's tradition!
Actually, it was very touchy-feely; Stalin touched them and they didn't feel anymore.
I don't know if you've ever been in an a discussion with 20 scientists, but generally they can't even agree on the time of day, much less something of this scope.
It doesn't answer the "why" questions that are necessary to answer in the learning process. It will definitely make a nice population of mindless drones though, which seems to be what most conservatives want anyway; for everyone to be like them.
Don't even start in on teachers unless you know what they go through. Next time you handle 30 13 year olds for an hour get back to me, then I'll toss you to 30 6 year olds for 6 hours. Oh, and make sure that they learn something during the course of the period.
And it's not about the system either. If parents actually gave a damn about what their kids were doing during the day, learning would go on, but parents treat school as day care. Education is not valued. Blame the parents, not the teachers.
I disagree with the ancestor post about who should be removed from society, I think it was too stringent, but I do agree with the sentiment. I generally only stick with multiple murderers. Killing another person can be an accident or caused by a controllable condition. Killing on multiple occasions and/or through premeditation is basically unforgiveable.
I also disagree that it should be gruesome. We're talking about removal from society because of the danger that this person poses; it's not about rehab in any sense.
Also, as an aside, I'm both pro-choice and in favor of the death penalty. I also think that we put too many people into prisons to begin with. An addict does not need to go to prison for possessing his drug of choice, he needs help, not punishment.
Actually, this would make no sense at all. The people that currently like Pepsi products would buy Pepsi in any case, free song or not.
This campaign is targeted at people who don't normally buy Pepsi for one reason or another or who are planning on switching to something else, thus increasing Pepsi's sales by giving them a reason to buy Pepsi.
Personally, I only buy Pepsi over Coke when it's on sale and then I usually buy Mt. Dew or Dr. Pepper since they go on sale along with the rest of Pepsi's products.
My floppy drives have done one thing in the last five years: gathered dust. All my machines can boot from CD. I've had a CD burner for the last five years, so if I need to make a bootable CD, I can (though I've never needed to).
My wife got a Powerbook about 5 years ago, it was the first computer I had that didn't come with a floppy drive. We got an external USB floppy for it so she could move data from an unnetworked PC (which at the time was already 5 years old) to it. Since she stopped doing research there, we haven't used it at all. In fact, at this point, I'm not even sure where it is.
The only machine that I have in my house that has a floppy drive is my PC. It's never been used. All the emergency software for it is on CD. It has a burner, so if I need to, I can burn backups and such.
Truthfully, not only are floppies fragile and bit rot prone, but they hold nearly nothing in today's world. So they can't even be used for quick "sneaker net" transfers anymore. I can't remember the last time that I need to transfer less than 5 megs from one computer to another. At my place of work, there are word docs that would easily swamp a floppy.
Currently, my "sneaker net" is powered by a single USB zip drive. When I need to move something, I just write it to disk and then move the whole unit to the new machine (everything I own has USB ports). Now that I think of it, I've never had to use it either, since I have a robust home network attached to a cable modem.