But for note taking you don't need much and I find Google Docs adequate, found that it really forces you to focus on spelling and grammer in comparison to MS Word as there is no spelling/grammer check that I know of
That has got to be a troll. No one could seriously present that as an advantage.
I'm so happy for kids now a days who can get out of that soul crushing hell, stay home with a parent, and fire up Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and even online college courses.
Staying at home and playing on the internet is not the same as being educated.
Yeah, I know everyone on slashdot is a genius who could read at one year and program at two, but the rest of us did actually benefit from interaction with good teachers, a sensible curriculum, relevant testing, not to mention social interaction.
The difference is that once you learned how to type on a typewriter, you could type on any typewriter. The same is not true for office suites (other than the actual typing part). Excel and Lotus and OpenOffice were quite different except for the most basic of tasks. Same, too, for Word, WordPerfect and OpenOffice.
Well (1) that is because all typewriters were/are basically the same and (2) the differences between any two spreadsheets or word processors are really quite trivial.
My 8 year old daughter uses Gnucalc and Abiword at home quite happily even though they use MS Office at school.
Using MS Office is a even greater waste of funds. I find Chromebooks to be fast, efficient, and highly productive vs the drudgery of maintaining Windows, Office, Flash, Adobe Reader, Etc.
So if you use a Chromebook, it magically never needs to be maintained? It doesn't use Flash, Adobe Reader, etc?
The fact that Google is, in fact, updating them silently behind your back does not strike me as a step forward in security or efficiency.
Solving problems effectively with excel is an oxymoron.
I've got an imported list of ten thousand different numbers and want the total. Using Excel is going to be as effective as anything else, because spreadsheets are perfectly fine for adding up numbers.
No. The companies on kickstarter have business plans... they need $$ to execute them. If there's no plan, why would anyone give them money? "Excuse me, I have no idea what I'm doing, please give me money..."
Anyone who uses kickstarter doesn't have a sufficiently compelling business plan to persuade real investors. Asking for money to help develop your brilliant hobby idea is not a business plan.
Making the language closer to English is not going to solve the problem most people have in writing software.
You're speaking as a competent programmer, not a novice. Verbosity is not a problem to someone who has only read English and not code before. Any speed penalty is more than compensated for by the fact that they can produce programmes at all. This is a language to learn with, and therefore should be as newbie-friendly as possible.
Otherwise you might as well say to children and non-programmers "just go and learn Assembly, then come back to us when you can program properly". Hint: very few will.
Similarly, in the 1960s we had plenty of food, water, shelter, and entertainment available to pretty much everybody with a real job, at least in the US. If that was what drove invention, why didn't it tail off then?
The Cold War, mainly.
I think it is arguable that if the US had felt no existential threat from the USSR (or anyone else), it would happily have trundled along after the Second World War at 1950s tech levels, with only slow technological advancements in terms of publicly available goods like cars or refrigerators..
But once the race to stay ahead in the rocket game led to smaller computers, transistors and so on that all sort of leaked out into the public domain.
It is a completely new drug. It works on a different biochemical pathway in the body, specifically the cysteinyl leukotriene pathways. Older drugs generally worked along eosinophil lines, or in the case of "anti-attack" medications, by triggering beta-epinephrine which causes a reaction that offsets the *symptoms* without actually doing anything to the underlying cause.
And so how many people have worked on discovering "crysteinyl leukotriene pathways"? How much testing of different biochemical pathways has been done, over what period of time?
What it comes down to is that the eureka/light bulb moment perception of invention is wrong, which is what TFA is saying. There is iterative innovation, which no one would deny.
Your life hasn't been transformed because some genius in a white coat and funny hair suddenly invented "Singulair" in his home lab. That's all anyone's saying.
Of course there has been progress. It's just that individuals and companies shouldn't be allowed to pretend anything they do is their own work. It's all collaborative and iterative. It's why the "IP" system is so fucked up.
I'm sixty and can list things I have now that nobody had when I was ten. Car air bags, antilock brakes, the Crystalens in my left eye, the microwave oven, the VCR, LED, LCD, and plasma display screens, viagra, naproxin sodium, artificial hearts, self-driving cars, laptop and tablet computers, cell phones... I could go on all day
But no one is denying that there have been huge technological improvements in the last 50 years. All we're saying is that these are not the result of a series of independent "light bulb moments" in the minds of genius inventors.
Wow. Just wow. You really have no idea what actually goes into natural-language recognition and translation. For starters, we've been able to "break audio into components and look them up in a translation table" for, oh, fifty or sixty years now. Speech recognition was "ten years away" for the first thirty or forty of those years. Now, it's basically arrived, although there's still plenty to be done.
You show me a computer that can translate poetry (or even literary prose) properly and I'll believe you.
By the same reasoning you applied to these points, the Internet is even less of a "breakthrough" -- it's a simple iterative advance stemming from more numerous and widely-used computers, better data-transmission technology, and new market demand. Except that it's anything but "simple", and the "iterations" that led to it took us over a precipice. On this side of the precipice, everything is different.
It's not a question of whether something turns out to be a breakthrough, it's whether you can legitimately describe it as an "invention" rather than "a series of technological improvements in various fields culminating in X".
Really, the ONLY advantage of a SAK is that it has a corkscrew
A Swiss Army Knife has one great advantage over a Leatherman: you can put a normal SAK on your key ring or carry it in a pocket, whereas a Leatherman needs a belt case or something similar.
I think we've had our share of big breakthroughs...
smart phone
internet
OLED
GPS
Social Media
Autonomous car
speech recognition (w/ 99%+ accuracy)
automatic language translation
etc...
None of those are one-off "eureka" inventions. They all required iterative progress.
Oh, and "automatic language translation" is still at the "the cat sat on the mat" = "le chat assis sur le tapis" stage, if Google translate is anything to go by.
It's also possible to create new things without fundamental inventions. There's a device in my shirt pocket that really has nothing fundamentally new in it (materials are better, the battery is a new sort but still just a battery, some of the manufacturing techniques are revolutionary, that's all), and it accesses a system that's a scaled-up version of stuff we had decades ago. It gives me fast access to a tremendous amount of the world's knowledge, and that is a fundamental change.
You're another person who's missing the point completely. The smartphone wasn't invented by some guy in a shed so that we jumped from rotary dial wired speech-only phones to the iPhone in one bound. It required a whole lot of other technological breakthroughs by a whole lot of different people to get to where we are now.
Slashdot Mirror
But for note taking you don't need much and I find Google Docs adequate, found that it really forces you to focus on spelling and grammer in comparison to MS Word as there is no spelling/grammer check that I know of
That has got to be a troll. No one could seriously present that as an advantage.
Education will find you a job. Self education will find you your fortune.
A proper education will make you realise that finding a fortune is not the royal road to happiness.
I'm so happy for kids now a days who can get out of that soul crushing hell, stay home with a parent, and fire up Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and even online college courses.
Staying at home and playing on the internet is not the same as being educated.
Yeah, I know everyone on slashdot is a genius who could read at one year and program at two, but the rest of us did actually benefit from interaction with good teachers, a sensible curriculum, relevant testing, not to mention social interaction.
The difference is that once you learned how to type on a typewriter, you could type on any typewriter. The same is not true for office suites (other than the actual typing part). Excel and Lotus and OpenOffice were quite different except for the most basic of tasks. Same, too, for Word, WordPerfect and OpenOffice.
Well (1) that is because all typewriters were/are basically the same and (2) the differences between any two spreadsheets or word processors are really quite trivial.
My 8 year old daughter uses Gnucalc and Abiword at home quite happily even though they use MS Office at school.
Using MS Office is a even greater waste of funds. I find Chromebooks to be fast, efficient, and highly productive vs the drudgery of maintaining Windows, Office, Flash, Adobe Reader, Etc.
So if you use a Chromebook, it magically never needs to be maintained? It doesn't use Flash, Adobe Reader, etc?
The fact that Google is, in fact, updating them silently behind your back does not strike me as a step forward in security or efficiency.
Solving problems effectively with excel is an oxymoron.
I've got an imported list of ten thousand different numbers and want the total. Using Excel is going to be as effective as anything else, because spreadsheets are perfectly fine for adding up numbers.
Not all problems are complex mathematical models.
I feel that way about anyone who uses the word "agile" on a CV, unless they've got a hobby chasing gazelles.
No. The companies on kickstarter have business plans... they need $$ to execute them. If there's no plan, why would anyone give them money? "Excuse me, I have no idea what I'm doing, please give me money..."
Anyone who uses kickstarter doesn't have a sufficiently compelling business plan to persuade real investors. Asking for money to help develop your brilliant hobby idea is not a business plan.
You read dead-tree books about software??!
Yeah, only old people read. Us hotshot cyberpunks get the data directly through our neural jacks.
Making the language closer to English is not going to solve the problem most people have in writing software.
You're speaking as a competent programmer, not a novice. Verbosity is not a problem to someone who has only read English and not code before. Any speed penalty is more than compensated for by the fact that they can produce programmes at all. This is a language to learn with, and therefore should be as newbie-friendly as possible.
Otherwise you might as well say to children and non-programmers "just go and learn Assembly, then come back to us when you can program properly". Hint: very few will.
Similarly, in the 1960s we had plenty of food, water, shelter, and entertainment available to pretty much everybody with a real job, at least in the US. If that was what drove invention, why didn't it tail off then?
The Cold War, mainly.
I think it is arguable that if the US had felt no existential threat from the USSR (or anyone else), it would happily have trundled along after the Second World War at 1950s tech levels, with only slow technological advancements in terms of publicly available goods like cars or refrigerators..
But once the race to stay ahead in the rocket game led to smaller computers, transistors and so on that all sort of leaked out into the public domain.
It is a completely new drug. It works on a different biochemical pathway in the body, specifically the cysteinyl leukotriene pathways. Older drugs generally worked along eosinophil lines, or in the case of "anti-attack" medications, by triggering beta-epinephrine which causes a reaction that offsets the *symptoms* without actually doing anything to the underlying cause.
And so how many people have worked on discovering "crysteinyl leukotriene pathways"? How much testing of different biochemical pathways has been done, over what period of time?
What it comes down to is that the eureka/light bulb moment perception of invention is wrong, which is what TFA is saying. There is iterative innovation, which no one would deny.
Of course there has been progress. It's just that individuals and companies shouldn't be allowed to pretend anything they do is their own work. It's all collaborative and iterative. It's why the "IP" system is so fucked up.
Think you are looking for Elisha Gray there. Sasha Grey is a very different animal :)
I think we can all guess what GP does during his time locked in his research-shed.
"No entry: I'm busy inventing on the internet".
The 3D printer in my shed can build the parts.
As long as your world-shaking invention can be assembled from shitty coloured plastic widgets.
Who has a router out in the open in their house? They're not supposed to be furniture or decorative pieces. Put it in a cupboard.
They're a very science fictioney technology happening right here in real life.
You must read some fairly dull science fiction. LEDs are cool, but they're not exactly FTL travel.
I would blow Baroness Thatcher for a fission powered hover duck.
You'd have to dig her up first, she died and was buried over the weekend.
(I'm practising the power of positive thinking).
I'm sixty and can list things I have now that nobody had when I was ten. Car air bags, antilock brakes, the Crystalens in my left eye, the microwave oven, the VCR, LED, LCD, and plasma display screens, viagra, naproxin sodium, artificial hearts, self-driving cars, laptop and tablet computers, cell phones... I could go on all day
But no one is denying that there have been huge technological improvements in the last 50 years. All we're saying is that these are not the result of a series of independent "light bulb moments" in the minds of genius inventors.
Back when the Internet created a new society with a better global consciousness
Nice one.
Wow. Just wow. You really have no idea what actually goes into natural-language recognition and translation. For starters, we've been able to "break audio into components and look them up in a translation table" for, oh, fifty or sixty years now. Speech recognition was "ten years away" for the first thirty or forty of those years. Now, it's basically arrived, although there's still plenty to be done.
You show me a computer that can translate poetry (or even literary prose) properly and I'll believe you.
By the same reasoning you applied to these points, the Internet is even less of a "breakthrough" -- it's a simple iterative advance stemming from more numerous and widely-used computers, better data-transmission technology, and new market demand. Except that it's anything but "simple", and the "iterations" that led to it took us over a precipice. On this side of the precipice, everything is different.
It's not a question of whether something turns out to be a breakthrough, it's whether you can legitimately describe it as an "invention" rather than "a series of technological improvements in various fields culminating in X".
Really, the ONLY advantage of a SAK is that it has a corkscrew
A Swiss Army Knife has one great advantage over a Leatherman: you can put a normal SAK on your key ring or carry it in a pocket, whereas a Leatherman needs a belt case or something similar.
The big moment for the Internet was when Average Joes could buy access.
It's similar to when Henry Ford made the motor car available to the masses (or, at least, not just a few ultra-rich hobbyists).
But the point is that he didn't invent the car himself, out of the blue, in the same way that no one suddenly invented the internet.
I think we've had our share of big breakthroughs...
smart phone internet OLED GPS Social Media Autonomous car speech recognition (w/ 99%+ accuracy) automatic language translation
etc...
None of those are one-off "eureka" inventions. They all required iterative progress.
Oh, and "automatic language translation" is still at the "the cat sat on the mat" = "le chat assis sur le tapis" stage, if Google translate is anything to go by.
It's also possible to create new things without fundamental inventions. There's a device in my shirt pocket that really has nothing fundamentally new in it (materials are better, the battery is a new sort but still just a battery, some of the manufacturing techniques are revolutionary, that's all), and it accesses a system that's a scaled-up version of stuff we had decades ago. It gives me fast access to a tremendous amount of the world's knowledge, and that is a fundamental change.
You're another person who's missing the point completely. The smartphone wasn't invented by some guy in a shed so that we jumped from rotary dial wired speech-only phones to the iPhone in one bound. It required a whole lot of other technological breakthroughs by a whole lot of different people to get to where we are now.