It depends on what you do with your computer. I would say that any model out there today runs well enough for web-browsing, e-mail and word processing. If that's all you do, there is no need to wait for better machines. I'm typing this on a two year old G4 laptop, and in spite of the fact that I have enough money, I can see no excuse to upgrade to a faster model.
If you do (or intend to do) a lot of editing of big images or video editing or compiling big applications, then you are probably more concerned with speed. Check out the benchmarks, or try a machine out with your nearest Apple dealer. It could be that the present machines already beat your current linux box.
I just spent a few months in China. I found only one website that was blocked by the Chinese: news.bbc.co.uk. The rest of BBC worked fine, and every other site in the world that I tried to go to was available. If you are a porn addict and have favourite sites you go to regularly, it is possible that you may be out of luck, but considering what some people around me in the internet cafés occasionally watched, it cannot be that limited.
On the other hand, even if your favourite sites happen to be blocked, would it really be that bad? You will probably find a few thousand other interesting sites instead. The internet is bigger than my garden.
Alphabetical keys may make it easier for "hunt and peck typists as well as senior citizens who have never had a computer because they are challenged by the difficult basic keyboard," but it is far from becoming a standard, since the layout is very inefficient for a touch typist.
Agree. The real improvement would be to actually change the inefficient ordering of the alphabet we have today. It has roots from about 3000 years ago. Who thought about keyboard efficiency in those days?
QWERTY... would be an excellent order to sort names in phone books and books on library shelves.
(And yes, I know that this is ethnocentric. The French use AZERTY, the Germans... something else, and so on, but one cannot solve all problems for everyone at the same time. At least, I cannot.)
Those statements are completely irrelevant for almost all purposes. It's very possible that men are better on average than women on maths, gardening or pizza delivery, but that does not matter a bit, as there are plenty of women, who outdo plenty of men in all those perhaps slightly man dominated areas.
It's possible that people in Wisconsin are better in sports than people in Kansas. In fact, I am sure that either this is the case, or the opposite is the case, because if you have a fine enough measurement tool you will find a difference in the averages. However, going from there to say that "people in Wisconsin are better in sports that people in Kansas" (or the opposite) is redundant, misleading and ridiculous.
An average of this kind has no practical meaning what so ever.
I have always been suspicious against people who have a university degree. How on earth could they stand that for several years someone else told them what was to be learnt? How could they waste part of their life learning things in order to "get their degree" instead of "because I find it interesting" or "because I know it's useful". Taking a degree seems to show such a lack of independent thoughts.
However, life has taught me that there are people who are bright in spite of their degrees. There are plenty of people graduating at Harvard without being complete morons. They may not become the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or
Lawrence Ellison, but they may get a decent life anyhow.
"involved in spreading viruses (something he strongly denies)"
Well, he denies that he has spread viruses himself, but as he says "29A just wants to share ideas with others, and source code is a way of expression", he cannot possibly guarantee that none of his viruses have made it into the wild.
Viruses and how they work is of course a fascinating subject, but having a group of people dedicating to exploring how to create new ones is very questionable. When I was younger I did the superficial test of making a Word-macro-"virus", which spread to other documents provided they were on my machine in the folder c:\donttouch\ and their name was xyz*.doc, just to see if it worked. I never showed the code to anyone, even though it was mostly harmless. This guy has gone much further than that, and I could not condone what he claims to have done.
To me he is at least as vile as the companies which release operating systems that have huge security gaps.
Seriously, do they actually employ the sysadmin to go thorugh all your cookies to find out what you've been up to online?
Nah, most, perhaps all, cybercafes are managed by friendly people, who simply reset the system after each user. And even if they didn't, I wouldn't mind if they figured out that I went to http://www.scmp.com or http://www.madameve.co.za/ . They don't know my name; all they know about me is that I paid 10 yuan in deposit.
However, if you go to a number of cybercafes, it is not impossible that at least one sysadmin checks your cookies for stored userids or the autofill cache for stored passwords. We wouldn't like that, would we?
Firefox killed off IE, where Mozilla couldn't
on
Planning For Mozilla 2.0
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I used different cybercafes around China the last few months, and they had very different ways of "protecting" my security in IE. Many of them had applied a Windows security mechanism that made it difficult or completely impossible to delete your own cookies.
My solution was to download nifty little Firefox with IE. No matter how mad the sys admins were, one could always delete history, cache and cookies with Firefox after each session. (Except at Shanghai City Library, where Firefox wouldn't even install.)
With a large bundle like Mozilla, I could never have downloaded it fast enough to have the patience to wait for it. Size matters.
Did anyone see anything about an upgrade option for iWork? I paid more for Keynote alone than iWork costs, so some sort of a rebate would seem appropriate.
"I've heard Japan was going to surrender before we dropped the bomb, but we didn't know due to a translation error. They responded to us "We don't have a decision yet" in regards to the end of the war. Our interpreters translated it to, "We decide no.""
In any case, there was a discussion within the Japanese government about surrendering. There were also people who had objected to the war for a long time. Make a search in google or wikipedia on e.g. Yamamoto Isoroku, Koiso Kuniaki or Suzuki Kantaro.
Making a judgement on politicians of that time is next to impossible. If the Americans had known exactly which diplomatic doors to knock at, they would probably not have had to use nuclear weapons - not even in Hiroshima. However, they did not have enough information and did what seemed the best thing at the time.
Pity. Still, not all is lost, if you anyhow happen to have an iPod, and if you can get the written text transliterated to latin characters. It's much less useful than seeing the "real" Arab letters, at least when you're past the stage of being a complete novice, but it might be better than nothing.
A handy way to carry around a language course is an iPod. What you need is:
1) The dialog CDs as mp3-files.
2) The dialog texts as text files.
Upload the mp3-files to the iPod and upload the texts as Notes. Then you can sit and read the texts at the same time as you listen to the voices. In an airplane, in a waiting room, at the dentist's, in the underground. In the car, you should not read the screen obviously, but you can still listen to the mp3-files, and then read the texts once you arrive at your hotel, the boring party you have to be at or wherever.
This may actually not work with Arabic. I'm not sure how good the iPod is at displaying Arabic characters. But I know you can make it work with most European languages, Japanese and Chinese.
One of the most common traps when it comes to learning languages is that there is a "better" method and a "worse" method. In the end, what matters is how much work you invest yourself. No software and no other method will learn the language for you. You have to spend a lot of time and energy regardless of method.
In my experience you have to try methods out yourself. Do you like learning things from a computer screen? Do so. Do you like reading grammar books? Do so. Do you like learning long lists of words from phrase books? Do so. Do you have a beautiful girl/boyfriend, who is a native speaker? Use him/her a lot (chatting, reading and writing - romantic staring can be pleasant as well, but that alone will not teach you the language). But whatever combination of activities you choose, do it a lot.
The problem with the new machines every year is all the features we get that we rarely use, and which hog the machines.
I just got rid of my old Powerbook 170 with a sad nostalgic sigh. It was such a lovely machine. Perfect for word processing. If it only had had a decent interface to a memory stick or airport... And perhaps a way to configure internet with DHCP and lynx.. It had a huge 80M harddisk, which there was no way I would ever fill up.
I'm typing this on a Powerbook G4 with a 40G harddisk, which is almost full of bloat programs, mp3s, Simplified Chinese localisation, all of which sometimes come in handy, but do I need them? No.
If I could have kept the Powerbook 170 for 12 years and just paid for those tiny add-ons: memory stick USB interface, airport, internet and lynx, I would definitely have done so.
I have not tried any of these myself, except the few I have had to "hack" (reset) on computers, where some admin didn't allow me to even use Notepad. To "hack" them, I had to use third party software, which the sloppy admin for some reason had installed. Perhaps it was just a silly test of my curiosity or integrity. In the former case I passed. In the latter I guess I failed, even though I actually didn't do any harm with Notepad.
My uneducated guess has always been that there is only one thing that really is needed: a protocol that verifies that the sender really is the sender.
If I see spam with casinohotnews as sender, and I know it's from them, I'll just block them on my machine.
If I see that someone uses a hotmail account to send me mail, and I can trust it is from hotmail, I ask MS to handle the problem.
The one horrible thing with today's mail protocols is that you can pretend you are someone else. It would have been so easy to add a handshake in there: So you claim you are, af62co@spamking.com, ok, pls verify that, before I even think of showing your mail to the recipient.
I may be missing something here, but I do not know what. Anyone who can tell me where I go wrong?
For those who did not bother reading the study, the author himself is painfully aware of the shortcoming of only studing pitches. He finishes with "It would be interesting to consider alternative extensions, at the level of melodic phrases, harmonic sequences, or rhythmic patterns, and thus explore the concept of musical context at different scales."
Apart from being a fun mathematical excercise, the only vaguely interesting thing this study says in its current form, is that there is a certain similarity between the spoken word, Bach, Debussy and Mozart on one hand, and Schoenberg on the other hand. However, not even this is particularly interesting, as Schoenberg explicitly tried to avoid just this kind of pattern. Had it been done with Stockhausen, Berio or (at least some of the early) Penderecki pieces, it would be more interesting.
"Microsoft should release a service pack to Windows that sets the security settings on MSIE to their highest levels, even at the risk of breaking many web sites."
"Redmond, listen: Make Windows Secure."
No.
Let's face it. Even if MS cancelled all other development for a year on all other products and just focused on making IE, IIS and Windows "secure", they would not become 100% secure, because there is no such thing. There is always a risk of bugs and bad undiscovered design faults and so on.
We do not live in a perfect world, and we will never do.
What is needed is a good judgement of the work load to increase safety against real and realistic risks. Spend the money where it helps most. Ill judged panic reactions is not where it is best spent.
PS. This defence speech was not meant to say that MS currently applies such a judgement. They are currently doing a sloppy job - no doubt about that. Go get them, Spot! Bite!
" You'll get some strange looks in Japan when you start using those Mandarin Chinese phrases on people:)"
Aha! Now, I start understanding things! I had vaguely suspected something was wrong with my pink velvet suit or my light green top hat, but speaking the wrong language might explain people's raised eyebrows, I guess...
"Your call is important to us, and so is your valuable time. Why don't we spend it together learning some Japanese? Say after me in the pause: Ni hao ma?... Hen hao. Xiexie ni... Ni zhidao ni bu shuo riyu?... Zhidao. Wo shuo hanyu..."
" What is the rational given in the USA for not using metric?"
OK, mod me troll here, but I love the US system. I was born in and spent most of my life in continental Europe, and for a long time to me the the meter was the only right way of measuring the world.
But seeing the advantages of working with smaller units I just loved it. "I'm 6 foot tall" instead of "182 centimeters". "It is on this page, 3 inches from the bottom" instead of "7... or perhaps 8 cm from the bottom".
It simply is more convenient in some situations. Metric is the way to go in spite of its drawbacks, not because it would not have any.
And often, of course, metric is clearly better. When it comes to science and international deals, the metric system is by far superior. Not to mention conversions between short and long: "This map is of the scale 1:20 000. That means that one inch on the map is, ehm 20 000 inches in real life, which is a lot of feet but not that many miles..."
... but I'm sure you have had some problems in your previous work life - perhaps not you personally, perhaps not where you work right now, but there has probably been something. Give some examples of similar situations, and ask him how s/he'd solve them. The more impossible the better to observe the reactions.
A simple example: "Suppose your team has been given a task that cannot be achieved by the given date with the available manpower. Staffing cannot be changed. How would you handle such a situation?" (But it is better that you choose something you have direct experience of yourself.)
Note, that this is sensitive. Unless you are careful you could give the idea that you are a trouble maker, and that's not the impression you want to give a boss even before s/he has started. Especially as you're not the only one s/he will speak with.
Re:If you keep making predictions...
on
Is This The Big One?
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· Score: 3, Funny
"If you keep making predictions, eventually one of them will come true."
Bah, that's far too much trouble for me. It is much easier to go for "If you keep reading other people's predictions, eventually you will find one that turned out to be true."
"My point is that to judge intelligence purely on the basis of how an animal performs in the human society is just as flawed as basing intelligence on how a human performs in a wolf pack.
"
Your interpretation of what I wrote is on the whole not unreasonable, but what I tried to express was somewhat different.
There are people who fail on IQ tests because the tests are too boring, but the failure in itself is of course usually no proof that the person is intelligent. (Unless one goes to the extreme. Let's assume that I give you an "intelligence" test that requires you to put a cross next to given numbers if and only if they are even. The list contains 50 000 random integers. If you score 100% on such a test, I will definitely not employ you for any job that requires lateral thinking. By passing the test you have shown that you are not the kind of person I'm looking for.)
The simple fact that a child fails to lead blind people does of course not in itself prove that children are more intelligent than dogs. However, looking at the reasons for why a child does not succeed, suggests that it is no proof that they would be less intelligent either.
My point was that your example was no proof for fully grown trained dogs being more intelligent that small children. I never intended to say that I had proved the opposite myself, even though such a claim made from your example might not be completely unreasonable. (Yes, it is made weaker by your puppy example. However, once more, one can look at what kind of curiosity the two species show, and only one shows curiosity of for example verbal dexterity. We could go further into detail here, but I am not sure it would be productive. Especially not as puppies never are used as blind dogs.)
To put it shortly: the blind dog example is no definite proof in either direction.
Slashdot Mirror
If you do (or intend to do) a lot of editing of big images or video editing or compiling big applications, then you are probably more concerned with speed. Check out the benchmarks, or try a machine out with your nearest Apple dealer. It could be that the present machines already beat your current linux box.
On the other hand, even if your favourite sites happen to be blocked, would it really be that bad? You will probably find a few thousand other interesting sites instead. The internet is bigger than my garden.
Agree. The real improvement would be to actually change the inefficient ordering of the alphabet we have today. It has roots from about 3000 years ago. Who thought about keyboard efficiency in those days?
QWERTY... would be an excellent order to sort names in phone books and books on library shelves.
(And yes, I know that this is ethnocentric. The French use AZERTY, the Germans... something else, and so on, but one cannot solve all problems for everyone at the same time. At least, I cannot.)
It's possible that people in Wisconsin are better in sports than people in Kansas. In fact, I am sure that either this is the case, or the opposite is the case, because if you have a fine enough measurement tool you will find a difference in the averages. However, going from there to say that "people in Wisconsin are better in sports that people in Kansas" (or the opposite) is redundant, misleading and ridiculous.
An average of this kind has no practical meaning what so ever.
However, life has taught me that there are people who are bright in spite of their degrees. There are plenty of people graduating at Harvard without being complete morons. They may not become the next Bill Gates, Steve Jobs or Lawrence Ellison, but they may get a decent life anyhow.
Well, he denies that he has spread viruses himself, but as he says "29A just wants to share ideas with others, and source code is a way of expression", he cannot possibly guarantee that none of his viruses have made it into the wild.
Viruses and how they work is of course a fascinating subject, but having a group of people dedicating to exploring how to create new ones is very questionable. When I was younger I did the superficial test of making a Word-macro-"virus", which spread to other documents provided they were on my machine in the folder c:\donttouch\ and their name was xyz*.doc, just to see if it worked. I never showed the code to anyone, even though it was mostly harmless. This guy has gone much further than that, and I could not condone what he claims to have done.
To me he is at least as vile as the companies which release operating systems that have huge security gaps.
Nah, most, perhaps all, cybercafes are managed by friendly people, who simply reset the system after each user. And even if they didn't, I wouldn't mind if they figured out that I went to http://www.scmp.com or http://www.madameve.co.za/ . They don't know my name; all they know about me is that I paid 10 yuan in deposit.
However, if you go to a number of cybercafes, it is not impossible that at least one sysadmin checks your cookies for stored userids or the autofill cache for stored passwords. We wouldn't like that, would we?
My solution was to download nifty little Firefox with IE. No matter how mad the sys admins were, one could always delete history, cache and cookies with Firefox after each session. (Except at Shanghai City Library, where Firefox wouldn't even install.)
With a large bundle like Mozilla, I could never have downloaded it fast enough to have the patience to wait for it. Size matters.
Did anyone see anything about an upgrade option for iWork? I paid more for Keynote alone than iWork costs, so some sort of a rebate would seem appropriate.
In any case, there was a discussion within the Japanese government about surrendering. There were also people who had objected to the war for a long time. Make a search in google or wikipedia on e.g. Yamamoto Isoroku, Koiso Kuniaki or Suzuki Kantaro.
Making a judgement on politicians of that time is next to impossible. If the Americans had known exactly which diplomatic doors to knock at, they would probably not have had to use nuclear weapons - not even in Hiroshima. However, they did not have enough information and did what seemed the best thing at the time.
Pity. Still, not all is lost, if you anyhow happen to have an iPod, and if you can get the written text transliterated to latin characters. It's much less useful than seeing the "real" Arab letters, at least when you're past the stage of being a complete novice, but it might be better than nothing.
Good luck, anyhow!
1) The dialog CDs as mp3-files.
2) The dialog texts as text files.
Upload the mp3-files to the iPod and upload the texts as Notes. Then you can sit and read the texts at the same time as you listen to the voices. In an airplane, in a waiting room, at the dentist's, in the underground. In the car, you should not read the screen obviously, but you can still listen to the mp3-files, and then read the texts once you arrive at your hotel, the boring party you have to be at or wherever.
This may actually not work with Arabic. I'm not sure how good the iPod is at displaying Arabic characters. But I know you can make it work with most European languages, Japanese and Chinese.
Have fun!
In my experience you have to try methods out yourself. Do you like learning things from a computer screen? Do so. Do you like reading grammar books? Do so. Do you like learning long lists of words from phrase books? Do so. Do you have a beautiful girl/boyfriend, who is a native speaker? Use him/her a lot (chatting, reading and writing - romantic staring can be pleasant as well, but that alone will not teach you the language). But whatever combination of activities you choose, do it a lot.
I just got rid of my old Powerbook 170 with a sad nostalgic sigh. It was such a lovely machine. Perfect for word processing. If it only had had a decent interface to a memory stick or airport... And perhaps a way to configure internet with DHCP and lynx.. It had a huge 80M harddisk, which there was no way I would ever fill up.
I'm typing this on a Powerbook G4 with a 40G harddisk, which is almost full of bloat programs, mp3s, Simplified Chinese localisation, all of which sometimes come in handy, but do I need them? No.
If I could have kept the Powerbook 170 for 12 years and just paid for those tiny add-ons: memory stick USB interface, airport, internet and lynx, I would definitely have done so.
And in addition the last hint at
http://silverstr.ufies.org/blog/archives/000257.ht ml about how to limit which programs are allowed.
I have not tried any of these myself, except the few I have had to "hack" (reset) on computers, where some admin didn't allow me to even use Notepad. To "hack" them, I had to use third party software, which the sloppy admin for some reason had installed. Perhaps it was just a silly test of my curiosity or integrity. In the former case I passed. In the latter I guess I failed, even though I actually didn't do any harm with Notepad.
If I see spam with casinohotnews as sender, and I know it's from them, I'll just block them on my machine.
If I see that someone uses a hotmail account to send me mail, and I can trust it is from hotmail, I ask MS to handle the problem.
The one horrible thing with today's mail protocols is that you can pretend you are someone else. It would have been so easy to add a handshake in there: So you claim you are, af62co@spamking.com, ok, pls verify that, before I even think of showing your mail to the recipient.
I may be missing something here, but I do not know what. Anyone who can tell me where I go wrong?
Apart from being a fun mathematical excercise, the only vaguely interesting thing this study says in its current form, is that there is a certain similarity between the spoken word, Bach, Debussy and Mozart on one hand, and Schoenberg on the other hand. However, not even this is particularly interesting, as Schoenberg explicitly tried to avoid just this kind of pattern. Had it been done with Stockhausen, Berio or (at least some of the early) Penderecki pieces, it would be more interesting.
Now it's just fun. No harm in that.
"Redmond, listen: Make Windows Secure."
No.
Let's face it. Even if MS cancelled all other development for a year on all other products and just focused on making IE, IIS and Windows "secure", they would not become 100% secure, because there is no such thing. There is always a risk of bugs and bad undiscovered design faults and so on.
We do not live in a perfect world, and we will never do.
What is needed is a good judgement of the work load to increase safety against real and realistic risks. Spend the money where it helps most. Ill judged panic reactions is not where it is best spent.
PS. This defence speech was not meant to say that MS currently applies such a judgement. They are currently doing a sloppy job - no doubt about that. Go get them, Spot! Bite!
Aha! Now, I start understanding things! I had vaguely suspected something was wrong with my pink velvet suit or my light green top hat, but speaking the wrong language might explain people's raised eyebrows, I guess...
Why stay with morse code?
"Your call is important to us, and so is your valuable time. Why don't we spend it together learning some Japanese? Say after me in the pause: Ni hao ma? ... Hen hao. Xiexie ni... Ni zhidao ni bu shuo riyu?... Zhidao. Wo shuo hanyu..."
OK, mod me troll here, but I love the US system. I was born in and spent most of my life in continental Europe, and for a long time to me the the meter was the only right way of measuring the world.
But seeing the advantages of working with smaller units I just loved it. "I'm 6 foot tall" instead of "182 centimeters". "It is on this page, 3 inches from the bottom" instead of "7... or perhaps 8 cm from the bottom".
It simply is more convenient in some situations. Metric is the way to go in spite of its drawbacks, not because it would not have any.
And often, of course, metric is clearly better. When it comes to science and international deals, the metric system is by far superior. Not to mention conversions between short and long: "This map is of the scale 1:20 000. That means that one inch on the map is, ehm 20 000 inches in real life, which is a lot of feet but not that many miles..."
A simple example: "Suppose your team has been given a task that cannot be achieved by the given date with the available manpower. Staffing cannot be changed. How would you handle such a situation?" (But it is better that you choose something you have direct experience of yourself.)
Note, that this is sensitive. Unless you are careful you could give the idea that you are a trouble maker, and that's not the impression you want to give a boss even before s/he has started. Especially as you're not the only one s/he will speak with.
Bah, that's far too much trouble for me. It is much easier to go for "If you keep reading other people's predictions, eventually you will find one that turned out to be true."
We have the same point! Great!
There are people who fail on IQ tests because the tests are too boring, but the failure in itself is of course usually no proof that the person is intelligent. (Unless one goes to the extreme. Let's assume that I give you an "intelligence" test that requires you to put a cross next to given numbers if and only if they are even. The list contains 50 000 random integers. If you score 100% on such a test, I will definitely not employ you for any job that requires lateral thinking. By passing the test you have shown that you are not the kind of person I'm looking for.)
The simple fact that a child fails to lead blind people does of course not in itself prove that children are more intelligent than dogs. However, looking at the reasons for why a child does not succeed, suggests that it is no proof that they would be less intelligent either.
My point was that your example was no proof for fully grown trained dogs being more intelligent that small children. I never intended to say that I had proved the opposite myself, even though such a claim made from your example might not be completely unreasonable. (Yes, it is made weaker by your puppy example. However, once more, one can look at what kind of curiosity the two species show, and only one shows curiosity of for example verbal dexterity. We could go further into detail here, but I am not sure it would be productive. Especially not as puppies never are used as blind dogs.)
To put it shortly: the blind dog example is no definite proof in either direction.