You do not understand what a zero-sum game is. Check it out:
Over time, the stock may be worth more than the trade price or less, but it's still a zero sum game.
So if the stock goes up from $2.1 to $2.2billion after 10 years, does that necessarily mean that the rest of the stock in the market lost $0.1 billion during those 10 years?
I don't think you understand what a zero-sum game is. The idea that, eventually, the stock market will be destroyed (or whatever you're saying) wouldn't make it a zero-sum game. From the wikipedia article:
a zero-sum game is a mathematical representation of a situation in which a participant's gain or loss is exactly balanced by the losses or gains of the other participant(s)
So the stock market isn't a zero sum game. It's not that stocks are simply traded-- the total amount of wealth in the world grows and shrinks.
I have no problem with Linux or BSD but please not yet another Unix or Windows.
Every new Unix/Linux distribution gets met with someone complaining, "Oh, please, not another one!" And yet someone wants it, or else it wouldn't get made.
As to "Its hard to write a mature OS" well that didn't stop Linux did it?
And it took several years with a lot of hobbyists and large businesses cooperating to turn Linux into a mature OS, and even then it wasn't always starting from scratch. They had a lot of Unix and GNU resources to draw from.
It take a lot of time and work to develop a mature OS, so why write the whole thing from scratch unless you need to? Even if you want to create a new OS, it probably makes sense to scavenge what you can from existing open source projects.
Yeah, I find the whole thing a bit dubious. It's not shocking to me that it might be possible to disrupt brain activity in such a way that a particular patient couldn't fabricate certain kinds of lies, but the idea that everyone's brain has a clear "lies on" and "lies off" switch that can be activated with a magnet.
Reading one of TFA:
The volunteers were presented a series of coloured discs, and told they could tell the truth or lie about the objects' colours while half were being stimulated on the left and half on the right.
Results showed that the eight volunteers who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, while the ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth, researchers said.
So it sounds like they were given the option of lying about something with no consequences, and they lied more often with one part of the brain stimulated. It doesn't say that it was "impossible" to lie, or even that it made it difficult to lie when strongly motivated to do so. Maybe it didn't directly cause them to be more likely to lie, but made them feel more whimsical or creative and likely to want to lie in a consequence-free environment.
Then there's the much-overlooked difference between "not-lying" and "telling the truth". I can tell you something false because I'm mistaken, because I'm telling you a fictional story, or because I'm over-simplifying. None of those actions are deceptive in nature, but none of them are "telling the truth".
While he never outwardly admitted it, he likely realized on some level that an idealistic approach such as his communism would not be able to stand up to the crushing weight of human want and corruption in a large country.
I thought I remember him claiming that communism would be something like a global movement-- I guess not necessarily that it would take hold everywhere at once or anything like that, but more the way the world is generally a capitalist/socialist hybrid now rather than operating by bartering. And it wasn't because communism was better, but in his view capitalism was unsustainable and would therefore it would inevitably collapse. It's been several years since I've read it, but I remember my impression was that he was describing capitalism as a big pyramid scheme, and as long as you could bring in new people to exploit, you could keep it going, but eventually it would just have to collapse.
The physical paper output assuredly enforces every fax must be ' handled' at the receiving end irregardless how much timeshift it pushes itself onto the receiver.
It shows that the "omg free stuff" marketing works to people.
It doesn't work on you, though, right? You're too smart for that stuff.
But oh, wait... what's this? Look at the site you're posting on. Slashdot is a "free" website supported by ads. You are not Slashdot's customer, you are their product. Same thing, and you fell for it. So of course many Slashdotters will defend the ad-supported model. If you were truly against the ad-supported model, you wouldn't be reading this site.
Yes, there's a lot of evidence that there are parts of your brain that won't really work while another part of your brain is working. Also, I've recently read a theory behind sleep-walking and sleep-talking that basically claims that parts of your brain can sleep independent of one another, so when there are enough parts of your brain to walk and talk that are "awake" while your higher consciousness sleeps, you might sleepwalk.
Business is driven almost entirely by profit. If you're a highly paid person who has skills that aren't in the critical areas I'm at a loss for why any company should feel compelled to keep you on, regardless of your age.
I think you've never been in the room while business decisions are being made. Many business decisions are in fact made by irrational narcissists who are largely driven by emotion. Even when the people making decisions are reasonable, that doesn't mean their decisions are completely free from emotion and bias. Even when businesses are being driven by profit, that doesn't mean that they won't discriminate against older people.
if you’ve got a bunch or rich guys who can afford their third computers. You know they’ve got their desktop, they got a portable, and now they got one of these to read with, that’s your market.
That's kind of the iPad market. it just turns out to be a decent-sized market.
Still, it's pretty clear now, that they could have charged an extra $100 on each model and sold out just as quick.
That's not really clear. People are willing to spend $200 right now because they're selling so quickly, and they're selling so quickly because they only cost $100. If HP had sold them for $200, then there wouldn't be as much hype, and so they probably wouldn't be selling out so quickly.
You're forgetting something that's very easy to forget: people aren't "rational". Tell them that they can buy a $600 device for $200 because nobody wants it and they'll scoff at at. Tell them that there's a high-demand device because it costs only $100, but because it's so high-demand they'll be lucky to buy it for $200, and they'll snap them up.
I would love to know if people that speak multiple languages get one language area for all languages or one area per language. If we get multiple areas, are they next to each other?
IANAE, but I would imagine a lot of these things depend on the brain, on the familiarity with the language, etc. but that there is "common machinery" to all languages, and that's what this is talking about.
I read an article several years ago that suggested that dyslexia may happen because dyslexics effectively lack (or perhaps just don't use) some of the normal language processing of the brain, and instead language gets processed by the puzzle-solving parts of the brain. I've also read that dyslexia is more common among speakers of different languages-- more English speakers suffer from dyslexia than Spanish speakers, supposedly. So it may be that different languages tend to use different "machinery" to different degrees.
Oh, of course it's possible, but it's not simple. It's not like I can just select any VHD file through some GUI and say, "Boot this image," without doing anything more complicated.
In my opinion, a more interesting development would be being able to boot from a disk image, thereby diminishing the need to image systems at all. Just copy a single disk image file to the hard drive, have the boot-loader be complex enough to read the image, and boot from it. I'm sure there'd be some performance loss, but it'd make lots of things easier if things could be that simple.
Any benefit from ribbons (which I haven't seen any yet) is lost from me not being able to find stuff.
The thing is, Office applications have so many features that there's no way to sort them all sensibly. For some features, you eventually have to just stick it somewhere. This was the case with the old menus too-- believe me, I've worked helpdesk support long enough to remember when people were just learning Excel, and throughout the years there were always some features that you'd have to go, "I know Excel can do this, but where is the control for it?!" Worse, Microsoft has always had a habit of shuffling things around with each new release, so the location keeps changing.
My point here is that, ultimately, the problem of "not being able to find stuff" isn't new to the ribbon. You just think it's new because you've gotten used to looking for the features you use under certain menus, and now it's all moved. However, the organization wasn't any more sensible; you were just so used to it that it seemed sensible. For people who learn to use this programs with the ribbon, the old menu system would probably seem confusing and arbitrary. Even though I'm not too fond of the ribbon myself, I applaud Microsoft for studying the way people use their products and trying to improve usefulness and efficiency for their users.
As for the suggestion to offer both UIs, it introduces a problem: now Microsoft would need to support to UI designs for all of their applications. Not only does that introduce a stupid amount of work, but you know that in situations like that, developers will end up favoring one of the designs and the other one would be relatively unsupported, and stupid bugs would creep in.
Sound the alarm, shut down major cities, and people crucify you if there aren't at least a few hundred dead.
And what's really shitty is, sometimes the reason lots of people didn't die is because you sounded the alarm.
The truth is, yes, the media likes to overhype things, but this was a bad storm that could have been much worse. Even if it were worse, it wouldn't have been the end of the world, but it still makes sense to take some precautions.
I wouldn't pay full price for it, but then I wouldn't pay full price for the iPad or Transformer either.
Well but that's kind of my point when I said they weren't necessarily "bad products" but they were products without a market. Obviously there's a market for $500 iPads because Apple is selling them at a healthy pace, but you aren't part of that market. You're also not part of the $500 TouchPad market, and you're not alone-- there is no market for $500 TouchPads. Your market-- the "I want a $500 tablet for $100" market-- obviously exists, but there's no business model for that unless you're subsidizing it some other way.
You just benefited from a huge blunder by a major company and got your product for 1/5th of the price, and still your evaluation is "It's fine." Hardly major praise.
The problem with the examples given (TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, and Google Wave) is that they were ultimately not great products. Not only should they have been yanked, but they really shouldn't have been offered in the first place. I say that not having actually used the TouchPad, but having had experience with WebOS and being generally unimpressed.
And... well... it's not necessarily so much that they're bad products, but that they're marketed poorly. Most of you will misunderstand and think that I mean that they weren't advertised well, but marketing is a different thing. A large part of marketing is determining that there is a market, determining what that market wants/needs, and then building/adjusting a product to meet those wants/needs. None of that was done very well with any of these products.
The Kin, for example, was a semi-smart phone released into a world where people generally either want smartphones or they want dumb-phones, and even the people who want dumb-phones are dying out. Since the smart phones have been so successful, there is a big demand and development community for smartphone apps, and there's a limit to how many incompatible platforms are going to be supported. As a result, the whole world is being divided into iOS and Android, and if you want to compete, you have to offer something compelling enough to displace one of the two big guys. The TouchPad suffered from the same thing: it was developed for a market that didn't exist. The world is all Android and iOS, and there isn't really a market for a 3rd platform at the same price point with no compelling advantages.
Google Wave had a different problem: it never defined what problem it was trying to solve. Was it a collaborative document editor, a replacement for email, or a weird IM client? I used Google Wave for several months, and I still don't know. They also launched a communications platform on an invite-only basis, which meant that you didn't have anyone to communicate with. By the time they had a wide release, everyone had already given up.
In each case, I wouldn't say it's an issue of the developer/manufacturer giving up too soon. The problem is that they didn't give up soon enough.
Slashdot Mirror
You do not understand what a zero-sum game is. Check it out:
Over time, the stock may be worth more than the trade price or less, but it's still a zero sum game.
So if the stock goes up from $2.1 to $2.2billion after 10 years, does that necessarily mean that the rest of the stock in the market lost $0.1 billion during those 10 years?
I don't think you understand what a zero-sum game is. The idea that, eventually, the stock market will be destroyed (or whatever you're saying) wouldn't make it a zero-sum game. From the wikipedia article:
So the stock market isn't a zero sum game. It's not that stocks are simply traded-- the total amount of wealth in the world grows and shrinks.
The stock market is not a zero-sum game.
If I'm a normal person with the choice of buying an Android or Windows tablet, am I going to buy the one that plays Flash or the one that doesn't?
Neither. If you're a normal person, you'll probably be buying an iPad.
I have no problem with Linux or BSD but please not yet another Unix or Windows.
Every new Unix/Linux distribution gets met with someone complaining, "Oh, please, not another one!" And yet someone wants it, or else it wouldn't get made.
As to "Its hard to write a mature OS" well that didn't stop Linux did it?
And it took several years with a lot of hobbyists and large businesses cooperating to turn Linux into a mature OS, and even then it wasn't always starting from scratch. They had a lot of Unix and GNU resources to draw from.
It take a lot of time and work to develop a mature OS, so why write the whole thing from scratch unless you need to? Even if you want to create a new OS, it probably makes sense to scavenge what you can from existing open source projects.
You would have been shocked but not surprised?
Yeah, I find the whole thing a bit dubious. It's not shocking to me that it might be possible to disrupt brain activity in such a way that a particular patient couldn't fabricate certain kinds of lies, but the idea that everyone's brain has a clear "lies on" and "lies off" switch that can be activated with a magnet.
Reading one of TFA:
The volunteers were presented a series of coloured discs, and told they could tell the truth or lie about the objects' colours while half were being stimulated on the left and half on the right.
Results showed that the eight volunteers who had their left DPC stimulated lied more often, while the ones with the right DPC stimulated were more likely to tell the truth, researchers said.
So it sounds like they were given the option of lying about something with no consequences, and they lied more often with one part of the brain stimulated. It doesn't say that it was "impossible" to lie, or even that it made it difficult to lie when strongly motivated to do so. Maybe it didn't directly cause them to be more likely to lie, but made them feel more whimsical or creative and likely to want to lie in a consequence-free environment.
Then there's the much-overlooked difference between "not-lying" and "telling the truth". I can tell you something false because I'm mistaken, because I'm telling you a fictional story, or because I'm over-simplifying. None of those actions are deceptive in nature, but none of them are "telling the truth".
While he never outwardly admitted it, he likely realized on some level that an idealistic approach such as his communism would not be able to stand up to the crushing weight of human want and corruption in a large country.
I thought I remember him claiming that communism would be something like a global movement-- I guess not necessarily that it would take hold everywhere at once or anything like that, but more the way the world is generally a capitalist/socialist hybrid now rather than operating by bartering. And it wasn't because communism was better, but in his view capitalism was unsustainable and would therefore it would inevitably collapse. It's been several years since I've read it, but I remember my impression was that he was describing capitalism as a big pyramid scheme, and as long as you could bring in new people to exploit, you could keep it going, but eventually it would just have to collapse.
The physical paper output assuredly enforces every fax must be ' handled' at the receiving end irregardless how much timeshift it pushes itself onto the receiver.
Once again, in English this time?
It shows that the "omg free stuff" marketing works to people.
It doesn't work on you, though, right? You're too smart for that stuff.
But oh, wait... what's this? Look at the site you're posting on. Slashdot is a "free" website supported by ads. You are not Slashdot's customer, you are their product. Same thing, and you fell for it. So of course many Slashdotters will defend the ad-supported model. If you were truly against the ad-supported model, you wouldn't be reading this site.
Yes, there's a lot of evidence that there are parts of your brain that won't really work while another part of your brain is working. Also, I've recently read a theory behind sleep-walking and sleep-talking that basically claims that parts of your brain can sleep independent of one another, so when there are enough parts of your brain to walk and talk that are "awake" while your higher consciousness sleeps, you might sleepwalk.
This doesn't seem impossible to me.
Business is driven almost entirely by profit. If you're a highly paid person who has skills that aren't in the critical areas I'm at a loss for why any company should feel compelled to keep you on, regardless of your age.
I think you've never been in the room while business decisions are being made. Many business decisions are in fact made by irrational narcissists who are largely driven by emotion. Even when the people making decisions are reasonable, that doesn't mean their decisions are completely free from emotion and bias. Even when businesses are being driven by profit, that doesn't mean that they won't discriminate against older people.
He was right about all of it.
if you’ve got a bunch or rich guys who can afford their third computers. You know they’ve got their desktop, they got a portable, and now they got one of these to read with, that’s your market.
That's kind of the iPad market. it just turns out to be a decent-sized market.
The Windows desktop was already an app. It was called "Explorer.exe".
Still, it's pretty clear now, that they could have charged an extra $100 on each model and sold out just as quick.
That's not really clear. People are willing to spend $200 right now because they're selling so quickly, and they're selling so quickly because they only cost $100. If HP had sold them for $200, then there wouldn't be as much hype, and so they probably wouldn't be selling out so quickly.
You're forgetting something that's very easy to forget: people aren't "rational". Tell them that they can buy a $600 device for $200 because nobody wants it and they'll scoff at at. Tell them that there's a high-demand device because it costs only $100, but because it's so high-demand they'll be lucky to buy it for $200, and they'll snap them up.
I would love to know if people that speak multiple languages get one language area for all languages or one area per language. If we get multiple areas, are they next to each other?
IANAE, but I would imagine a lot of these things depend on the brain, on the familiarity with the language, etc. but that there is "common machinery" to all languages, and that's what this is talking about.
I read an article several years ago that suggested that dyslexia may happen because dyslexics effectively lack (or perhaps just don't use) some of the normal language processing of the brain, and instead language gets processed by the puzzle-solving parts of the brain. I've also read that dyslexia is more common among speakers of different languages-- more English speakers suffer from dyslexia than Spanish speakers, supposedly. So it may be that different languages tend to use different "machinery" to different degrees.
Oh, of course it's possible, but it's not simple. It's not like I can just select any VHD file through some GUI and say, "Boot this image," without doing anything more complicated.
if there's demand for your product, keep making it.
I'm not sure that works if the reason for the demand is that you're selling it at a huge loss without any business model to recoup the loss.
In my opinion, a more interesting development would be being able to boot from a disk image, thereby diminishing the need to image systems at all. Just copy a single disk image file to the hard drive, have the boot-loader be complex enough to read the image, and boot from it. I'm sure there'd be some performance loss, but it'd make lots of things easier if things could be that simple.
Any benefit from ribbons (which I haven't seen any yet) is lost from me not being able to find stuff.
The thing is, Office applications have so many features that there's no way to sort them all sensibly. For some features, you eventually have to just stick it somewhere. This was the case with the old menus too-- believe me, I've worked helpdesk support long enough to remember when people were just learning Excel, and throughout the years there were always some features that you'd have to go, "I know Excel can do this, but where is the control for it?!" Worse, Microsoft has always had a habit of shuffling things around with each new release, so the location keeps changing.
My point here is that, ultimately, the problem of "not being able to find stuff" isn't new to the ribbon. You just think it's new because you've gotten used to looking for the features you use under certain menus, and now it's all moved. However, the organization wasn't any more sensible; you were just so used to it that it seemed sensible. For people who learn to use this programs with the ribbon, the old menu system would probably seem confusing and arbitrary. Even though I'm not too fond of the ribbon myself, I applaud Microsoft for studying the way people use their products and trying to improve usefulness and efficiency for their users.
As for the suggestion to offer both UIs, it introduces a problem: now Microsoft would need to support to UI designs for all of their applications. Not only does that introduce a stupid amount of work, but you know that in situations like that, developers will end up favoring one of the designs and the other one would be relatively unsupported, and stupid bugs would creep in.
Sound the alarm, shut down major cities, and people crucify you if there aren't at least a few hundred dead.
And what's really shitty is, sometimes the reason lots of people didn't die is because you sounded the alarm.
The truth is, yes, the media likes to overhype things, but this was a bad storm that could have been much worse. Even if it were worse, it wouldn't have been the end of the world, but it still makes sense to take some precautions.
I wouldn't pay full price for it, but then I wouldn't pay full price for the iPad or Transformer either.
Well but that's kind of my point when I said they weren't necessarily "bad products" but they were products without a market. Obviously there's a market for $500 iPads because Apple is selling them at a healthy pace, but you aren't part of that market. You're also not part of the $500 TouchPad market, and you're not alone-- there is no market for $500 TouchPads. Your market-- the "I want a $500 tablet for $100" market-- obviously exists, but there's no business model for that unless you're subsidizing it some other way.
You just benefited from a huge blunder by a major company and got your product for 1/5th of the price, and still your evaluation is "It's fine." Hardly major praise.
Can we all just scientifically get to step two and then we'll go from there?
I thought we already had...?
The problem with the examples given (TouchPad, the Microsoft Kin, and Google Wave) is that they were ultimately not great products. Not only should they have been yanked, but they really shouldn't have been offered in the first place. I say that not having actually used the TouchPad, but having had experience with WebOS and being generally unimpressed.
And... well... it's not necessarily so much that they're bad products, but that they're marketed poorly. Most of you will misunderstand and think that I mean that they weren't advertised well, but marketing is a different thing. A large part of marketing is determining that there is a market, determining what that market wants/needs, and then building/adjusting a product to meet those wants/needs. None of that was done very well with any of these products.
The Kin, for example, was a semi-smart phone released into a world where people generally either want smartphones or they want dumb-phones, and even the people who want dumb-phones are dying out. Since the smart phones have been so successful, there is a big demand and development community for smartphone apps, and there's a limit to how many incompatible platforms are going to be supported. As a result, the whole world is being divided into iOS and Android, and if you want to compete, you have to offer something compelling enough to displace one of the two big guys. The TouchPad suffered from the same thing: it was developed for a market that didn't exist. The world is all Android and iOS, and there isn't really a market for a 3rd platform at the same price point with no compelling advantages.
Google Wave had a different problem: it never defined what problem it was trying to solve. Was it a collaborative document editor, a replacement for email, or a weird IM client? I used Google Wave for several months, and I still don't know. They also launched a communications platform on an invite-only basis, which meant that you didn't have anyone to communicate with. By the time they had a wide release, everyone had already given up.
In each case, I wouldn't say it's an issue of the developer/manufacturer giving up too soon. The problem is that they didn't give up soon enough.