And of course no-one really wants to say this: "No model can predict the future, because the data from the past does not necessarily follow in the future."
We have all sorts of very nice models built by very bright people who will try to convince anyone that their model can tell you how to trade, or what to invest in, or what this market or that market can do. There are several problems with this: Not only can a model not accurately predict future events, especially major, "abnormal" future events, but the model can't even take into account enough data to accurately model the past! You find that you overlooked a data point, that something was correlated that you think was not correlated; you find that things become correlated that were never correlated before.
Models have their place, but directing the overall flow of interest rates and investment and market direction is not that place. How many times do we have to have every single model proved absolutely and totally wrong by freak events before we say enough?
I'm going to start a business selling incompatible hardware to clueless Ubuntu users. When they donate them back to my newly-founded charity, I'll auction them off to the ever-expanding pool of clueless Ubuntu users. It'll be like perpetual motion, except with money.
Small sect. You might as well take all the people that code in LISP and call them a representative sample of programmers worldwide.
In any case you're confusing a belief in the sanctity of the human body with something far different, a belief that present reality cannot be changed by human working. Even that point (which you have managed to confuse) is tangential to the evolution/creation debate. I am slightly puzzled why you made it, unless you simply let your triumphalism run away with you (easy to do, as I'm sure the Christians will agree).
My point is not that these people don't exist. They do. They're just a vanishingly small sample. My point is, instead, that your argument is specious, your logic is flawed (at best), your triumphant crowing is annoying and immature, and your post did nothing to further your cause.
This is of course a fine strawman you have (barely) managed to tear down. "Godists" come in all stripes and colours, including those who have followed the development of evolution and agree with it, and those who do not.
On the other hand, evolutionary biology, when misapplied to the social (pretend) sciences, produced a whole range of crimes against humanity whose shock waves have turned the Western mind inside out. But let's sweep those under the rug in favour of pointing out what a hypothetical group of people (who you invented) might do their hypothetical children (who you also invented).
Massive resources require massive management overhead. Like any large company, Microsoft has multiple competing visions existing within its doors, and a certain lack of co-ordination across teams and divisions. This shows up in things like how many different types of interfaces you can find on its recent products, all targeted at Vista. There are something like seven different interfaces from Office to Visual Studio to Windows Media Player to Notepad to IE7 to Windows Explorer, etc. Why can they not all develop the same interface? Because it's *hard*.
But that's not the only reason they don't use Silverlight. They could manage their massive resources perfectly to achieve a unified Silverlight push across all their divisions, but if no-one's using Silverlight, there's no point. And right now no-one is using Silverlight except bleeding-edge Microsoft fans (God bless their beaten and downtrodden souls).
Of course that's going to change when Microsoft simply pushes Silverlight as an update; though that's not guaranteed to happen, as they'll almost certainly be hit with multiple lawsuits over the update.
Same here. Mostly due to the new X server and its dependence on xrandr. In 8.04 the devs decided that single and dual screens were the most common use cases for xrandr (still in relative infancy, as well). As such, 8.04 doesn't support more than two monitors and more than one graphics card, not to mention s-video output (in my experience). That's not so bad... typically with my setup I install the NVidia binary drivers and use nvidia-settings to generate an xorg.conf.
The problem is that I can't use my old xorg.conf. xrandr has deprecated most of its functionality. But there's no way to remove xrandr or downgrade to the previous version of X. There's no information about this in the 8.04 release notes. There was no information period, except for a well-buried Ubuntu wiki page.
My bug report was thankfully triaged almost immediately (probably because Bryce recognised the problem from the heading) and I understand why they did it. But the lack of information is what bothered me most. I wouldn't have upgraded till 8.10 (when the functionality for more than two screens and more than one graphics card is supposed to be introduced into xrandr) if I had known my setup would break, or that there would be this amount of functional regression. And I'm fairly involved in the community (not the xrandr dev side of things of course). I had no idea.
Also PulseAudio has been no end of trouble for me. If I have to install nswrapper just to get sound with Flash, I consider that a major show-stopper.
That said, I'm not leaving Ubuntu. I am downgrading to 7.10 again (again!), and I'll be rather more careful about upgrading in the future.
You're exactly right. When Ubuntu starts up for the first time, it should ask you if you're a new user or if you're comfortable with Linux. If you're new, then it should point out the main features of the OS as you go along. If you're not, it should maybe tell you to reboot after a new kernel update, but maybe not even that.
If I had to base my expectations of usability testing off of the steaming offal that is Windows' various and sundry attempts at an interface, I'd be suspicious too.
That's not completely true. I've found out some shocking things from a group of altruists called "GNAA", not to mention elusive references to a girl in a tub, which frankly sounds pretty hot.
Slashdot Mirror
And post-rock. Lots of Mogwai, Godspeed, Explosions, Sparrowes, etc.
And of course no-one really wants to say this: "No model can predict the future, because the data from the past does not necessarily follow in the future."
We have all sorts of very nice models built by very bright people who will try to convince anyone that their model can tell you how to trade, or what to invest in, or what this market or that market can do. There are several problems with this: Not only can a model not accurately predict future events, especially major, "abnormal" future events, but the model can't even take into account enough data to accurately model the past! You find that you overlooked a data point, that something was correlated that you think was not correlated; you find that things become correlated that were never correlated before.
Models have their place, but directing the overall flow of interest rates and investment and market direction is not that place. How many times do we have to have every single model proved absolutely and totally wrong by freak events before we say enough?
If only there were some sort of theory to string these things together sensibly!
What's a 'GNU/Linux'?
So let me get this straight. You can move widgets and you can resize panels? Will the madness never end?!?!
Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality, after all.
I'm going to start a business selling incompatible hardware to clueless Ubuntu users. When they donate them back to my newly-founded charity, I'll auction them off to the ever-expanding pool of clueless Ubuntu users. It'll be like perpetual motion, except with money.
Which is pretty awesome, because you can do all sorts of things like, for instance, take a nice restful nap while the thing is loading.
Small sect. You might as well take all the people that code in LISP and call them a representative sample of programmers worldwide.
In any case you're confusing a belief in the sanctity of the human body with something far different, a belief that present reality cannot be changed by human working. Even that point (which you have managed to confuse) is tangential to the evolution/creation debate. I am slightly puzzled why you made it, unless you simply let your triumphalism run away with you (easy to do, as I'm sure the Christians will agree).
My point is not that these people don't exist. They do. They're just a vanishingly small sample. My point is, instead, that your argument is specious, your logic is flawed (at best), your triumphant crowing is annoying and immature, and your post did nothing to further your cause.
This is of course a fine strawman you have (barely) managed to tear down. "Godists" come in all stripes and colours, including those who have followed the development of evolution and agree with it, and those who do not.
On the other hand, evolutionary biology, when misapplied to the social (pretend) sciences, produced a whole range of crimes against humanity whose shock waves have turned the Western mind inside out. But let's sweep those under the rug in favour of pointing out what a hypothetical group of people (who you invented) might do their hypothetical children (who you also invented).
I don't care what angle it's at, it still sounds like it hurts!
Massive resources require massive management overhead. Like any large company, Microsoft has multiple competing visions existing within its doors, and a certain lack of co-ordination across teams and divisions. This shows up in things like how many different types of interfaces you can find on its recent products, all targeted at Vista. There are something like seven different interfaces from Office to Visual Studio to Windows Media Player to Notepad to IE7 to Windows Explorer, etc. Why can they not all develop the same interface? Because it's *hard*.
But that's not the only reason they don't use Silverlight. They could manage their massive resources perfectly to achieve a unified Silverlight push across all their divisions, but if no-one's using Silverlight, there's no point. And right now no-one is using Silverlight except bleeding-edge Microsoft fans (God bless their beaten and downtrodden souls).
Of course that's going to change when Microsoft simply pushes Silverlight as an update; though that's not guaranteed to happen, as they'll almost certainly be hit with multiple lawsuits over the update.
Same here. Mostly due to the new X server and its dependence on xrandr. In 8.04 the devs decided that single and dual screens were the most common use cases for xrandr (still in relative infancy, as well). As such, 8.04 doesn't support more than two monitors and more than one graphics card, not to mention s-video output (in my experience). That's not so bad... typically with my setup I install the NVidia binary drivers and use nvidia-settings to generate an xorg.conf.
The problem is that I can't use my old xorg.conf. xrandr has deprecated most of its functionality. But there's no way to remove xrandr or downgrade to the previous version of X. There's no information about this in the 8.04 release notes. There was no information period, except for a well-buried Ubuntu wiki page.
My bug report was thankfully triaged almost immediately (probably because Bryce recognised the problem from the heading) and I understand why they did it. But the lack of information is what bothered me most. I wouldn't have upgraded till 8.10 (when the functionality for more than two screens and more than one graphics card is supposed to be introduced into xrandr) if I had known my setup would break, or that there would be this amount of functional regression. And I'm fairly involved in the community (not the xrandr dev side of things of course). I had no idea.
Also PulseAudio has been no end of trouble for me. If I have to install nswrapper just to get sound with Flash, I consider that a major show-stopper.
That said, I'm not leaving Ubuntu. I am downgrading to 7.10 again (again!), and I'll be rather more careful about upgrading in the future.
I do! If my wife wants her XP box all nice and tidy, I'd like her to slide a nice and tidy box my way too.
You're exactly right. When Ubuntu starts up for the first time, it should ask you if you're a new user or if you're comfortable with Linux. If you're new, then it should point out the main features of the OS as you go along. If you're not, it should maybe tell you to reboot after a new kernel update, but maybe not even that.
If I had to base my expectations of usability testing off of the steaming offal that is Windows' various and sundry attempts at an interface, I'd be suspicious too.
That's not completely true. I've found out some shocking things from a group of altruists called "GNAA", not to mention elusive references to a girl in a tub, which frankly sounds pretty hot.
The imperial to metric problem was not NASA but their Lockheed Martin sub-contractors.
It would appear they're running it on 1994's servers, too.
Speaking of which, I recently bought a toaster that has a higher processing speed than my first computer. Sort of depressing, actually.
Maybe Microsoft should look into this "everything is a file" thing I've been hearing so much about.
Well, to fair, we don't know what a "standard compliant" application means for Microsoft... seeing how they've never done that before.
So what you're saying is that by IE15 we should see a fully standard-compliant browser?
Microsoft has the be the only organisation on earth *slower* that the W3C. I mean, it's not exactly a moving target.
Because... they're French?
It's going to take about 34 years, but on the upside, I'll have very muscular fingers.
Welcome to the internet, where we use grown-up swear words. It's okay. Really. Feel free to, for instance, call me an ass.