Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men.
This is wrong. What the article intends to say is that people at the very ends of the bell curve are more likely to be men. People at the top are more likely to be women.
Parent post:
Of course, there's more very stupid men, which is reflected in crime rates etc.
This is oversimplified. I wouldn't be surprised if even more intelligent men commit more crimes than average-intelligent women, since crime rates are associated with a bunch of other factors like aggression.
Instead of installing Cygwin, my former flatmate made a bunch of.bat scripts that mimicked ls, cat, etc. to some extent. In my eyes it was a bit silly, but every time I make a switch between Linux and Windows XP, I want to hug XP's graphical interface. I hate X11's paste buffers and its incessantly overconfigurable window management systems. You can call me "raised in the 1990s", but I just find those grey menus comforting. And the damn fakers at the other side of the pond can never get the pixels right in those XP look-alike themes for Metacity.
Yours faithfully
Whenever I've had to set up a forum on the 'net for some specific purpose, it always crosses my mind "Why don't I just set up NNTP, and then people can either use their own readers or a custom web interface?" and I always quit the idea once I realise how terrible the available UNIX implementations of nntpd are. It's a real pity.
Obesity is very often a case of bad diet (eating the wrong stuff) and non-balanced lifestyle (no exercise to match the food), and not simply eating too much. Athletes eat FAR more than your average fatty.
The fat people that eat more than athletes also gradually take on more and more weight. Athletes wouldn't make it on the same diet, they'd probably get tired and chubby and unable to exercise intensely.
My girlfriend has been vegan for years and we jog three times a week, and still she's somewhat overweight. Life is sometimes just unfair. Still, I'm talking way less than American standards here.:-)
I should start off by saying that I agree with many of your conservative reasons for staying with Windows. (I've turned forth and back between Windows and Linux at least half a dozen times over the past ten years.) I do however believe Linux has matured from package anarchy and become user-friendly. Last week I installed Ubuntu on my laptop because all applications in Windows were unable to access the Internet after I had deinstalled a proprietary piece of firewall software.
It's what I'm used to. I always thought Windows'es GUI beat most Linux WMs for the simple fact that there was only one and you couldn't change it much. So you don't think about changing it, and it works quite good. All the shortcuts become subconscious.
I have a lot invested in Windows software that isn't available natively on Linux. There isn't much you can do about that, but think about this: There really isn't any reason why applications shouldn't be supported on Windows, Linux and MacOS. It's all a matter of popularity. So while Linux can't always offer a working port of commercial products, I'm sure that'll come in the next few years. (If that's not good enough, discard the idea of running Linux for now.)
Installing software.Have you tried Ubuntu? (All of your worries don't even come into the picture of Joe Average's computer experience. They're a product of your past bad experience with the instability with Linux distros.
Do I trust the people who seem to build and redistribute packages on random websites? I don't know.
I also downloaded and compiled some apps myself because I couldn't find packages for certain things for the version of Fedora I was using. Are regular consumers expected to do this? Perhaps not. At this stage, people are expected to at least have the courage to open a terminal and follow random advice on a website. But are regular consumers expected to install random commercial apps in Windows? My girlfriend surely can't (read: won't learn).
Accessing my Windows files was a bit of a PITA. Ubuntu automatically mounts all your NTFS drives and places an icon on the GNOME desktop with a link to a graphical browser. The only difference between this and Windows is that the graphics look better. Also, in the default Ubuntu, portable drives are detected upon insertion and an annoying "Whadda ya wanna do?" menu pops up. (I sympathise with you, though. I tried accessing my NTFS drives some years ago on Gentoo, and its "write" mode garbled up the partition. NTFS support nowadays is stable.)
[...] Then I tried editing some conf files from the shell. With vi. Enough said. So don't? Vi isn't required to run an operational Linux. All of this tweaking doesn't even compare to some of the similar tweaking in Windows where you have to reverse engineer DLLs or *shiver* search the registry database.
Which desktop environment do I want to use? I have no clue. This was mainly why I hated the Linux GUIs, too much choice. Now I stick with the default. I think it's GNOME and a bunch of GNOME apps, but I frankly don't care because I don't have to care. And installing KDE apps in my graphical install manager (Windows doesn't have this), I don't have to think twice about dependencies.
I think what's made Ubuntu successful is the acknowledgement that most people use their computers for the exact same thing: Browsing the 'net, reading webmail, writing documents/spreadsheets/presentations and listening to music synced with their portable music players. Most things beyond that is niché. A friend of mine lives in a collective where everyone was a Windows user until he moved in. Now they all use Linux and don't pretend to know the difference except "it's the other thing with the funnier small games."
I've used nmap's OS-detection and IP-range scan several times at work to figure out servers' addresses because some guy moved it temporarily, then to abuse their PC speakers. It's come to the point where I've converted MIDI files to `beep' input to vary the melodies.
For anything near-reliable, I would use a radio transmitter hidden within the laptop to go off on a long-range transmission (kilometres) if it can't pick up the presence of a receiver within short-range (a hundred metres, e.g. in your keychain).
That and a bit of radio location will make a fun family trip.
If IBM wants to run Linux on all its hardware, they should think about publishing free drivers to the community. Being forced to run their commercial copies of Red Hat is only "Running Linux" by a thin margin.
Blizzard use their own hybrid BitTorrent/HTTP client to download new updates for World of Warcraft. With millions of players each downloading hundreds of megabytes of patches (I think they've passed one gigabyte with the game expansion), they save quite an amount of money on dedicated hosting.
What they instead do is use BitTorrent for the most part and then supply with HTTP whenever the transfer rate drops.
So yes, legal use of BitTorrent isn't new. But it's always nice to see more. Bram did use to advertise BT as "not filesharing (presumable referring to the anarchic concept), but file distribution".
> Vim shows you the mode in the bottom left hand corner.
Hence the 'almost' - it might not be obvious what those mean to new users, though.
> Also, when you invoke it, it gives you a little help screen telling you how to quit and how to get help.
Not if you invoke the editor with a filename as argument. And not if you press mostly any other key than the quit sequence since it will wait for a full command. The first thing I learned in this regard was to press escape a number of times since, in command mode, one escape and a character will call forth one set of commands, whereas two escapes in a row will return to command mode with a bell beep, suggesting you can now type:commands again. Confusing, I admit, but once one gets used to it, it is really just a matter of how much of the editor's state one can experience through subtleties.
> If they are starting off on a Linux system then they will be using vim whenever they type 'vi' (on other platforms, vi may be either nvi or something else).
Yes, I have noticed this hideous tendency. I personally have 'vi' aliased to execute vim because I can use the command anywhere and avoid "command not found" (compareable to when Linux users type 'ls' in MS-DOS prompts). But faking the editor binary seems like an obfuscating practice. I have noticed on one particular server I connect to that the operating system has been shipped with a customised vim adapted to behave exactly like Berkeley vi. They even disabled colours, run in compatible mode and the like. Exactly why is beyond my understanding.
> Learning vim is easier than learning vi, but using vi when you know vim is pretty easy.
Returning to vi on systems I have less control of, I continuously type commands that only exist in vim.
And the basics are basically just i, and:wq, ain't it.:-)
No, because recommending vi to anyone means having to spend more time helping them leave the editor. The fact that the editor has (almost UI transparent) states where keys behave differently throws off most people. But I do like to help people who have already chosen the editor and damn themselves for not changing.
So instead of pulling out the batteries taking a stroll while talking to your fellow political activists, you now bring a metal case and explain everyone about the experiments you did at home. Makes for great conversation, and you can take turns carrying the box.
My friend and I did it in 72 hours. Then again, we didn't do anything else in those 72 hours.:-)
Another suggestion is the Prince of Persia 1, 2 & 3 (the new 3D games, not the oldies). They're awesome, and they require quite a lot of finesse. Then again, watching your children or (potentially later) your grand-children solve newer, more cinematic games, doesn't sound too boring either.
> Get Informed. > Get to the Ballot. > Get your vote counted.
I agree. There will be people who are not only less informed than you, but who also disagree strongly with you, who are idiots and who will vote. By not voting, you let their votes count more. Moral: You don't have to get that informed, just make your vote count a little.
On another note, I realise why choosing between just two candidates *is* hard. In Denmark, you can vote for the party which you identify as being in your vicinity on the politcal compas. That makes voting easier (and not too much less meaningful).
> However, wealth is, to a large degree, a measure of your freedom. > How much wealth you want to have is basically a measure of how much > you care to tolerate the circumstances of your life being dictated to you.
So wealth gives you freedom and dictates the circumstances of your life. How do you define freedom, again?
> How the hell is porn harmful? That's the worst part of this American culture.
> Killing people is glorified but OH CHRIST DON'T LET ANYONE BE SEEN MAKING LOVE!
Porn isn't "making love". Making love means having an intimate and sexual relationship with someone you love. (Unless you refer to the romantically debunked "makin' luv" version of love otherwise just known as sex.) Supposedly, that's exactly what's wrong with porn: Kids confuse it with intimacy and even real sex, and adjust to the stereotypic images that are often their primary and only source of sexual education. Porn teaches kids that women get sexually aroused from getting cum all over themselves, and that the women also get orgasms from it. (How many times have you seen a porn where the woman whines just as much as the men when getting the cum over her?) While porn pushes the border of decency (like anal sex, dildos and so on), the majority of porn films fail in being realistic but win trying to look just like existing porns. How many porn films have you seen that have the exact same plot: 1) Cheezy intro muzak, 2) Woman pulls out cock, masturbates it and sucks it, 3) Man removes clothes and procedes to remove woman's clothes. 4) Man masturbates woman, 5) Common intercourse involving few sexual positions, 6) Man ejaculates on woman's (breasts | ass | belly) and goes "yeah!" while the woman is having an orgasm from all that jizz that just touched her skin! Common sexual practice?
I'm not saying porn is bad. Most porn just sucks because it's supposed to look like the existing majority of stereotypical porn that has little to do with the sex you might end up having involving more than one individual. Porn does not teach about feelings, and because men mostly watch it, it either distances young men's ideas about sex from young women's resulting in bad sexual experiences, or it forces young women to adjust to a banal version of sex. The fact that many women don't receive orgasms during intercourse leaves much to be desired for. Who wants a false moaner just because they're staged in the porn films?
Slightly off-topic. More importantly: Who decides what's not good for kids, and who decides what can and what can't be put on.com domains? Mod sibling up!
> -Not always true. Say I can come up with a 2048 bit encryption, that is just increase the key size from 256 to 2048, I can to that in a second. It is going to take _a lot more time_ for the computing power to overcome that increase.
You can't just "switch". If you encrypt material, it is because of the general idea that it might fall into unwanted hands. If it has first fallen into unwanted hands, you can't simply update the data they have so that it isn't encrypted with 256 bits rather than 2048. What you do within seconds leaves a trail of encrypted data that any eavesdroppers could get started on cracking. That includes publicly accessible email archives and keyservers.
The best effort you can do regarding this dilemma is of course to avoid releasing your keys. If you want your keys for the exact reason that you can release them, you better pick an encryption that is estimated not to be able to be cracked within reasonable time, or at least until quantum cryptography.
I'd vote, but the names mean absolutely nothing to me! I consider myself politically involved, but to be able to keep up with what the hell's even going on in the European Union is a greater task than just reading the news papers, apparently. I recognized one name, which was of the former Danish prime minister. The rest is kind of a blur. It saddens me that these people are apparently affecting the lives of people like you and me when in fact I've never heard of them before. Some representatives, huh.
Down with the EU. We don't understand it because it's too big to be understood.
...besides perhaps other Operating System communities?
Doesn't the need for opposing standards like patents and trademarks become larger as the community grows in size, or do we accept that very large corporations have a natural, excusable reason to protect their name and value through legal bondage? I think it's bull.
Slashdot Mirror
Although [men and women] are on average the same, the people at the very top and the very bottom of the IQ bell curve are more likely to be men.
This is wrong. What the article intends to say is that people at the very ends of the bell curve are more likely to be men. People at the top are more likely to be women.
Parent post:
Of course, there's more very stupid men, which is reflected in crime rates etc.
This is oversimplified. I wouldn't be surprised if even more intelligent men commit more crimes than average-intelligent women, since crime rates are associated with a bunch of other factors like aggression.
Instead of installing Cygwin, my former flatmate made a bunch of .bat scripts that mimicked ls, cat, etc. to some extent. In my eyes it was a bit silly, but every time I make a switch between Linux and Windows XP, I want to hug XP's graphical interface. I hate X11's paste buffers and its incessantly overconfigurable window management systems. You can call me "raised in the 1990s", but I just find those grey menus comforting. And the damn fakers at the other side of the pond can never get the pixels right in those XP look-alike themes for Metacity.
Yours faithfully
...and just say "You can try." and smile. :-)
Whenever I've had to set up a forum on the 'net for some specific purpose, it always crosses my mind "Why don't I just set up NNTP, and then people can either use their own readers or a custom web interface?" and I always quit the idea once I realise how terrible the available UNIX implementations of nntpd are. It's a real pity.
The fat people that eat more than athletes also gradually take on more and more weight. Athletes wouldn't make it on the same diet, they'd probably get tired and chubby and unable to exercise intensely.
My girlfriend has been vegan for years and we jog three times a week, and still she's somewhat overweight. Life is sometimes just unfair. Still, I'm talking way less than American standards here. :-)
It's what I'm used to. I always thought Windows'es GUI beat most Linux WMs for the simple fact that there was only one and you couldn't change it much. So you don't think about changing it, and it works quite good. All the shortcuts become subconscious.
I have a lot invested in Windows software that isn't available natively on Linux. There isn't much you can do about that, but think about this: There really isn't any reason why applications shouldn't be supported on Windows, Linux and MacOS. It's all a matter of popularity. So while Linux can't always offer a working port of commercial products, I'm sure that'll come in the next few years. (If that's not good enough, discard the idea of running Linux for now.)
Installing software. Have you tried Ubuntu? (All of your worries don't even come into the picture of Joe Average's computer experience. They're a product of your past bad experience with the instability with Linux distros.
Do I trust the people who seem to build and redistribute packages on random websites? I don't know.
I also downloaded and compiled some apps myself because I couldn't find packages for certain things for the version of Fedora I was using. Are regular consumers expected to do this? Perhaps not. At this stage, people are expected to at least have the courage to open a terminal and follow random advice on a website. But are regular consumers expected to install random commercial apps in Windows? My girlfriend surely can't (read: won't learn).
Accessing my Windows files was a bit of a PITA. Ubuntu automatically mounts all your NTFS drives and places an icon on the GNOME desktop with a link to a graphical browser. The only difference between this and Windows is that the graphics look better. Also, in the default Ubuntu, portable drives are detected upon insertion and an annoying "Whadda ya wanna do?" menu pops up. (I sympathise with you, though. I tried accessing my NTFS drives some years ago on Gentoo, and its "write" mode garbled up the partition. NTFS support nowadays is stable.)
[...] Then I tried editing some conf files from the shell. With vi. Enough said. So don't? Vi isn't required to run an operational Linux. All of this tweaking doesn't even compare to some of the similar tweaking in Windows where you have to reverse engineer DLLs or *shiver* search the registry database.
Which desktop environment do I want to use? I have no clue. This was mainly why I hated the Linux GUIs, too much choice. Now I stick with the default. I think it's GNOME and a bunch of GNOME apps, but I frankly don't care because I don't have to care. And installing KDE apps in my graphical install manager (Windows doesn't have this), I don't have to think twice about dependencies.
I think what's made Ubuntu successful is the acknowledgement that most people use their computers for the exact same thing: Browsing the 'net, reading webmail, writing documents/spreadsheets/presentations and listening to music synced with their portable music players. Most things beyond that is niché. A friend of mine lives in a collective where everyone was a Windows user until he moved in. Now they all use Linux and don't pretend to know the difference except "it's the other thing with the funnier small games."
My $.04
For anything near-reliable, I would use a radio transmitter hidden within the laptop to go off on a long-range transmission (kilometres) if it can't pick up the presence of a receiver within short-range (a hundred metres, e.g. in your keychain).
That and a bit of radio location will make a fun family trip.
If IBM wants to run Linux on all its hardware, they should think about publishing free drivers to the community. Being forced to run their commercial copies of Red Hat is only "Running Linux" by a thin margin.
Dude, just use two synchronised Gmail accounts! Then if one breaks, the other will still be around! ^_^ (Alright, some humour intended)
What they instead do is use BitTorrent for the most part and then supply with HTTP whenever the transfer rate drops.
So yes, legal use of BitTorrent isn't new. But it's always nice to see more. Bram did use to advertise BT as "not filesharing (presumable referring to the anarchic concept), but file distribution".
I download
Those who count in binary, those who don't, and those who mistake trinary for binary.
> Vim shows you the mode in the bottom left hand corner.
:commands again. Confusing, I admit, but once one gets used to it, it is really just a matter of how much of the editor's state one can experience through subtleties.
:wq, ain't it. :-)
Hence the 'almost' - it might not be obvious what those mean to new users, though.
> Also, when you invoke it, it gives you a little help screen telling you how to quit and how to get help.
Not if you invoke the editor with a filename as argument. And not if you press mostly any other key than the quit sequence since it will wait for a full command. The first thing I learned in this regard was to press escape a number of times since, in command mode, one escape and a character will call forth one set of commands, whereas two escapes in a row will return to command mode with a bell beep, suggesting you can now type
> If they are starting off on a Linux system then they will be using vim whenever they type 'vi' (on other platforms, vi may be either nvi or something else).
Yes, I have noticed this hideous tendency. I personally have 'vi' aliased to execute vim because I can use the command anywhere and avoid "command not found" (compareable to when Linux users type 'ls' in MS-DOS prompts). But faking the editor binary seems like an obfuscating practice. I have noticed on one particular server I connect to that the operating system has been shipped with a customised vim adapted to behave exactly like Berkeley vi. They even disabled colours, run in compatible mode and the like. Exactly why is beyond my understanding.
> Learning vim is easier than learning vi, but using vi when you know vim is pretty easy.
Returning to vi on systems I have less control of, I continuously type commands that only exist in vim.
And the basics are basically just i, and
> Do you recommend vi to all new *nix users now?
No, because recommending vi to anyone means having to spend more time helping them leave the editor. The fact that the editor has (almost UI transparent) states where keys behave differently throws off most people. But I do like to help people who have already chosen the editor and damn themselves for not changing.
Why have sex when you have six?
So instead of pulling out the batteries taking a stroll while talking to your fellow political activists, you now bring a metal case and explain everyone about the experiments you did at home. Makes for great conversation, and you can take turns carrying the box.
My friend and I did it in 72 hours. Then again, we didn't do anything else in those 72 hours. :-)
Another suggestion is the Prince of Persia 1, 2 & 3 (the new 3D games, not the oldies). They're awesome, and they require quite a lot of finesse. Then again, watching your children or (potentially later) your grand-children solve newer, more cinematic games, doesn't sound too boring either.
> Get Informed.
> Get to the Ballot.
> Get your vote counted.
I agree. There will be people who are not only less informed than you, but who also disagree strongly with you, who are idiots and who will vote. By not voting, you let their votes count more. Moral: You don't have to get that informed, just make your vote count a little.
On another note, I realise why choosing between just two candidates *is* hard. In Denmark, you can vote for the party which you identify as being in your vicinity on the politcal compas. That makes voting easier (and not too much less meaningful).
> However, wealth is, to a large degree, a measure of your freedom.
> How much wealth you want to have is basically a measure of how much
> you care to tolerate the circumstances of your life being dictated to you.
So wealth gives you freedom and dictates the circumstances of your life. How do you define freedom, again?
... should be achieved sufficiently with lie detector tests... that fail.
Arrr, them skipping wheel's mine or I hook ya! Teeeacher, I don't wanna play with Bob when he says the sounds!!!
Neither Gandhi nor King supposedly masturbated.
> It is actually going to ship. 3DRealms has to make money to stick around.
That premise is only consistent if we assume that 3DRealms *are* going to stick around.
Duke Nukem is a stupid concept that has been dead for long.
Suppose we see Dai Katana 2?
> How the hell is porn harmful? That's the worst part of this American culture.
.com domains? Mod sibling up!
> Killing people is glorified but OH CHRIST DON'T LET ANYONE BE SEEN MAKING LOVE!
Porn isn't "making love". Making love means having an intimate and sexual relationship with someone you love. (Unless you refer to the romantically debunked "makin' luv" version of love otherwise just known as sex.) Supposedly, that's exactly what's wrong with porn: Kids confuse it with intimacy and even real sex, and adjust to the stereotypic images that are often their primary and only source of sexual education. Porn teaches kids that women get sexually aroused from getting cum all over themselves, and that the women also get orgasms from it. (How many times have you seen a porn where the woman whines just as much as the men when getting the cum over her?) While porn pushes the border of decency (like anal sex, dildos and so on), the majority of porn films fail in being realistic but win trying to look just like existing porns. How many porn films have you seen that have the exact same plot: 1) Cheezy intro muzak, 2) Woman pulls out cock, masturbates it and sucks it, 3) Man removes clothes and procedes to remove woman's clothes. 4) Man masturbates woman, 5) Common intercourse involving few sexual positions, 6) Man ejaculates on woman's (breasts | ass | belly) and goes "yeah!" while the woman is having an orgasm from all that jizz that just touched her skin! Common sexual practice?
I'm not saying porn is bad. Most porn just sucks because it's supposed to look like the existing majority of stereotypical porn that has little to do with the sex you might end up having involving more than one individual. Porn does not teach about feelings, and because men mostly watch it, it either distances young men's ideas about sex from young women's resulting in bad sexual experiences, or it forces young women to adjust to a banal version of sex. The fact that many women don't receive orgasms during intercourse leaves much to be desired for. Who wants a false moaner just because they're staged in the porn films?
Slightly off-topic. More importantly: Who decides what's not good for kids, and who decides what can and what can't be put on
You can't just "switch". If you encrypt material, it is because of the general idea that it might fall into unwanted hands. If it has first fallen into unwanted hands, you can't simply update the data they have so that it isn't encrypted with 256 bits rather than 2048. What you do within seconds leaves a trail of encrypted data that any eavesdroppers could get started on cracking. That includes publicly accessible email archives and keyservers.
The best effort you can do regarding this dilemma is of course to avoid releasing your keys. If you want your keys for the exact reason that you can release them, you better pick an encryption that is estimated not to be able to be cracked within reasonable time, or at least until quantum cryptography.
And yeah, 2048 should stick for now.
I'd vote, but the names mean absolutely nothing to me! I consider myself politically involved, but to be able to keep up with what the hell's even going on in the European Union is a greater task than just reading the news papers, apparently. I recognized one name, which was of the former Danish prime minister. The rest is kind of a blur. It saddens me that these people are apparently affecting the lives of people like you and me when in fact I've never heard of them before. Some representatives, huh.
Down with the EU. We don't understand it because it's too big to be understood.
...besides perhaps other Operating System communities?
Doesn't the need for opposing standards like patents and trademarks become larger as the community grows in size, or do we accept that very large corporations have a natural, excusable reason to protect their name and value through legal bondage? I think it's bull.