Now, if they'll band this in the UK, I'll be able to watch Dr. Who on BBC's website, instead of having to search it out on a more "questionable" site. (/wishful-thinking)
I must be completely missing the point of this hardware.
Am I to assume that circuit boards, LCD pixels, etc. in a configuration thusly makes this a holy item, somehow endorsed by God? Am I to further assume that they invented it so that they could get their favorite in-house Bible application its own platform upon which to be used? (Never you mind that there are probably a hundred of those apps out there.)
As a Christian, I consider this utterly stupid, and (theologically-speaking) wonder if it's just a product of pride and greed (that is, "the usual business model," plus pride)...if I were to guess. If so, this is very Christian, indeed./sarcsasm
The jokes about it being able to run a web browser, Flash, and therefore pornography, violent movies, etc. are, of course, rather insightful. Maybe it's "Christian" because its hardware is too crappy to play one of those evil violent video games...? *facepalm*
Maybe some Christian more brilliant than I am will shortly enlighten me...
If he completes the year (to whatever degree is possible), and in so doing chronicles a list of (useful) open-source things that are missing, I can see how this stunt could be useful. Putting aside issues of whether we care about open-source TP and such, he could provide information similar to what the Blender Institute is trying hard to acquire (in their own field): what OSS improvements/additions are missing to make something (life, in this case) fully-operational without the need for proprietary solutions....Or it could just be a publicity stunt. Wait and see...
...a ruling done to prevent a crap-storm of appeals and further contested DUI charges. I've seen such things happen before, where the ruling has less to do with evidence, and more to do with all the trouble that ruling on such evidence would cause. How much of a headache for law enforcement will it be if their DUI test proves flawed? It's a good thing to consider, even if it probably shouldn't affect the ruling...kind-of a "catch-.22."
More insightful than you think: this is the "last resort" solution by way of being a more-or-less unavoidable eventuality--unless one of the other solutions manages to "fix" things. We'll keep this one in our "back pocket," eh?;-)
I just checked my own Facebook info page and discovered that while my gmail address was still "Friends/not shown on timeline," my new Facebook address is "Friends/shown on timeline." Depending on exactly is meant by that last bit, it could explain why I'm suddenly getting about double the spam in my Gmail account that I was getting a month ago. (I get email notifications from Facebook sent to me Gmail account, as I suspect most people do.) Thank goodness for good spam filters...
There's a good reason why I ratchet-down my email address' availability on web pages, and apparently Facebook isn't nearly so concerned (which, of course, comes as no great surprise). I'd be curious to know if someone whose normal address is set to "hidden" now has a non-hidden Facebook address.
Also, the line, "We want people to use whatever's easier for them" has a somewhat different meaning when you're actively making it easier for those looking at a user's info page to see the @facebook address, rather than the one the user intentionally put there. Either the staff is oblivious, or they're being dishonest about their intentions. (Not sure, given their track record with privacy and such...)
From what I've gathered, it's similar to PBS and such, but with much more "serious" funding. I am, of course, "antsy" about the nearly-unavoidable government influence on anything the govt. funds, but if it can be somehow overseen in a meaningful way or mostly independent of such funding (perhaps by having its own income sources), this would be less of a problem.
You're right about this, Celerant, but I have to point out that more people will vote sensibly if they have easy access to good information. Yes, most people are pretty feckless about it, and probably always will be (with no easy solution, as you've mentioned), but to my mind, "every little bit helps."
It's kind of a wordplay on the oft-cited "history is written by the victor" phrase. Only this time round, TFA makes it like history is written by he who has the most money.
Which in this day and age is pretty much synonymous with 'the victor'
I, personally, see this trend as a major problem for democratic processes. If we can't really know what's going on, we can't vote sensibly on it. While this is a problem with mainstream media, anyway, the existing problem is a lot less severe than would be an unabashedly (or covertly) state-sponsored news media--and despite what we might think, people will undoubtedly believe such tripe, much as most people "buy into" the less-than-objective news we currently get.
So, I'm asking the brilliant minds of Slashdot what a better solution might be. I mean this as a serious question, so please no trolls, flames, etc.
For the sake of completeness/initiating the conversation/clarity: Options we have so far (which seem to be increasingly inadequate): 1) Traditional media. It's dying. I think we can all point to a handful of compelling reasons why it'll continue to die. 2) Paywalls. Nobody likes them, and they're arguably little better than unabashed state media, since one has to pay for a lot of them in order to sort out what's nonobjective. (If someone knows a fix for this, let's hear it!) 3) Free (as in beer) news--ad-sponsored. It lacks funding required to do a lot of "real" investigative reporting, and as such, it isn't likely to send a reporter across the world to report on the latest war in which our soldiers are fighting. (Let's put the topic of what wars they should be fighting aside, for the moment.) Also, I'm sick of seeing "lowest common denominator" content--no matter how cute those cats are. 4) Purely user-contributed news--similar to an "open-source" approach. Also suffers from "lowest common denominator," but can have some amount of filtering, much like/. does. Possibly some "real" reporters will get in on it, but I don't know how they'll make a living. Otherwise, this means that everyone is doing journalism in a mostly (or strictly) amateur capacity, which will (typically) produce low-quality stories and lack journalistic legal protection in those countries that provide such. Also, it's likely to be dangerous for those who don't know what they're doing. This still won't address the issue of how much it costs to report important, non-easy news stories, but the lack of ad-driven funding could provide for a more "serious" tenor to the content (by way of not catering to popular-but-vapid content). 5) Other?
One final thought: how can we prevent whatever we end up with from becoming just as bad/useless/corrupt/biased as current and trending options?
I look forward to reading your thoughts. I don't know how we might go about implementing any wonderful ideas we come up with, so if anyone cares to tackle that "porcupine," I'm all for it. Otherwise, it's a fun mental exercise, and might inspire some reader who actually has a say in such matters.
Because... wait for it.... applications not behaving properly during updates and figuring out what to do is NOT the expected behavior for non-technical end users?
Of course; I realize that. It is, however, the expected behavior for those making the packages: if program/service X is running, stop it or prompt the user to do so. I've seen it done before, so why not now?
I read TFA, and read some of the comments above, and I still don't understand why it's infeasible to stop/start the appropriate programs and services, patch/replace software, then start them again.
TFA gives the example of Firefox freaking out if you upgrade xulrunner while it's running. Solution...(wait for it)...close Firefox for 30 seconds while the changes are occurring! (Anyone...?) I really don't see why that example can be considered valid, since I've been doing it for years--both in Linux and (*gasp*) in Windows--without restarting the whole friggin' machine in the process. (Also, some versions of Firefox/Xulrunner packages--incl. Ubuntu's, IIRC--will prompt you to close Firefox before continuing.)
I can understand that upgrading parts of the GUI (as well as other things, of course) while it's running causes problems. I've had Gnome, Unity, KDE, etc. crash/glitch badly as a result...but it's never something that can't be fixed by...(wait for it)...shutting down the GUI for a minute and running apt/yum/emerge/whatever from the command prompt. It works in every single distro I've tried. Also, network services like Samba/CIFS, NFS, Avahi, etc. are quite alright with "service stop X"/"service start X", so that's not an issue, either. (Restarting them takes a lot less time than rebooting, obviously.) Finally, I don't think I've yet encountered a single service in the dozen or so distros I've used that can't be stopped/restarted for an upgrade if you know what you're doing. In VERY rare instances, you have to go down to init 1 (which isn't all that different from rebooting, in many ways--but is still faster to recover from), but that's usually just a workaround for not knowing what services depend on others--which Fedora's devs obviously DO know (or I'd find it quite amazing/surprising if none of them did, at least). I don't use ksplice, so I understand the need to reboot for kernel upgrades...but that's always been the case, and I don't see it as a big deal. Just how often are you planning on upgrading your mission-critical, "always-up" server's kernel, anyway?
So, it would seem that: (1) Fedora's doing something else that's crazy-different from what every distro in the world has done up to this point (perhaps involving an upstream change?); or (2) I'm missing something important--that nobody else seems to get, either (outside of Fedora's developers, or maybe someone I haven't yet read the explanation from); or (3) Fedora's just doing something really, really stupid that shouldn't actually be happening. As a new Fedora user (refugee from Ubuntu's Unity push...), this kind-of ticks me off.
One last thing: it was mentioned that Fedora is not generally used for business/mission-critical applications. Huh? It was my understanding that Fedora is used for little else! (It's certainly not designed for Desktop end-users, what with their draconian media codec/non-free software policy. As a "technical user," it's not a big deal for me to add repos and such, but I certainly don't recommend it for Mom and Dad.) Also, it's always been made clear that Fedora is the "testing ground" and (in a sense) "upstream" for RHEL--which is absolutely used for mission-critical and business stuff. I guess I just don't see how they're fooling themselves into thinking that this change is "good."
Thoughts? Am I just too dense to understand the reasons? Are the Fedora folks really being as stupid about this as I suspect? (I have great respect for them, in general, but a stupid idea is still stupid, no matter whose it is.) Does anyone know of a *good* reason for this change?
I was amazed by their creativity and ability to argue ridiculous claims with total certainty and literacy. It's truly fascinating how far some will go to reinforce their beliefs, and smart people are often very skilled at it. The combination of complicated arguments, heavy language and the absolute certainty of the person making the claims, is probably often enough to convince less clever individuals.
"Amen.";-)
I have a number of intelligent friends who are like that--which is especially frustrating since I espouse a (somewhat abnormal) Christian outlook--though I try to shy away from the silliness that plagues most of this religion. (I don't mean to start a Slashdot discussion about religion, for reasons that are probably obvious.) It's so saddening to try and converse with a friend who ostensibly believes as I do, only to find that he's really just interested in pushing ultra-conservative dogmas about the faith.:-(
A absolutely agree with you on all points. (Yes, this is rare for/. comments.):-)
Your assertion about there being a means to combat bias--that finds itself in only a few people, but enough to matter--is quite apt, I find. Likewise, I've noticed that your two traits apply to those whom I know (myself included, except when I'm not) with the ability to detect such inner bias: "a strong tendency to double-check or triangulate social hypotheses, and the ability to embrace contradiction."
Accordingly, the "triangulation" of social hypotheses and the ability to embrace contradiction inevitably lead to being contradictory without intending to be combative (and almost invariably being treated as a "combatant," anyway)--and to probably the sort of "less-than-acceptable" lives as you've noted. I strongly suspect that most of the "great thinkers" of history (in any field, really, so long as they're truly great thinkers, and not simply well-accomplished) have had great difficulty fitting into society's acceptable, normative lifestyle paradigms. How could a person who sees the idiosyncrasies of society laid-bare (to some significant degree) tolerate not to act otherwise than those idiosyncrasies dictate? As those with such tendencies well know, this leads to being branded as an eccentric, at best. (Not a few such people have been executed for their behavior, I understand.)
Any, I think I've co-dissertated enough for now. Thanks for your insights, epine.
In my own experience--both by observing smart people and by being one (if I may be so bold), I've noticed that the more "smart" a person is (by several definitions; see below), the more easily he/she can convince him/herself--and others--of incorrect things. Furthermore (as these findings suggest), a person who possesses unusually great capacity for self-analysis often becomes quite accustomed to analyzing things on a much "higher level" than what actually motivates one to (erroneous) thought and action.
For example, a "stupid" person might see another person as a threat to getting into a relationship with someone he/she, him/herself, likes, and will therefore treat that person poorly--while probably having few illusions about why he/she is doing so. A "smart" person, on the other hand, will have that same "root" motivation cause him/her to come up with "rational" reasons (which aren't nearly so rational as assumed, of course) for why that rival is actually bad at his/her job, "annoying," unethical, unreliable, unintelligent, etc., and will then treat that person badly without realizing just how "base" or "primal" the root cause of the behavior is.
Notably, I've seen/experienced this with people who are "smart" by way of IQ, and "smart" by way of education (and, of course by way of the two, combined; though--as we all know here--the two aren't always the same thing). Apparently, simply engaging the analytical portion of one's brain habitually--whether by training or nature--almost invariably creates this effect--and can often lead to some truly irritating "smart" people (myself at the forefront, at times, I'll admit).
I'm glad that someone with "license to wear a lab coat" has also determined as much in a somewhat more scientific/official fashion.
About 10 years ago, I was using a Radeon 9600XT. At the time, it was well-known that ATI's drivers sucked, but that their hardware was better for the price you paid. So, with the release of the 9000 series, ATI (now AMD, as you probably know) made a big deal about how they were starting to overhaul and vastly improve their driver quality.
Well...?
10 years later, they're still not giving their drivers nearly the attention they deserve, and it seems evident that they simply don't consider them a high priority. Does this announcement smell like penny-pinching to anyone else? Slower release cycles allow them to lay-off or cut the hours of employees, and I imagine that this seems quite appealing to a lot of companies in the current economic climate--perhaps in particular companies who produce flagship products that can be deemed "recreational" or discretionary spending."
As it turns out, that 9600XT never did work properly (largely due to driver problems), so I've been forking out the extra dough for Nvidia cards ever since--but I'd love to get my hands on ATI/AMD hardware if/when they solve their driver problems (on Windows and Linux), and find a way to support PhysX or similar without giving the users a lot of hassle or decreased performance.
Why they've never realized that people hating their drivers leads to lower profits (or so I suppose it does) is pretty-well beyond me. Anyone have additional insights on what's going on over there? Are they totally inept, or do they seem to have a strategy of some kind? (Both?)
Slashdot Mirror
Now, if they'd only translate Javascript into a less painful scripting language, we'd have REAL progress. *insane laughter*
Now, if we can only translate Javascript into a less painful scripting language, we'd have REAL progress! *insane laughter*
Now, if they'll band this in the UK, I'll be able to watch Dr. Who on BBC's website, instead of having to search it out on a more "questionable" site. (/wishful-thinking)
I must be completely missing the point of this hardware.
Am I to assume that circuit boards, LCD pixels, etc. in a configuration thusly makes this a holy item, somehow endorsed by God? Am I to further assume that they invented it so that they could get their favorite in-house Bible application its own platform upon which to be used? (Never you mind that there are probably a hundred of those apps out there.)
As a Christian, I consider this utterly stupid, and (theologically-speaking) wonder if it's just a product of pride and greed (that is, "the usual business model," plus pride)...if I were to guess. If so, this is very Christian, indeed. /sarcsasm
The jokes about it being able to run a web browser, Flash, and therefore pornography, violent movies, etc. are, of course, rather insightful. Maybe it's "Christian" because its hardware is too crappy to play one of those evil violent video games...? *facepalm*
Maybe some Christian more brilliant than I am will shortly enlighten me...
If he completes the year (to whatever degree is possible), and in so doing chronicles a list of (useful) open-source things that are missing, I can see how this stunt could be useful. Putting aside issues of whether we care about open-source TP and such, he could provide information similar to what the Blender Institute is trying hard to acquire (in their own field): what OSS improvements/additions are missing to make something (life, in this case) fully-operational without the need for proprietary solutions. ...Or it could just be a publicity stunt. Wait and see...
...a ruling done to prevent a crap-storm of appeals and further contested DUI charges. I've seen such things happen before, where the ruling has less to do with evidence, and more to do with all the trouble that ruling on such evidence would cause. How much of a headache for law enforcement will it be if their DUI test proves flawed? It's a good thing to consider, even if it probably shouldn't affect the ruling...kind-of a "catch-.22."
It's equivalent to a boss that makes you work all week, fires you, and then doesn't pay you any wages.
In point of fact, I've had that happen as a result of working for a door company. Just saying...
You all know the normal arguments about out-dated business models, as they apply to these things, so I won't repeat them at this time.
(I've also released works under the Creative Commons, just to "head-off" any heated replies on that front.)
More insightful than you think: this is the "last resort" solution by way of being a more-or-less unavoidable eventuality--unless one of the other solutions manages to "fix" things. We'll keep this one in our "back pocket," eh? ;-)
This raises the question, which people do they want to make it easier for?
Yes, quite.
So what is Yammer for?
Maybe it's for helping bosses to feel less jealous of your Facebook account, so they don't have to demand its password?
*rimshot*
How long before FB is hated and flamed as much as MS and Apple on /.?
You mean, this hasn't already happened?
Hmmm...must be sample bias....
I just checked my own Facebook info page and discovered that while my gmail address was still "Friends/not shown on timeline," my new Facebook address is "Friends/shown on timeline." Depending on exactly is meant by that last bit, it could explain why I'm suddenly getting about double the spam in my Gmail account that I was getting a month ago. (I get email notifications from Facebook sent to me Gmail account, as I suspect most people do.) Thank goodness for good spam filters...
There's a good reason why I ratchet-down my email address' availability on web pages, and apparently Facebook isn't nearly so concerned (which, of course, comes as no great surprise). I'd be curious to know if someone whose normal address is set to "hidden" now has a non-hidden Facebook address.
Also, the line, "We want people to use whatever's easier for them" has a somewhat different meaning when you're actively making it easier for those looking at a user's info page to see the @facebook address, rather than the one the user intentionally put there. Either the staff is oblivious, or they're being dishonest about their intentions. (Not sure, given their track record with privacy and such...)
Thanks for the information, JasterBobaMereel. This does sound quite good.
Good suggestion.
From what I've gathered, it's similar to PBS and such, but with much more "serious" funding. I am, of course, "antsy" about the nearly-unavoidable government influence on anything the govt. funds, but if it can be somehow overseen in a meaningful way or mostly independent of such funding (perhaps by having its own income sources), this would be less of a problem.
You're right about this, Celerant, but I have to point out that more people will vote sensibly if they have easy access to good information. Yes, most people are pretty feckless about it, and probably always will be (with no easy solution, as you've mentioned), but to my mind, "every little bit helps."
It's kind of a wordplay on the oft-cited "history is written by the victor" phrase. Only this time round, TFA makes it like history is written by he who has the most money.
Which in this day and age is pretty much synonymous with 'the victor'
Good call!
I, personally, see this trend as a major problem for democratic processes. If we can't really know what's going on, we can't vote sensibly on it. While this is a problem with mainstream media, anyway, the existing problem is a lot less severe than would be an unabashedly (or covertly) state-sponsored news media--and despite what we might think, people will undoubtedly believe such tripe, much as most people "buy into" the less-than-objective news we currently get.
So, I'm asking the brilliant minds of Slashdot what a better solution might be. I mean this as a serious question, so please no trolls, flames, etc.
For the sake of completeness/initiating the conversation/clarity: /. does. Possibly some "real" reporters will get in on it, but I don't know how they'll make a living. Otherwise, this means that everyone is doing journalism in a mostly (or strictly) amateur capacity, which will (typically) produce low-quality stories and lack journalistic legal protection in those countries that provide such. Also, it's likely to be dangerous for those who don't know what they're doing. This still won't address the issue of how much it costs to report important, non-easy news stories, but the lack of ad-driven funding could provide for a more "serious" tenor to the content (by way of not catering to popular-but-vapid content).
Options we have so far (which seem to be increasingly inadequate):
1) Traditional media. It's dying. I think we can all point to a handful of compelling reasons why it'll continue to die.
2) Paywalls. Nobody likes them, and they're arguably little better than unabashed state media, since one has to pay for a lot of them in order to sort out what's nonobjective. (If someone knows a fix for this, let's hear it!)
3) Free (as in beer) news--ad-sponsored. It lacks funding required to do a lot of "real" investigative reporting, and as such, it isn't likely to send a reporter across the world to report on the latest war in which our soldiers are fighting. (Let's put the topic of what wars they should be fighting aside, for the moment.) Also, I'm sick of seeing "lowest common denominator" content--no matter how cute those cats are.
4) Purely user-contributed news--similar to an "open-source" approach. Also suffers from "lowest common denominator," but can have some amount of filtering, much like
5) Other?
One final thought: how can we prevent whatever we end up with from becoming just as bad/useless/corrupt/biased as current and trending options?
I look forward to reading your thoughts. I don't know how we might go about implementing any wonderful ideas we come up with, so if anyone cares to tackle that "porcupine," I'm all for it. Otherwise, it's a fun mental exercise, and might inspire some reader who actually has a say in such matters.
Because ... wait for it .... applications not behaving properly during updates and figuring out what to do is NOT the expected behavior for non-technical end users?
Of course; I realize that. It is, however, the expected behavior for those making the packages: if program/service X is running, stop it or prompt the user to do so. I've seen it done before, so why not now?
I read TFA, and read some of the comments above, and I still don't understand why it's infeasible to stop/start the appropriate programs and services, patch/replace software, then start them again.
TFA gives the example of Firefox freaking out if you upgrade xulrunner while it's running. Solution...(wait for it)...close Firefox for 30 seconds while the changes are occurring! (Anyone...?) I really don't see why that example can be considered valid, since I've been doing it for years--both in Linux and (*gasp*) in Windows--without restarting the whole friggin' machine in the process. (Also, some versions of Firefox/Xulrunner packages--incl. Ubuntu's, IIRC--will prompt you to close Firefox before continuing.)
I can understand that upgrading parts of the GUI (as well as other things, of course) while it's running causes problems. I've had Gnome, Unity, KDE, etc. crash/glitch badly as a result...but it's never something that can't be fixed by...(wait for it)...shutting down the GUI for a minute and running apt/yum/emerge/whatever from the command prompt. It works in every single distro I've tried. Also, network services like Samba/CIFS, NFS, Avahi, etc. are quite alright with "service stop X"/"service start X", so that's not an issue, either. (Restarting them takes a lot less time than rebooting, obviously.) Finally, I don't think I've yet encountered a single service in the dozen or so distros I've used that can't be stopped/restarted for an upgrade if you know what you're doing. In VERY rare instances, you have to go down to init 1 (which isn't all that different from rebooting, in many ways--but is still faster to recover from), but that's usually just a workaround for not knowing what services depend on others--which Fedora's devs obviously DO know (or I'd find it quite amazing/surprising if none of them did, at least). I don't use ksplice, so I understand the need to reboot for kernel upgrades...but that's always been the case, and I don't see it as a big deal. Just how often are you planning on upgrading your mission-critical, "always-up" server's kernel, anyway?
So, it would seem that: (1) Fedora's doing something else that's crazy-different from what every distro in the world has done up to this point (perhaps involving an upstream change?); or (2) I'm missing something important--that nobody else seems to get, either (outside of Fedora's developers, or maybe someone I haven't yet read the explanation from); or (3) Fedora's just doing something really, really stupid that shouldn't actually be happening. As a new Fedora user (refugee from Ubuntu's Unity push...), this kind-of ticks me off.
One last thing: it was mentioned that Fedora is not generally used for business/mission-critical applications. Huh? It was my understanding that Fedora is used for little else! (It's certainly not designed for Desktop end-users, what with their draconian media codec/non-free software policy. As a "technical user," it's not a big deal for me to add repos and such, but I certainly don't recommend it for Mom and Dad.) Also, it's always been made clear that Fedora is the "testing ground" and (in a sense) "upstream" for RHEL--which is absolutely used for mission-critical and business stuff. I guess I just don't see how they're fooling themselves into thinking that this change is "good."
Thoughts? Am I just too dense to understand the reasons? Are the Fedora folks really being as stupid about this as I suspect? (I have great respect for them, in general, but a stupid idea is still stupid, no matter whose it is.) Does anyone know of a *good* reason for this change?
Have a good one, all.
--Dane
I was amazed by their creativity and ability to argue ridiculous claims with total certainty and literacy. It's truly fascinating how far some will go to reinforce their beliefs, and smart people are often very skilled at it. The combination of complicated arguments, heavy language and the absolute certainty of the person making the claims, is probably often enough to convince less clever individuals.
"Amen." ;-)
I have a number of intelligent friends who are like that--which is especially frustrating since I espouse a (somewhat abnormal) Christian outlook--though I try to shy away from the silliness that plagues most of this religion. (I don't mean to start a Slashdot discussion about religion, for reasons that are probably obvious.) It's so saddening to try and converse with a friend who ostensibly believes as I do, only to find that he's really just interested in pushing ultra-conservative dogmas about the faith. :-(
Excellent analysis, epine!
A absolutely agree with you on all points. (Yes, this is rare for /. comments.) :-)
Your assertion about there being a means to combat bias--that finds itself in only a few people, but enough to matter--is quite apt, I find. Likewise, I've noticed that your two traits apply to those whom I know (myself included, except when I'm not) with the ability to detect such inner bias: "a strong tendency to double-check or triangulate social hypotheses, and the ability to embrace contradiction."
Accordingly, the "triangulation" of social hypotheses and the ability to embrace contradiction inevitably lead to being contradictory without intending to be combative (and almost invariably being treated as a "combatant," anyway)--and to probably the sort of "less-than-acceptable" lives as you've noted. I strongly suspect that most of the "great thinkers" of history (in any field, really, so long as they're truly great thinkers, and not simply well-accomplished) have had great difficulty fitting into society's acceptable, normative lifestyle paradigms. How could a person who sees the idiosyncrasies of society laid-bare (to some significant degree) tolerate not to act otherwise than those idiosyncrasies dictate? As those with such tendencies well know, this leads to being branded as an eccentric, at best. (Not a few such people have been executed for their behavior, I understand.)
Any, I think I've co-dissertated enough for now. Thanks for your insights, epine.
My theory is that smart people are mostly stupid, and that stupid people are fully stupid.
LOL...quite true, and I wish more of us "smart people" (as well as the stupid ones, of course) would realize it!
Someone mod-up parent, please! :-)
In my own experience--both by observing smart people and by being one (if I may be so bold), I've noticed that the more "smart" a person is (by several definitions; see below), the more easily he/she can convince him/herself--and others--of incorrect things. Furthermore (as these findings suggest), a person who possesses unusually great capacity for self-analysis often becomes quite accustomed to analyzing things on a much "higher level" than what actually motivates one to (erroneous) thought and action.
For example, a "stupid" person might see another person as a threat to getting into a relationship with someone he/she, him/herself, likes, and will therefore treat that person poorly--while probably having few illusions about why he/she is doing so. A "smart" person, on the other hand, will have that same "root" motivation cause him/her to come up with "rational" reasons (which aren't nearly so rational as assumed, of course) for why that rival is actually bad at his/her job, "annoying," unethical, unreliable, unintelligent, etc., and will then treat that person badly without realizing just how "base" or "primal" the root cause of the behavior is.
Notably, I've seen/experienced this with people who are "smart" by way of IQ, and "smart" by way of education (and, of course by way of the two, combined; though--as we all know here--the two aren't always the same thing). Apparently, simply engaging the analytical portion of one's brain habitually--whether by training or nature--almost invariably creates this effect--and can often lead to some truly irritating "smart" people (myself at the forefront, at times, I'll admit).
I'm glad that someone with "license to wear a lab coat" has also determined as much in a somewhat more scientific/official fashion.
About 10 years ago, I was using a Radeon 9600XT. At the time, it was well-known that ATI's drivers sucked, but that their hardware was better for the price you paid. So, with the release of the 9000 series, ATI (now AMD, as you probably know) made a big deal about how they were starting to overhaul and vastly improve their driver quality.
Well...?
10 years later, they're still not giving their drivers nearly the attention they deserve, and it seems evident that they simply don't consider them a high priority. Does this announcement smell like penny-pinching to anyone else? Slower release cycles allow them to lay-off or cut the hours of employees, and I imagine that this seems quite appealing to a lot of companies in the current economic climate--perhaps in particular companies who produce flagship products that can be deemed "recreational" or discretionary spending."
As it turns out, that 9600XT never did work properly (largely due to driver problems), so I've been forking out the extra dough for Nvidia cards ever since--but I'd love to get my hands on ATI/AMD hardware if/when they solve their driver problems (on Windows and Linux), and find a way to support PhysX or similar without giving the users a lot of hassle or decreased performance.
Why they've never realized that people hating their drivers leads to lower profits (or so I suppose it does) is pretty-well beyond me. Anyone have additional insights on what's going on over there? Are they totally inept, or do they seem to have a strategy of some kind? (Both?)
How many frustrated consumers does it take to change a light bulb, now?