No doubt. At this point the best slashdot could do on April 1 is post 100% real stories and watch everybody try to figure out where the silly fake stuff is.
I understand the value and weight that your real-world experience in your world-view, and I respect it. I also know that a lot of understanding of the subject can come from doing something aside from drinking around a campfire with every color of the rainbow -- believe it or not, science has learned a lot about the subject, abeit they speak in terms of odd jargon, like "heterosexual relationship initiation process", "contact readiness cues". etc. What we've learned is that -- sit down, this may come as a shock -- we're animals, and that a large part of our sexual & relationship mechanism was in place prior to the birth of culture. Amazingly, scientists can do this without using time machines to go back and lick the alphabet on some prehistoric vulva -- don't ask me how.
I agree that flirting is also very cultural, and so do the same scientists. I don't think any reasonable person would try to make it an either/or debate. The fact is that we're animals with a thick layer of culture layered on top. Neither nature nor nurture can be blamed 100% for any of it, and both nature and nurture must be acknowledged in order to have a good understanding.
I do find your idea that flirting is hardwired behavior intriguing. Please reconsider your position as there is really no evidence to support that point of view.
LOL, aside from the fact that homo sapiens have been around for about 3 million years and civilization has only been around for a little over ten thousand years -- and the circuitry for flirtation exists in other animals. I can't believe you actually said that with a straight face.
I would go further still: analysis should not be limited to the assumption that this is nothing but a mere attempt to communicate. Courtship rituals are a sieve meant to filter out the lesser fit potential mates. If a man can't jump over that first hurdle by showing that he's tuned-in to subtleties, then it's a success of the sieve as much as it is a failure to communicate -- and that success has much higher consequences than does the failure to "hook up".
No. The message should definitely be to women, "Be more clear about your intentions."
Thats' a great fantasy, but women and men were carved out in very different evolutionary contexts, given that a man's theoretical-gene-spreading-bandwidth is limited only by his ability to get hard and get off -- whereas a woman has one uterus, must carry the child to term, and must ensure that the child gets resources and protection. In short, the evolutionary game for men was very simple: they sought vaginas, and could more easily choose to not take responsibility for the consequences. Women needed to seek someone able and willing to protect and provide.
The modern world -- with birth control, affluence, and virtual extinction of top-predators -- has made things somewhat less asymmetrical today, but our brains are still essentially the same machines they were in deep history.
That said, it is not to a woman's advantage to be clear about their intentions. Rather, it is to their advantage to wait for that one guy in a thousand who is able to pick up on her subtlety. It's an indicator of his genetic fitness. Now you can argue that such a guy would be a skillful player and might be less likely to stick around and support the child, but consider this: if their sexual transaction was initiated in a subtle manner, it's also more likely that it can be completed in secret as well. This protects her reputation and keeps her options open to go grab one of the other 999 out of a thousand who would make a great cuckold for the genes donated by the one guy capable of subtlety.
Both Apple and ATT have non free practices at the core of their business. It is not surprising that they would each pretend to be more customer friendly...
I should hope that they have non-free practices, given that a business is a money-making endeavor, and a customer is someone who pays for goods and services.
Thank you for the link to Shaver's blog post. Indeed it is more reasonable than Rob Sayre's "sour grapes" post, although i find Ian Hickson's response to Shaver's blog post to be more reasonable still. (Worth reading if you missed it.)
Also don't miss Maciej Stachowiak's Scenes From an Acid Test. It does touch on the careful approach they have taken.
I wish we could peek behind the curtain at Opera to see what's really going on there.
I think Joel Spolsky was right about the eventual antidote to "messing with HTML/XML/Javascript/Ajax/etc." when he suggested that eventually these things would simply become the "instruction sets" that compilers target. GWT is an excellent example of that right now. Browser developers can continue to refine support for these standards and we can both use them and insulate ourselves from minor deviations from one browser to another. And, I dare say this is a much better idea than 'checking out xaml'.
No kidding. This is the second really alarming thing I've read from the FF crew today. It's almost as if they've become disheartened by the pace set by Opera and WebKit, and are engaging in random attention-seeking behaviours.
Thank you for that wikipedia link. That is a tragic story. I don't understand why you think that "we're all doomed", though. Being in the minority of programmers who understand a given technique is potentially lucrative, so those people are not doomed. And there's no need whatsoever to eek out every last drop of 16-core performance out of a machine that needs to make sure that a beam-spreader is rotated into position prior to activiting the high-power X-Ray emitter -- so the obvious solution in that case is to not apply superfluous concurrency optimizations in the first place. Meaning that the patients who need such a machine need not be doomed either (any more than they already were given their malady). In short, who says that everybody will start writing parallel programs irrespective of its applicability to a given problem?
From Thread (computer science): in general, a thread is contained inside a process and different threads of the same process share some resources while different processes do not.
The aforementioned shared resources implies a tradeoff. Threads don't need multiple copies (a space savings) and don't have as high a cost of context switching (a time savings). The tradeoff for those benefits is that you have to think about sharing those resources safely, which requires more thought.
So the behaviour mandated by the standard is insecure?
No, that is not the case. IE8 is trying to prevent exploitation of their own, proprietary ActiveX API, and simply needs to make some minor corrections to make sure that they do it in such a way that does not violate the standards. The standards don't need to be revised since nobody else implements the swiss cheese that is ActiveX.
You know, Asa, I had read John's post about that topic when it was new, and the reason it didn't sit well with me is that there is an implicit fallacy in his text: he assumes that if one cannot take that graph at face-value, then it must have been done "carelessly", or "accidentally". It seems you buy the same line of reasoning, based on your own use of the word "casually". I don't think there's anything careless, accidental, or casual about refusing to lay your strategic direction bare for all competitors to see. Rather, it would be exceedingly careful, deliberate, and calculated. John's post did not address that hypothesis at all, other than to knock down the "careless" and "accedental" strawmen that he constructed.
If there's anything that Apple doesn't do casually, it's prepare Steve's keynote slides.
Actually, there is one thing that they are even less likely to do casually, and that is to give away their strategic direction. Can you think of a more secretively strategic software company?
Cool, a response from Asa. I'm glad to hear that the apparent stagnation of Firefox's climb actually indicates a change in the nature of its growth. That's very encouraging news.
Still, I don't think that invalidates my observation about which competitive browser is actually the target of this distribution mechanism.
Further, note that this distribution mechanism isn't even going after the same market segment that Firefox currently enjoys. Firefox climbed to about 15% share and has stalled there for quite a while.
This suggests to me that of the people in the world who will voluntarily go out and download another browser, about 15% of them choose Firefox.
This distribution mechanism, however, is not targeting people who will go out of their way to try another browser. Rather, it targets people who, if presented with a 1-click impulse offer, will try another browser. On windows, almost all of those people are currently using IE -- the exceptions being a few people who had a friend or family member install Firefox or Opera for them.
So, clearly, if Apple's strategy is to decrease Firefox's market share, this distribution mechanism won't do it for them. What it might do, however, is grab a small slice of the pie from IE. The graph from that keynote is like getting your little brother to "look over there" so that you can easily grab his french fries.
Yeah, I remember how controversial that graph was at the time. It seemed to me, however, that Steve was engaging in some misdirection and/or a joke that "fell flat" in front of the audience. Apple has no incentive to genuinely target a browser that supports standards, browser diversity, and platform diversity.
It was clear to me then, and it's clear to me now, that the real intended target is IE, and Apple merely didn't want to telegraph its punch.
Apple sometimes makes it really hard to download the Quicktime player without iTunes bundled and so on
Another interesting example that should hit closer to home here on slashdot is how difficult mysql.com makes it to download the community edition. I don't know why that doesn't cause the same wailing and gnashing of teeth that finding the unbundled quicktime installer does. Heck, my bank (Wells Fargo) in all of their mailings and in their online banking makes it much, much easier for me to borrow money out of my HELOC -- and difficult to make a payment on it! That's business.
Yeah, you know, that's the way law works with respect to monopolies. They're held to a different standard. While Microsoft has been legally declared a monopoly, and it held up on appeal. So far, the only people who call Apple a 'monopoly' are trolls on various internet forums -- a far cry from a federal court ruling.
Like it or not, Microsoft has different rules to abide by. Get over it. You sound like someone who's whining about their pedophile uncle not being allowed to live near a public school system.
Note that Firefox 2 is the current release, and Firefox 3 is in beta. If you want to widen the playing field to show that Firefox outperforms Safari, you'll need to also include Webkit nightly builds to be fair. Apple's claim is probably limited to the scope of production browsers.
my point was that some math nerd should've posted it when they read about it in the journal,
Ok, I see what you meant. Which journal do you mean, by the way? The one that's mentioned in TFA is the Isreal Journal of Mathematics, and according to TFA the results haven't been published in that journal yet. The paper itself was published in September, but journals like that are essentially bundles of papers -- and that particular paper hasn't made it into one of those bundles quite yet, it seems.
Slashdot Mirror
No doubt. At this point the best slashdot could do on April 1 is post 100% real stories and watch everybody try to figure out where the silly fake stuff is.
I understand the value and weight that your real-world experience in your world-view, and I respect it. I also know that a lot of understanding of the subject can come from doing something aside from drinking around a campfire with every color of the rainbow -- believe it or not, science has learned a lot about the subject, abeit they speak in terms of odd jargon, like "heterosexual relationship initiation process", "contact readiness cues". etc. What we've learned is that -- sit down, this may come as a shock -- we're animals, and that a large part of our sexual & relationship mechanism was in place prior to the birth of culture. Amazingly, scientists can do this without using time machines to go back and lick the alphabet on some prehistoric vulva -- don't ask me how.
I agree that flirting is also very cultural, and so do the same scientists. I don't think any reasonable person would try to make it an either/or debate. The fact is that we're animals with a thick layer of culture layered on top. Neither nature nor nurture can be blamed 100% for any of it, and both nature and nurture must be acknowledged in order to have a good understanding.
I do find your idea that flirting is hardwired behavior intriguing. Please reconsider your position as there is really no evidence to support that point of view.
LOL, aside from the fact that homo sapiens have been around for about 3 million years and civilization has only been around for a little over ten thousand years -- and the circuitry for flirtation exists in other animals. I can't believe you actually said that with a straight face.
I would go further still: analysis should not be limited to the assumption that this is nothing but a mere attempt to communicate. Courtship rituals are a sieve meant to filter out the lesser fit potential mates. If a man can't jump over that first hurdle by showing that he's tuned-in to subtleties, then it's a success of the sieve as much as it is a failure to communicate -- and that success has much higher consequences than does the failure to "hook up".
You're describing a personal social advantage here, not an evolutionary one.
Have you ever heard of the phrase brood parasite? Or Cuckold?
No. The message should definitely be to women, "Be more clear about your intentions."
Thats' a great fantasy, but women and men were carved out in very different evolutionary contexts, given that a man's theoretical-gene-spreading-bandwidth is limited only by his ability to get hard and get off -- whereas a woman has one uterus, must carry the child to term, and must ensure that the child gets resources and protection. In short, the evolutionary game for men was very simple: they sought vaginas, and could more easily choose to not take responsibility for the consequences. Women needed to seek someone able and willing to protect and provide.
The modern world -- with birth control, affluence, and virtual extinction of top-predators -- has made things somewhat less asymmetrical today, but our brains are still essentially the same machines they were in deep history.
That said, it is not to a woman's advantage to be clear about their intentions. Rather, it is to their advantage to wait for that one guy in a thousand who is able to pick up on her subtlety. It's an indicator of his genetic fitness. Now you can argue that such a guy would be a skillful player and might be less likely to stick around and support the child, but consider this: if their sexual transaction was initiated in a subtle manner, it's also more likely that it can be completed in secret as well. This protects her reputation and keeps her options open to go grab one of the other 999 out of a thousand who would make a great cuckold for the genes donated by the one guy capable of subtlety.
Both Apple and ATT have non free practices at the core of their business. It is not surprising that they would each pretend to be more customer friendly...
I should hope that they have non-free practices, given that a business is a money-making endeavor, and a customer is someone who pays for goods and services.
Thank you for the link to Shaver's blog post. Indeed it is more reasonable than Rob Sayre's "sour grapes" post, although i find Ian Hickson's response to Shaver's blog post to be more reasonable still. (Worth reading if you missed it.) Also don't miss Maciej Stachowiak's Scenes From an Acid Test. It does touch on the careful approach they have taken. I wish we could peek behind the curtain at Opera to see what's really going on there.
I think Joel Spolsky was right about the eventual antidote to "messing with HTML/XML/Javascript/Ajax/etc." when he suggested that eventually these things would simply become the "instruction sets" that compilers target. GWT is an excellent example of that right now. Browser developers can continue to refine support for these standards and we can both use them and insulate ourselves from minor deviations from one browser to another. And, I dare say this is a much better idea than 'checking out xaml'.
No kidding. This is the second really alarming thing I've read from the FF crew today. It's almost as if they've become disheartened by the pace set by Opera and WebKit, and are engaging in random attention-seeking behaviours.
Thank you for that wikipedia link. That is a tragic story. I don't understand why you think that "we're all doomed", though. Being in the minority of programmers who understand a given technique is potentially lucrative, so those people are not doomed. And there's no need whatsoever to eek out every last drop of 16-core performance out of a machine that needs to make sure that a beam-spreader is rotated into position prior to activiting the high-power X-Ray emitter -- so the obvious solution in that case is to not apply superfluous concurrency optimizations in the first place. Meaning that the patients who need such a machine need not be doomed either (any more than they already were given their malady). In short, who says that everybody will start writing parallel programs irrespective of its applicability to a given problem?
The WebKit rendering engine has reached 100/100 on Acid 3.
From Thread (computer science): in general, a thread is contained inside a process and different threads of the same process share some resources while different processes do not.
The aforementioned shared resources implies a tradeoff. Threads don't need multiple copies (a space savings) and don't have as high a cost of context switching (a time savings). The tradeoff for those benefits is that you have to think about sharing those resources safely, which requires more thought.
Strom's not dead. He faked his death to live out his golden years in peace.
If McCain had associated with a minister who was a white supremacist and KKK supporter, he would have been kicked out, just like that.
Exactly -- that's why Strom Thurmond had such a short political career.
Well, he did run the tap at that awesome kegger...
No, that is not the case. IE8 is trying to prevent exploitation of their own, proprietary ActiveX API, and simply needs to make some minor corrections to make sure that they do it in such a way that does not violate the standards. The standards don't need to be revised since nobody else implements the swiss cheese that is ActiveX.
You know, Asa, I had read John's post about that topic when it was new, and the reason it didn't sit well with me is that there is an implicit fallacy in his text: he assumes that if one cannot take that graph at face-value, then it must have been done "carelessly", or "accidentally". It seems you buy the same line of reasoning, based on your own use of the word "casually". I don't think there's anything careless, accidental, or casual about refusing to lay your strategic direction bare for all competitors to see. Rather, it would be exceedingly careful, deliberate, and calculated. John's post did not address that hypothesis at all, other than to knock down the "careless" and "accedental" strawmen that he constructed.
If there's anything that Apple doesn't do casually, it's prepare Steve's keynote slides.
Actually, there is one thing that they are even less likely to do casually, and that is to give away their strategic direction. Can you think of a more secretively strategic software company?
Cool, a response from Asa. I'm glad to hear that the apparent stagnation of Firefox's climb actually indicates a change in the nature of its growth. That's very encouraging news.
Still, I don't think that invalidates my observation about which competitive browser is actually the target of this distribution mechanism.
Further, note that this distribution mechanism isn't even going after the same market segment that Firefox currently enjoys. Firefox climbed to about 15% share and has stalled there for quite a while.
This suggests to me that of the people in the world who will voluntarily go out and download another browser, about 15% of them choose Firefox.
This distribution mechanism, however, is not targeting people who will go out of their way to try another browser. Rather, it targets people who, if presented with a 1-click impulse offer, will try another browser. On windows, almost all of those people are currently using IE -- the exceptions being a few people who had a friend or family member install Firefox or Opera for them.
So, clearly, if Apple's strategy is to decrease Firefox's market share, this distribution mechanism won't do it for them. What it might do, however, is grab a small slice of the pie from IE. The graph from that keynote is like getting your little brother to "look over there" so that you can easily grab his french fries.
Yeah, I remember how controversial that graph was at the time. It seemed to me, however, that Steve was engaging in some misdirection and/or a joke that "fell flat" in front of the audience. Apple has no incentive to genuinely target a browser that supports standards, browser diversity, and platform diversity.
It was clear to me then, and it's clear to me now, that the real intended target is IE, and Apple merely didn't want to telegraph its punch.
Apple sometimes makes it really hard to download the Quicktime player without iTunes bundled and so on
Another interesting example that should hit closer to home here on slashdot is how difficult mysql.com makes it to download the community edition. I don't know why that doesn't cause the same wailing and gnashing of teeth that finding the unbundled quicktime installer does. Heck, my bank (Wells Fargo) in all of their mailings and in their online banking makes it much, much easier for me to borrow money out of my HELOC -- and difficult to make a payment on it! That's business.
Yeah, you know, that's the way law works with respect to monopolies. They're held to a different standard. While Microsoft has been legally declared a monopoly, and it held up on appeal. So far, the only people who call Apple a 'monopoly' are trolls on various internet forums -- a far cry from a federal court ruling. Like it or not, Microsoft has different rules to abide by. Get over it. You sound like someone who's whining about their pedophile uncle not being allowed to live near a public school system.
Note that Firefox 2 is the current release, and Firefox 3 is in beta. If you want to widen the playing field to show that Firefox outperforms Safari, you'll need to also include Webkit nightly builds to be fair. Apple's claim is probably limited to the scope of production browsers.
my point was that some math nerd should've posted it when they read about it in the journal,
Ok, I see what you meant. Which journal do you mean, by the way? The one that's mentioned in TFA is the Isreal Journal of Mathematics, and according to TFA the results haven't been published in that journal yet. The paper itself was published in September, but journals like that are essentially bundles of papers -- and that particular paper hasn't made it into one of those bundles quite yet, it seems.