Kaczynski is the guy who sent mail bombs to people he didn't like. So unless you're planning on sending Blizzard distasteful packages, I don't think that's who you want to compare yourself to.
I think you mean Fisher, as in Bobby Fisher, who disappeared into the wild after becoming the top rated player in the world. He's also a little out there, but fairly harmless if you're not facing him on the other side of a chess board.
I have friends who are teachers who still don't understand what fractions really mean and how to do basic math on them.
And people wonder why the state of education in the US is so poor.
As for the rest of your post, I have to disagree. The concepts you mention are easy. They're incredibly basic, and are a combination of no more than two separate but related ideas. For example, a fraction is comprised of the concept of dividing something equally, and possessing one or more of those parts. A (strongly-typed) variable is the concept of something unknown combined with the concept of representation. Branching is the concept of choice combined with that of duality.
What's difficult is teaching the concepts. Everyone learns and understands things a little differently. Some people are more abstract. Others are more visual. Others need practical examples. Finding a way to teach a concept that would satisfy all of the different thought patterns is incredibly difficult. Most people can and will teach a concept the same way they learned it, but that will most likely satisfy only one type of student, if that much.
And the truth is, some people will get very far with a concept because their way of thinking is more appropriate for the concept, while others will only grasp the basic ideas and will struggle with the more advanced manipulations. And I think people's strengths and weaknesses will show in how quickly or slowly they are able to grasp ever-increasingly difficult concepts. That is indeed a measure of intelligence (with respect to that concept), and I would agree does vary between people.
But I absolutely do not subscribe to the idea that very basic concepts are difficult to understand. I definitely think that the dots are all there for everyone; it's a matter of making the relevant connections. After all, save for a few truly exceptional people out there, we all begin at the same place, born with the same mental faculties, and start wi the same experiences (eating, sleeping, and crapping).
The teacher's (and by teacher, I mean anyone who teachers, including parents) job is to facilitate learning--to make it easier for the students to learn. It is to help the students make the connections, because no one can force those connections to happen Matrix-style (yet). However, if the teacher was a poor student, then the students of that teacher will not receive the necessary assistance. I think that is what you're experiencing: the results of several generations of poor schooling that ultimately result in an inability to make accessible even the most basic concepts.
If you sent a lot of e-mails to a company, it'd be harassment. It's the same the other way around.
If a lot of people sent one e-mail each to a company, it's not harassment. It's the same as if a lot of companies each sent you one e-mail.
In the latter two cases, there needs to be a legitimate reason for sending so many e-mails. You can't just ask a bunch of people to flood the mailbox of a company with random junk out of malice. Vice versa, a bunch of companies can't flood your mailbox with random junk out of malice either.
Already doing it to Western Europe in the form of software patents and ever-increasing length of copyright. But I guess they call it "diplomacy" instead of "war".
Every set period of time, admins get x number of article deletions, y number of reverts, z number of edits, etc.
Nobody gets unlimited modifications. The lack of scarcity makes things worthless. Worthless things are treated as trivial and thus abused before being discarded. Make something scarce, and it becomes important.
The embedded culture of edit wars and automated reverts won't go away immediately. But people will start to think twice about what they're willing to go to war over when they lose because their quota ran out.
Problem's don't stem from the concept of null-terminated strings, it's how everything else around it is written base on its benefits and limitations. In the case of strcpy, the problems weren't taken into consideration, and thus the result turned out poorly.
Effectively, null-termination doesn't result in bad things happening, it's the lack of understanding of what it means for everything else that does. And that's probably extensible for everything.
I'm still completely disgusted by and resistant to widescreen monitors. In order to get the same screen real estate of a single 4:3 monitor, I pretty much need two widescreens of the same diagonal, in portrait layout, side by side. The latter setup gives me a bit more real estate, but at the cost of a bezel running down the middle. It's ridiculous that everybody, not just makers of consumer-grade TN LCD's, are buying into the widescreen bull.
I also don't understand why nobody makes monitors of the most pixel density (currently 15.4" 1920x1200, or my preferred 1600x1200 15.1" in the old days). I know laptops tend to be used close to the user's body and that's why they're offered in laptops, but I can't understand why they don't make them for desktops.
To get back on topic, I honestly can see why reducing horizontal components is a good thing for widescreen monitors. And in that sense, I can agree with consolidating some of the things up top, because they're not often used. But I can't understand why they outright remove features (like the status bar) rather than disable it by default. Something like say, hiding the menu bar by default would be fine, but outright removing it would not.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of things they could do to improve Firefox (e.g. back-end performance) that are neither noticeable nor able to be developed in the timeframe of one release cycle.
The first thing I'd like to see them do is offer (but not impose) the ability to run every tab as a separate process. That should offer a workaround to a significant amount of the unaddressed memory leaks that everybody's experiencing.
Well, the real question is, what is the value of virtual goods from a taxation standpoint? Does generating an item for the player constitute as a sale, and what is the value of the item? Do items depreciate in value over time, and can that be written off? What about appreciation, and is that considered capital gains? Would selling to someone in another country, say Iran, be subject to export control laws?
These are the kinds of new questions that need to be answered for virtual goods, especially officially-endorsed virtual goods.
What people will do is download the cracked version just so that they won't have to deal with the DRM. Whether they'll also additionally buy a copy or not is completely orthogonal.
I don't see myself doing this, but only because I think there are better games out there that aren't as restrictive (*ahem* indie games *ahem*) and more worth my time and money. But for those who actually do want to play it, I see this as the avenue people who only want to play the game on single player will take. And I have to think there's quite a few of those people out there.
I think Blizzard is taking themselves way too seriously. Sure, these restrictions may appeal to the hardcore games and the farmers in that they prevent cheating and whatnot, but at the cost of the casual gamer. And the whole auction thing is probably going to annoy the hardcore gamers too in the same way farmers annoy them, so all that's left are the rich kids with lots of time on their hands. And the farmers.
Taking out the U.S. economy for a couple of campaign promises seems a little extreme. But I guess that's what you get for voting in a bunch of extremists. If you can't compromise, you can't have a functioning democracy. In a working democracy, nobody gets everything they want because what people want is usually benefit at the expense of others. By compromising, everybody prioritizes their wants, and usually ends up with what they want the most. That way, everbody wins a little, and nobody loses a lot. But with the state of education these days, this isn't a concept I'd expect most people to understand. Everybody wants everything without giving anything back. That's not going to happen.
Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck
And a woman to open doors. I know this is Slashdot, but there's a reason behind every successful man is a woman. True to geekdom, for Bill Gates, it was his mother.
With NPR, at least it'll make other major media outlets aware of the issue and begin to run their own segments on software patents. Which stance they take depends on the network, but having it out in the open for discussion is better than nobody knowing that it is even a thing.
I'm not sure they have a strong candidate. Nobody in their right mind wants to run against Obama, despite the Senate Republican leader mouthing off about how their only goal is to ensure that Obama is a one-term president.
The worst part is, Obama isn't going to win on his own merits. He's going to win because the Republicans have disenfranchised their support base by selecting the wealthiest and most rabid right-wing nutjubs as the bulk of their constituency. The moderates are such a powerful swing force because they're not being properly representated. The Democrats tend to be too liberal for their tastes, and the Republicans are too pro-large corporation.
If any time's appropriate for a 3rd party to show up--a moderate party--now is it. The key is to start on the right and move center, because that's where most of the disenfranchised voters are right now.
"Glean" doesn't require gathering slowly or laboriously. It only requires insight, which depending on the person and subject matter, comes after a variable amount of time. Take a story, abstract it to the relevant bits, and apply it elsewhere as necessary. The key is to know which bits to take, and when to apply it.
In this particular case, he's saying to think out of the box, and to not be restricted by preconceptions. That certain methods do not produce the optimal results in the short term should not necessarily be a hindrance, and that it can produce even better results in the long term.
People wonder why Asians are stereotyped as educated and successful. They're the same people who find the "Tiger Mom (tm)" method of parenting reprehensible or otherwise deride it. These same parents probably let their kids run wild, either while they're busy working or out in town having a good time. Meanwhile, I'm certain parents who read to their children every night and go over their children's homework and follow up on their children's progress at school would see many similarities in their parenting method with the methods in that book. Certainly, there's a middle ground somewhere. But success lies closer to the latter than the former.
Unfortunately, trying to encourage parents to behave better is difficult. Parents get incredibly defensive when anyone tries to say anything about their parenting. They're also highly variable. Even if you send them to training programs that will teach them how to teach their children, it's difficult to make sure it'll happen. And as they can't be held accountable for their child's education, there's no method of recourse for when they fail in these duties.
What's probably easier to start are mentorship programs, where someone sufficiently successful mentors one to three kids after school. That person effectively does the job that the parents should be doing. The key is that they'll be able to encourage the successive generation they're mentoring to be better parents, so that within a generation or three, the mentorship program wouldn't be necessary anymore. It's not a replacement outright, but it's better than nothing.
But put a kid one-on-one with an adult (or a much older kid), and you'll be able to hear the outcries of "pedophile" and "not-my-kid" from the moon.
It's not that simple. Even if you have good ears, if your output device is crap or poorly configured, the point is suddenly moot. And by output device, I mean the entire chain, from the DAC to the driver (yeah, we can rule out the wires, but there's several other components that do matter). And even with a good setup, if what you're playing is already downsampled anyway, of course there wouldn't be a difference.
I suspect most people do their double blind at home with fairly average equipment playing their normal music. And it wouldn't be surprising that they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. By the time the sound exits the speaker, it's going to be so distorted already that the difference between the compressed and uncompressed is minute. I've used poor earphones, good earphones, and IEM's, and the difference in output between them is readily apparent. At the same time, listening to music that wasn't produced properly would yield the same effects.
The best setup for doing the double blind testing is by playing some kind of analog instrumental music (classical, jazz, etc.), on a Sansa clip or clip+ (it's got the flattest DAC output out there for the price), through a pair of good IEM's (there are a few out there that are reasonably sufficient that won't beak your bank either) in a quiet room away from any noise. That's when you'll be able to know if you can tell the difference or not. It sounds snobbish, but the entire setup can cost less than $300 with the price of the CD.
At the same time, I should emphasize that the returns are indeed diminishing. You certainly can get good sounding music by buying better equipment, but there's a point where the improvement in sound just isn't going to be worth the extra cost. If you're not willing to spend that kind of money anyway, or you don't listen to the kind of music that has that fidelity where better equipment produces better sound, then there's no point in even considering whether you can tell the difference or not. Might as well go with lossy and save yourself the cost of extra flash storage.
Slashdot Mirror
If I choose to do a 'Kaczynski'
I don't think that means what you think it means.
Kaczynski is the guy who sent mail bombs to people he didn't like. So unless you're planning on sending Blizzard distasteful packages, I don't think that's who you want to compare yourself to.
I think you mean Fisher, as in Bobby Fisher, who disappeared into the wild after becoming the top rated player in the world. He's also a little out there, but fairly harmless if you're not facing him on the other side of a chess board.
I have friends who are teachers who still don't understand what fractions really mean and how to do basic math on them.
And people wonder why the state of education in the US is so poor.
As for the rest of your post, I have to disagree. The concepts you mention are easy. They're incredibly basic, and are a combination of no more than two separate but related ideas. For example, a fraction is comprised of the concept of dividing something equally, and possessing one or more of those parts. A (strongly-typed) variable is the concept of something unknown combined with the concept of representation. Branching is the concept of choice combined with that of duality.
What's difficult is teaching the concepts. Everyone learns and understands things a little differently. Some people are more abstract. Others are more visual. Others need practical examples. Finding a way to teach a concept that would satisfy all of the different thought patterns is incredibly difficult. Most people can and will teach a concept the same way they learned it, but that will most likely satisfy only one type of student, if that much.
And the truth is, some people will get very far with a concept because their way of thinking is more appropriate for the concept, while others will only grasp the basic ideas and will struggle with the more advanced manipulations. And I think people's strengths and weaknesses will show in how quickly or slowly they are able to grasp ever-increasingly difficult concepts. That is indeed a measure of intelligence (with respect to that concept), and I would agree does vary between people.
But I absolutely do not subscribe to the idea that very basic concepts are difficult to understand. I definitely think that the dots are all there for everyone; it's a matter of making the relevant connections. After all, save for a few truly exceptional people out there, we all begin at the same place, born with the same mental faculties, and start wi the same experiences (eating, sleeping, and crapping).
The teacher's (and by teacher, I mean anyone who teachers, including parents) job is to facilitate learning--to make it easier for the students to learn. It is to help the students make the connections, because no one can force those connections to happen Matrix-style (yet). However, if the teacher was a poor student, then the students of that teacher will not receive the necessary assistance. I think that is what you're experiencing: the results of several generations of poor schooling that ultimately result in an inability to make accessible even the most basic concepts.
If you sent a lot of e-mails to a company, it'd be harassment. It's the same the other way around.
If a lot of people sent one e-mail each to a company, it's not harassment. It's the same as if a lot of companies each sent you one e-mail.
In the latter two cases, there needs to be a legitimate reason for sending so many e-mails. You can't just ask a bunch of people to flood the mailbox of a company with random junk out of malice. Vice versa, a bunch of companies can't flood your mailbox with random junk out of malice either.
Already doing it to Western Europe in the form of software patents and ever-increasing length of copyright. But I guess they call it "diplomacy" instead of "war".
What's new is his birth video.
You don't replace them. You limit them.
Every set period of time, admins get x number of article deletions, y number of reverts, z number of edits, etc.
Nobody gets unlimited modifications. The lack of scarcity makes things worthless. Worthless things are treated as trivial and thus abused before being discarded. Make something scarce, and it becomes important.
The embedded culture of edit wars and automated reverts won't go away immediately. But people will start to think twice about what they're willing to go to war over when they lose because their quota ran out.
Tap a Microsoft exec, get a Microsoft solution.
Just ask Nokia.
Problem's don't stem from the concept of null-terminated strings, it's how everything else around it is written base on its benefits and limitations. In the case of strcpy, the problems weren't taken into consideration, and thus the result turned out poorly.
Effectively, null-termination doesn't result in bad things happening, it's the lack of understanding of what it means for everything else that does. And that's probably extensible for everything.
Enough is enough! I have had it with these motherfucking UFO's on this motherfucking planet!
I'm still completely disgusted by and resistant to widescreen monitors. In order to get the same screen real estate of a single 4:3 monitor, I pretty much need two widescreens of the same diagonal, in portrait layout, side by side. The latter setup gives me a bit more real estate, but at the cost of a bezel running down the middle. It's ridiculous that everybody, not just makers of consumer-grade TN LCD's, are buying into the widescreen bull.
I also don't understand why nobody makes monitors of the most pixel density (currently 15.4" 1920x1200, or my preferred 1600x1200 15.1" in the old days). I know laptops tend to be used close to the user's body and that's why they're offered in laptops, but I can't understand why they don't make them for desktops.
To get back on topic, I honestly can see why reducing horizontal components is a good thing for widescreen monitors. And in that sense, I can agree with consolidating some of the things up top, because they're not often used. But I can't understand why they outright remove features (like the status bar) rather than disable it by default. Something like say, hiding the menu bar by default would be fine, but outright removing it would not.
Meanwhile, there are plenty of things they could do to improve Firefox (e.g. back-end performance) that are neither noticeable nor able to be developed in the timeframe of one release cycle.
The first thing I'd like to see them do is offer (but not impose) the ability to run every tab as a separate process. That should offer a workaround to a significant amount of the unaddressed memory leaks that everybody's experiencing.
Well, the real question is, what is the value of virtual goods from a taxation standpoint? Does generating an item for the player constitute as a sale, and what is the value of the item? Do items depreciate in value over time, and can that be written off? What about appreciation, and is that considered capital gains? Would selling to someone in another country, say Iran, be subject to export control laws?
These are the kinds of new questions that need to be answered for virtual goods, especially officially-endorsed virtual goods.
What people will do is download the cracked version just so that they won't have to deal with the DRM. Whether they'll also additionally buy a copy or not is completely orthogonal.
I don't see myself doing this, but only because I think there are better games out there that aren't as restrictive (*ahem* indie games *ahem*) and more worth my time and money. But for those who actually do want to play it, I see this as the avenue people who only want to play the game on single player will take. And I have to think there's quite a few of those people out there.
I think Blizzard is taking themselves way too seriously. Sure, these restrictions may appeal to the hardcore games and the farmers in that they prevent cheating and whatnot, but at the cost of the casual gamer. And the whole auction thing is probably going to annoy the hardcore gamers too in the same way farmers annoy them, so all that's left are the rich kids with lots of time on their hands. And the farmers.
Well, they are trying to outdo the competition in the internet and security markets.
Taking out the U.S. economy for a couple of campaign promises seems a little extreme. But I guess that's what you get for voting in a bunch of extremists. If you can't compromise, you can't have a functioning democracy. In a working democracy, nobody gets everything they want because what people want is usually benefit at the expense of others. By compromising, everybody prioritizes their wants, and usually ends up with what they want the most. That way, everbody wins a little, and nobody loses a lot. But with the state of education these days, this isn't a concept I'd expect most people to understand. Everybody wants everything without giving anything back. That's not going to happen.
"We encourage anyone using PayPal to immediately close their accounts and consider an alternative."
Coming from these guys, this doesn't sound as much like a boycott as it sounds like they've found some laundry they're about to air.
Major successes are often a convergence of skill, ambition and blind luck
And a woman to open doors. I know this is Slashdot, but there's a reason behind every successful man is a woman. True to geekdom, for Bill Gates, it was his mother.
Sounds like Hoover and the FBI. Everything is cylical in nature indeed.
It's certainly more mainstream than Slashdot.
With NPR, at least it'll make other major media outlets aware of the issue and begin to run their own segments on software patents. Which stance they take depends on the network, but having it out in the open for discussion is better than nobody knowing that it is even a thing.
I'm not sure they have a strong candidate. Nobody in their right mind wants to run against Obama, despite the Senate Republican leader mouthing off about how their only goal is to ensure that Obama is a one-term president.
The worst part is, Obama isn't going to win on his own merits. He's going to win because the Republicans have disenfranchised their support base by selecting the wealthiest and most rabid right-wing nutjubs as the bulk of their constituency. The moderates are such a powerful swing force because they're not being properly representated. The Democrats tend to be too liberal for their tastes, and the Republicans are too pro-large corporation.
If any time's appropriate for a 3rd party to show up--a moderate party--now is it. The key is to start on the right and move center, because that's where most of the disenfranchised voters are right now.
"Glean" doesn't require gathering slowly or laboriously. It only requires insight, which depending on the person and subject matter, comes after a variable amount of time. Take a story, abstract it to the relevant bits, and apply it elsewhere as necessary. The key is to know which bits to take, and when to apply it.
In this particular case, he's saying to think out of the box, and to not be restricted by preconceptions. That certain methods do not produce the optimal results in the short term should not necessarily be a hindrance, and that it can produce even better results in the long term.
You need an AT&T account to use it.
Yeah, a lot of good that would do for all the AT&T customers trying to make phone calls.
People wonder why Asians are stereotyped as educated and successful. They're the same people who find the "Tiger Mom (tm)" method of parenting reprehensible or otherwise deride it. These same parents probably let their kids run wild, either while they're busy working or out in town having a good time. Meanwhile, I'm certain parents who read to their children every night and go over their children's homework and follow up on their children's progress at school would see many similarities in their parenting method with the methods in that book. Certainly, there's a middle ground somewhere. But success lies closer to the latter than the former.
Unfortunately, trying to encourage parents to behave better is difficult. Parents get incredibly defensive when anyone tries to say anything about their parenting. They're also highly variable. Even if you send them to training programs that will teach them how to teach their children, it's difficult to make sure it'll happen. And as they can't be held accountable for their child's education, there's no method of recourse for when they fail in these duties.
What's probably easier to start are mentorship programs, where someone sufficiently successful mentors one to three kids after school. That person effectively does the job that the parents should be doing. The key is that they'll be able to encourage the successive generation they're mentoring to be better parents, so that within a generation or three, the mentorship program wouldn't be necessary anymore. It's not a replacement outright, but it's better than nothing.
But put a kid one-on-one with an adult (or a much older kid), and you'll be able to hear the outcries of "pedophile" and "not-my-kid" from the moon.
more than 50% of the participants, then they'd have some meaningful influence.
They might as well fund their own efforts while calling themselves Anonymous in name. There's no point in "infiltrating" Anonymous.
It's not that simple. Even if you have good ears, if your output device is crap or poorly configured, the point is suddenly moot. And by output device, I mean the entire chain, from the DAC to the driver (yeah, we can rule out the wires, but there's several other components that do matter). And even with a good setup, if what you're playing is already downsampled anyway, of course there wouldn't be a difference.
I suspect most people do their double blind at home with fairly average equipment playing their normal music. And it wouldn't be surprising that they wouldn't be able to tell the difference. By the time the sound exits the speaker, it's going to be so distorted already that the difference between the compressed and uncompressed is minute. I've used poor earphones, good earphones, and IEM's, and the difference in output between them is readily apparent. At the same time, listening to music that wasn't produced properly would yield the same effects.
The best setup for doing the double blind testing is by playing some kind of analog instrumental music (classical, jazz, etc.), on a Sansa clip or clip+ (it's got the flattest DAC output out there for the price), through a pair of good IEM's (there are a few out there that are reasonably sufficient that won't beak your bank either) in a quiet room away from any noise. That's when you'll be able to know if you can tell the difference or not. It sounds snobbish, but the entire setup can cost less than $300 with the price of the CD.
At the same time, I should emphasize that the returns are indeed diminishing. You certainly can get good sounding music by buying better equipment, but there's a point where the improvement in sound just isn't going to be worth the extra cost. If you're not willing to spend that kind of money anyway, or you don't listen to the kind of music that has that fidelity where better equipment produces better sound, then there's no point in even considering whether you can tell the difference or not. Might as well go with lossy and save yourself the cost of extra flash storage.