I guess I'm talking about everyone apart from those who actually try to strip everything back and work from the basics up, ie those who take a scientific approach. Some atheists are idiots who try to reason with religious people without actually knowing what those people believe.
People who rely on their emotions to give them the answers to the universe obviously have never altered their emotional state with drugs. I have been on antidepressants a couple of times in my life, so I know how easily emotions can be tampered with, and don't consider them a good basis for reasoning about something as important as your beliefs. While some atheists might still just be going on feelings, I think more are going on the lack of actual evidence for God. I mean, no doubt, the fact that we are here is pretty amazing, but saying that God created us then leaves the question 'who created god' and so on. At some stage, something just has to have been there. That something being a fully formed intelligence is just as unlikely as our universe appearing and gradually evolving life.
Exactly. Once people feel they have a reason for their own existence, they stop caring. "God made me" seems to be good enough for them, and beyond that they don't seem to mind that God just existed. That's beneficial in some ways though, because you could drive yourself mad asking questions that you ultimately cannot really find out the answer to.
And I've heard Christians say that, and I used to think a bit like that myself, but it is a load of bollocks. If time doesn't exist for god, he wouldn't change. The bible even says he doesn't change, but if that is the case why did he create the universe? How could he 'decide' to do so if he doesn't change? And why were there already angels and such? There was a time before the universe existed, and a time after it will exist, simply because time is defined by the universe existing, and we know that it must all end due to entropy. We also believe that the beginning is the big bang, that may or may not be the case, because the universe may have expanded and contracted several times before.
Also if you are a christian you believe that Christ now has a body and exists in time. Which means that God exists in time. Etc. Too many paradoxes, which to me hints strongly of it all being a load of bollocks. People try to be all profound and say 'oh but God is so much smarter than us and exists differently, without time, etc'. That may be the case, but if it is the case, then the Christian god isn't real.
Fair enough. The thing about religion though is that there are no tests you can do. Perhaps a god is there, but just doesn't care. Perhaps the universe is a simulation - we can't really find out whether that is true or not. Though if it were a simulation I don't think the inhabitants would exactly be conscious in the same way that I am. They might react the same, but.. well there just wouldn't be anything 'there' in the same way that we are all aware and stuck inside our bodies, feeling, seeing, thinking, reasoning. Sometimes life feels like a joke in that we're just put here but there may be no rhyme or reason. You claim to have found one, but yet again are being rather silent with it so you still seem overly defensive or selfish if you think you have found the grand purpose of existence. Then again you could just be trolling.
Yep. I was getting fed up of waiting for God to make me into a better person, I realised I was going to have to take control of things myself. Some of the uglier sides of my personality were revealed while going through depression and an empty relationship.
Well, it was made easier by the circumstances, and in the initial stages I comforted myself that Christians believe that once you are a believer you are saved and can't lose that. But it was still pretty scary to just change everything you ever based your morals, attitudes and opinions on!
I find that I'm in a weird place where I still have 'Christian' morals, but I don't believe in God. So I don't feel I fit in with your average unbeliever yet, and I don't quite feel at home with Christians either! I think that a lot of Christians have their 'morals' through a fear of punishment or a desire to please some god, rather than an actual desire to be a good person. I've occasionally wondered what my morals would be like if I hadn't been brought up in a Christian home. I most likely wouldn't be a virgin for one thing:p
That's some pretty grand claims when you say that you don't even understand how some humans can have different worldviews from others. Of course perhaps you have stumbled upon the meaning of life, who am I to say when I haven't even heard it:p Personally I wouldn't put it in a book where not many people are likely to read it, I'd put it online and have a link in my sig so that as many people as possible could see it! I wouldn't use it as an attempt to make money. It's very easy to prey on people's insecurities to do that. Perhaps you're not just out to make money, but you're being very secretive about your opinions.
I've seen plenty of people who think they have explained everything, but there are often gaps or just poor logic in their reasoning. I myself will very likely have inconsistencies in my beliefs, because they have changed pretty rapidly over the last couple of years. I may not be able to see the inconsistencies but if I tried to explain my views to others then they would likely spot some flaws. There is no such thing as 'a perfect theory of moral philosophy' - it may be perfect for your own culture, but other cultures often hold very different ideas on morality. The whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" kind of works, but not really - how exactly does it work when applied to a masochist?
BTW, you probably should only call your opinions hypothesis until other people have had a go at refuting it. Calling your own opinions a theory is bad enough, but 'perfect theory'? It just makes me think you are being arrogant and short-sighted rather than insightful. Sorry if that is harsh, but it's the way you come across to me.
Okay so how do you propose a company sends out important messages and notifications if not by a group email? When I'm going to perform maintenance I send out an email a day or two in advance to the whole domain. 1:1 communications IMO can be done via email or IM, though email tends to be easier to keep track of and provides more accessible records.
Work occasionally should feel like work, otherwise you may be doing it wrong;) I only started using subfolders for certain projects this year. My inbox is mostly just a big blancmange! If I need to I just use search or sort by name, etc.
Because stress and a negative attitude does somehow leave your body more defenseless and run down, in the same way that your immune system seems to relax when you go on holiday (not even to another country - I often have been ill over holidays but fine during term time - could just be superstition but I have seen other people online saying similar things). Having a more positive, stress free outlook can help to keep your body running well.
The same would apply to the early humans too. If cousing Urgh and aunt Graah ate the funny spotted mushrooms and died, you avoid those mushrooms. You don't divide the tribe in two halves and do a double blind experiment to see if it was really the mushrooms.
Fear evolved to help many species survive you mean. Unless you're saying that everything exists just for us? It might feel like that sometimes, but we have no evidence of it:p
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science. The only thing likely to turn them is the belief that God has let them down somehow.
Mostly true. It's not so much the belief that God has let you down (there are plenty of excuses for that in Christianity), as a certain attitude of depression and a period in my life where everything was upside down anyway, and a combination of seeing some pretty decnt evidence for macro-evolution (species to species evolution by an organism evolving new abilities). A combination of a number of things are necessary for someone to change their beliefs without being brainwashed.
So I think science and logic helps, but you can't reason someone out of their beliefs. They have to doubt them for themselves, otherwise they will just get very defensive and even more entrenched. You can present some evidence to them and leave it with them to let them compare and decide. It's scary losing your faith, especially if you believe in hell or have a lot of friends with the same beliefs, but it's better than living a lie.
You wouldn't understand unless you yourself had once believed in something. The religious types don't get why you discount all of their beliefs either. From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest. I'm saying that from the point of view of someone who used to be religious and was trying to keep fooling myself as well, but eventually gave up on it. There were definitely benefits to being in a large group of likeminded and 'moral' people, but I'd rather live alone seeking the truth, than live a lie with a group of people who think they know the truth and therefore have stopped seeking*.
Religion is basically included in superstition btw, so I considered your post pretty redundant. It also seems pretty flamebait-ish with the mention of republicans. Being left or right wing doesn't necessarily mean being religious. The fact that you "don't get" how different people can believe different things and see the world differently shows that you need to learn more of the science of the mind. I'll give you a clue, logic doesn't always win in there. Quite often the opposite is true.
*Okay, so god created the universe - who created God? You say a watch can't appear fully formed, someone just created it - but a god who is even more complex than us can appear fully formed, or is more likely to have 'always existed' than the universe? Sure. Believing there is a higher purpose in life does make me feel nice and fuzzy inside, and curbs my nihilistic leanings. It also still is possible that there is some higher truth that we just don't have the capacity to grasp yet. But at the moment I don't think humanity has any clue what that is, nor can it be blamed for not being able to understand yet, in the same way that we can't blame fish for having to live underwater. BTW if we did all appear by chance, it doesn't matter how improbable the odds are. We wouldn't be here to question things if those odds had not paid off. I know that's circular reasoning, and I'm not saying that we are just an accident, but IMO it's even more foolish to assume that god always existed fully formed, then decided to create a bunch of people because he was bored.
# NO online and offline advertising, NO virus, NO spyware, NO software or user registration, everything is FREE!
Yeah right.. no advertising? From google? I mean it is possible if they base everything on a Linux distro, but basically the whole idea is pure pie in the sky wishfulness atm. Google doesn't need their own OS because they are mostly web based. I'm not saying they won't do it eventually, and I think them making their own browser shows that they are taking the actual platform being used to run their apps more seriously, but they still don't have much reason to make an actual OS.
I was going to say it would be like a games company making its own OS, but of course there are such things as consoles, so perhaps eventually we'll have Google computers and OSes:)
BTW I'd happily pay for a Google OS if 1) it was a good OS and 2) it meant no frickin advertising. At the moment I use Mac OS with XP in a VM, and a PS3 for 99.9% of my gaming time.
True in most cases, but then again, look at the port of the source engine to PS3. Valve did the Xbox 360 port themselves but left the PS3 one to EA, who royally screwed it up. Competition is usually good, but developers can only stretch themselves so far.. I'd rather the competition be to make the actual games themselves great, rather than resources being split between too many platforms.
Besides, the whole ethos of Linux itself promotes enough competition among the different components you can use for filesystem, graphics drivers and APIs, sound APIs, window managers, etc.. even if it became the dominant OS there would still be innovation taking place simply because people can mess about with it legally and without jumping through too many hoops.
Outlook pops up a little window for messages that go directly to the inbox.
Checking every second is a bit of a waste of network overhead, don't you think? It's not too bad if it's just yourself, but in a corporate environment it's a total waste of bandwidth..
are you telling me that you would have also learned Geography, History, Chemistry, Biology and read the classics of literature on your own?
Geography and History, probably not. Biology and Chemistry I don't know. I didn't particularly enjoy it in high school so I didn't take it as a subject, just Physics and Chemistry, which I both enjoyed, but I knew would be mostly irrelevant to my job. I knew that I wanted to code for a living since I was about 12.
I actually read quite a lot when I was younger, but that tailed off during high school. I read a lot of children's classics during primary school and then a bit of sci-fi and fantasy stuff during the first few years of high school, but since halfway through high school I've mostly just read DiscWorld books.
So I probably wouldn't have such a breadth of general knowledge if I hadn't attended high school, but I basically already knew about algebra just from my previous coding experience (my dad taught me about strings, booleans and numeric vairables when I was 8, and taught me negative numbers when I was 4 actually), and my reading writing and spelling was very good just from the amount of reading I used to do. I knew a decent amount about computers from using my Amigas and Macs, reading computer magazines and coding. You mention linked lists, my dad taught me about them when I was 15 or 16.
He died when I was 17 (6 weeks before I started my University studies), so that fscked up my plans of going to work for him after University and I was left pretty demoralised, and started wondering about the point in learning if it is all just going to be lost when you die. Not until towards the very end of university did I start to regain an interest in learning, which sucks but it's just the way it has been. I'm now doing my dad's job (IT Manager/Developer) in my uncle's engineering company though, so it wasn't all for the worst.
I do know what you mean by the O(n*n) efficiency notation, though I don't remember much about the classes where I learned it, I think it was probably Operating Systems. I already knew 80% of the stuff we did in that class, though we went over some basic assembly and compiler stuff that I was quite interested to learn. It's generally pretty obvious to me where a program will be getting bogged down, and whether a technique will scale well, but for a large program it would require a bit more of a scientific approach of course, rather than just going with gut instinct..
I did admittedly only learn about databases at University, but linking tables and separating them out to eliminate redundancy is pretty natural for me too (I can't even remember what the terminology for separating the tables out to different derees is called now though).
I think I know enough to be aware of the holes in my knowledge, though sometimes I am shocked by just how easy certain things have become in the time when I looked into them a few years ago and the way things are now. I used to think I'd have to write everything from scratch. For example back in my amiga days I used to write games and was wanting to write a networked game, but didn't know much about networks, and thought I'd have to code things on a really low level. Nowadays there are a lot of frameworks and libraries to do a lot of the hard work for you, but I know a lot more about networks anyway and could probably write my own library to do communications down at binary level if I had a bit of time. In my third university summer holiday I took on a project at work involving sending communications down a drillpipe and then decrypting them on the other end using LabVIEW and C/Delphi DLLs. So after that I understood binary transmission and receiving on a pretty basic level, but then when it came to writing a license server/client combo recently I found out how easy it was to do network communications in the real world using premade libraries/IDE components (I use Delphi for building apps requiring a Windows GUI). Generally things turn out to be a lot easier th
Personally I agree with the texts being less invasive - similar to email. You can check them whenever you have time, or send someone a message in a lecture where they wouldn't be able to talk.
I would still consider it rude to text in a formal meeting, or if you're always texting while sitting around with your friends. Occasional texting is fine.
Funnily enough, one of my friends used to always complain at people for texting when they were with him, but since he got his own mobile a few years ago he was the person in the group that was texting the most often!
I was basing it on Counter-Strike pings rather than actual latency I've measured myself, I thought they'd be basically the same but apparently not (unless our current main switch is a lot faster than the one we were using a few years ago). Perhaps CS pings are measured in ten-thousandths of a second rather than thousandths..
Just checked with a command line ping to one of our servers and am actually getting 0.2ms latency (that will be through 2 switches).
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
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Huh? That's like saying if a guy building a set of scales knew what he was doing, why would he build them? You need the scales to measure your weight, and you need the LHC to run particle physics experiments.
Just because you know what a set of scales is going to measure, and you know that the mechanisms involved during the measurement are safe, doesn't mean you know what the results will be!
In this case, perhaps the LHC dudes could cause an explosion or inter-dimensional rift, but I think the mini black holes angle has been well covered;)
Thats unfortunate; I didn't learn anything I didn't know already when i was taking classes in high school.
I find that very strange - I learned plenty about geography, physics, chemistry, german and even some Maths in high school. For stuff like Computing, Music and English I didn't learn that much that I didn't know, but I certainly learned some things.
When it came to university I perhaps learned a little about interface design, databases, a bit of logic/set theory etc (though I'll admit I've forgotten some stuff like the logical notation). I did find some of these classes interesting but due to personal circumstances like I said (depression due to my dad dying, and he was the one that got me interested in computers and taught me a lot of stuff about coding) I wasn't very well motivated at Uni. Since I started off basically knowing everything for the first 2 years and getting good grades without even trying, the classes in 3rd and 4th year hit me a bit harder because they were starting to cover things I'd never studied before, but I was already in a pattern of not really going to classes or studying. I actually ended up having to read an AI textbook to pass one of my exams in 3rd year! It was the first exam I'd ever failed. Usually I could get by just by reviewing the lecture slides for a day or 2 before an exam. I basically already knew the first half of the content of that class (probably was stuff like graphs, which I knew about because I'd written pathfinding algorithms for my Counter-Strike bots in high school), and so had stopped going to the lectures, but it turns out the second half was stuff I'd never done before:p
I don't find exams intimidating, I rather enjoy them actually. Theory exams anyway. You have time to think in a nice quiet atmosphere, and you can erase mistakes. Practical tests such as driving tests get me pretty nervous, but I passed my advanced driving test earlier this year, so a normal test would probably be piss easy for me now.
Re:More than scientific learning
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Holy shit!! Niburu is coming!
We must exodus en masse in a giant ark, and hide within the rings of Uranus!
Re:you can't stop the doomsayers
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The fact is that just because these guys aren't going to make the planet implode does not mean that for example we shouldn't take an active and cynical interest if North Korea want to build the world's most powerful nuclear reactor or whatever.
You have to take each case on its own merits. Saying that just because the LHC is safe means every other future scientific project will be safe is even more dumb than being worried about everything being dangerous. It was right for people to consider whether an atomic reaction would ignite our atmosphere or not. Better to consider the possible problems you're facing than just plow on with no regard for the consequences.
Of course, the guys who built the LHC knew what they were doing, but that doesn't mean that others shouldn't double-check. It's very common engineering practice to have someone check over your design drawings for problems - for really important projects sometimes external companies will be called in to recheck everything as well.
Re:More than scientific learning
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Ah yes - we have 'lolcats', but the aliens have 'lolhomos' or 'lolsaps'!
Slashdot Mirror
I guess I'm talking about everyone apart from those who actually try to strip everything back and work from the basics up, ie those who take a scientific approach. Some atheists are idiots who try to reason with religious people without actually knowing what those people believe.
People who rely on their emotions to give them the answers to the universe obviously have never altered their emotional state with drugs. I have been on antidepressants a couple of times in my life, so I know how easily emotions can be tampered with, and don't consider them a good basis for reasoning about something as important as your beliefs. While some atheists might still just be going on feelings, I think more are going on the lack of actual evidence for God. I mean, no doubt, the fact that we are here is pretty amazing, but saying that God created us then leaves the question 'who created god' and so on. At some stage, something just has to have been there. That something being a fully formed intelligence is just as unlikely as our universe appearing and gradually evolving life.
Exactly. Once people feel they have a reason for their own existence, they stop caring. "God made me" seems to be good enough for them, and beyond that they don't seem to mind that God just existed. That's beneficial in some ways though, because you could drive yourself mad asking questions that you ultimately cannot really find out the answer to.
And I've heard Christians say that, and I used to think a bit like that myself, but it is a load of bollocks. If time doesn't exist for god, he wouldn't change. The bible even says he doesn't change, but if that is the case why did he create the universe? How could he 'decide' to do so if he doesn't change? And why were there already angels and such? There was a time before the universe existed, and a time after it will exist, simply because time is defined by the universe existing, and we know that it must all end due to entropy. We also believe that the beginning is the big bang, that may or may not be the case, because the universe may have expanded and contracted several times before.
Also if you are a christian you believe that Christ now has a body and exists in time. Which means that God exists in time. Etc. Too many paradoxes, which to me hints strongly of it all being a load of bollocks. People try to be all profound and say 'oh but God is so much smarter than us and exists differently, without time, etc'. That may be the case, but if it is the case, then the Christian god isn't real.
Fair enough. The thing about religion though is that there are no tests you can do. Perhaps a god is there, but just doesn't care. Perhaps the universe is a simulation - we can't really find out whether that is true or not. Though if it were a simulation I don't think the inhabitants would exactly be conscious in the same way that I am. They might react the same, but .. well there just wouldn't be anything 'there' in the same way that we are all aware and stuck inside our bodies, feeling, seeing, thinking, reasoning. Sometimes life feels like a joke in that we're just put here but there may be no rhyme or reason. You claim to have found one, but yet again are being rather silent with it so you still seem overly defensive or selfish if you think you have found the grand purpose of existence. Then again you could just be trolling.
Yep. I was getting fed up of waiting for God to make me into a better person, I realised I was going to have to take control of things myself. Some of the uglier sides of my personality were revealed while going through depression and an empty relationship.
He assailed OEM system builders for including bad, buggy, or just plain useless apps on their machines in exchange for a few bucks on the back end
You'd think he'd be more thankful that OEMs were able to be coerced into installing Vista on their machines..
Well, it was made easier by the circumstances, and in the initial stages I comforted myself that Christians believe that once you are a believer you are saved and can't lose that. But it was still pretty scary to just change everything you ever based your morals, attitudes and opinions on!
I find that I'm in a weird place where I still have 'Christian' morals, but I don't believe in God. So I don't feel I fit in with your average unbeliever yet, and I don't quite feel at home with Christians either! I think that a lot of Christians have their 'morals' through a fear of punishment or a desire to please some god, rather than an actual desire to be a good person. I've occasionally wondered what my morals would be like if I hadn't been brought up in a Christian home. I most likely wouldn't be a virgin for one thing :p
That's some pretty grand claims when you say that you don't even understand how some humans can have different worldviews from others. Of course perhaps you have stumbled upon the meaning of life, who am I to say when I haven't even heard it :p Personally I wouldn't put it in a book where not many people are likely to read it, I'd put it online and have a link in my sig so that as many people as possible could see it! I wouldn't use it as an attempt to make money. It's very easy to prey on people's insecurities to do that. Perhaps you're not just out to make money, but you're being very secretive about your opinions.
I've seen plenty of people who think they have explained everything, but there are often gaps or just poor logic in their reasoning. I myself will very likely have inconsistencies in my beliefs, because they have changed pretty rapidly over the last couple of years. I may not be able to see the inconsistencies but if I tried to explain my views to others then they would likely spot some flaws. There is no such thing as 'a perfect theory of moral philosophy' - it may be perfect for your own culture, but other cultures often hold very different ideas on morality. The whole "do unto others as you would have them do unto you" kind of works, but not really - how exactly does it work when applied to a masochist?
BTW, you probably should only call your opinions hypothesis until other people have had a go at refuting it. Calling your own opinions a theory is bad enough, but 'perfect theory'? It just makes me think you are being arrogant and short-sighted rather than insightful. Sorry if that is harsh, but it's the way you come across to me.
Okay so how do you propose a company sends out important messages and notifications if not by a group email? When I'm going to perform maintenance I send out an email a day or two in advance to the whole domain. 1:1 communications IMO can be done via email or IM, though email tends to be easier to keep track of and provides more accessible records.
Work occasionally should feel like work, otherwise you may be doing it wrong ;) I only started using subfolders for certain projects this year. My inbox is mostly just a big blancmange! If I need to I just use search or sort by name, etc.
Because stress and a negative attitude does somehow leave your body more defenseless and run down, in the same way that your immune system seems to relax when you go on holiday (not even to another country - I often have been ill over holidays but fine during term time - could just be superstition but I have seen other people online saying similar things). Having a more positive, stress free outlook can help to keep your body running well.
The same would apply to the early humans too. If cousing Urgh and aunt Graah ate the funny spotted mushrooms and died, you avoid those mushrooms. You don't divide the tribe in two halves and do a double blind experiment to see if it was really the mushrooms.
I avoid McDonald's for similar reasons :)
Fear evolved to help many species survive you mean. Unless you're saying that everything exists just for us? It might feel like that sometimes, but we have no evidence of it :p
Science doesn't help, that's for sure, but you can't shake a true believer with science. The only thing likely to turn them is the belief that God has let them down somehow.
Mostly true. It's not so much the belief that God has let you down (there are plenty of excuses for that in Christianity), as a certain attitude of depression and a period in my life where everything was upside down anyway, and a combination of seeing some pretty decnt evidence for macro-evolution (species to species evolution by an organism evolving new abilities). A combination of a number of things are necessary for someone to change their beliefs without being brainwashed.
So I think science and logic helps, but you can't reason someone out of their beliefs. They have to doubt them for themselves, otherwise they will just get very defensive and even more entrenched. You can present some evidence to them and leave it with them to let them compare and decide. It's scary losing your faith, especially if you believe in hell or have a lot of friends with the same beliefs, but it's better than living a lie.
You wouldn't understand unless you yourself had once believed in something. The religious types don't get why you discount all of their beliefs either. From their point of view they have 'evidence' of their beliefs (mostly based on feelings or circular/incomplete reasoning) and can make up even more stuff to discount the rest. I'm saying that from the point of view of someone who used to be religious and was trying to keep fooling myself as well, but eventually gave up on it. There were definitely benefits to being in a large group of likeminded and 'moral' people, but I'd rather live alone seeking the truth, than live a lie with a group of people who think they know the truth and therefore have stopped seeking*.
Religion is basically included in superstition btw, so I considered your post pretty redundant. It also seems pretty flamebait-ish with the mention of republicans. Being left or right wing doesn't necessarily mean being religious. The fact that you "don't get" how different people can believe different things and see the world differently shows that you need to learn more of the science of the mind. I'll give you a clue, logic doesn't always win in there. Quite often the opposite is true.
*Okay, so god created the universe - who created God? You say a watch can't appear fully formed, someone just created it - but a god who is even more complex than us can appear fully formed, or is more likely to have 'always existed' than the universe? Sure. Believing there is a higher purpose in life does make me feel nice and fuzzy inside, and curbs my nihilistic leanings. It also still is possible that there is some higher truth that we just don't have the capacity to grasp yet. But at the moment I don't think humanity has any clue what that is, nor can it be blamed for not being able to understand yet, in the same way that we can't blame fish for having to live underwater. BTW if we did all appear by chance, it doesn't matter how improbable the odds are. We wouldn't be here to question things if those odds had not paid off. I know that's circular reasoning, and I'm not saying that we are just an accident, but IMO it's even more foolish to assume that god always existed fully formed, then decided to create a bunch of people because he was bored.
# NO online and offline advertising, NO virus, NO spyware, NO software or user registration, everything is FREE!
Yeah right.. no advertising? From google? I mean it is possible if they base everything on a Linux distro, but basically the whole idea is pure pie in the sky wishfulness atm. Google doesn't need their own OS because they are mostly web based. I'm not saying they won't do it eventually, and I think them making their own browser shows that they are taking the actual platform being used to run their apps more seriously, but they still don't have much reason to make an actual OS.
I was going to say it would be like a games company making its own OS, but of course there are such things as consoles, so perhaps eventually we'll have Google computers and OSes :)
BTW I'd happily pay for a Google OS if 1) it was a good OS and 2) it meant no frickin advertising. At the moment I use Mac OS with XP in a VM, and a PS3 for 99.9% of my gaming time.
True in most cases, but then again, look at the port of the source engine to PS3. Valve did the Xbox 360 port themselves but left the PS3 one to EA, who royally screwed it up. Competition is usually good, but developers can only stretch themselves so far.. I'd rather the competition be to make the actual games themselves great, rather than resources being split between too many platforms.
Besides, the whole ethos of Linux itself promotes enough competition among the different components you can use for filesystem, graphics drivers and APIs, sound APIs, window managers, etc.. even if it became the dominant OS there would still be innovation taking place simply because people can mess about with it legally and without jumping through too many hoops.
Outlook pops up a little window for messages that go directly to the inbox.
Checking every second is a bit of a waste of network overhead, don't you think? It's not too bad if it's just yourself, but in a corporate environment it's a total waste of bandwidth..
are you telling me that you would have also learned Geography, History, Chemistry, Biology and read the classics of literature on your own?
Geography and History, probably not. Biology and Chemistry I don't know. I didn't particularly enjoy it in high school so I didn't take it as a subject, just Physics and Chemistry, which I both enjoyed, but I knew would be mostly irrelevant to my job. I knew that I wanted to code for a living since I was about 12.
I actually read quite a lot when I was younger, but that tailed off during high school. I read a lot of children's classics during primary school and then a bit of sci-fi and fantasy stuff during the first few years of high school, but since halfway through high school I've mostly just read DiscWorld books.
So I probably wouldn't have such a breadth of general knowledge if I hadn't attended high school, but I basically already knew about algebra just from my previous coding experience (my dad taught me about strings, booleans and numeric vairables when I was 8, and taught me negative numbers when I was 4 actually), and my reading writing and spelling was very good just from the amount of reading I used to do. I knew a decent amount about computers from using my Amigas and Macs, reading computer magazines and coding. You mention linked lists, my dad taught me about them when I was 15 or 16.
He died when I was 17 (6 weeks before I started my University studies), so that fscked up my plans of going to work for him after University and I was left pretty demoralised, and started wondering about the point in learning if it is all just going to be lost when you die. Not until towards the very end of university did I start to regain an interest in learning, which sucks but it's just the way it has been. I'm now doing my dad's job (IT Manager/Developer) in my uncle's engineering company though, so it wasn't all for the worst.
I do know what you mean by the O(n*n) efficiency notation, though I don't remember much about the classes where I learned it, I think it was probably Operating Systems. I already knew 80% of the stuff we did in that class, though we went over some basic assembly and compiler stuff that I was quite interested to learn. It's generally pretty obvious to me where a program will be getting bogged down, and whether a technique will scale well, but for a large program it would require a bit more of a scientific approach of course, rather than just going with gut instinct..
I did admittedly only learn about databases at University, but linking tables and separating them out to eliminate redundancy is pretty natural for me too (I can't even remember what the terminology for separating the tables out to different derees is called now though).
I think I know enough to be aware of the holes in my knowledge, though sometimes I am shocked by just how easy certain things have become in the time when I looked into them a few years ago and the way things are now. I used to think I'd have to write everything from scratch. For example back in my amiga days I used to write games and was wanting to write a networked game, but didn't know much about networks, and thought I'd have to code things on a really low level. Nowadays there are a lot of frameworks and libraries to do a lot of the hard work for you, but I know a lot more about networks anyway and could probably write my own library to do communications down at binary level if I had a bit of time. In my third university summer holiday I took on a project at work involving sending communications down a drillpipe and then decrypting them on the other end using LabVIEW and C/Delphi DLLs. So after that I understood binary transmission and receiving on a pretty basic level, but then when it came to writing a license server/client combo recently I found out how easy it was to do network communications in the real world using premade libraries/IDE components (I use Delphi for building apps requiring a Windows GUI). Generally things turn out to be a lot easier th
Personally I agree with the texts being less invasive - similar to email. You can check them whenever you have time, or send someone a message in a lecture where they wouldn't be able to talk.
I would still consider it rude to text in a formal meeting, or if you're always texting while sitting around with your friends. Occasional texting is fine.
Funnily enough, one of my friends used to always complain at people for texting when they were with him, but since he got his own mobile a few years ago he was the person in the group that was texting the most often!
I was basing it on Counter-Strike pings rather than actual latency I've measured myself, I thought they'd be basically the same but apparently not (unless our current main switch is a lot faster than the one we were using a few years ago). Perhaps CS pings are measured in ten-thousandths of a second rather than thousandths..
Just checked with a command line ping to one of our servers and am actually getting 0.2ms latency (that will be through 2 switches).
Huh? That's like saying if a guy building a set of scales knew what he was doing, why would he build them? You need the scales to measure your weight, and you need the LHC to run particle physics experiments.
Just because you know what a set of scales is going to measure, and you know that the mechanisms involved during the measurement are safe, doesn't mean you know what the results will be!
In this case, perhaps the LHC dudes could cause an explosion or inter-dimensional rift, but I think the mini black holes angle has been well covered ;)
Thats unfortunate; I didn't learn anything I didn't know already when i was taking classes in high school.
I find that very strange - I learned plenty about geography, physics, chemistry, german and even some Maths in high school. For stuff like Computing, Music and English I didn't learn that much that I didn't know, but I certainly learned some things.
When it came to university I perhaps learned a little about interface design, databases, a bit of logic/set theory etc (though I'll admit I've forgotten some stuff like the logical notation). I did find some of these classes interesting but due to personal circumstances like I said (depression due to my dad dying, and he was the one that got me interested in computers and taught me a lot of stuff about coding) I wasn't very well motivated at Uni. Since I started off basically knowing everything for the first 2 years and getting good grades without even trying, the classes in 3rd and 4th year hit me a bit harder because they were starting to cover things I'd never studied before, but I was already in a pattern of not really going to classes or studying. I actually ended up having to read an AI textbook to pass one of my exams in 3rd year! It was the first exam I'd ever failed. Usually I could get by just by reviewing the lecture slides for a day or 2 before an exam. I basically already knew the first half of the content of that class (probably was stuff like graphs, which I knew about because I'd written pathfinding algorithms for my Counter-Strike bots in high school), and so had stopped going to the lectures, but it turns out the second half was stuff I'd never done before :p
I don't find exams intimidating, I rather enjoy them actually. Theory exams anyway. You have time to think in a nice quiet atmosphere, and you can erase mistakes. Practical tests such as driving tests get me pretty nervous, but I passed my advanced driving test earlier this year, so a normal test would probably be piss easy for me now.
Holy shit!! Niburu is coming!
We must exodus en masse in a giant ark, and hide within the rings of Uranus!
The fact is that just because these guys aren't going to make the planet implode does not mean that for example we shouldn't take an active and cynical interest if North Korea want to build the world's most powerful nuclear reactor or whatever.
You have to take each case on its own merits. Saying that just because the LHC is safe means every other future scientific project will be safe is even more dumb than being worried about everything being dangerous. It was right for people to consider whether an atomic reaction would ignite our atmosphere or not. Better to consider the possible problems you're facing than just plow on with no regard for the consequences.
Of course, the guys who built the LHC knew what they were doing, but that doesn't mean that others shouldn't double-check. It's very common engineering practice to have someone check over your design drawings for problems - for really important projects sometimes external companies will be called in to recheck everything as well.
Ah yes - we have 'lolcats', but the aliens have 'lolhomos' or 'lolsaps'!