"Are you proposing that medical science engage in a systematic effort to mislead patients into believing, for example, that green M&M's cure cancer in order to use the placebo effect to actually cure cancer? "
No. Definitely not.
"That proposal is the exact opposite of medicine, and the attitude is the exact reason why "alternative medicine" is held in wide contempt."
A placebo is a psychological treatment agent, as opposed to a biological or chemical agent. It's no surprise at all that placebos should be effective for psychological problems. What is more surprising, and thus interesting, is the array of physical and biological problems for which placebos are provably effective.
Actually, without having a common definition of "these people" we will have to agree to disagree. There are more reasonable and less reasonable sorts of claims made, the more reasonable ones may not explicitly say 'placebo effect' but they do not really claim anything else. The entire premise of 'holistic medicine' is that your emotions effect your bodies systems which in turn can make you e.g. heal very quickly or not at all, or even effectively dial your immune system up or down. Sounds like an explanation for *why* placebos work to me.
And while "placebo effect" is often cited in a tone of dismissal, it's a pretty darn powerful effect. For some applications it may be the most powerful therapy available.
Except that the programs they are running go far beyond even what the Patriot Act authorizes. So if they wont obey the Patriot Act, why do you think they will obey a new law they like less?
"Disabling flash writes isn't a viable solution, since that would stop important BIOS updates as well that protect against the same problems (and you don't want your system to persist its old BIOS, that's not a good way to go)."
Having a physical read-write switch does not prevent BIOS updates, you simply turn it off when you are going to do a legitimate upgrade, and then turn it back on afterwards. It just prevents BIOS updates from being installed stealthily from a distance.
You got that reversed. The lunatics are the people whose alarms dont go off at the notion of a browser that just runs whatever program the website hands it.
I think if you'll go back and read the message I initially replied to, as I have just done, you will find that the incivility started there, and I simply replied in kind. He stated without reservation that those using these prefixes intending their binary meaning simply wrong, and cited the busy-bodies as if that were proof of the contention.
If my reply was rude, so was that post, because I did nothing but mirror it back.
Your claim that the GPs statement was "factually correct" and your acknowledgement that standards committees are not actually authoritative contradict each other.
The link you posted is actually not that bad an essay on the subject, although I disagree with his conclusions at least he's mostly accurate and aboveboard on his logic.
But you are completely misunderstanding me if you think I am appealing to any nonexistent authority or denying that people use these terms in confusing and incorrect ways on a regular basis, and have for a very long time. The interface between communications and computing equipment was an inevitable rough spot since the communications guys were already working with base-10 from pre-computing times, and HDD manufacturers have been fond of lying about their capacities as long as I can remember. But the fact that people misuse language does not make their misuse correct, what an absurd position!
In essence the main difference between my position and the one you linked is that he prefers to use Ki/K where I would use K/k. Sorry, "kibi" is nonsense and I do not favor inventing words where perfectly good words already exist. Nor do I favor abandoning correct usage simply because it's become unpopular. You may have a different opinion on those issues and you have a right to that, but you dont have a right to force me to agree.
And while it's certainly possible you have by chance avoided companies where that happened, it honestly seems as likely you just never saw it, or realized what you were seeing. These women are good at this game and we geeky technical guys (in the vast majority of cases) are pathetically outclassed. And the one in this story sounds like a bumbling child compared to another person in a similar position I have known.
I was (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) pointing to its role as the standard implementation. Which unfortunately is really just a memory as for over a decade now other distros have insisted tenaciously on ignoring solid standards and everyone just reinvents the wheel, in ever more byzantine fashion each iteration.
Why is it so hard for you aspyrons to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on context?
In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?
In this case, we expect her try to snare a man for the same reason she (apparently) tried to snare the woman - to further her own plots in the company.
"Don't forget that the founder's wife treated her the way she did, precisely because she couldn't see Horvath as an engineer, but only as a potential lust object for the founder."
And that is different from how we would expect her to approach a male engineer she was trying to ensnare exactly how?
"And the founder let her."
So you are saying the man should have kept better control of his woman?
There might be some sexism here but not in the direction you are pointing...
"It's hard enough to take for a man; if I were a woman, I would have permanently left IT ages ago."
Do you say that because you believe as a woman you would be less well equipped to deal with such situations, or because you believe as a woman you would have simply been less willing to deal with them, perhaps because you would have had better opportunities elsewhere? What's the logic there?
After reading the referenced article, and the github response, I am still finding myself pretty meh.
The actual sexism in it seems overblown at best. They had a party, girls were hulu-hooping, guys stared. She seems to somehow have been shocked and perturbed by this, which makes me wonder about her. Is she shocked and perturbed by the affects of gravity or the inverse square law as well? Yet this completely unremarkable scene is cited as the 'last straw' before she left.
For the most part the real problem appears to have been a founders wife. FTFA: "In her email to TechCrunch, Horvath says she felt "confused and insulted to think that a woman who was not employed by my company was pulling the strings." She also said she felt bullied by someone with perceived power and influence over her personal relationship and her career at GitHub."
Now I dont know about where Julia is from, but here on Earth a founders spouse having what might be technically inappropriate involvement in the company business is not exactly unheard of. It's also typical for that spouse to have what we gamers would describe as a great intrigue score - a manipulative deceitful personality that will bluff or lie about her current position in order to improve her position 10 moves later in her game, and who will use you up and throw you away without a hint of remorse if she sees a gain in it. This sort of woman is always scheming, and employees that just want to keep punching their clock and spending their paycheck have to be vigilant to avoid getting involved in her schemes, usually to their detriment.
Now I dont blame our heroine for being uncomfortable in that spot, Everyone is. I am just saying it's odd that she would actually be surprised by something so common, and odder still that she would attribute it to sexism.
Github indicates the spouse in question has been dealt with, so frankly it sounds like they may have won on both ends of the deal. Seems an easy bet that at least some of the employees are breathing much more easily in the office today with both of these ladies gone from it.
"Well, it's just as illegal to download an episode than is 1 year old, than it is to download one that is 50 years old. If the punishment is the same, why wouldn't you download the latest stuff?"
Because I wanted to watch something that doesnt suck?
Official explanation is that older machines were using too much CPU decoding the audio. In this case the fix could be worse than the problem, because now you run the risk of saturating disk and memory IO. Frying pan, fire, hah.
Might have been wise to shop around for codec/decoder combinations that worked properly instead.
"So, if we're just supposed to use the search box for everything, why not just get rid of the rest of the interface and have a command prompt? "
GUIs are like training wheels. But better, really - where the analogy falls down is that with training wheels you really have to get rid of them to get things going properly. Modern computers can typically run a simple GUI with idle resources so there is little or no benefit to unloading it. And even an advanced user will wind up shuffling through a menu looking for a seldom-used function now and then.
But for the stuff you do hundreds of times a day, every day, it's worth taking some time to work on eliminating the mouse wherever possible. Unless of course it's a task that you just cant do with the keyboard (drawing is the classic example) - the context switches back and forth between the two-handed position on the keyboard and the one-handed mouse-and-keyboard position are relatively high cost and with a tiny bit of thought most can be avoided.
"It's questionable whether typing stuff, even just a few letters, should always be considered faster and/or more productive than using a mouse."
No, it isnt, but keep telling yourself that.
"Sometimes, especially on a laptop, it's a pain to keep shifting from mouse to keyboard and back."
Exactly why you should avoid shifting away from the keyboard in the first place as much as possible.
"Besides, since when is running a particular program the only thing you would ever want to do on a given operating system?"
Well, running one program or another is in fact the only thing you would ever do an any OS. That's the entire point to the shell, and all the other stuff that has to be loaded underneath it. Am I misunderstanding you?
"Windows 8 if filled with non-intuitive commands,"
Like every other computer OS that's ever been or ever will be invented, yes.
"and offers almost nothing of value in return for scaling its rather steep learning curve."
Yeah, that I have to mostly agree with you on. It DOES offer some value - there are some real performance improvements over 7, and I have to give MS kudos for that - that's several releases in a row where they have managed to reverse their historical trend to ever-increasing system requirements - every MS system up through Vista was more bloated than the last and they have actually been trimming and tightening a bit with Win7 and then again with 8.
But the Metro interface is painful and stupid. The only point to it is to drive people to Windows Store and Windows Phones and for that reason alone I would like to see Win8 die painfully and profitless. The average end-user sees that upfront and experiences pain as a result and hates it, while s/he in most cases never has any call to consider whether it's more responsive, more stable, and has more free memory than the same machine would have running Win7, so to them it's a completely negative experience.
To the technically adept user it's a much more positive experience though, because we tend to naturally avoid the interface stupidity and are more likely to be aware of the improvements.
(A little historical note, "Metro" actually started in the early 90s with the Chicago team, who did a mock-up and a useability study before scrapping the idea. It gets dusted back off now because end users are no longer their customers in any statistically significant sense, and their entire focus right now is on OEM sales, Windows Store, and trying to find some way to get people on Windows Phone. )
It depends, if you are an actual employee I understand the pay is not really spectacular. The benefits, however, are outrageous. And these days of course the government has gotten into outsourcing too, and most of their workers are contractors, not employees. The contractors are obviously paid well, and if theoretically they have less job security practically their programs are only set to expand.
Anyway, regardless of position, you could probably make more money in the private sector if you are really motivated to go out and make the next big thing. But this sort of job is about more than compensation. It draws people that really believe in the cause (who eventually become disillusioned, and sometimes become whistleblowers) along with amoral sociopaths that get off on power. Unfortunate that the latter stand a much better chance of being promoted and the former of being waterboarded, seems backwards somehow, but oh well.
Slashdot Mirror
"Are you proposing that medical science engage in a systematic effort to mislead patients into believing, for example, that green M&M's cure cancer in order to use the placebo effect to actually cure cancer? "
No. Definitely not.
"That proposal is the exact opposite of medicine, and the attitude is the exact reason why "alternative medicine" is held in wide contempt."
Except that you just made it up.
A placebo is not 'nothing.'
A placebo is a psychological treatment agent, as opposed to a biological or chemical agent. It's no surprise at all that placebos should be effective for psychological problems. What is more surprising, and thus interesting, is the array of physical and biological problems for which placebos are provably effective.
Actually, without having a common definition of "these people" we will have to agree to disagree. There are more reasonable and less reasonable sorts of claims made, the more reasonable ones may not explicitly say 'placebo effect' but they do not really claim anything else. The entire premise of 'holistic medicine' is that your emotions effect your bodies systems which in turn can make you e.g. heal very quickly or not at all, or even effectively dial your immune system up or down. Sounds like an explanation for *why* placebos work to me.
And while "placebo effect" is often cited in a tone of dismissal, it's a pretty darn powerful effect. For some applications it may be the most powerful therapy available.
Except that the programs they are running go far beyond even what the Patriot Act authorizes. So if they wont obey the Patriot Act, why do you think they will obey a new law they like less?
Took a look at it based on your recommendation. Requires steam is a very long ways from "free."
"Disabling flash writes isn't a viable solution, since that would stop important BIOS updates as well that protect against the same problems (and you don't want your system to persist its old BIOS, that's not a good way to go)."
Having a physical read-write switch does not prevent BIOS updates, you simply turn it off when you are going to do a legitimate upgrade, and then turn it back on afterwards. It just prevents BIOS updates from being installed stealthily from a distance.
You got that reversed. The lunatics are the people whose alarms dont go off at the notion of a browser that just runs whatever program the website hands it.
I think if you'll go back and read the message I initially replied to, as I have just done, you will find that the incivility started there, and I simply replied in kind. He stated without reservation that those using these prefixes intending their binary meaning simply wrong, and cited the busy-bodies as if that were proof of the contention.
If my reply was rude, so was that post, because I did nothing but mirror it back.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_Committee
Your claim that the GPs statement was "factually correct" and your acknowledgement that standards committees are not actually authoritative contradict each other.
The link you posted is actually not that bad an essay on the subject, although I disagree with his conclusions at least he's mostly accurate and aboveboard on his logic.
But you are completely misunderstanding me if you think I am appealing to any nonexistent authority or denying that people use these terms in confusing and incorrect ways on a regular basis, and have for a very long time. The interface between communications and computing equipment was an inevitable rough spot since the communications guys were already working with base-10 from pre-computing times, and HDD manufacturers have been fond of lying about their capacities as long as I can remember. But the fact that people misuse language does not make their misuse correct, what an absurd position!
In essence the main difference between my position and the one you linked is that he prefers to use Ki/K where I would use K/k. Sorry, "kibi" is nonsense and I do not favor inventing words where perfectly good words already exist. Nor do I favor abandoning correct usage simply because it's become unpopular. You may have a different opinion on those issues and you have a right to that, but you dont have a right to force me to agree.
And while it's certainly possible you have by chance avoided companies where that happened, it honestly seems as likely you just never saw it, or realized what you were seeing. These women are good at this game and we geeky technical guys (in the vast majority of cases) are pathetically outclassed. And the one in this story sounds like a bumbling child compared to another person in a similar position I have known.
You misunderstand me, I love slack too.
I was (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) pointing to its role as the standard implementation. Which unfortunately is really just a memory as for over a decade now other distros have insisted tenaciously on ignoring solid standards and everyone just reinvents the wheel, in ever more byzantine fashion each iteration.
You appear to believe that argument from authority trumps sense. You have it backwards.
To put it another way, even if you got every committee of busy-bodies on the planet to agree that 2+2=3, they and you would still be wrong.
"Is there a reference framework for *anything* in Linux?"
Yes, it's called Slackware.
Why is it so hard for you aspyrons to understand that the meaning of a word is often dependent on context?
In a decimal context, kilo means 1000. In a binary context, it means 1024. Most of the people that pretend to have difficulty understanding this are actually making money from their 'confusion' - what's your excuse?
I believe the correct word is androphobe.
In this case, we expect her try to snare a man for the same reason she (apparently) tried to snare the woman - to further her own plots in the company.
Don't read more into it than is there.
"Don't forget that the founder's wife treated her the way she did, precisely because she couldn't see Horvath as an engineer, but only as a potential lust object for the founder."
And that is different from how we would expect her to approach a male engineer she was trying to ensnare exactly how?
"And the founder let her."
So you are saying the man should have kept better control of his woman?
There might be some sexism here but not in the direction you are pointing...
"It's hard enough to take for a man; if I were a woman, I would have permanently left IT ages ago."
Do you say that because you believe as a woman you would be less well equipped to deal with such situations, or because you believe as a woman you would have simply been less willing to deal with them, perhaps because you would have had better opportunities elsewhere? What's the logic there?
After reading the referenced article, and the github response, I am still finding myself pretty meh.
The actual sexism in it seems overblown at best. They had a party, girls were hulu-hooping, guys stared. She seems to somehow have been shocked and perturbed by this, which makes me wonder about her. Is she shocked and perturbed by the affects of gravity or the inverse square law as well? Yet this completely unremarkable scene is cited as the 'last straw' before she left.
For the most part the real problem appears to have been a founders wife. FTFA: "In her email to TechCrunch, Horvath says she felt "confused and insulted to think that a woman who was not employed by my company was pulling the strings." She also said she felt bullied by someone with perceived power and influence over her personal relationship and her career at GitHub."
Now I dont know about where Julia is from, but here on Earth a founders spouse having what might be technically inappropriate involvement in the company business is not exactly unheard of. It's also typical for that spouse to have what we gamers would describe as a great intrigue score - a manipulative deceitful personality that will bluff or lie about her current position in order to improve her position 10 moves later in her game, and who will use you up and throw you away without a hint of remorse if she sees a gain in it. This sort of woman is always scheming, and employees that just want to keep punching their clock and spending their paycheck have to be vigilant to avoid getting involved in her schemes, usually to their detriment.
Now I dont blame our heroine for being uncomfortable in that spot, Everyone is. I am just saying it's odd that she would actually be surprised by something so common, and odder still that she would attribute it to sexism.
Github indicates the spouse in question has been dealt with, so frankly it sounds like they may have won on both ends of the deal. Seems an easy bet that at least some of the employees are breathing much more easily in the office today with both of these ladies gone from it.
You are far too easy on him.
"Where there is infringing copyright accessible through Google"
This is a null case. Google is not the internet, the phrasing suggests total ignorance.
"Well, it's just as illegal to download an episode than is 1 year old, than it is to download one that is 50 years old. If the punishment is the same, why wouldn't you download the latest stuff?"
Because I wanted to watch something that doesnt suck?
Yeah, it's as retarded as it sounds.
Official explanation is that older machines were using too much CPU decoding the audio. In this case the fix could be worse than the problem, because now you run the risk of saturating disk and memory IO. Frying pan, fire, hah.
Might have been wise to shop around for codec/decoder combinations that worked properly instead.
"So, if we're just supposed to use the search box for everything, why not just get rid of the rest of the interface and have a command prompt? "
GUIs are like training wheels. But better, really - where the analogy falls down is that with training wheels you really have to get rid of them to get things going properly. Modern computers can typically run a simple GUI with idle resources so there is little or no benefit to unloading it. And even an advanced user will wind up shuffling through a menu looking for a seldom-used function now and then.
But for the stuff you do hundreds of times a day, every day, it's worth taking some time to work on eliminating the mouse wherever possible. Unless of course it's a task that you just cant do with the keyboard (drawing is the classic example) - the context switches back and forth between the two-handed position on the keyboard and the one-handed mouse-and-keyboard position are relatively high cost and with a tiny bit of thought most can be avoided.
"It's questionable whether typing stuff, even just a few letters, should always be considered faster and/or more productive than using a mouse."
No, it isnt, but keep telling yourself that.
"Sometimes, especially on a laptop, it's a pain to keep shifting from mouse to keyboard and back."
Exactly why you should avoid shifting away from the keyboard in the first place as much as possible.
"Besides, since when is running a particular program the only thing you would ever want to do on a given operating system?"
Well, running one program or another is in fact the only thing you would ever do an any OS. That's the entire point to the shell, and all the other stuff that has to be loaded underneath it. Am I misunderstanding you?
"Windows 8 if filled with non-intuitive commands,"
Like every other computer OS that's ever been or ever will be invented, yes.
"and offers almost nothing of value in return for scaling its rather steep learning curve."
Yeah, that I have to mostly agree with you on. It DOES offer some value - there are some real performance improvements over 7, and I have to give MS kudos for that - that's several releases in a row where they have managed to reverse their historical trend to ever-increasing system requirements - every MS system up through Vista was more bloated than the last and they have actually been trimming and tightening a bit with Win7 and then again with 8.
But the Metro interface is painful and stupid. The only point to it is to drive people to Windows Store and Windows Phones and for that reason alone I would like to see Win8 die painfully and profitless. The average end-user sees that upfront and experiences pain as a result and hates it, while s/he in most cases never has any call to consider whether it's more responsive, more stable, and has more free memory than the same machine would have running Win7, so to them it's a completely negative experience.
To the technically adept user it's a much more positive experience though, because we tend to naturally avoid the interface stupidity and are more likely to be aware of the improvements.
(A little historical note, "Metro" actually started in the early 90s with the Chicago team, who did a mock-up and a useability study before scrapping the idea. It gets dusted back off now because end users are no longer their customers in any statistically significant sense, and their entire focus right now is on OEM sales, Windows Store, and trying to find some way to get people on Windows Phone. )
It depends, if you are an actual employee I understand the pay is not really spectacular. The benefits, however, are outrageous. And these days of course the government has gotten into outsourcing too, and most of their workers are contractors, not employees. The contractors are obviously paid well, and if theoretically they have less job security practically their programs are only set to expand.
Anyway, regardless of position, you could probably make more money in the private sector if you are really motivated to go out and make the next big thing. But this sort of job is about more than compensation. It draws people that really believe in the cause (who eventually become disillusioned, and sometimes become whistleblowers) along with amoral sociopaths that get off on power. Unfortunate that the latter stand a much better chance of being promoted and the former of being waterboarded, seems backwards somehow, but oh well.