I have no reason to think you're lying, so why would I be rude? Let the AC's handle that.:) I'm simply surprised that your experience is so much different than mine, and I'm curious what sort of numbers you're seeing.
I support an admittedly small number of Macs - a dozen or so - a couple imacs, a couple macbook pros, a couple macbooks, and 2 mac minis. I've found these systems need much less admin intervention, in general, than the Dell & Lenovo systems that I also support - both on the hardware & software level. Offhand, I can only think of 3 hardware issues with the Macs - a bad iMac hard drive after about 8 months, a bad mini hard drive after about 4 years, and an issue with the spring in the power button of one of the MBPros. 2 were handled under warranty, and I replaced the Mini's hard drive myself with a seagate drive.
In the same time, I can think of quite a few hard drive failures, a couple power supply failures, and 3 bad motherboards on dell & lenovo systems I work with... so while it's hard to make a direct comparison, I wouldn't say that I've experienced a significantly higher or lower rate of failures in either set of hardware.
If the info the Apple tech gave you is correct, and the fans are not running properly when in Bootcamp or target mode, the excessive heating might explain the difference if your users use Bootcamp a lot - I'm pretty much the only one who uses it here, and even that is VERY infrequently, so it could be that I simply haven't been exposed to that particular oddity of design.
I'd have guessed that the BIOS / EFI would simply expose the functionality & sensor data to the OS and leave it up to the OS to manage the fans, maybe Windows expects the opposite, or maybe my guess is completely ass-backwards... but yeah, if that's what's getting you, that's a really weird bit of design.
There is some freeware out there that will allow you to control the fans on your mac while booted into Windows - I can't vouch for any of it because I've not used it, but it might make your life a little easier on the systems where users are frequently booting into windows.
I've had to call in tons of warranty repairs the last couple years (easily 10x than from our pool of HP and Dell machines
How many Apple systems versus how many Dell/HP, and how many repairs for each? "easily 10x" isn't such a bad number if "hundreds of imacs and macbooks" are in one pool, and "10 dell/hp" systems are in the other.
And Apple doesn't manufacture most of the components going into the imacs and macbooks - they source their components from the same vendors that HP & Dell do. I've had a hard drive failure on my iMac - the Western Digital drive that failed was replaced by a slightly larger seagate drive when they did the warranty repair.
I have a 3G, and it's definitely slower than it used to be after upgrading to iOS 4. Just because the multi-tasking sections of code aren't "turned on" doesn't mean that there's not rewritten, more CPU- and memory- intensive code in all of the operating system & application software which is slowing it down.
It works okay, but the responsiveness is definitely slower than with the 3.x version of the operating system, and I've never jailbroken.
Or... you could just be making vast generalizations with absolutely no data to support them other than a 5% "jitter" in their stock price that can most likely be attributed to general intra- and inter-day trading noise on the market.
Based on what? They have strong revenues, very little debt, a ton of cash reserves, and a phenomenally popular product line. If any company deserves to have a high stock value based on fundamentals like that, Apple is surely one of them.
The UN has no power to "switch to a basket of currencies" - the UN can recommend all it likes, but the markets still choose for themselves what reserve currencies to use.
Also, the SDR "basket" most certainly includes the dollar, and I've seen no discussion about excluding the dollar from the valuation of the SDR. Perhaps you'd care to share your sources of information, or are you just fearmongering?
You're missing the point by trying to assign "because I was intelligent" as the reason people are bullied. Intelligence doesn't enter into it - plenty of intelligent people don't get bullied, and plenty of dumb people DO get bullied.
Want to know why you were persecuted? Simple: you stood out from the crowd. You were, for all intents and purposes, alien. Therefore, you were the target. You violated social norms - whatever they happened to be for the particular group you're thinking of - and so they rejected you, as you rejected them by refusing to learn, acknowledge, or just simply missing out on - their social cues.
"Liking subjects" isn't going to get you bullied. Rhapsodizing over how much you just LOVE geometry and linear algebra and can't wait to study particle physics at MIT while the people around you are focused on prom or last night's football game... that might. It's not your "intelligence" that gets you stuffed headfirst in a trashcan, it's your "inability to understand that you are carrying on about something that nobody else in the room wants to hear about," that does. Remember that, because it's important.
And, for the record, nerds can be just as savage to other people as these bullies were to them when people violate their social norms, too. For instance: 1) Linux is a shitty platform that doesn't deserve to exist. 2) VI is better than emacs. 3) The original Star Trek series was the best, but it was still fucking awful - wooden acting, ridiculous characters, and the production values of Victorian porn. All future Star Trek series went downhill from there, too. 4) I love Microsoft's products, and find them so delightfully easy to work with that I can't even conceive of any way to make them better. You had me at Office 2007, MSFT. 5) My iPhone is the best phone that's ever been built, and probably will never be overtaken by any other phone, because Apple makes amazing products that will probably never be matched by any competitor.
Did you see what I did there? Bet you felt a strong visceral "OH NO YOU DIDN'T" reaction to at least one of those statements being made here, inside your circle of nerds. So congratulations, you share the same social ineptitude high school bullies do, you're just not strong enough or brave enough to punch me in the face for violating your norms, so you'll resort to vicious rhetoric and verbal abuse.
Always remember, internet trolling and flame wars were not created by illiterate jocks - they didn't even know what the internet was when the trolls emerged.
The problem is that a nerd often is the omega of the pack and will be abused by pretty much everybody
I'd say the nerd often isn't even in the pack which is why they are targeted. They're the albino zebra - the oddity that stands out from the group, and that's what causes them to be targeted. The reason they stand out, as discussed in TFA, is that they are lacking in "social skills" which would allow them to relate with and integrate into the normal social circles.
and the most important condition is that some kids are weak - this is actually a sufficent reason for a bully. His instinct tells him that there is a weak kid that can be abused and his instinct drives the bully
That's a pretty sweeping, and unfortunately inaccurate, generalization. There are plenty of "weak" kids who aren't bullied. There are also plenty of "strong" kids who are bullied. Again, the findings discussed in TFA indicate that it's the lack of social skills that is often the critical lacking component in bullies and in the people being bullied. Bullies aren't born predators any more than the bullied are born prey. They fail to (or are delayed in) in learning the intricacies of social interaction, which ends up with the both of them being outcasts; then it's simply a matter of one of them deciding to take out their frustrations on the other.
In my opinion limited scuffle between kids is normal and even important in that age so they can learn where the violence has got to stop.
I wouldn't disagree that "scuffling" is normal between kids. An occasional shoving match, maybe a minor fistfight, that sort of thing while not to be encouraged, is certainly not unexpected either. What we are talking about though is not "scuffling" - we're talking about bullies who can and have driven people to suicide; we're talking about the bullied who insist that "going apeshit all over the bully and beating him within an inch of his life" is the best way to prevent bullying; Both of these are NOT "normal scuffling" no matter how hard you try to paint it as such.
There is something fundamentally flawed in the bullies' and the bullied's social skills at appears to lead them both to conclude that it's just "the way it is," and the only way to break the cycle of violence is, surprisingly, with even more violence. What's needed is not to just "let them scuffle," but for educators and parents to take an interest in what's happening, acknowledge the problem, and take steps to teach BOTH children appropriate social coping mechanisms that don't involve picking up a chair and splitting someone's skull.
I'm sorry, but somewhere in there your impartial argument in favor of logic and selflessness turned into a rant against women breaking up your D&D club with sweet sweet boobies and apple booty.
Care to try again?
(Pro tip: if you both want the girl, go for the threesome. Just don't cross swords, unless that's the way you roll. And please let us know how it turns out. I look forward to reading all about "Spock's Threesome," because I'm sure you'll be nothing but logical about it.)
Do you not see any reason to be concerned that you consider social skills to be something which you "use against" other people?
For fuck's sake, get out of your fantasy world - you're not casting "Mind Control, Rank 4!" You're relating to other people as people, and perhaps enjoying their company as friends - your implication that people are simply game pieces to be manipulated on a game board shows a frightening degree of disconnectedness and a shocking lack of any ability to empathize.
What a surprise, you think that "scaring enemies" by making other people fear you is the best way to relate to others. Did you, by chance, participate in any of the studies this article is about? Sounds like you're a posterboy.
Pretty sure this is getting widespread coverage the past few months, I know it's been big news here in Massachusetts.
The girl in question, from all reports and photos that I've seen, a lovely young woman, had the "misfortune" of being the new kid in school, who happened to run afoul of some cliques who disliked the fact that she had dated a couple of boys where they didn't "approve" of the relationship.
That's all it took to set the bullying off, and because she was a new kid in town, because she had a "funny" accent having moved from Ireland, because she probably dressed a little different... she was tormented for months. Enough so that she took her own life.
She wasn't tormented because she was a "nerd", or because of her intelligence (I don't know her, so I have no way of judging how intelligent she was, but every detail of the case has focused on her relationships with a couple boys as the focus of the bullying) - she was tormented because she stood out, and that's all it took.
Certainly - as I noted, it took us an extra 10 years to reach that point where we could sit down and actually talk, and maybe understand that we had some common ground. Maybe if we had both been taught a few coping strategies in school, maybe the situation never would have devolved into the two of us being a couple of socially inept losers locked in a vicious cycle of abusive violence.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people posting here on Slashdot who are - presumably - grown fucking adults, and they're talking about how "working out and kicking the guy's ass," or "acting so weird that everybody thinks you'll kill them," is the obvious solution to the problem of violence - and TFA clearly discusses how bullies & those being bullied tend towards social ineptitude, which in turn breeds the violence in question - they know no other way to relate, so the solution is, "I'll kick your ass."
This information is as good as what you do with it. If you recognize that there are conditions that breed bullying, then you can begin focusing on how to teach children to cope with those conditions without resorting to a closed fist. It seems like even as adults, many nerds don't get it. If ever there was a collective "WHOOSH" deserved on Slashdot, this entire fucking thread deserves it.
That the problem is that people are so hard-wired to find social ineptitude a problem.
I'm not sure why skateboarding, programming, reading fantasy novels, and playing Starcraft have to be completely exclusive activities, where you can't do a little of all of them?
I read fantasy & science fiction novels; I program; I play world of warcraft;
I also play hockey, mountain bike, play the guitar, hike, camp, and enjoy photography;
Sometimes a night out at a show or down to the pub for drinks with friends is exactly what I want. Sometimes, I just feel like staying home to fire up warcraft, or reading all night.
In the next year, I am planning to learn some spanish, do some travelling in Europe, and get a scuba certification, too. I also hope to finish a couple hobbyist programming projects I've been working on with a friend.
You can do a lot of fun, and wildly interesting things in life... why limit yourself to just a few things? When you feel like being alone, by all means, be alone - recharge, rest, relax... but don't cut yourself off from other people completely, or you'll soon realize that you're forced to be alone even when you don't want to be alone.
I'll relate my own eye-opening (for me, at least) experience. I was a nerd from the moment I entered school - studied hard, interest in geeky shit, liked computers, liked video games, and really school was pretty much effortless for me - I have a good memory, and so things just stuck once I'd read through them a few times. But I sucked at social interaction - I didn't have a lot of good friends, I was happy with a few people I got on well with, and I learned enough to deflect bullying by making jokes - hard to slam a guy into the lockers when he's cracking you up, and it worked well enough that at least I wasn't in perpetual fear of having my ass kicked.
I was back home a few years back, and went out with a few high school friends who I've kept in touch with for a few drinks. While we were there, a guy we went to high school with recognized us and came over to say hello. He was one of the less-successful students, barely passed classes, barely graduated, spent most of his time drinking and smoking with the rest of the "burnouts". He gave me his fair share of shit in high school, so we never got on all that well, at graduation, it was at best an armed truce - I never liked him, and he seemed to derive a lot of joy from tormenting nerds, which I most definitely was.
He sat down with us and we all started chatting, and he said the oddest thing to me: "Man, I used to envy you so much, you had SUCH an easy time in high school. Not like me, I struggled so bad, I hated it and couldn't wait to get out of there. Instead of giving you guys so much crap I should've asked you to show me how to fucking study." This stunned me - the guy who used to give me so much shit, telling me *I* had it easy? So I told him how much I disliked high school myself, and couldn't wait to get out of there, and asked him why he hated it so much. So, I heard quite a bit about his alcoholic mother, absent father, his nearly-full-time hours to make money while in high school, and of course what I always knew, that he struggled to make the mental connections that I made with ease.
This was eye-opening. I had spent so much time worried about "me" and how bad I had it, that it never occurred to me how bad someone else might have had it, and how that might play into his behavior. Is it any wonder that two socially inept people would misread each other so badly, and that anger would grow from that? Now, his environment certainly doesn't make the bullying "okay," but it's very easy to paint someone as a born thug, and quite another thing to actually understand what they've got going on, and maybe use social skills to defuse that anger.
It took us both 10 years or so to develop the social aptitude to be able to sit down over a beer and have a real conversation, and the only thing I can say is that I'm ashamed it took so long, but I'm glad that we were able to do it. We were able to sit there and laugh about how dysfunctional we both were with other people back in high school, have a few beers, and part amicably. We aren't best friends, but if we see each other around, we'll great each other with a smile, a "Hey, how's it going?", and an offer to buy a round - a far cry from the bully/prey relationship of high school, and far preferable than walking around carrying this giant chip on my shoulder about how badly I was treated in high school, when I never took the time to try and learn why the kid behaved the way he did.
It's amazing what you can discover about somebody if you take the time to listen, and the fault doesn't lie strictly with the bully.
Functionality is not a zero-sum game. Just because you provide "go back" via a menu, or button, or gesture, or long-press-on-1-button-mouse, or whatever, doesn't mean you can't also provide it for "back button on 5-button mouse".
Way to completely miss the point, and nice job skewering that straw man you set up - you really showed that irrelevant point who's the boss. Please quote for me the part of my post where I said we should "limit" functionality in the name of usability?
Interface design should be done with the lowest common denominator in mind - making the functionality fully accessible to anybody with a single-button mouse, in other words.
This does not require, or even suggest, that you STOP there - you can add support for 2, 3, 4,... , 30-button mice if you want - provide programmable functionality for each button so that the user can choose what sort of task he/she wants to accomplish with a right click - that adds functionality to the system, without forcing functionality into "hidden" context menus and other arrangements requiring "N" buttons. When "N" can never safely be assumed to be any number greater than 1, designing your application to *require* more than 1 button is not a good idea.
In short, you're an idiot and I hope you're not in a position to make decisions with any real-world implications.
Hey, I can do personal attacks too! Watch this! Big talk from an anonymous chickenshit. Thanks for weighing in on that straw man you set up, douchebag. Get stuffed.
I'm not saying the mouse need be one-button, I'm saying the user interface should be *designed* so that a mouse with only a single button can work the interface and access the full functionality. Any other buttons should not be *required* or *expected* by your interface design, and you certainly should not hide functionality in a way that it's only accessible by using a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth...) button.
Is it inconvenient to move your mouse to the side of the screen and click the scroll bar every time you want to page down or up? Of course it is. And that's why extra mouse buttons are put into service supporting that common (and convenient) functionality. Now imagine that the scroll bar didn't exist, and you were just expected to have a mousewheel in order to scroll up and down. How usable would that be on a two-button mouse?
That's what I'm saying is "bad design". Not "supporting other buttons," but "making more buttons required to access functionality." There are a host of alternate input devices that don't support 3,4,5 buttons - your mouse trackpad, for example; a tongue-control joystick for a handicapped person; old mice with only 2 buttons and no wheel; touchscreen devices... the point of usability is to expose the functionality of the application to the user. Supporting shortcuts via context-sensitive menus is fine - as long as you also provide access via your menus to that same functionality in a way that's accessible without right-clicking.
Nobody's arguing that users "shouldn't have to learn anything" - we're arguing that application developers need to understand that if they are burying an app's functionality in a way that it is *only* accessible via a 2nd, 3rd, etc. button, they are <i>doing it wrong</i>.
Consider your example of pen & paper - it's a very open interface, and supports just about any "input method" you care to use - crayon, marker, pen, pencil, anything you can use to draw a character.
Now imagine that the pad of paper was manufactured so that only right handed people using blue ballpoint pens could write on them. "But *everybody* uses blue ballpoint pens," the manufacturer would exclaim. "Hardly anybody uses black ink or pencil - why should we bother changing our product to support those needs? Let the pencil users learn to write in pen!"
A zero button mouse would be great "if applications were designed for it".
Right, because a pointing device that has no way of registering an action to an application would be really useful, wouldn't it? "Move a pointer around on the screen... and do nothing else with it."
You CAN design for multiple buttons, and Operating Systems and applications have been designed that way for a long time - unfortunately. What this means is that many things have right-click-only functionality, and other "hidden" functionality, which absolutely impedes usability for people on alternate devices.
Your need for 8 buttons is not universal, and the issue with usability is not that "you can program lots of buttons and as a power user, get more out of it." The issue is that for some devices <i>the interaction is impossible</i> and when the functionality is <i>only accessible through the "power-user" interaction you've decided is the way power users will want to access it</i>, you have delivered software that is unusable.
Examples: How's "mouseover-only" functionality like tooltips working for you on touchscreen devices? How's multi-button functionality working for you on devices like a tongue controlled joystick?
To put it in terms you can understand - imagine if "Go back" in your browser could ONLY be accessed with a 5-button mouse's "back" button. imagine if "scroll down" could ONLY be done with a mouse wheel - then tell me a non-obvious system like that would be "usable".
Right, because boys will just naturally want total control over their phones and pick up programming and learn to love C code.
Whereas girls, being, you know, girly, just want things to be pretty and frilly and cute. So we "encourage" those girls by giving them watered down tools to let them do "cute" but ultimately meaningless things so they'll feel good about themselves.
And then we wonder why IT is seen as unfriendly and unappealing to women?
You're right - they're absolutely not useful... if your user interface is designed to require two buttons, and in fact hides some of the application's functionality ONLY in those second-mouse-button context menus. For applications that are designed to expose all of their functionality via sensibly laid out single-button menuing, that second button is just an added bonus that can invoke a context-sensitive menu, but which is not *required* to access functionality.
You are looking at the state of your applications today and saying, "No second button? Jesus, I can't use my computer without a second button!" The point of usability is to respond to that by saying, "But you should be able to."
Those extra buttons, for those who can use them, could be programmed to do all kinds of fun and exciting things, while not preventing people using alternate input methods from using the application at all.
The primary purpose of buying a Mac is elitism - and if you say otherwise then I challenge you to remove the little Apple logo from your box(es) to prove that it's not display of that logo is unimportant to you.
I rather like the decal because it helps protect the surface of the laptop from scuffs and scratches, and I rather like the design because it tickles my interests in world war 2 history, as well as reminding me of the Hitchhiker's Guide, with it's advice to, "Don't Panic". I don't give a shit who sees me using my Macbook, or who knows it's an "APPLE" computer - if they ask, I'll tell them, and relate my positive experiences with it. If they don't, they're welcome to continue using their Dell / Lenovo / HP / other laptop, and I don't really care.
You see, to YOU, the aesthetics of a product mean nothing, and the raw power and stats are all. And that's fine, but your choices and standards of value are not universal, and some people do place value on clean, thoughtful design, and aren't so interested in "being able to render a 90 minute long HD movie in 45 seconds or less using the POWAR OF LINUX!!!"
But then the Apple people start touting on about the wonders of a BSD core to OS X and this strikes me as a complete contradiction.
Your argument confuses "simplicity" with "lack of depth".
For general use, OS X is extremely simple to use, aesthetically pleasing, consistent, and quite stable. I have experience with Windows (3.1 through 7), Linux (Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu), and Solaris (their x86 workstation) "desktop" environments - none of them have matched OSX in the desktop space, in my experience. They all lacked a degree of usability, consistency, attractiveness, and stability - this is not to say that OS X is without it's flaws, as it certainly is not, but in my opinion, it beats all of the other alternatives when it comes to being a usable, reliable, attractive desktop system for casual web browsing, mail, photo/video editing, and the like.
And yet, when I want to see what's happening in the guts of the thing, 7 keystrokes gets me there: Command-Space (invoke Quicksilver), type "term" (Quicksilver determines that I want to invoke the Terminal), press "enter" - I'm in bash, with a full complement of UNIX tools to work with.
This is what Apple gets right: The simplicity for general users, with the ability to dive MUCH deeper with very little effort. I know how to use sed, awk, find, grep, vi, and a host of other command line tools - I've been using them for 13 years professionally, and rather love the ease of scripting large tasks that Unix provides. What I don't like is the fact that Linux GUIs in my experience are inconsistent, fairly ugly, and offer a "kitchen sink" approach - EVERY possible option is exposed in the GUI, and frankly that's annoying and counterproductive to me. If I want the deep options, I'll drop into bash and access them. If I want to get something done quickly, I don't want the 3 million possible options presented to me across 17 tabs of options, I want the 15 or so that 99% of what I'm doing will require.
"People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." -- Steve Jobs (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-new-machine.html)
And for many people, the "how it works" is exactly why they choose Apple over Linux when the choice is offered to them. It's why I do, and why many of my very smart, very unix-savvy fellow software engineers have, as well. Yes, a plain old white tower running BSD or Linux is cheaper - and you sacrifice the design quality as well. For some people, that's an acceptable tradeoff. For others, it's not. You use what you prefer, I'll use what I prefer, and we'll both be happy. But don't you dare suggest that I don't "understand" how to work with Unix when it's what's paid my bills for the last 13 years, and the very reason I chose Mac OS X - I wanted a usable desktop that would have the depth and power of Unix under it, and Linux frankly took far too much of my time to get running and keep running, and proved no more reliable than the Windows box I rejected as being too much effort to maintain.
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I have no reason to think you're lying, so why would I be rude? Let the AC's handle that. :) I'm simply surprised that your experience is so much different than mine, and I'm curious what sort of numbers you're seeing.
I support an admittedly small number of Macs - a dozen or so - a couple imacs, a couple macbook pros, a couple macbooks, and 2 mac minis. I've found these systems need much less admin intervention, in general, than the Dell & Lenovo systems that I also support - both on the hardware & software level. Offhand, I can only think of 3 hardware issues with the Macs - a bad iMac hard drive after about 8 months, a bad mini hard drive after about 4 years, and an issue with the spring in the power button of one of the MBPros. 2 were handled under warranty, and I replaced the Mini's hard drive myself with a seagate drive.
In the same time, I can think of quite a few hard drive failures, a couple power supply failures, and 3 bad motherboards on dell & lenovo systems I work with... so while it's hard to make a direct comparison, I wouldn't say that I've experienced a significantly higher or lower rate of failures in either set of hardware.
If the info the Apple tech gave you is correct, and the fans are not running properly when in Bootcamp or target mode, the excessive heating might explain the difference if your users use Bootcamp a lot - I'm pretty much the only one who uses it here, and even that is VERY infrequently, so it could be that I simply haven't been exposed to that particular oddity of design.
I'd have guessed that the BIOS / EFI would simply expose the functionality & sensor data to the OS and leave it up to the OS to manage the fans, maybe Windows expects the opposite, or maybe my guess is completely ass-backwards... but yeah, if that's what's getting you, that's a really weird bit of design.
There is some freeware out there that will allow you to control the fans on your mac while booted into Windows - I can't vouch for any of it because I've not used it, but it might make your life a little easier on the systems where users are frequently booting into windows.
How many Apple systems versus how many Dell/HP, and how many repairs for each? "easily 10x" isn't such a bad number if "hundreds of imacs and macbooks" are in one pool, and "10 dell/hp" systems are in the other.
And Apple doesn't manufacture most of the components going into the imacs and macbooks - they source their components from the same vendors that HP & Dell do. I've had a hard drive failure on my iMac - the Western Digital drive that failed was replaced by a slightly larger seagate drive when they did the warranty repair.
I have a 3G, and it's definitely slower than it used to be after upgrading to iOS 4. Just because the multi-tasking sections of code aren't "turned on" doesn't mean that there's not rewritten, more CPU- and memory- intensive code in all of the operating system & application software which is slowing it down.
It works okay, but the responsiveness is definitely slower than with the 3.x version of the operating system, and I've never jailbroken.
And somewhere, I'm sure that Steve Jobs is trembling that some dude on the internet didn't like his company's stuff.
Then he went and bought a private island or something with the money all the people who do like his company's stuff have sent to him.
Or... you could just be making vast generalizations with absolutely no data to support them other than a 5% "jitter" in their stock price that can most likely be attributed to general intra- and inter-day trading noise on the market.
There's always that option, too.
Based on what? They have strong revenues, very little debt, a ton of cash reserves, and a phenomenally popular product line. If any company deserves to have a high stock value based on fundamentals like that, Apple is surely one of them.
Define what market they have a "~2% share" of.
So you're a committed Windows user then? Fanboy.
The UN has no power to "switch to a basket of currencies" - the UN can recommend all it likes, but the markets still choose for themselves what reserve currencies to use.
Also, the SDR "basket" most certainly includes the dollar, and I've seen no discussion about excluding the dollar from the valuation of the SDR. Perhaps you'd care to share your sources of information, or are you just fearmongering?
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE65S40620100629
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special_Drawing_Rights
You're missing the point by trying to assign "because I was intelligent" as the reason people are bullied. Intelligence doesn't enter into it - plenty of intelligent people don't get bullied, and plenty of dumb people DO get bullied.
Want to know why you were persecuted? Simple: you stood out from the crowd. You were, for all intents and purposes, alien. Therefore, you were the target. You violated social norms - whatever they happened to be for the particular group you're thinking of - and so they rejected you, as you rejected them by refusing to learn, acknowledge, or just simply missing out on - their social cues.
"Liking subjects" isn't going to get you bullied. Rhapsodizing over how much you just LOVE geometry and linear algebra and can't wait to study particle physics at MIT while the people around you are focused on prom or last night's football game... that might. It's not your "intelligence" that gets you stuffed headfirst in a trashcan, it's your "inability to understand that you are carrying on about something that nobody else in the room wants to hear about," that does. Remember that, because it's important.
And, for the record, nerds can be just as savage to other people as these bullies were to them when people violate their social norms, too. For instance:
1) Linux is a shitty platform that doesn't deserve to exist.
2) VI is better than emacs.
3) The original Star Trek series was the best, but it was still fucking awful - wooden acting, ridiculous characters, and the production values of Victorian porn. All future Star Trek series went downhill from there, too.
4) I love Microsoft's products, and find them so delightfully easy to work with that I can't even conceive of any way to make them better. You had me at Office 2007, MSFT.
5) My iPhone is the best phone that's ever been built, and probably will never be overtaken by any other phone, because Apple makes amazing products that will probably never be matched by any competitor.
Did you see what I did there? Bet you felt a strong visceral "OH NO YOU DIDN'T" reaction to at least one of those statements being made here, inside your circle of nerds. So congratulations, you share the same social ineptitude high school bullies do, you're just not strong enough or brave enough to punch me in the face for violating your norms, so you'll resort to vicious rhetoric and verbal abuse.
Always remember, internet trolling and flame wars were not created by illiterate jocks - they didn't even know what the internet was when the trolls emerged.
I'd say the nerd often isn't even in the pack which is why they are targeted. They're the albino zebra - the oddity that stands out from the group, and that's what causes them to be targeted. The reason they stand out, as discussed in TFA, is that they are lacking in "social skills" which would allow them to relate with and integrate into the normal social circles.
That's a pretty sweeping, and unfortunately inaccurate, generalization. There are plenty of "weak" kids who aren't bullied. There are also plenty of "strong" kids who are bullied. Again, the findings discussed in TFA indicate that it's the lack of social skills that is often the critical lacking component in bullies and in the people being bullied. Bullies aren't born predators any more than the bullied are born prey. They fail to (or are delayed in) in learning the intricacies of social interaction, which ends up with the both of them being outcasts; then it's simply a matter of one of them deciding to take out their frustrations on the other.
I wouldn't disagree that "scuffling" is normal between kids. An occasional shoving match, maybe a minor fistfight, that sort of thing while not to be encouraged, is certainly not unexpected either. What we are talking about though is not "scuffling" - we're talking about bullies who can and have driven people to suicide; we're talking about the bullied who insist that "going apeshit all over the bully and beating him within an inch of his life" is the best way to prevent bullying; Both of these are NOT "normal scuffling" no matter how hard you try to paint it as such.
There is something fundamentally flawed in the bullies' and the bullied's social skills at appears to lead them both to conclude that it's just "the way it is," and the only way to break the cycle of violence is, surprisingly, with even more violence. What's needed is not to just "let them scuffle," but for educators and parents to take an interest in what's happening, acknowledge the problem, and take steps to teach BOTH children appropriate social coping mechanisms that don't involve picking up a chair and splitting someone's skull.
I'm sorry, but somewhere in there your impartial argument in favor of logic and selflessness turned into a rant against women breaking up your D&D club with sweet sweet boobies and apple booty.
Care to try again?
(Pro tip: if you both want the girl, go for the threesome. Just don't cross swords, unless that's the way you roll. And please let us know how it turns out. I look forward to reading all about "Spock's Threesome," because I'm sure you'll be nothing but logical about it.)
Do you not see any reason to be concerned that you consider social skills to be something which you "use against" other people?
For fuck's sake, get out of your fantasy world - you're not casting "Mind Control, Rank 4!" You're relating to other people as people, and perhaps enjoying their company as friends - your implication that people are simply game pieces to be manipulated on a game board shows a frightening degree of disconnectedness and a shocking lack of any ability to empathize.
What a surprise, you think that "scaring enemies" by making other people fear you is the best way to relate to others. Did you, by chance, participate in any of the studies this article is about? Sounds like you're a posterboy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Phoebe_Prince
Pretty sure this is getting widespread coverage the past few months, I know it's been big news here in Massachusetts.
The girl in question, from all reports and photos that I've seen, a lovely young woman, had the "misfortune" of being the new kid in school, who happened to run afoul of some cliques who disliked the fact that she had dated a couple of boys where they didn't "approve" of the relationship.
That's all it took to set the bullying off, and because she was a new kid in town, because she had a "funny" accent having moved from Ireland, because she probably dressed a little different... she was tormented for months. Enough so that she took her own life.
She wasn't tormented because she was a "nerd", or because of her intelligence (I don't know her, so I have no way of judging how intelligent she was, but every detail of the case has focused on her relationships with a couple boys as the focus of the bullying) - she was tormented because she stood out, and that's all it took.
Certainly - as I noted, it took us an extra 10 years to reach that point where we could sit down and actually talk, and maybe understand that we had some common ground. Maybe if we had both been taught a few coping strategies in school, maybe the situation never would have devolved into the two of us being a couple of socially inept losers locked in a vicious cycle of abusive violence.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of people posting here on Slashdot who are - presumably - grown fucking adults, and they're talking about how "working out and kicking the guy's ass," or "acting so weird that everybody thinks you'll kill them," is the obvious solution to the problem of violence - and TFA clearly discusses how bullies & those being bullied tend towards social ineptitude, which in turn breeds the violence in question - they know no other way to relate, so the solution is, "I'll kick your ass."
This information is as good as what you do with it. If you recognize that there are conditions that breed bullying, then you can begin focusing on how to teach children to cope with those conditions without resorting to a closed fist. It seems like even as adults, many nerds don't get it. If ever there was a collective "WHOOSH" deserved on Slashdot, this entire fucking thread deserves it.
I'm not sure why skateboarding, programming, reading fantasy novels, and playing Starcraft have to be completely exclusive activities, where you can't do a little of all of them?
I read fantasy & science fiction novels; I program; I play world of warcraft;
I also play hockey, mountain bike, play the guitar, hike, camp, and enjoy photography;
Sometimes a night out at a show or down to the pub for drinks with friends is exactly what I want. Sometimes, I just feel like staying home to fire up warcraft, or reading all night.
In the next year, I am planning to learn some spanish, do some travelling in Europe, and get a scuba certification, too. I also hope to finish a couple hobbyist programming projects I've been working on with a friend.
You can do a lot of fun, and wildly interesting things in life... why limit yourself to just a few things? When you feel like being alone, by all means, be alone - recharge, rest, relax... but don't cut yourself off from other people completely, or you'll soon realize that you're forced to be alone even when you don't want to be alone.
+5 internets for you.
I'll relate my own eye-opening (for me, at least) experience. I was a nerd from the moment I entered school - studied hard, interest in geeky shit, liked computers, liked video games, and really school was pretty much effortless for me - I have a good memory, and so things just stuck once I'd read through them a few times. But I sucked at social interaction - I didn't have a lot of good friends, I was happy with a few people I got on well with, and I learned enough to deflect bullying by making jokes - hard to slam a guy into the lockers when he's cracking you up, and it worked well enough that at least I wasn't in perpetual fear of having my ass kicked.
I was back home a few years back, and went out with a few high school friends who I've kept in touch with for a few drinks. While we were there, a guy we went to high school with recognized us and came over to say hello. He was one of the less-successful students, barely passed classes, barely graduated, spent most of his time drinking and smoking with the rest of the "burnouts". He gave me his fair share of shit in high school, so we never got on all that well, at graduation, it was at best an armed truce - I never liked him, and he seemed to derive a lot of joy from tormenting nerds, which I most definitely was.
He sat down with us and we all started chatting, and he said the oddest thing to me: "Man, I used to envy you so much, you had SUCH an easy time in high school. Not like me, I struggled so bad, I hated it and couldn't wait to get out of there. Instead of giving you guys so much crap I should've asked you to show me how to fucking study." This stunned me - the guy who used to give me so much shit, telling me *I* had it easy? So I told him how much I disliked high school myself, and couldn't wait to get out of there, and asked him why he hated it so much. So, I heard quite a bit about his alcoholic mother, absent father, his nearly-full-time hours to make money while in high school, and of course what I always knew, that he struggled to make the mental connections that I made with ease.
This was eye-opening. I had spent so much time worried about "me" and how bad I had it, that it never occurred to me how bad someone else might have had it, and how that might play into his behavior. Is it any wonder that two socially inept people would misread each other so badly, and that anger would grow from that? Now, his environment certainly doesn't make the bullying "okay," but it's very easy to paint someone as a born thug, and quite another thing to actually understand what they've got going on, and maybe use social skills to defuse that anger.
It took us both 10 years or so to develop the social aptitude to be able to sit down over a beer and have a real conversation, and the only thing I can say is that I'm ashamed it took so long, but I'm glad that we were able to do it. We were able to sit there and laugh about how dysfunctional we both were with other people back in high school, have a few beers, and part amicably. We aren't best friends, but if we see each other around, we'll great each other with a smile, a "Hey, how's it going?", and an offer to buy a round - a far cry from the bully/prey relationship of high school, and far preferable than walking around carrying this giant chip on my shoulder about how badly I was treated in high school, when I never took the time to try and learn why the kid behaved the way he did.
It's amazing what you can discover about somebody if you take the time to listen, and the fault doesn't lie strictly with the bully.
True, but if you talk to her about your experiences raiding with your orc warrior, she'll think you're a fucking badass.
Can't go wrong talking to a special lady about the hours and hours you spend playing Warcraft!
Way to completely miss the point, and nice job skewering that straw man you set up - you really showed that irrelevant point who's the boss. Please quote for me the part of my post where I said we should "limit" functionality in the name of usability?
Interface design should be done with the lowest common denominator in mind - making the functionality fully accessible to anybody with a single-button mouse, in other words.
This does not require, or even suggest, that you STOP there - you can add support for 2, 3, 4, ... , 30-button mice if you want - provide programmable functionality for each button so that the user can choose what sort of task he/she wants to accomplish with a right click - that adds functionality to the system, without forcing functionality into "hidden" context menus and other arrangements requiring "N" buttons. When "N" can never safely be assumed to be any number greater than 1, designing your application to *require* more than 1 button is not a good idea.
Hey, I can do personal attacks too! Watch this! Big talk from an anonymous chickenshit. Thanks for weighing in on that straw man you set up, douchebag. Get stuffed.
I'm not saying the mouse need be one-button, I'm saying the user interface should be *designed* so that a mouse with only a single button can work the interface and access the full functionality. Any other buttons should not be *required* or *expected* by your interface design, and you certainly should not hide functionality in a way that it's only accessible by using a second (or third, or fourth, or fifth...) button.
Is it inconvenient to move your mouse to the side of the screen and click the scroll bar every time you want to page down or up? Of course it is. And that's why extra mouse buttons are put into service supporting that common (and convenient) functionality. Now imagine that the scroll bar didn't exist, and you were just expected to have a mousewheel in order to scroll up and down. How usable would that be on a two-button mouse?
That's what I'm saying is "bad design". Not "supporting other buttons," but "making more buttons required to access functionality." There are a host of alternate input devices that don't support 3,4,5 buttons - your mouse trackpad, for example; a tongue-control joystick for a handicapped person; old mice with only 2 buttons and no wheel; touchscreen devices... the point of usability is to expose the functionality of the application to the user. Supporting shortcuts via context-sensitive menus is fine - as long as you also provide access via your menus to that same functionality in a way that's accessible without right-clicking.
Nobody's arguing that users "shouldn't have to learn anything" - we're arguing that application developers need to understand that if they are burying an app's functionality in a way that it is *only* accessible via a 2nd, 3rd, etc. button, they are <i>doing it wrong</i>.
Consider your example of pen & paper - it's a very open interface, and supports just about any "input method" you care to use - crayon, marker, pen, pencil, anything you can use to draw a character.
Now imagine that the pad of paper was manufactured so that only right handed people using blue ballpoint pens could write on them. "But *everybody* uses blue ballpoint pens," the manufacturer would exclaim. "Hardly anybody uses black ink or pencil - why should we bother changing our product to support those needs? Let the pencil users learn to write in pen!"
Sound usable?
Right, because a pointing device that has no way of registering an action to an application would be really useful, wouldn't it? "Move a pointer around on the screen... and do nothing else with it."
You CAN design for multiple buttons, and Operating Systems and applications have been designed that way for a long time - unfortunately. What this means is that many things have right-click-only functionality, and other "hidden" functionality, which absolutely impedes usability for people on alternate devices.
Your need for 8 buttons is not universal, and the issue with usability is not that "you can program lots of buttons and as a power user, get more out of it." The issue is that for some devices <i>the interaction is impossible</i> and when the functionality is <i>only accessible through the "power-user" interaction you've decided is the way power users will want to access it</i>, you have delivered software that is unusable.
Examples: How's "mouseover-only" functionality like tooltips working for you on touchscreen devices? How's multi-button functionality working for you on devices like a tongue controlled joystick?
To put it in terms you can understand - imagine if "Go back" in your browser could ONLY be accessed with a 5-button mouse's "back" button. imagine if "scroll down" could ONLY be done with a mouse wheel - then tell me a non-obvious system like that would be "usable".
Right, because boys will just naturally want total control over their phones and pick up programming and learn to love C code.
Whereas girls, being, you know, girly, just want things to be pretty and frilly and cute. So we "encourage" those girls by giving them watered down tools to let them do "cute" but ultimately meaningless things so they'll feel good about themselves.
And then we wonder why IT is seen as unfriendly and unappealing to women?
You're right - they're absolutely not useful... if your user interface is designed to require two buttons, and in fact hides some of the application's functionality ONLY in those second-mouse-button context menus. For applications that are designed to expose all of their functionality via sensibly laid out single-button menuing, that second button is just an added bonus that can invoke a context-sensitive menu, but which is not *required* to access functionality.
You are looking at the state of your applications today and saying, "No second button? Jesus, I can't use my computer without a second button!" The point of usability is to respond to that by saying, "But you should be able to."
Those extra buttons, for those who can use them, could be programmed to do all kinds of fun and exciting things, while not preventing people using alternate input methods from using the application at all.
Yes, "one can," provided "one" is not a typical slashdot poster.
I would, but mine is covered already by this: http://www.gelaskins.com/store/skins/laptops/15.4_inch_MacBook_Pro/Keep_Calm
I rather like the decal because it helps protect the surface of the laptop from scuffs and scratches, and I rather like the design because it tickles my interests in world war 2 history, as well as reminding me of the Hitchhiker's Guide, with it's advice to, "Don't Panic". I don't give a shit who sees me using my Macbook, or who knows it's an "APPLE" computer - if they ask, I'll tell them, and relate my positive experiences with it. If they don't, they're welcome to continue using their Dell / Lenovo / HP / other laptop, and I don't really care.
You see, to YOU, the aesthetics of a product mean nothing, and the raw power and stats are all. And that's fine, but your choices and standards of value are not universal, and some people do place value on clean, thoughtful design, and aren't so interested in "being able to render a 90 minute long HD movie in 45 seconds or less using the POWAR OF LINUX!!!"
Your argument confuses "simplicity" with "lack of depth".
For general use, OS X is extremely simple to use, aesthetically pleasing, consistent, and quite stable. I have experience with Windows (3.1 through 7), Linux (Fedora, Red Hat, and Ubuntu), and Solaris (their x86 workstation) "desktop" environments - none of them have matched OSX in the desktop space, in my experience. They all lacked a degree of usability, consistency, attractiveness, and stability - this is not to say that OS X is without it's flaws, as it certainly is not, but in my opinion, it beats all of the other alternatives when it comes to being a usable, reliable, attractive desktop system for casual web browsing, mail, photo/video editing, and the like.
And yet, when I want to see what's happening in the guts of the thing, 7 keystrokes gets me there: Command-Space (invoke Quicksilver), type "term" (Quicksilver determines that I want to invoke the Terminal), press "enter" - I'm in bash, with a full complement of UNIX tools to work with.
This is what Apple gets right: The simplicity for general users, with the ability to dive MUCH deeper with very little effort. I know how to use sed, awk, find, grep, vi, and a host of other command line tools - I've been using them for 13 years professionally, and rather love the ease of scripting large tasks that Unix provides. What I don't like is the fact that Linux GUIs in my experience are inconsistent, fairly ugly, and offer a "kitchen sink" approach - EVERY possible option is exposed in the GUI, and frankly that's annoying and counterproductive to me. If I want the deep options, I'll drop into bash and access them. If I want to get something done quickly, I don't want the 3 million possible options presented to me across 17 tabs of options, I want the 15 or so that 99% of what I'm doing will require.
"People think it's this veneer -- that the designers are handed this box and told, 'Make it look good!' That's not what we think design is. It's not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works." -- Steve Jobs (http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/30/magazine/the-guts-of-a-new-machine.html)
And for many people, the "how it works" is exactly why they choose Apple over Linux when the choice is offered to them. It's why I do, and why many of my very smart, very unix-savvy fellow software engineers have, as well. Yes, a plain old white tower running BSD or Linux is cheaper - and you sacrifice the design quality as well. For some people, that's an acceptable tradeoff. For others, it's not. You use what you prefer, I'll use what I prefer, and we'll both be happy. But don't you dare suggest that I don't "understand" how to work with Unix when it's what's paid my bills for the last 13 years, and the very reason I chose Mac OS X - I wanted a usable desktop that would have the depth and power of Unix under it, and Linux frankly took far too much of my time to get running and keep running, and proved no more reliable than the Windows box I rejected as being too much effort to maintain.