Mr. Dust Storm, marsian: "Hey, rovers, nice research you got running there. It'll be a shame if something terrible, HORRIBLE is to happen with it. Maybe you wanna go home and avoid that, uh?" (waves a knife in front of the rovers)
"Yea, here's my argument: I don't actually like big breasted blonde blue-eyed women."
OIC, because YOU don't fit the theory, it MUST be wrong...
Who the hell fits anyway? Stereotypical Joe Shmoe, your unemployed playboy neighbor? I'm a human being, or you think I should prove I'm not some sorta alien life with alergy to blonde.
The world must be a pretty boring place in Stereotype Pseudo-science land. BTW, all this conversation we've led so far. It's to get us laid. Ponder that. The article claims all we do comes back to that.
I hope this guy does better than Steorn, which claimed that they could throw away physics and produce free energy. You can see how well this went.
This guy has a beef with mathematics, since he wants solutions to be developed be more naturally. Well, natural intelligence took several million years to develop adaptively, but if I told my client "I'll take your spec and let it 'evolve' into a solution for the next 100 000 years", there's quite the possibility he'll find someone who knows math instead.
He's right about one thing, and in fact I've said this myself lots of times: lots of the consumer apps don't need heavy math to build. they just need work, good UI and adherence to functionality specs.
But all of this "easy development" is still built upon math libraries we take for granted (os kernel and management, image and video compression libraries, DSP libraries, sorting algorithms etc).
As a quick test: let's try and remove all math related machine commands from a CPU and try to work a usable solution with that.. Good luck.
I don't like people who reject hundreds of years of science work (math) and offer nothing as alternative, except vague dreams about more natural computing.
Do you have any evidence or argument that these are incorrect assertions, or are you just pulling that out of thin air?
Yea, here's my argument: I don't actually like big breasted blonde blue-eyed women. They look fine on a photoshopped picture, but I prefer brunettes in real life. Is something messed up with my DNA?
And seriously: when someone claims a bunch of ridiculous facts, the burden's on him/her to prove it and refer us to the work the statements have been built upon. It's not my job to prove them wrong, since I rejected them already and don't care at all what they think about it.
Those aren't just "politically incorrect observations". They're just incorrect observations.
It's a poor "mix-and-match" mixture of poorly carried out studies, wrong assumptions, "facts" pulled out of thin air, and just plain pseudo-science.
All of the reasons why we prefer one or another physical trait in each other is dumbed down to "it makes you look healthier". But we actually knew thus far, thank you very much. The actual reasons are usually way more subtle and related to the way our brains have evolved to process information, and the resulting perception we have for the world around us.
But why not - let's dumb it all down. The condescending tone doesn't help either.
To top it all, after you've done reading the article, this online magazine offers a handy form:
"Find a therapist near you"
I suggest you check it out, since after you're done with this article, you'll need it.
Good point. Ignoring whitespace is not trivial and differs among languages. Amusingly, your post ended up formatted wrong because HTML ignored your whitespace.
Yea I cracked up when I saw my post after the fact. Good thing I didn't opt for the "Python code blocks" example...
"And just to stay on topic: human factors researchers have found that a line length of 65-70 is best for scanning. That leaves 10 or so columns for assorted decorations and programming language requirements (FORTRAN, I'm looking at your columns 1-6)."
Were those researchers using Apple II.
Code isn't just "any text". There's lots of indenting, and colorized syntax helps scanning immensely.
I've been using 80 columns to this day for comments, but the immense wrapping was pissing me off last couple of months. I just switch to 132 and it's just perfect.
The feeling can be described as feeling little bubbles grow in your brain and blow up, your eyes kinda wanna get as far away as possible from the bubbles.
There are also bubbles in your throat, and sometimes your feet.
Wait.. there must've been something else in that Coke:P damn it.
Which indicates (as others have said here) that this outfit is either a. run by fools or b. into something a bit more devious. Personally, given the caliber of their employers, I'd vote for the latter.
What bothers me, they obviously have no problem with this idea, and they may try again (but covering their tracks better). I wonder how they'll use the collected evidence in court that way though.
There's something wrong when you offer "full movie downloads!" on your site, and just checking it out constitutes an offense. Most people don't even know it's illegal.
And it may very well not be: with companies like cnn, cbs, bbc starting to offer free shows streaming on their own sites or youtube, for your casual user, differentiating between legal and illegal services becomes a non-trivial task.
This is stooping so low, SO LOW, and remind me of those FBI agents which hang on #sex chatrooms with girly nicknames, waiting for someone to say something sexy and take him down.
Eclipse has a highly customizable Java code formatter. Although in my experience it has been slightly buggy (ex. one version would not re-wrap 81 character lines) and does not tend to be quite perfect, I find it quite useful.
Great idea! A destructive code formatted versus realtime wrap option.
"MediaDefender was working on an internal project that involved video and didn't realize that people would be trying to go to it and so we didn't password-protect the site," Saaf said. "It was just an oversight from that perspective. This was not an entrapment site, and we were not working with the MPAA on it. In fact, the MPAA didn't even know about it."
So let me get that right. They register a short catchy domain name, for that "internal-only project", host the site on that domain, a site that loudly advertises full free movie downloads.. and they didn't expect anyone to come by!
Imagine their shocked faces when one morning they checked the logs and saw hundreds of people from outside visiting their site! Surprise! And so, what they did? Nothing, they left it running.. that is, until someone wrote the investigation of who's behind the site.
So what was that internal project about anyway? Was it movie server for them to watch movies during lunch breaks? Isn't this violating copyrights in some sort? And why would they produce an application that scans your harddrive and reports media files back to mothership. I mean, do they SO lack control of their own employees?
Bottom line is: jesus, they aren't even TRYING to fool us. Idiots.
... it's some intern's Eclipse code, full of tabbed indentation and java.foo.bar myFooBarObject = new java.foo.bar(someInstanceIStupidlyNamedThis, someInstanceIStupidlyNamedThat); kind-a-code, that they want to give back to a real programmer, who can't fit it on his terminal.... , or you could have deviated (oh the nerve!) from Sun's coding standards and use two spaces instead... stop giving your variables names of 30 characters long that can really only be safely typed with some form of machine-driven autocompletion... use small functions with only three levels of indentation (max).... *Don't use tabs*.... And everything will fit perfectly in 80 columns.
Nice, so we just gave up the likes of 15 years of programming language and IDE development, and what do we gain? Compatibility with 15 year old terminals. Amazing.
I think I'll pass though, and happily tab and autocomplete in my IDE.
We have the CPU power to do so much more now. We shouldn't need to manually wrap our lines - why can't the IDE intelligently wrap it for us, so that everyone gets their screen used to the fullest.
Actually most IDE-s wrap it, and while it may be confusing at times, it works mostly well. Well, most wrap it, except Eclipse. Power of the open source, huh*..
Dating back to the venerable high-school years of my youth, the $10 bucks for food my mom gave me served me well for the entire day. Even now, if I have my breakfast and supper at home, with $10 bucks you still can get yourself a decent snack for lunch in most places. But can we do more?
I am not alone, judging by fat people all around me at work and neighborhood, finding a $10 snack for lunch insufficient, much less for a businessman like me who travels a lot. Given that I have enough money right now to afford 100, hell 1000 meals a day, why not make a good use of my money?
I'm surprised it has been going on for so long. I actually expected the appropriate copyright sedish las to be patched in sync with most other countries, thus outlawing the act of hosting bittorents to illegal content (not direct hosting only).
But this is plain wrong. And smart at the same time. You see, people are predisposed to think more about some situations, and reply automatically to other situations. What the powers-that-be want here, is automatic answers, and no discussion.
Let's try:
Police: "Is hosting links to copyrighted content illegal"? Public: "Well hmmm... that's something to think about. The border definitely isn't clear. We can discuss it"
Police: "Is sharing your personal collection of CD-s with your online friends illegal?" Public: "Well, sharing has always been going on, even before the Internet was round. We did mix-tapes etc. Of course the scale of it demands a discussion.. The border isn't clear again.. "
Police: "They host CHILD PORN. We should block them" Public: "OH YEAH! Definitely, block 'em right now! Monsters!"
I have a hard time believing any phone sold 22 million in 3 months. Maybe over the lifetime of the phone. Lets ask google what it thinks.
No you're right, the 22 million were for that *brand*, not the *model*. I fugured that out when I posted but there's no edit button..:P
That said, we don't count each individual model of iPod for a different iPod (black iPod, big iPod, small iPod, G1 iPod, G4 iPod, whatever), so I'm just counting how much a company sells in principle.
The decision from Apple to keep the models number down is their decision, with some benefits and some drawbacks. What matters is the big picture.
Have ANY of those others been even nearly as successful as the iPhone has already been?
I advise you to look at hard numbers when talking about success, since "recent hype" metrics are wildly inaccurate.
For example, let's see, I have a Sony Ericsson. How many were sold from this one model? 22 million in Q1 2007 (3 months).
How many has iPhone sold? 0.5 million. Of course, iPhone is just hot out of the oven, but I only trust numbers, so I'll wait and see how it does for, say, 3 months.
If it tops other phone makers, I'll agree with your sentiment.
"As a gay man, I take positive representations where I can get them. But anytime we can get some good press, it helps us all."
Oh:P, well I hope the following headlines make you feel better then:
"2008 - the year of metrosexual fashion" "Bush admits he's kinda gay" "Gays are on average 0.15% smarter than non-gay people. Bisexuals stand on average between both averages." "Ubuntu with a new slogan: The Linux for gay people (tm)" "Experts counter the claims of FCC that gay people are more vulnerable since they're too open"
Take no offense, I just accept gays as I accept any other people, and all people should be able to handle a joke or two;)
Honestly, I've no idea why smart people keep deluding themselves in "next year it'll be different" fantasies.
Check this from 2005: "Jack Messman, chief executive of networking software vendor Novell says that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop. According to Messman the catalyst will be the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and the high costs associated with upgrading."
Like a mirror of the current story. Totally. What happened? Nothing. Linux is still exactly where it was.
The truth is, if Linux had any reasons to suddenly take over the market, we'd be having tangible effects and numbers for this RIGHT NOW.
Things don't change overnight. Of course it's tempting to just imagine how the calendar changing digits from 2007 to 2008 suddenly means a whole new universe of possibilities. But it's stupid.
Do you remember how people thought that year 2000 will suddenly bring flying cars and futuristic glassy cities all of a sudden (amongst religious freaks expecting the end of the world and Y2K paranoia)? Did it?
No, just on January 2000, it was exactly one day after Dec 31 1999. And in a day, only so much can happen.
There are thousands of phones out there - why concentrate such incredible efforts on the iPhone specifically? Don't the other phones out there need to... uhmmm...
Oh, ok, the other phones have API and aren't locked to AT&T.
... and that another almost-me is wasting time on a Friday night posting on slashdot, while another almost-me is partying it up like there's no tomorrow (of course for trhat doppelganger, there may not be a tomorrow...)
Funny thing is, in the almost-this other universe everyone who parties on a Friday night is a geek loser, and social people all post on Slashdot every day.
Now the only thing you gotta do, is devise a machine that lets you two swap the universes.
Slashdot Mirror
1. check for disasters that happened while you were away
2. coffee
3. plan the day
Mr. Dust Storm, marsian: "Hey, rovers, nice research you got running there. It'll be a shame if something terrible, HORRIBLE is to happen with it. Maybe you wanna go home and avoid that, uh?" (waves a knife in front of the rovers)
"Yea, here's my argument: I don't actually like big breasted blonde blue-eyed women."
OIC, because YOU don't fit the theory, it MUST be wrong...
Who the hell fits anyway? Stereotypical Joe Shmoe, your unemployed playboy neighbor?
I'm a human being, or you think I should prove I'm not some sorta alien life with alergy to blonde.
The world must be a pretty boring place in Stereotype Pseudo-science land. BTW, all this conversation we've led so far. It's to get us laid. Ponder that. The article claims all we do comes back to that.
I hope this guy does better than Steorn, which claimed that they could throw away physics and produce free energy. You can see how well this went.
This guy has a beef with mathematics, since he wants solutions to be developed be more naturally. Well, natural intelligence took several million years to develop adaptively, but if I told my client "I'll take your spec and let it 'evolve' into a solution for the next 100 000 years", there's quite the possibility he'll find someone who knows math instead.
He's right about one thing, and in fact I've said this myself lots of times: lots of the consumer apps don't need heavy math to build. they just need work, good UI and adherence to functionality specs.
But all of this "easy development" is still built upon math libraries we take for granted (os kernel and management, image and video compression libraries, DSP libraries, sorting algorithms etc).
As a quick test: let's try and remove all math related machine commands from a CPU and try to work a usable solution with that.. Good luck.
I don't like people who reject hundreds of years of science work (math) and offer nothing as alternative, except vague dreams about more natural computing.
Do you have any evidence or argument that these are incorrect assertions, or are you just pulling that out of thin air?
Yea, here's my argument: I don't actually like big breasted blonde blue-eyed women. They look fine on a photoshopped picture, but I prefer brunettes in real life. Is something messed up with my DNA?
And seriously: when someone claims a bunch of ridiculous facts, the burden's on him/her to prove it and refer us to the work the statements have been built upon. It's not my job to prove them wrong, since I rejected them already and don't care at all what they think about it.
Those aren't just "politically incorrect observations". They're just incorrect observations.
It's a poor "mix-and-match" mixture of poorly carried out studies, wrong assumptions, "facts" pulled out of thin air, and just plain pseudo-science.
All of the reasons why we prefer one or another physical trait in each other is dumbed down to "it makes you look healthier". But we actually knew thus far, thank you very much. The actual reasons are usually way more subtle and related to the way our brains have evolved to process information, and the resulting perception we have for the world around us.
But why not - let's dumb it all down. The condescending tone doesn't help either.
To top it all, after you've done reading the article, this online magazine offers a handy form:
"Find a therapist near you"
I suggest you check it out, since after you're done with this article, you'll need it.
Good point. Ignoring whitespace is not trivial and differs among languages. Amusingly, your post ended up formatted wrong because HTML ignored your whitespace.
Yea I cracked up when I saw my post after the fact. Good thing I didn't opt for the "Python code blocks" example...
So.. wait, you paid $40 to get the PDF and post it here?
Wow, someone's desperate for karma.
"And just to stay on topic: human factors researchers have found that a line length of 65-70 is best for scanning. That leaves 10 or so columns for assorted decorations and programming language requirements (FORTRAN, I'm looking at your columns 1-6)."
Were those researchers using Apple II.
Code isn't just "any text". There's lots of indenting, and colorized syntax helps scanning immensely.
I've been using 80 columns to this day for comments, but the immense wrapping was pissing me off last couple of months. I just switch to 132 and it's just perfect.
True, it is a problem. Why can't diff just ignore whitespace?
Because those two would be the same:
hi = "hello world";
hi = "hello world";
The "wasted on Coke" phase:
:P damn it.
The feeling can be described as feeling little bubbles grow in your brain and blow up, your eyes kinda wanna get as far away as possible from the bubbles.
There are also bubbles in your throat, and sometimes your feet.
Wait.. there must've been something else in that Coke
Which indicates (as others have said here) that this outfit is either a. run by fools or b. into something a bit more devious. Personally, given the caliber of their employers, I'd vote for the latter.
What bothers me, they obviously have no problem with this idea, and they may try again (but covering their tracks better). I wonder how they'll use the collected evidence in court that way though.
There's something wrong when you offer "full movie downloads!" on your site, and just checking it out constitutes an offense. Most people don't even know it's illegal.
And it may very well not be: with companies like cnn, cbs, bbc starting to offer free shows streaming on their own sites or youtube, for your casual user, differentiating between legal and illegal services becomes a non-trivial task.
This is stooping so low, SO LOW, and remind me of those FBI agents which hang on #sex chatrooms with girly nicknames, waiting for someone to say something sexy and take him down.
Eclipse has a highly customizable Java code formatter. Although in my experience it has been slightly buggy (ex. one version would not re-wrap 81 character lines) and does not tend to be quite perfect, I find it quite useful.
Great idea! A destructive code formatted versus realtime wrap option.
And how do they call this one? "diff destroyer"?
The full response was:
"MediaDefender was working on an internal project that involved video and didn't realize that people would be trying to go to it and so we didn't password-protect the site," Saaf said. "It was just an oversight from that perspective. This was not an entrapment site, and we were not working with the MPAA on it. In fact, the MPAA didn't even know about it."
So let me get that right. They register a short catchy domain name, for that "internal-only project", host the site on that domain, a site that loudly advertises full free movie downloads.. and they didn't expect anyone to come by!
Imagine their shocked faces when one morning they checked the logs and saw hundreds of people from outside visiting their site! Surprise! And so, what they did? Nothing, they left it running.. that is, until someone wrote the investigation of who's behind the site.
So what was that internal project about anyway? Was it movie server for them to watch movies during lunch breaks? Isn't this violating copyrights in some sort? And why would they produce an application that scans your harddrive and reports media files back to mothership. I mean, do they SO lack control of their own employees?
Bottom line is: jesus, they aren't even TRYING to fool us. Idiots.
... it's some intern's Eclipse code, full of tabbed indentation and java.foo.bar myFooBarObject = new java.foo.bar(someInstanceIStupidlyNamedThis, someInstanceIStupidlyNamedThat); kind-a-code, that they want to give back to a real programmer, who can't fit it on his terminal. ... , or you could have deviated (oh the nerve!) from Sun's coding standards and use two spaces instead... stop giving your variables names of 30 characters long that can really only be safely typed with some form of machine-driven autocompletion ... use small functions with only three levels of indentation (max). ... *Don't use tabs* .... And everything will fit perfectly in 80 columns.
Nice, so we just gave up the likes of 15 years of programming language and IDE development, and what do we gain? Compatibility with 15 year old terminals. Amazing.
I think I'll pass though, and happily tab and autocomplete in my IDE.
We have the CPU power to do so much more now. We shouldn't need to manually wrap our lines - why can't the IDE intelligently wrap it for us, so that everyone gets their screen used to the fullest.
..
Actually most IDE-s wrap it, and while it may be confusing at times, it works mostly well.
Well, most wrap it, except Eclipse. Power of the open source, huh*
* I am an Eclipse user.
Dating back to the venerable high-school years of my youth, the $10 bucks for food my mom gave me served me well for the entire day. Even now, if I have my breakfast and supper at home, with $10 bucks you still can get yourself a decent snack for lunch in most places. But can we do more?
I am not alone, judging by fat people all around me at work and neighborhood, finding a $10 snack for lunch insufficient, much less for a businessman like me who travels a lot. Given that I have enough money right now to afford 100, hell 1000 meals a day, why not make a good use of my money?
I'm surprised it has been going on for so long. I actually expected the appropriate copyright sedish las to be patched in sync with most other countries, thus outlawing the act of hosting bittorents to illegal content (not direct hosting only).
But this is plain wrong. And smart at the same time. You see, people are predisposed to think more about some situations, and reply automatically to other situations. What the powers-that-be want here, is automatic answers, and no discussion.
Let's try:
Police: "Is hosting links to copyrighted content illegal"?
Public: "Well hmmm... that's something to think about. The border definitely isn't clear. We can discuss it"
Police: "Is sharing your personal collection of CD-s with your online friends illegal?"
Public: "Well, sharing has always been going on, even before the Internet was round. We did mix-tapes etc. Of course the scale of it demands a discussion.. The border isn't clear again.. "
Police: "They host CHILD PORN. We should block them"
Public: "OH YEAH! Definitely, block 'em right now! Monsters!"
I have a hard time believing any phone sold 22 million in 3 months. Maybe over the lifetime of the phone. Lets ask google what it thinks.
:P
No you're right, the 22 million were for that *brand*, not the *model*. I fugured that out when I posted but there's no edit button..
That said, we don't count each individual model of iPod for a different iPod (black iPod, big iPod, small iPod, G1 iPod, G4 iPod, whatever), so I'm just counting how much a company sells in principle.
The decision from Apple to keep the models number down is their decision, with some benefits and some drawbacks. What matters is the big picture.
Have ANY of those others been even nearly as successful as the iPhone has already been?
I advise you to look at hard numbers when talking about success, since "recent hype" metrics are wildly inaccurate.
For example, let's see, I have a Sony Ericsson. How many were sold from this one model? 22 million in Q1 2007 (3 months).
How many has iPhone sold? 0.5 million. Of course, iPhone is just hot out of the oven, but I only trust numbers, so I'll wait and see how it does for, say, 3 months.
If it tops other phone makers, I'll agree with your sentiment.
"As a gay man, I take positive representations where I can get them. But anytime we can get some good press, it helps us all."
:P, well I hope the following headlines make you feel better then:
;)
Oh
"2008 - the year of metrosexual fashion"
"Bush admits he's kinda gay"
"Gays are on average 0.15% smarter than non-gay people. Bisexuals stand on average between both averages."
"Ubuntu with a new slogan: The Linux for gay people (tm)"
"Experts counter the claims of FCC that gay people are more vulnerable since they're too open"
Take no offense, I just accept gays as I accept any other people, and all people should be able to handle a joke or two
Honestly, I've no idea why smart people keep deluding themselves in "next year it'll be different" fantasies.
Check this from 2005: "Jack Messman, chief executive of networking software vendor Novell says that 2006 will see widespread adoption of Linux on the corporate desktop. According to Messman the catalyst will be the release of Microsoft Windows Vista and the high costs associated with upgrading."
Like a mirror of the current story. Totally. What happened? Nothing. Linux is still exactly where it was.
The truth is, if Linux had any reasons to suddenly take over the market, we'd be having tangible effects and numbers for this RIGHT NOW.
Things don't change overnight. Of course it's tempting to just imagine how the calendar changing digits from 2007 to 2008 suddenly means a whole new universe of possibilities. But it's stupid.
Do you remember how people thought that year 2000 will suddenly bring flying cars and futuristic glassy cities all of a sudden (amongst religious freaks expecting the end of the world and Y2K paranoia)? Did it?
No, just on January 2000, it was exactly one day after Dec 31 1999. And in a day, only so much can happen.
title = "2008 - year of Linux desktop?";
:P
You idiots! How many times do I tell you. You don't hardcode dynamically changing variables all over your code:
title = ((new Date()).currentYear()+1).toString()+" - year of Linux desktop?";
Aaah.. that's better now
There are thousands of phones out there - why concentrate such incredible efforts on the iPhone specifically? Don't the other phones out there need to... uhmmm...
Oh, ok, the other phones have API and aren't locked to AT&T.
I get it now.
... and that another almost-me is wasting time on a Friday night posting on slashdot, while another almost-me is partying it up like there's no tomorrow (of course for trhat doppelganger, there may not be a tomorrow ...)
Funny thing is, in the almost-this other universe everyone who parties on a Friday night is a geek loser, and social people all post on Slashdot every day.
Now the only thing you gotta do, is devise a machine that lets you two swap the universes.