The two are loosely correlated. A much more important indicator than size is the complexity of the brain's internal structure. Density of neurons, number of interconnections, etc. To put a tech spin on it, a larger CPU might mean more processing power, but if it has fewer transistors per square inch, the computing power won't be any higher. These IQ comparisons always hold the internal structure to be constant.
By comparison, Homo neanderthalensis had a larger brain than Homo sapiens, on average. But while they are accepted to have been quite intelligent, they are seldom thought to have been more intelligent than H. sapiens.
It seems more likely that nature would select for a smaller, more densely packed brain than a larger, loosely packed brain. Big brain != more complex.
That's a big assumption, though. Look at the current state of health in this country. Our baseline is *waaaaaay* below that. For the average overweight, malnourished, sleep-deprived adult, any one of those boring answers would result in a very noticeable improvement.
Assuming you already have someone who has properly cared for their body, my next step would be to train the mind. Try an assortment of methods to improve the efficiency with which you think. Play with things like mnemonics to help your memory, for example.
Another boring answer, I know, but I see artificial solutions as a proper choice only when you have exhausted the natural solutions. Much like the focus on muscle size. I'd rather take X pounds of muscle and learn how to utilize it twice as efficiently than ingest some random magic powder to double my muscle mass while remaining at the baseline efficiency.
I think I'm the only 20-something techie who refuses to get a smartphone. Of course, I've run the numbers and I average about 17 minutes a day on the phone, so I'm a bit of an oddity all around.
Problem there is that doing so pretty well blacklists you from ever working in the industry again if your name ever gets out. Not feasible unless you're getting enough to retire on. In this case, I don't want to screw the company just to get a policy changed. My boss went ballistic when I reported what I'd found, and legit licenses were immediately ordered. This was just a case of someone (no longer employed) acting without permission.
Of course, if you really want to get vindictive when leaving, report your company's OSHA violations (practically every company has them, regardless of their claims of OSHA compliance). Nothing like a surprise visit from an OSHA inspector to really make the owners love you.
Honestly, it really isn't that complicated. Like most "problems", really.
--Eat healthy. You need the right balance of chemicals in the brain. --Sleep more. Studies consistently show the link between sleep and memory. Doesn't have to be 8 hours. I recall hearing that sleep goes through 90-minute cycles, so a multiple of that might be optimal. --Exercise. Increased cardiovascular fitness means more blood travels to the brain.
A normal body doesn't require any kind of special help to function well. Just like dieting. You lose weight by eating less and exercising, not by living off grapefruit or cutting out all carbs. Just let your body do what it was meant to do.
Now, if you have some sort of genetic anomaly, this may not apply.
Agreed. Many of my problems come from not having the machines locked down (I've been able to reverse a few long-standing convenience-over-security decisions, but not this one). I've found BitTorrent clients installed, cracked copies of extremely expensive software (many thousands of $$$ per 1-user license), etc. Every machine has a different mix of software, different set of app patches, different versions of apps. No consistency at all.
Locked machines with preset deployment builds for each department would make my life so much easier.
Yeah, it is insane, I'm not arguing that. But it happens all the time.
What often ends up happening is the client rejects (A) because of the incurred cost of rescheduling deployment and marketing, refuses (B) and points out some key clauses buried in the million-page contract, leading to: (C) you cave, because the contract you signed has so many clauses and penalties that the client has you by the short hairs and you, being a small development shop, don't have the capital to sustain a protracted legal battle over the contractual obligations. At that point, development processes go out the window and the company does whatever it has to just to get paid.
If the Indian programmers are sub-par why hire them. The companies are in USA, I assume they want workable products devloped by competent programmers.
No, they want a product just good enough not to get sued into oblivion for breach of contract, and they want it done as cheaply as possible.
Look at the code for some random app. Chances are you'll see the same crap over and over: basic library functions reinvented (multiple permutations of IsDigit() in the same "utility" file, DateTime classes, etc), short-sighted moves like hard-coding TLDs in email address field validators, etc. These programmers (be they American or H1B) weren't hired because they are competent, they were hired because they are *cheap*.
Doesn't surprise me in the least. Freezing a code base months in advance is extremely *rare*. If you're building an OS, maybe. But for a business app, you might freeze a week or two at most.
And anyone who has been around has seen this scenario play out at least once: you freeze the code, run your final tests, and the boss hands down a list of alterations from the client at the last minute. You aren't allowed to delay the release because the client has spent a ton of money on promotional media, and the changes *must* be in place for the release. It sucks, but coding right down to the wire happens all the time. That's what happens when you let bosses slash development time.
I've had similar experiences. I have a larger-sized Swiss Army Knife that I carry around. I've taken it traveling numerous times, and only *once* has it been found. Where? Asheville, NC of all places. Tampa, Ft. Lauderdale, Charlotte, Atlanta, no problem getting through. The only place it gets caught is a little podunk airport with so few commercial flights that the ticket agent actually remembers you if you fly through more than once a month.
The one time they caught it is actually a great story highlighting the absurdness of the whole system. When the screener spotted the knife, he gave me two choices: surrender it, or take it out to my car. I chose the latter. Only instead of going to my car (parked too far away), I went into the little store and got a plastic bag. I went outside, wrapped the knife in the bag and buried it in a potted plant two feet outside the terminal. When I flew back in a few days later, I dug it back up and went home.
Now, where we my bags during all of this? At the security checkpoint. That's right, they allowed me to exit the building while leaving my bags at the checkpoint, so that I wouldn't have to take them through the scanners a second time.
You do have some options. I can't speak for Halo, as I hate that series, but I can say that my guild when I played WoW was almost entirely female. Just getting an invite as a guy was a challenge. Recommendations from three existing members, socializing with the members to assess my "maturity level", etc. Completely worth it though, without a doubt the best guild I've been in.
Way back in my Quake II days, my clan was "partnered" with a couple others, one of which was an all-female clan. Public servers were always a pain for them, but we hosted private servers where that middle-school "ZOMG!!! U R a girl?!?!" crap was verboten.
I seem to recall one game where you could actually control breast size when creating your character. There was a big outcry from the feminist segment about how sexist the devs were for specifically targeting that feature. You either leave them at a fixed size and piss off a segment of gamers, or make them adjustable and piss off the feminists. Damned either way.
I personally would like to see more realistic character models, though. Mirror's Edge was a nice example (even though I know I'm the only person on Earth who actually played it). Faith and Celeste were certainly endowed, but not to the point of being ridiculous (a la Bloodrayne). Reasonable size, if still somewhat above average. Same for male characters. I don't want to play a character who looks like a poster child for doping.
The bulk of the installs can automated. Once you have a boot environment up with SSH, a remote script can handle the actual install process. Most of the random hardware can still be autodetected in a lot of distros. Sure, it'll take a while, but most of the work is really just watching a script run. I can think of worse ways to spend my day (like babysitting a SQL Server 2008 install).
You'd be surprised at how slowly some companies change.
I recently had to deal with a support issue involving a certain Fortune 500 company that some of our employees collaborate with. They were having trouble chatting with the other company's employees. Do they use Office Communicator? Live Meeting? GoToMeeting? Any of a thousand other modern meeting clients? No, the Fortune 500 company still uses NETMEETING.
Hell, our old website (currently being redesigned) included scripting to bypass a bug in NN 4.X. That browser was dead 6 years ago, and the site was only 4 years old.
True, but in reality *very* few bugs can actually prevent you from playing. The majority of bugs are the mostly harmless variety: terrain glitches, unexpected AI behavior, etc.
Those are gameplay bugs. Game *breaking* bugs are another matter.
Several reasons, really. It depends on a lot on the subject.
In Physics and Math courses, the textbook problems are often solved by the author's students, and are often wrong. Every math course I took (Calculus 1-3, Differential Equations, Engineering Math 1&2) had several cases where one or more homework problems would be incorrect. Same for Physics. For example, pulley system problems where the person doing the illustration accidentally swapped the locations of two forces. Again, these are usually cases where the professor either (1) was in a hurry or (2) most of the work was done by his students. In my Intro to EE course, the problem set was so horribly screwed up (even the sample problems had errors) that our instructor provided everyone with a solutions manual. Why did he use it? Because the choice of textbook was decided by the department, not the professor.
One of my favorite examples was back in high school. We were preparing for a certain standardized test for a comp sci elective I was taking, and we received in advance a copy of the library we would have to work with during the test. While familiarizing ourselves with it, we discovered numerous logic errors, and even a few syntax errors. We corrected them, but when we got around to the test, we discovered the errors had not been corrected by the test provider. So we were taking an exam (for college credit) referencing a library we *knew* was broken, and had to just pretend that it was a black box that actually functioned.
There *are* that many variants of key components. I remember several cases in the past few years where a game failed to function properly on a *single* model of video card because of a bug in the card's programming, or an update to the graphics subsystem of a certain MMO that broke the display on a handful of cards. You can't test on a P4 and say it works on every Intel chipset, you can't test one Radeon and say it works on all ATI cards. Factor in possible issues when combining hardware, and the list grows exponentially.
What ends up happening with the qualified list is that as time goes on, the list gets smaller and smaller as companies work to minimize their liability for returns. We have an app controlling our RFID card reader at work that has, among other things, the following requirements (it will *not* work on anything else): no multi-core processors, 2000 or XP (but only if you don't install SP3, otherwise you have to hack the registry to get it working again). How did they respond when we contacted them for support? "We don't support any setups other than what we listed, so either install it on a machine that meets the specs or pay $8K for an upgrade to a new version." This is how I see the future if we go to a "supported" list. If you don't fit the artificially narrow list, the company will be more than happy to let you pay again for an upgrade that supports current_spec_list+1. Otherwise, you can feel free to sod off.
Ultimately, support lists help the seller, not the buyer, because the seller can decide how narrowly he wants to define the list.
No one runs a game with no software other than the OS installed.
*Raises hand* I do exactly this. All my real work is done in a Linux enviro. My primary machine dual-boots XP exclusively for gaming. Granted, I realize I am an exception to the rule, but be careful with those "no one does X" phrases.
Sellers *choose* to allow returns for buyer's remorse because it is good PR. They are not legally obligated to do so. Similarly, I can *choose* to give you a refund if you don't like your game, but I don't *have* to. If the product/game is defective, then yes, there are legal issues to force me to refund your money. But I'm not aware of any laws in the US forcing me to accept returns for any random reason.
Not really. Getting an illness from his food would be like my software accidentally erasing your hard drive. Those are serious issues that justify a strong response.
A gameplay bug would be more like your hotdog coming with mustard that had no flavor, or a bun that had a hole in it. Annoying, but mostly harmless. And as a small business, I wouldn't have time to personally test every batch of mustard or examine every bun.
Where I grew up, we had a children's science museum (Great Explorations: http://www.greatex.org/index.php ) that I used to visit during summers (they did 1-2 week summer camps). The most popular exhibit (most of them were rotated in and out) was always the Touch Tunnel. Totally dark inside, with corridors, ramps, etc. You had to feel your way through to the end. Kids loved it, even when the lights were on. The idea was really simple: giving kids the experience of relying on something other than their sight, and it was really effective.
It is great to see the author's company contributing to a kid's museum. I still remember some of the things I learned at those summer camps (like the letters of the alphabet in ASL). I always loved learning, but it was those camps that really sparked my interest in the sciences.
I took my adopted sisters there once a few years ago (they were adopted at 5/6 years of age when I was 19). I think I had more fun with the exhibits than they did *grin*
Slashdot Mirror
The two are loosely correlated. A much more important indicator than size is the complexity of the brain's internal structure. Density of neurons, number of interconnections, etc. To put a tech spin on it, a larger CPU might mean more processing power, but if it has fewer transistors per square inch, the computing power won't be any higher. These IQ comparisons always hold the internal structure to be constant.
By comparison, Homo neanderthalensis had a larger brain than Homo sapiens, on average. But while they are accepted to have been quite intelligent, they are seldom thought to have been more intelligent than H. sapiens.
It seems more likely that nature would select for a smaller, more densely packed brain than a larger, loosely packed brain. Big brain != more complex.
That's a big assumption, though. Look at the current state of health in this country. Our baseline is *waaaaaay* below that. For the average overweight, malnourished, sleep-deprived adult, any one of those boring answers would result in a very noticeable improvement.
Assuming you already have someone who has properly cared for their body, my next step would be to train the mind. Try an assortment of methods to improve the efficiency with which you think. Play with things like mnemonics to help your memory, for example.
Another boring answer, I know, but I see artificial solutions as a proper choice only when you have exhausted the natural solutions. Much like the focus on muscle size. I'd rather take X pounds of muscle and learn how to utilize it twice as efficiently than ingest some random magic powder to double my muscle mass while remaining at the baseline efficiency.
I think I'm the only 20-something techie who refuses to get a smartphone. Of course, I've run the numbers and I average about 17 minutes a day on the phone, so I'm a bit of an oddity all around.
Yeah, it's a great operating system. If only it had a decent text editor =)
Problem there is that doing so pretty well blacklists you from ever working in the industry again if your name ever gets out. Not feasible unless you're getting enough to retire on. In this case, I don't want to screw the company just to get a policy changed. My boss went ballistic when I reported what I'd found, and legit licenses were immediately ordered. This was just a case of someone (no longer employed) acting without permission.
Of course, if you really want to get vindictive when leaving, report your company's OSHA violations (practically every company has them, regardless of their claims of OSHA compliance). Nothing like a surprise visit from an OSHA inspector to really make the owners love you.
Honestly, it really isn't that complicated. Like most "problems", really.
--Eat healthy. You need the right balance of chemicals in the brain.
--Sleep more. Studies consistently show the link between sleep and memory. Doesn't have to be 8 hours. I recall hearing that sleep goes through 90-minute cycles, so a multiple of that might be optimal.
--Exercise. Increased cardiovascular fitness means more blood travels to the brain.
A normal body doesn't require any kind of special help to function well. Just like dieting. You lose weight by eating less and exercising, not by living off grapefruit or cutting out all carbs. Just let your body do what it was meant to do.
Now, if you have some sort of genetic anomaly, this may not apply.
Agreed. Many of my problems come from not having the machines locked down (I've been able to reverse a few long-standing convenience-over-security decisions, but not this one). I've found BitTorrent clients installed, cracked copies of extremely expensive software (many thousands of $$$ per 1-user license), etc. Every machine has a different mix of software, different set of app patches, different versions of apps. No consistency at all.
Locked machines with preset deployment builds for each department would make my life so much easier.
For the accountants, a nice big "A" emblazoned on the breast. Perhaps in a lovely scarlet color.
I'm remembering the BOFH episode with the branded shirts.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2002/08/11/bofh_and_the_art/
Yeah, it is insane, I'm not arguing that. But it happens all the time.
What often ends up happening is the client rejects (A) because of the incurred cost of rescheduling deployment and marketing, refuses (B) and points out some key clauses buried in the million-page contract, leading to: (C) you cave, because the contract you signed has so many clauses and penalties that the client has you by the short hairs and you, being a small development shop, don't have the capital to sustain a protracted legal battle over the contractual obligations. At that point, development processes go out the window and the company does whatever it has to just to get paid.
It sucks, but it happens far too often.
If the Indian programmers are sub-par why hire them. The companies are in USA, I assume they want workable products devloped by competent programmers.
No, they want a product just good enough not to get sued into oblivion for breach of contract, and they want it done as cheaply as possible.
Look at the code for some random app. Chances are you'll see the same crap over and over: basic library functions reinvented (multiple permutations of IsDigit() in the same "utility" file, DateTime classes, etc), short-sighted moves like hard-coding TLDs in email address field validators, etc. These programmers (be they American or H1B) weren't hired because they are competent, they were hired because they are *cheap*.
Doesn't surprise me in the least. Freezing a code base months in advance is extremely *rare*. If you're building an OS, maybe. But for a business app, you might freeze a week or two at most.
And anyone who has been around has seen this scenario play out at least once: you freeze the code, run your final tests, and the boss hands down a list of alterations from the client at the last minute. You aren't allowed to delay the release because the client has spent a ton of money on promotional media, and the changes *must* be in place for the release. It sucks, but coding right down to the wire happens all the time. That's what happens when you let bosses slash development time.
I've had similar experiences. I have a larger-sized Swiss Army Knife that I carry around. I've taken it traveling numerous times, and only *once* has it been found. Where? Asheville, NC of all places. Tampa, Ft. Lauderdale, Charlotte, Atlanta, no problem getting through. The only place it gets caught is a little podunk airport with so few commercial flights that the ticket agent actually remembers you if you fly through more than once a month.
The one time they caught it is actually a great story highlighting the absurdness of the whole system. When the screener spotted the knife, he gave me two choices: surrender it, or take it out to my car. I chose the latter. Only instead of going to my car (parked too far away), I went into the little store and got a plastic bag. I went outside, wrapped the knife in the bag and buried it in a potted plant two feet outside the terminal. When I flew back in a few days later, I dug it back up and went home.
Now, where we my bags during all of this? At the security checkpoint. That's right, they allowed me to exit the building while leaving my bags at the checkpoint, so that I wouldn't have to take them through the scanners a second time.
You do have some options. I can't speak for Halo, as I hate that series, but I can say that my guild when I played WoW was almost entirely female. Just getting an invite as a guy was a challenge. Recommendations from three existing members, socializing with the members to assess my "maturity level", etc. Completely worth it though, without a doubt the best guild I've been in.
Way back in my Quake II days, my clan was "partnered" with a couple others, one of which was an all-female clan. Public servers were always a pain for them, but we hosted private servers where that middle-school "ZOMG!!! U R a girl?!?!" crap was verboten.
I seem to recall one game where you could actually control breast size when creating your character. There was a big outcry from the feminist segment about how sexist the devs were for specifically targeting that feature. You either leave them at a fixed size and piss off a segment of gamers, or make them adjustable and piss off the feminists. Damned either way.
I personally would like to see more realistic character models, though. Mirror's Edge was a nice example (even though I know I'm the only person on Earth who actually played it). Faith and Celeste were certainly endowed, but not to the point of being ridiculous (a la Bloodrayne). Reasonable size, if still somewhat above average. Same for male characters. I don't want to play a character who looks like a poster child for doping.
The bulk of the installs can automated. Once you have a boot environment up with SSH, a remote script can handle the actual install process. Most of the random hardware can still be autodetected in a lot of distros. Sure, it'll take a while, but most of the work is really just watching a script run. I can think of worse ways to spend my day (like babysitting a SQL Server 2008 install).
PB is still around in Europe. Last year they were acquired by Acer as a ride-along from the Acer buyout of Gateway.
And yeah, their machines were the pinnacle of shittiness.
You'd be surprised at how slowly some companies change.
I recently had to deal with a support issue involving a certain Fortune 500 company that some of our employees collaborate with. They were having trouble chatting with the other company's employees. Do they use Office Communicator? Live Meeting? GoToMeeting? Any of a thousand other modern meeting clients? No, the Fortune 500 company still uses NETMEETING.
Hell, our old website (currently being redesigned) included scripting to bypass a bug in NN 4.X. That browser was dead 6 years ago, and the site was only 4 years old.
True, but in reality *very* few bugs can actually prevent you from playing. The majority of bugs are the mostly harmless variety: terrain glitches, unexpected AI behavior, etc.
Those are gameplay bugs. Game *breaking* bugs are another matter.
Several reasons, really. It depends on a lot on the subject.
In Physics and Math courses, the textbook problems are often solved by the author's students, and are often wrong. Every math course I took (Calculus 1-3, Differential Equations, Engineering Math 1&2) had several cases where one or more homework problems would be incorrect. Same for Physics. For example, pulley system problems where the person doing the illustration accidentally swapped the locations of two forces. Again, these are usually cases where the professor either (1) was in a hurry or (2) most of the work was done by his students. In my Intro to EE course, the problem set was so horribly screwed up (even the sample problems had errors) that our instructor provided everyone with a solutions manual. Why did he use it? Because the choice of textbook was decided by the department, not the professor.
One of my favorite examples was back in high school. We were preparing for a certain standardized test for a comp sci elective I was taking, and we received in advance a copy of the library we would have to work with during the test. While familiarizing ourselves with it, we discovered numerous logic errors, and even a few syntax errors. We corrected them, but when we got around to the test, we discovered the errors had not been corrected by the test provider. So we were taking an exam (for college credit) referencing a library we *knew* was broken, and had to just pretend that it was a black box that actually functioned.
There *are* that many variants of key components. I remember several cases in the past few years where a game failed to function properly on a *single* model of video card because of a bug in the card's programming, or an update to the graphics subsystem of a certain MMO that broke the display on a handful of cards. You can't test on a P4 and say it works on every Intel chipset, you can't test one Radeon and say it works on all ATI cards. Factor in possible issues when combining hardware, and the list grows exponentially.
What ends up happening with the qualified list is that as time goes on, the list gets smaller and smaller as companies work to minimize their liability for returns. We have an app controlling our RFID card reader at work that has, among other things, the following requirements (it will *not* work on anything else): no multi-core processors, 2000 or XP (but only if you don't install SP3, otherwise you have to hack the registry to get it working again). How did they respond when we contacted them for support? "We don't support any setups other than what we listed, so either install it on a machine that meets the specs or pay $8K for an upgrade to a new version." This is how I see the future if we go to a "supported" list. If you don't fit the artificially narrow list, the company will be more than happy to let you pay again for an upgrade that supports current_spec_list+1. Otherwise, you can feel free to sod off.
Ultimately, support lists help the seller, not the buyer, because the seller can decide how narrowly he wants to define the list.
No one runs a game with no software other than the OS installed.
*Raises hand* I do exactly this. All my real work is done in a Linux enviro. My primary machine dual-boots XP exclusively for gaming. Granted, I realize I am an exception to the rule, but be careful with those "no one does X" phrases.
Sellers *choose* to allow returns for buyer's remorse because it is good PR. They are not legally obligated to do so. Similarly, I can *choose* to give you a refund if you don't like your game, but I don't *have* to. If the product/game is defective, then yes, there are legal issues to force me to refund your money. But I'm not aware of any laws in the US forcing me to accept returns for any random reason.
Not really. Getting an illness from his food would be like my software accidentally erasing your hard drive. Those are serious issues that justify a strong response.
A gameplay bug would be more like your hotdog coming with mustard that had no flavor, or a bun that had a hole in it. Annoying, but mostly harmless. And as a small business, I wouldn't have time to personally test every batch of mustard or examine every bun.
I would love to see this filter of his. I've never seen a filter for *anything* that could truly be said to be 100% accurate.
I like this idea.
Where I grew up, we had a children's science museum (Great Explorations: http://www.greatex.org/index.php ) that I used to visit during summers (they did 1-2 week summer camps). The most popular exhibit (most of them were rotated in and out) was always the Touch Tunnel. Totally dark inside, with corridors, ramps, etc. You had to feel your way through to the end. Kids loved it, even when the lights were on. The idea was really simple: giving kids the experience of relying on something other than their sight, and it was really effective.
It is great to see the author's company contributing to a kid's museum. I still remember some of the things I learned at those summer camps (like the letters of the alphabet in ASL). I always loved learning, but it was those camps that really sparked my interest in the sciences.
I took my adopted sisters there once a few years ago (they were adopted at 5/6 years of age when I was 19). I think I had more fun with the exhibits than they did *grin*