I second that. "On Intelligence" is a great book, and although I like physics and CS more than biology, it has seriously caused me to think of pursuing a career in neuroscience, simply because it shows how little we truly know about ourselves.
It was quite serious. Some people may be constrained by money, and a difference between having a GPS and camera and not having them may be a deal-saver. Power-users may want a faster phone, maybe with a different processor or more memory. Like it or not, Apple can't make a phone which satisfies everyone. With different hardware, maybe you can get a phone perfect for you - or who knows, maybe a company will make them on order sometime in the future, like Dell does with computers. Honestly, I don't see what you find so funny about this list, and I don't see the need for a snarky response.
Hey, maybe you don't want to pay an extra $100 for a GPS gizmo you'd never use. Or a camera, if you have a small camera outside of your phone. Or maybe you want some extra RAM in your phone (for the upcoming days when phones may be doing some more intensive things?). Or a replaceable battery! The list goes on and on.
I think he was joking? At least, I sincerely hope he was joking... I'd suggest doing it for a few more months, and if nothing improves after that, maybe start looking for a new job. Living for a long period of time with a job you hate might not be good for you. :D
Well, actually... that takes me to my iGoogle pages, and you know, with the latest redesign... * starts bitching about minor unimportant things while ignoring the general benefits of the iGoogle homepage redesign :D
I think you might be exaggerating how inaccessible 3d animation and rendering is. Pretty much anyone can download Blender3d (blender.org) and learn it in a year or two well enough to make decent animations. (It'd take a lot of practice, of course, but it's still not that hard)
A friend of mine was being taught Java in an introductory programming course (although he already knew some BASIC). He was having a lot of trouble, so I introduced him to Lisp... After touring through some of the more basic features (no macro-writing or call/cc), he responded with, "Whoa... This is so much simpler than Java, it makes so much more sense."
My take on that was that the only reason people find Java easier is because it's more similar to other curly-brace languages, the ones they already know. If you take a newcomer to programming, Lisp just may actually be simpler. So the unwashed masses still have some hope.
Because as far as I know, MIDI uses pre-recorded sounds to synthesize tracks. This, on the other hand, simulates the physics of the given instrument, which lets the program create much more complex sounds. This has the type of potential that MIDI cannot have in anything resembling its current form.
Hey, I think just being away from HN for a while is good for me. I haven't been here in a week or so and I'm pretty sure my productivity rose. Though it's fun to come back and read some of the stuff here when I feel burnt out :)
Has this always been possible? (By always, of course, I mean these past years.) Because this is the first time I've heard of a successful hand transplant, or, actually, any hand transplant at all.
Whoa, thanks so much. Didn't know about that. I haven't tried it yet, but based on it's latest 'supported devices list' it supports my ATI Radeon HD 2600 XT.
Wow. I read the second method, tried it, and it just worked. I don't know how that explanation helped me, but something just clicked. Now I can whistle! (Though not loudly yet...)
In some places, sadly, getting a low B is considered 'failing'... In most of my classes, at least. But I suppose the pressure gets you to work more quickly and efficiently.
If you want italics, put whatever you're italicizing in asterisks. This is italics, and I typed that by writing "(asterisk) This is italics (asterisk)"
Not without a pretty weird lisp VM or something. Or maybe separating different threads into processes and doing the communication hidden inside the macro? Hum, I dunno. Might be worth looking into, but it seems either very hard or impossible... granted, I don't have as much experience with macros as other people on this site might have, so maybe someone else will correct me in my assessment.
Well, I'm youth. What would you do if you were in my place? (High school, likes hacking, general geek, plays DnD, etc)
I'm actually sincerely curious, since somehow lately I've been feeling that I'm not doing anything significantly awesome or useful - nothing I'll remember in a year or two.
So that's what was missing! I knew something was disrupting my normal flow of analyzing search results... and now that you mention it I realize I usually look at the URL's, sometimes even before the article title.
Somehow, that line just has a brilliant ring of truth to it: Once a hacker, always a hacker. And it's probably right. You can't go back to a life of normalcy after experiencing the exhilaration of hacking away at something for hours on end and finally getting it. What you can do, though, is apply your mind to the social system - as you said, hack it.
A lot of nerds and geeks (the ones I know at least) are unpopular not because they're unpleasant people (they aren't), but because they don't understand how the social system works, what you're allowed to say and what you aren't (and when). If you just watch people talking around you you can easily notice what annoys people or causes them to end the conversation, and avoid doing it. If you just apply your mind to everyday life, being involved in your surrounding culture really isn't that hard.
It did that to me for a while, too; I would always want to explain to them my latest idea or tell them about some awesome new language or something. They would yawn.
They're still awesome people, but sometimes I wish there were people around me who I could associate with and discuss computer hobbies with. (Sadly, being in school doesn't give you many opportunities to meet new people very often, it seems to me...)
Fair enough. Although still, I fail to see how Google being an advertising company makes it any better or worse than any other company?
The only possible Google-related complaint I can see towards Android (ignoring the usual, tech-wise complaints) is that since it's made by Google maybe it will have advertising... Or something along the lines of that? But I haven't seen or heard anyone saying anything about ads on Android, so I don't think Android being made by Google is any worse than Mac OSX for iPhone being made by Apple.
Quite the opposite, since at least Android gives you some sort of freedom in the source.
And speaking of the FSF - I have to agree, they do seem a bit like crazy cultists sometimes. Stallman, for instance.