Tell that to the Chinese. Anyone who's ever been to China will know that the entire communal transport system is based on "left-over" buses from all parts of Europe, including Eastern Europe. They tear out the innards and replace them with electric motors, sometimes leaving stuff hanging out from the back.

Funny thing is, their buses are more frequent and more on-time than the ones in my "developed" country, Denmark, where the buses are sparkling new and never on time ;)

Well, as I always say, "If you can't pronounce it, don't put it in your mouth."

Lemon. PASS
Horse. PASS
Pee. PASS
Polyethylendicarbonate. FAIL
Arnold Schwarzenegger. FAIL ...and so on.

Well, either that, or Microsoft adheres to Darwinian standards.

It's like the self-peeling, self-feeding banana. So the ape is too dumb to peel it and eat it itself? Let an ebola-diseased fungus "auto-peel" it, and if the monkey dies from it, well that's natural selection for you, right there.

So only 60% pirated, eh?

Congratulations on that! You beat everything else!

Stil sucks to be so crappy that one wouldn't even pirate the OS, though, right? Ah, well, I promise to listen to more stories of your world. It's interesting, really, I mean that, good with some change to the real world :)

XOXO

Well, they're recognizing the symptoms, but missing the point completely.

It's the typical IT professional's misconception: "I'm using computers, therefore my skills are based on mathematics."

No, no, no, no, no. A programmer is a linguistic being. Mathematical skills are most definitely a plus, but in my experience, the most gifted developers are the ones who are also able to express themselves verbally and in writing, and who understand the difference between the thing and "the thing".

Mastering a programming LANGUAGE is different to mastering a human language only in that when programming, you're actually CREATING a language. The levels of abstraction are immense when you know what you're doing, as is the power, and really - if non-geeks like Heidegger, Foucault, Berger and Luckmann had the tools back then that we have know, they'd been friggin' ecstatic!

You want a good developer? Look at how the resumé and application are written and constructed. You can sort out the first 90% of crud right there. Find someone who knows how to express himself or herself concisively and correctly and you have a starting point.

(Btw, I'm Danish, so I know my English is crap ;) )

That settles it. I'm NOT purchasing any new hardware until 2018.

Yeah, you see, what would happen when using that plan, is that the top 1,000 sites would become the top 1,001 to top 2,000 sites.

Once you start to understand http://nepomuk.semanticdesktop.org/xwiki/bin/view/Main1/some of the things in the pipeline for KDE beginning with 4.0, you start to get that tickling sensation in your stomach. There's no other desktop out there with that kind of potential.

In the attached article, if people could distinguish between an MP3 and FLAC, it was because the MP3 was good enough no flaws could be detected. That's fine; people can't distinguish good compression from the real thing. However, if they COULD distinguish an MP3, but preferred to the flac, it was because they found the error pleasing... just like you and tapes.

That's a really good point! As it is today, we (musicians using computers, and producers) use plugins to re-create compression artifacts of tape machines and tube amps, hiss, pops, and crackles from vinyl source and imperfect sound booths and studio rooms, distortion from amps, etc. Some of those plugins cost thousands of dollars.

Sure, part of it is making up for the shortcomings of a 44.1kHz/16-bit eventual downsample, but most of it is about recreating what people have come accustomed to perceiving as the "right quality" of sound.

Now, as much as I loathe the lisping, watery and distorted sound of treble when exposed to bad temporal digital compression, this might just be what the new generations perceive as being the "authentic quality of sound".

We didn't have the fidelity or clarity when we were young that the CD introduced, and we're producing plugins to recreate some of the "shortcomings". Why should this be any different from the way the new generations approach music?

Argh! Can't... find... anything... to... say... that's... more... funny... than what they're already saying!

The holy book heads' battle with science a.k.a. lucency a.k.a. anti-brainwash a.k.a. non-bullshit is much akin to a talking monkey trying to explain the passing of seasons as somehow being ultimately tied to the taste of bananas.

They're just so funny!

Except, of course, when they go postal with the crusading, and the suicide bombing, and the child molestation, and the... Ah well, maybe it's not so funny after all...

It's exactly algorithms like the one used by Pandora that make me agree with the viewpoint that it's not possibly to calculate what "other music" I like based upon the "known music" that I like.

Anyone with a preference for Electro Pop will likely have been wondering when the hell Pandora would learn the difference between Miss Kittin and Scooter after mindlessly clicking "Dislike" on eurodance tracks when Pandora fails to see the difference between one type of electronic music with a repetitive beat and another.

The only really worthful algorithm we'll ever manage to produce is one that uses the collective intelligence of all its users.

Stop being arithmetic supergeeks wanting to put everything inside a box, and start figuring out how to get all these weird unpredictable people to input valuable data into your system.

Google figured this out more than a decade ago, so why are we still seeing stupid mathematical and "pattern-based" algorithms every year?

The thing about tests like these is that they say nothing about quality in general or "the truth" as perceived by the individual.

The majority of people in historic Germany voted for Hitler.
The majority of people thought DDT was a good idea for keeping moths out of your clothes.
The majority of people are more scared of dying in a terrorist attack than of taking a leathal step in the bath (http://freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2362835/posts).
The majority of Americans don't know that Georgia is not just an American state. ...and so forth.

You can either learn from this that any selected majority of people are idiots, or that they just have different opinions, but that - thank you scientists - there are actually non-idiots out there working hard to provide crisp sounding silky smooth feinschmecker audio fidelity for the ones of us who can actually tell a difference.

Think of it this way: 1/3 thinks that 48kbps AAC+ sounds better that 160kbps OGG Vorbis... Well, don't throw out those broken loudspeakers just yet - there's a market stock-full of suckers out there just begging to buy them from you, just as long as you tell 'em they're 48kbps Ready (TM).