Or, instead of counting, perhaps the chicks maintained a rough mental estimate of how much "parent stuff" was behind each screen. With only five balls, about 20% of the "stuff" moved each time a ball moved, so it's not clear why counting would be necessary to pick the right screen. The interesting thing about counting is that it's discrete and precise, perhaps even symbolic, instead of a rough estimate of continuous quantity. By not explaining how the researchers proved that distinction, the BBC article left out the only thing that makes the experiment interesting. Quite disappointing.

VLC is an extremely sophisticated program for doing video transcoding, etc. It's a testament to the developers that it became known as a good way for regular people to watch videos, despite apparently never being intended for that role. It was never designed for regular use as a video player, and it shows. The UI throws up huge, complex dialogs without provocation -- for instance, when a naive user clicks "Open file" instead of "Quick open file." Despite all the complexity, a bunch of basic conveniences are missing, such as menu items for recently-viewed videos. There's a general lack of polish -- for instance, the progress indicator moves in bigger jumps than it should. The menu layout conforms to no precedent and no user expectations except VLC's own.

There's only one outright bug I know of, but it drives me crazy sometimes: if you want to click on the thingy that indicates where you are in the video and drag it back and forth, you can't just click on it. If you do, the video will jump backwards just as if you clicked on the progress bar to the lift of the indicator. You have to aim a little bit to the right. Usually I aim a couple of pixels to the right of the rightmost edge. That usually works, but sometimes the "sweet spot" is a little to the right or to the left of that spot. Also, while you drag it and right after you let go, the video does a Ma-Ma-Ma-Ma-Max Headroom shake.

All in all, it's a real testament to the technical quality of VLC that it has become so popular with the UI it has. As far as I can tell, most people know about and use VLC because one day they ran into a video file that only VLC handled properly. (For me it started a long time ago with mp4; now I use it for flv and whenever my other video players screw up a DVD menu system.) If all video players handled all files well, VLC would just be used for its more advanced features like transcoding, not for playback.

Thanks for the links. I'm pretty convinced that I "have" Avoidant Personality Disorder, in the sense that I fit the diagnostic criteria; I'm just not convinced it's a useful fact. However, I found a book in the books section on avoidantpersonality.com (Distancing by Martin Kantor) that makes the case for treating AvPD as a gestalt instead of as a collection of loosely related pathologies. I'll have to read it and see if I'm convinced.

As for therapy, you should research the legal dangers and get a grasp on the facts before using them as a reason to avoid therapy. Therapists see a lot of really screwed up, truly dangerous people. If they bothered getting people like us (avoidant, over thirty, no history of suicide attempts or major violence) committed for evaluation, they'd have to do it for the majority of their clients. That wouldn't be good for business.

But, you know, you are avoidant, and I've even seen non-avoidant people make weird excuses to avoid therapy. A doctor friend of mine claims he is afraid his medical license could be suspended if he entered therapy (despite the fact that he has no issues with violence, drug abuse, or personal integrity) or that he might be subject to investigation by the state licensing board. That doesn't even pass the laugh test -- probably half the doctors in every major city are in therapy, and for psychiatrists doing psychotherapy it's kind of a "best practice" to be in therapy oneself. I explained that to him, yet he still finds it a compelling reason to avoid therapy. So you're not in bad company if you're a little irrational that regard :-)

I know of Avoidant Personality Disorder and know I fit the diagnostic criteria, but aside from reading a few overviews I haven't researched it at all. I may have dismissed it prematurely, but it seemed like an arbitrary category that didn't carry any guidance for understanding or treating the condition. That probably reflects my bias: it seems to me that many psychiatric classifications are intuitive and convenient, but not supported by any theoretical or clinical justification. They're just invented to provide mental and linguistic frames of reference in an area where we can't discern any natural structure.

On the other hand, everything you said in your second paragraph except two things (testing friends' loyalty and making excuses to avoid going places with friends) is true of me, too, so maybe Avoidant Personality Disorder is a distinct disorder and not just an abritrary piece carved out of the pie. I should read more about it. Can you point me to anything?

Speaking of pointing people to places, get thee to a therapist, stat. You'll be glad you did. I got lucky and got a congenial one on the first try, but it's common and completely accepted to shop around a bit. If you have any doubts or questions about this, please ask. We can take the conversation to another channel if you want.

I did the hyphen-ass transform on that and got "like-ass burgers" which McDonald's will make sure you never have to give up.

The "other way" may be basically the same, except faster and more reliably without any awareness of what you've actually done. Plus it has a huge head start in development on the "conscious" version.

When I put it that way it sounds like a "mature black-box library vs. home-grown kludge" situation. However, I think a more common analogy is "specialized hardware vs. software simulation." (Sorry, I don't do cars.)

Be that as it may, I was describing Martin Luther King, Jr. Whatever loss, misery, and devastation he left behind him in his personal life, I think he comes off pretty well if you take a larger view.

Even worse, the popularity of Asperger's as a self-diagnosis among geeks prevents them from getting a better grasp on their problems. Many other causes can produce similar symptoms, and even when a diagnosis of Asperger's is accurate, it isn't the last word on a person's mental health. An Aspie can have other psychological problems.

For instance, I had long thought I might be an Aspie, and when I ended up in therapy, I waited to see if my therapist mentioned it. (On my first visit, I spotted a couple of books about Asperger's on her bookshelf, so I figured she would be a good check on my self-diagnosis.) After several visits she did mention that my description of my childhood experiences sounded like I could have Asperger's, and she knew an authority on Asperger's who could screen me. At the time, my health insurance wouldn't cover the screening (a couple thousand bucks,) so I basically asked, is the screening worth it? She said it would be interesting to have a more expert opinion on whether it was really Asperger's, but:

1. My current level of functioning didn't support a diagnosis, so the diagnosis would be retrospective.
2. My problems were at most indirectly related to Asperger's, in that I was deeply formed by my early social difficulties, whatever caused them.
3. Asperger's would be one factor among several traumatic influences in my childhood.
4. There was no particular question about my current condition that would be cleared up by a diagnosis of Asperger's.
5. All in all, the course of my therapy would be minimally affected by a diagnosis of Asperger's.

This from a therapist who had books about Asperger's on her shelf and who suggested I get screened for it without any prompting on my part. Clearly she was interested in Asperger's and knowledgable about it. She just didn't think it was that important for my further development.

Contrast that with the many geeks who (without any professional diagnosis) use Asperger's to wholly define their past experience and future potential.

As someone who manifested many Asperger's symptoms as a child, I remember thinking all the time, "It would be obviously better if everyone did X, but they don't, because they're stupid." And you know what? None of my insights did anybody a damn bit of good. Aspies are great at pushing forward some fields (such as computing,) but they fail badly at fields that require influencing other people. RMS is only a partial exception to this.

One example: Aspies are more ethically daring basically because they don't recognize a lot of the small-scale pain they cause. It's easy for them to see the social big picture because they don't see the social small picture. They don't hesitate to call for large changes because they don't understand the cost of the social and cultural disruption that large changes cause, or they dismiss them as irrelevant. Calling for change doesn't make it happen. You need people who can make changes happen by hacking the culture. For instance, Ghandi came up with a theory of nonviolent resistance that meshed perfectly with Hindu culture, while at the same time making it open to all Indians. Then Martin Luther King, Jr. adapted ideas from Ghandi and elsewhere to a completely different cultural context.

An Aspie in MLK's place would have said, "Look, these Indian guys totally kicked ass with this approach, and I know we're black and Christian but we just need to forget about that because this stuff FUCKING WORKS. I mean, this is so OBVIOUS and I can't believe you guys are getting hung up on the fact that these ideas seem a little alien. They make perfect sense in a Hindu context, and if you're interested in that I can recommend some scriptures. If you're not going to bother understanding it, then just SHUT THE HELL UP and let the smart people talk. What the hell is wrong with you fucking dickhead morons? I give up. I can't make it any more obvious than I already have. Why don't you just go and play basketball and be cool and have sex and all that stuff that's so much more important than the FREEDOM OF OUR RACE. Idiots."

Aspie-type people make valuable contributions to society (and I have to believe this or I'd just off myself) but Aspies are impotent in the face of many important problems. Sometimes the right guy for the job is someone who is really unattractive from a geeky point of view -- like a slick, charismatic, self-aggrandizing, womanizing minister.

A guy with a technical degree who goes straight into management is not a technical guy. He will start out as naive about technical issues as the average green hire and go downhill from there. We need people with ten years' technical experience moving into management.

SWT's performance varie depending on the toolkit used to implement it. Unfortunately, the GTK+ implementation is notoriously slow, and nobody outside IBM knows whether a Qt version will ever be released.

It's simpler to use something already built and tested, with known strengths and weaknesses, multiple mostly-compatible implementations available, tool support, and plenty of books and trained personnel to choose from, than to use a much simpler solution that is less well understood, or worse, one that I have to design and implement myself.

Or, to put it another way, why do the Chinese and Indians do business with each other in English when Esperanto would suffice?

Don't judge based on this article. The author's "young guys playing fast and loose" vs. "stuffy but reliable old guys" way of explaining things misses the point. Either he's a bad writer, or he doesn't know what he's talking about. A much better treatment can be found here.

Thanks for the tips. I'll take a look at lazy-lock. I don't know if the font-locking code even terminates on the problem files and don't have the patience to find out, so caching wouldn't help.

Just out of curiosity, since you're well-qualified to prognosticate, what do you foresee for Emacs? Will a more modern Lisp-based editor eventually displace Emacs, or will Emacs continue to eat its young until something totally different kills it?

What I meant by "RAM is cheap" is that on modern systems you'll only start swapping under pathological circumstances. The GP poster was worried that running two jobs concurrently would turn the disk into a bottleneck. His objection was framed around jobs with heavy disk I/O, but I also wanted to address the question of swapping, which was a valid a concern back in the days when switching from task #1 to task #2 could mean swapping in a bunch of code and data for task #2. These days, #2's code and data would be in memory somewhere, a much quicker trip than disk.

That seems to be the case to me, too. It's the applications that drop the ball. Emacs can get hung opening a large .cpp file if the macros confuse the parser used by the syntax highlighter. Why isn't that done in a separate thread so I can make my changes and close the file while the syntax highlighter flails in the background?