Is the new Ipad a worthy update to the Ipad 2?

toa1995 · 2012-05-25T01:24:31.051901+00:00

Yes, but apps were smaller (no retina images) and I didn't keep a lot of movies on it. Either played from from my computer at home or just put 2-4 on if I was travelling. I think if you're judicious about movie/music/apps you can do 16gb.

Paulie4star · 2012-05-24T21:01:10.638035+00:00

Learn the ranks and insignia. Your recruiter should've given you a booklet. If not, look it up on wikipedia. Make flashcards. Take it seriously. Nothing sucks more than getting yelled at for saluting a chief.

In general, don't stand out. Boot camp is 13 weeks (still? I dunno. Was 13 weeks for me) of everybody doing the same thing. If you're a rough edge they will knock you down. Nobody is going to care if you are the best at thing XYZ and the world won't end if you're the worst at it. But if you can help your team (division? Ship? whatever) be good at something without getting people to pay attention to you, do that.

Paulie4star · 2012-05-24T20:57:36.240563+00:00

Son of a submariner!

toa1995 · 2012-05-24T20:46:03.707343+00:00

It's well worth it. In 2-3 years of use that 100 dollar difference will evaporate but the difference in screen quality will remain, especially on reading apps (Instapaper, Kindle, iBooks) which take full advantage of the display.

Also if you take care of it (use a case and don't ding the edges) the resale value of the iPad 3 will be considerably higher than the 2. I sold my iPad 1 16GB Wifi (the base model) last december for ~300 bucks. I might have gotten 50-60 bucks more if I had been more patient. I would expect that after 2 years of careful use you'll be able to sell the iPad back for about the same. This won't be true for the iPad 2 because it is already a model year behind.

ReluctantRedditor275 · 2012-05-24T19:42:05.098149+00:00

Just don't read the comments. Actually don't read the comments on any tech related blog. It's either entitled nonsense or a fucking holy war.

denniedarko · 1 day

The face she makes in the car when the homeless guy says he's Jesus and he loves marijuana is pretty priceless.

karessakow · 1 day

I could swear there were DS9 episodes where they had tunics w/ front zippers and grey turtleneck style shirts underneath. Didn't Sisko and what-not walk around w/ the front unzipped all the time?

robotevil · 1 day

I know that underneat it is +-. But psychologically it is very different.

I've been a slashdot user (under two different accounts) since like 2001. In my experience it isn't different at all. And my research into feedback and rating systems indicates that most people don't utilize the added flavor that hyper-nerds (I mean that endearingly, and I'll self apply it) insist is necessary. I personally know a half dozen people who will swear up and down that all Netflix needs to improve their recommendation engine is to allow users to specify which elements of a film they liked and why (nevermind how that would work for the moment). When you imagine a large scale recommendation engine does that make any sense to you? How many people, of the already small fraction who provide feedback, will offer detailed feedback? In practice it tends to be 1/10th to 1/100th of the folks providing the feedback. And even then we have some indication that it may be perfunctory. Netflix might gain a tiny bit of information about the preferences of heavy users and would likely incur a decent UX cost (and drop in overall ratings) as a result.

In the case of slashdot it's pretty simple. The system is designed to treat ranking as secondary to the informational content in the moderation. You aren't supposed to treat +1 informative as an upvote. That's reinforced by the low ceiling on comment ranking, the meta-moderation system and some of the culture there (back when there still was a culture). But the system just doesn't work and the costs are large. For most moderation/ranking systems the goal is partially to order content for the reader by some measure other than chronological. In large enough discussions, this may be impossible or uninformative as the reader has to sift between dozens or hundreds of +5 replies which may just have the benefit of timing. In audio terms, there is a tremendous amount of clipping and information is lost. As a result, you're back reading a flat list of (mostly) pruned comments. You can sort by other measures but almost nobody changes the defaults so I don't see the sense in analyzing the system by starting w/ the assumption that they do.

Another core difference which didn't end up mattering was the cost and scarcity of moderation points. The idea here was that if points were offered randomly and in finite quantities users would treat them as valuable and wouldn't bury comments or expend them on frivolous or jokey replies. I could just leave slashdot comments as an example proof of this failure but I won't. First, the random allotment. On ideal function of this was to prevent drive-by ratings just as we see on reddit. If someone sees my comment and says ""are you fucking serious" is rude" they may not have the power to downvote just that moment and they'll have to reply to my comment or ignore it. However as the community grows, the law of large numbers bites you in the ass. Even if a small number of individuals get the power to vote that ceases to work well once the post sees enough traffic. Start seeing the growth slashdot did from 2000 to ~2007 and you can imagine the results. The scarcity bit works the same way, with a twist. They added in expiration for the votes in an attempt to convince people to not hoard them and to provide some immediacy. That was a decent idea and a good attempt but it provided an interesting side effect. Once you knew that the points were going away, they started to burn a hole in your proverbial pocket. It was ok to spend them upvoting dumb things because they would evaporate in a while anyway. Like I said at the top of this paragraph, I could point to the variable quality of slashdot comments as proof this didn't work.

I have no idea how you'd apply stackoverflow's system to reddit. That would be odd indeed.

Yeah, but you can imagine the basic contours. It likely wouldn't work without a level of moderation that most reddit users (and mods) would balk at. But a system of tiered privileges based on karma might work fine. Especially if those were tailored to the demands of the site.

robotevil · 1 day

/. isn't up/down votes.

Yes it is. The instructions say explicitly that they aren't upvotes and each of the different flavors say things like "insightful" or "flamebait" but in practical terms they are upvotes and downvotes. People +1 comments they like and -1 comments they don't. We even have all the fun meta-commentary w/ people bitching that "-1 off-topic doesn't mean -1 I disagree".

Descriptions like that are nice in theory but almost never work when meeting the real world. Comment is witty or interesting? It'll be +5 insightful. Does it have a link? +5 Informative. Doesn't really matter unless you're the 0.001% of users who browses w/ filters or different thresholds for different characterisations. And it should tell us something that later voting systems have done away with the classification (if you don't like reddit, look at hackernews or stackoverflow).

Metamoderation isn't a bad idea in general. I don't know how effective it is but it could potentially be helpful in curbing voting blocs assuming that people didn't game the metamoderation system and that a sufficient (and sufficiently diverse) group of users actually participated.

robotevil · 1 day

are you fucking serious? Slashdot is upvotes/downvotes with an upper limit and metamoderation. Unless you think it is an improvement to have all comments w/ net 5 upvotes be listed in reverse chronological order I can't see how that's an improvement.

karessakow · 1 day

Some TNG movie and mid DS9 uniforms had front zippers.

karessakow · 1 day

Do you have a turtleneck to go along with it? I think the zip up front was First Contact/DS9 territory (w/ a bunch of different versions) and might look really good w/ a dark grey turtleneck.

robotevil · 1 day

You're welcome to work out a better method for organizing discussions at scale.

mi-16evil · 1 day

I'm obviously taking some liberties in characterizing responses with a broad brush. A more nuanced comment might be to say that something about Skyler causes people to respond negatively to the character and forget the distinction between a character you are meant to dislike for story purposes and one you might merely dislike. I'll lay some of that at the feet of the writers as they use her as a device to establish the boundaries of Walter's old life. As such, we start to hate her because we sympathize with walter. There's also some dramatic irony at work; the audience knows what Walter is going through while Skyler can only see him at home.

But I see way too many negative responses to her to chalk this up to normal story structure, especially responses which focus around her nagging or her being a "bitch" etc. It doesn't take long for those discussions to slot right into the standard litany of complaints about women as human beings.

mi-16evil · 1 day

they hate her so much because she's:

A woman
Poised as a foil to the "protagonist"

That's about it.

jer420 · 2 days

I guess. Still not sure how people convinced themselves he was a "character" who needed development and not just a dude in a mask who looked cool for the trailer and nodded a bit.

God, what a turd of a film.

jer420 · 2 days

yeah because what that 2 hour and 37 minute movie needed was more of anything.

railroad-redditor · 2 days

Eh.

Everyone turns into some flavor of authoritarian when given a little fiefdom. Add in the problem that society actually kinda does want these people to teach students to say "yes" to authority (I'm not endorsing that, obviously) and it is pretty hard to blame them specifically.

anony666 · 2 days

This is a really common argument despite it containing it's own negation. We had a draft until the late 1970s and somehow managed to get entangled into wars despite the notion that a draft would prevent such an entanglement. If anything, the Vietnam war should have been the kind of conflict that a draft susceptible nation would oppose on face. turns out that wasn't the case--we just sent draftees into an unjust war.

More generally, nearly every war gets started because one (or both) sides insist that the conflict will be brief, one sided and honorable. If you had asked someone in 2002 about Afghanistan or 2003 about Iraq they would not have suggested that 10 years later we would still be in both places unless they were inclined to oppose the war in the first place.

Not to mention that drafts are appallingly inefficient uses of human capital. The absolute last thing a country should be doing is taking every 18 year old and throwing them into the infantry unless it absolutely has to. It is bad for the country (think about how the internet boom would have been different if all those software engineers had been marching instead of writing code) and bad for the military. That last part is under-appreciated by those who have never served but make no mistake it is much easier to build a functioning military with people who want to be there than with people going through the motions in order to get out in 2 years. You can't invest in training because that would occupy all of their allotted time and you can't rely on on the job training because by the time anyone builds up a skillset they are out the door.

We seem to imagine a draft as doing one of two things. Either returning us to an idyllic and apocryphal past where everyone wanted to be part of something bigger than themselves or mystically enjoining a nation from adventurism by gambling with the lives of millions who haven't volunteered. It's madness and I'm happy we abolished the draft.

danger_mcboom · 2 days

And if you get ahold of some big ranking data you'll find that for products with a lot of ratings averaging out the 1s and 5s comes fairly close to what you might get from dropping them and only taking the remaining values into account.

danger_mcboom · 2 days

Almost all 1-5 star user reviews or ratings for any product are strongly bimodal. I don't know how fair it is to get mad at people for answering the question "did you like my product" even when it isn't asked. They answer may be to eventually move to something like YouTube's "like/dislike" system and stop trying to force user behavior.

railroad-redditor · 2 days

People are understandably upset. It's a shitty thing to do.

Also, do you really think this is a valuable "lesson" for later in life?

This is only true if you believe the lesson being taught is the one school administrators intended to teach. The lesson I took from it is that high school is a small and petty place and the seniors should be glad they learned this sooner rather than later.

Aaronmcom · 2 days

The premise wasn't what made it terrible.

railroad-redditor · 2 days

The act wasn't completely harmless, but this is a classic example of the school trying to say "you didn't beat us." There's no real reason for that

That is the real reason. The whole purpose was to make clear who holds the authority and punish students for bucking that authority. The nice thing we can realize now is those students can look forward to a life where their school has absolutely no say in how they conduct their affairs. Unfortunately at that age it is nearly impossible to have the perspective necessary to laugh at the prospect of being denied a graduating walk.

In 5-10 years they'll look back and understand the school gave them a wonderful gift. In late may of their last year they learned exactly how liberating it will be to leave our secondary education system.

icameforthesnacks · 2 days

I'm military and yes, we need a reason to use vacation AKA leave.

There's a box on the chit for it, but you don't need a reason. Or specifically you don't need a good reason. Unless your boss is a dick they'd be happy to authorize 3 days leave because it doesn't disrupt training, planning, etc.

Edit: I recognize that some commands (and maybe services?) have rules about taking leave in small chunks but it always was fairly easy to convince my CoC to approve 72-96 hours bouts of leave which wouldn't disrupt operations.

therealprotonk

TROPHY CASE

therealprotonk

TROPHY CASE

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