radiant.matrix

A collection of thoughts and links from the minds of geeks

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Month: October, 2008

Beware the “Gay lifestyle”!

30 October, 2008 (12:32) | Random Thoughts | By: radiantmatrix

The gay lifestyle involves stuff like doing laundry and taking the dog out. — comment by marymactavish at Flickr

Wow, Win 7 looks a lot like a Mac

30 October, 2008 (11:28) | Technology | By: radiantmatrix

Via DaringFireball: A first look at Windows 7 from ArsTechnica.

I’m struck by how many of the ‘new and innovative features’ are essentially re-implementations of OS X features.

  • The new taskbar is an awful lot like the Dock
  • The “peek” feature is a lot like Exposé (yeah, a different interface to it, but substantially similar)
  • New Explorer features mimic the Finder pretty well
  • New Tray features ‘common tasks like switching wireless networks’: similar to OS X’s menu-bar functionality

Not that MS might not improve the implementation of some of these things (not holding my breath on that, but…), but there’s nothing truly “brave” or “innovative” here. Sad, because MS has some great engineers — I wonder what holds them back.

Politics and religion are like software and hardware

17 October, 2008 (15:14) | Quotation | By: radiantmatrix

Politics and religion are just like software and hardware. They all suck, the documentation is provably incorrect, and all the vendors tell lies. — Andrew Dalgleish, in the Monastery

Girls are good at math, US culture isn’t

14 October, 2008 (16:09) | Mindless Links, science | By: radiantmatrix

According to the report, many girls with extremely high aptitude for math exist, but they are rarely identified in the U.S. because they veer from a career trajectory in the mathematical sciences due to the low respect American culture places on math, systemic flaws in the U.S. public school education system, and a lack of role models. — American Culture Derails Girl Math Whizzes, Study Finds

archive and screenshot: http://bit.ly/info/3zJitA
via: skepchick

Shocker: girls are actually quite good at math, but our culture thinks math is stodgy and gross, so girls shy away from it. We all knew that, but nice to see it actually demonstrated…