No, but why would you want to? It defaults to Magnatune, which has a much nicer business model than iTunes. No DRM, more formats including patent-free Ogg Vorbis, artists gets half of what you pay instead of only 10% or less, you pay whatever you think is reasonable, and you're allowed, nay, encouraged to share. I think you can also get other music stores like Jamendo for Amarok, but I personally use Gnome's Rhythmbox, which has plugins by default for both of these stores. Sure, you won't find Britney Spears selling her stuff in Magnatune, but the quality of the music is not bad at all, even if it's not what's currently playinig in MTV.
Personally, iTunes was the biggest reason why I installed Debian etch on my mom's laptop. She doesn't know her own root password, of course; I'm the one adminning it for her. A bit of a hassle for me to set up at first, but now it works fine, and it has the rock solid stability of Debian. She loves it, and in her own words, "a lot less bullshitty than that other thing." She doesn't know the other thing is called Sony Vaio's default Windows XP install with all that crapware it comes with out of the box.
I can't stand how plotting is implemented in Octave.
I see. Plotting is supposedly more Matlab-like in recent incarnations of Octave since the Handle Graphics frontend was implemented, but I'm guessing you're saying that you can't stand Gnuplot. There has been talk of moving to other plotting backends instead of Gnuplot, and there's some serious work being done on that, but it hasn't been merged with the main Octave branch yet (but work on that is underway too).
Matter of fact, I'm currently debugging a segfault in 64 bit Octaviz, but it's starting to look likely that the segfault is in VTK itself.
Being very slightly involved with Octave development and being impressed with its recent pace, I would like to ask you what is Matlab on GNU/Linux giving you that Octave can't?
Otherwise, they'd have a bunch of confused users wondering why they can't run iTunes on their new computer.
The Xandros with the Eee PC comes with Amarok. It's dubbed "music manager" or something to that effect in the Xandros menus. It works fine with iPods (or it has for me).
With any luck, users won't even notice the difference.:-)
He's dead. Gone. For all human purposes, ceased to exist.
If you decide to not crack his accounts out of some sort of respect, then what you would be respecting would be your memory of him, not the man himself. He's not here anymore to care if you disrespect him or not.
That being said, if you want access to his online haunts, my guess is that you would need something more substantial than links to obituaries. You would probably have to have some documents that demonstrate you're next of kin and a death certificate, depending how bureaucratic the companies that managed his information are (my guess is very bureaucratic).
In order to rule out possible foul play (no suicide note?), I would say that you're morally obligated to do as much as you can to discover the circumstances of his death, or collaborate with the police to do it. If you find some brooding posts in MySpace, then you have good evidence that it probably was suicide. If not, get more suspicious.
Yeah, some of those discoveries were simultaneous, some weren't. I should have clarified further. There are many more examples of simultaenous and independent discovery nowadays, but they're not as accessible as the examples I gave.
This is the crux of the argument between discovery and invetion: symbols versus content. And I would say mathematics is not the symbolism. Mathematics has content, symbols don't. Symbols are meaningless.
To put it another way, if mathematics were not discovered, we need a pretty good explanation for simultaneous and independent discovery (calculus by Newton and Leibniz, zero by Indians, Mayans, and Chinese, many theorems with a hyphenated name like Schur-Zassenhaus or Cauchy-Kovalevkskaya, gauge or Henstock-Kurzweil integrals). Independent discovery, whether simultaneous or not, is a pretty good argument in favour of the discovery portion of mathematics, that mathematics has an intrinsic content for us to discover that does not depend at all on the formalism of symbols we use to describe that content.
The day we run into alien civilisation, the first thing I'm gonna ask is to see their mathematical books. I expect to find a lot of familiar things in there.
are you saying you want to be able to just walk in no questions asked and stay as long as you want in any nation?
Why not? Not to sound like a liberal commie hippie here (although I kinda am), but why do we have national boundaries to begin with? The usual rationale is that the people who are born in the country are paying taxes to live there, and those who immigrate illegally aren't paying taxes, hence not elligible for the same rights as other citizens. In actuality, even illegal immigrants aren't exempt from paying all taxes; at the very least, they usually pay sales tax on products they buy. Seeing how the IRS is, it probably wouldn't be too hard to enforce more tax payments from immigrants if so desired.
National boundaries are simply insitutionalised xenophobia, and the xenophobes are the ones who define what "legal" means. Now, I personally believe that humans are all naturally xenophobic to varying degrees, but whether it's desirable or not to institutionalise xenophobia is a different matter altogether.
Going back to the original point, the Great Wall of Mexico, it really is a thing of infamy. It won't stop illegal immigration, it creates much grief for the immigrants who are going to cross anyways however they can, and it doesn't solve the root of the problem, which is that a vast conquering and militarised nation has a much poorer neighbour who wants a piece of the pie that the richer nation has carved out of the rest of the world.
What the actual solution to centuries of pillaging and plundering is I don't know, but building a wall is just more of the same pillaging and plundering, or rather, just greedy protection of the booty acquired through conquest.
How long before someone packages up a Linux live CD with Skype preinstalled so that you can ensure you're computer isn't compromised when making phone calls?
Whatever makes you think that packaging Skype with Linux is going to make it more secure? Skype is proprietary and closed source, and security and privacy are both as strong as its weakest link. You can't see the source, you can't know how the protocol works, hence you're vulnerable to privacy invasions. No amount of bundling it with free software is going to fix that unless you use a free protocol and client to begin with.
So now we need a proof of the law of cosines that doesn't use the Pythagorean theorem. Wikipedia has such a proof, perhaps, but it uses the addition formula for cosines. I guess you can prove the addition formula for cosines without using any geometry at all by considering a cosine function as the solution to the ivp c'' = -c; c(0) = 1; c'(0) = 0, but then that requires a whole other kind of mathematics to prove it.
Maybe it can be done. All in all, not very intellectually satisfying to kill Pythagora's theorem with a larger rock like the law of cosines.;-)
(Ogg Theora. If you can't play it, get VLC or any other free software player.)
The method I used is a very flexible meshless method that is a relatively modern alternative to finite element methods. Btw, finite volumes are much more popular for fluid dynamical problems, but the other big two methods (finite elements and differences) are also widely used. The meshless method I used (of which there are also many available) is radial basis functions, what looks to me like a thriving area of modern research. Pros is that you avoid all the mesh generation that takes about 80% of the computational time with finite elements and you manage to keep the flexibility of meshes by allowing finer detail at problematic sites (just put more basis functions where the problems could happen). Cons is that you get ugly matrices, but if you play your method right, you can arrange it so that you only have to factorise the ugly matrix once and then just do forward and back substitutions at each iteration. I did unsymmetric collocation for my matrices, since experience seems to show that the extra work required to make the matrices symmetric yields only very small dividends. There are also ways of coupling this method with domain decomposition in order to get smaller matrices. This is in fact my thesis work.:-) If you're interested in more details and seeing my C++ source, contact me at jordigh@gmail.com
As for visualisation software, I indirectly used VTK through Octaviz, a visualisation addon for Octave. The movies I generated with mplayer's encoder, mencoder.
If we are selling mathematics, then we need to merchandise. And this is what this book is doing. It's a sales pitch. "Hey, do mathematics, and you can be attractive too while you do it!" As far as I know, every person wants to be attractive, regardless of whether they are or not (and imho, attractiveness comes when people work hard to get it). You want to make mathematics appear sexy, then you need to put sexy people next to it. Judging by the teen magazines that this book is trying to emulate, a preoccupation with appearance is a good sales pitch. If we manage to sell mathematics along with beauty, why not?
We don't need any more reinforcement of the notion that plain women can be mathematicians. Look at portraits of Noether, Ladyzhenskaya, or de Germain. They're all quite plain. Coupled with the notion that mathematics is masculine, dorky, and, well, ugly, there's quite a stereotype here to battle against.
You mean that I shouldn't just arbitrarily remove that software etc, etc from my computer, because then my computer would be useless? Thanks for the heads up. If I ever remove bash I'll make sure to replace it with a different shell. (I actually love bash and wouldn't really do this.)
You would probably run into problems, yes. There are lots of scripts out there whose shebang isn't/bin/sh but specifically/bin/bash. Some scripts actually use more than just Bourne compatability; some really do use Bash extensions (mostly extensions from the C and Korn shells). I suppose you could track them down and port them to remove the bash extensions to the Bourne shell, but why bother? Just acknowledge that we do need the GNU system unless we're running some BSD (and even the hardcore BSD folks begrudgingly have to use gcc to compile).
The difference is that Telmex *IS* a competitive and efficient company.
Uh, wtf? I don't know what country you're living in, but Telmex is a monopoly and by definition no monopoly can be competitive, since there's no one else to compete with really. There may be other smaller telecom companies attempting to compete with Telmex, but they play at a serious disadvantage since Telmex owns all the infrastructure. All the phone lines, the cells, they're all owned by Telmex, and competitors can only use them with Telmex's blessing. Not to mention public phones that in many areas of Mexico are the only available phone to many people. Remember we live in a country where by many estimates from 30% to 50% of the population lives in poverty, with at least 15 to 30% in extreme poverty, depending on who you ask.
And efficient? Yeah, efficient at making money. I don't know if you're aware, but the fees we pay for phone services here ridiculously high as compared to other countries were true competition exists, particularly for mobile phone services (yeah, Telcel is supposedly a different company, but we know it isn't). I'm particularly amused by how my phone bill has shown for the past four months a billing for an internet service I cancelled those four months ago. Each month, I have to navigate their crappy dialtone tech support (and there is no other way to fix this; if you try to go to their offices, they redirect you to the phone) in order to ask them to reverse the charge, which so far they have kindly done, each month.
It's no coincidence that Telmex and Microsoft are heavily partnered. Honour among thieves.
Slashdot Mirror
If you want music, torrent it.
If you want to pay for it, pay for music that's sold fairly and doesn't sue its customers.
Well, politics or not, one sells DRM, the other doesn't, and one makes sharing illegal, and the other doesn't.
I guess you can ignore politics as long as politics ignores you.
No, but why would you want to? It defaults to Magnatune, which has a much nicer business model than iTunes. No DRM, more formats including patent-free Ogg Vorbis, artists gets half of what you pay instead of only 10% or less, you pay whatever you think is reasonable, and you're allowed, nay, encouraged to share. I think you can also get other music stores like Jamendo for Amarok, but I personally use Gnome's Rhythmbox, which has plugins by default for both of these stores. Sure, you won't find Britney Spears selling her stuff in Magnatune, but the quality of the music is not bad at all, even if it's not what's currently playinig in MTV.
Personally, iTunes was the biggest reason why I installed Debian etch on my mom's laptop. She doesn't know her own root password, of course; I'm the one adminning it for her. A bit of a hassle for me to set up at first, but now it works fine, and it has the rock solid stability of Debian. She loves it, and in her own words, "a lot less bullshitty than that other thing." She doesn't know the other thing is called Sony Vaio's default Windows XP install with all that crapware it comes with out of the box.
I see. Plotting is supposedly more Matlab-like in recent incarnations of Octave since the Handle Graphics frontend was implemented, but I'm guessing you're saying that you can't stand Gnuplot. There has been talk of moving to other plotting backends instead of Gnuplot, and there's some serious work being done on that, but it hasn't been merged with the main Octave branch yet (but work on that is underway too).
Matter of fact, I'm currently debugging a segfault in 64 bit Octaviz, but it's starting to look likely that the segfault is in VTK itself.
Being very slightly involved with Octave development and being impressed with its recent pace, I would like to ask you what is Matlab on GNU/Linux giving you that Octave can't?
The Xandros with the Eee PC comes with Amarok. It's dubbed "music manager" or something to that effect in the Xandros menus. It works fine with iPods (or it has for me).
With any luck, users won't even notice the difference. :-)
It takes a few unobvious clicks to navigate Adobe's website, but here are the specs.
Now let's get hacking! :-)
Woohoo! Gnash, your job just got a heckuva lot easier!
If this is supposed to be funny, then my sarcastometer is malfunctioning today.
Otherwise, huh?
He's dead. Gone. For all human purposes, ceased to exist.
If you decide to not crack his accounts out of some sort of respect, then what you would be respecting would be your memory of him, not the man himself. He's not here anymore to care if you disrespect him or not.
That being said, if you want access to his online haunts, my guess is that you would need something more substantial than links to obituaries. You would probably have to have some documents that demonstrate you're next of kin and a death certificate, depending how bureaucratic the companies that managed his information are (my guess is very bureaucratic).
In order to rule out possible foul play (no suicide note?), I would say that you're morally obligated to do as much as you can to discover the circumstances of his death, or collaborate with the police to do it. If you find some brooding posts in MySpace, then you have good evidence that it probably was suicide. If not, get more suspicious.
You've got the GPL, used by the majority of free software projects, and the guy who made it sports a fabulous GNU/Beard.
Yeah, some of those discoveries were simultaneous, some weren't. I should have clarified further. There are many more examples of simultaenous and independent discovery nowadays, but they're not as accessible as the examples I gave.
This is the crux of the argument between discovery and invetion: symbols versus content. And I would say mathematics is not the symbolism. Mathematics has content, symbols don't. Symbols are meaningless.
To put it another way, if mathematics were not discovered, we need a pretty good explanation for simultaneous and independent discovery (calculus by Newton and Leibniz, zero by Indians, Mayans, and Chinese, many theorems with a hyphenated name like Schur-Zassenhaus or Cauchy-Kovalevkskaya, gauge or Henstock-Kurzweil integrals). Independent discovery, whether simultaneous or not, is a pretty good argument in favour of the discovery portion of mathematics, that mathematics has an intrinsic content for us to discover that does not depend at all on the formalism of symbols we use to describe that content.
The day we run into alien civilisation, the first thing I'm gonna ask is to see their mathematical books. I expect to find a lot of familiar things in there.
I wonder if it would be excessively trollish of me to remind Adobe that their Reader isn't "free software".
Why not? Not to sound like a liberal commie hippie here (although I kinda am), but why do we have national boundaries to begin with? The usual rationale is that the people who are born in the country are paying taxes to live there, and those who immigrate illegally aren't paying taxes, hence not elligible for the same rights as other citizens. In actuality, even illegal immigrants aren't exempt from paying all taxes; at the very least, they usually pay sales tax on products they buy. Seeing how the IRS is, it probably wouldn't be too hard to enforce more tax payments from immigrants if so desired.
National boundaries are simply insitutionalised xenophobia, and the xenophobes are the ones who define what "legal" means. Now, I personally believe that humans are all naturally xenophobic to varying degrees, but whether it's desirable or not to institutionalise xenophobia is a different matter altogether.
Going back to the original point, the Great Wall of Mexico, it really is a thing of infamy. It won't stop illegal immigration, it creates much grief for the immigrants who are going to cross anyways however they can, and it doesn't solve the root of the problem, which is that a vast conquering and militarised nation has a much poorer neighbour who wants a piece of the pie that the richer nation has carved out of the rest of the world.
What the actual solution to centuries of pillaging and plundering is I don't know, but building a wall is just more of the same pillaging and plundering, or rather, just greedy protection of the booty acquired through conquest.
Wait, what do you mean "copy"? SAGE is GPL! Oh, dear, will Mathematica have to open up something? Say it is so!
How long before someone packages up a Linux live CD with Skype preinstalled so that you can ensure you're computer isn't compromised when making phone calls?
Whatever makes you think that packaging Skype with Linux is going to make it more secure? Skype is proprietary and closed source, and security and privacy are both as strong as its weakest link. You can't see the source, you can't know how the protocol works, hence you're vulnerable to privacy invasions. No amount of bundling it with free software is going to fix that unless you use a free protocol and client to begin with.
I personally would prefer to see Wengophone really get off the ground instead, but it seems that the project is already dead. :-(
Hm.
So now we need a proof of the law of cosines that doesn't use the Pythagorean theorem. Wikipedia has such a proof, perhaps, but it uses the addition formula for cosines. I guess you can prove the addition formula for cosines without using any geometry at all by considering a cosine function as the solution to the ivp c'' = -c; c(0) = 1; c'(0) = 0, but then that requires a whole other kind of mathematics to prove it.
Maybe it can be done. All in all, not very intellectually satisfying to kill Pythagora's theorem with a larger rock like the law of cosines. ;-)
You can prove Pythagoras' theorem on two pages using only elementary geometry or in two lines using vectors.
Curious, what vector proof did you have in mind?
Could this work if your program were free software, not just shareware?
As a matter of fact, I *am* an applied mathematician, and I do work in this field.
I am just a beginner, though. Here are is a solution of the shallow water wave equations in a circular tub:
http://platinum.linux.pl/~jordi/movies/sw-solution .ogg
(Ogg Theora. If you can't play it, get VLC or any other free software player.)
The method I used is a very flexible meshless method that is a relatively modern alternative to finite element methods. Btw, finite volumes are much more popular for fluid dynamical problems, but the other big two methods (finite elements and differences) are also widely used. The meshless method I used (of which there are also many available) is radial basis functions, what looks to me like a thriving area of modern research. Pros is that you avoid all the mesh generation that takes about 80% of the computational time with finite elements and you manage to keep the flexibility of meshes by allowing finer detail at problematic sites (just put more basis functions where the problems could happen). Cons is that you get ugly matrices, but if you play your method right, you can arrange it so that you only have to factorise the ugly matrix once and then just do forward and back substitutions at each iteration. I did unsymmetric collocation for my matrices, since experience seems to show that the extra work required to make the matrices symmetric yields only very small dividends. There are also ways of coupling this method with domain decomposition in order to get smaller matrices. This is in fact my thesis work. :-) If you're interested in more details and seeing my C++ source, contact me at jordigh@gmail.com
As for visualisation software, I indirectly used VTK through Octaviz, a visualisation addon for Octave. The movies I generated with mplayer's encoder, mencoder.
HTH :-)
So what, the ugly ones don't use math?
If we are selling mathematics, then we need to merchandise. And this is what this book is doing. It's a sales pitch. "Hey, do mathematics, and you can be attractive too while you do it!" As far as I know, every person wants to be attractive, regardless of whether they are or not (and imho, attractiveness comes when people work hard to get it). You want to make mathematics appear sexy, then you need to put sexy people next to it. Judging by the teen magazines that this book is trying to emulate, a preoccupation with appearance is a good sales pitch. If we manage to sell mathematics along with beauty, why not?
We don't need any more reinforcement of the notion that plain women can be mathematicians. Look at portraits of Noether, Ladyzhenskaya, or de Germain. They're all quite plain. Coupled with the notion that mathematics is masculine, dorky, and, well, ugly, there's quite a stereotype here to battle against.
You mean that I shouldn't just arbitrarily remove that software etc, etc from my computer, because then my computer would be useless? Thanks for the heads up. If I ever remove bash I'll make sure to replace it with a different shell. (I actually love bash and wouldn't really do this.)
You would probably run into problems, yes. There are lots of scripts out there whose shebang isn't /bin/sh but specifically /bin/bash. Some scripts actually use more than just Bourne compatability; some really do use Bash extensions (mostly extensions from the C and Korn shells). I suppose you could track them down and port them to remove the bash extensions to the Bourne shell, but why bother? Just acknowledge that we do need the GNU system unless we're running some BSD (and even the hardcore BSD folks begrudgingly have to use gcc to compile).
The difference is that Telmex *IS* a competitive and efficient company.
Uh, wtf? I don't know what country you're living in, but Telmex is a monopoly and by definition no monopoly can be competitive, since there's no one else to compete with really. There may be other smaller telecom companies attempting to compete with Telmex, but they play at a serious disadvantage since Telmex owns all the infrastructure. All the phone lines, the cells, they're all owned by Telmex, and competitors can only use them with Telmex's blessing. Not to mention public phones that in many areas of Mexico are the only available phone to many people. Remember we live in a country where by many estimates from 30% to 50% of the population lives in poverty, with at least 15 to 30% in extreme poverty, depending on who you ask.
And efficient? Yeah, efficient at making money. I don't know if you're aware, but the fees we pay for phone services here ridiculously high as compared to other countries were true competition exists, particularly for mobile phone services (yeah, Telcel is supposedly a different company, but we know it isn't). I'm particularly amused by how my phone bill has shown for the past four months a billing for an internet service I cancelled those four months ago. Each month, I have to navigate their crappy dialtone tech support (and there is no other way to fix this; if you try to go to their offices, they redirect you to the phone) in order to ask them to reverse the charge, which so far they have kindly done, each month.
It's no coincidence that Telmex and Microsoft are heavily partnered. Honour among thieves.