I know pi to a thousand places!
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
How about "You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive? "Turn Turn Turn" by the Byrds? "Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash?
Or, since pi day is a day when we should be celebrating irrationality...
"Dare to be Stupid" by Weird Al Yankovic!
Re:Tau instead of Pi... Wait a few months
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
...tau/2 * r^2?
Transcendental Day sales
on
Happy Pi Day
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· Score: 1
In most states, there are no longer separate holidays for pi and e but rather a combined "Transcendentals Day".
"Come on down, our prices for this one day event are just irrational".
You know the deals on Transcendentals Day can be really great - but in practice most people just get drawn into a seemingly endless process of haggling over smaller and smaller price increments...
if you want a desktop system that stays out of your way
You have unused items on your desktop! We have helpfully hidden all those pesky start menu items that you rarely use! This dialog box is Very Important, so we've made it so you can't move it, or put any other window in front of it, until you've dealt with this thing!
(Fortunately, you can turn a lot of those kind of features off, and have a system that mostly stays out of your way...)
Windows 'works' largely because it comes pre-installed. Try taking any random PC, wiping the disk and installing Windows on it from an official Microsoft install CD and you'll find it at least as hard to get working as Linux.
These days I think it mostly depends on your hardware. I got a Wacom tablet for Christmas and had to take some fairly extraordinary steps to get it working on my Linux system (it required a newer version of the Wacom driver than Debian provided at the time - and hence, also, an updated kernel and X-server, and a custom-compile of the necessary Xinput driver...)
I don't do too much Windows installation these days - but from "back in the day" I would expect that getting hardware working on a new Windows installation is mostly an issue of installing the right driver (unless you're unfortunate enough to have hardware that simply doesn't work in your version of Windows...)
Yeah, we know, you don't like anything related to M$, MicroShaft, or Micro$oft, and de Icaza is a total sellout. Having choice is great, as long as you choose (insert technology here), amirite?
Here's a thought: maybe wait until someone actually posts something along those lines before you start bitching about it?
'Cause I seriously haven't seen any of that so far...
'We as an open source community, we don't seem to get our act together when it comes to understanding the needs of end users on the desktop.'
I for one am fine with that. To me the bigger question is: can Linux systems cater to the average end-user who has no intention of ever understanding how the system works, without losing everything I love about Linux? You just can't do that without dumbing-down the system. Not "dumbing-down" like smart people vs. stupid people, but "dumbing-down" like technically inclined versus not technically inclined.
It's really ok if Linux never becomes the next Windows, if you never see it on 90%+ of desktops. The 90% of users who are not hobbyists and are not tinkerers and do not find the technology fascinating already have several companies that are happy to meet their needs.
Yeah, that's generally how I feel.
I don't think it's necessarily even a question of "dumbing down" - it's just a different set of needs and expectations. Personally I believe making a good system for hobbyists is a lot tougher: building interfaces for the "average user" is how most people think about UI design, I think, and if you're making a more complex UI, you're also creating more ways to trip yourself up in the design process... "hobbyists" needs are less clearly defined at this point, and possibly (since, presumably, the hobbyists will always be doing something new) will stay that way.
I think even the "hackers" of the world appreciate a system with a certain amount of polish, consistency, coherency - it's just the direction the overall design takes that differs between "hackers" and hobbyists, people who enjoy the machines for their own sake enough to want to spend time learning to interact with the in more complex ways - and those who have "simpler" needs.
(and from a more other, differenter post)
it's perfectly possible thanks to open source's inherently modular structure. Someone makes an idiot-proof GUI, distro X bundles it as the default and only option. Someone makes a uberhacker GUI, distro Y bundles it as the default and only option. Distro Z prides itself on being able to switch from newbie to expert and back again in less than three seconds.
It is possible, but in the real world this represents a division of resources. The number of people working on open source, and the amount of work they can contribute, are actually limited quantities. The ability for competing solutions to coexist and thrive is also limited. We've got Gnome and KDE right now - if someone started another desktop environment project for Linux, how many people would jump on board developing it? How many people would use it? How many people would tailor their applications to suit it? I think the situation with Gnome and KDE would have to be really bad for a competing solution to gain any significant amount of ground.
Also, as I said before, I think even hobbyists like to have a certain consistency and coherency between applications. You don't get that when one chunk of your programs are part of Gnome, one chunk are part of another major project, and one chunk is relatively undisciplined GTK stuff... But that's hard to achieve without clear direction and leadership - and that kind of leadership is hard to establish without a central authority (like Microsoft is for Windows, or Apple is for Mac) guiding the decisions. So the prospect of a coherent, well-designed environment, designed particularly for hobbyists and tinkerers seems unlikely to materialize...
Okay, honest question - I don't know much about Ham radio. But the article says they're selling rights to a particular spectrum - but is this the only part of the spectrum available for amateur operators?
I swear I'm not trolling, or trying to minimize the impact. I understand it might require changing broadcast gear, etc., but this wouldn't seem to be an existential threat to ham operators, merely a hassle because you have to move to new frequencies. Or is there something intrinsically better about the specific frequencies in question (420-440 MhZ) which makes them particularly well-suited to amateur radio broadcasts, to the point that hams couldn't operate elsewhere?
A couple issues.
First off, if you're a ham and you've invested in gear for a particular band, and that band gets sold off... Guess what? Your gear's now nearly worthless. "Moving to new frequencies" means "buying new gear", unless you have gear that already supports that band. And there's nothing in this deal about a new chunk of spectrum being allocated to hams to replace 440.
Second, yes, it's just one chunk of spectrum. But the problem is this isn't the only thing something like this has happened. If chunks of amateur spectrum continue to be taken away, at some point there will be nothing left.
Third: different wavelengths have different benefits. I don't remember all the details but I know the longer wavelengths (10 meters, etc.) allow you do do things like atmospheric propagation to get a signal to the other side of the world. Shorter wavelengths (and, hence, higher frequencies) IIRC deal better with local obstacles, and you can get more data through a signal (more bandwidth)
1) They're everywhere. There are over 600,000 licensed amateur radio operators in the US. If you live in the US, odds are, a ham lives or works less than half a mile from you. 2) A quick example of what they can do:
a) talk to people in the ISS
Goodness knows that's just what I need in an emergency!:)
This was Claude Shannon's "outguessing machine" ported to BASIC; I remember seeing it in Creative Computing. It built a Markov matrix from your entries (yes, this is the "table" you're thinking of) but it's much quicker to follow the Markov machine than to search a table.
Well, you wouldn't have to "search" a table of 16 entries... Just plug in an array index generated by shifting left the previous index and possibly adding one... What I described (if I understand Markov matrices correctly) is a fourth-order Markov matrix...
On the Commodore 64, I had a program that had you input a series of values ("heads or tails", I think, as if you were calling a coin flip... I think it was from Compute's Gazette.) and tried to follow patterns in your input to guess what you'd input next. It was actually pretty good at it.
I expect it worked by building a table of recent history (say, the last 4 moves, so a table size of 16) and then counting how many times, at the end of that sequence, you picked one value or the other...
This wasn't "freeware". It was shareware. A commercial product.
I never really liked that model, mostly because it only ever seemed to exist on the PC. Everywhere else the world was content to give software for free. But on PC I just saw far to people with the mindset that if you used a computer you deserved to get paid for it; including some people who would attach readme files to buggy junk that read "I learned to program while writing this, you owe me $20 if you run it once".
"freeware" was, at one point, a name for the business model that became known as "shareware"... Neither term is really properly descriptive, if you think about it.
I hear ya with regard to the "PC mindset". I always hated that on Windows or Mac, if there was some useful bit of functionality that was somehow missing, someone would be there to charge you money for it. For instance, the game emulator (NES emulator, I think?) I had on my Powerbook (OSX 10.3, around 2004) was free (because the original author licensed it as such) but the guy who ported it to Mac decided to charge extra for the module that let you use a USB gamepad with it... All kinds of little things came with little fees attached. There was kind of a similar issue on PalmOS: because there were lots of things you might want to do that weren't provided in the OS already, there were lots of niches for people to write cheap (but not free), and very simple applications to exploit those niches.
But as a Linux user I think I developed the opposite problem: I developed the mindset that software wasn't something that should be paid for. Why pay for Paint Shop Pro when GIMP is free? Why pay for Word when Openoffice is free? And so on. Personally I think this led me to under-value software, and avoid software that had to be paid for. I think it's a healthier approach than what i did when I ran DOS and Windows (i.e. not paying for software, but running software for which payment was expected) - I wasn't taking anything that wasn't being offered for free, but I think the expectation that good stuff should be free is a bit unhealthy if taken too far.
I think the really bad thing about getting "nickled and dimed" was that, in the cases I was dealing with, it was generally very simple stuff that people were charging for. The threshold, of how much capability you could expect to get for no cost beyond getting on the platform, was very low. That's changed a lot over the years: operating systems come with simple video editors, free photo editors of GIMP's caliber are pretty common, and so on... And so there's a higher threshold for what people can successfully charge money for. At least on most platforms. (I think with new platforms in general it takes a little while for this threshold to rise up to a reasonable level again...)
I have a scientific theory that God dose not exist. It is scientific because it is falsifiable. If God appears in front of me and offers me a beer that he makes materialize out of thin air, then he will have falsified my scientific theory.
Well, because he can appear in front of you and summon a beer, does that mean it's really a god? Maybe it's just Q messing with you... Or maybe it's a wizard. Or maybe we're all in the Matrix and what you think is god is really just Agent Smith. And what does God need with a Starship, anyway? What exactly constitutes proof of God?
The virgin birth served the same purpose as all miraculous births in literature and religion, to foreshadow a mythical character, a chosen one.
Well, sure, but no one questions it. Including, most importantly, Shmi herself.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, you're married to a woman, and she gets pregnant without you having sex with her. Are you going to believe her when she says it's a miracle?
Don't you remember, Amidala's republican credits are no good on Tatooine, that's why they had to gamble on the pod race.
Well, that by itself isn't too unreasonable - if it's not a world where Republic Credits are an accepted currency, they wouldn't be accepted. They don't take Euros at the local 7-11 either.
But more importantly, in that particular instance, Watto was dealing with off-worlders who needed a ship. In other words, they were stuck on Tattooine. He probably could have taken their credits. But when dealing with people desperate to make a deal, there's an opportunity to exploit them.
After leaving Tattooine, of course, they'd be at no such disadvantage...
This is a reasonable goal. But to take a falsifiable theorem and prove it, and then to suggest that some or all unfalsifiable theorems are thusly incorrect, is a fallacy.
It's not that unfalsifiable ideas are incorrect, it's that they aren't science.
Let's start with the "god" thing. We could never, ever disprove it because the theory holds that, if a god wanted to, he/she/skle could hide his/her/skler existence from us. This also means the idea of "god" can be adjusted to fit any facts we may find. A god could still exist, and that existence could be proven, potentially: but until that happens, without some criteria for determining that there isn't a god, there is no way to build (or destroy) confidence in the idea - and there's no basis for making any kind of useful characterization of this god. So at best the idea leads us in the right direction by chance. At worst, it misleads us. We can't build any confidence in the idea or develop an idea of what implications the idea holds - hence, it's not a useful idea in the context of science.
Yet many "scientists" know God does not exist just like they know the sun will rise. Why is that?
To even begin to answer that question we'd have to start talking about specific scientists. I wouldn't argue that this is a reasonable scientific idea - there's no basis for saying one way or another - but I'm also not going to engage in vague discussion on what "many scientists" speak about as fact. If you want to talk about that, name one, and we can talk about him.
That is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. "I don't care what you say... blah blah blah I can't hear you." That's how it sounds to other people when you do that.
It's not very kind, perhaps, and not tactful - but there are cases where a dismissive response is entirely appropriate.
Slashdot Mirror
How about "You Spin Me Round" by Dead or Alive?
"Turn Turn Turn" by the Byrds?
"Ring of Fire" by Johnny Cash?
Or, since pi day is a day when we should be celebrating irrationality...
"Dare to be Stupid" by Weird Al Yankovic!
...tau/2 * r^2?
In most states, there are no longer separate holidays for pi and e but rather a combined "Transcendentals Day".
"Come on down, our prices for this one day event are just irrational".
You know the deals on Transcendentals Day can be really great - but in practice most people just get drawn into a seemingly endless process of haggling over smaller and smaller price increments...
I think you mean 3/14/16. The next digit is a nine, so you round up.
And now the real tricky question... If you didn't round up or down, when would you celebrate pi day? 2/16/16? (0.9265 years after 3/14/15?)
That would be nice, except for the annoying fact that April only has 30 days...
Maybe they're expecting the months to be renumbered sometime in the next four years?
>>And that is why Open Source doesn't win.
>I feel like the whole idea that we had to "win" in the first place was a fallacy...
Would you say the same thing about freedom?
I don't get it. Freedom is largely a separate issue from the question of whether free software would become a mainstream end-user OS.
How do you get around, dragging such a huge penis everywhere?
The trick is finding a good holster for your penis.
It's tougher than you might think - unfortunately your mom's time is spread pretty thin.
it would be nice. but open source isn't about nice.
And that is why Open Source doesn't win.
I feel like the whole idea that we had to "win" in the first place was a fallacy...
Sorry Miguel, but the subject says it all.
Perhaps you should give kde 3.5.x a whirl and find out what an actual pleasant UI is like.
<shrug> I switched from KDE to Gnome and I love it. I'm not real clear what KDE has to offer that's better...
if you want a desktop system that stays out of your way
You have unused items on your desktop!
We have helpfully hidden all those pesky start menu items that you rarely use!
This dialog box is Very Important, so we've made it so you can't move it, or put any other window in front of it, until you've dealt with this thing!
(Fortunately, you can turn a lot of those kind of features off, and have a system that mostly stays out of your way...)
Windows 'works' largely because it comes pre-installed. Try taking any random PC, wiping the disk and installing Windows on it from an official Microsoft install CD and you'll find it at least as hard to get working as Linux.
These days I think it mostly depends on your hardware. I got a Wacom tablet for Christmas and had to take some fairly extraordinary steps to get it working on my Linux system (it required a newer version of the Wacom driver than Debian provided at the time - and hence, also, an updated kernel and X-server, and a custom-compile of the necessary Xinput driver...)
I don't do too much Windows installation these days - but from "back in the day" I would expect that getting hardware working on a new Windows installation is mostly an issue of installing the right driver (unless you're unfortunate enough to have hardware that simply doesn't work in your version of Windows...)
Yeah, we know, you don't like anything related to M$, MicroShaft, or Micro$oft, and de Icaza is a total sellout. Having choice is great, as long as you choose (insert technology here), amirite?
Here's a thought: maybe wait until someone actually posts something along those lines before you start bitching about it?
'Cause I seriously haven't seen any of that so far...
I for one am fine with that. To me the bigger question is: can Linux systems cater to the average end-user who has no intention of ever understanding how the system works, without losing everything I love about Linux? You just can't do that without dumbing-down the system. Not "dumbing-down" like smart people vs. stupid people, but "dumbing-down" like technically inclined versus not technically inclined.
It's really ok if Linux never becomes the next Windows, if you never see it on 90%+ of desktops. The 90% of users who are not hobbyists and are not tinkerers and do not find the technology fascinating already have several companies that are happy to meet their needs.
Yeah, that's generally how I feel.
I don't think it's necessarily even a question of "dumbing down" - it's just a different set of needs and expectations. Personally I believe making a good system for hobbyists is a lot tougher: building interfaces for the "average user" is how most people think about UI design, I think, and if you're making a more complex UI, you're also creating more ways to trip yourself up in the design process... "hobbyists" needs are less clearly defined at this point, and possibly (since, presumably, the hobbyists will always be doing something new) will stay that way.
I think even the "hackers" of the world appreciate a system with a certain amount of polish, consistency, coherency - it's just the direction the overall design takes that differs between "hackers" and hobbyists, people who enjoy the machines for their own sake enough to want to spend time learning to interact with the in more complex ways - and those who have "simpler" needs.
(and from a more other, differenter post)
it's perfectly possible thanks to open source's inherently modular structure. Someone makes an idiot-proof GUI, distro X bundles it as the default and only option. Someone makes a uberhacker GUI, distro Y bundles it as the default and only option. Distro Z prides itself on being able to switch from newbie to expert and back again in less than three seconds.
It is possible, but in the real world this represents a division of resources. The number of people working on open source, and the amount of work they can contribute, are actually limited quantities. The ability for competing solutions to coexist and thrive is also limited. We've got Gnome and KDE right now - if someone started another desktop environment project for Linux, how many people would jump on board developing it? How many people would use it? How many people would tailor their applications to suit it? I think the situation with Gnome and KDE would have to be really bad for a competing solution to gain any significant amount of ground.
Also, as I said before, I think even hobbyists like to have a certain consistency and coherency between applications. You don't get that when one chunk of your programs are part of Gnome, one chunk are part of another major project, and one chunk is relatively undisciplined GTK stuff... But that's hard to achieve without clear direction and leadership - and that kind of leadership is hard to establish without a central authority (like Microsoft is for Windows, or Apple is for Mac) guiding the decisions. So the prospect of a coherent, well-designed environment, designed particularly for hobbyists and tinkerers seems unlikely to materialize...
I'm 26. I'm not old.
Well, I can't just call you "man"
Okay, honest question - I don't know much about Ham radio. But the article says they're selling rights to a particular spectrum - but is this the only part of the spectrum available for amateur operators?
I swear I'm not trolling, or trying to minimize the impact. I understand it might require changing broadcast gear, etc., but this wouldn't seem to be an existential threat to ham operators, merely a hassle because you have to move to new frequencies. Or is there something intrinsically better about the specific frequencies in question (420-440 MhZ) which makes them particularly well-suited to amateur radio broadcasts, to the point that hams couldn't operate elsewhere?
A couple issues.
First off, if you're a ham and you've invested in gear for a particular band, and that band gets sold off... Guess what? Your gear's now nearly worthless. "Moving to new frequencies" means "buying new gear", unless you have gear that already supports that band. And there's nothing in this deal about a new chunk of spectrum being allocated to hams to replace 440.
Second, yes, it's just one chunk of spectrum. But the problem is this isn't the only thing something like this has happened. If chunks of amateur spectrum continue to be taken away, at some point there will be nothing left.
Third: different wavelengths have different benefits. I don't remember all the details but I know the longer wavelengths (10 meters, etc.) allow you do do things like atmospheric propagation to get a signal to the other side of the world. Shorter wavelengths (and, hence, higher frequencies) IIRC deal better with local obstacles, and you can get more data through a signal (more bandwidth)
Two quick points:
1) They're everywhere. There are over 600,000 licensed amateur radio operators in the US. If you live in the US, odds are, a ham lives or works less than half a mile from you.
2) A quick example of what they can do:
a) talk to people in the ISS
Goodness knows that's just what I need in an emergency! :)
This was Claude Shannon's "outguessing machine" ported to BASIC; I remember seeing it in Creative Computing. It built a Markov matrix from your entries (yes, this is the "table" you're thinking of) but it's much quicker to follow the Markov machine than to search a table.
Well, you wouldn't have to "search" a table of 16 entries... Just plug in an array index generated by shifting left the previous index and possibly adding one... What I described (if I understand Markov matrices correctly) is a fourth-order Markov matrix...
On the Commodore 64, I had a program that had you input a series of values ("heads or tails", I think, as if you were calling a coin flip... I think it was from Compute's Gazette.) and tried to follow patterns in your input to guess what you'd input next. It was actually pretty good at it.
I expect it worked by building a table of recent history (say, the last 4 moves, so a table size of 16) and then counting how many times, at the end of that sequence, you picked one value or the other...
This wasn't "freeware". It was shareware. A commercial product.
I never really liked that model, mostly because it only ever seemed to exist on the PC. Everywhere else the world was content to give software for free. But on PC I just saw far to people with the mindset that if you used a computer you deserved to get paid for it; including some people who would attach readme files to buggy junk that read "I learned to program while writing this, you owe me $20 if you run it once".
"freeware" was, at one point, a name for the business model that became known as "shareware"... Neither term is really properly descriptive, if you think about it.
I hear ya with regard to the "PC mindset". I always hated that on Windows or Mac, if there was some useful bit of functionality that was somehow missing, someone would be there to charge you money for it. For instance, the game emulator (NES emulator, I think?) I had on my Powerbook (OSX 10.3, around 2004) was free (because the original author licensed it as such) but the guy who ported it to Mac decided to charge extra for the module that let you use a USB gamepad with it... All kinds of little things came with little fees attached. There was kind of a similar issue on PalmOS: because there were lots of things you might want to do that weren't provided in the OS already, there were lots of niches for people to write cheap (but not free), and very simple applications to exploit those niches.
But as a Linux user I think I developed the opposite problem: I developed the mindset that software wasn't something that should be paid for. Why pay for Paint Shop Pro when GIMP is free? Why pay for Word when Openoffice is free? And so on. Personally I think this led me to under-value software, and avoid software that had to be paid for. I think it's a healthier approach than what i did when I ran DOS and Windows (i.e. not paying for software, but running software for which payment was expected) - I wasn't taking anything that wasn't being offered for free, but I think the expectation that good stuff should be free is a bit unhealthy if taken too far.
I think the really bad thing about getting "nickled and dimed" was that, in the cases I was dealing with, it was generally very simple stuff that people were charging for. The threshold, of how much capability you could expect to get for no cost beyond getting on the platform, was very low. That's changed a lot over the years: operating systems come with simple video editors, free photo editors of GIMP's caliber are pretty common, and so on... And so there's a higher threshold for what people can successfully charge money for. At least on most platforms. (I think with new platforms in general it takes a little while for this threshold to rise up to a reasonable level again...)
Chicken nuggets that look like Chickens.
But why 3-D print Chicken Nuggets when the current process of pressing them in molds works perfectly well?
I have a scientific theory that God dose not exist. It is scientific because it is falsifiable. If God appears in front of me and offers me a beer that he makes materialize out of thin air, then he will have falsified my scientific theory.
Well, because he can appear in front of you and summon a beer, does that mean it's really a god? Maybe it's just Q messing with you... Or maybe it's a wizard. Or maybe we're all in the Matrix and what you think is god is really just Agent Smith. And what does God need with a Starship, anyway? What exactly constitutes proof of God?
The virgin birth served the same purpose as all miraculous births in literature and religion, to foreshadow a mythical character, a chosen one.
Well, sure, but no one questions it. Including, most importantly, Shmi herself.
Let's say, for the sake of argument, you're married to a woman, and she gets pregnant without you having sex with her. Are you going to believe her when she says it's a miracle?
Don't you remember, Amidala's republican credits are no good on Tatooine, that's why they had to gamble on the pod race.
Well, that by itself isn't too unreasonable - if it's not a world where Republic Credits are an accepted currency, they wouldn't be accepted. They don't take Euros at the local 7-11 either.
But more importantly, in that particular instance, Watto was dealing with off-worlders who needed a ship. In other words, they were stuck on Tattooine. He probably could have taken their credits. But when dealing with people desperate to make a deal, there's an opportunity to exploit them.
After leaving Tattooine, of course, they'd be at no such disadvantage...
"falsifiable"
This is a reasonable goal. But to take a falsifiable theorem and prove it, and then to suggest that some or all unfalsifiable theorems are thusly incorrect, is a fallacy.
It's not that unfalsifiable ideas are incorrect, it's that they aren't science.
Let's start with the "god" thing. We could never, ever disprove it because the theory holds that, if a god wanted to, he/she/skle could hide his/her/skler existence from us. This also means the idea of "god" can be adjusted to fit any facts we may find. A god could still exist, and that existence could be proven, potentially: but until that happens, without some criteria for determining that there isn't a god, there is no way to build (or destroy) confidence in the idea - and there's no basis for making any kind of useful characterization of this god. So at best the idea leads us in the right direction by chance. At worst, it misleads us. We can't build any confidence in the idea or develop an idea of what implications the idea holds - hence, it's not a useful idea in the context of science.
Yet many "scientists" know God does not exist just like they know the sun will rise. Why is that?
To even begin to answer that question we'd have to start talking about specific scientists. I wouldn't argue that this is a reasonable scientific idea - there's no basis for saying one way or another - but I'm also not going to engage in vague discussion on what "many scientists" speak about as fact. If you want to talk about that, name one, and we can talk about him.
Doesn't matter, it's still bunk.
That is exactly the attitude I'm talking about. "I don't care what you say... blah blah blah I can't hear you." That's how it sounds to other people when you do that.
It's not very kind, perhaps, and not tactful - but there are cases where a dismissive response is entirely appropriate.