Tell me about it. On a flight back from DC a month ago, I sat next to this enormous woman who fell asleep and put her enormous head on my shoulder. She apologized the first time when I got up and woke her but then promptly did it again.
Yeah, I was bullied too. That's almost a given being a mixed-race, poor Chinese Jamaican with a facial tic, glasses, diminutive size, and a penchant for saying things without thinking of the reaction. I was hit in the ribs with a baseball bat because some kid hated that a dork like me caught a fly ball that he hit. I was thrown naked into the girls' locker room and I was the one who got in trouble for it.
But I finished high school, went to college, then realized that those simian, cheating, dead end schoolmates of mine didn't matter.
And why do I hate medication? It's because in this age I would be the one given the medication, not the bullies. They would medicate you too because some idiot counselor would believe it would be in your best interest. I concur that caring and attentive parents would solve many bullying cases, but it's precisely the lack of care and attention that precludes such bullies from getting medication.
I know, I know. This is robably a good thing. Kids fighting on a school bus is probably not the safest thing. But on reading the article, I can't help but compare it to medicating a kid so he doesn't run around as much and so he's docile and well behaved and compliant and conforming. That's scary to me.
These things -- bottled water, diamonds, and music -- have much in common. The vendors of these products have created an artificial demand for a plentiful product. We are told that diamonds are exceedingly rare. When someone invents a process to manufacture flawless diamonds, we are told that only "natural" diamonds are proper tokens of affection. Bottled water is the same. We pay more for a gallon of water than for a gallon of high grade 93 octane gasoline. The same with music. There is no shortage of great music. Sure, there are local bands that just suck, but there are many of better talent than the few who the industry highlights.
Imagine if every slashdotter just replaced the contents of their music device with some local, unsigned, or "open" bands just for a few weeks. Play only that music. Print the lyric sheets. Learn the songs.
I don't think I ever did anything specifically to attract a geek girl except buy a Zebra 301 pen. I was in an English course in college. This girl next to me needed to write something down. I lent her my pen. She wrote something on her folder. She handed back the pen. She said, "Nice pen."
It wasn't my pen, though. That afternoon I went to Office Depot and bought a Zebra 301 pen. I started wearing it in my shirt pocket.
On my desk, right now, I have a Windows XP, a Win7, a MacOSX 10.6 and a Linux workstation. The "apps" I'm using on them right now are browsers running Google Mail and Yahoo, VMWare consoles, and some other client applications. The binary apps I'm using are Putty, Lotus Notes, Acrobat Reader, an MP3 player, and some editors (gvim, JEdit, vi).
My point? 95% of the apps I use are not tied to a particular OS. I can easily switch from one system to another without affecting my ability to do work. If I had to choose one system I'd likely go with Linux because I'm just more comfortable with it, but any of them will do the job. So yeah, I could see a 3 year timeframe when Windows has to change or lose lots of market share.
could you guys give the pointless Microsoft bashing a rest? Just once, ever?
No. Users of Microsoft product have a shared experience. It's no different from that knowing wink when I talk to other Florida residents about Hurricane Andrew. Or comisserate with a Cubs fan. Or talk about the most recent inanities of the most recent PHB with another cubicle dweller. Windows is our shared hell, our Inferno. We could no more stop talking about its pains than we could stop complaining about taxes or the latest government screwup. Indeed, I could holler over my cubicle wall, "Remember Code Red?" or "Just like Nimda" and four people will join in a collective groan of agreement.
I know a lot of people who use Linux in production environments and the majority of them buy support contracts from RedHat. There are a few Novell and Oracle shops, and some that apparently buy through IBM also.
I make no claims that I am not an idiot, but until my work stops requiring hourly kernel rebuilds I'm keeping to the default key sequence as that causes the least number of WTF outbursts.
Oh heck, I use the SysRq key on an almost daily basis whenever I screw up a kernel compile (and that's often). At least on my keyboards, it's on the same key as PrntScrn. Looking at my keyboard, there's nothing that I don't use on a fairly regular basis:Num Lk - *almost* always on when using a laptop. Almost always off when using a regular keyboard. Pause/Break I've mapped to bring up my task manager. I've also noticed that the paint is actually wearing off the hjkl keys on one keyboard (too much nethack...er vi).
I run primarily Linux desktops. I installed Win7 a few weeks ago on a couple Vista-32 and Vista-64 laptops (one with the vendor supplied upgrade, the other with a 3-pack update). So far, nothing to complain about. Some apps still aren't Win7-64 ready, but for the most part the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are nowhere near as problematic as Vista. I am not a huge fan of the networking configuration tools as it's been difficult finding the correct tools for certain tasks and some Java64 glitches (mostly related to heap size issues), but it works.
I just reread Lord of Light (brought on by a reading of American Gods and Anansi Boys). Though it is my *favorite* Zelazny novel, I would enjoy seeing the Chronicles of Amber brought to the screen. It seems perfect for it... though some would make the comment that "It's a Sliders ripoff":D Come to think of it, Damnation Alley was once made into a movie, though I heard it sucked.
Basic statistics as taught in a beginning stats class is counter-intuitive because they don't teach the calculus behind it. But it's actually quite simple to use, however. The tough part is figuring out what statistic to apply to a given problem. It's not difficult. There's a reason that it satisfies the "basic math requirements" for a business major and physical therapy major.
The mathematics behind statistics is Calculus 2 which is hardly obscure. The Statistics with Calculus class in fact only requires a Calc 1 understanding; i.e., knowledge of limits, differentiation and integration. What the statistics course teaches is how to apply those tools and not the reasoning behind how they work.
And yes, statistics is often badly taught, but I can say that about almost every undergrad math course that I ever took.
I really just don't understand this whole 3D movie thing.
Ok, I get your sentiment, but the same was said about sound and color. 3D, by itself, won't make a good movie. At the worst you'll get something that's a crappy movie with crappy 3D effects. At the middle you'd get something like "The Mind's Eye", except in 3D and even that bar would be raised as the technology trickles down so regular folks can do those effects (e.g., the Terminator liquid metal man can now be done with $2,000 software). And the very best would be an immersive movie with an interesting storyline that completely transports the viewer away. Yeah, you can do the same with 2D, but 3D is just another paintbrush.
In another thread someone had posted that there was no reason for any modern CPUs; the idea being that anything one could reasonably want to do with a computer was possible with decade old hardware.
This.. *This* article is why I enjoy the breakneck pace of processor speed improvements. The thought of being able to do some pretty serious computing on a relatively inexpensive bit of hardware -- even if it takes half a year to get results -- does what the printing press did. It allows the unwashed masses (of which I am one) a chance to do things that were once only the realm of researchers in academia or the corporate world. Sure, all that you need to do some serious mathematics is a pen and paper, but more and more discoveries occur using methods that can only be performed with a computer.
There's always the argument that cheap computers and cheap access to powerful software pollutes the space with hacks and dilletantes. People have said this about desktop publishing, ray tracing, and even the growth of Linux. But it's this ability to do some amazing things with computers that makes it all worthwhile.
The story was pretty cliché. I'm not sure how Americans see this, but I can usually predict the end of American movies while European or Asian movies are much more unpredictable.
I don't mean to be facetious, but after having seen as many Asian and European movies as American ones, I can usually predict all the standard plots:
American movies -- Hero survives. Villain dies, but there's movement in the ruins in the closing shot.
Asian movies - Hero dies. Villain dies.
European movies - Hero and villain work it out. Or not. But there's usually something involving a mysterious past shared by both.
Hopefully this will spur more interest in some of the many tools that NASA provides for free on its website. There are many free Java applications (standalone or jnlp) to view the data or embed it within your own application. Though the documentation is not always the greatest, with a little tinkering you can make interactive websites for anything from planning your camping trip to searching for ancient meteor craters.
Though a lot of the sources are availble, many of the Linux distributions don't have an easy way of building them. It's a real pain to build, but the results are spectacular.
Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent. :) Those days are long gone, I think, when it was understood that developers understood how to do basic (and advanced) maintenance on their systems.
Our developers are mostly Java programmers... Our machines are mostly AIX. The developers have been known to ask how to get to the "D:\" drive and have opened tickets that "ls doesn't work" because they ran it in an empty directory and didn't get any listings.
Every admin here probably has a hundred similar stories about things that supposedly computer literate developers have done.
I can forgive certain things.. Like the developer opening a ticket that his Java program wouldn't run (trying to./deploy.jar was giving a permissions error). I suppose on some desktop systems you could double-click a JAR and have it launch.
Some things are harder to forgive...
Like the developer copying AIX 5.3 binaries from a pSeries system to a RHEL5 on Xeon and opening a ticket that it didn't work...
Or the one about "all the files appear to be corrupted" when user tried to do "CD/USR/LOCAL/"...
This dissipates the crushing force over the entire surface of the egg. Try it yourself, you can't crush an egg in your hand no matter how hard you squeeze.
I read this once too. Place an egg in the palm of your hand and try to crush it. When I was 12 I couldn't do it. By 18 it was a simple thing to squish it to pieces. If you don't place it precisely in your hand so that your fingers aren't exerting pressure then it will break very easily.
This is sort of nonsensical. First of all, a PDF isn't an application, it's a file format. It's great for holding "page centric" slideshows, and I use it as the destination for Powerpoint presentations fairly often. Second, "bringing up the web page live" is hardly a substitute for a presentation. You're only going to have a live web page for stuff that's either 1) customer facing material - how to get to your location, product lines, etc; or 2) internal company stuff - HR policies, trouble ticket systems, etc, etc. When you need to brief your boss on the new servers you need to buy, you're going to show your decision process by bringing up various companies' live web pages and talking off the cuff? Good luck with that.
I wasn't clear enough. The browser is the front-end and "live" in the sense that it's not a static page. Behind it the presentation is HTML based and created on-the-fly with any number of content creation tools that are not page-centric. I can export the webpage -- sound, video, javascript and all -- into a directory that I can use as a presentation. Whether the content is Flash-based, or DHTML, or an embedded video, this approach is much more engaging to the audience than a Powerpoint presentation that's essentially an animation with limited interactivity. I.e., with a PowerPoint talk we can go forward a slide, go backward a slide, play some video, etc.. With the browser you can flip through in the traditional method but you also have the ability to create widgets that will highlight a point, seamlessly integrate many forms of web content, and navigate on the fly.
As for the "old school" paper documents, that won't go away anytime soon, there's little complaint about that. What will change is how we create those documents. For example, in Word there's limited ability to define multiple content sources in a page.
Now, this makes sense because Word's output is geared for the printed document and began before RSS feeds, databases, online image repositories, etc. were commonplace. So when I create a page in Word, I have to import my data from say, a monitoring tool that graphs CPU utilization. Another section lists disk utilization graphs from the SAN admin page (available as an RSS feed). I have to import that data as static content into my document. When I'm done, no matter how quickly I do it, the content is already becoming stale.
Contrast this with a "new media" tool. I define the URL to the graphic and the RSS feed in my document. I tag the information to show that it was a snapshot as of a certain date and time. When I export to a page, I know that the content is up to date. If needed, I export to PDF and send it up to the bosses. The next week, when I need to create another one, I re-tag and re-import. Sure, this is possible in Word if you get creative, but it's not an easy process (and I've done it so I know).
The defense industry may be different, but among the small and medium sized businesses that have the option of integrating more cutting-edge technology the need for traditional page-centric tools is fading.
Slashdot Mirror
Tell me about it. On a flight back from DC a month ago, I sat next to this enormous woman who fell asleep and put her enormous head on my shoulder. She apologized the first time when I got up and woke her but then promptly did it again.
Yeah, I was bullied too. That's almost a given being a mixed-race, poor Chinese Jamaican with a facial tic, glasses, diminutive size, and a penchant for saying things without thinking of the reaction. I was hit in the ribs with a baseball bat because some kid hated that a dork like me caught a fly ball that he hit. I was thrown naked into the girls' locker room and I was the one who got in trouble for it.
But I finished high school, went to college, then realized that those simian, cheating, dead end schoolmates of mine didn't matter.
And why do I hate medication? It's because in this age I would be the one given the medication, not the bullies. They would medicate you too because some idiot counselor would believe it would be in your best interest. I concur that caring and attentive parents would solve many bullying cases, but it's precisely the lack of care and attention that precludes such bullies from getting medication.
I know, I know. This is robably a good thing. Kids fighting on a school bus is probably not the safest thing. But on reading the article, I can't help but compare it to medicating a kid so he doesn't run around as much and so he's docile and well behaved and compliant and conforming. That's scary to me.
These things -- bottled water, diamonds, and music -- have much in common. The vendors of these products have created an artificial demand for a plentiful product. We are told that diamonds are exceedingly rare. When someone invents a process to manufacture flawless diamonds, we are told that only "natural" diamonds are proper tokens of affection. Bottled water is the same. We pay more for a gallon of water than for a gallon of high grade 93 octane gasoline. The same with music. There is no shortage of great music. Sure, there are local bands that just suck, but there are many of better talent than the few who the industry highlights.
Imagine if every slashdotter just replaced the contents of their music device with some local, unsigned, or "open" bands just for a few weeks. Play only that music. Print the lyric sheets. Learn the songs.
I don't think I ever did anything specifically to attract a geek girl except buy a Zebra 301 pen. I was in an English course in college. This girl next to me needed to write something down. I lent her my pen. She wrote something on her folder. She handed back the pen. She said, "Nice pen."
It wasn't my pen, though. That afternoon I went to Office Depot and bought a Zebra 301 pen. I started wearing it in my shirt pocket.
All this because some girl said, "Nice pen."
On my desk, right now, I have a Windows XP, a Win7, a MacOSX 10.6 and a Linux workstation. The "apps" I'm using on them right now are browsers running Google Mail and Yahoo, VMWare consoles, and some other client applications. The binary apps I'm using are Putty, Lotus Notes, Acrobat Reader, an MP3 player, and some editors (gvim, JEdit, vi).
My point? 95% of the apps I use are not tied to a particular OS. I can easily switch from one system to another without affecting my ability to do work. If I had to choose one system I'd likely go with Linux because I'm just more comfortable with it, but any of them will do the job. So yeah, I could see a 3 year timeframe when Windows has to change or lose lots of market share.
could you guys give the pointless Microsoft bashing a rest? Just once, ever?
No. Users of Microsoft product have a shared experience. It's no different from that knowing wink when I talk to other Florida residents about Hurricane Andrew. Or comisserate with a Cubs fan. Or talk about the most recent inanities of the most recent PHB with another cubicle dweller. Windows is our shared hell, our Inferno. We could no more stop talking about its pains than we could stop complaining about taxes or the latest government screwup. Indeed, I could holler over my cubicle wall, "Remember Code Red?" or "Just like Nimda" and four people will join in a collective groan of agreement.
You bastard!! That just brought back some memories of my childhood. This was a real conversation:
"So who is the dungeon master."
"Well, Jonathan is usually the dungeon master."
"Who is Jonathan?"
"He's my friend."
"So you can see him?"
"What do you mean? Of course I can see him."
"And he's the dungeon master?"
"Yes, he's the dungeon mater."
"Obviously this game is playing tricks with your mind if you think you can actually see this dungeon master."
I know a lot of people who use Linux in production environments and the majority of them buy support contracts from RedHat. There are a few Novell and Oracle shops, and some that apparently buy through IBM also.
I make no claims that I am not an idiot, but until my work stops requiring hourly kernel rebuilds I'm keeping to the default key sequence as that causes the least number of WTF outbursts.
Haha, who's laughing now. I did it in six hours!!! And you mocked my -funroll-loops and -O16. Who's laughing now???
Oh heck, I use the SysRq key on an almost daily basis whenever I screw up a kernel compile (and that's often). At least on my keyboards, it's on the same key as PrntScrn. Looking at my keyboard, there's nothing that I don't use on a fairly regular basis:Num Lk - *almost* always on when using a laptop. Almost always off when using a regular keyboard. Pause/Break I've mapped to bring up my task manager. I've also noticed that the paint is actually wearing off the hjkl keys on one keyboard (too much nethack...er vi).
I run primarily Linux desktops. I installed Win7 a few weeks ago on a couple Vista-32 and Vista-64 laptops (one with the vendor supplied upgrade, the other with a 3-pack update). So far, nothing to complain about. Some apps still aren't Win7-64 ready, but for the most part the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are nowhere near as problematic as Vista. I am not a huge fan of the networking configuration tools as it's been difficult finding the correct tools for certain tasks and some Java64 glitches (mostly related to heap size issues), but it works.
I just reread Lord of Light (brought on by a reading of American Gods and Anansi Boys). Though it is my *favorite* Zelazny novel, I would enjoy seeing the Chronicles of Amber brought to the screen. It seems perfect for it... though some would make the comment that "It's a Sliders ripoff" :D Come to think of it, Damnation Alley was once made into a movie, though I heard it sucked.
So, umm, I guess there will be no "RTFA" comments in this thread.
Can't agree with that.
Basic statistics as taught in a beginning stats class is counter-intuitive because they don't teach the calculus behind it. But it's actually quite simple to use, however. The tough part is figuring out what statistic to apply to a given problem. It's not difficult. There's a reason that it satisfies the "basic math requirements" for a business major and physical therapy major.
The mathematics behind statistics is Calculus 2 which is hardly obscure. The Statistics with Calculus class in fact only requires a Calc 1 understanding; i.e., knowledge of limits, differentiation and integration. What the statistics course teaches is how to apply those tools and not the reasoning behind how they work.
And yes, statistics is often badly taught, but I can say that about almost every undergrad math course that I ever took.
I really just don't understand this whole 3D movie thing.
Ok, I get your sentiment, but the same was said about sound and color. 3D, by itself, won't make a good movie. At the worst you'll get something that's a crappy movie with crappy 3D effects. At the middle you'd get something like "The Mind's Eye", except in 3D and even that bar would be raised as the technology trickles down so regular folks can do those effects (e.g., the Terminator liquid metal man can now be done with $2,000 software). And the very best would be an immersive movie with an interesting storyline that completely transports the viewer away. Yeah, you can do the same with 2D, but 3D is just another paintbrush.
In another thread someone had posted that there was no reason for any modern CPUs; the idea being that anything one could reasonably want to do with a computer was possible with decade old hardware.
This.. *This* article is why I enjoy the breakneck pace of processor speed improvements. The thought of being able to do some pretty serious computing on a relatively inexpensive bit of hardware -- even if it takes half a year to get results -- does what the printing press did. It allows the unwashed masses (of which I am one) a chance to do things that were once only the realm of researchers in academia or the corporate world. Sure, all that you need to do some serious mathematics is a pen and paper, but more and more discoveries occur using methods that can only be performed with a computer.
There's always the argument that cheap computers and cheap access to powerful software pollutes the space with hacks and dilletantes. People have said this about desktop publishing, ray tracing, and even the growth of Linux. But it's this ability to do some amazing things with computers that makes it all worthwhile.
The story was pretty cliché. I'm not sure how Americans see this, but I can usually predict the end of American movies while European or Asian movies are much more unpredictable.
I don't mean to be facetious, but after having seen as many Asian and European movies as American ones, I can usually predict all the standard plots:
American movies -- Hero survives. Villain dies, but there's movement in the ruins in the closing shot.
Asian movies - Hero dies. Villain dies.
European movies - Hero and villain work it out. Or not. But there's usually something involving a mysterious past shared by both.
Check out tvtropes.org BTW.. :)
Hopefully this will spur more interest in some of the many tools that NASA provides for free on its website. There are many free Java applications (standalone or jnlp) to view the data or embed it within your own application. Though the documentation is not always the greatest, with a little tinkering you can make interactive websites for anything from planning your camping trip to searching for ancient meteor craters.
http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/java/
Though a lot of the sources are availble, many of the Linux distributions don't have an easy way of building them. It's a real pain to build, but the results are spectacular.
Any developer who can't competently administer his own machine is incompetent. :) Those days are long gone, I think, when it was understood that developers understood how to do basic (and advanced) maintenance on their systems.
Our developers are mostly Java programmers... Our machines are mostly AIX. The developers have been known to ask how to get to the "D:\" drive and have opened tickets that "ls doesn't work" because they ran it in an empty directory and didn't get any listings.
Every admin here probably has a hundred similar stories about things that supposedly computer literate developers have done.
I can forgive certain things.. Like the developer opening a ticket that his Java program wouldn't run (trying to ./deploy.jar was giving a permissions error). I suppose on some desktop systems you could double-click a JAR and have it launch.
Some things are harder to forgive...
Like the developer copying AIX 5.3 binaries from a pSeries system to a RHEL5 on Xeon and opening a ticket that it didn't work...
Or the one about "all the files appear to be corrupted" when user tried to do "CD /USR/LOCAL/"...
Oh my goodness, what a surprise... The linked article on SA was one for a question that I had submitted 10 years ago to "Ask the Experts"!!
"...I've not got much time for that particular play."
Wait around until the end.. It's quite a surprise.
This dissipates the crushing force over the entire surface of the egg. Try it yourself, you can't crush an egg in your hand no matter how hard you squeeze.
I read this once too. Place an egg in the palm of your hand and try to crush it. When I was 12 I couldn't do it. By 18 it was a simple thing to squish it to pieces. If you don't place it precisely in your hand so that your fingers aren't exerting pressure then it will break very easily.
This is sort of nonsensical. First of all, a PDF isn't an application, it's a file format. It's great for holding "page centric" slideshows, and I use it as the destination for Powerpoint presentations fairly often. Second, "bringing up the web page live" is hardly a substitute for a presentation. You're only going to have a live web page for stuff that's either 1) customer facing material - how to get to your location, product lines, etc; or 2) internal company stuff - HR policies, trouble ticket systems, etc, etc. When you need to brief your boss on the new servers you need to buy, you're going to show your decision process by bringing up various companies' live web pages and talking off the cuff? Good luck with that.
I wasn't clear enough. The browser is the front-end and "live" in the sense that it's not a static page. Behind it the presentation is HTML based and created on-the-fly with any number of content creation tools that are not page-centric. I can export the webpage -- sound, video, javascript and all -- into a directory that I can use as a presentation. Whether the content is Flash-based, or DHTML, or an embedded video, this approach is much more engaging to the audience than a Powerpoint presentation that's essentially an animation with limited interactivity. I.e., with a PowerPoint talk we can go forward a slide, go backward a slide, play some video, etc.. With the browser you can flip through in the traditional method but you also have the ability to create widgets that will highlight a point, seamlessly integrate many forms of web content, and navigate on the fly.
As for the "old school" paper documents, that won't go away anytime soon, there's little complaint about that. What will change is how we create those documents. For example, in Word there's limited ability to define multiple content sources in a page.
Now, this makes sense because Word's output is geared for the printed document and began before RSS feeds, databases, online image repositories, etc. were commonplace. So when I create a page in Word, I have to import my data from say, a monitoring tool that graphs CPU utilization. Another section lists disk utilization graphs from the SAN admin page (available as an RSS feed). I have to import that data as static content into my document. When I'm done, no matter how quickly I do it, the content is already becoming stale.
Contrast this with a "new media" tool. I define the URL to the graphic and the RSS feed in my document. I tag the information to show that it was a snapshot as of a certain date and time. When I export to a page, I know that the content is up to date. If needed, I export to PDF and send it up to the bosses. The next week, when I need to create another one, I re-tag and re-import. Sure, this is possible in Word if you get creative, but it's not an easy process (and I've done it so I know).
The defense industry may be different, but among the small and medium sized businesses that have the option of integrating more cutting-edge technology the need for traditional page-centric tools is fading.