Leave it to/.ers to complain about science being used to critically analyze something. God forbid! It is an article of faith that video games are good for you! We must oppose this use of "science" to evaluate possible effects of behaviors or physical systems! Unless of course it's evolution.
I bought a Chaintech S1689 mobo with ULi chipset recently, and haven't been able to get it fully functioning under Linux. The redhat installer wouldn't even boot. I got the Suse installer to boot with some jiggling. I have to pass acpi=off and agp=off to the kernel to get it to boot, and if I have any USB support enabled in the BIOS, or even have a PCI USB card plugged in, it freezes at the "Probing for PCI Hardware" stage. I guess this is as much of a Linux problem as a ULi problem (it all works fine under Windows) but I'm not a kernel hacker, I just want something that works out of the box. Guess I got what I paid for. (Incidentally, has anybody else had problems like this? Or am I just a total retard?)
Everybody is blasting Slashdot, the submitter, and their mother for running a fake quote in the Slashdot headline. Doesn't it seem like it's maybe a wee bit irresponsible (read: incredibly irresponsible) for a supposedly legitimate news outlet like The Register to run a fake quote at the top of their article, and follow it up with, "Just kidding!" The cardinal rule of article writing is that the likelihood that somebody will read a paragraph is inversely proportional to how far into the article it is. So, if you lie in the first paragraph and clear it up in the second, about half of the people who read it won't ever make it to the second paragraph. These clowns think their prose is amusing or something, but it's just badly written and irresponsible.
I haven't read the links yet, but I just have to point out that the U.S. government has a long history, particularly in the mid 20th century, of using humans as guinea pigs. In particular, see the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, which took place between 1932 and 1972, and which basically allowed about 40 black men to die of syphilis so that doctors could study the effects of the disease, even after effective cures for it were known.
The US government was looking for Mengele until at least his death in 1979, but continued the aforementioned experiment on a group that it considered racially inferior until 1972. Amazing.
I have a Case Logic neoprene laptop sleeve that protects my laptop when I throw it into my backpack, and doubles as a lap protector. The neoprene is a very good insulator, and this is much more useful than a dedicated laptop crotch protector.
Calling Mitnick the "uberhacker" is like calling Mengele the "uberdoctor." Mitnick is a pathetic, attention-starved loser. Everytime I see people in a technical forum rally around him like some kind of demigod it makes me want to puke. Randal Schwartz at least gave something back to the community (the Llama Book.) All Mitnick did was make the word "hacker" a dirty word in the press.
It really sucks, but it's true. He was the least talented of the MP players by far. He's like the Chevy Chase of SNL. And he's just been riding the coattails of the Python legacy since, in one way or another. A quick overview of where they've been:
John Cleese: "Fawlty Towers", "A Fish Called Wanda" (both brilliant), formed a company to make very funny instructional videos for businesses, is a Buhddist.
Terry Gilliam: "Time Bandits," "Brazil," et cetera. Also brilliant.
Graham Chapman: RIP.
Michael Palin: "A Fish Called Wanda," "Brazil," and more recently some very amusing and enlightening travelogues, e.g., "Around the World in 80 Days."
Terry Jones: Co-wrote "Labryinth", is a prolific writer in Medieval history.
Eric Idle: "Nuns on the Run" and "Suddenly Susan."
A loss of two million jobs...of which a large number are convicts, currently serving prison sentences, who get paid below minimum wage, because it's a good source of cheap labor with American accents, and it's their only opportunity for work. See, e.g., http://www.stopjunkcalls.com/convict.htm
Make sure there are some console games available for "cool-down." Highly recommended is Soul Caliber for Dreamcast, or, if this will be after August, Soul Caliber II for the platform of your choice. Soul Caliber is an excellent beteween-deathmatch game, as it requires very little thought and is a lot of fun (I generally just play Yoshimitsu and commit seppuku when I start to lose badly.)
That's a pretty untutored opinion. I've used debuggers on about ten different platforms and found the MS Visual C++ debugger to be the best designed one I've used. It's well integrated, easy to look at, it has machine code disassembly built in and displays it between the code lines (if you want), it has intuitive hot keys, et cetera. There are some really bad debuggers out there. dbx on AIX was absolutely retarded, and couldn't set watch points without crashing. Their GUI for it was harder to use than the command line. The MS debugger is a dream by comparison.
One major problem is that the very concept of debugging is problematic. It assumes that you will make mistakes, and that the only way to track down mistakes is to painstakingly find each one. This process takes O(n) time, but the number of bugs grows more like O(exp(n)) with the program size, so when programs become non-trivial, you'll never be able to track down all the bugs.
What's actually needed is more intelligent languages and automated code checking tools, as well as better code review and coding practices. Strict code review and coding practices help make programming more like a real engineering endeavor, instead of the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants garage hack-fest that seems prevalent in a lot of existing code. But, the real challenge is to develop languages with features like the ability to detect potential problems in code using partial evaluation, and alert the programmer at compilation time rather than run time.
Basically, we're still in the hunter-gatherer stage of software development, and the Bug Problem needs to be fixed by a fundamental shift in paradigm that can move us beyond the need to deal with "bugs" explicitly. Until then, a snappier debugger interface and new debugging features will only have marginal impact on the ability to develop fault-free software.
Dude, you're a crack monkey. The article you referenced didn't offer evidence that anybody was targeted by the Feds for buying "charcoal and hummus." It didn't even say there existed a person who bought "charcoal and hummus." "Charcoal and hummus" are used as examples of grocery items that might have been on the list of frequent-shopper records that got turned over to the Feds by an overzealous marketroid. The article doesn't cite a single instance of anybody being visited by the Feds as a result of their shopping habits. I'm as anti-frequent-shopping cards as the next Slashdot nerd, but, seriously, get your panties unbunched and try to use some of those reading comprehension skills that you had to demonstrate on the SATs (not to mention some good old-fashioned common sense) next time you start to make wild-eyed conspiracy-theory-esque leaps of logic.
Aside from that, whether or not buying chemicals will get the Feds at your door depends strongly on what you buy. If you buy potassium chloride, probably not. If you buy sulfuric and picric acid, you should probably expect to be hearing the pitter pat of little feet on your doorstep.
This paper takes some very simple statistical models and turns them into what seem to be totally unfounded generalizations about the way science is done. Taking their statistical conclusions at face value, we find that 77% of the people who cited the paper didn't read it in its original form. But, they go on to conclude that a) the only source of information about the paper could have come from a single other paper (namely, the paper with the original citation), and b) misunderstandings about the conclusions drawn by a paper will spread "like wildfire." They do not actually demonstrate this latter conclusion, and don't show that any of the papers actually did misconstrue the science in the original paper.
This is because heavily cited papers become very widely known and understood. Not everybody who's ever cited "The Origin of the Species" has read the whole thing, but it certainly then does not follow that they took their understandings of its conclusions from a single other citing paper.
They end their article with a smug admonition to "read before you cite." These guys sound like the guy with a clean desk who never gets anything done complaining about all the clutter on your desk. Smug social scientists criticizing physicists for their lack of citation rigor does not impress me. There are plenty of better reasons to criticize physicists this year (e.g., Ninov and Schoen). This one seems a bit silly.
Spinning a dreidel with Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock
on
Ask William Shatner
·
· Score: 1
We all know, from Adam Sandler's famous song, that you and Leonard Nimoy are Jewish. Leonard Nimoy has been cited on many ocassions for his involvement with various Jewish projects (including receiving an honarary degree from the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies), but I've heard very little about your involvement with religion. How do you feel about religion in general, and what is your relationship to Judaism? How observant are you, and how did your religion impact your life and your work?
Notice that one of the authors on this paper is Neil Gershenfeld, author of The Physics of Information Technology, reviewed here exactly a year ago yesterday (at least I think it was a year. The searched Slashdot postings have no year indication on them. Is this a Y0K bug?) I liked that book, actually. It had a very readable section on the fluctuation dissipation-theorem, though I think it gave short shrift to research on the underlying causes of the FDT.
Landau and Lipschitz. Skip the pop science crap and get a few volumes of L&L. If you can get through them, you'll know more physics than most physics grad students.
Do you mean "gross generalization" as in "disgusting generalization" or as in "general generalization"? In either case, yes, it is a generalization, hence my saying "generally." The question is, is it an untrue generalization? Of course it isn't. Most sci-fi/fantasy readers will defend their genre of choice using Sturgeon's Law, but the fact remains that the vast majority of sci-fi/fantasy is written to to demonstrate some clever idea about the future (sci-fi genre), or some approximation of an adolescent magical power fantasy (fantasy genre). Of course there's well written science fiction and fantasy, and I've read some of it. But, I'll take Nabokov or Martin Amis or E.L. Doktrow (who actually did write a science fiction novel) any day over your average science fiction/fantasy writer. The problem isn't that it's hard to write a good science fiction/fantasy novel. It's that the good writers mostly choose not to.
I enjoyed many of your books when I was much younger, and I found that they had a fantastic impact on my vocabulary and imagination. However, at around age 14, I started to feel that the newer novels that you were producing (this was in 1990 or so) were much more commerically oriented (I particularly recall that making the Brown Adept a lesbian seemed out of character and gratuitously sexual.) I'm now a much more mature reader, and I generally eschew the fantasy and science fiction genres for their immaturity, prefering works with more developed characters. My question to you is: Where do you feel your work fits into the science fiction/fantasy genre, and more importantly, where does it fit into the greater literary scheme of things?
Why the hell would you aspire to become a systems administrator? Most people don't aspire to be systems administrators, they just wind up there because they find that it's the only computer job where ignorance, vanity and anti-social tendencies are tolerated, and where they can fulfill their needs for petty power mongering over other people without having to work their way up into management. Now, don't get me wrong: a good systems administrator is worth his weight in gold. Unfortunately, I've only ever met one or two people who I would consider "good" systems administrators, and they were actually programmers who wound up taking on sysadmin responsibility when it was necessary. Full-time systems administrators are, as a general rule, the lowest form of life. It's a job that would delight an anti-social high-school weenie who likes to think he's smarter than eveybody else and likes to boost his tenuous self-esteem by being bossy. This is how most system administrators act. Please, don't be That Guy[tm].
Slashdot Mirror
Leave it to /.ers to complain about science being used to critically analyze something. God forbid! It is an article of faith that video games are good for you! We must oppose this use of "science" to evaluate possible effects of behaviors or physical systems! Unless of course it's evolution.
I bought a Chaintech S1689 mobo with ULi chipset recently, and haven't been able to get it fully functioning under Linux. The redhat installer wouldn't even boot. I got the Suse installer to boot with some jiggling. I have to pass acpi=off and agp=off to the kernel to get it to boot, and if I have any USB support enabled in the BIOS, or even have a PCI USB card plugged in, it freezes at the "Probing for PCI Hardware" stage. I guess this is as much of a Linux problem as a ULi problem (it all works fine under Windows) but I'm not a kernel hacker, I just want something that works out of the box. Guess I got what I paid for. (Incidentally, has anybody else had problems like this? Or am I just a total retard?)
Everybody is blasting Slashdot, the submitter, and their mother for running a fake quote in the Slashdot headline. Doesn't it seem like it's maybe a wee bit irresponsible (read: incredibly irresponsible) for a supposedly legitimate news outlet like The Register to run a fake quote at the top of their article, and follow it up with, "Just kidding!" The cardinal rule of article writing is that the likelihood that somebody will read a paragraph is inversely proportional to how far into the article it is. So, if you lie in the first paragraph and clear it up in the second, about half of the people who read it won't ever make it to the second paragraph. These clowns think their prose is amusing or something, but it's just badly written and irresponsible.
...the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider. You know, the one that will create a blackhole into which will swallow the planet.
I haven't read the links yet, but I just have to point out that the U.S. government has a long history, particularly in the mid 20th century, of using humans as guinea pigs. In particular, see the Tuskegee Syphilis experiment, which took place between 1932 and 1972, and which basically allowed about 40 black men to die of syphilis so that doctors could study the effects of the disease, even after effective cures for it were known.
The US government was looking for Mengele until at least his death in 1979, but continued the aforementioned experiment on a group that it considered racially inferior until 1972. Amazing.
I have a Case Logic neoprene laptop sleeve that protects my laptop when I throw it into my backpack, and doubles as a lap protector. The neoprene is a very good insulator, and this is much more useful than a dedicated laptop crotch protector.
If you were running a Yiddish web site, that would be a perfect TLD.
Calling Mitnick the "uberhacker" is like calling Mengele the "uberdoctor." Mitnick is a pathetic, attention-starved loser. Everytime I see people in a technical forum rally around him like some kind of demigod it makes me want to puke. Randal Schwartz at least gave something back to the community (the Llama Book.) All Mitnick did was make the word "hacker" a dirty word in the press.
John Cleese: "Fawlty Towers", "A Fish Called Wanda" (both brilliant), formed a company to make very funny instructional videos for businesses, is a Buhddist.
Terry Gilliam: "Time Bandits," "Brazil," et cetera. Also brilliant.
Graham Chapman: RIP.
Michael Palin: "A Fish Called Wanda," "Brazil," and more recently some very amusing and enlightening travelogues, e.g., "Around the World in 80 Days."
Terry Jones: Co-wrote "Labryinth", is a prolific writer in Medieval history.
Eric Idle: "Nuns on the Run" and "Suddenly Susan."
Need we say more?
A loss of two million jobs...of which a large number are convicts, currently serving prison sentences, who get paid below minimum wage, because it's a good source of cheap labor with American accents, and it's their only opportunity for work. See, e.g., http://www.stopjunkcalls.com/convict.htm
Wow. I should get myself one of these, and a little bitty CRT, and it will be just like the movie Brazil!
Make sure there are some console games available for "cool-down." Highly recommended is Soul Caliber for Dreamcast, or, if this will be after August, Soul Caliber II for the platform of your choice. Soul Caliber is an excellent beteween-deathmatch game, as it requires very little thought and is a lot of fun (I generally just play Yoshimitsu and commit seppuku when I start to lose badly.)
Now you've told them everything! You fool! You fool!
Good point. This was actually the first thing that I noticed about it, which irritated me. Apologies to Dan Weinreb!
What is this guy, a Lisp programmer?
That's a pretty untutored opinion. I've used debuggers on about ten different platforms and found the MS Visual C++ debugger to be the best designed one I've used. It's well integrated, easy to look at, it has machine code disassembly built in and displays it between the code lines (if you want), it has intuitive hot keys, et cetera. There are some really bad debuggers out there. dbx on AIX was absolutely retarded, and couldn't set watch points without crashing. Their GUI for it was harder to use than the command line. The MS debugger is a dream by comparison.
What's actually needed is more intelligent languages and automated code checking tools, as well as better code review and coding practices. Strict code review and coding practices help make programming more like a real engineering endeavor, instead of the fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants garage hack-fest that seems prevalent in a lot of existing code. But, the real challenge is to develop languages with features like the ability to detect potential problems in code using partial evaluation, and alert the programmer at compilation time rather than run time.
Basically, we're still in the hunter-gatherer stage of software development, and the Bug Problem needs to be fixed by a fundamental shift in paradigm that can move us beyond the need to deal with "bugs" explicitly. Until then, a snappier debugger interface and new debugging features will only have marginal impact on the ability to develop fault-free software.
Aside from that, whether or not buying chemicals will get the Feds at your door depends strongly on what you buy. If you buy potassium chloride, probably not. If you buy sulfuric and picric acid, you should probably expect to be hearing the pitter pat of little feet on your doorstep.
This paper takes some very simple statistical models and turns them into what seem to be totally unfounded generalizations about the way science is done. Taking their statistical conclusions at face value, we find that 77% of the people who cited the paper didn't read it in its original form. But, they go on to conclude that a) the only source of information about the paper could have come from a single other paper (namely, the paper with the original citation), and b) misunderstandings about the conclusions drawn by a paper will spread "like wildfire." They do not actually demonstrate this latter conclusion, and don't show that any of the papers actually did misconstrue the science in the original paper.
This is because heavily cited papers become very widely known and understood. Not everybody who's ever cited "The Origin of the Species" has read the whole thing, but it certainly then does not follow that they took their understandings of its conclusions from a single other citing paper.
They end their article with a smug admonition to "read before you cite." These guys sound like the guy with a clean desk who never gets anything done complaining about all the clutter on your desk. Smug social scientists criticizing physicists for their lack of citation rigor does not impress me. There are plenty of better reasons to criticize physicists this year (e.g., Ninov and Schoen). This one seems a bit silly.
We all know, from Adam Sandler's famous song, that you and Leonard Nimoy are Jewish. Leonard Nimoy has been cited on many ocassions for his involvement with various Jewish projects (including receiving an honarary degree from the Spertus Institute for Jewish Studies), but I've heard very little about your involvement with religion. How do you feel about religion in general, and what is your relationship to Judaism? How observant are you, and how did your religion impact your life and your work?
Notice that one of the authors on this paper is Neil Gershenfeld, author of The Physics of Information Technology, reviewed here exactly a year ago yesterday (at least I think it was a year. The searched Slashdot postings have no year indication on them. Is this a Y0K bug?) I liked that book, actually. It had a very readable section on the fluctuation dissipation-theorem, though I think it gave short shrift to research on the underlying causes of the FDT.
Landau and Lipschitz. Skip the pop science crap and get a few volumes of L&L. If you can get through them, you'll know more physics than most physics grad students.
Do you mean "gross generalization" as in "disgusting generalization" or as in "general generalization"? In either case, yes, it is a generalization, hence my saying "generally." The question is, is it an untrue generalization? Of course it isn't. Most sci-fi/fantasy readers will defend their genre of choice using Sturgeon's Law, but the fact remains that the vast majority of sci-fi/fantasy is written to to demonstrate some clever idea about the future (sci-fi genre), or some approximation of an adolescent magical power fantasy (fantasy genre). Of course there's well written science fiction and fantasy, and I've read some of it. But, I'll take Nabokov or Martin Amis or E.L. Doktrow (who actually did write a science fiction novel) any day over your average science fiction/fantasy writer. The problem isn't that it's hard to write a good science fiction/fantasy novel. It's that the good writers mostly choose not to.
I enjoyed many of your books when I was much younger, and I found that they had a fantastic impact on my vocabulary and imagination. However, at around age 14, I started to feel that the newer novels that you were producing (this was in 1990 or so) were much more commerically oriented (I particularly recall that making the Brown Adept a lesbian seemed out of character and gratuitously sexual.) I'm now a much more mature reader, and I generally eschew the fantasy and science fiction genres for their immaturity, prefering works with more developed characters. My question to you is: Where do you feel your work fits into the science fiction/fantasy genre, and more importantly, where does it fit into the greater literary scheme of things?
Why the hell would you aspire to become a systems administrator? Most people don't aspire to be systems administrators, they just wind up there because they find that it's the only computer job where ignorance, vanity and anti-social tendencies are tolerated, and where they can fulfill their needs for petty power mongering over other people without having to work their way up into management. Now, don't get me wrong: a good systems administrator is worth his weight in gold. Unfortunately, I've only ever met one or two people who I would consider "good" systems administrators, and they were actually programmers who wound up taking on sysadmin responsibility when it was necessary. Full-time systems administrators are, as a general rule, the lowest form of life. It's a job that would delight an anti-social high-school weenie who likes to think he's smarter than eveybody else and likes to boost his tenuous self-esteem by being bossy. This is how most system administrators act. Please, don't be That Guy[tm].