We had a consultant come in for show-and-tell and he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
For big projects there is truth in that. However there is also truth in saying that the only way to get a really good programing job is to gain lots of experience, and open source is a good place to get it.
I on the other hand have my own FOSS product. I'm the sole developer, although I have accepted some code from others over the years. With a small project you get to set all the timescales, all the goals, everything.
I don't make money with it, but I get invites to universities, free attendance at conferences, and I help with supervision of Msc/Ph.D students who use my stuff. In short, I have a lot of fun.
No-one else has ever shown much interest in joining my project. I don't mind though, I have fun, and being in control of a product used by hundreds of people is actually quite a buzz.
I get my money from my day job, so that's not a worry. If you want to earn money from open source then you either have to create software which is then provided as part of a paid service, get a job for an open source company, or get yourself involved in a big project and work your way up.
Here in the US, the reason we have the right to bear arms is because the founders of the Constitution essentially said "If we fuck up, take us out." - point being, the government should act in your benefit only, as that is the way it was intended when it was founded.
Well yes, but when that particular gem was signed into law the US was a mainly agrarian society with fewer citizens (hundreds of millions fewer), occupying mainly the coastal regions. One that crucially also did not have a standing profesional army.
Does it still hold for a country of >300 million, most of whom live in cities and towns with law enforcement, elected local government, and an efficient state/national governmental system?
Even those who don't live in big towns and cities have the protection of county/state/government run law enforcement.
I think, in all honesty, that some elements of the constitution could do with a bit of an update.
Conservatives have proven time and time again they don't think about consequences, and they assume what is good for them is what is good for everyone.
This just in, conservatives are like other people.
the US is, like it or not, an ultra conservative country. Sorry, that's the way it is. Actually it seems likely most people *do* like it, because your free and fair election system has moved towards preferring conservatives. Bear in mind here that what you call a democrat, we in the UK would call a right wing conservative.
Is this a bad thing? Well I'd say not, because your people would seem to want it that way.
After hearing all this neocon rhetoric over and over and being disgusted (Ann Coulter especially comes to mind), I can't say with any kind of conviction I can morally support anyone with opinions like that.
Neo conservatives are a bit of an anomaly, at least they seem to be from the perspective of a non US citizen like myself. Since they got serious post 9/11 influence some aspects of the way the US is behaving are a little scary.
I had planned to come over to the US and walk the Appalachian Way next year, but this whole border control 'we might take your laptop and iPod', and we'll be thinking you could be a terrorist/criminal as soon as you get off that plane' thing is a little too much for me. I do hope it ends soon, because its got to be costing you tourism.
They've made irrational choices, they've been WRONG plenty of times, and they've outright LIED to us to further their own agendas. Not that liberals don't have some folks who are downright nuts, but by and large the conservative movement has proven itself to be untrustworthy on several fronts and, quite frankly, un-American.
Well yes, but they've been doing it for decades, and no-ones ever tried to stop them. neocons are elected too, and they have been consistently reelected over the decades, so they must be saying things a lot of people like.
Once, over a period of a week when I was in my twenties, I got repeatedly destroyed at chess by a guy in his eighties. Seriously, I have never been so utterly unable to outthink anyone in my life, and I'm a pretty good chess player.
He started playing chess as a boy, and while he did tend to ramble on a bit, if his mind wasn't as sharp as it used to be, it must have once been able to cut diamonds...
One RK4 solver, with easy explanations of the steps. http://code.google.com/p/nmod/wiki/int3 Its not adaptive (I fail to see why adding adaptivity helps, and I have yet to see satisfactory proof that it does).
Obviously what they expected was better evolutionary biology principles. Was that an unreasonable expectation? Well, yeah, and I bet they feel stupid for expecting that now, but hindsight is 20-20.
Speaking as someone who spent three years working in the field of evolutionary biology (from the standpoint of working on same with evolutionary algorithms), I can tell you that the reality of that subject, whilst scientifically fascinating, is about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
You wouldn't want a game to follow scientifically realistic principles. For one thing doing so would involve including the possibility that it would go off on a tangent and fail. You don't want that, not in a game anyway, which means you have to add a lot of constraints, which in turn means a truly scientific approach is pretty much impossible.
That said, I'm sure there is a lot that can be taken from the real science. Just don't ask a scientist to do the extraction, instead, ask an experienced game designer, someone who knows what a game would need.
What with humans being rather complex, mentally, Information may not be stored only once, or it could be fragmented.
The only way to selectively destroy memory would be to track down all instances of it, which I would say is pretty unlikely in the human brain. Same goes for most other primates.
Amnesiacs typically have a non uniform memory loss. Some things they can recall, but not others. Two people with identical brain damage can easily experience different levels of amnesia. Producing a reliable general method for memory deletion is almost certainly impossible.
Short term memory disruption, and the prevention of moving short term memories into long term memory is easier to achieve.
If you want to experience it, dislocate your elbow and go to hospital. They'll give you a nice pill, you'll scream while they manhandle your arm back into position, and five minutes later you won't remember any of it. I've not experienced it, but I've relocated a fair few arms. Its funny when the people wake up and ask when your going to start.
Is there a reason microsoft would be the prefered OS for this type of machine?
Yes there is. Microsoft are desperate to get into the cluster computing market, and they hope this will get them a foothold.
I don't think it will though. The simple fact is that this level of supercomputing can be achieved with less cost by buying off the shelf components and building your own. It won't be as pretty but we are talking possibly ten thousand cheaper if you want to match the performance of this system. Using Windows also imposes a serious drag factor. I'm not against using Microsoft software just because its Microsoft. The process scheduling of Linux is simply superior. That's a pretty big deal on a large system.
I built a seriously powerful cluster just using the cast off PCs from other departments at my university. It went from a project to help me with my own research needs to becoming an essential department resource, and it cost less than 2k. Sure, I'd like a cray, but I don't believe it wouldn't be possible to equal its performance without the price tag.
Given that people in the ancient world believed completely that the sky was populated by gods, its not at all far fetched to expect them to explain odd occurrences in such a fashion.
Extrapolating alien visitation from this is foolish.
That first link is indeed a bit dodgy, but if you look a bit around you find more articles on the web with references in them that show older sightings than from the 19th century.
I don't doubt there are. However, its not early sightings of strange things in the sky I take issue with. Rather its the insertion of spurious conclusions without proof, and worse, the hailing of these rather childish idea's as confirmed and reliable sightings.
I do in fact believe wholeheartedly in the existence of extraterrestrial life. However I do so as a scientist. Therefore I recognize my belief in this regard is totally without proof, and I freely admit this. It is more a hope then a belief in this respect, and one I expect only my descendants will answer.
I don't however believe in alien visitation on Earth, in fact I disregard such claims completely. Those who do believe such things lack even the most basic grasp of the inconceivable distances involved and the velocities that would be required for such a journey.
Oh please... "The Egyptian papyrus described a fleet of flying saucers darting through the sky?"
Seriously....
The Egyptians said NO SUCH THING, that is by way of being utter nonsense. There have been lots of fascinating reports of strange events and objects in the sky in ancient time, most notably by the chinese. These are interesting because they reveal that early civilizations felt such things were worth recording, but most of the time information is scant, sufficient only to allow us to speculate as to causes, such as meteors or ball lightening.
They are not, in any way at all, indicating that there were people sitting around pondering alien spaceships in the ancient world. Ever...
When even pink contract spammers can find a way online, are you telling me they can't find an ISP that doesn't have their head up their ass? File a breach of contract lawsuit if you got good reason to and if not just move on.
The problem is one of perception. There is a perception that spammers (and other internet denizens of a dodgy nature) are primarily a Russian and Chinese problem (a lie, but there we are), and that the US, with its 'clean' internet must crack down on the currently hot, if in reality extremely unimportant, issue of copyright enforcement (not that it isn't important, but no way is it as important as is being ranted in the halls of power).
Its an assumption that all the big problems on the internet are 'somebody elses problem', so they focus on silly things like music copyright, often mindlessly following 'the rules' so that only the big labels get a say.
Its classic disassociation, and it can't last. I'm not being all 'ooh look at me, I'm a liberal', I'm being realistic.
The old economic and copyright models are collapsing. Not into anarchy, that's far too pessimistic an assessment. No, they're falling in the face of different models. In the case of Internet and copyright the people who run things (businesses, not regulatory bodies) aren't quite as up with the trends as they need to be.
Even China's Tianamen Square atrocity has a western parallel with the USA's killing of Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University in 1970.
Wrong, there has been, and continues to be, absolutely no attempt by the US government to disallow access to websites that mention the Kent State University incident.
Its not what they want to censor now, its just that such laws and methods tend to get misapplied later. For example, sites which criticize the current administration in a not too nice way could be added to the list, or sites which recall 'uncomfortable truths' about a countries past. All they have to do is justify it to themselves.
Laws and government policies which cover such wide topics often get misapplied. Here in the UK, laws passed to fight terrorism just got used to impound money from failing Icelandic banks. Didn't take long to justify using them out of their intended area, nor will it take long to misuse these blacklists.
I'd rather laugh at you when you find yourself unable to change jobs because you have 'health insurance worries'. Oh yes, no problems in America, nosirree.
Hey, keep up with the times! We can't change jobs because of economic uncertainty and will probably lose health insurance anyway.
Does it mean that 94% of websites did not find the standard useful?
Or perhaps that the standard is poorly presented, causing fewer people to be aware of it?
My personal leaning is that the standards body lost control of their 'standards' a long time ago, but they haven't realised yet. The only real thing most web devs care about is 'does my site/application run as required in the browsers I need it to?' If the answer is 'yes, if you don't follow the standard', then the standard is ignored.
The US has already ruled you can't be forced to give out an encryption key.
It's nice having a Bill of Rights, ain't it?
Laugh at all the British who say such a thing is unnecessary.
I'd rather laugh at you when you find yourself unable to change jobs because you have 'health insurance worries'. Oh yes, no problems in America, nosirree.
If you had say, a town sized data centre installation, it would probably have about the same effect as a smallish and partially active volcano, of which there are many in northern latitudes. Pretty much nothing apart from local effects, which is, in spite of the green crazies rantings, not too bad, not compared to the alternatives.
What you wouldn't have is as much need for additional power to cool, which of course saves the pollution caused by its generation. You should bear in mind that the colder parts of the Earth are being far more seriously effected by polutants in the atmosphere then by anything which is just warmer than its surroundings.
As for why I said green crazies. Well if they hadn't been so all fired determined to put governments off nuclear power, we'd have that instead of all these coal burning plants. Now we have massive pollution problems and a truly gigantic cost for building all those nuclear plants in a shorter time, instead of gradually over the last three or four decades.
Slashdot Mirror
We had a consultant come in for show-and-tell and he made some very good points, but he told us to stay away from open source because(shortened version) if we wanted to be well-known in the open source world then we'd have to slog it out full-time, fighting amongst other egos working for free just trying to get our names known.
For big projects there is truth in that. However there is also truth in saying that the only way to get a really good programing job is to gain lots of experience, and open source is a good place to get it.
I on the other hand have my own FOSS product. I'm the sole developer, although I have accepted some code from others over the years. With a small project you get to set all the timescales, all the goals, everything.
I don't make money with it, but I get invites to universities, free attendance at conferences, and I help with supervision of Msc/Ph.D students who use my stuff. In short, I have a lot of fun.
No-one else has ever shown much interest in joining my project. I don't mind though, I have fun, and being in control of a product used by hundreds of people is actually quite a buzz.
I get my money from my day job, so that's not a worry. If you want to earn money from open source then you either have to create software which is then provided as part of a paid service, get a job for an open source company, or get yourself involved in a big project and work your way up.
Here in the US, the reason we have the right to bear arms is because the founders of the Constitution essentially said "If we fuck up, take us out." - point being, the government should act in your benefit only, as that is the way it was intended when it was founded.
Well yes, but when that particular gem was signed into law the US was a mainly agrarian society with fewer citizens (hundreds of millions fewer), occupying mainly the coastal regions. One that crucially also did not have a standing profesional army.
Does it still hold for a country of >300 million, most of whom live in cities and towns with law enforcement, elected local government, and an efficient state/national governmental system?
Even those who don't live in big towns and cities have the protection of county/state/government run law enforcement.
I think, in all honesty, that some elements of the constitution could do with a bit of an update.
Conservatives have proven time and time again they don't think about consequences, and they assume what is good for them is what is good for everyone.
This just in, conservatives are like other people.
the US is, like it or not, an ultra conservative country. Sorry, that's the way it is. Actually it seems likely most people *do* like it, because your free and fair election system has moved towards preferring conservatives. Bear in mind here that what you call a democrat, we in the UK would call a right wing conservative.
Is this a bad thing? Well I'd say not, because your people would seem to want it that way.
After hearing all this neocon rhetoric over and over and being disgusted (Ann Coulter especially comes to mind), I can't say with any kind of conviction I can morally support anyone with opinions like that.
Neo conservatives are a bit of an anomaly, at least they seem to be from the perspective of a non US citizen like myself. Since they got serious post 9/11 influence some aspects of the way the US is behaving are a little scary.
I had planned to come over to the US and walk the Appalachian Way next year, but this whole border control 'we might take your laptop and iPod', and we'll be thinking you could be a terrorist/criminal as soon as you get off that plane' thing is a little too much for me. I do hope it ends soon, because its got to be costing you tourism.
They've made irrational choices, they've been WRONG plenty of times, and they've outright LIED to us to further their own agendas. Not that liberals don't have some folks who are downright nuts, but by and large the conservative movement has proven itself to be untrustworthy on several fronts and, quite frankly, un-American.
Well yes, but they've been doing it for decades, and no-ones ever tried to stop them. neocons are elected too, and they have been consistently reelected over the decades, so they must be saying things a lot of people like.
Hyperlinks are more like references rather than footnotes.
Well, they're really like a lot of tube entrances...
Philosophy is a form of science, so no, ID definitely is *not* philosophy. More like idiocy.
I hate to be seeming to defend ID, but a philosophical stance need not be provable, so ID can be a valid philosophy.
Of course a philosophical idea can also be a load of rancid donkey bollocks too...
My ex mother in law thought I only did my Ph.D to get out of paying maintenance, does that count?
(I paid it anyway btw).
Once, over a period of a week when I was in my twenties, I got repeatedly destroyed at chess by a guy in his eighties. Seriously, I have never been so utterly unable to outthink anyone in my life, and I'm a pretty good chess player.
He started playing chess as a boy, and while he did tend to ramble on a bit, if his mind wasn't as sharp as it used to be, it must have once been able to cut diamonds...
One RK4 solver, with easy explanations of the steps.
http://code.google.com/p/nmod/wiki/int3
Its not adaptive (I fail to see why adding adaptivity helps, and I have yet to see satisfactory proof that it does).
what do you expect?
Obviously what they expected was better evolutionary biology principles. Was that an unreasonable expectation? Well, yeah, and I bet they feel stupid for expecting that now, but hindsight is 20-20.
Speaking as someone who spent three years working in the field of evolutionary biology (from the standpoint of working on same with evolutionary algorithms), I can tell you that the reality of that subject, whilst scientifically fascinating, is about as entertaining as watching paint dry.
You wouldn't want a game to follow scientifically realistic principles. For one thing doing so would involve including the possibility that it would go off on a tangent and fail. You don't want that, not in a game anyway, which means you have to add a lot of constraints, which in turn means a truly scientific approach is pretty much impossible.
That said, I'm sure there is a lot that can be taken from the real science. Just don't ask a scientist to do the extraction, instead, ask an experienced game designer, someone who knows what a game would need.
What with humans being rather complex, mentally, Information may not be stored only once, or it could be fragmented.
The only way to selectively destroy memory would be to track down all instances of it, which I would say is pretty unlikely in the human brain. Same goes for most other primates.
Amnesiacs typically have a non uniform memory loss. Some things they can recall, but not others. Two people with identical brain damage can easily experience different levels of amnesia. Producing a reliable general method for memory deletion is almost certainly impossible.
Short term memory disruption, and the prevention of moving short term memories into long term memory is easier to achieve.
If you want to experience it, dislocate your elbow and go to hospital. They'll give you a nice pill, you'll scream while they manhandle your arm back into position, and five minutes later you won't remember any of it. I've not experienced it, but I've relocated a fair few arms. Its funny when the people wake up and ask when your going to start.
Is there a reason microsoft would be the prefered OS for this type of machine?
Yes there is. Microsoft are desperate to get into the cluster computing market, and they hope this will get them a foothold.
I don't think it will though. The simple fact is that this level of supercomputing can be achieved with less cost by buying off the shelf components and building your own. It won't be as pretty but we are talking possibly ten thousand cheaper if you want to match the performance of this system. Using Windows also imposes a serious drag factor. I'm not against using Microsoft software just because its Microsoft. The process scheduling of Linux is simply superior. That's a pretty big deal on a large system.
I built a seriously powerful cluster just using the cast off PCs from other departments at my university. It went from a project to help me with my own research needs to becoming an essential department resource, and it cost less than 2k.
Sure, I'd like a cray, but I don't believe it wouldn't be possible to equal its performance without the price tag.
Given that people in the ancient world believed completely that the sky was populated by gods, its not at all far fetched to expect them to explain odd occurrences in such a fashion.
Extrapolating alien visitation from this is foolish.
That first link is indeed a bit dodgy, but if you look a bit around you find more articles on the web with references in them that show older sightings than from the 19th century.
I don't doubt there are. However, its not early sightings of strange things in the sky I take issue with. Rather its the insertion of spurious conclusions without proof, and worse, the hailing of these rather childish idea's as confirmed and reliable sightings.
I do in fact believe wholeheartedly in the existence of extraterrestrial life. However I do so as a scientist. Therefore I recognize my belief in this regard is totally without proof, and I freely admit this. It is more a hope then a belief in this respect, and one I expect only my descendants will answer.
I don't however believe in alien visitation on Earth, in fact I disregard such claims completely. Those who do believe such things lack even the most basic grasp of the inconceivable distances involved and the velocities that would be required for such a journey.
Oh please... "The Egyptian papyrus described a fleet of flying saucers darting through the sky?"
Seriously....
The Egyptians said NO SUCH THING, that is by way of being utter nonsense.
There have been lots of fascinating reports of strange events and objects in the sky in ancient time, most notably by the chinese. These are interesting because they reveal that early civilizations felt such things were worth recording, but most of the time information is scant, sufficient only to allow us to speculate as to causes, such as meteors or ball lightening.
They are not, in any way at all, indicating that there were people sitting around pondering alien spaceships in the ancient world. Ever...
When even pink contract spammers can find a way online, are you telling me they can't find an ISP that doesn't have their head up their ass? File a breach of contract lawsuit if you got good reason to and if not just move on.
The problem is one of perception. There is a perception that spammers (and other internet denizens of a dodgy nature) are primarily a Russian and Chinese problem (a lie, but there we are), and that the US, with its 'clean' internet must crack down on the currently hot, if in reality extremely unimportant, issue of copyright enforcement (not that it isn't important, but no way is it as important as is being ranted in the halls of power).
Its an assumption that all the big problems on the internet are 'somebody elses problem', so they focus on silly things like music copyright, often mindlessly following 'the rules' so that only the big labels get a say.
Its classic disassociation, and it can't last. I'm not being all 'ooh look at me, I'm a liberal', I'm being realistic.
The old economic and copyright models are collapsing. Not into anarchy, that's far too pessimistic an assessment. No, they're falling in the face of different models. In the case of Internet and copyright the people who run things (businesses, not regulatory bodies) aren't quite as up with the trends as they need to be.
Even China's Tianamen Square atrocity has a western parallel with the USA's killing of Vietnam war protesters at Kent State University in 1970.
Wrong, there has been, and continues to be, absolutely no attempt by the US government to disallow access to websites that mention the Kent State University incident.
Tesla was OK I guess, but those lightening towers he built for the Russians used to tear up my tanks something rotten, the barstard.
Its not what they want to censor now, its just that such laws and methods tend to get misapplied later. For example, sites which criticize the current administration in a not too nice way could be added to the list, or sites which recall 'uncomfortable truths' about a countries past. All they have to do is justify it to themselves.
Laws and government policies which cover such wide topics often get misapplied. Here in the UK, laws passed to fight terrorism just got used to impound money from failing Icelandic banks. Didn't take long to justify using them out of their intended area, nor will it take long to misuse these blacklists.
Hey, keep up with the times! We can't change jobs because of economic uncertainty and will probably lose health insurance anyway.
Yeah, actually that sucks, doesn't it.
Does it mean that 94% of websites did not find the standard useful?
Or perhaps that the standard is poorly presented, causing fewer people to be aware of it?
My personal leaning is that the standards body lost control of their 'standards' a long time ago, but they haven't realised yet. The only real thing most web devs care about is 'does my site/application run as required in the browsers I need it to?' If the answer is 'yes, if you don't follow the standard', then the standard is ignored.
The US has already ruled you can't be forced to give out an encryption key.
It's nice having a Bill of Rights, ain't it?
Laugh at all the British who say such a thing is unnecessary.
I'd rather laugh at you when you find yourself unable to change jobs because you have 'health insurance worries'. Oh yes, no problems in America, nosirree.
You seem to grossly miss a point: a password might easily be really forgotten. Ever happened to you?
nope, because 'biscuit123' is really easy to remember, and totally secure, because letters and numbers == strong, plus no-one would ever think of it.
See, some of us have the clevers.
If you had say, a town sized data centre installation, it would probably have about the same effect as a smallish and partially active volcano, of which there are many in northern latitudes. Pretty much nothing apart from local effects, which is, in spite of the green crazies rantings, not too bad, not compared to the alternatives.
What you wouldn't have is as much need for additional power to cool, which of course saves the pollution caused by its generation. You should bear in mind that the colder parts of the Earth are being far more seriously effected by polutants in the atmosphere then by anything which is just warmer than its surroundings.
As for why I said green crazies. Well if they hadn't been so all fired determined to put governments off nuclear power, we'd have that instead of all these coal burning plants. Now we have massive pollution problems and a truly gigantic cost for building all those nuclear plants in a shorter time, instead of gradually over the last three or four decades.
I believe it is much easier to fool an average human than a person with even some basic knowledge about AI.
Depends, are we talking undergrad CS student AI knowledge? Because if we are, then you obviously know some atypical students...
I'm given to wonder how I got modded +3 informative for typing 'no'.
Mind you, it seemed the simplest way to say that some of us manage to get through our teens without committing crimes.
If one has that large of a gap in judgement.. ...When he was 15. Everyone does crazy stuff when they are 15. I know I did. Didn't you?
No.