As the thread parent, I've got to say that astounding "we know what the user wants better than the user" arrogance displayed above is just what I've come to expect from watching the Gnome 3 development process.
Again, 10 years in HPC as the lead sysadmin. Odds are I've worked with more computers before lunch than you have in your entire career. I know exactly what works for me in terms of work flow.
Saying "Well the user just doesn't know what they want" really means "We're going to pretend to care about user input, then totally ignore it and do our own thing and tell the user that they should have wanted that in the first place."
* Tons of terminal windows * Web browser * Email client
That's it. All you have to give me is that, and not screw up my work-flow, and I'm happy. And Gnome3 messes up my terminal royally (I have the same gripe as Linus). Windows 7 does a better job of providing a usable desktop.
Slashcode keeps mangling my greater-than/less-thans, so...
When water freezes into ice when Temperature less than 32 F. When star collapses into black hole when Radius less than the Schwartzchild radius When your overleveraged economy implodes when the number of savers outnumbers the number of consumers.
As someone with both an MBA and most of a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, I have to disagree with calling the MBA a vocational degree. It involved a lot of thinking and learning about the subject matter, the world, and myself that I've found quite invaluable.
As it turns out, economics, like physics, is largely the study of phase transitions, whether it is water freezing into ice when T Mschwartz, or your overleveraged economy imploding into depression when # savers > # consumers.
The difference is, Congress isn't going to pick a fight over whether water freezes or boils at 32 F, whereas there's currently a barroom brawl over essentially, whether the economic universe is Keynesian or Austrian. A good knowledge of managerial econ and org behavior helps you understand both the stated reason, the real reason behind the stated reason, the incentives, the players, and the chumps. It lets you see the poker game/game of chicken for what it is.
The two biggest sins of my MBA program is that they forced us to read Thomas Friedman, and didn't force us to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Ten years ago, CS was filled with money-chasers. Today it's the MBA. Tomorrow it might be engineering for all you know. Don't demean a degree and body of knowledge just because of the people who chase it it.
I've often thought that if I were an alien intent on long-term observation of the solar system, I'd plant myself on either Vesta or (more likely) Ceres due to abundant construction material and (on Ceres) ice to crack to fuel, just enough gravity well to keep things from floating off, and just far enough away that you don't have to worry about the savages until they (hopefully) grow up.
Yeah I know, it would be one of those one in a million sort of things, but a nerd can dream.
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
RSA was hacked, ultimately, because of short-term MBA thinking (I have one, so I know the type). If there's only a 10% chance of a serious security breach, then 90% of the time you can scrimp on security, and you won't merely get away with it, you'll be rewarded for "doing more with less". This same dynamic is often seen in both Wall Street and Washington.
I really wish we were required to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" and "Black Swan" in school, instead of Thomas Friedman's dreck. At least they couldn't say they weren't forewarned.
I was forced to read "The Earth is Round" as part of my MBA. When it comes to amazing him, the bar is set pretty low. He could probably write a column on how the sun rises in the east
"Empire of Debt" has a delicious and well-deserved excoriation of Friedman. If it wasn't such a great book in and of itself, it would be worth reading just for that.
Windows XP's crypto stack doesn't support any hash stronger than SHA-1, so if you have to worry about XP users, that's a big constraint.
Note that's for browsers/apps that use Windows native crypto stack. Browsers that include their own SSL implementation (Firefox and I believe Chrome too) can use whatever.
I've got 10+ years experience managing a large (2000 core, 1+ PB storage) compute cluster. If you're using one of those annoying commercial apps that assume Linux = Red Hat Linux (Matlab, Oracle, GPFS,etc.), then CentOS or Scientific Linux are the way to go.
If you don't have that constraint, consider Ubuntu or Debian. apt-get is my single favorite feature in the history of Unix-dom. Plus, there are often pre-built packages for several common cluster programs (Torque, Globus, Atlas, Lapack, FFTW, etc.) which can get you up and running a lot faster than if you had to build them yourselves.
I have lunch with a few co-workers twice a week, and regularly get guilty stares the other three days.
One, I'm paying off student loans and a home mortgage on a 15 year. Right now my sources of entertainment include whatever I can find at Goodwill and the used book store. I simply don't have the free cash to eat out 5 days a week, no matter how much it helps morale.
Two, after graduating I went back into super-disciplined mode, hit the gym, ate properly, and lost 40 pounds. I have no desire to go backwards just for the sake of camaraderie. I like you, but all our cafeteria serves is burgers, brats, and pizza, and I like not having a heart attack at 50 a lot more.
Three, no offense, I like you guys, but after 40 hours a week, I need a little break from you all. I like getting a sandwich, walking to the park, and just chilling the F out. That helps my productivity a lot more than any group lunch does.
Tennessee has maintained a online map of broadband availability for some time. Except that it shows theoretical broadband availability instead of actual broadband availability. The federal map seems to be Slashdotted, but I'm betting it pulls from the same data sources and has the same problems.
The Tennessee map tracks cable, DSL, and cellular wireless/WiMAX. According to the map, my parents are serviced by both cable and cellular wireless.
Except that my parents live at the bottom of a valley and can't get any cell phone signal where they live. And since they live a mile off the main road, the cable company wants $4k to pull cable down to their house.
So my parents have no broadband. There's a BellSouth DSLAM a mile from their house, but no DSL.
BellSouth promised to roll out DSL several years ago, purely coincidentally about the time that the local electric co-op was making noises about providing broadband. BellSouth/Charter/Comcast increased their political donations that year by a factor of 100, and again purely by coincidence the republican party passed a law to prevent public co-ops from getting into the internet business. Since the law was passed 3 years ago, BellSouth has been promising us DSL "within 6 months". I expect broadband to arrive in our neighborhood in the "Half-Life 23" timeframe.
Having endured a 1000 year flood in Tennessee last year, flooding of this level is destructive in ways unimaginable to those who haven't experienced it. In one day the Cumberland River turned into something resembling a white-water Mississippi River. Many had to be plucked from their homes via helicopter, and hundreds of homes and businesses were reduced to rubble. It crippled the local economy for months. In sheer destructiveness it exceeds an earthquake or hurricane, though mercifully limited in geographic extent.
My deepest sympathies to anyone who has to go through something like that.
"Welcome to Pacific Book Review - Our goal is to help authors succeed! Strengthen your credibility with a professional book review."
I haven't read the book, but it sets off enough alarms that I wouldn't spend money on it.
If you want a real book on the subject, read Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality". I still flip through my copy regularly 5 years after buying it. I wish I had read it before I entered my Ph.D. program, it would have saved me much pain and suffering.
I'm a log-sleeper too, with the added disadvantage of being hard of hearing too. My bedroom has two alarm clocks, a radio on top volume attached to a timer, and two 200-watt lights over my head, and even if I get a full 8 hours of sleep it still regularly takes 15-20 minutes of all that for me to wake up.
I have nothing to add, other than it's nice to know that it's not just me, I'm not broken or anything, there are other people out there who experience the same thing.
I was the typical introverted high school nerd (5'4 at the time), and had a 6'5" upper-class psychopath following me around and finding new ways to harass me.
I talked to my principal over it (God bless you Roger Hood!). He told me next time it happened, kick his ass and he (the principal) wouldn't punish me.
A few days later at PE we were playing soccer, and whenever I had the ball he would "accidentally" kick me in the leg as hard as he could. For days, it felt like a knife every time I put weight on that foot. Hurt so bad it took my breath away.
Two days later I spotted him in the hall. I kicked him in the jewels, and laid him flat on the ground. I proceeded to spend the next 3 minutes kicking and punching him in the balls, the sides, the head, anything I could hit. I didn't feel any pain in my foot at all during this. Eventually he was bawling so loud that the girls in a nearby classroom came out and rescued him (and had the gaul to ask why I was picking on the poor psychopath and being such a mean person).
Two things happened: the psychopath transferred out of the school a week later, and *no one* ever messed with me again.
I wish we could all get along. But some whack jobs only understand the language of violence, and you have to be willing to speak their language to teach them a lesson.
I did Ph.D. research on this exact subject a decade ago, and at a quick glance I didn't see anything new in this paper. A spinning and/or charged black hole in theory can be spun or charged to the point where a naked singularity would appear. But, the harder you spin/charge the black hole, the harder it tries to neutralize itself by preferentially emitting particles of a given angular momentum or charge. So the equality probably is a physical limit. I thought someone had proven that years ago, but I've been out of the field for a while.
This looks kind of like someone wrote a paper so they could go to a conference or something. There doesn't appear to be anything earth-shattering (or black hole-shattering) here.
I have almost 300 hours of undergrad/grad credit, and some killer real-world experience. I could be quite substantially richer by living somewhere else. But the idea of being able to afford More Shiny Things isn't nearly as appealing to me as being able to eat Sunday lunch after church with my parents and brother, or catch a baseball game after work with my friends.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. - Matthew 6:21
I was a smallish kid for 9th grade (I skipped a grade so everyone else was 1-2 years older). I had to put up with the usual upper-class bullying (dorks out for laughs instead of psychotic), but nothing too serious.
Then the new kid showed up. I was 5'6" at the time, he was 6'5". And he zeroed in on me like a laser. I put up with it for a few months. Then the day came when we were out playing soccer at PE and he "missed" the ball whenever I had it and would kick me in the leg. The next day I could barely stand, and probably had a fracture of some kind. Standing felt like someone stabbing me with a knife.
I talked to my principal about it. I should mention that I went to a small Christian private school. The principal listened to my story, and then told me the next time it happened, beat the hell out of the kid and the principal wouldn't do anything (God bless you Roger).
Sure enough, within 2 days the psycho caught me in the hall and started trying to choke me. I kicked him in the family jewels as hard as I could, he fell over flat. I proceeded to spend the next two minutes kicking him in the family jewels, the chest, the head, everywhere i could swing a foot or arm. This ended only when the girls in the next classroom came rushing out to ask why I was beating up on Goliath, and they ended up pulling me off of him.
The kid didn't come back to school for a few days, and ended up transferring out a few weeks later. No one else ever messed with me again.
I don't like fighting, and greatly prefer to reason with people. But some people are psychotic sociopaths. The only suffering they can understand is their own. I'm always happy to give bullies a lesson using their own language.
As the parent of this thread... I believe that the libertarian approach is, to first order, the correct approach to capitalism. But capitalism has edge-cases where laissez-faire Capitalism fails. Freshman economics covers many of this break-downs, such as monopolies, oligopolies, externalities, moral hazard, information asymmetry, adverse selection, etc. You might try actually reading an economics book before having a argument about economics.
When physicists talk about modeling something as an "infinite plane", "infinite line", etc, they don't really *mean* it's infinite. It is a simplifying assumption that makes modeling physical behavior much easier. You get nice, simple, tidy equations by doing this, but they suffer from edge effects when that "infinite distance" assumption breaks down.
Pure Libertarian theory is similar. Markets are great, but they aren't perfect. The world works the way it does, not the way you wish it did. Stop trying to force reality to conform to your beliefs, and expand your beliefs to embrace reality.
Slashdot Mirror
As the thread parent, I've got to say that astounding "we know what the user wants better than the user" arrogance displayed above is just what I've come to expect from watching the Gnome 3 development process.
Again, 10 years in HPC as the lead sysadmin. Odds are I've worked with more computers before lunch than you have in your entire career. I know exactly what works for me in terms of work flow.
Saying "Well the user just doesn't know what they want" really means "We're going to pretend to care about user input, then totally ignore it and do our own thing and tell the user that they should have wanted that in the first place."
I need 3 things to do my job:
* Tons of terminal windows
* Web browser
* Email client
That's it. All you have to give me is that, and not screw up my work-flow, and I'm happy. And Gnome3 messes up my terminal royally (I have the same gripe as Linus). Windows 7 does a better job of providing a usable desktop.
I've worked as a sysadmin in academic HPC for 10+ years. 1000+ Linux servers. I've worked with Gnome for years, since the 1.x days.
Gnome 3 is so bad I've switched to using Windows 7. Whiskey Tango Foxtrot were the Gnome3 developers "thinking"?
Want to refactor a crap ton of code? I understand completely. Want to completely trash the most usable Linux UI? Go die in a fire. Seriously.
Start listening to your user base, or you'll quickly cease to have one.
Slashcode keeps mangling my greater-than/less-thans, so...
When water freezes into ice when Temperature less than 32 F.
When star collapses into black hole when Radius less than the Schwartzchild radius
When your overleveraged economy implodes when the number of savers outnumbers the number of consumers.
The 2nd paragraph was supposed to say:
As it turns out, economics, like physics, is largely the study of phase transitions, whether it is water freezing into ice when T # consumers.
As someone with both an MBA and most of a Ph.D. in theoretical physics, I have to disagree with calling the MBA a vocational degree. It involved a lot of thinking and learning about the subject matter, the world, and myself that I've found quite invaluable.
As it turns out, economics, like physics, is largely the study of phase transitions, whether it is water freezing into ice when T Mschwartz, or your overleveraged economy imploding into depression when # savers > # consumers.
The difference is, Congress isn't going to pick a fight over whether water freezes or boils at 32 F, whereas there's currently a barroom brawl over essentially, whether the economic universe is Keynesian or Austrian. A good knowledge of managerial econ and org behavior helps you understand both the stated reason, the real reason behind the stated reason, the incentives, the players, and the chumps. It lets you see the poker game/game of chicken for what it is.
The two biggest sins of my MBA program is that they forced us to read Thomas Friedman, and didn't force us to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb.
Ten years ago, CS was filled with money-chasers. Today it's the MBA. Tomorrow it might be engineering for all you know. Don't demean a degree and body of knowledge just because of the people who chase it it.
I've often thought that if I were an alien intent on long-term observation of the solar system, I'd plant myself on either Vesta or (more likely) Ceres due to abundant construction material and (on Ceres) ice to crack to fuel, just enough gravity well to keep things from floating off, and just far enough away that you don't have to worry about the savages until they (hopefully) grow up.
Yeah I know, it would be one of those one in a million sort of things, but a nerd can dream.
It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it. If you think about that, you'll do things differently.
RSA was hacked, ultimately, because of short-term MBA thinking (I have one, so I know the type). If there's only a 10% chance of a serious security breach, then 90% of the time you can scrimp on security, and you won't merely get away with it, you'll be rewarded for "doing more with less". This same dynamic is often seen in both Wall Street and Washington.
I really wish we were required to read Nassim Nicholas Taleb's "Fooled by Randomness" and "Black Swan" in school, instead of Thomas Friedman's dreck. At least they couldn't say they weren't forewarned.
I was forced to read "The Earth is Round" as part of my MBA. When it comes to amazing him, the bar is set pretty low. He could probably write a column on how the sun rises in the east
"Empire of Debt" has a delicious and well-deserved excoriation of Friedman. If it wasn't such a great book in and of itself, it would be worth reading just for that.
Windows XP's crypto stack doesn't support any hash stronger than SHA-1, so if you have to worry about XP users, that's a big constraint.
Note that's for browsers/apps that use Windows native crypto stack. Browsers that include their own SSL implementation (Firefox and I believe Chrome too) can use whatever.
I've got 10+ years experience managing a large (2000 core, 1+ PB storage) compute cluster. If you're using one of those annoying commercial apps that assume Linux = Red Hat Linux (Matlab, Oracle, GPFS,etc.), then CentOS or Scientific Linux are the way to go.
If you don't have that constraint, consider Ubuntu or Debian. apt-get is my single favorite feature in the history of Unix-dom. Plus, there are often pre-built packages for several common cluster programs (Torque, Globus, Atlas, Lapack, FFTW, etc.) which can get you up and running a lot faster than if you had to build them yourselves.
He's taking credit for getting Osama to release his death certificate...
I have lunch with a few co-workers twice a week, and regularly get guilty stares the other three days.
One, I'm paying off student loans and a home mortgage on a 15 year. Right now my sources of entertainment include whatever I can find at Goodwill and the used book store. I simply don't have the free cash to eat out 5 days a week, no matter how much it helps morale.
Two, after graduating I went back into super-disciplined mode, hit the gym, ate properly, and lost 40 pounds. I have no desire to go backwards just for the sake of camaraderie. I like you, but all our cafeteria serves is burgers, brats, and pizza, and I like not having a heart attack at 50 a lot more.
Three, no offense, I like you guys, but after 40 hours a week, I need a little break from you all. I like getting a sandwich, walking to the park, and just chilling the F out. That helps my productivity a lot more than any group lunch does.
EBP is grandfathered in because it already offered internet before the bill was passed. CEMC (I live in Ashland City) wasn't.
http://www.nashvillepost.com/news/2008/4/7/cableatt_legislation_unveiled
Tennessee has maintained a online map of broadband availability for some time. Except that it shows theoretical broadband availability instead of actual broadband availability. The federal map seems to be Slashdotted, but I'm betting it pulls from the same data sources and has the same problems.
The Tennessee map tracks cable, DSL, and cellular wireless/WiMAX. According to the map, my parents are serviced by both cable and cellular wireless.
Except that my parents live at the bottom of a valley and can't get any cell phone signal where they live. And since they live a mile off the main road, the cable company wants $4k to pull cable down to their house.
So my parents have no broadband. There's a BellSouth DSLAM a mile from their house, but no DSL.
BellSouth promised to roll out DSL several years ago, purely coincidentally about the time that the local electric co-op was making noises about providing broadband. BellSouth/Charter/Comcast increased their political donations that year by a factor of 100, and again purely by coincidence the republican party passed a law to prevent public co-ops from getting into the internet business. Since the law was passed 3 years ago, BellSouth has been promising us DSL "within 6 months". I expect broadband to arrive in our neighborhood in the "Half-Life 23" timeframe.
Having endured a 1000 year flood in Tennessee last year, flooding of this level is destructive in ways unimaginable to those who haven't experienced it. In one day the Cumberland River turned into something resembling a white-water Mississippi River. Many had to be plucked from their homes via helicopter, and hundreds of homes and businesses were reduced to rubble. It crippled the local economy for months. In sheer destructiveness it exceeds an earthquake or hurricane, though mercifully limited in geographic extent. My deepest sympathies to anyone who has to go through something like that.
They've had this for years. It's called Pabst Blue Ribbon. You can't tell me that's actually made for human consumption.
The "anonymous author" of this review is http://www.pacificbookreview.com./ From their website:
"Welcome to Pacific Book Review - Our goal is to help authors succeed! Strengthen your credibility with a professional book review."
I haven't read the book, but it sets off enough alarms that I wouldn't spend money on it.
If you want a real book on the subject, read Roger Penrose's "The Road to Reality". I still flip through my copy regularly 5 years after buying it. I wish I had read it before I entered my Ph.D. program, it would have saved me much pain and suffering.
I use Evince for Windows. Haven't had a problem yet.
http://live.gnome.org/Evince/Downloads
I'm a log-sleeper too, with the added disadvantage of being hard of hearing too. My bedroom has two alarm clocks, a radio on top volume attached to a timer, and two 200-watt lights over my head, and even if I get a full 8 hours of sleep it still regularly takes 15-20 minutes of all that for me to wake up.
I have nothing to add, other than it's nice to know that it's not just me, I'm not broken or anything, there are other people out there who experience the same thing.
I was the typical introverted high school nerd (5'4 at the time), and had a 6'5" upper-class psychopath following me around and finding new ways to harass me.
I talked to my principal over it (God bless you Roger Hood!). He told me next time it happened, kick his ass and he (the principal) wouldn't punish me.
A few days later at PE we were playing soccer, and whenever I had the ball he would "accidentally" kick me in the leg as hard as he could. For days, it felt like a knife every time I put weight on that foot. Hurt so bad it took my breath away.
Two days later I spotted him in the hall. I kicked him in the jewels, and laid him flat on the ground. I proceeded to spend the next 3 minutes kicking and punching him in the balls, the sides, the head, anything I could hit. I didn't feel any pain in my foot at all during this. Eventually he was bawling so loud that the girls in a nearby classroom came out and rescued him (and had the gaul to ask why I was picking on the poor psychopath and being such a mean person).
Two things happened: the psychopath transferred out of the school a week later, and *no one* ever messed with me again.
I wish we could all get along. But some whack jobs only understand the language of violence, and you have to be willing to speak their language to teach them a lesson.
I did Ph.D. research on this exact subject a decade ago, and at a quick glance I didn't see anything new in this paper. A spinning and/or charged black hole in theory can be spun or charged to the point where a naked singularity would appear. But, the harder you spin/charge the black hole, the harder it tries to neutralize itself by preferentially emitting particles of a given angular momentum or charge. So the equality probably is a physical limit. I thought someone had proven that years ago, but I've been out of the field for a while.
This looks kind of like someone wrote a paper so they could go to a conference or something. There doesn't appear to be anything earth-shattering (or black hole-shattering) here.
I have almost 300 hours of undergrad/grad credit, and some killer real-world experience. I could be quite substantially richer by living somewhere else. But the idea of being able to afford More Shiny Things isn't nearly as appealing to me as being able to eat Sunday lunch after church with my parents and brother, or catch a baseball game after work with my friends.
For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also. - Matthew 6:21
I was a smallish kid for 9th grade (I skipped a grade so everyone else was 1-2 years older). I had to put up with the usual upper-class bullying (dorks out for laughs instead of psychotic), but nothing too serious.
Then the new kid showed up. I was 5'6" at the time, he was 6'5". And he zeroed in on me like a laser. I put up with it for a few months. Then the day came when we were out playing soccer at PE and he "missed" the ball whenever I had it and would kick me in the leg. The next day I could barely stand, and probably had a fracture of some kind. Standing felt like someone stabbing me with a knife.
I talked to my principal about it. I should mention that I went to a small Christian private school. The principal listened to my story, and then told me the next time it happened, beat the hell out of the kid and the principal wouldn't do anything (God bless you Roger).
Sure enough, within 2 days the psycho caught me in the hall and started trying to choke me. I kicked him in the family jewels as hard as I could, he fell over flat. I proceeded to spend the next two minutes kicking him in the family jewels, the chest, the head, everywhere i could swing a foot or arm. This ended only when the girls in the next classroom came rushing out to ask why I was beating up on Goliath, and they ended up pulling me off of him.
The kid didn't come back to school for a few days, and ended up transferring out a few weeks later. No one else ever messed with me again.
I don't like fighting, and greatly prefer to reason with people. But some people are psychotic sociopaths. The only suffering they can understand is their own. I'm always happy to give bullies a lesson using their own language.
As the parent of this thread... I believe that the libertarian approach is, to first order, the correct approach to capitalism. But capitalism has edge-cases where laissez-faire Capitalism fails. Freshman economics covers many of this break-downs, such as monopolies, oligopolies, externalities, moral hazard, information asymmetry, adverse selection, etc. You might try actually reading an economics book before having a argument about economics.
When physicists talk about modeling something as an "infinite plane", "infinite line", etc, they don't really *mean* it's infinite. It is a simplifying assumption that makes modeling physical behavior much easier. You get nice, simple, tidy equations by doing this, but they suffer from edge effects when that "infinite distance" assumption breaks down.
Pure Libertarian theory is similar. Markets are great, but they aren't perfect. The world works the way it does, not the way you wish it did. Stop trying to force reality to conform to your beliefs, and expand your beliefs to embrace reality.