No exaggeration at all, this is completely true! The author himself states that he's not in favor of ruling out quantitative reasoning, which he considers important. The fact that the thinks algebra isn't an important component of this skill only shows how ignorant he is of mathematics (why he's given his soapbox in light of this is only more concerning, but I digress).
Algebra builds an understanding of abstract and unknown concepts. You can train students to do quantitative reasoning problems like machines, but algebra is much more abstract, but then you can throw them a curveball and they'll be totally hopeless. You end up with situations where students can solve problems like 'how much should 3 apples cost if one costs 1$' and then they won't be able to solve things like 'if you have 5$, how many apples can you buy?' We have freaking tip calculators on our phones because we're too lazy to learn that all you have to do is slide the decimal over, round to a convenient number and double it. Is that really so hard?
No, the problem isn't the subject - it's the students. Get over the fact that you have to learn things that you don't like. I feel like all the time I spent on my humanities subjects in secondary school and college were thoroughly wasted as well, but I put up with it because I had to. I fell off the honor roll when I was 12 because I got straight A's and a B in Art. Art for Christ's sake! Pardon me if I suck at using a pair of scissors! I guess that's what should hold me back from being recognized in my math and science achievements, right?
I'm not gonna stand here and suggest that I never complained about it, but at the same time, I went into that class every day fighting for my life because I knew that was the one thing standing in the way of my being recognized as a good scholar. So ultimately I didn't reach my goal, but at least I can say that I tried as hard as i could. I don't make excuses. The problem is that nowadays we have a problem telling kids to suck it up and deal with it. Math is a requirement - deal with it. I'm not gonna get a damn thing out of reading Dante's Inferno, or buillshitting about character development and relationships in Dickens, but do it because I must. Kids (and their parents) seem to not accept that as a reason nowadays.
Maybe alongside with learning algebra (or whatever subject trips you up), we should learn to accept that not eveything's gonna be easy in life and that we shouldn't make excuses and just blame ourselves instead.
It's unrealistic to expect that the MAFIAA will be stopped if artists no longer sign with them. There are probably 10,000 - 100,000 artists that sign with them. If some fraction decide to stop, they'll just sign some more to replace them. And what's the average lifetime of most artists nowadays... less than 5 years? So they're easily replaceable.
Besides, these so-called artists don't even really do very much. The MAFIAA makes its killing on the major 'stars' who don't honestly do very much themselves. All they do is find find a woman that has no respect for herself or her image or a boy that'll make 12-year-old girls horny, then they manufacture a song and market the shit out of it. Let's face it - there will always be at least 100 people who are stupid and/or desperate enough in America to enter some kind of ridiculous bargain like this. So there really isn't much of a way to stop these 'artists' from signing them.
Now as for the rest of the artists who aren't stars but still actually make their own work, you could argue that we need to fund independent labels so they don't sign with the corrupt labels, but what do you expect that to achieve? It's gonna take a lot of artists and a lot of marketing to make any success for them.
But regardless, the only hope of breaking these industries is to break their public image. There needs to be created a New World Order of sorts in the music industry, one which will make the current labels look antiquated and corrupt. Explore new revenue models: support real online music stores like Jamendo and Bandcamp that actually support the ones who make the music and cut out the middlemen. If we break their image, then we can start to push them out of the way. They will try to take us back over, but if we tarnish their image so much that they can't recover, then maybe there will be hope
Pardon me for being idealistic here, but I don't see how any good friend would force you to use a social networking service, especially if you have a legitimate problem with it.
I kicked Facebook permanantly over a year ago. In that time, I've found that the friends I communicate most with send me updates from Facebook anyways, or link me to pictures on Facebook (which I need a proxy to view since I've blocked as much FB as I can in my hosts) - quite a few of my friends do this in fact. This was what I figured would happen when I chose to delete my account; if they're good enough friends, we'll find other ways to keep up anyways, and that's certainly turned out to be true.
Maybe everyone who's finding this dissatisfaction should just try it. Disable the account for a few months and see what happens. Maybe you too will find that Facebook is not the only medium of communicating with other people. Personally, I feel thoroughly liberated since I deleted (not disabled) mine.
Because Sprint has had Wimax since the beginning (longer than any other company has had 4G^H^H 3.5G). The only reason they're changing over is that they're pretty much the only ones that have adopted Wimax instead of LTE. Wimax is still gonna be supported by Sprint into 2014 - there's really no rush to change over.
And honestly, there's really no difference between Wimax and LTE either outside of the fact that more people started adopting LTE after Sprint started building up their Wimax network. It's not like the speeds are worlds apart in the way that '4G' is an improvement over 3G. LTE is a little bit faster than Wimax, but the difference will be totally inconsequential.
Which means they're probably gonna end up litigating even more as that's all that zombie companies are good for. From SCO to Nokia. Hopefully RIM have too much class to degrade themselves like that.
Masters or PhD? There's a big difference. Biomedical science and engineering usually require advanced degrees and as much experience as possible. This is something that a PhD does a lot better than a Master's. It's not like computer science or mechanical engineering where you can just get a Master's and get a regular job. There just aren't that many jobs like that in the biomedical field (at least as far as I know, maybe someone can confirm or correct me).
Agreed, and it's the community that's so important. When you consider how versatile and ubiquitous the kernel is, you have to understand that it takes an extremely broad and diverse community of developers and other contributors to make it possible. Compare this to Microsoft, who can barely manage to port their operating system to ARM, and somehow they're raking in hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even if you cast all of Linus' software development contibutions aside, the fact that he started such a diverse and prodigious community is worthy of several awards on its own.
A million times no! When I got frustrated with the headphones that came with my phone because the buds kept falling out, I replaced them with some earbuds from Sony. The sound quality would basically qualify as what I call Brittney Spears quality. In other words, they have no bass, the treble is hissy, the sound is static-ey and unclear. To me, the represent another low-quality piece of crap from Sony made with the slogan 'rush it out and try to make as much money as possible.' No quality, no value, nothing. I can't imagine a $5 pair sounding worse. I knew it was a mistake to buy from Sony, but I gave them just one more chance. Not doing it again.
Personally, I got a Sennheiser HD 202 for $20 and they're quite simply the best value you can possibly get for headphones. For the price, the sound is impressively rich, clear and well-rounded.
Leia: "If you do this bad thing, you probably won't get what you want" Tarkin: ignores the advice, does the bad thing anyway (some time later) Tarkin doesn't have what he wants. He's also dead.
Exactly what I thought when I read this. Don't all good lawyers simply prey on the uninformed judges and jurors? How could they possibly allow someone intelligent and reasonable to preside over this case? I don't understand the legal process so well, but if a juror said something like this, wouldn't a mistrial be pretty much automatic?
On a side note, why can't all cases be presided over by judges who have an informed opinion on the subject at hand?
There are quite a few computer vendors that offer Linux options at purchase... Google around. Here's a list, for example: http://linuxpreloaded.com/. I'm sure that a few of them ship internationally too. I suppose the main drawback is that the price is still steeper cause of shipping, but that's life....
Right. The EU has already decided that APIs are not copyrightable and wrote an extremely reasonable and balanced explanation as to why:
The object of the protection conferred by Directive 91/250 is the expression in any form of a computer program, such as the source code and the object code, which permits reproduction in different computer languages. On the basis of those considerations, the Court holds that neither the functionality of a computer program nor the programming language and the format of data files used in a computer program in order to exploit certain of its functions constitute a form of expression. Accordingly, they do not enjoy copyright protection.
To accept that the functionality of a computer program can be protected by copyright would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development.
So maybe there's still some hope left... otherwise we'll just have to hire lawyers to write the software of the future.
Even the mighty Facebook, who has a somewhat similar MO, don't run an advertising network that is widely used on other web sites.
You crazy mon? Do Facebook Beacon and Facebook Connect mean nothing to you? Facebook is not just tracking the activities of its own users on its own site, not its own users on other sites, but even other users (who have never agreed to terms with Facebook) on any site that has Facebook's JS on it. And (pardon the pun here), Facebook is IMO far more faceless about sharing the private data they collect than Google. It's for this reason that I have them blocked in every way possible in my hosts file.
Best for numerical analysis and simulation: C/C++ (nowadays), Fortran (once upon a time, still has some holdouts)
Best for scientific visualization: Matlab (not free) or Octave (free), IDL (not free)
Python deserves some mention in both of these categories as well. Numpy/Scipy are outstanding tools which can easily replace Matlab and Octave. Namespace hierarchies and OO implementation aren't necessarily the highest priorities for simulation, but when they are, Python kicks the pants off Matlab. Pylab has also fit all of my needs for plotting, though I have never really used it for anything too serious and it still isn't Python3 compatible.
For numerical analysis and simulation, you can always write Python wrappers for your low-level C and Fortran libraries.
Another consideration to keep in mind for these types of projects is that if you're gonna run them on a supercomputer, you can damn near guarantee that Python will be available on it while Matlab probably will be, but will require a bitch of dealing with license matters.
I as much as anyone else hate when an OSS user tells people who are looking for help that they're doing it wrong, but this is clearly the case here.
You should not be moving files you don't have persmission to move using a GUI. You don't need admin prvileges to do even 99% of your everyday file operations. If you absolutely must, there's this extension. But I can't see any reason why you would need to do this, and it strongly suggests to me that your setup is wrong. Sometimes stuff does happen, like a root-owned file ends up in $HOME, but the solution is to change the owner, not to use root access all the time.
And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line. That got to really be annoying.
You are probably using the wrong terminal emulator. Left and right keys work even in the most basic ones.
As for the rest of your points, you could have just used a VM. And if you hate proprietary plugins so much, then why do you keep using Netflix? You're supporting the thing you proclaim to hate - so don't waste your time saying that you don't like it.
I'm sorry, but you never tried Linux. You tried Windows on a different OS. You need to be willing to relearn how to do things you've gotten used to and it doesn't hurt to have a friend help show you how it's done. While there are some things that you're just not going to be able to do without a VM, there are others which you claim you can't do when the problem really is that you're doing it the way you're used to it, rather than how it should really be done. It sucks having to accept that you need to change the way you think, but if you get it out of the way when you start, then things will only get better from there.
Music lobby group, the BPI, welcomed the move, saying music creators 'deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else'
Then maybe there should be some laws against the record labels which don't even pay the artists shit?
and calling for those who use The Pirate Bay to illegally download content to 'explore the many digital music services operating ethically and legally in the UK.'"
Well it would probably help if they would be more specific about it. I haven't read the TOS myself, but if they said something like 'creating a derivative work for the purpose of displaying thumbnails,' or something more general, but not quite 'we can do whatever we want with it,' that would ease my mind a lot.
It doesn't matter at all. Do you see how much money Apple has? Apple will just settle with the trolls and and never worry again. But then the trolls are gonna start targeting others, e.g. Samsung, Moto, HTC, LG, etc., and it's just gonna crush competitors because they already have a precedent for high settlements. This is a little more problematic for companies that don't have the ridiculous margins that Apple does.
This model just isn't sustainable. I think Apple is as evil as anyone else (full disclosure), but between Apple and patent trolls, you still gotta root for Apple, cause the damage spreads. Get the lawyers the fuck away from the jobs where people actually do things that improve society as a whole... not just their individual selves.
Slashdot Mirror
No exaggeration at all, this is completely true! The author himself states that he's not in favor of ruling out quantitative reasoning, which he considers important. The fact that the thinks algebra isn't an important component of this skill only shows how ignorant he is of mathematics (why he's given his soapbox in light of this is only more concerning, but I digress).
Algebra builds an understanding of abstract and unknown concepts. You can train students to do quantitative reasoning problems like machines, but algebra is much more abstract, but then you can throw them a curveball and they'll be totally hopeless. You end up with situations where students can solve problems like 'how much should 3 apples cost if one costs 1$' and then they won't be able to solve things like 'if you have 5$, how many apples can you buy?' We have freaking tip calculators on our phones because we're too lazy to learn that all you have to do is slide the decimal over, round to a convenient number and double it. Is that really so hard?
No, the problem isn't the subject - it's the students. Get over the fact that you have to learn things that you don't like. I feel like all the time I spent on my humanities subjects in secondary school and college were thoroughly wasted as well, but I put up with it because I had to. I fell off the honor roll when I was 12 because I got straight A's and a B in Art. Art for Christ's sake! Pardon me if I suck at using a pair of scissors! I guess that's what should hold me back from being recognized in my math and science achievements, right?
I'm not gonna stand here and suggest that I never complained about it, but at the same time, I went into that class every day fighting for my life because I knew that was the one thing standing in the way of my being recognized as a good scholar. So ultimately I didn't reach my goal, but at least I can say that I tried as hard as i could. I don't make excuses. The problem is that nowadays we have a problem telling kids to suck it up and deal with it. Math is a requirement - deal with it. I'm not gonna get a damn thing out of reading Dante's Inferno, or buillshitting about character development and relationships in Dickens, but do it because I must. Kids (and their parents) seem to not accept that as a reason nowadays.
Maybe alongside with learning algebra (or whatever subject trips you up), we should learn to accept that not eveything's gonna be easy in life and that we shouldn't make excuses and just blame ourselves instead.
And before I forget, obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1050/
And also before I forget, not only should algebra be mandatory, but statistics should as well.
It's unrealistic to expect that the MAFIAA will be stopped if artists no longer sign with them. There are probably 10,000 - 100,000 artists that sign with them. If some fraction decide to stop, they'll just sign some more to replace them. And what's the average lifetime of most artists nowadays... less than 5 years? So they're easily replaceable.
Besides, these so-called artists don't even really do very much. The MAFIAA makes its killing on the major 'stars' who don't honestly do very much themselves. All they do is find find a woman that has no respect for herself or her image or a boy that'll make 12-year-old girls horny, then they manufacture a song and market the shit out of it. Let's face it - there will always be at least 100 people who are stupid and/or desperate enough in America to enter some kind of ridiculous bargain like this. So there really isn't much of a way to stop these 'artists' from signing them.
Now as for the rest of the artists who aren't stars but still actually make their own work, you could argue that we need to fund independent labels so they don't sign with the corrupt labels, but what do you expect that to achieve? It's gonna take a lot of artists and a lot of marketing to make any success for them.
But regardless, the only hope of breaking these industries is to break their public image. There needs to be created a New World Order of sorts in the music industry, one which will make the current labels look antiquated and corrupt. Explore new revenue models: support real online music stores like Jamendo and Bandcamp that actually support the ones who make the music and cut out the middlemen. If we break their image, then we can start to push them out of the way. They will try to take us back over, but if we tarnish their image so much that they can't recover, then maybe there will be hope
Guess Ubuntu should take it as a sign that they have 'made it' that the same is now being said of them.
Maybe we should hold off on that until they turn a profit....
Yes, I agree... our Android vs iOS discussions are impressively civil!
Pardon me for being idealistic here, but I don't see how any good friend would force you to use a social networking service, especially if you have a legitimate problem with it.
I kicked Facebook permanantly over a year ago. In that time, I've found that the friends I communicate most with send me updates from Facebook anyways, or link me to pictures on Facebook (which I need a proxy to view since I've blocked as much FB as I can in my hosts) - quite a few of my friends do this in fact. This was what I figured would happen when I chose to delete my account; if they're good enough friends, we'll find other ways to keep up anyways, and that's certainly turned out to be true.
Maybe everyone who's finding this dissatisfaction should just try it. Disable the account for a few months and see what happens. Maybe you too will find that Facebook is not the only medium of communicating with other people. Personally, I feel thoroughly liberated since I deleted (not disabled) mine.
Back in the day, I found the best way to stop them from changing your settings... is to give them no settings to change.
I haven't checked them recently, but it's not like I can.
Because Sprint has had Wimax since the beginning (longer than any other company has had 4G^H^H 3.5G). The only reason they're changing over is that they're pretty much the only ones that have adopted Wimax instead of LTE. Wimax is still gonna be supported by Sprint into 2014 - there's really no rush to change over.
And honestly, there's really no difference between Wimax and LTE either outside of the fact that more people started adopting LTE after Sprint started building up their Wimax network. It's not like the speeds are worlds apart in the way that '4G' is an improvement over 3G. LTE is a little bit faster than Wimax, but the difference will be totally inconsequential.
So for that, shame on whoever wrote the title.
Which means they're probably gonna end up litigating even more as that's all that zombie companies are good for. From SCO to Nokia. Hopefully RIM have too much class to degrade themselves like that.
Masters or PhD? There's a big difference. Biomedical science and engineering usually require advanced degrees and as much experience as possible. This is something that a PhD does a lot better than a Master's. It's not like computer science or mechanical engineering where you can just get a Master's and get a regular job. There just aren't that many jobs like that in the biomedical field (at least as far as I know, maybe someone can confirm or correct me).
I believe he splits the prize with the other winner, so he only gets 600k. Nevertheless, he actually does have a pretty solid income anyways.
http://www.technologyacademy.fi/blog/2012/06/13/press-release/
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=953999
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds#Later_years
Agreed, and it's the community that's so important. When you consider how versatile and ubiquitous the kernel is, you have to understand that it takes an extremely broad and diverse community of developers and other contributors to make it possible. Compare this to Microsoft, who can barely manage to port their operating system to ARM, and somehow they're raking in hundreds of billions of dollars.
Even if you cast all of Linus' software development contibutions aside, the fact that he started such a diverse and prodigious community is worthy of several awards on its own.
A million times no! When I got frustrated with the headphones that came with my phone because the buds kept falling out, I replaced them with some earbuds from Sony. The sound quality would basically qualify as what I call Brittney Spears quality. In other words, they have no bass, the treble is hissy, the sound is static-ey and unclear. To me, the represent another low-quality piece of crap from Sony made with the slogan 'rush it out and try to make as much money as possible.' No quality, no value, nothing. I can't imagine a $5 pair sounding worse. I knew it was a mistake to buy from Sony, but I gave them just one more chance. Not doing it again.
Personally, I got a Sennheiser HD 202 for $20 and they're quite simply the best value you can possibly get for headphones. For the price, the sound is impressively rich, clear and well-rounded.
So there you have it, Windows is a piggy bank guarded by a crack ho :-)
To be fair, the crack needed to bypass the security can be fairly difficult for some people to obtain.
No pun on 'crack' intended.
Not really.
Leia: "If you do this bad thing, you probably won't get what you want"
Tarkin: ignores the advice, does the bad thing anyway
(some time later)
Tarkin doesn't have what he wants. He's also dead.
It's a movie. Also.
Knowing facts is a conflict of interest?
Judging Oracle's lawyers' arguments, I'm sure they wouldn't hesitate to try....
Exactly what I thought when I read this. Don't all good lawyers simply prey on the uninformed judges and jurors? How could they possibly allow someone intelligent and reasonable to preside over this case? I don't understand the legal process so well, but if a juror said something like this, wouldn't a mistrial be pretty much automatic?
On a side note, why can't all cases be presided over by judges who have an informed opinion on the subject at hand?
There are quite a few computer vendors that offer Linux options at purchase... Google around. Here's a list, for example: http://linuxpreloaded.com/. I'm sure that a few of them ship internationally too. I suppose the main drawback is that the price is still steeper cause of shipping, but that's life....
Would that still be his own eyesocket or that of someone else? This could go wrong very quickly...
Right. The EU has already decided that APIs are not copyrightable and wrote an extremely reasonable and balanced explanation as to why:
The object of the protection conferred by Directive 91/250 is the expression in any form of a computer program, such as the source code and the object code, which permits reproduction in different computer languages. On the basis of those considerations, the Court holds that neither the functionality of a computer program nor the programming language and the format of data files used in a computer program in order to exploit certain of its functions constitute a form of expression. Accordingly, they do not enjoy copyright protection.
To accept that the functionality of a computer program can be protected by copyright would amount to making it possible to monopolise ideas, to the detriment of technological progress and industrial development.
So maybe there's still some hope left... otherwise we'll just have to hire lawyers to write the software of the future.
Even the mighty Facebook, who has a somewhat similar MO, don't run an advertising network that is widely used on other web sites.
You crazy mon? Do Facebook Beacon and Facebook Connect mean nothing to you? Facebook is not just tracking the activities of its own users on its own site, not its own users on other sites, but even other users (who have never agreed to terms with Facebook) on any site that has Facebook's JS on it. And (pardon the pun here), Facebook is IMO far more faceless about sharing the private data they collect than Google. It's for this reason that I have them blocked in every way possible in my hosts file.
Best for numerical analysis and simulation: C/C++ (nowadays), Fortran (once upon a time, still has some holdouts)
Best for scientific visualization: Matlab (not free) or Octave (free), IDL (not free)
Python deserves some mention in both of these categories as well. Numpy/Scipy are outstanding tools which can easily replace Matlab and Octave. Namespace hierarchies and OO implementation aren't necessarily the highest priorities for simulation, but when they are, Python kicks the pants off Matlab. Pylab has also fit all of my needs for plotting, though I have never really used it for anything too serious and it still isn't Python3 compatible.
For numerical analysis and simulation, you can always write Python wrappers for your low-level C and Fortran libraries.
Another consideration to keep in mind for these types of projects is that if you're gonna run them on a supercomputer, you can damn near guarantee that Python will be available on it while Matlab probably will be, but will require a bitch of dealing with license matters.
I as much as anyone else hate when an OSS user tells people who are looking for help that they're doing it wrong, but this is clearly the case here.
You should not be moving files you don't have persmission to move using a GUI. You don't need admin prvileges to do even 99% of your everyday file operations. If you absolutely must, there's this extension. But I can't see any reason why you would need to do this, and it strongly suggests to me that your setup is wrong. Sometimes stuff does happen, like a root-owned file ends up in $HOME, but the solution is to change the owner, not to use root access all the time.
And there's really no way to correct a typing mistake in command line. That got to really be annoying.
You are probably using the wrong terminal emulator. Left and right keys work even in the most basic ones.
As for the rest of your points, you could have just used a VM. And if you hate proprietary plugins so much, then why do you keep using Netflix? You're supporting the thing you proclaim to hate - so don't waste your time saying that you don't like it.
I'm sorry, but you never tried Linux. You tried Windows on a different OS. You need to be willing to relearn how to do things you've gotten used to and it doesn't hurt to have a friend help show you how it's done. While there are some things that you're just not going to be able to do without a VM, there are others which you claim you can't do when the problem really is that you're doing it the way you're used to it, rather than how it should really be done. It sucks having to accept that you need to change the way you think, but if you get it out of the way when you start, then things will only get better from there.
Music lobby group, the BPI, welcomed the move, saying music creators 'deserve to be paid for their work just like everyone else'
Then maybe there should be some laws against the record labels which don't even pay the artists shit?
and calling for those who use The Pirate Bay to illegally download content to 'explore the many digital music services operating ethically and legally in the UK.'"
I invite those slimy pigs to make a legal and ethical living themselves.
Well it would probably help if they would be more specific about it. I haven't read the TOS myself, but if they said something like 'creating a derivative work for the purpose of displaying thumbnails,' or something more general, but not quite 'we can do whatever we want with it,' that would ease my mind a lot.
On the other hand, it's nice to see Apple getting a taste of its own medicine.
It doesn't matter at all. Do you see how much money Apple has? Apple will just settle with the trolls and and never worry again. But then the trolls are gonna start targeting others, e.g. Samsung, Moto, HTC, LG, etc., and it's just gonna crush competitors because they already have a precedent for high settlements. This is a little more problematic for companies that don't have the ridiculous margins that Apple does.
This model just isn't sustainable. I think Apple is as evil as anyone else (full disclosure), but between Apple and patent trolls, you still gotta root for Apple, cause the damage spreads. Get the lawyers the fuck away from the jobs where people actually do things that improve society as a whole... not just their individual selves.