False dichotomy. If you just expect to get a trade job, then yes a degree is worthless. But there are many fields that require advanced degrees because the knowledge required for those fields is only obtainable through years of education, such as medicine and engineering.
Not everybody who counts is a slashdot geek. My in-laws regularly print off crosswords from the internet so they can do them wherever, and still routinely print off directions from google maps. My parents who are incredibly tech savvy often print off emails and such for my elderly grandmother who will go to her grave having never owned anything with a general purpose CPU in it. This Christmas, we printed nice "to/from" labels for all of the Christmas presents we gave. Yes, the necessity of a 2D printer is decreasing every year, but it I don't think it has decreased as much as you think it has, especially among the non-tech-savvy regular Joe and Jane.
But even as the necessity of the 2D printer decreases over the coming years, the point still stands that 2D printers were/are still incredibly useful to non-professionals, and an inexpensive, easy to use 3D printer certainly can be as well.
Most people are not authors or graphics designers, yet nearly everyone with a computer has a need for a traditional 2D paper-and-ink printer. There is already a large library of downloadable 3D printable content, and if 3D printing becomes mainstream there will surely be 3D modeling software made along the lines of Word or Paint that is easy to use and good enough for Joe Homeowner to make that plastic widget he needs for that DIY project rather than going to the hardware store, or to make themed decorations and favors for Timmy's 12th birthday party, or countless other scenarios like that. Most people aren't 'professional makers', but plenty of people out there are casual hobbyist or home 'makers'.
It seems as though while smoking any plant creates a risk for lung cancer as all smoke contains known carcinogens, smoking a particular plant high in cannabinoids has shown to result in a near negligible real-world incidence of cancer, suggesting that while cannabis smoke contains carcinogens, it must also contain substances that have an anti-carcinogenic effect.
Yes, Apple may be a bit over-represented. (MacBook Air? Sure its form factor sparked a slew of of copycats known as 'ultrabooks', but it didn't exactly change the UX or how the general public used computers) But to use 'software libre' as the reason why they shouldn't be in this list at all is just stupid. For all that FOSS has done, it has been almost nonexistent as far as influence in general personal computing, largely because FOSS for the most part has still not figured out how to make UX not suck. And that is what this list is about - those products that have caused a watershed in how the general public does computing.
Just because one high speed happens to be slower than another high speed doesn't mean it is not high speed. In this case, as we are talking about collisions, high speed means significantly faster than the average 35-40mph that crash tests are generally done at. 70mph, 80mph and 155mph all satisfy that definition of "significantly faster than 40mph" and therefore all can be considered high speed when discussing collisions.
Part of the problem is that much of math education is based on rote memorization rather than problem solving, and writing a program to do your homework for you is frowned upon and often considered cheating. If writing programs to solve your math homework was generally accepted as legitimate, we would have both fewer kids flunk out of math and more kids going into programming, as those kids would be actually learning how both math and programming are used in the real world.
The only thing that's "hurting" iPhone 5c sales is that unexpectedly more consumers are choosing the faster, better designed, and more capable iPhone 5s, despite it being a higher cost & higher margin product. That's certainly a problem I wouldn't mind having.
Yeah, when scientists say "This shouldn't happen according to current models", they are really saying "Holy shit, this is awesome! We get to come up with new models!".
Meanwhile, the mainstream media hears that and reports it either as "Scientists say this shouldn't happen. The universe is fucked up" or "Scientists say this shouldn't happen. Science is fucked up" depending on their political bent.
It would be odd to find 1 in the first 1000 samples if the probability of detection was the same for every object out there. But not all planets have the same probability of detection.
The shorter its orbital period, the more likely it is that it will be detected as it will take less time to determine a pattern. Consider, it would take E.T. multiple years to detect Earth simply because they would have to detect multiple transits of Earth across the sun which of course happen once a year. It might take them 10 years of observations to be sure, as other planets transiting might screw up the signal. Whereas a planet that orbits in a couple of days will provide the same quality of data in a couple of weeks or months.
I've just looked at the data from an armchair perspective, but my understanding is that they only declare a signal to be a planet once they are pretty darn sure that it is. Kepler found several thousand planet candidates with a relatively high certainty, but they have so far only declared a few hundred of them as actual planets as they are confirmed by separate observations preferably using different techniques.
In the case of Kepler 78b, they got both a transiting signal from Kepler and a doppler signal from a ground based telescope. So something is making this star wobble towards and away from us, while simultaneously dimming it at the point when it is closest to us in the wobble. The only reasonable explanation is a planet.
... given our current understanding of planets/orbits/forces...
That's the key.
It would be like finding a neptune-like planet orbiting a sun-like star at 0.5 AUs, due to the solar wind at that distance, it should only be a 'rocky' planet, not a gas planet.
Hot jupiters have been found as close as 0.0165 AU from sun-like stars. Again, they're very rare, but they exist.
The 'problem' with this planet is that it is too close to the star for it to have formed there, and there is no stable orbital migration pattern which would allow it to have formed farther out and drifted inward as close as it has w/o almost immediately falling into the star itself.
"Stable" is a relative term. According to TFA, Kepler 78b's orbit is unstable, and will degrade in about 3 billion years. "Immediately" in astronomical terms can mean millions or billions of years.
That, and the results of both of our effective planet detecting schemes - transit and doppler - skew proportionately towards these hot worlds, as for both methods a shorter period will give a stronger signal and therefore be more likely to be detected. So just like with the hot jupiters detected by the doppler method, they are probably actually a minuscule fraction of the planets out there but happen to be the easiest to detect. So even though they are rare, we are guaranteed to see them, and then muse about their rarity.
Very true about it not just applying to technology companies. A really good example I have mentioned before on/. that is even farther removed from the tech sector is JC Penny. Their radical plan of no-nonsense pricing was a good idea (prices in whole dollar amounts rather than $x.99 bs, as well as reasonable everyday prices as opposed to artificially inflated prices with periodic "sales" to trick consumers into thinking they're getting a good deal) which could have really paid off if given enough time for consumers to get used to it. But in the short term, consumers shied away from it, they had a couple of bad quarters, wall street freaked out, and they shitcanned the CEO.
There is a massive difference between taking it private and buying out the shareholders for the purpose of shutting it down, even if the first step looks the same on the surface. I have no idea what Mr. Dell is planning, but in general operating a business in a way that makes shareholders happy is not necessarily the best strategy for a technology company. Shareholders want to see the goods on a quarter-by-quarter basis, and if a particular quarter is down, the shareholders interpret that as a hiccup in the company's strategy and punish the stock accordingly. However, running a technology company requires a long-term view of the future, and a roadmap for how to get there. That roadmap may require some sacrificial quarters where emphasis is put into future R&D rather than maximizing current sales. If done properly, future awesome technology to come from that R&D more than makes up for a couple of flat quarters. But the markets don't see it that way. So the only way to be able to fully achieve the potential of the roadmap is to take the stock market out of the equation.
The key to good design, on the other hand, is making it work in the way the user expects it to work, not in the way the user tells you they want it to work. More often than not, those two are quite different.
Most users don't want customization settings. They want it to just work the way they expect it to work. Putting in lots of fiddly options isn't design. It's punting on design.
My understanding was that Babbage's own programs were more akin to today's Hello World in complexity, just as a proof of concept to show that his machine would work in the first place. Ada's program on the other hand was a complete implementation of an algorithm to compute a mathematical sequence (Bernoulli numbers) based on a mathematical formula provided by Babbage. So whether Babbage or Ada was the first programmer would depend on whether you consider Hello World to be a proper program or not.
"Dodging taxes" implies moving hiding income so that it is never taxed, such as when corporations claim to operate out of the caiman islands. Apple does not 'claim residence' in Ireland. They claim residence in Cupertino, California. All sales in the US pay US sales tax, and there is no dodging there. They own a subsidiary in Ireland where they aggregate revenue from sales outside the US. But for all of those sales, they already pay sales tax to the countries in which the sales were made. They just hold that money in Ireland, because the US has very high repatriation taxes, in effect causing all foreign sales to be double taxed. Is it unethical to keep money outside of the US that never originated inside the US to begin with just because the feds want an extra slice of the pie?
Yep. Not only do you have to use it for it to be defensible, but you have to actively defend it as well. Failing to take action to protect your trademark is legally implicitly agreeing that you no longer wish to retain exclusive ownership of that mark. That is why anybody can market their moving staircase contraption as an Escalator, and Otis Co. has no say in the matter anymore.
Yep, came here to post exactly that. Slashdot is the last comment board on the internet with truly threaded conversations where you can see at a glance who is replying to whom. That, I think, is the greatest strength of the comment section layout, and is completely lost with the redesign. My eyes hurt after a while trying to follow tab indentation for thread depth. Also, completely agree with being able to hide idiot posters below a certain score threshold. I wish the rest of the internet had a way of hiding all "-1 Troll" comments.
The MO of SpaceX is to under promise and over deliver. But adding new technology on top of more new technology increases the probability of failure rather than decreasing it, until that technology has been tested and the bugs are ironed out. Today's launch was one of those tests. They were testing new technology that will let them relight the first stage after separation and bring it back for a controlled landing. That new technology adds additional complexity that had a nonzero chance of making the rest of the rocket fail due to untested redesigns.
Slashdot Mirror
False dichotomy. If you just expect to get a trade job, then yes a degree is worthless. But there are many fields that require advanced degrees because the knowledge required for those fields is only obtainable through years of education, such as medicine and engineering.
Not everybody who counts is a slashdot geek. My in-laws regularly print off crosswords from the internet so they can do them wherever, and still routinely print off directions from google maps. My parents who are incredibly tech savvy often print off emails and such for my elderly grandmother who will go to her grave having never owned anything with a general purpose CPU in it. This Christmas, we printed nice "to/from" labels for all of the Christmas presents we gave. Yes, the necessity of a 2D printer is decreasing every year, but it I don't think it has decreased as much as you think it has, especially among the non-tech-savvy regular Joe and Jane.
But even as the necessity of the 2D printer decreases over the coming years, the point still stands that 2D printers were/are still incredibly useful to non-professionals, and an inexpensive, easy to use 3D printer certainly can be as well.
Most people are not authors or graphics designers, yet nearly everyone with a computer has a need for a traditional 2D paper-and-ink printer. There is already a large library of downloadable 3D printable content, and if 3D printing becomes mainstream there will surely be 3D modeling software made along the lines of Word or Paint that is easy to use and good enough for Joe Homeowner to make that plastic widget he needs for that DIY project rather than going to the hardware store, or to make themed decorations and favors for Timmy's 12th birthday party, or countless other scenarios like that. Most people aren't 'professional makers', but plenty of people out there are casual hobbyist or home 'makers'.
It seems as though while smoking any plant creates a risk for lung cancer as all smoke contains known carcinogens, smoking a particular plant high in cannabinoids has shown to result in a near negligible real-world incidence of cancer, suggesting that while cannabis smoke contains carcinogens, it must also contain substances that have an anti-carcinogenic effect.
Yes, Apple may be a bit over-represented. (MacBook Air? Sure its form factor sparked a slew of of copycats known as 'ultrabooks', but it didn't exactly change the UX or how the general public used computers) But to use 'software libre' as the reason why they shouldn't be in this list at all is just stupid. For all that FOSS has done, it has been almost nonexistent as far as influence in general personal computing, largely because FOSS for the most part has still not figured out how to make UX not suck. And that is what this list is about - those products that have caused a watershed in how the general public does computing.
"Schooling" is mandatory. "Education" on the other hand often seems to be actively discouraged.
Just because one high speed happens to be slower than another high speed doesn't mean it is not high speed. In this case, as we are talking about collisions, high speed means significantly faster than the average 35-40mph that crash tests are generally done at. 70mph, 80mph and 155mph all satisfy that definition of "significantly faster than 40mph" and therefore all can be considered high speed when discussing collisions.
Part of the problem is that much of math education is based on rote memorization rather than problem solving, and writing a program to do your homework for you is frowned upon and often considered cheating. If writing programs to solve your math homework was generally accepted as legitimate, we would have both fewer kids flunk out of math and more kids going into programming, as those kids would be actually learning how both math and programming are used in the real world.
The only thing that's "hurting" iPhone 5c sales is that unexpectedly more consumers are choosing the faster, better designed, and more capable iPhone 5s, despite it being a higher cost & higher margin product. That's certainly a problem I wouldn't mind having.
Yeah, when scientists say "This shouldn't happen according to current models", they are really saying "Holy shit, this is awesome! We get to come up with new models!".
Meanwhile, the mainstream media hears that and reports it either as "Scientists say this shouldn't happen. The universe is fucked up" or "Scientists say this shouldn't happen. Science is fucked up" depending on their political bent.
It would be odd to find 1 in the first 1000 samples if the probability of detection was the same for every object out there. But not all planets have the same probability of detection.
The shorter its orbital period, the more likely it is that it will be detected as it will take less time to determine a pattern. Consider, it would take E.T. multiple years to detect Earth simply because they would have to detect multiple transits of Earth across the sun which of course happen once a year. It might take them 10 years of observations to be sure, as other planets transiting might screw up the signal. Whereas a planet that orbits in a couple of days will provide the same quality of data in a couple of weeks or months.
I've just looked at the data from an armchair perspective, but my understanding is that they only declare a signal to be a planet once they are pretty darn sure that it is. Kepler found several thousand planet candidates with a relatively high certainty, but they have so far only declared a few hundred of them as actual planets as they are confirmed by separate observations preferably using different techniques.
In the case of Kepler 78b, they got both a transiting signal from Kepler and a doppler signal from a ground based telescope. So something is making this star wobble towards and away from us, while simultaneously dimming it at the point when it is closest to us in the wobble. The only reasonable explanation is a planet.
... given our current understanding of planets/orbits/forces ...
That's the key.
It would be like finding a neptune-like planet orbiting a sun-like star at 0.5 AUs, due to the solar wind at that distance, it should only be a 'rocky' planet, not a gas planet.
Hot jupiters have been found as close as 0.0165 AU from sun-like stars. Again, they're very rare, but they exist.
The 'problem' with this planet is that it is too close to the star for it to have formed there, and there is no stable orbital migration pattern which would allow it to have formed farther out and drifted inward as close as it has w/o almost immediately falling into the star itself.
"Stable" is a relative term. According to TFA, Kepler 78b's orbit is unstable, and will degrade in about 3 billion years. "Immediately" in astronomical terms can mean millions or billions of years.
That, and the results of both of our effective planet detecting schemes - transit and doppler - skew proportionately towards these hot worlds, as for both methods a shorter period will give a stronger signal and therefore be more likely to be detected. So just like with the hot jupiters detected by the doppler method, they are probably actually a minuscule fraction of the planets out there but happen to be the easiest to detect. So even though they are rare, we are guaranteed to see them, and then muse about their rarity.
Very true about it not just applying to technology companies. A really good example I have mentioned before on /. that is even farther removed from the tech sector is JC Penny. Their radical plan of no-nonsense pricing was a good idea (prices in whole dollar amounts rather than $x.99 bs, as well as reasonable everyday prices as opposed to artificially inflated prices with periodic "sales" to trick consumers into thinking they're getting a good deal) which could have really paid off if given enough time for consumers to get used to it. But in the short term, consumers shied away from it, they had a couple of bad quarters, wall street freaked out, and they shitcanned the CEO.
There is a massive difference between taking it private and buying out the shareholders for the purpose of shutting it down, even if the first step looks the same on the surface. I have no idea what Mr. Dell is planning, but in general operating a business in a way that makes shareholders happy is not necessarily the best strategy for a technology company. Shareholders want to see the goods on a quarter-by-quarter basis, and if a particular quarter is down, the shareholders interpret that as a hiccup in the company's strategy and punish the stock accordingly. However, running a technology company requires a long-term view of the future, and a roadmap for how to get there. That roadmap may require some sacrificial quarters where emphasis is put into future R&D rather than maximizing current sales. If done properly, future awesome technology to come from that R&D more than makes up for a couple of flat quarters. But the markets don't see it that way. So the only way to be able to fully achieve the potential of the roadmap is to take the stock market out of the equation.
Best comment ever in the history of slashdot. Pretty much sums this place up completely.
The key to good design, on the other hand, is making it work in the way the user expects it to work, not in the way the user tells you they want it to work. More often than not, those two are quite different.
Most users don't want customization settings. They want it to just work the way they expect it to work. Putting in lots of fiddly options isn't design. It's punting on design.
My understanding was that Babbage's own programs were more akin to today's Hello World in complexity, just as a proof of concept to show that his machine would work in the first place. Ada's program on the other hand was a complete implementation of an algorithm to compute a mathematical sequence (Bernoulli numbers) based on a mathematical formula provided by Babbage. So whether Babbage or Ada was the first programmer would depend on whether you consider Hello World to be a proper program or not.
- dodging taxes by claiming residence in ireland
"Dodging taxes" implies moving hiding income so that it is never taxed, such as when corporations claim to operate out of the caiman islands. Apple does not 'claim residence' in Ireland. They claim residence in Cupertino, California. All sales in the US pay US sales tax, and there is no dodging there. They own a subsidiary in Ireland where they aggregate revenue from sales outside the US. But for all of those sales, they already pay sales tax to the countries in which the sales were made. They just hold that money in Ireland, because the US has very high repatriation taxes, in effect causing all foreign sales to be double taxed. Is it unethical to keep money outside of the US that never originated inside the US to begin with just because the feds want an extra slice of the pie?
Yep. Not only do you have to use it for it to be defensible, but you have to actively defend it as well. Failing to take action to protect your trademark is legally implicitly agreeing that you no longer wish to retain exclusive ownership of that mark. That is why anybody can market their moving staircase contraption as an Escalator, and Otis Co. has no say in the matter anymore.
Yep, came here to post exactly that. Slashdot is the last comment board on the internet with truly threaded conversations where you can see at a glance who is replying to whom. That, I think, is the greatest strength of the comment section layout, and is completely lost with the redesign. My eyes hurt after a while trying to follow tab indentation for thread depth. Also, completely agree with being able to hide idiot posters below a certain score threshold. I wish the rest of the internet had a way of hiding all "-1 Troll" comments.
Here's a good one:
http://www.space.com/22996-spacex-launches-falcon-9-rocket-test-flight.html
The MO of SpaceX is to under promise and over deliver. But adding new technology on top of more new technology increases the probability of failure rather than decreasing it, until that technology has been tested and the bugs are ironed out. Today's launch was one of those tests. They were testing new technology that will let them relight the first stage after separation and bring it back for a controlled landing. That new technology adds additional complexity that had a nonzero chance of making the rest of the rocket fail due to untested redesigns.