Well, there are plenty of issues with various apps, but I won't bother listing them all. The issues are mostly with the stock Android apps, so I would say yes, it's Android's fault. If Minesweeper crashed all the time on windows, I'd blame Microsoft, right?
Oh, they have a 2.1 upgrade. However, it won't work in virtualbox, although everything else in their 'pc companion app' works in virtualbox with XP. Of course, no support for mac or linux, so I'm stumped on that front. Upgrading apps just fails, I have never managed to upgrade any of the apps I installed. I could also mention that apps frequenly crash, for instance, the mail app will usually say 'oops errorz' and the wifi will fall out and come back in at random points in time.
I wasn't an iPhone fanboy before, but after getting the Android phone, I'm seriously considering becoming one. I know the Desire is better, but I can't be bothered to be a make/model/android version number fanboy, it just won't fit the fanboy bill.
Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini Pro. (Yes, it sucks.) Stock alarm app. If I need to buy an app to get an alarm clock, I guess I should have stuck with a cheap'n'crappy phone. Oh, and if I buy a 'good' alarm clock app, I'm still stuck with the old one, without the ability to delete it.
Android is the new windows, someone said, and they were right.
How do you do that? Because frequently, when I set the alarm, it doesn't go off. Also, there is no correlation to significant dates, so I never know when to prepare for an absent alarm. (I have an android phone, and I bitterly regret buying it.)
Mormons are not the premier experts. On Iceland, family records go back virtually to the original settlement, way before the US was populated by europeans. Of course, their records are mostly confined to Iceland, but it is nonetheless impressive.
Thanks! I was looking for a sensible explanation of why HFCS was actually bad. The "fructose is bad, glucose is great" BS just don't add up in my mind. Kudos!
WTF, interesting? Yes, there is a difference between sucrose and glucose+fructose. But, as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sucrose#Metabolism_of_sucrose will tell you, sucrose is split into glucose and fructose (i.e. HFCS) very efficiently in the stomach. This means that when the sucrose enters the intestine, where it will be absorbed, there is no chemical difference between (the main content of) HFCS and sucrose. After reading the comments to this article it is clear to me that very very few CS people take even a basic chemistry course - which is a shame, chemistry is a fundamental skill everyone should learn (if nothing else, to understand why mail-order diet pills and "natural" food is a sham).
On another note, I'm from Europe and find the US debate over HFCS somewhat fascinating. Here, the "health food" industry will sell you fructose telling people that it is a "more natural and healthy" sweetener. My conclusion is nonetheless that if you want to eat something sweet and stay healthy, eat fruit or something such - don't screw around with candy.
It really looks like you know what you're talking about! For the rest of us, however, we'd be glad if you could try to come up with a nice server rack analogy?
I was going to say almost exactly the same. I bought an HP desktop in 2003 (bad choice, but I've learned). It had this exact setup: burn your recovery disk once. Thankfully, I was clever enough to do so. For this, and many other, reasons, I am never buying a HP (whatever-product) again. Either I'll get a perfectly priced Linux distro, or stick to macs - they all come with bootable OS disks with hard drive tools and what have you not.
I'm no expert, but from what I understand, it wouldn't be at all surprising. IBM has been regularly using their Power processors for supercomputers, and the architecture is (largely) the same. The Cell has some extra graphics-friendly floating-point units, but it's not entirely differnent from the CPUs IBM has been pushing for computation in the past. I'm not even sure if the extra stuff in the Cell is interesting in the supercomputing arena.
I'm really interested in using GPGPU for my physics calculations. But you know - I don't want to learn Nvidia's low-level, proprietary (whateveritis) in order to do an addition or multiplication, which may or may not outperform the CPU version. What would be _really_ great is stuff like porting the standard "low-level numerics" libraries to the GPU: BLAS, LAPACK, FFTs, special functions, and whatnot - the building blocks for most numerical programs. LAPACK+BLAS you already get in multicore versions, and there's no extra work on my part to use all cores on my PC. Please, computer geeks (i.e. more computer geek than myself), let me have the same on the GPU. When that happens, we can all buy Nvidia HotShit gaming cards and get research done. Until then, GPGPU is for the superdupergeeks.
I agree - there should be a blu-ray player, if it is really intended for home theatre systems. Now, however, the PS3 is a sucky system for home theatres. It doesn't run linux (the mac does), it doesn't accept a lot of formats - I always end up converting, which is annoying, and surely an issue for non-techies. The PS3 is a home theater system only if you buy blu-rays or DVDs, and not at all if you want to rip DVDs or similar. I kinda like the PS3, but I'm never buying something that says Sony on it again - Apple is "open" in comparison.
It's pretty close to flat - the curvature of the earth is less than a foot per mile - a rounding error really, given that even the smoothest of prairies can easily vary by more than that.
"a foot per mile" is really a useless statement, since the "curvature" (somewhat vaguely defined) goes like the distance squared. That is - if it really is "a foot per mile", it will be four - 4 - feet per two miles, 9 feet per 3 miles, and so on. So the earth is only flat if you're not looking at distances over one mile. If you're standing by the sea and you're 2 meters tall (7 feet-ish), you can see no more than 3 miles across the ocean.
This car analogy was pretty awesome. Just one detail: The CNGS (CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso) experiment is based on slamming cars (in fact, protons) into a mountainside (or a metallic target) and seeing what comes out on the backside of the mountain (730 km away). This is where the car analogy breaks down, and the Standard Model takes over.
Are you a developer / IT guy? If so, you could quite likely contribute a lot to science on the tool side of things. While it would be hard to you to contribute to science directly just due to practicalities like getting subscriptions to expensive scientific journals, you could more easily contribute to, say, open source software tools, like Octave, Numpy/Scipy/other python packages, the open source fortran compilers. There's a ton of good stuff out there, but still lots of work to be done. If you dig around, you might even find a research project you could become more directly involved in. Oh, and even simpler, you could build a few high-end PCs and run Folding@Home et al. on them. It doesn't let you contribute much directly, but it's valuable for the scientists at the other end.
Hm, if I make a file 'hello.py' with the following content:
print 42
...and say to Mac OS X "open.py files in the python interpreter" and double-click, it does the job. In 9 bytes. I guess you can get it shorter if you use a language with a shorter "print" statement / function?
And how big is Python?
Granted, but how big is linux, letting you run that ELF?
Hm, if I make a file 'hello.py' with the following content:
print 42
...and say to Mac OS X "open.py files in the python interpreter" and double-click, it does the job. In 9 bytes. I guess you can get it shorter if you use a language with a shorter "print" statement / function?
I've got a masters degree in physics, and I'm now teaching as part of my duties as a PhD studies. At my university, most professors give "chalk talks", and some use presentation software. In my experience, presentation software lets the lecturer skip quickly ahead before the students have time to make up their mind about "what just happened", and don't have time to take notes. During a chalk talk, the speed of progress is limited by the time it takes to write up that big nasty equation, and the lecture proceeds at a natural pace. Most importantly, the students more easily see how you think while doing a calculation; if using a powerpoint slide, forget that.
Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.
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Well, there are plenty of issues with various apps, but I won't bother listing them all. The issues are mostly with the stock Android apps, so I would say yes, it's Android's fault. If Minesweeper crashed all the time on windows, I'd blame Microsoft, right?
I wasn't an iPhone fanboy before, but after getting the Android phone, I'm seriously considering becoming one. I know the Desire is better, but I can't be bothered to be a make/model/android version number fanboy, it just won't fit the fanboy bill.
Android is the new windows, someone said, and they were right.
And what is a ROM?
How do you do that? Because frequently, when I set the alarm, it doesn't go off. Also, there is no correlation to significant dates, so I never know when to prepare for an absent alarm. (I have an android phone, and I bitterly regret buying it.)
Mormons are not the premier experts. On Iceland, family records go back virtually to the original settlement, way before the US was populated by europeans. Of course, their records are mostly confined to Iceland, but it is nonetheless impressive.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of those! The cooling needs should be taken care of quite nicely...
Thanks! I was looking for a sensible explanation of why HFCS was actually bad. The "fructose is bad, glucose is great" BS just don't add up in my mind. Kudos!
On another note, I'm from Europe and find the US debate over HFCS somewhat fascinating. Here, the "health food" industry will sell you fructose telling people that it is a "more natural and healthy" sweetener. My conclusion is nonetheless that if you want to eat something sweet and stay healthy, eat fruit or something such - don't screw around with candy.
It really looks like you know what you're talking about! For the rest of us, however, we'd be glad if you could try to come up with a nice server rack analogy?
I, for one, welcome our new Canonical overlords!
I was going to say almost exactly the same. I bought an HP desktop in 2003 (bad choice, but I've learned). It had this exact setup: burn your recovery disk once. Thankfully, I was clever enough to do so. For this, and many other, reasons, I am never buying a HP (whatever-product) again. Either I'll get a perfectly priced Linux distro, or stick to macs - they all come with bootable OS disks with hard drive tools and what have you not.
Believe me, when you change the way you think about how an algorithm works, it doesn't matter if you are using 3 or 10000 processors.
Have you ever read up on Amdahl's law?
I'm no expert, but from what I understand, it wouldn't be at all surprising. IBM has been regularly using their Power processors for supercomputers, and the architecture is (largely) the same. The Cell has some extra graphics-friendly floating-point units, but it's not entirely differnent from the CPUs IBM has been pushing for computation in the past. I'm not even sure if the extra stuff in the Cell is interesting in the supercomputing arena.
I'm really interested in using GPGPU for my physics calculations. But you know - I don't want to learn Nvidia's low-level, proprietary (whateveritis) in order to do an addition or multiplication, which may or may not outperform the CPU version. What would be _really_ great is stuff like porting the standard "low-level numerics" libraries to the GPU: BLAS, LAPACK, FFTs, special functions, and whatnot - the building blocks for most numerical programs. LAPACK+BLAS you already get in multicore versions, and there's no extra work on my part to use all cores on my PC. Please, computer geeks (i.e. more computer geek than myself), let me have the same on the GPU. When that happens, we can all buy Nvidia HotShit gaming cards and get research done. Until then, GPGPU is for the superdupergeeks.
I am now posting using my GPU. It's at least 50x faster!
I agree - there should be a blu-ray player, if it is really intended for home theatre systems. Now, however, the PS3 is a sucky system for home theatres. It doesn't run linux (the mac does), it doesn't accept a lot of formats - I always end up converting, which is annoying, and surely an issue for non-techies. The PS3 is a home theater system only if you buy blu-rays or DVDs, and not at all if you want to rip DVDs or similar. I kinda like the PS3, but I'm never buying something that says Sony on it again - Apple is "open" in comparison.
It's pretty close to flat - the curvature of the earth is less than a foot per mile - a rounding error really, given that even the smoothest of prairies can easily vary by more than that.
"a foot per mile" is really a useless statement, since the "curvature" (somewhat vaguely defined) goes like the distance squared. That is - if it really is "a foot per mile", it will be four - 4 - feet per two miles, 9 feet per 3 miles, and so on. So the earth is only flat if you're not looking at distances over one mile. If you're standing by the sea and you're 2 meters tall (7 feet-ish), you can see no more than 3 miles across the ocean.
You forgot to post as Anonymous Coward!
This car analogy was pretty awesome. Just one detail: The CNGS (CERN Neutrinos to Gran Sasso) experiment is based on slamming cars (in fact, protons) into a mountainside (or a metallic target) and seeing what comes out on the backside of the mountain (730 km away). This is where the car analogy breaks down, and the Standard Model takes over.
Are you a developer / IT guy? If so, you could quite likely contribute a lot to science on the tool side of things. While it would be hard to you to contribute to science directly just due to practicalities like getting subscriptions to expensive scientific journals, you could more easily contribute to, say, open source software tools, like Octave, Numpy/Scipy/other python packages, the open source fortran compilers. There's a ton of good stuff out there, but still lots of work to be done. If you dig around, you might even find a research project you could become more directly involved in. Oh, and even simpler, you could build a few high-end PCs and run Folding@Home et al. on them. It doesn't let you contribute much directly, but it's valuable for the scientists at the other end.
Hm, if I make a file 'hello.py' with the following content:
print 42
And how big is Python?
Granted, but how big is linux, letting you run that ELF?
print 42
Conclusion? Chalk Talk rules for fundamental science teaching. Powerpoint is probably OK for management theory classes.