I also did some writing using WP 5.1 on DOS back in the day, but later I've come to realize the problem of word processors. The issue became apparent upon learning LaTeX, and since then I've wondered why people spend so much time on the "ink on paper" look, as opposed to the text itself. If you want to focus on text, you should try a plain text editor rather than a "fancy because it's not fancy" word processor.
Here's a idea, if you must be stuck in the 1990s with physical media, just rip the CD to a media server when you get home.
That might work for you, if your media server exists on some weird elemental plane. My media servers are unfortunately physical entities.
Also, when you stream stuff from 'the Cloud' (which ostensibly depends on the quaint physical media itself), you are using electrons and photons, some of the fundamental physical particles.
(It's great nobody mentioned 'digital download' yet...)
Purism is nice in the sense that it helps label things properly. If you stick to the Reinheitsgebot for your definition of beer, then you know what you're getting. Some of the things I brew are hard to label as they live somewhere between beer, mead and wine, but are nevertheless quite enjoyable. (This involves a broad definition of wine -- we don't grow much grapes here in Finland.)
I was also wondering how much this seeing ability contributes to actual, productive math ability. The visions described remind me of what, erm, some people see when on acid.
I'm particularly interested in the idea, being mathematically minded myself, and I believe my ability to conceptualize things in many visual dimensions is an important factor. Nevertheless, there is rarely a direct translation from my pictorial musings into hard and solid math. Visualization helps you get new ideas, but it's implementing them in some rigorous language that's the hard part. I guess it's the linguistic tendencies that might help there...
The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.
Agreed (to the extent that all generalizations are dumb). I don't think you need to learn all the extra artsy fartsy in order to master your language, though of course it helps to have some context.
I've only officially studied science/tech fields, but I've always been interested in language, and like any complex system, I like to pay attention to its details and play with it. I grew up in Finland, went to an international school mostly because of the language aspect, but ended up getting a science degree in Britain. Later I have taught math and science in both languages, and I find my attention to language invaluable. For starters, it's just embarrassing if you teacher makes obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, even if it's not a language teacher. On a deeper level, teaching is all about communication, and it always helps if you can make your message clearer and simpler (without simplifying the subject matter, of course).
I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases. You know how disastrous it can be to miss a quotation mark in a programming language, yet you don't care about "its" vs. "it's"? Of course, the latter is not disastrous in the same way, but for a lot of people such mistakes will break the flow of reading, as well as giving an impression of generally sloppy thinking.
Throwing away original information is kind of lo-fi IMHO. I don't mean it's bad, it serves an artistic purpose, for example by helping the viewer focus on an intended part of the picture. In the same way, overdriving a guitar amp is a lossy transformation that many people find pleasant.
Too much miniaturization is dumb, unless you want a portable device. Why is it that every time you see a lower-powered version of some CPU/GPU, it is crammed into a tiny box with miserable heatsinks and whiny fans, resulting in more noise than the original higher-powered one? IMHO, it's much nicer to keep things well spaced out, for a (nearly) fanless experience.
They're not really difficult. They're just really unattractive
In some sense, these two can be the same thing. For example, I find working as a teacher more difficult than any of the science/programming I've ever done, even though the individual technical challenges may seem much easier. Dealing with troubled kids from day to day can make your life feel difficult in a grander scale.
This was my initial reaction too, it's like glorifying the gramophone record in an age of practically unlimited bit depth and sampling frequency. However, that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the full precision of current tech. Lo-fi effects can be nice in the right place, finally we have the ability to choose, to get the occasional buglike feature instead of the other way round.
In space, 'just use rockets' is not the answer people want to hear, because mass is precious.
In an atmosphere, though, all you need is a little extra battery power to shove air in whatever direction you prefer, which works just fine for modifying your path. It wouldn't be much like skateboarding; but I suspect that if you threw some accelerometers, clever math, and a mixture of control surfaces and glorified model airplane thrusters at the problem you could have a system that can be 'steered' by shifting your body weight, as people are accustomed to, with the actual work being handled by the aerodynamic components, since you don't have solid objects to push off of.
Doesn't solve the 'make hoverboard hover' problem; but if you ignore that...
True, so it would basically take fans/propellers. Ideally, though, the hover mechanism itself would automatically enable some level of steering via weight shifting. Imagine a regular hovercraft modified for extra ground clearance. If you tilt it, it's pushing more air to one side than the other. It should also work this way in the plasma levitation systems envisioned in the paper I linked above. But in practice you'd probably want some additional control.
How would you steer this imaginary hoverboard? A skateboard will continue rolling in one direction only, as long as you do nothing. The various ways of controlling a skateboard rely on high friction in other directions. Turn it sideways quickly and you can stop it, if you know what you're doing. A hoverboard would simply continue hovering sideways, and you'd have no way to turn it without a wall or something. Similarly, there would be much less room for tricks that rely on hitting the deck against something solid, as the hover mechanism would repel any direct contact. You'd need spacewalk-style thrusters to get where you want to.
We genuinely are bad at predicting the future of tech, but it's usually not because we're too fanciful. It's usually the opposite. Tech predictions usually fail because we're way too conservative. That's partly the reason behind this joke drawing in 1981. Now predictions about almost everything else - society, politics, and social adoption of tech - are usually way too optimistic. But tech predictions are way too pessimistic.
More precisely, futurists like Osmo A. Wiio have stated that people don't understand exponential growth -- they overestimate short-term progress, but underestimate long-term. There are lots of almost unnoticeable advances that make people cry "where's my flying car" and yet over time those advances add up, amplifying each other, and we suddenly find ourselves beyond the need to fly.
Technology advances because techies remember the past and build on it, learning from past mistakes -- politics, on the other hand...
liebensraum.
Leben = life; lieben = to love:P I think I'll start using that term in place of "get a room".
Slashdot Mirror
I also did some writing using WP 5.1 on DOS back in the day, but later I've come to realize the problem of word processors. The issue became apparent upon learning LaTeX, and since then I've wondered why people spend so much time on the "ink on paper" look, as opposed to the text itself. If you want to focus on text, you should try a plain text editor rather than a "fancy because it's not fancy" word processor.
Further links: http://iki.fi/teknohog/rants/w...
Here's a idea, if you must be stuck in the 1990s with physical media, just rip the CD to a media server when you get home.
That might work for you, if your media server exists on some weird elemental plane. My media servers are unfortunately physical entities.
Also, when you stream stuff from 'the Cloud' (which ostensibly depends on the quaint physical media itself), you are using electrons and photons, some of the fundamental physical particles.
(It's great nobody mentioned 'digital download' yet...)
This guy has an incredible blinkered view of "embedded devices". Most embedded devises are not connected to the Interned.
Did you mean: Most people who design such devices are interned.
http://xkcd.com/221/
This is a site for nerds. Name a nerdier topic than Tesla.
Oh, almost forgot: Edison.
This is a site for nerds. Name a nerdier topic than Tesla.
Make a machine do a specific job as a tool and this won't ever be a problem.
Do one thing and do it well -- the eunuch's philosophy.
Purism is nice in the sense that it helps label things properly. If you stick to the Reinheitsgebot for your definition of beer, then you know what you're getting. Some of the things I brew are hard to label as they live somewhere between beer, mead and wine, but are nevertheless quite enjoyable. (This involves a broad definition of wine -- we don't grow much grapes here in Finland.)
Will it blend?
What percentage of the discussion on Slashdot goes down in flames over semantic quibbles having nothing to do with the substance of the issue at hand?
FTFY.
hunter2
You're doing it wrong. It's suppose to be something like Hj1pAab5!z21i0lO&sa8q0, on a sticky note attached to the machine.
That's the combination^W^W my Bitcoin address!
I'll drink to that!
I was also wondering how much this seeing ability contributes to actual, productive math ability. The visions described remind me of what, erm, some people see when on acid.
I'm particularly interested in the idea, being mathematically minded myself, and I believe my ability to conceptualize things in many visual dimensions is an important factor. Nevertheless, there is rarely a direct translation from my pictorial musings into hard and solid math. Visualization helps you get new ideas, but it's implementing them in some rigorous language that's the hard part. I guess it's the linguistic tendencies that might help there...
Oh my, what a place to drop a letter...
For starters, it's just embarrassing if you teacher makes obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, even if it's not a language teacher.
Don't worry, I do the same thing sometimes, usually it's with the letter "s" though.
Ah! I knew a post like this would hit Muphry's law sooner or later.
The problem with humanities majors is not that they can't communicate, but that they have nothing interesting to say.
Agreed (to the extent that all generalizations are dumb). I don't think you need to learn all the extra artsy fartsy in order to master your language, though of course it helps to have some context.
I've only officially studied science/tech fields, but I've always been interested in language, and like any complex system, I like to pay attention to its details and play with it. I grew up in Finland, went to an international school mostly because of the language aspect, but ended up getting a science degree in Britain. Later I have taught math and science in both languages, and I find my attention to language invaluable. For starters, it's just embarrassing if you teacher makes obvious spelling or grammar mistakes, even if it's not a language teacher. On a deeper level, teaching is all about communication, and it always helps if you can make your message clearer and simpler (without simplifying the subject matter, of course).
I've never understood why math/science/programming geeks are stereotypically bad at spelling (or language in general). It should be about the same kind of attention to detail in both cases. You know how disastrous it can be to miss a quotation mark in a programming language, yet you don't care about "its" vs. "it's"? Of course, the latter is not disastrous in the same way, but for a lot of people such mistakes will break the flow of reading, as well as giving an impression of generally sloppy thinking.
Throwing away original information is kind of lo-fi IMHO. I don't mean it's bad, it serves an artistic purpose, for example by helping the viewer focus on an intended part of the picture. In the same way, overdriving a guitar amp is a lossy transformation that many people find pleasant.
Too much miniaturization is dumb, unless you want a portable device. Why is it that every time you see a lower-powered version of some CPU/GPU, it is crammed into a tiny box with miserable heatsinks and whiny fans, resulting in more noise than the original higher-powered one? IMHO, it's much nicer to keep things well spaced out, for a (nearly) fanless experience.
They're not really difficult. They're just really unattractive
In some sense, these two can be the same thing. For example, I find working as a teacher more difficult than any of the science/programming I've ever done, even though the individual technical challenges may seem much easier. Dealing with troubled kids from day to day can make your life feel difficult in a grander scale.
This was my initial reaction too, it's like glorifying the gramophone record in an age of practically unlimited bit depth and sampling frequency. However, that doesn't mean I can't enjoy the full precision of current tech. Lo-fi effects can be nice in the right place, finally we have the ability to choose, to get the occasional buglike feature instead of the other way round.
In space, 'just use rockets' is not the answer people want to hear, because mass is precious. In an atmosphere, though, all you need is a little extra battery power to shove air in whatever direction you prefer, which works just fine for modifying your path. It wouldn't be much like skateboarding; but I suspect that if you threw some accelerometers, clever math, and a mixture of control surfaces and glorified model airplane thrusters at the problem you could have a system that can be 'steered' by shifting your body weight, as people are accustomed to, with the actual work being handled by the aerodynamic components, since you don't have solid objects to push off of. Doesn't solve the 'make hoverboard hover' problem; but if you ignore that...
True, so it would basically take fans/propellers. Ideally, though, the hover mechanism itself would automatically enable some level of steering via weight shifting. Imagine a regular hovercraft modified for extra ground clearance. If you tilt it, it's pushing more air to one side than the other. It should also work this way in the plasma levitation systems envisioned in the paper I linked above. But in practice you'd probably want some additional control.
How would you steer this imaginary hoverboard? A skateboard will continue rolling in one direction only, as long as you do nothing. The various ways of controlling a skateboard rely on high friction in other directions. Turn it sideways quickly and you can stop it, if you know what you're doing. A hoverboard would simply continue hovering sideways, and you'd have no way to turn it without a wall or something. Similarly, there would be much less room for tricks that rely on hitting the deck against something solid, as the hover mechanism would repel any direct contact. You'd need spacewalk-style thrusters to get where you want to.
(Disclaimer: a little something from my days of physics studies http://iki.fi/teknohog/physics...)
Oh yeah? Well I was ranting about global warming before it was cool.
Maybe Trucrypt isn't available for linux distros but i am sure there are plenty of alternatives that do a similar full system os encryption.
I can think of one alternative on Linux, it's called Truecrypt with an "e".
We genuinely are bad at predicting the future of tech, but it's usually not because we're too fanciful. It's usually the opposite. Tech predictions usually fail because we're way too conservative. That's partly the reason behind this joke drawing in 1981. Now predictions about almost everything else - society, politics, and social adoption of tech - are usually way too optimistic. But tech predictions are way too pessimistic.
More precisely, futurists like Osmo A. Wiio have stated that people don't understand exponential growth -- they overestimate short-term progress, but underestimate long-term. There are lots of almost unnoticeable advances that make people cry "where's my flying car" and yet over time those advances add up, amplifying each other, and we suddenly find ourselves beyond the need to fly.
Technology advances because techies remember the past and build on it, learning from past mistakes -- politics, on the other hand...
liebensraum.
Leben = life; lieben = to love :P I think I'll start using that term in place of "get a room".