Yeah for sure, there needs to be more emphasis on standards compliance and simple pages that convey information. I'm not going to sit though a 20 second flash intro and then fight my way though animated menus that render behind other page elements. If your website can't serve it's function as a means to convey information then I'm going elsewhere.
I think Toyota should be issued a restraining order to never contact this person again. Next time a flyer with a Toyota ad in it arrives at her door...jail time for the execs.
Seriously though, people in the company need to be held personally accountable. As you pointed out, litigation clearly isn't effective to prevent companies from doing things like this.
The Toyota and Saatchi marketing directors really should be dealt with as if they had stalked this woman. Similarly, those responsible for IKEA's "let's spray paint 'this space could be beautiful' on public and private property" campaign should be formally charged with vandalism.
Certainly if you're working in high-energy physics and dealing with the standard model (or whichever other model you like) there's a very real difference between an elementary particle and a quasi-particle. At the end of the day, however, all you can really do is ask "did my model correctly predict detector clicks?"
I suppose my point is that what you include in your ontology depends on the model you use. Within the standard model, a certain set of particles are elementary and in string theory only the strings are elementary. In another model phonons may be valid ontic entities.
I would argue that there may not be a single, fundamental ontology in physics. If there is, then I hope, for aesthetic reasons, that it isn't the standard model;-) I will be very interested to see what is considered elementary in the first Theory of Everything (and even more interested to what's elementary in the second:p ).
I don't know why a huge amount of a nano-structured meta-material would be cheaper to make than a large mirror. The device is interesting in it's own right but the application to solar power is a real stretch. It seems like every advance has to claim to be a step on the way to curing cancer or solving the energy crisis to get any attention. Even the article about magnetic monopole quasi-particles tied it back to applications to computing...possible but that certainly isn't why the discovery is interesting.
I use Windows Vista (at least I do when I've somehow broken X on my Linux install) and I don't see why people hate it so much. Almost all hardware comes with compatible drivers these days, I have a reasonably powerful mid-range desktop with 4GB of RAM and I'm used to logging in as root every 5 minutes so the "are you sure" messages don't really bother me. Given all that, I think Vista is a good operating system (although I did upgrade to it directly from Windows 98).
Can someone who has used Vista extensively and tried Windows 7 RC let me know if it's actually very different from Vista or is all the "it's so much better than Vista" hype just a reaction to the now accepted (but I argue ill-founded) view that Vista sucks? From what I can tell it seems that Microsoft slapped a new wallpaper on Vista and called it Windows 7 just to get away from the name Vista.
Living in Canada, price differences are frequently apparent. Books for example list a Canadian price and a US price, which was fine when the Canadian dollar traded at 70 cents US. When the Canadian dollar shot up to parity, however, we were inexplicably still paying $15 for a $10 book. I'm not sure what the current book situation is though, it may have stabilized. Cars are another example, it's often cheaper to fly to the US to buy a car and then pay import taxes to drive it to Canada than it is to buy it here.
Online merchandise makes the inequalities more apparent because of the ease of comparing prices and the obvious lack of transport costs that could explain a difference but it's nothing new.
Oh quasi-particles; on one hand you you think "well they're just mathematical constructs rather than physical things" but then you realize that regular particles fall into the same category. I heard of an interesting experiment where a Stern-Gerlach experiment was conducted on a dark-state polariton and resulted in the same effect as for nuclei. You can really only talk about how something behaves when a particular measurement is performed when treating it within whichever theory you're using, calling something a particle or a quasi-particle doesn't really matter.
>"whether anyone actually needs a 3D laptop is another question entirely"
A question I can answer: no. You can, however, buy one and use it and the 3D glasses it comes with to replace the bulky, neon "NERD" sign that you've become tired of hauling around. For that purpose though, I prefer to strap a Wii-mote to my head and use that VR plug-in that was developed for use with Compiz.
Google is a great example of this. They have a good history of open-sourcing when it benefits them and closely guarding source when it doesn't. They manage to come across as a friendly, open organisation while maintaining a highly profitable business model.
It seems to me that this type of technology, coupled with existing technology and much more customizable window mangers supporting multi-touch is the way to go. It's not a keyboard or a multi-touch, or a mouse or a multi-touch.
Why not have it all! You could have a mouse on a multi-touch pad and another pad below the keyboard that's however large you want it to be. You could have a standard cursor associated with the mouse and record finger presses beside the mouse. I can easily control the mouse with my palm and index finger and still have a thumb and three finger to accurately touch the mousepad for pinch zoom and application scrolling. Just bind the interface to do what you want for any given window management task or application task. In an FPS you could use the mouse for aim and hits on the multi-touch for leaning out from corners or weapon selection or whatever else you want.
More possibilities are never bad! I can't wait to use the full information bandwidth of my digits, I have dexterity to spare! I think that concepts like that are gonna make the future *awesome*, bring on the bandwidth!
Exactly right. Why would anyone confuse Facebook or Twitter with professional tools. An email can be a very professional means of communicating (provided that you employ proper grammar an etiquette). Social networking tools are great and may find a place to communicate between close colleagues but they should never be mistaken for a professional solution.
LiveCDs are far to insecure to even consider using. Tin Hat Linux is an improvement but it's still far too unsafe for me to use; not with the Illuminati hiding around every corner waiting to perform cold boot attacks. That's why I choose to live in the Google opt-out village.
We know a great deal about how to make fantastic quantum computers...that is, if we're in the field of quantum information theory. It's the field of experimental quantum computing that tends to be tricky. Certainly is enormous room for developing quantum algorithms but the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory are more than sufficiently established to write this kind of article.
I'd say we're a lot closer to a quantum computer than we are to travelling at the speed of light but that doesn't invalidate it as an upper bound.
Yeah no kidding. I don't know if maybe that quote ('Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem') was taken out of context, but I'm surprised a professor would say something that ignorant. I recently did a Master's in physics and it certainly didn't involve huge quantities of data; I ended up transferring much of my data off a spectrum analyzer with a floppy drive. (When we lost the GPIB transfer script I thought it would take too long to learn the HP libraries to rewrite it. That was a mistake, after 4 hours of shoving floppies in the drive I sat down and wrote a script in 2 hours, ah well.)
But the point is, a 400 data point trace may be exactly what you need to get the information your looking for. Just because we can collect and process huge quantities of data doesn't mean that all science requires you to do so, nor is simply handling the data the critical part of analyzing it.
As a trained physicist I would like to extend that to include not just software developers but also Sci-Fi writers, politicians, the media, the general public and anyone who incorrectly uses the word "exponentially". In fact, people who use the word exponentially incorrectly are exponentially worse.
>Are you raising the subject of sexism just based on the fact that only 1.5% of FOSS developers are women?
I think it's very clear in the article that the author is basing his claims on the fact that his colleagues have been discriminated against and the reaction to his defense of a feminist viewpoint.
>If there's any sexism, I've seen no proof it's internal to FOSS.
Factors that are external to FOSS may be the predominant reason why there are few female developers but the fact that women who are developers feel unwelcome in FOSS communities is very much internal. Likely you've never seen any instances of it because you're not a woman (I'm blindly assuming that from the tone of your post).
Recognizing that female developers are often treated differently is critical to maintaining an open community for everyone, which is something that people interested in FOSS should have a great deal of respect for. Developers shouldn't feel that acknowledging discrimination is a personal attack against them and become defensive. They should strive to openly acknowledge problems and make every attempt to create an open community; anything less should be regarded as beneath the ideals that drive FOSS development in the first place.
For the sake of openness I should point out that I'm not a woman or a developer but I'm writing based on what I read in the article and what I've seen in my own discipline. Outright discrimination is uncommon but an overly defensive position that it could never happen is common and is almost as bad.
Yeah I fail to see the utility. If you need to have something plugged into your TV anyway why not plug in an Eee Box and use a wireless keyboard. It doesn't really gain the advantages of a laptop since it needs an external screen and an Eee Box plus a thin keyboard probably take up less space.
They charge $2.50/GB if you go over your monthly transfer limit. If I lost my data and needed to replace it quickly (assuming I for some reason chose to back up multimedia in the cloud and then suddenly needed all my DVDs at once) it would cost considerably more than buying a highly redundant RAID array.
I looked into the effect of persistent current a bit and it turns out that someone has figured out how to use it as a photonic memory. Check out the Wikipedia article on Ahranov-Bohm nano-rings.
The Harris Lab website has a number of papers on the persistent current effect. The Ahranov-Bohm effect is one of the weirdest observed effects in physics so reading about the persistent current effect that arises from it is (arguably) a fun read.
Eventually installing windows will involve dozens of ballot screens asking you to choose among many possible software options. What a painful process! It's a good thing linux distros never present you with too many options...no Gentoo is the way to go for a quick and simple install. (Ok, I'm sorry, Gentoo jokes are way too easy.) Of course, linux distros don't tend to build their installers as webpages in IE.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah for sure, there needs to be more emphasis on standards compliance and simple pages that convey information. I'm not going to sit though a 20 second flash intro and then fight my way though animated menus that render behind other page elements. If your website can't serve it's function as a means to convey information then I'm going elsewhere.
I think Toyota should be issued a restraining order to never contact this person again. Next time a flyer with a Toyota ad in it arrives at her door...jail time for the execs.
Seriously though, people in the company need to be held personally accountable. As you pointed out, litigation clearly isn't effective to prevent companies from doing things like this.
The Toyota and Saatchi marketing directors really should be dealt with as if they had stalked this woman. Similarly, those responsible for IKEA's "let's spray paint 'this space could be beautiful' on public and private property" campaign should be formally charged with vandalism.
Combine it with Google street view and you'll have a completely virtual mundane experience!
Fair enough, thanks for the feedback! I always like to hear opinions from users rather than tech blogs and sales departments.
Certainly if you're working in high-energy physics and dealing with the standard model (or whichever other model you like) there's a very real difference between an elementary particle and a quasi-particle. At the end of the day, however, all you can really do is ask "did my model correctly predict detector clicks?"
I suppose my point is that what you include in your ontology depends on the model you use. Within the standard model, a certain set of particles are elementary and in string theory only the strings are elementary. In another model phonons may be valid ontic entities.
I would argue that there may not be a single, fundamental ontology in physics. If there is, then I hope, for aesthetic reasons, that it isn't the standard model ;-) I will be very interested to see what is considered elementary in the first Theory of Everything (and even more interested to what's elementary in the second :p ).
I don't know why a huge amount of a nano-structured meta-material would be cheaper to make than a large mirror. The device is interesting in it's own right but the application to solar power is a real stretch. It seems like every advance has to claim to be a step on the way to curing cancer or solving the energy crisis to get any attention. Even the article about magnetic monopole quasi-particles tied it back to applications to computing...possible but that certainly isn't why the discovery is interesting.
I use Windows Vista (at least I do when I've somehow broken X on my Linux install) and I don't see why people hate it so much. Almost all hardware comes with compatible drivers these days, I have a reasonably powerful mid-range desktop with 4GB of RAM and I'm used to logging in as root every 5 minutes so the "are you sure" messages don't really bother me. Given all that, I think Vista is a good operating system (although I did upgrade to it directly from Windows 98).
Can someone who has used Vista extensively and tried Windows 7 RC let me know if it's actually very different from Vista or is all the "it's so much better than Vista" hype just a reaction to the now accepted (but I argue ill-founded) view that Vista sucks? From what I can tell it seems that Microsoft slapped a new wallpaper on Vista and called it Windows 7 just to get away from the name Vista.
Living in Canada, price differences are frequently apparent. Books for example list a Canadian price and a US price, which was fine when the Canadian dollar traded at 70 cents US. When the Canadian dollar shot up to parity, however, we were inexplicably still paying $15 for a $10 book. I'm not sure what the current book situation is though, it may have stabilized. Cars are another example, it's often cheaper to fly to the US to buy a car and then pay import taxes to drive it to Canada than it is to buy it here.
Online merchandise makes the inequalities more apparent because of the ease of comparing prices and the obvious lack of transport costs that could explain a difference but it's nothing new.
Oh quasi-particles; on one hand you you think "well they're just mathematical constructs rather than physical things" but then you realize that regular particles fall into the same category. I heard of an interesting experiment where a Stern-Gerlach experiment was conducted on a dark-state polariton and resulted in the same effect as for nuclei. You can really only talk about how something behaves when a particular measurement is performed when treating it within whichever theory you're using, calling something a particle or a quasi-particle doesn't really matter.
>"whether anyone actually needs a 3D laptop is another question entirely"
A question I can answer: no. You can, however, buy one and use it and the 3D glasses it comes with to replace the bulky, neon "NERD" sign that you've become tired of hauling around. For that purpose though, I prefer to strap a Wii-mote to my head and use that VR plug-in that was developed for use with Compiz.
Google is a great example of this. They have a good history of open-sourcing when it benefits them and closely guarding source when it doesn't. They manage to come across as a friendly, open organisation while maintaining a highly profitable business model.
It seems to me that this type of technology, coupled with existing technology and much more customizable window mangers supporting multi-touch is the way to go. It's not a keyboard or a multi-touch, or a mouse or a multi-touch.
Why not have it all! You could have a mouse on a multi-touch pad and another pad below the keyboard that's however large you want it to be. You could have a standard cursor associated with the mouse and record finger presses beside the mouse. I can easily control the mouse with my palm and index finger and still have a thumb and three finger to accurately touch the mousepad for pinch zoom and application scrolling. Just bind the interface to do what you want for any given window management task or application task. In an FPS you could use the mouse for aim and hits on the multi-touch for leaning out from corners or weapon selection or whatever else you want.
More possibilities are never bad! I can't wait to use the full information bandwidth of my digits, I have dexterity to spare! I think that concepts like that are gonna make the future *awesome*, bring on the bandwidth!
It's a real distro. I haven't gotten around to trying it out but I agree, it seems like a fun one to try (once I put 4 more GB of RAM in my box).
Exactly right. Why would anyone confuse Facebook or Twitter with professional tools. An email can be a very professional means of communicating (provided that you employ proper grammar an etiquette). Social networking tools are great and may find a place to communicate between close colleagues but they should never be mistaken for a professional solution.
LiveCDs are far to insecure to even consider using. Tin Hat Linux is an improvement but it's still far too unsafe for me to use; not with the Illuminati hiding around every corner waiting to perform cold boot attacks. That's why I choose to live in the Google opt-out village.
We know a great deal about how to make fantastic quantum computers...that is, if we're in the field of quantum information theory. It's the field of experimental quantum computing that tends to be tricky. Certainly is enormous room for developing quantum algorithms but the fundamentals of quantum mechanics and quantum information theory are more than sufficiently established to write this kind of article.
I'd say we're a lot closer to a quantum computer than we are to travelling at the speed of light but that doesn't invalidate it as an upper bound.
Wikipedia has a good article on the basic design.
Yeah no kidding. I don't know if maybe that quote ('Science these days has basically turned into a data-management problem') was taken out of context, but I'm surprised a professor would say something that ignorant. I recently did a Master's in physics and it certainly didn't involve huge quantities of data; I ended up transferring much of my data off a spectrum analyzer with a floppy drive. (When we lost the GPIB transfer script I thought it would take too long to learn the HP libraries to rewrite it. That was a mistake, after 4 hours of shoving floppies in the drive I sat down and wrote a script in 2 hours, ah well.)
But the point is, a 400 data point trace may be exactly what you need to get the information your looking for. Just because we can collect and process huge quantities of data doesn't mean that all science requires you to do so, nor is simply handling the data the critical part of analyzing it.
As a trained physicist I would like to extend that to include not just software developers but also Sci-Fi writers, politicians, the media, the general public and anyone who incorrectly uses the word "exponentially". In fact, people who use the word exponentially incorrectly are exponentially worse.
>Are you raising the subject of sexism just based on the fact that only 1.5% of FOSS developers are women?
I think it's very clear in the article that the author is basing his claims on the fact that his colleagues have been discriminated against and the reaction to his defense of a feminist viewpoint.
>If there's any sexism, I've seen no proof it's internal to FOSS.
Factors that are external to FOSS may be the predominant reason why there are few female developers but the fact that women who are developers feel unwelcome in FOSS communities is very much internal. Likely you've never seen any instances of it because you're not a woman (I'm blindly assuming that from the tone of your post).
Recognizing that female developers are often treated differently is critical to maintaining an open community for everyone, which is something that people interested in FOSS should have a great deal of respect for. Developers shouldn't feel that acknowledging discrimination is a personal attack against them and become defensive. They should strive to openly acknowledge problems and make every attempt to create an open community; anything less should be regarded as beneath the ideals that drive FOSS development in the first place.
For the sake of openness I should point out that I'm not a woman or a developer but I'm writing based on what I read in the article and what I've seen in my own discipline. Outright discrimination is uncommon but an overly defensive position that it could never happen is common and is almost as bad.
Yeah I fail to see the utility. If you need to have something plugged into your TV anyway why not plug in an Eee Box and use a wireless keyboard. It doesn't really gain the advantages of a laptop since it needs an external screen and an Eee Box plus a thin keyboard probably take up less space.
They charge $2.50/GB if you go over your monthly transfer limit. If I lost my data and needed to replace it quickly (assuming I for some reason chose to back up multimedia in the cloud and then suddenly needed all my DVDs at once) it would cost considerably more than buying a highly redundant RAID array.
And on the output side I wouldn't call looking at an LED a mind-machine interface!
I looked into the effect of persistent current a bit and it turns out that someone has figured out how to use it as a photonic memory. Check out the Wikipedia article on Ahranov-Bohm nano-rings.
The Harris Lab website has a number of papers on the persistent current effect. The Ahranov-Bohm effect is one of the weirdest observed effects in physics so reading about the persistent current effect that arises from it is (arguably) a fun read.
Eventually installing windows will involve dozens of ballot screens asking you to choose among many possible software options. What a painful process! It's a good thing linux distros never present you with too many options...no Gentoo is the way to go for a quick and simple install. (Ok, I'm sorry, Gentoo jokes are way too easy.) Of course, linux distros don't tend to build their installers as webpages in IE.