If Bill Gates went to jail and got raped, there's a good chance he would contract something like AIDs or Herpes. Nearly overnight you'd see a couple billion dollars go into researching cures for those diseases.
Okay. According to this logic, it is perfectly ethical, and indeed almost obligatory, for those who are afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases and/or are passionate (pardon the almost pun) about finding cures for these diseases to rape and/or cause to be raped those individuals whom they deem able to best effect said cure. Yeah, I didn't think so.
Rape is never right. That our resources are not optimially distributed according to some ethical code or other may be wrong, but raping people isn't going to help things.
Bill Gates might not care much about a $600M check, but laying down in a cell bed at night and wondering if his 300lb cell-mate is going to get romantic.....
I know like everybody says stuff like this, but it is just not right. Being raped should not be part and parcel of a prison sentence. Yes, it was funny in Office Space when they joked about "pound-you-in-the-ass prison", but I am concerned about living in a world where rape is viewed as justice, even informally. While I may not like Windows and Microsoft and even Bill Gates, he certainly doesn't deserve to be raped for ruthlessly creating a monopoly in computer software
In short, prison for executives who view themselves and their corporations as above the law? Absolutely. Should they have to make license plates or make gravel or pick up trash from the highway? That would be great. But raped? That is just barbaric.
I know you probably didn't really mean you wanted Bill Gates raped for his crimes, and I am not trying to be the PC police or anything. I am just disturbed by how nonchalantly we seem to treat the issue of prison rape.
For a format thats so highly tied to the printed page, I'm not sure what the fuss is about online readers for PDF's.
I care because I use PPower4 for my presentations, so I need a really good online reader. Given the amount of equations and such and the fact that I'm doing LaTeX all the time for my papers anyway, PPower4 is a perfect fit for my presentation needs.
internally the Flash format uses 16 bit INTEGER values exclusively!
. . .
SVG uses 128 bit variable-length pages, with a modern cubic spline rendering core
I am no expert in such things, but could this be because maybe they wanted Flash to be able to work on portable devices like a Palm Pilot or some other "embedded" type system? In that case 16-bit integers and a simpler rendering model could be an asset.
Obviously nothing came of it, but I just offering the possibility that maybe they were trying to "plan ahead". Maybe it was a dumb plan, but it might have seemed reasonable and smart "back in the day".
As of gnumeric 1.2.1 the solver i gnumeric is not nearly as capable as the one in Excel. I am not bashing gnumeric. It has come a long way, and is probably great for 90% of what 99% of people do with their spreadsheets. But the only thing I really do with spreadsheets is use Solver, and I can't do it with gnumeric the way I can with Excel...
If I had the time and energy, I would help you guys write a solver work-a-like, but grad school, work, family, you know...
The only thing I use Excel for is Solver. Solver turns Excel into the worlds easiest to use linear/non-linear optimizer for ANY function you can put in a spreadsheet. I use Gnumeric a lot, but I always have to go back to Excel for Solver...
I note from your post that you are going straight from school to teaching. I think you make my point that "those who can, do, those who can't teach". You would do your future students better service by getting experience outside the ivory tower before purporting to tell them what they need to know to succeed there.
Have you ever thought that what I want to do is teach? To do pure research? To let me investigations take me where they will, not where my boss wants them too? That is what I want to do and am doing now. Working in industry only confirmed these feelings.
In short: Too many people go to College, there are too many colleges, most of them learn and teach nothing of much use, and the money spent on it could be used far better reforming the K-12 system.
The funny thing is I agree with you here. "But if there were fewer colleges wouldn't it be harder for you to find a job?" you say. Sure. But I would make it anyway. I believe that each person has something they were meant to do. I was meant to teach college.
You really need to prevent your rightful indignation at the state of education in this country from causing you to be rude and disrepectful of those of us who have choosen to commit our lives to trying to improve this situation.
As a soon to be minted PhD (hopefully) and a college educator, I think you are way of base here. Yeah, a lot of books are a rip-off, and yeah, some departments at some schools depend too much on grad students without the requisite English skills. Those schools and departments will hopefully crumble overtime as market forces sap their resources.
You can't always learn by experience. Every graduate student should be a very motivated self-learner, e.g., be able to sit down with a text or resource and teach themselves. I consider myself to be pretty decent at that. But there is nothing more valuable than the insight of a properly trained individual to guide you through a text or problem.
administrators and faculty who, in most cases, are 1960's and '70s reject recycled hippies
As a person who's politics have more in common with Rand than Ginsberg, it take offense at this statement. I will however admit that the majority of faculty are more liberal than the average american, we are not all tie-dyed hippies. And even my colleagues who do evoke that image from time to time in my mind are still good teachers, by and large.
You are right that the system is broken. I have seen too many would be chemistry majors without the requisite grasp of algebra due to poor K-12 education.
One of the problems is that I think too many people are going to college for the wrong reasons. (E.g., to learn what they should have learned in HS). Maybe that is why there are enough schools around to employ the obviously mediocre educators you seem to have met up with.
We aren't all like that you know. And I would say, at least from my experiences at several colleges and universities, that most of us are going a far better job than you give us credit for in your post.
Being a bit more extreme, water vapor is "noisier" than solid ice, with liquid water somewhere in the middle.
Yeah. That's why we do our radial distribution functions with respect to the idea ideal gas. If the system is vapor the radial distibution function will look like a line at 1. If it has some order to it there will be peaks and valleys.
have you experience with bioinformatic code?
Nope. We do molecular simulation. Our webpage. Ah, heck, now look what I've done. Now you will know who I am. I guess the value of communication overcame my value for privacy.;) See, we are on topic.:)
Particles in liquid water cannot separate as much as particles in water vapor. Therefore, the former must have a lesser range of distances than the latter (at least on the mini-macro scale that allows for a concept of distance).
Not really. Any two molecules can be any distance apart in either case. It is the distributions that look different.
That for the info. I will look into it.
What do you teach?
I am less than a year away from a PhD in computational chemistry (I hope). I am teaching analytical chemistry right now at another school. Hopefully by September I will have a tenure-track teaching position at some college, somewhere.
encryption is that it does not imply data expansion
Yes, of course.
there's a gigantic amount of information contained in the precise interparticulate distance.
Yes, quite true, but no more than there has ever been (i.e., there are approximately as many interparticle distances now as there will be then).
Do not underestimate accidental data sources -- during WW2, an intercepted shipment of watches had to have every clock's time altered, just in case the so-called "random times" were actually code to a huge message.
That is a cool story. Do you have a reference for it? It would be great to use in my classes to help explain entropy and such. WW2 is so fasinating. It is in someways both the apex and nadir of humanity's stay here on Earth thus far.
Totally with you. When data is maximally compressed, there is only one way to represent it, W=1, S=0, in a sense. To encrypt, you are mixing in a bunch of randomness (entropy) to hide the information contained in the message. There are lots of different ways to mix in that entropy, and lots of random stuff to mix in. W>>1 S>>0.
So I don't think we REALLY disagree.
I don't know about this statement: "over time, the universe gets harder and harder to describe". Heck, there is nothing easier to describe than a homogeneous gas at a few Kelvin spread over all space.:)
I liked your parent post. It has some good ideas. But I think AC is right. Entropy is disorder -- lack of information. The normal tendency for the universe is for entropy to increase. In an ever expanding universe, eventually all matter and energy will be homogenously spread out (the state of highest entropy), erasing all information about the past state of the universe.
In the computer world, entropy is kind weird, because in the computer universe, to coin a phrase, things tend to be relatively well ordered, and entropy (disorder) is hard to come by. That might be where you are confused.
Here's a way to look at it. S = k lnW, right? If there is someone out there who is so unique there is only one way to be them, then W=1, and S=0. Low entropy. If there are a bunch of "interchangeable" people, W>1, and S is bigger.
As I underestand it, if MS patents their file formats, that will prevent anyone without a license from generating files in MS Office formats, but it will not prevent people from displaying them or converting the information into other formats.
This is just not good enough. If my colleagues send me a.doc or.xls, I need to be able to view it, modify it and send it back to them in that format. "Oh, yeah, thanks for sending me that spreadsheet. I fixed it up and sent it back to you in.gnumeric format because gnumeric can't write.xls anymore because of some patent." The ability to export data TO MS formats is important to interoperability.
I thought the same thing until I started using Amanda. We were this close (||) to buying a whole Arkeia setup to backup about a dozen workstations to a VXA-1 tape drive when I decided to give Amanda a try, just to see if it could save us ~$1200. I read about the tape spanning thing and said, "Wow, that sucks. This will never work." But then I tried it, and all I have to say is, "Damn, amanda is smart."
Basically, once you get your full backups done, Amanda dynamically schedules incremental backups to most efficiently use tape and protect your data. With judicious selection rules about what constitutes a "disk" (e.g., a single disk must fit on 1 tape), and a properly tuned set up, the no tape spanning thing is not a problem. We are currently backing up a total of 300GB (180GB compressed) of data from 24 "disks" on 12 workstations onto a set of 20 33GB VXA-1 tapes with the ability to roll back to any state in the last 16 days.
That said, tape spanning would definitely rock in amanda.
There should be some legislation that makes it illegal to cut the lines without removing them completely. When you vacate a space, the wiring should either be useable or gone.
Yup, just what we need, more legistlation increasing the cost of doing business. I totally agree that business needs some regulation, but too many people just hit the "outlaw it" button too often without thinking of the cost.
How about this, your company can fire you, and use the money saved to get rid of their old wiring so they are in compliance with your new law? How does that grab you?
Using the oh-so cliche E=mc^2 you quickly find that by going the speed of light matter turns into energy
How does E=mc**2 mean going the speed of light turns matter into energy? There is no velocity dependence in that equation. As a matter of fact, that equation is the energy of a mass m at rest in the absence of an external potential.
The real answer is that as one travels faster, the energy needed to maintain a certain accleration increases. Ah, ha, here we are. So you see, there is nothing about matter turning into energy there. In a way, as you approch light speed it is like you are getting more matter (in that your apparent mass is increasing).
Re:Much of this could be done in linux...
on
Microsoft's new CLI
·
· Score: 1
orthogonal approach like psh (perl shell)
Well that's a first: some one calling perl orthogonal. Are you sure you know what that word means? If so, what possessed you to use it in reference to perl?
BTW, I love perl and use it a TON in my research. Nothing beats it for processing the output of other programs into usable data. But, I have never thought of perl and orthogonal at the same time.
The tape technologies that really aren't worth anyone's time or money are the "Travan" drives,
True, that. We originally (like 6 years ago) wanted to eliminate the need for some one to administer our machines as much as possible, so we bought a travan drive for each workstation, so people could manage their own backups. Between having to send the drives back every 4-6 moths for repairs and the human factor of even the most otherwise intelligent people failing to learn tar or even Arkeia we decided to invest in a "global solution". We went with VXA and have been very happy.
Now things are getting a little tight, and our nightlies are barely fitting on one 33GB tape. VXA-2 seems to be one upgrade path, but the LTO Ultrium capacity is really impressive. Have you used such a drive? How are they?
If you actualy run your tape backups on a nightly basis, religiously, you have no business buying anything less than a DLT drive. The DAT drives and all the other cheaper solutions are "consumer-grade", meaning they're only intended for the occasional use (such as doing a full backup right before wiping out or upgrading your hard drive). They'll quickly wear out and break down if you do much more than that with them.
What about VXA? We run at least five tapes a week through our VXA-1 drive, and have had almost zero problems with the tapes (I think we had one tape "wear out" and get eaten in two years.) And it's not like we don't know if our backups are good. Just last week some one snagged some files they accidentally deleted off an old tape.
what definition of "higher animals" includes humans but doesn't include sheep and cats
I don't have the reference in front of me, so I can't give you the exact break down of where things seem to be going arwy. I will give you an example of a definition of "higher animals" that does not include sheep and cats: Kingdom - Animala, Phylum - Craniata, Order - Primates. There may be a few other mammilian orders for which nuclear transfer in its current incarnation is almost certainly doomed to failure (cetacea perhaps?). Pehaps the old kpofgs is not the best way to group things as it does not follow exact evolutionary lines but I think it works good enough for ths discussion.
Needless to say, it appears that certain animals (primates for sure), have structures relating to cell division actually attached to or in close proximity to their nuclei, such that these essential components are almost always severely damaged or destroyed during nuclear transfer. In "lower animals", these structures are apparently not so closly affiliated with the nucleus and nuclear transfer is a viable technique. Some people even suggest that the high failure rate of nuclear transfer even in those species where it is considered viable may be related to the damaging or destruction of cell division machinery during the process.
The BBC article said that the eggs had the egg donor's genetic material cleaned out before the host mother's Nucleus was implanted. So, it seems to me, that it is a mistake to talk about these fetuses (feti?) as having three genetic parents.
But what about the mitochondria? These beings would have genetic information (nucleic acids) from three other beings, chromosomes from the sperm and the transfered egg nucleus and mitochondrial DNA from the original egg.
My understanding is that this won't really work anyway. Nuclear transfer techniques fail to produce viable cells in higher animals due to destruction of spindles or some such structures during the process. These structures are associated with the nucleus in higher animals, but are more homogeneously distributed in the cytoplasm of animals like sheep and cats.
Slashdot Mirror
Okay. According to this logic, it is perfectly ethical, and indeed almost obligatory, for those who are afflicted with sexually transmitted diseases and/or are passionate (pardon the almost pun) about finding cures for these diseases to rape and/or cause to be raped those individuals whom they deem able to best effect said cure. Yeah, I didn't think so.
Rape is never right. That our resources are not optimially distributed according to some ethical code or other may be wrong, but raping people isn't going to help things.
I know like everybody says stuff like this, but it is just not right. Being raped should not be part and parcel of a prison sentence. Yes, it was funny in Office Space when they joked about "pound-you-in-the-ass prison", but I am concerned about living in a world where rape is viewed as justice, even informally. While I may not like Windows and Microsoft and even Bill Gates, he certainly doesn't deserve to be raped for ruthlessly creating a monopoly in computer software
In short, prison for executives who view themselves and their corporations as above the law? Absolutely. Should they have to make license plates or make gravel or pick up trash from the highway? That would be great. But raped? That is just barbaric.
I know you probably didn't really mean you wanted Bill Gates raped for his crimes, and I am not trying to be the PC police or anything. I am just disturbed by how nonchalantly we seem to treat the issue of prison rape.
I care because I use PPower4 for my presentations, so I need a really good online reader. Given the amount of equations and such and the fact that I'm doing LaTeX all the time for my papers anyway, PPower4 is a perfect fit for my presentation needs.
I am no expert in such things, but could this be because maybe they wanted Flash to be able to work on portable devices like a Palm Pilot or some other "embedded" type system? In that case 16-bit integers and a simpler rendering model could be an asset.
Obviously nothing came of it, but I just offering the possibility that maybe they were trying to "plan ahead". Maybe it was a dumb plan, but it might have seemed reasonable and smart "back in the day".
As of gnumeric 1.2.1 the solver i gnumeric is not nearly as capable as the one in Excel. I am not bashing gnumeric. It has come a long way, and is probably great for 90% of what 99% of people do with their spreadsheets. But the only thing I really do with spreadsheets is use Solver, and I can't do it with gnumeric the way I can with Excel...
If I had the time and energy, I would help you guys write a solver work-a-like, but grad school, work, family, you know...
Keep it up though...
The only thing I use Excel for is Solver. Solver turns Excel into the worlds easiest to use linear/non-linear optimizer for ANY function you can put in a spreadsheet. I use Gnumeric a lot, but I always have to go back to Excel for Solver...
I think a better translation is "magic ship".
http://www.sworld.com.au/steven/space/shenzhou/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/1892598.stm
And others... IANACT (I am not a Chinese translator). Maybe some one who speaks Chinese could comment?
Have you ever thought that what I want to do is teach? To do pure research? To let me investigations take me where they will, not where my boss wants them too? That is what I want to do and am doing now. Working in industry only confirmed these feelings.
The funny thing is I agree with you here. "But if there were fewer colleges wouldn't it be harder for you to find a job?" you say. Sure. But I would make it anyway. I believe that each person has something they were meant to do. I was meant to teach college.
You really need to prevent your rightful indignation at the state of education in this country from causing you to be rude and disrepectful of those of us who have choosen to commit our lives to trying to improve this situation.
As a soon to be minted PhD (hopefully) and a college educator, I think you are way of base here. Yeah, a lot of books are a rip-off, and yeah, some departments at some schools depend too much on grad students without the requisite English skills. Those schools and departments will hopefully crumble overtime as market forces sap their resources.
You can't always learn by experience. Every graduate student should be a very motivated self-learner, e.g., be able to sit down with a text or resource and teach themselves. I consider myself to be pretty decent at that. But there is nothing more valuable than the insight of a properly trained individual to guide you through a text or problem.
As a person who's politics have more in common with Rand than Ginsberg, it take offense at this statement. I will however admit that the majority of faculty are more liberal than the average american, we are not all tie-dyed hippies. And even my colleagues who do evoke that image from time to time in my mind are still good teachers, by and large.
You are right that the system is broken. I have seen too many would be chemistry majors without the requisite grasp of algebra due to poor K-12 education.
One of the problems is that I think too many people are going to college for the wrong reasons. (E.g., to learn what they should have learned in HS). Maybe that is why there are enough schools around to employ the obviously mediocre educators you seem to have met up with.
We aren't all like that you know. And I would say, at least from my experiences at several colleges and universities, that most of us are going a far better job than you give us credit for in your post.
Yeah. That's why we do our radial distribution functions with respect to the idea ideal gas. If the system is vapor the radial distibution function will look like a line at 1. If it has some order to it there will be peaks and valleys.
Nope. We do molecular simulation. Our webpage. Ah, heck, now look what I've done. Now you will know who I am. I guess the value of communication overcame my value for privacy. ;) See, we are on topic. :)
Not really. Any two molecules can be any distance apart in either case. It is the distributions that look different.
That for the info. I will look into it.
I am less than a year away from a PhD in computational chemistry (I hope). I am teaching analytical chemistry right now at another school. Hopefully by September I will have a tenure-track teaching position at some college, somewhere.
Yes, of course.
Yes, quite true, but no more than there has ever been (i.e., there are approximately as many interparticle distances now as there will be then).
That is a cool story. Do you have a reference for it? It would be great to use in my classes to help explain entropy and such. WW2 is so fasinating. It is in someways both the apex and nadir of humanity's stay here on Earth thus far.
Totally with you. When data is maximally compressed, there is only one way to represent it, W=1, S=0, in a sense. To encrypt, you are mixing in a bunch of randomness (entropy) to hide the information contained in the message. There are lots of different ways to mix in that entropy, and lots of random stuff to mix in. W>>1 S>>0.
So I don't think we REALLY disagree.
I don't know about this statement: "over time, the universe gets harder and harder to describe". Heck, there is nothing easier to describe than a homogeneous gas at a few Kelvin spread over all space. :)
I liked your parent post. It has some good ideas. But I think AC is right. Entropy is disorder -- lack of information. The normal tendency for the universe is for entropy to increase. In an ever expanding universe, eventually all matter and energy will be homogenously spread out (the state of highest entropy), erasing all information about the past state of the universe.
In the computer world, entropy is kind weird, because in the computer universe, to coin a phrase, things tend to be relatively well ordered, and entropy (disorder) is hard to come by. That might be where you are confused.
Here's a way to look at it. S = k lnW, right? If there is someone out there who is so unique there is only one way to be them, then W=1, and S=0. Low entropy. If there are a bunch of "interchangeable" people, W>1, and S is bigger.
This is just not good enough. If my colleagues send me a .doc or .xls, I need to be able to view it, modify it and send it back to them in that format. "Oh, yeah, thanks for sending me that spreadsheet. I fixed it up and sent it back to you in .gnumeric format because gnumeric can't write .xls anymore because of some patent." The ability to export data TO MS formats is important to interoperability.
Try Amaya
I don't think I necessarily agree with your statement, but your subject line is hilarious. Did you make that up yourself?
I thought the same thing until I started using Amanda. We were this close (||) to buying a whole Arkeia setup to backup about a dozen workstations to a VXA-1 tape drive when I decided to give Amanda a try, just to see if it could save us ~$1200. I read about the tape spanning thing and said, "Wow, that sucks. This will never work." But then I tried it, and all I have to say is, "Damn, amanda is smart."
Basically, once you get your full backups done, Amanda dynamically schedules incremental backups to most efficiently use tape and protect your data. With judicious selection rules about what constitutes a "disk" (e.g., a single disk must fit on 1 tape), and a properly tuned set up, the no tape spanning thing is not a problem. We are currently backing up a total of 300GB (180GB compressed) of data from 24 "disks" on 12 workstations onto a set of 20 33GB VXA-1 tapes with the ability to roll back to any state in the last 16 days.
That said, tape spanning would definitely rock in amanda.
Yup, just what we need, more legistlation increasing the cost of doing business. I totally agree that business needs some regulation, but too many people just hit the "outlaw it" button too often without thinking of the cost.
How about this, your company can fire you, and use the money saved to get rid of their old wiring so they are in compliance with your new law? How does that grab you?
How does E=mc**2 mean going the speed of light turns matter into energy? There is no velocity dependence in that equation. As a matter of fact, that equation is the energy of a mass m at rest in the absence of an external potential.
The real answer is that as one travels faster, the energy needed to maintain a certain accleration increases. Ah, ha, here we are. So you see, there is nothing about matter turning into energy there. In a way, as you approch light speed it is like you are getting more matter (in that your apparent mass is increasing).
Well that's a first: some one calling perl orthogonal. Are you sure you know what that word means? If so, what possessed you to use it in reference to perl?
BTW, I love perl and use it a TON in my research. Nothing beats it for processing the output of other programs into usable data. But, I have never thought of perl and orthogonal at the same time.
True, that. We originally (like 6 years ago) wanted to eliminate the need for some one to administer our machines as much as possible, so we bought a travan drive for each workstation, so people could manage their own backups. Between having to send the drives back every 4-6 moths for repairs and the human factor of even the most otherwise intelligent people failing to learn tar or even Arkeia we decided to invest in a "global solution". We went with VXA and have been very happy.
Now things are getting a little tight, and our nightlies are barely fitting on one 33GB tape. VXA-2 seems to be one upgrade path, but the LTO Ultrium capacity is really impressive. Have you used such a drive? How are they?
What about VXA? We run at least five tapes a week through our VXA-1 drive, and have had almost zero problems with the tapes (I think we had one tape "wear out" and get eaten in two years.) And it's not like we don't know if our backups are good. Just last week some one snagged some files they accidentally deleted off an old tape.
I refer you to this link for starters.
I don't have the reference in front of me, so I can't give you the exact break down of where things seem to be going arwy. I will give you an example of a definition of "higher animals" that does not include sheep and cats: Kingdom - Animala, Phylum - Craniata, Order - Primates. There may be a few other mammilian orders for which nuclear transfer in its current incarnation is almost certainly doomed to failure (cetacea perhaps?). Pehaps the old kpofgs is not the best way to group things as it does not follow exact evolutionary lines but I think it works good enough for ths discussion.
Needless to say, it appears that certain animals (primates for sure), have structures relating to cell division actually attached to or in close proximity to their nuclei, such that these essential components are almost always severely damaged or destroyed during nuclear transfer. In "lower animals", these structures are apparently not so closly affiliated with the nucleus and nuclear transfer is a viable technique. Some people even suggest that the high failure rate of nuclear transfer even in those species where it is considered viable may be related to the damaging or destruction of cell division machinery during the process.
But what about the mitochondria? These beings would have genetic information (nucleic acids) from three other beings, chromosomes from the sperm and the transfered egg nucleus and mitochondrial DNA from the original egg.
My understanding is that this won't really work anyway. Nuclear transfer techniques fail to produce viable cells in higher animals due to destruction of spindles or some such structures during the process. These structures are associated with the nucleus in higher animals, but are more homogeneously distributed in the cytoplasm of animals like sheep and cats.