Agreed. I thought maybe this piece would be interesting because it would feature interesting gear rather than poorly thought out opinions and commentary. But apparently he can't even choose interesting gifts let alone solve mildly difficult real-world problems.
I'd use slashdot beta if it offered Haselton free reading.
I've used Matlab for 10 years. I do not enjoy its syntax, but it's fast at what it does (matrix math) and has a huge library of tools built in that are also quite fast. It's also very cheap for academics, which is why it has such a stronghold there. People who say "switch to C or Python" for huge immediate speedups rarely know what they are talking about - they only projects I know of that tried that found that their code (again, matrix heavy) ran slower, not faster. With a lot of optimizing and the right libraries, yes, it is possible. But for most Matlab users their time is mostly spent developing, so that would be a poor tradeoff.
It's much more pleasurable to write or read python (or lisp (or smalltalk)) code, but you lose the kitchen sink. Here's a quick example: printf. Yes, it's ugly. And takes a little while to learn. But, it's very good at formatting text, and has all the options you need, want, or will ever want. Well, matlab is a language filled with printf style functions for every kind of data visualization you could want.
That said, TFA sounds like a load of crap. Anybody in google want to share what really goes on? I'm sure it depends a lot on which group you are in - machine vision and AI surely use a lot of matlab, whereas search probably never heard of it.
That's a nice theory, but none of the primary literature I've read on this topic, or review articles, have ever suggested that it was misdirection. Perhaps that's how your prof justified his behavior, but I don't think it is what most Dr's think they are doing.
Clever!! I do wonder what good use they could be put too, though:-) Nicotine is actually a pretty fantastic insecticide, though there is some concern about the bees.
I would argue that we never really knew that fat was bad for us - it was a hypothesis that got converted into policy before the empirical evidence that could have lead to actual knowledge was ever collected.
About as many studies find a decrease in blood pressure with increased salt intake as the reverse. So the number that find the high salt=high bp link isn't really that informative.
The link between salt and blood pressure is pretty clearly not the one your Dr. tells you, and this has been known for a really long time. Even the first study to show the "link" turns out to be bunk science:
More recent meta studies have shown that about as many papers find a positive link as a negative link between blood pressure and salt - yes, eating more salt can lower your blood pressure (or, more likely, it's all just noise). Look it up on Pubmed if you want to read all the details. It's a good skill: you'll quickly learn more than your Dr. does about any topic of real concern to you, unless your Dr. is a specialist or obscenely good at his job.
What's sad is that simple to understand explanations that lead to simple to follow prescriptions (ie eat less salt) tend to stick around way longer than the scientific consensus behind them.
It's called home schooling. And often there isn't that much schooling going on, and yet the kids do way better than in public school. A low bar, I know.
That sounds like a lot of overhead for a problem that seems unlikely. I've used lots of multi-user linux boxes over the years and never noticed that a few bad users ruined the experience for everybody else. If it's really an issue, think of it instead as a learning opportunity - post concise instructions on proper lab utilization and how to use top, etc to check if somebody else is the reason why the machine you are using is slow. Then let users police each other.
I find the Economist to be much higher info density than any other print magazine I've looked at recently. Not a long list I admit, but still I'm shocked you would say it's low density. Maybe you just aren't interested in the content.
Having switched to Win7 for my home machine and still using XP at work, I have lots of opportunities to compare and contrast the two oses. 7 brings a few small improvements in the start menu and windows explorer, and some minor bugs. The improvements are not nearly enough to justify the time and cost to upgrade machines that work just fine. If WinXp was still supported I'd guess we would still see 30% of PCs running it for years and years after today. Even more if it were still sold.
Seems like a lot to me. I tend to think that (1) it could have been done a lot cheaper (wireless?) and (2) if in fact it had to cost that much, then the money probably could have been spent better.
I've been on the internet since the mid 90s, and never ever detected a virus on my machine, other than in un-opened email. Email used to be a big source of viruses, but these days ISPs use scanners just as up to date as anything I could buy. A little common sense is all it takes to be virus free. This libertarian would not support your plan - I see little advantage to having everybody install anti-virus software.
I recently did a head to head comparison between Win2k and Xubuntu on a 800mhz Thinkpad with 384MB. Both ran pretty well, but Win2k had the distinct advantage of booting faster, as well as resuming from hibernate faster. If you intend to carry the machine around with you and use it during the 10 minutes between classes, etc, then that's pretty important.
Once loaded, however, both OSes were perfectly snappy. More details:
Yes, other people have thought of it before, but kudos to Microsoft for implementing it. Disks are cheap, whereas the documents I create are not. Anything which helps protect those documents from mistakes is going to be a good thing.
Even if you are good at static stereograms, you need to give this one a while before your brain & eyes will work well with this. After a while it's pretty playable, but the (neccessary) lack of texture and colored objects makes navigation very difficult. A wall and a door look exactly the same. Enimies are not so bad, since they are more geometircally complex than almost anything else, and they move, even when you don't. Thus the key seems to be whenever you hear an enimy wake up, stop moving and look for the part of the screen where the depth is changing.
It's quite amazing. It really, really makes you appricate the fact that your visual system extracts much more than just shape from the world. On the other hand, quake worlds were never that geometrically complex, and that makes it very easy to get lost. Perhaps if you could only see shape in the real world it wouldn't be so bad, since there is so much more varation.
I've not heard that before. Do you have a reference? I find it hard to believe, given that the bar-code is only useful once you have the electronics to read it, something that did not far precede Lemelson's birth. Unless you mean punch cards, but that's a stretch...
The bar code was a reasonably innovative idea, one which I think Lemelson had every right to patent. Unlike many software patents that we (rightfully) complain about today, this does seem to meet the criteria of being a non-obvious idea.
On the other hand, it does seem that he manipulated the patent system to his gain. There was a very good article about this in American Heritage of Invention and Technology about 6 years ago. Perhaps a little bit less one-sided than the PDF that cognex puts forward (but who can blame them, eh?)
In general I think what he did was wrong, but not as bad as many of the extortions people atempt with incredibly obvious software patents. But I may be biased by what he did with the money (aka the Lemelson program at Hampshire and other colleges).
Sounds great, but 31 miles? How about 50 feet though wood and concrete? Line of sight is nice, but for most interesting home networking, there's just no way.
Of course the RIAA doesn't like MP3s. They make no money if the artists makes profits off of non-music sales (T-shirts, etc). So what if the artist does.
The RIAA represents the interests of big stars, making proffits off of selling lots of CDs. I doubt many people have decided to buy a Britney ablubm because they downloaded a song off of it...
I've always loved the book, but trying to use the ideas from it to implement socerplaying softbots (aka robocup) taught me that it's really hard to get the behavior you want. Sure, what you get is damn interesting, but is it what you intended? Often not. For those of you interested what the limitations of vehicle style robots (in this case, simulated) see http://wonka.hampshire.edu/~alan/research/soccerbo t.html
(I still love the book though; it's really worth reading, just for the points it makes about what fear, love, and hate are).
Slashdot Mirror
perhaps the biggest bug was allowing BH to use the website in the first place?
Agreed. I thought maybe this piece would be interesting because it would feature interesting gear rather than poorly thought out opinions and commentary. But apparently he can't even choose interesting gifts let alone solve mildly difficult real-world problems.
I'd use slashdot beta if it offered Haselton free reading.
I've used Matlab for 10 years. I do not enjoy its syntax, but it's fast at what it does (matrix math) and has a huge library of tools built in that are also quite fast. It's also very cheap for academics, which is why it has such a stronghold there. People who say "switch to C or Python" for huge immediate speedups rarely know what they are talking about - they only projects I know of that tried that found that their code (again, matrix heavy) ran slower, not faster. With a lot of optimizing and the right libraries, yes, it is possible. But for most Matlab users their time is mostly spent developing, so that would be a poor tradeoff.
It's much more pleasurable to write or read python (or lisp (or smalltalk)) code, but you lose the kitchen sink. Here's a quick example: printf. Yes, it's ugly. And takes a little while to learn. But, it's very good at formatting text, and has all the options you need, want, or will ever want. Well, matlab is a language filled with printf style functions for every kind of data visualization you could want.
That said, TFA sounds like a load of crap. Anybody in google want to share what really goes on? I'm sure it depends a lot on which group you are in - machine vision and AI surely use a lot of matlab, whereas search probably never heard of it.
If you think java is a potential replacement for Matlab, then I doubt you know much about Matlab.
That's a nice theory, but none of the primary literature I've read on this topic, or review articles, have ever suggested that it was misdirection. Perhaps that's how your prof justified his behavior, but I don't think it is what most Dr's think they are doing.
Clever!! I do wonder what good use they could be put too, though :-) Nicotine is actually a pretty fantastic insecticide, though there is some concern about the bees.
I would argue that we never really knew that fat was bad for us - it was a hypothesis that got converted into policy before the empirical evidence that could have lead to actual knowledge was ever collected.
About as many studies find a decrease in blood pressure with increased salt intake as the reverse. So the number that find the high salt=high bp link isn't really that informative.
The link between salt and blood pressure is pretty clearly not the one your Dr. tells you, and this has been known for a really long time. Even the first study to show the "link" turns out to be bunk science:
http://www.stat.berkeley.edu/~...
More recent meta studies have shown that about as many papers find a positive link as a negative link between blood pressure and salt - yes, eating more salt can lower your blood pressure (or, more likely, it's all just noise). Look it up on Pubmed if you want to read all the details. It's a good skill: you'll quickly learn more than your Dr. does about any topic of real concern to you, unless your Dr. is a specialist or obscenely good at his job.
What's sad is that simple to understand explanations that lead to simple to follow prescriptions (ie eat less salt) tend to stick around way longer than the scientific consensus behind them.
It's called home schooling. And often there isn't that much schooling going on, and yet the kids do way better than in public school. A low bar, I know.
That sounds like a lot of overhead for a problem that seems unlikely. I've used lots of multi-user linux boxes over the years and never noticed that a few bad users ruined the experience for everybody else. If it's really an issue, think of it instead as a learning opportunity - post concise instructions on proper lab utilization and how to use top, etc to check if somebody else is the reason why the machine you are using is slow. Then let users police each other.
I find the Economist to be much higher info density than any other print magazine I've looked at recently. Not a long list I admit, but still I'm shocked you would say it's low density. Maybe you just aren't interested in the content.
Meanwhile 7 seems a good bit less stable and rough around the edges. Haven't tried 8, but all signs point to it being much worse.
Having switched to Win7 for my home machine and still using XP at work, I have lots of opportunities to compare and contrast the two oses. 7 brings a few small improvements in the start menu and windows explorer, and some minor bugs. The improvements are not nearly enough to justify the time and cost to upgrade machines that work just fine. If WinXp was still supported I'd guess we would still see 30% of PCs running it for years and years after today. Even more if it were still sold.
Seems like a lot to me. I tend to think that (1) it could have been done a lot cheaper (wireless?) and (2) if in fact it had to cost that much, then the money probably could have been spent better.
I've been on the internet since the mid 90s, and never ever detected a virus on my machine, other than in un-opened email. Email used to be a big source of viruses, but these days ISPs use scanners just as up to date as anything I could buy. A little common sense is all it takes to be virus free. This libertarian would not support your plan - I see little advantage to having everybody install anti-virus software.
I recently did a head to head comparison between Win2k and Xubuntu on a 800mhz Thinkpad with 384MB. Both ran pretty well, but Win2k had the distinct advantage of booting faster, as well as resuming from hibernate faster. If you intend to carry the machine around with you and use it during the 10 minutes between classes, etc, then that's pretty important.
Once loaded, however, both OSes were perfectly snappy. More details:
http://alantechreview.blogspot.com/2008/10/what-os-is-best-for-low-end-laptop.html
http://alantechreview.blogspot.com/2008/10/evaluating-linux-for-low-end-laptop-my.html
Yes, other people have thought of it before, but kudos to Microsoft for implementing it. Disks are cheap, whereas the documents I create are not. Anything which helps protect those documents from mistakes is going to be a good thing.
Does it matter? It says the "data" is generated randomly.
Even if you are good at static stereograms, you need to give this one a while before your brain & eyes will work well with this. After a while it's pretty playable, but the (neccessary) lack of texture and colored objects makes navigation very difficult. A wall and a door look exactly the same. Enimies are not so bad, since they are more geometircally complex than almost anything else, and they move, even when you don't. Thus the key seems to be whenever you hear an enimy wake up, stop moving and look for the part of the screen where the depth is changing.
It's quite amazing. It really, really makes you appricate the fact that your visual system extracts much more than just shape from the world. On the other hand, quake worlds were never that geometrically complex, and that makes it very easy to get lost. Perhaps if you could only see shape in the real world it wouldn't be so bad, since there is so much more varation.
I've not heard that before. Do you have a reference? I find it hard to believe, given that the bar-code is only useful once you have the electronics to read it, something that did not far precede Lemelson's birth. Unless you mean punch cards, but that's a stretch...
The bar code was a reasonably innovative idea, one which I think Lemelson had every right to patent. Unlike many software patents that we (rightfully) complain about today, this does seem to meet the criteria of being a non-obvious idea.
On the other hand, it does seem that he manipulated the patent system to his gain. There was a very good article about this in American Heritage of Invention and Technology about 6 years ago. Perhaps a little bit less one-sided than the PDF that cognex puts forward (but who can blame them, eh?)
In general I think what he did was wrong, but not as bad as many of the extortions people atempt with incredibly obvious software patents. But I may be biased by what he did with the money (aka the Lemelson program at Hampshire and other colleges).
Sounds great, but 31 miles? How about 50 feet though wood and concrete? Line of sight is nice, but for most interesting home networking, there's just no way.
Of course the RIAA doesn't like MP3s. They make no money if the artists makes profits off of non-music sales (T-shirts, etc). So what if the artist does.
The RIAA represents the interests of big stars, making proffits off of selling lots of CDs. I doubt many people have decided to buy a Britney ablubm because they downloaded a song off of it...
I've always loved the book, but trying to use the ideas from it to implement socerplaying softbots (aka robocup) taught me that it's really hard to get the behavior you want. Sure, what you get is damn interesting, but is it what you intended? Often not. For those of you interested what the limitations of vehicle style robots (in this case, simulated) see http://wonka.hampshire.edu/~alan/research/soccerbo t.html
(I still love the book though; it's really worth reading, just for the points it makes about what fear, love, and hate are).