but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
Not really,
Eh? Are you saying the US is not predominantly urban/suburban? Or were you contradicting some other part of the statement? The 2000 census breaks down the population as 80% urban, 20% rural. "Predominant" is subjective, but 80% seems so to me.
This list seems like cherry-picking. How do you define a "continent-spanning federation"? Not to mention, the United States is a much more coherent entity than the EU. Breaking out the individual US states in the second list is somewhat reasonable since there's obviously a good bit of regional variation, but you're leaving Asia out of the comparison there.
I wasn't trying to say (above) that US speeds suck, but for a nation that I thought prided itself on technical leadership, it should strive to do better.
I've recently picked up UMoria again, and you know a game is old when after mentioning it people refer you to slightly-less ancient games like Angband:-).
Also I got a Rogue port for my iPhone, but I can't say that touch is the way to go for that style of game.
I like this quote regarding expanding access to rural areas:
"That's like motherhood, everyone wants to vote for that and I certainly support that," Mossberg said. But there are two other issues that he said don't receive enough attention: speed and cost.
Rural access is definitely important, but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
The only thing left for Apple to do to make me happy is to admit that they put a higher priority on making the phone "cool" than on making it functional. Jobs didn't do that today and probably never will.
I'm genuinely curious here: do you own an iPhone, and would you ever consider owning any Apple products at all? In other words, does it really matter (to Apple, in terms of sales or potential sales) whether they make you happy? I have a strong impression that a significant proportion of the people raging at Apple over this issue are not primarily owners of the device, but are simply people that want to see Apple stumble and fall, for whatever reason.
I'm not sure that "X% worse than the iPhone 3G" is the best way to judge significance here. It seems like "dropped calls per N attempted calls" is the most useful number, from a user's point of view. Of course, the absolute number does matter, but I think it would be just as misleading to say "iPhone4 1000% worse than iPhone 3G!!!!" in the scenario you describe.
Yep, IBM produced the PowerXCell for that purpose, and used them to build Roadrunner, which was the worlds first petaflop supercomputer. I'm not sure whether Cell is still being pushed forward these days though.
That's somewhat different than the trend towards GPGPU that the article talks about, although it's related. Both approaches use semi-specialized parallel hardware for compute-intensive tasks.
Sadly, the Humble Indie Bundle proved that on the PC, there isn't much you can do to fight it...offering non-DRM games for a single cent don't even necessarily work.
I don't understand why people bring up the Humble Indie Bundle experiment as proof of anything.
(a) "Lots of people only paid 1 cent for these DRM-free games!" Well, duh, it was a pay-what-you-wish scheme. To me the fact that the average price wasn't 1 cent indicates a surprising generosity. A purely rational economic being would have paid only 1 cent.
(b) "People pirated the games anyways!" Well, yeah. If you didn't see that coming, you think the world is full of fluffy bunnies, rainbows, and unicorns, and no one would ever do anything slightly bad ever.
Here's an experiment that I think would be interesting. Put a game up for sale, sans DRM, at some fixed price point (you know, the way everything else is sold), and just see how sales are. Does it do better or worse than the DRM-ed version? How does that change as you adjust the price?
In this model the news source is an endowed foundation, ostensibly free from both the profit motive and government control. The model is the same as pursued by many universities - one of the authors of the above Op-Ed is the chief investment officer at Yale.
The endowment model has problems, to be sure (for example, endowed institutions may not legally attempt to influence legislation or elections). But, it's something at least worth considering since other options seem to have significant problems as well.
It's probably because Slashdot is one of the few sites where I read comments, but I think I see about five "apple hater" posts for every "apple fanboi" post. (Note, I'm not trying to say that one side has more or less merit than the other, I'm just having trouble seeing where one gets the impression of "legions of fanbois".)
1. Don't listen to people telling you to read the all the latest research in your field. You will likely not understand it. That's not meant as an insult at all. While you might know the field you are interested (clinical psychology) you likely don't know any of the specific terms to do a thorough analysis. It would be like me telling a 3rd year EE undergrad interested in signals that they should read an IEEE transaction journal on motion compensated temporal filter DWT lifting algorithm, and somehow be able to understand it and contact the author regarding their research. It's unrealistic and probably does more harm than good (you might get depressed at how little you actually know).
I agree with this advice for people just starting out - there's far too much detailed research out there to figure out your interests by reading papers in detail. That said, it might be worthwhile to skim some abstracts to get a feeling for what people do. Also, once you've picked a general field, I'd say read like crazy. There's an initial hump that you have to get over in reading technical papers, and the more you do it the better you'll get.
I think lots of generally capable students just don't get proper direction regarding how to navigate this phase of their academic careers.
Mod parent up.
There's a lot of pre-Ph.D. advice that seems to be like, "well, if you aren't already familiar with the current research and researchers in the field and know exactly what project you want to work on and all of the relevant journals and top papers, etc., etc., then you shouldn't even dream of applying to a Ph.D. program." Already knowing that stuff is probably a recipe for an excellent start, but it's not necessary (and it's not sufficient).
Figuring out how to get started in academia can be tricky. It helps to have the advice of knowledgeable professors. You'll probably also want to go bumbling around the internet looking for advice - although lots of the advice is of the pessimistic and discouraging nature I mention above. But, it will at least give you some ideas of how to make a good start.
I don't get this attitude at all. Surely you can see a difference between "I want a pony give me one" and "I created a work of art, and would like you to pay me for a copy of said art, should you want one."
Talk like what? Grammatically, with few spelling errors? That's an awfully low bar. Surely on a site like this one full of reasonably intelligent people we can believe that at least a few teenagers are capable of writing coherent sentences. lolkthxbye
That's an awesome example, actually. I'm trying to think of another analogy... Maybe, hiring an electrician to come fix a problem, and then stiffing him on the bill for his time. That's not perfect either because composers aren't exactly billing us by the hour, but it's similar in spirit: trading something ephemeral (time or bits) for money.
This case seems about as clear cut a case of "artist produced a work, artist would like to be compensated for the sale of that work" as you can get. There are undoubtedly problems with copyright as implemented in the US today, but this case just does not seem to be one of them. I'm totally in the composer's corner on this one.
Of course, I'd also be tempted to buy a copy of the sheet music and just mail it to the girl. It's $4 lousy dollars, and it really sucks to be a minor in an era of digital transactions.
Ouch. Just ouch. Doesn't that attitude seem downright nasty to you? "Thanks, artists, for that moving poetry, those thought-provoking novels, and that beautiful music, but, you see, you have no rights to any of it, so I'll just take them, and not pay you a dime."
Do you really believe that's the way things should be?
While the summary states that they used free and open source software, the article only states that they used free software. Their writers used Google Docs, which is free but not open source, instead of Microsoft Word.
I totally have to second this opinion of Inkscape! I use it for all my vector graphics needs. While I'm told by friends who are designers that Adobe Illustrator is a much more powerful product (and I believe them), I really struggled with it. Inkscape does what I need, and I don't spend hours hunting for the answer to "How do I make my lines have arrowheads?"
You're making it sound like people just publish their conclusions, but they're publishing data as well, at least distillations of it. Certainly every grant proposal is going to say, "Look! This big, important problem is big and important! I need funding to investigate it!" and every journal paper is going to say, "In conclusion, I conclude something important!"
That's where peer review comes in: the reviewers look at the data and decide whether the conclusions are merited. Once the paper is published, other scientists can look at it and decide what to believe based on some combination of the paper's results, other research in the field, and their own research. That's what is meant by "consensus" in science, not that everyone gets together and takes a vote. It's an informal opinion.
Furthermore, where did this consensus come from in the first place? It didn't just magically appear, and it wasn't dictated to the NSF in a smoky back room. It's the result of lots of eyes going over the same problems and the same (or similar) experiments. The reason why you're faced with scrutiny when you make a claim counter to the consensus is that you are making an extraordinary claim! Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary proof, and all that. If you told me that you'd found a place where things fall up instead of down, I'd ask for some serious proof!
Finally, I have to question this:
Not that there isn't a market for scientific results that run counter to the consensus. There is a big market for that. It just doesn't tend to be funded by government grant money.
Where does the funding come from, then? Leprechauns with pots of gold? Private industry sure would love to hear the opposite of the current consensus, but if you have a problem with government funding for this type of research, and not with private industry, then this whole argument is totally off the rails.
By "respect", I don't mean that we should respect anything that any scientist says about anything ever. That would be absurd, of course. What I'm arguing is that the conclusions of scientists about the research in their own field is the best conclusion the rest of us have to go on. Note, I'm not talking about an individual researcher's opinion about his or her own research. I forget the source, but I recall reading that "No sane person should ever believe every claim made in a grant proposal.";-)
Of course, we could all go to the published research papers and review them ourselves, and if we're not satisfied we could probably do our own original research, but then we're scientists in the field too. At some point we've got to take someone's word on something, even if it's just "this data series is honestly what we measured," or else we're just hosed.
Now, your second point gets at the issues I'm trying to separate: there's a difference between accepting the conclusions of scientists on scientific matters, and accepting their policy recommendations. Scientists are not experts on policy, so their opinion should certainly not unilaterally dictate our actions. But this is the eternally thorny question of who makes the decisions in a polity.
I couldn't pretend to answer that, but I want to draw a distinction between the science and the policy recommendation. My suspicion, though, is that people see the policy recommendations, and they don't like them. But if they accept the scientific conclusions, then they are almost forced to believe the policy is necessary. So, they reject the science. That doesn't seem like an intellectually honest approach to me.
Slashdot Mirror
but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
Not really,
Eh? Are you saying the US is not predominantly urban/suburban? Or were you contradicting some other part of the statement? The 2000 census breaks down the population as 80% urban, 20% rural. "Predominant" is subjective, but 80% seems so to me.
This list seems like cherry-picking. How do you define a "continent-spanning federation"? Not to mention, the United States is a much more coherent entity than the EU. Breaking out the individual US states in the second list is somewhat reasonable since there's obviously a good bit of regional variation, but you're leaving Asia out of the comparison there.
I wasn't trying to say (above) that US speeds suck, but for a nation that I thought prided itself on technical leadership, it should strive to do better.
I've recently picked up UMoria again, and you know a game is old when after mentioning it people refer you to slightly-less ancient games like Angband :-).
Also I got a Rogue port for my iPhone, but I can't say that touch is the way to go for that style of game.
"That's like motherhood, everyone wants to vote for that and I certainly support that," Mossberg said. But there are two other issues that he said don't receive enough attention: speed and cost.
Rural access is definitely important, but the United States is predominantly urban and suburban these days, and we should be leading in broadband speeds, not following.
The only thing left for Apple to do to make me happy is to admit that they put a higher priority on making the phone "cool" than on making it functional. Jobs didn't do that today and probably never will.
I'm genuinely curious here: do you own an iPhone, and would you ever consider owning any Apple products at all? In other words, does it really matter (to Apple, in terms of sales or potential sales) whether they make you happy? I have a strong impression that a significant proportion of the people raging at Apple over this issue are not primarily owners of the device, but are simply people that want to see Apple stumble and fall, for whatever reason.
I'm not sure that "X% worse than the iPhone 3G" is the best way to judge significance here. It seems like "dropped calls per N attempted calls" is the most useful number, from a user's point of view. Of course, the absolute number does matter, but I think it would be just as misleading to say "iPhone4 1000% worse than iPhone 3G!!!!" in the scenario you describe.
Yep, IBM produced the PowerXCell for that purpose, and used them to build Roadrunner, which was the worlds first petaflop supercomputer. I'm not sure whether Cell is still being pushed forward these days though.
That's somewhat different than the trend towards GPGPU that the article talks about, although it's related. Both approaches use semi-specialized parallel hardware for compute-intensive tasks.
Somewhat ironically, it seems like the moderators of his post had the wrong definition of "troll" as well...
Maybe there should actually *be* a "-1 Disagree" and then allow viewers to use the absolute value of the score to filter :-).
It's "grammar nazis", not "grammar nazi's", thank you very much! ;-)
Sadly, the Humble Indie Bundle proved that on the PC, there isn't much you can do to fight it...offering non-DRM games for a single cent don't even necessarily work.
I don't understand why people bring up the Humble Indie Bundle experiment as proof of anything.
(a) "Lots of people only paid 1 cent for these DRM-free games!" Well, duh, it was a pay-what-you-wish scheme. To me the fact that the average price wasn't 1 cent indicates a surprising generosity. A purely rational economic being would have paid only 1 cent.
(b) "People pirated the games anyways!" Well, yeah. If you didn't see that coming, you think the world is full of fluffy bunnies, rainbows, and unicorns, and no one would ever do anything slightly bad ever.
Here's an experiment that I think would be interesting. Put a game up for sale, sans DRM, at some fixed price point (you know, the way everything else is sold), and just see how sales are. Does it do better or worse than the DRM-ed version? How does that change as you adjust the price?
A possible (C) is an endowment model, such as proposed here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/28/opinion/28swensen.html
In this model the news source is an endowed foundation, ostensibly free from both the profit motive and government control. The model is the same as pursued by many universities - one of the authors of the above Op-Ed is the chief investment officer at Yale.
The endowment model has problems, to be sure (for example, endowed institutions may not legally attempt to influence legislation or elections). But, it's something at least worth considering since other options seem to have significant problems as well.
It's probably because Slashdot is one of the few sites where I read comments, but I think I see about five "apple hater" posts for every "apple fanboi" post. (Note, I'm not trying to say that one side has more or less merit than the other, I'm just having trouble seeing where one gets the impression of "legions of fanbois".)
1. Don't listen to people telling you to read the all the latest research in your field. You will likely not understand it. That's not meant as an insult at all. While you might know the field you are interested (clinical psychology) you likely don't know any of the specific terms to do a thorough analysis. It would be like me telling a 3rd year EE undergrad interested in signals that they should read an IEEE transaction journal on motion compensated temporal filter DWT lifting algorithm, and somehow be able to understand it and contact the author regarding their research. It's unrealistic and probably does more harm than good (you might get depressed at how little you actually know).
I agree with this advice for people just starting out - there's far too much detailed research out there to figure out your interests by reading papers in detail. That said, it might be worthwhile to skim some abstracts to get a feeling for what people do. Also, once you've picked a general field, I'd say read like crazy. There's an initial hump that you have to get over in reading technical papers, and the more you do it the better you'll get.
I think lots of generally capable students just don't get proper direction regarding how to navigate this phase of their academic careers.
Mod parent up.
There's a lot of pre-Ph.D. advice that seems to be like, "well, if you aren't already familiar with the current research and researchers in the field and know exactly what project you want to work on and all of the relevant journals and top papers, etc., etc., then you shouldn't even dream of applying to a Ph.D. program." Already knowing that stuff is probably a recipe for an excellent start, but it's not necessary (and it's not sufficient).
Figuring out how to get started in academia can be tricky. It helps to have the advice of knowledgeable professors. You'll probably also want to go bumbling around the internet looking for advice - although lots of the advice is of the pessimistic and discouraging nature I mention above. But, it will at least give you some ideas of how to make a good start.
I don't get this attitude at all. Surely you can see a difference between "I want a pony give me one" and "I created a work of art, and would like you to pay me for a copy of said art, should you want one."
Talk like what? Grammatically, with few spelling errors? That's an awfully low bar. Surely on a site like this one full of reasonably intelligent people we can believe that at least a few teenagers are capable of writing coherent sentences. lolkthxbye
:)
(Sorry, had to do that
I would feel morally wrong downloading this composer's sheet music from a share site, especially knowing that he really doesn't want me to do that.
Legally, I'm breaking the law by downloading it.
I guess it seems to me that morality and legality line up in this instance, but maybe I misunderstood your point.
That's an awesome example, actually. I'm trying to think of another analogy... Maybe, hiring an electrician to come fix a problem, and then stiffing him on the bill for his time. That's not perfect either because composers aren't exactly billing us by the hour, but it's similar in spirit: trading something ephemeral (time or bits) for money.
Right on, man.
This case seems about as clear cut a case of "artist produced a work, artist would like to be compensated for the sale of that work" as you can get. There are undoubtedly problems with copyright as implemented in the US today, but this case just does not seem to be one of them. I'm totally in the composer's corner on this one.
Of course, I'd also be tempted to buy a copy of the sheet music and just mail it to the girl. It's $4 lousy dollars, and it really sucks to be a minor in an era of digital transactions.
The author has no ownership and no rights.
Ouch. Just ouch. Doesn't that attitude seem downright nasty to you? "Thanks, artists, for that moving poetry, those thought-provoking novels, and that beautiful music, but, you see, you have no rights to any of it, so I'll just take them, and not pay you a dime."
Do you really believe that's the way things should be?
While the summary states that they used free and open source software, the article only states that they used free software. Their writers used Google Docs, which is free but not open source, instead of Microsoft Word.
I totally have to second this opinion of Inkscape! I use it for all my vector graphics needs. While I'm told by friends who are designers that Adobe Illustrator is a much more powerful product (and I believe them), I really struggled with it. Inkscape does what I need, and I don't spend hours hunting for the answer to "How do I make my lines have arrowheads?"
You're making it sound like people just publish their conclusions, but they're publishing data as well, at least distillations of it. Certainly every grant proposal is going to say, "Look! This big, important problem is big and important! I need funding to investigate it!" and every journal paper is going to say, "In conclusion, I conclude something important!"
That's where peer review comes in: the reviewers look at the data and decide whether the conclusions are merited. Once the paper is published, other scientists can look at it and decide what to believe based on some combination of the paper's results, other research in the field, and their own research. That's what is meant by "consensus" in science, not that everyone gets together and takes a vote. It's an informal opinion.
Furthermore, where did this consensus come from in the first place? It didn't just magically appear, and it wasn't dictated to the NSF in a smoky back room. It's the result of lots of eyes going over the same problems and the same (or similar) experiments. The reason why you're faced with scrutiny when you make a claim counter to the consensus is that you are making an extraordinary claim! Extraordinary claims call for extraordinary proof, and all that. If you told me that you'd found a place where things fall up instead of down, I'd ask for some serious proof!
Finally, I have to question this:
Not that there isn't a market for scientific results that run counter to the consensus. There is a big market for that. It just doesn't tend to be funded by government grant money.
Where does the funding come from, then? Leprechauns with pots of gold? Private industry sure would love to hear the opposite of the current consensus, but if you have a problem with government funding for this type of research, and not with private industry, then this whole argument is totally off the rails.
By "respect", I don't mean that we should respect anything that any scientist says about anything ever. That would be absurd, of course. What I'm arguing is that the conclusions of scientists about the research in their own field is the best conclusion the rest of us have to go on. Note, I'm not talking about an individual researcher's opinion about his or her own research. I forget the source, but I recall reading that "No sane person should ever believe every claim made in a grant proposal." ;-)
Of course, we could all go to the published research papers and review them ourselves, and if we're not satisfied we could probably do our own original research, but then we're scientists in the field too. At some point we've got to take someone's word on something, even if it's just "this data series is honestly what we measured," or else we're just hosed.
Now, your second point gets at the issues I'm trying to separate: there's a difference between accepting the conclusions of scientists on scientific matters, and accepting their policy recommendations. Scientists are not experts on policy, so their opinion should certainly not unilaterally dictate our actions. But this is the eternally thorny question of who makes the decisions in a polity.
I couldn't pretend to answer that, but I want to draw a distinction between the science and the policy recommendation. My suspicion, though, is that people see the policy recommendations, and they don't like them. But if they accept the scientific conclusions, then they are almost forced to believe the policy is necessary. So, they reject the science. That doesn't seem like an intellectually honest approach to me.