Actually, that is not very helpful to the parent poster. the png and jpeg devices still need X11. However, those manpages also clearly state that you can create bitmaps without X, but with Ghostscript, so you are quite correct in telling him to RTFM...:-)
Actually, I can't really agree... For those who do not intend to grok anything in their life, R is probably a bad choice...:-) But I think it is a good choice for everyone who do things where math is important and who sees it as important that things are to be grokked.
However, you do not necessarily need to be into statistics to find R appealing. I'm an astrophysicist, and I wrote my whole thesis based on R. I started out with a bit of C, and I used some small Perl hacks to do some naive parallellizing, but I eventually phased out the C code and relied on R. I'd write thousands of lines of R code rather than go back to something like IDL (*shrug*).
For programmers, it may be a bit hard to overcome that you do not need for loops in R. For most purposes, think matrix and vector arithmetic instead. If you look at it from a math perspective that makes a lot of sense. For the things you do where it doesn't make sense to think in terms of vector arithmetic, you think in terms of applying functions to array elements instead.
Also, R has some simple OO concepts. They do not aim to do everything OO does, but the things they do, they do very well (as opposed to IDL (*shrug*, *shrug*) where they attempt to do everything, but does it bad). You need to exploit this to make it pretty.
I think these are the main two things that needs to be overcome for most scientists to use R efficiently. I really fell in love with the language for these two reasons, and I'd recommend R for all scientists, also non-statisticians.
As usual I strongly recommend RTFM, you don't need an X device to create bitmaps, but it is probably the simplest way to do it. With the modularity freedesktop is aiming for, this is probably become less and less of an argument, and probably the main reason why they haven't bothered rewriting it.
R is really a beautiful language, for its purpose. It has a very nice correspondence with math and code, and for most parts of "hard" science, that's really important.
Compared to MATLAB, you can easily write R code 5 times as compact as MATLAB code, and still get more understandable code.
I had the same worry. Field-of-use provisions are incompatible with the GPL. So this was rather unclear. However, in TFA, they say clearly that:
PC:In your FAQ you say that the license that Dirac is released under is Mozilla triple license (MPL), but also that, "...allows for relicensing under the GPL or the LGPL." Could you clarify this - does it mean that Dirac will only be under the MPL, but that others developing using the source could release their work as GPL?
I'm not positive it is what you're looking for, but have a look at the Mozilla AOM Reference site. It contains a lot of good reference that a friend of mine has put together.
We haven't got small-claims court around here, but the interesting thing would be to sue MS without having had a business relationship with them. For example: A company had left behind a box in the same server room I was in, and managed to route their traffic through my box. Then, it got this nasty SQL virus. My firewall performed well, but bombardment of packets was immense. Initially, I didn't understand what was going on, and since I'm pretty new at this, I had to learn tcpdump and similar tools. It took me two days to track it down, and only then the operators managed to kill the box.
I would like to send the bill to the company that managed to have an unpatched system and routed their traffic through me. They need to realize bad security is a TCO factor. They might then send the bill on to MS if they wish.
But the really interesting thing would be to sue because of the lost time and bandwidth all the MS viruses cost, not because you're a customer, but because you're a victim anyway.
So, if you have any experience here, please go ahead!
Come to think of it, we should be suing MS. I haven't clicked though the EULA of MS, but I have lost mamy days of full work, the daily annoyance of MS viruses and lots and lots of bandwidth ude to MS' negligence. Why don't we sue?
Eh, I guess it is me causing the doubled server load...;-)
But seriously, Slashdot should fix their broken HTML, it is just incredibly lame. Browser writers shouldn't have to spend time on debugging other people's broken pages, I'm pretty sure this hadn't happened if Slashdot had been valid XHTML+CSS.
Well, hope you don't mind a question from one who even can't vote because he is Norwegian (that's something troubling by itself, since both major parties look upon themselves as world leaders, i.e. my leader, but not elected by me):
Well, the UN has its flaws to say the least, but for small countries, it is hard to establish fora to be heard, and the UN is perceived to be the only such forum we have.
How do you plan to improve international relations among bigger and smaller countries?
I had an experience in Dublin, Ireland which changed my view of how I look upon security.
Anybody who has been to Dublin can't help noticing that there are cameras all over. I felt bad about it, actually.
In the heavy traffic of central Dublin, I was just getting off a bus, and I noticed a guy lying on the street. I don't know exactly what had happened, but he was a motor cyclist, I suppose he had been hit by a car. People were running over from screaming "someone call an ambulance!" and things like that. He had a helmet, but appeared to be unconsious from where I was, on the other side of the street.
I was appalled at what I saw. Poeple were just standing there, pretty much paralyzed. Nobody did anything sensible, beyond shouting "somebody call an ambulance" and some actually picking up their phones to do it.
Nobody checked if he was breathing, if he was indeed unconscious. Nobody got him into a stable position. Some took his hand apparently made a pathetic attempt to find a pulse.
I was on the other side of the street, and crossing was a non-trivial matter. Nevertheless, witnessing how twenty people were standing there obviously having not the slightest clue how to deal with the situation, I finally made my way over. When I got over, about 5 minutes after the incident, a doctor had also managed to get his way over. I pulled away. At the same time, I could hear the first ambulance, but it apparently got stuck in the traffic.
He was in plain view of several cameras. Did it help him? Not a single bit. If he couldn't breath, those five minutes would most likely kill him, or at least severly damage his brain.
Real security is not about cameras. It is about having people around you that are capable and willing to help. Security isn't about a government or people employed to look out for you. It is about each and everyone of us. Ensure free airways, do CPR if necessary, and don't stop unless a doctor orders you to.
Real security is about every one of us acquiring the skills to help a fellow human in a critical situation. Take a course. Not wait for someone to do it in five minutes. Do it. Now.
BTW, I think he woke up just as the doctor got over.
Hm, I can't quite agree with that. I tried to get a mod_perl I could use up on a RHEL3 box, and it was a whole evening in intense agony. Doing the same thing on Debian Stable is a breeze. However, I agree that the release cycle is a bit too slow, and that there are some packages (like snort, chkrootkit, etc) that might as well be updated more often than the rest of stable. But for many applications (like a good server, supporting many users), Debian Stable is a great platform.
But it does possibly have to do what you're used to working with I guess.
Well, they are patenting something trivial again, and fetchmail has a trivial replacement for MS patented algorithm, it seems. This Perl one-liner is said to implement MS patent:
my $pra = $headers->get('Resent-Sender') || $headers->get('Resent-From') || $headers->get('Sender') || $headers->get('From');
It is just wrong that something like that should hold up a programmer one second...
Very interesting. I have tried to follow the situation in Uzbekistan for some time, for various reasons. Islam Karimov is certainly one of the worst dictators on the planet right now.
At the same time, Uzbekistan is one of the countries that could most easily reform, with a pretty high education level and many people who groks democracy, it should be a smooth transition (as opposed to Iraq, where just a small elite groks democracy).
Just after 911, many democratic leaders in Uzbekistan welcomed America, and thought that America's entry to Central Asia would rapidly bring about reform.
Instead, I've read many saying Karimov has gone from a soviet-style autocrat wannabee too a full-fledged dictator, with Bush's support.
What is your wife's opinion on this?
Of course, I have also noted that the Bush administration stopped an economic aid program recently.
Does she see this is as a genuine change of policy, one that would actually help, or has the Bush administration missed its chance?
Really, if I were Kerry, I would have made the handshakes Bush and his administration had with Karimov a major topic in the campaign, for it much resembles those Rumsfeldt and the Reagan administration had with Saddam in the mid 80-ties.
That's an interesting comment. I find no motivation in money at all, and I did go to University for close to 9 years...
However, the last couple of years since I finished, I have lived very close to the official poverty limit of my city, and I know that is bad.... So, I need to do something to get a higher influx of cash. I find no motivation in doing it, though, to the contrary, it feels like I have to abandon the pursuit of interesting things to get it.
I just need to be fed, kept clothed when it is cold (and when it is warm too, I hear society demands it for some strange reason), some bandwidth and electricity, given a bit of sports equipment, and an occasional trip to interesting places on earth. Then, I need interesting and hard problems to work on, and I'll be a very happy creature.
I could probably do this at below average income, but right now, it seems very interesting stuff very seldomly pays even that...
Thank you for pointing out this very important point. In fact, it seems the respect is mutual. At least the bushies and Richard Hoagland seems to be mutual fans.
Which pretty much explains Bush's Mars initiative: Why bother with expensive science, when all you have to do is to up there and walk through the ruins?
...but then, since it does deploy a parachute, I guess not. But it is OK to hype things to get people excited about something that is pretty cool, namely the return of solar wind particles.
I don't know this, but my guess is that since this thing reenters the atmosphere from something really remote, it will crash in much faster than something falling in from low earth orbit. That could make a big difference. But I'm just guessing.
Also adopting Sender ID is Sendmail, which makes a commercial version of the venerable open source Sendmail message transfer agent
However, Dave Anderson, Sendmail's CEO, says:
What you get [with the license] is the ability to use the software for free, and if you don't get a license what you get is the ability to use this software for free -- so we've decided there really is no reason for us to get a license.
Uhm, fine, but I think that's an attitude that will come back and bite them... If there weren't technical reasons for avoiding sendmail, I would be very skeptical about putting any kind of investment into a product that isn't more concerned about licensing issues... This is a minefield.
As I said yesterday, I think Sender ID looks dead, unless Microsoft changes their mind. People have worked very hard on this topic. Larry Rosen worked very hard with them, and Matt Sargeant (Matts on/.) took it up with them. I think it looks like a case of MS not getting it.
I came across this message on Exim-users where one of the core developers
flatly rejects the license, and it also indicates the Sendmail folks feel the same. Courier has also rejected it in a similar manner.
Sender ID needs rapid adoption, and it won't get off the ground with rejection from all the major FOSS MTA's.
I believe MS knows it, but they appear to fail to understand that licensing means at least as much for FOSS developers as it does for them. They said that they would update their FAQ with a promise that they will never charge for Sender ID, but miss the point that that isn't enough for developers.
I think this is extremely interesting, because it is the first time MS and the FOSS community comes together over something like this, where everyone knows that we have to get a standard up working. We're seeing a clash of worldviews, but if MS steps down now, they will have learned a valuable lesson.
Kuhn's philosophy rested, in part, on the myth that epicycles were added upon epicycles in the Ptolemyian universe. This myth had become some prevalent it became very prominent in the EB, which, it may seem (just may seem, because Kuhn wasn't very careful about his sources), Kuhn relied heavily on....
I have posted about this before on/. but the irony here was just overwhelming.... Goldy, almost.:-)
Anyway, yep, I think Wikipedia is nice, and extremely interesting. This experiment revealed problems in the community process, and points to ways to adapt and improve. Both using and editing Wikipedia is, I believe a vital skill for the future, and so, it is clear that we always need to adapt and improve the process.
Despite being told on/. that MS license is perfectly reasonable and OK, Sender ID looks really dead to me. ASF has rejected it openly allready, and today, Debian followed suit. Courier and Exim folks have also been very clear about it, and while I haven't seen Sendmail folks being that explicit, I wonder if the mentioned implementation is going anywhere.
People have been trying very hard to get MS to understand the issues, but they doesn't seem to get it, and if they don't turn around soon, Sender ID can be buried.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, that is not very helpful to the parent poster. the png and jpeg devices still need X11. However, those manpages also clearly state that you can create bitmaps without X, but with Ghostscript, so you are quite correct in telling him to RTFM... :-)
However, you do not necessarily need to be into statistics to find R appealing. I'm an astrophysicist, and I wrote my whole thesis based on R. I started out with a bit of C, and I used some small Perl hacks to do some naive parallellizing, but I eventually phased out the C code and relied on R. I'd write thousands of lines of R code rather than go back to something like IDL (*shrug*).
For programmers, it may be a bit hard to overcome that you do not need for loops in R. For most purposes, think matrix and vector arithmetic instead. If you look at it from a math perspective that makes a lot of sense. For the things you do where it doesn't make sense to think in terms of vector arithmetic, you think in terms of applying functions to array elements instead.
Also, R has some simple OO concepts. They do not aim to do everything OO does, but the things they do, they do very well (as opposed to IDL (*shrug*, *shrug*) where they attempt to do everything, but does it bad). You need to exploit this to make it pretty.
I think these are the main two things that needs to be overcome for most scientists to use R efficiently. I really fell in love with the language for these two reasons, and I'd recommend R for all scientists, also non-statisticians.
R is really a beautiful language, for its purpose. It has a very nice correspondence with math and code, and for most parts of "hard" science, that's really important.
Compared to MATLAB, you can easily write R code 5 times as compact as MATLAB code, and still get more understandable code.
Seems pretty clear, so I wouldn't worry too much.
I'm not positive it is what you're looking for, but have a look at the Mozilla AOM Reference site. It contains a lot of good reference that a friend of mine has put together.
How good? I thought mainland US had around 1" median? 0.07" is pretty awesome, I have to give them that. Best I've had was 0.47" IIRC.
I would like to send the bill to the company that managed to have an unpatched system and routed their traffic through me. They need to realize bad security is a TCO factor. They might then send the bill on to MS if they wish.
But the really interesting thing would be to sue because of the lost time and bandwidth all the MS viruses cost, not because you're a customer, but because you're a victim anyway.
So, if you have any experience here, please go ahead!
Well, I haven't got the money it takes...
But seriously, Slashdot should fix their broken HTML, it is just incredibly lame. Browser writers shouldn't have to spend time on debugging other people's broken pages, I'm pretty sure this hadn't happened if Slashdot had been valid XHTML+CSS.
Well, the UN has its flaws to say the least, but for small countries, it is hard to establish fora to be heard, and the UN is perceived to be the only such forum we have.
How do you plan to improve international relations among bigger and smaller countries?
Anybody who has been to Dublin can't help noticing that there are cameras all over. I felt bad about it, actually.
In the heavy traffic of central Dublin, I was just getting off a bus, and I noticed a guy lying on the street. I don't know exactly what had happened, but he was a motor cyclist, I suppose he had been hit by a car. People were running over from screaming "someone call an ambulance!" and things like that. He had a helmet, but appeared to be unconsious from where I was, on the other side of the street.
I was appalled at what I saw. Poeple were just standing there, pretty much paralyzed. Nobody did anything sensible, beyond shouting "somebody call an ambulance" and some actually picking up their phones to do it.
Nobody checked if he was breathing, if he was indeed unconscious. Nobody got him into a stable position. Some took his hand apparently made a pathetic attempt to find a pulse.
I was on the other side of the street, and crossing was a non-trivial matter. Nevertheless, witnessing how twenty people were standing there obviously having not the slightest clue how to deal with the situation, I finally made my way over. When I got over, about 5 minutes after the incident, a doctor had also managed to get his way over. I pulled away. At the same time, I could hear the first ambulance, but it apparently got stuck in the traffic.
He was in plain view of several cameras. Did it help him? Not a single bit. If he couldn't breath, those five minutes would most likely kill him, or at least severly damage his brain.
Real security is not about cameras. It is about having people around you that are capable and willing to help. Security isn't about a government or people employed to look out for you. It is about each and everyone of us. Ensure free airways, do CPR if necessary, and don't stop unless a doctor orders you to.
Real security is about every one of us acquiring the skills to help a fellow human in a critical situation. Take a course. Not wait for someone to do it in five minutes. Do it. Now.
BTW, I think he woke up just as the doctor got over.
(I'm somewhere in the R contributions file. A very small contribution, but I'm grateful for being included)
But it does possibly have to do what you're used to working with I guess.
At the same time, Uzbekistan is one of the countries that could most easily reform, with a pretty high education level and many people who groks democracy, it should be a smooth transition (as opposed to Iraq, where just a small elite groks democracy).
Just after 911, many democratic leaders in Uzbekistan welcomed America, and thought that America's entry to Central Asia would rapidly bring about reform.
Instead, I've read many saying Karimov has gone from a soviet-style autocrat wannabee too a full-fledged dictator, with Bush's support.
What is your wife's opinion on this?
Of course, I have also noted that the Bush administration stopped an economic aid program recently.
Does she see this is as a genuine change of policy, one that would actually help, or has the Bush administration missed its chance?
Really, if I were Kerry, I would have made the handshakes Bush and his administration had with Karimov a major topic in the campaign, for it much resembles those Rumsfeldt and the Reagan administration had with Saddam in the mid 80-ties.
However, the last couple of years since I finished, I have lived very close to the official poverty limit of my city, and I know that is bad.... So, I need to do something to get a higher influx of cash. I find no motivation in doing it, though, to the contrary, it feels like I have to abandon the pursuit of interesting things to get it.
I just need to be fed, kept clothed when it is cold (and when it is warm too, I hear society demands it for some strange reason), some bandwidth and electricity, given a bit of sports equipment, and an occasional trip to interesting places on earth. Then, I need interesting and hard problems to work on, and I'll be a very happy creature.
I could probably do this at below average income, but right now, it seems very interesting stuff very seldomly pays even that...
Which pretty much explains Bush's Mars initiative: Why bother with expensive science, when all you have to do is to up there and walk through the ruins?
...but then, since it does deploy a parachute, I guess not. But it is OK to hype things to get people excited about something that is pretty cool, namely the return of solar wind particles.
I don't know this, but my guess is that since this thing reenters the atmosphere from something really remote, it will crash in much faster than something falling in from low earth orbit. That could make a big difference. But I'm just guessing.
Hm, if you have a good phone company, do you actually need customer service....?
However, Dave Anderson, Sendmail's CEO, says:
Uhm, fine, but I think that's an attitude that will come back and bite them... If there weren't technical reasons for avoiding sendmail, I would be very skeptical about putting any kind of investment into a product that isn't more concerned about licensing issues... This is a minefield.
I came across this message on Exim-users where one of the core developers flatly rejects the license, and it also indicates the Sendmail folks feel the same. Courier has also rejected it in a similar manner.
Sender ID needs rapid adoption, and it won't get off the ground with rejection from all the major FOSS MTA's.
I believe MS knows it, but they appear to fail to understand that licensing means at least as much for FOSS developers as it does for them. They said that they would update their FAQ with a promise that they will never charge for Sender ID, but miss the point that that isn't enough for developers.
I think this is extremely interesting, because it is the first time MS and the FOSS community comes together over something like this, where everyone knows that we have to get a standard up working. We're seeing a clash of worldviews, but if MS steps down now, they will have learned a valuable lesson.
Kuhn's philosophy rested, in part, on the myth that epicycles were added upon epicycles in the Ptolemyian universe. This myth had become some prevalent it became very prominent in the EB, which, it may seem (just may seem, because Kuhn wasn't very careful about his sources), Kuhn relied heavily on....
I have posted about this before on /. but the irony here was just overwhelming.... Goldy, almost. :-)
Anyway, yep, I think Wikipedia is nice, and extremely interesting. This experiment revealed problems in the community process, and points to ways to adapt and improve. Both using and editing Wikipedia is, I believe a vital skill for the future, and so, it is clear that we always need to adapt and improve the process.
People have been trying very hard to get MS to understand the issues, but they doesn't seem to get it, and if they don't turn around soon, Sender ID can be buried.
I'd like to see something like FOAF used for whitelisting. I posted a SA bug about it, and then there's things like Trust and Reputation in Web Based Social Networks . I think this looks like a workable approach.