They probably will. The whole reason for the failure is lack of IT funding, and campus admin is currently studying whether to choose Google or Microsoft for their outsourcing. Of course, this is slightly tricky since federal law doesn't allow emails containing student information (eg grades) on third-party servers
Then why report grades via email in the first place? Presumably some of the money saved could go towards implementing a Web front-end to the registration system, or to improving your current system to cover whatever use cases led to grades being emailed to students.
This is assuming communication between faculty and staff will remain either in-house or "seriously" outsourced (effective SLAs, NDAs that cover confidential information, etc., rather than best-effort "branded Gmail").
Oh, and electronic gradebooks are one thing, but please, please, PLEASE don't torture your students by implementing messaging embedded insome "courseware" system that amounts to a non-interoperable inbox for each course that uses the system on compliance grounds. Any email system that's inappropriate for day-to-day course communications is unsuitable for campus use in the first place, no?
Calling a government "stable" when they're creating an uncontrollably deadly super flu is a bit of a stretch. I don't think that any genuinely stable government would do this.
Because no stable government would want to respond rapidly and effectively against new flu viruses, saving lives? These researchers aren't hoping to obtain "superweapons." Could this research help those who are? Maybe so. But this is true of most any immunological research*. On the other hand, natural mutation of influenza viruses has in the past been a far more significant threat to human life than "weaponization," so the cost in lives lost due to overreaction to the risks of otherwise-useful research "falling into the wrong hands" could be quite significant. Hence the debate.
"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."
* One need not stop there. Finite-element analysis could have been helpful in planning the 9/11 attacks. Should we similarly restrict research in applied mathematics, cluster computing, and 3D visualization?
Product ideas are like (name your favorite body part), everybody has one, or two.
True, but there's a huge difference between "1,000 songs in your pocket" and an iPod. Product ideas are not products. Unless, of course, you can sell the idea itself.
Most people who go into business focus on being able to execute the product/service better than the competition,
The other issue is the source code. In my opinion, since we taxpayers paid for the development of this piece of shit, we should at least be able to modify and redistrubute the code. Apparently though, the Government doesn't have to supply any information which it considers to be a "trade secret," and OSHA has determined that this crappy source code is somehow a privileged secret. This means that the company which wrote the application was allowed to object to the release of the source code, since the time limit on their objection time has since lapsed and OSHA hasn't sent the source code, I can only assume that they have filed such an objection, making this $200,000 worth of broken proprietary software which the public isn't even allowed to fix.
Or he could do a bit of fact-checking Fuck, the source is not only available on a OSHA's Web site, it's also available on site the article itself links to.
Looking at the iOS version, there is very little code, and essentially no graphic or custom UI design. According to the original iOS developer's blog, there were indeed a lot of change requests that "began to add up." In light of the public outcry, I'd feel bad for the guy even if he had made the full $56,000 for his work on the app, which he clearly didn't.
Finally, compared to the requirements churn I've personally experienced subcontracting on similarly "trivial" projects in the private sector, a "mere" $56K sounds like a good deal. Taking salaries into account, I've seen Fortune 500 companies easily drop $50,000 on what amounts to a two-page proposal for a project with similarly trivial scope.
So even if "government" is the problem, returning to the trees sounds like a more promising solution than "business."
Mayo on fries isn't bad, esp. with pepper â" but horseradish is even better. And I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Sriracha complements damn near anything. Also, there are few simple, nutrition-free pleasures better than potato chips with Frank's Red Hot.
Finally, it may sound a bit off, but Totino's Party Pizzas are outstanding for "experiments" â"Âtry, for instance, artichokes, Brie, a light sprinkling of sea salt, and just a hint of truffle oil. I'm not making this up â" actually, I did, but it's surprisingly good. As implied above, Sriracha is also quite good on pizza (though possibly not the one I just mentioned, but, hey, I haven't tried it, maybe?).
Can't stomach ketchup, though â"Ânever quite understood why, as I like pretty much anything else tomato-based, but even the smell of ketchup has always made me cringe.
I have one of the first generation of unibody MacBook Pros, so I can very easily get to the battery and hard drive. I loath the fact that they un-did this feature of the MBP in later models. Jerks!
The manual for my "early 2011" 17" MacBook Pro explains the (easy) procedure for replacing the RAM and hard drive (and theÂ"non-user-replaceable" battery is right next to the hard drive). Given that the "late 2011" MacBook Pros are just speed bumps, what you say no longer appears to be true (for the 17", at least).
If iOS applications were DRM-free, someone could fork GNUstep to make a binary-compatible operating environment in the tradition of Wine. The reason such an environment hasn't been built in the three years that the App Store has been running is because of the DRM.
"In the tradition of Wine," an appropriately "clean room" implementation would entail a massive amount of work, and "in the tradition of Wine," it'd most likely never be robust and current enough for anything but "useful special cases" in production.
Not to mention the fact that Apple's army of lawyers, unlike Microsoft's, aren't wearing antitrust shackles. Thus the project would almost certainly attract "undesirable attention" from Apple's lawyersÂonce it looked promising, demotivating the aforementioned "massive amount of work" required to reach that point.
Perhaps "DRM"Âwould become involved eventually, but, as it stands, app DRM really is designed to prevent casual piracy of App Store apps. Apple already lets you "format shift" apps onto every device you own that's capable of running the damn things, after all.
And if iOS apps were DRM-free, people wouldn't have to pay $600 plus $99 per year to run applications that a friend developed on a device that they bought.
Unless by "run" you mean "compile from source and run," I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from. Assuming the "friend" is a member of the paid developer program, there are several ways to do this for free.
Nothing. It's bunk. Most reputable laptop manufacturers all have comparable build quality unless you're getting the damn thing for free, but even then I'm willing to bet the thing will live long enough for you to replace it because you want something faster, not because it broke down.
While I'm not aware of any vendors who actually give away laptops for free, I believe the "myth" comes from the fact that Apple not only does not make $500 laptops, unlike most other high-volume vendors, Apple has never made low-margin laptops at any price point. Given the size of the "consumer" market segment, the volume of low-margin "made for Best Buy" laptops may well be considerably higher than that of ThinkPads and their moral equivalents, so the statement that "Apple laptops have above-average build quality" may well be true. But if the mythical "average" laptop is, say, a $500 unit built only to last longer than its warranty period, and then only under "average home use," this is hardly a fair comparison.
Your second comment illustrates the annoying fact that a "fair comparison" is surprisingly hard. I can't ever remember a laptop that I've owned that didn't require a hard drive replacement, a replacement battery or three, and at least one other major repair (all not infrequently under warranty) well within the "useful lifetime" where I have no interest whatsoever in "something faster"; in my experience, these things are more or less independent of build quality. On the other hand, a major difference between "cheaply built" laptops and "well-built" laptops is that, after 2-3 years of reasonable care and moderate-to-heavy use, the latter don't look and feel like they're literally about to fall apart; given that this translates almost directly into "resale value," especially — but hardly exclusively — in the case of Apple products, my own experience seems to indicate, perhaps surprisingly, that laptop ownership costs are more or less independent of build quality, as well.
Incidentally, I tend to replace laptops to avoid expensive out-of-warranty repairs on worn-out items like display panels, rather than performance problems of the sort you describe, given that, perceptions aside, the things don't actually slow down with age. The trick, I've found, is to not "adapt" to using others' newer, faster machines!
I still don't understand math. I can manipulate the symbols but I don't understand what the symbols represent.
Spoken like a true algebraist! "The symbols" represent anything you want them to, subject only to whatever "ground rules" the desired algebraic manipulations require.
I believe that as a student in any discipline, understanding the things that the symbols represent is far more essential than being able to decode the symbols without comprehension.
I'd go further and question what it means in the first place to "learn" something without understanding it. In this sense, what one needs to "understand" is that the value of algebra is precisely that the symbols are "meaningless." This extends directly to C.S., and, for that matter, bookkeeping — using one set of symbols and procedures to enumerate, say, sheep, and another for, I don't know, ice cream cones, would be a major PITA.
Sure I have basic concepts down such as whole numbers, but more complex functions are completely lost on me.
If you take a nonzero complex number to be a positive "scale factor" and an angle (i.e., taking "polar coordinates"), you can think of them as geometric transformations, namely, rotation and uniform scaling about some fixed point in the plane. Then "complex multiplication" is simply "composition of transformations," which, as you can easily see from the geometry, happens to be commutative. Incidentally, quaternions are heavily used in computer graphics for similar reasons in three dimensions.
And addition of complex numbers is just "vector addition" in the plane, a.k.a. "adding arrows," a.k.a., adding pairs of numbers "componentwise." But you can do that in exactly the same way for triples, quadruples, quintuples, . .., n-tuples of numbers; what's special about complex numbers is that they also have multiplication that follows the exact same rules as "ordinary" multiplication. And again, what they "represent" is entirely up to you — they're often used in physics and engineering to represent a great variety of phenomena. What do these phenomena have in common? The simple and seemingly bone-headed, but nevertheless true answer really does seem to be, "similar equations." This is no different, conceptually, than what counting sheep and counting ice cream cones have in common, namely, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . whatever these "mean."
I would be ever grateful to a math educator who could teach understandable concepts first, followed distantly by symbolic notation. Now that you understand what I'm taking about, I'll give this concept a name: "numbers vs numerals"
While I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments, I tend to feel the problem is less one of "notation" per se and a more fundamental one of poor communication — funny symbols are just shorthand for (lots and lots of typically tedious and quite repetitive) words, after all. The main purpose of mathematical speech, including, without limitation, the sort used in the classroom, is communication. While this is no different than any other subject, I'm amazed at the number of students and teachers, "good" and "bad" alike, who seem to think it is.
In an unrelated nod to the article, how is this "news"? I'm 33 years old, and the Count has been around for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years longer than me! (cue laughter and lightning)
No eink, and at this point I'd probably wait for an iPad with a higher-resolution screen, but I've been reading maths papers and books using GoodReader for almost a year now and it works quite well. GoodReader is fast, handles large files well, and has a "persistent crop" feature that's worth its weight in gold: for any given document (and, optionally, for facing pages), you can crop the margins, eliminating the very annoying "turn the page and zoom" phenomenon characteristic of my experience with other readers.
What others have said about "reading straight through versus skipping around" is quite true, alas: I find myself buying hard copies of any books that I reference heavily for exactly this reason.
Seriously, though, what happens when Google patches 700 salesmen's laptops at an inopportune time? According to the documentation,
Customers on the Scheduled Release track gain access to new features on a regular, weekly release schedule following the initial release of those features. This delay allows time for administrators to familiarize themselves with new features using a test domain, educate support staff, and communicate any changes to their users. New features will be released on the Scheduled Release track each Tuesday, with at least a one-week notice following the initial feature launch.
What? Google expects "customers with complex IT environments" to "familiarize themselves with new features using a test domain, educate support staff, and communicate any changes to their users" in a week?
Google clearly has a rather superficial sense of familiarization in mind. Moreover, what sort of users, other than "IT people with nothing more interesting to do," would want to rely on a perfectly satisfactory tool to change on a weekly basis? Is it conceivable that Google's idea of "customer satistfaction" is akin to "boiling a frog"?
Perhaps Google Apps' target market is people who want an excuse to avoid taking the time to learn how to use their tools and companies who want an excuse to avoid training?
...unless we're talking about "unused" Keychain files.
Suppose a desktop Mac has been compromised. Then we can assume, for the purposes of security, that the local Keychain binaries have been compromised. Thus the attacker has free access to the cleartext of any keychain used ("unlocked") on the system. But this is hardly a flaw in Keychain, since it's true, by design, for any credential cache whatsoever.
(disclaimer: I am a Mac user, though I have over a decade's experience maintaining and developing for both Windows and *nix and tend to use bash more than the Finder)
people who find Linux or Windows "too complicated" tend to gravitate towards Macs
In my experience, these are some of the "smartest" people in fields of "knowledge work" — natural and social sciences, liberal and creative arts, in both academia and the private sector — not primarily interested in "computers for their own sake." Hell, it's not unusual for researchers in computer science to "gravitate towards Macs" in IT support-poor environments where they're expected to maintain their own systems.
For that matter, I worked in business IT administration and software development for a decade and have had a Mac as my primary personal system since the release of OS X, and as my exclusive choice of personal system since the Intel transition. The average client isn't delighted with the excuse that you were "eating your own dog food" when you deliver a project late, and Apple's offerings have always been geared more towards "self-support" in ordinary, run-of-the-mill senses that don't involve kernel modifications and hardware hacks (of course, in the "middle years," they were also crap — during this period, I was using a combination of FreeBSD, Windows NT, and NeXTSTEP on a slab I recovered from a uni dumpster).
Do you honestly think PhD biologists, say, are "bringing down the averages" because they don't give a damn about device drivers?
Unfortunately this is not true — far from being "expert wordsmiths," many lawyers have famously poor written language skills, and rely heavily on "standard form" responses in situations like these. The net result is that these sorts of "purely inter-lawyer transactions" are somewhat comedic to read, as the letters often reflect misunderstanding and even outright non sequitur — because lazy lawyers often skim correspondence and "assume" they know what it says!
You can't gruntle all the people all the time — especially if your employes have high-value marketable skills you're not yet successful enough to pay for.
Get your paperwork in order, ask your employees to remove any "stray software" they may have personally installed, and do your best to convince yourself that the "disaster scenarios" you've heard are a combination of carefully crafted BSA public relations and the simple fact that "what bleeds, leads." Cases that go nowhere are, above all, uninteresting — if nine out of ten cases were marked at random to get no attention whatsoever beyond the first "nasty letter," you'd still hear virtually nothing about any case other than those of the "tenth men."
If what you say about "not being able to afford a lawyer" is true, you can scarcely afford a settlement that, additionally, covers BSA's own legal fees, let alone "profit." So it's quite possible that a simple, curt response on a lawyer's letterhead will suffice to quash the matter, for no other reason than that the BSA won't invest significant resources into your case without knowing something about your finances. Rest assured they'll run a credit check before committing significant non-secretarial human resources.
So write a short, confident*, non-threatening letter informing them only that their source is mistaken — then hire an inexpensive lawyer not affiliated with a large firm — a pricey lawyer from a "big name" firm is evidence that you have "something to lose" in a settlement — to revise it, print it, sign it, and send it. This shouldn't cost you more than a billable hour or two.
After that, don't panic! Get back to running your business as usual. You've done all you can, and mulling over "worst-case scenarios" will cause you nothing but grief. If the sky will certainly fall tomorrow, you may as well dance today.
Needless to say, I'm not a lawyer. I have, however, argued successfully against the recommendations of several I've hired, no harm has ever arisen on account of this, and most have subsequently suggested I should consider the profession.
* As much as is possible, avoid weasel phrases like "to the best of my knowledge" at this stage. Since it'll be written in the person of the lawyer, insist he express the confidence of your claim: "according to my client, he has no improperly-licensed software installed..." Your response isn't "under penalty of perjury" even if you were lying, and you certainly won't be thrown under a bus for expressing your honest beliefs with "insufficient linguistic skepticism" in an informal response.
What I don't get is why they're adopting something modeled on one of the key weaknesses of traditional relational database management systems. "Familiarity," perhaps, but this seems likely to be superficial, and the stated goal of "creat[ing] some form of commonality among non-SQL databases" strikes me as similar to the goal of finding "some form of commonality among non-elephant mammals."
That there exist applications for data storage where a relational database isn't the appropriate tool is trivial, and well-understood by the relational database community, as is the fact that integrity guarantees are not, in general, available "for free." This has nothing at all to do with one's choice of query language, incidentally.
The whole "NoSQL" thing strikes me as an attempt to use straw man arguments to drum up publicity, which, as I pointed out in response to another article, can be quite brilliant if done artfully. Unfortunately, the NoSQL community is hardly Groucho Marx, and the relational database "establishment," taken as a whole, is hardly comparable to a bunch of money-grubbing, back-stabbing studio executives.
The result, predictably, seems to be even more misinformed skepticism in a field already full of it, sort of like Twain's line about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" being mistakenly invoked as a general indictment of mathematical modeling (and, by extension, most of empirical science).
To say he was being "a bit disingenuous" is a bit disingenuous: he himself claimed his goal was to manufacture a controversy to generate publicity for his film; that he did this by "out-lawyering the lawyers" — using bullshit historical and moral claims to preempt bullshit legal claims— is actually quite brilliant. It's not "as if" he wanted Warner Bros. to sue — he actually wanted Warner Bros. to sue, as this would generate even more publicity for the film. Alternatively, he wanted to be left alone to make his movie without legal review of each and every comedic detail to ensure "compliance" with some mythical "good-faith effort to avoid infringing on Warner Bros. rights."
To wit: his "publicity stunt" is itself carefully-crafted satire. In particular, note how Groucho's letter is a virtual minefield of double entendre, unverifiable half-truths, outright lies, and facts that are "wrong only in detail," carefully crafted to force any conceivable response to read like a parody of itself. And don't think these things weren't intentional, Marx was quite familiar with the things he's speaking of, and with the law. Consider his jab against "confusing and misleading customers": he begins by saying that it's absurd that consumers would mistake someone with a "face only a brother could love" for Ingrid Bergman, and goes on to compare the head of the studio to Jack the Ripper, "who," according to Marx, "cut quite a figure in his day" (emphasis mine).
Incidentally, those familiar with the Marx Brothers' other work will recognize that Groucho's irreverent attitude towards the "legal establishment" was hardly without well-known precedent, and is generally quite consistent with the tradition of "social ridicule" the Marxes represent.
QED says that the path light travels is a path of least action
Perhaps this is pedantry, but wouldn't that be classical mechanics? The classical "action" is mass times velocity times length, so it would vanish identically for massless particles —though modern formulations tend to substitute Hamilton's principle (discovered, incidentally, by Lagrange): admissible paths are critical points for the map from paths to real numbers given by integrating the system's Lagrangian over the path. But still, this only holds for quantum systems in the limit as the Planck constant goes to zero —hence Feynman's formalism that effectively reduces Hamilton's principle to a "stationary phase approximation" of an infinite-dimensional path integral.
When it comes down tobrass tacks, I'm pretty sure QED doesn't say anything about the "path" of a single photon — to the extent paths are introduced at all, one considers integrals over spaces of paths, including, in the usual formulation, paths where "photons travel faster than light."
The end result, as I recall, indicates that the probability that any given experiment would reveal a photon traveling faster than light is zero. And I'm not really sure how you would "prove" the difference between "zero probability" and "unimaginably small nonzero probability" experimentally; I'm pretty sure these "virtual tachyons" are just "unobservable intermediate results" in the formalism, that "faster than light photons" implies a violation of local conservation of energy that is generally held to be true by hypothesis.
So I'm confused by the summary and the press release from the outset, rather generally, since it's impossible in principle to "prove" that something cannot occur by "direct observation." Observation of what? All possible photon trajectories?
in the strange quantum world nothing seems impossible
strikes me as rather wrong-headed. It's just that formulations of quantum mechanics have been more rigorous and less "intuitive" than formulations of classical physics, thus nothing seems obviously or "intuitively" impossible. Or, for that matter, possible. The point is simply that quantum physics is neither obvious nor intuitive.
The previous posts noting that "photons do not exceed the speed of light" is actually a good example of this. What is a "photon"? How do you define "speed"? Given that the formalisms of relativistic quantum theory are still very much an active research area, this appears to be a result that requires a bit more than a Slashdot summary to grasp.
To give a rough idea of the problems involved in "intuitive explanations," individual photons are indistinguishable, thus we might say "we create a photon at point A at time t0" and "we detect a photon at point B at time t1," but how can we be sure it's the "same photon"? Does the question even make sense? Probably not, since photons are not "practically indistinguishable," they are indistinguishable even in theory — the underlying mathematical models do not admit the concept.
As an analogy, given particular conditions, sound travels at a certain finite speed, significantly slower than light. Now encode the sound and send the encoded representation as an optical signal through a vacuum to a decoder that reproduces the original sound from a speaker. Have we demonstrated that, under certain conditions, sound travels at the speed of light?
Rather, it's intended for small businesses that primarily use Mac desktops and don't have an IT department — thus Apple focused on removing things from the basic GUI admin tools that didn't directly support this application — are there seriously admins out there who are familiar enough with Apache and bind to run a nontrivial server, yet "uncomfortable" with command-line tools and configuration files?
The fact that the only hardware Apple markets as a "server" is a Mac mini should be the first clue.
As for "lack of Windows support," this is just Apple's typical "angling for new rather than old" — Active Directory has never been a good fit for small businesses with a single server. The main reason it shows up in this environment other than "because Microsoft documentation implies there is no alternative" is "because some application requires it" — and vendors whose applications make nontrivial use of AD are unlikely to support non-Microsoft AD servers in the first place, even if Apple's servers could pass some hypothetical industry-standard Active Directory regression test suite, which doesn't even exist in the first place. And not tilting at windmills is generally regarded as good business sense.
Given that small businesses will almost surely be either "mostly Mac" or "mostly Windows," it doesn't strike me as "stupid" for Apple to make things as easy as possible for "mostly Mac" organizations, given especially the potential for growth in this market, rather than trying to compete with other vendors' products "on their own terms," even at the expense of the very small number of "enterprise IT shops" heavily invested in Apple servers.
Scientist code is usually a giant JUST-SO story, sufficient to derive the results they need for the task at hand. They either don't have, or avoid putting in data that will crash the program so limit checking is not necessary. Crashes are fine if they do nothing more than leave a trail of breadcrumbs sufficient to find the offending line of code.
Funny — this could as easily describe how physicists often write mathematics.
In this paper (the paper itself is here), Feynman notes that
The mathematics is not completely satisfactory. No attempt has been made to maintain mathematical rigor. The excuse is not that it is expected that rigorous demonstrations can be easily supplied. Quite the contrary, it is believed that to put the present methods on a rigorous basis may be quite a difficult task, beyond the abilities of the author.
Feynman's "exoskeleton" nevertheless led him to some reasonably well-respected work in quantum electrodynamics. But my point is simply that the problem isn't with "scientists," it's with intelligent people confusing 'ability, in principle to understand X' with 'actually understanding X in practice' —a fallacy that is very common in IT, and one Feynman quite consciously worked to avoid. Life is short, "all one surveys," quite long. Besides, it cuts both ways: it's not at all clear that developers who don't understand the underlying science would do a better job with scrupulous documentation, because even if they bothered to RTFM, they wouldn't have the necessary background to understand it. The net result might be a loss stemming from a "false sense of comprehension."
Finally, it is not unusual for engineers to "understand how hard it [will be] to turn [a given] exoskeleton into [the required] self-sufficient robot" only in retrospect, thus it seems quite silly to expect anyone else to understand this at the outset —here I did not say "believe one understands."
For "turning an exoskeleton into a robot," write "double-entry bookkeeping," "plumbing," "formal mathematical proof," "horseback archery," or "dating," and nothing much changes— it's hard to have a good working knowledge of something one has no experience doing.
Updates. Web apps always run at the latest version, desktop apps do not.
This is false: suppose that a given Web application's releases are linearly ordered, that is to say, given any two distinct release versions, one is always "later" than the other. Then any hosting organization with sufficient resources can run twodistinct versions —at most one of these versions can be the "latest," contradicting your claim that "Web apps always run at the latest version."
I point this out because it's a red herring often used to retroactively justify the decision to write a "Web(bish) app" with little or no business justification beyond "not getting fired by doing the same thing everyone else claims to be doing," and projects fail because your claim is successfully used to avoid discussions of the real virtues and vices of various architectural decisions.
I've been involved with a number of projects that "failed along these lines," and one thing I find uncanny is that the Web developers seemed to be almost universally ignorant of what they were actually claiming — usually it boiled down to "we only have to support the latest version." Except subsequent versions would depend on the availability of various bits on the client end, whether this is compliance with newer standards or the presence of a certain ActiveX control, and when a product is being used by a large number of autonomous organizations, one cannot simply demand that they use Foobar = 5.0 before using the application in the next month.
This sort of "Panglossian optimism" with respect to "magical Web beans" seems to be a common occurrence: in many cases, the developer simply chooses to "always run at the latest version" on the server, then blames the customer for not "meeting the requirements of the new version."
In the case of a desktop applicationor "traditional" client-server app, if the previous version worked yesterday, and nothing changes today, it will very likely also work tomorrow. According to "Web application developers," this is an unreasonable expectation — customers must ensure they "stay up to date" with the technologies required to support the vendor's ever-changing priorities.
Slashdot Mirror
Then why report grades via email in the first place? Presumably some of the money saved could go towards implementing a Web front-end to the registration system, or to improving your current system to cover whatever use cases led to grades being emailed to students.
This is assuming communication between faculty and staff will remain either in-house or "seriously" outsourced (effective SLAs, NDAs that cover confidential information, etc., rather than best-effort "branded Gmail").
Oh, and electronic gradebooks are one thing, but please, please, PLEASE don't torture your students by implementing messaging embedded insome "courseware" system that amounts to a non-interoperable inbox for each course that uses the system on compliance grounds. Any email system that's inappropriate for day-to-day course communications is unsuitable for campus use in the first place, no?
Because no stable government would want to respond rapidly and effectively against new flu viruses, saving lives? These researchers aren't hoping to obtain "superweapons." Could this research help those who are? Maybe so. But this is true of most any immunological research*. On the other hand, natural mutation of influenza viruses has in the past been a far more significant threat to human life than "weaponization," so the cost in lives lost due to overreaction to the risks of otherwise-useful research "falling into the wrong hands" could be quite significant. Hence the debate.
"To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell."
* One need not stop there. Finite-element analysis could have been helpful in planning the 9/11 attacks. Should we similarly restrict research in applied mathematics, cluster computing, and 3D visualization?
True, but there's a huge difference between "1,000 songs in your pocket" and an iPod. Product ideas are not products. Unless, of course, you can sell the idea itself.
Citation needed.
FTA:
Or he could do a bit of fact-checking Fuck, the source is not only available on a OSHA's Web site, it's also available on site the article itself links to.
Looking at the iOS version, there is very little code, and essentially no graphic or custom UI design. According to the original iOS developer's blog, there were indeed a lot of change requests that "began to add up." In light of the public outcry, I'd feel bad for the guy even if he had made the full $56,000 for his work on the app, which he clearly didn't.
Finally, compared to the requirements churn I've personally experienced subcontracting on similarly "trivial" projects in the private sector, a "mere" $56K sounds like a good deal. Taking salaries into account, I've seen Fortune 500 companies easily drop $50,000 on what amounts to a two-page proposal for a project with similarly trivial scope.
So even if "government" is the problem, returning to the trees sounds like a more promising solution than "business."
Mayo on fries isn't bad, esp. with pepper â" but horseradish is even better. And I'm glad I'm not the only one who thinks Sriracha complements damn near anything. Also, there are few simple, nutrition-free pleasures better than potato chips with Frank's Red Hot.
Finally, it may sound a bit off, but Totino's Party Pizzas are outstanding for "experiments" â"Âtry, for instance, artichokes, Brie, a light sprinkling of sea salt, and just a hint of truffle oil. I'm not making this up â" actually, I did, but it's surprisingly good. As implied above, Sriracha is also quite good on pizza (though possibly not the one I just mentioned, but, hey, I haven't tried it, maybe?).
Can't stomach ketchup, though â"Ânever quite understood why, as I like pretty much anything else tomato-based, but even the smell of ketchup has always made me cringe.
As you say, to each his own.
Cheers,
Jason
The manual for my "early 2011" 17" MacBook Pro explains the (easy) procedure for replacing the RAM and hard drive (and theÂ"non-user-replaceable" battery is right next to the hard drive). Given that the "late 2011" MacBook Pros are just speed bumps, what you say no longer appears to be true (for the 17", at least).
"In the tradition of Wine," an appropriately "clean room" implementation would entail a massive amount of work, and "in the tradition of Wine," it'd most likely never be robust and current enough for anything but "useful special cases" in production.
Not to mention the fact that Apple's army of lawyers, unlike Microsoft's, aren't wearing antitrust shackles. Thus the project would almost certainly attract "undesirable attention" from Apple's lawyersÂonce it looked promising, demotivating the aforementioned "massive amount of work" required to reach that point.
Perhaps "DRM"Âwould become involved eventually, but, as it stands, app DRM really is designed to prevent casual piracy of App Store apps. Apple already lets you "format shift" apps onto every device you own that's capable of running the damn things, after all.
Unless by "run" you mean "compile from source and run," I'm not sure where your numbers are coming from. Assuming the "friend" is a member of the paid developer program, there are several ways to do this for free.
Both good reasons why the answer to the headline question is "no".
Well, if you have a one time pad, you don't have to exchange your key in the clear, for one thing.
In other words, "having already exchanged keys solves the key exchange problem." How Zen. As a follow-up, why not rid the world of all known diseases?
While I'm not aware of any vendors who actually give away laptops for free, I believe the "myth" comes from the fact that Apple not only does not make $500 laptops, unlike most other high-volume vendors, Apple has never made low-margin laptops at any price point. Given the size of the "consumer" market segment, the volume of low-margin "made for Best Buy" laptops may well be considerably higher than that of ThinkPads and their moral equivalents, so the statement that "Apple laptops have above-average build quality" may well be true. But if the mythical "average" laptop is, say, a $500 unit built only to last longer than its warranty period, and then only under "average home use," this is hardly a fair comparison.
Your second comment illustrates the annoying fact that a "fair comparison" is surprisingly hard. I can't ever remember a laptop that I've owned that didn't require a hard drive replacement, a replacement battery or three, and at least one other major repair (all not infrequently under warranty) well within the "useful lifetime" where I have no interest whatsoever in "something faster"; in my experience, these things are more or less independent of build quality. On the other hand, a major difference between "cheaply built" laptops and "well-built" laptops is that, after 2-3 years of reasonable care and moderate-to-heavy use, the latter don't look and feel like they're literally about to fall apart; given that this translates almost directly into "resale value," especially — but hardly exclusively — in the case of Apple products, my own experience seems to indicate, perhaps surprisingly, that laptop ownership costs are more or less independent of build quality, as well.
Incidentally, I tend to replace laptops to avoid expensive out-of-warranty repairs on worn-out items like display panels, rather than performance problems of the sort you describe, given that, perceptions aside, the things don't actually slow down with age. The trick, I've found, is to not "adapt" to using others' newer, faster machines!
Spoken like a true algebraist! "The symbols" represent anything you want them to, subject only to whatever "ground rules" the desired algebraic manipulations require.
I'd go further and question what it means in the first place to "learn" something without understanding it. In this sense, what one needs to "understand" is that the value of algebra is precisely that the symbols are "meaningless." This extends directly to C.S., and, for that matter, bookkeeping — using one set of symbols and procedures to enumerate, say, sheep, and another for, I don't know, ice cream cones, would be a major PITA.
If you take a nonzero complex number to be a positive "scale factor" and an angle (i.e., taking "polar coordinates"), you can think of them as geometric transformations, namely, rotation and uniform scaling about some fixed point in the plane. Then "complex multiplication" is simply "composition of transformations," which, as you can easily see from the geometry, happens to be commutative. Incidentally, quaternions are heavily used in computer graphics for similar reasons in three dimensions.
And addition of complex numbers is just "vector addition" in the plane, a.k.a. "adding arrows," a.k.a., adding pairs of numbers "componentwise." But you can do that in exactly the same way for triples, quadruples, quintuples, . . ., n-tuples of numbers; what's special about complex numbers is that they also have multiplication that follows the exact same rules as "ordinary" multiplication. And again, what they "represent" is entirely up to you — they're often used in physics and engineering to represent a great variety of phenomena. What do these phenomena have in common? The simple and seemingly bone-headed, but nevertheless true answer really does seem to be, "similar equations." This is no different, conceptually, than what counting sheep and counting ice cream cones have in common, namely, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, . . . whatever these "mean."
Highly recommended reading.
While I wholeheartedly agree with your sentiments, I tend to feel the problem is less one of "notation" per se and a more fundamental one of poor communication — funny symbols are just shorthand for (lots and lots of typically tedious and quite repetitive) words, after all. The main purpose of mathematical speech, including, without limitation, the sort used in the classroom, is communication. While this is no different than any other subject, I'm amazed at the number of students and teachers, "good" and "bad" alike, who seem to think it is.
In an unrelated nod to the article, how is this "news"? I'm 33 years old, and the Count has been around for 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 years longer than me! (cue laughter and lightning)
No eink, and at this point I'd probably wait for an iPad with a higher-resolution screen, but I've been reading maths papers and books using GoodReader for almost a year now and it works quite well. GoodReader is fast, handles large files well, and has a "persistent crop" feature that's worth its weight in gold: for any given document (and, optionally, for facing pages), you can crop the margins, eliminating the very annoying "turn the page and zoom" phenomenon characteristic of my experience with other readers.
What others have said about "reading straight through versus skipping around" is quite true, alas: I find myself buying hard copies of any books that I reference heavily for exactly this reason.
Google provides support?
Seriously, though, what happens when Google patches 700 salesmen's laptops at an inopportune time? According to the documentation,
What? Google expects "customers with complex IT environments" to "familiarize themselves with new features using a test domain, educate support staff, and communicate any changes to their users" in a week?
Google clearly has a rather superficial sense of familiarization in mind. Moreover, what sort of users, other than "IT people with nothing more interesting to do," would want to rely on a perfectly satisfactory tool to change on a weekly basis? Is it conceivable that Google's idea of "customer satistfaction" is akin to "boiling a frog"?
Perhaps Google Apps' target market is people who want an excuse to avoid taking the time to learn how to use their tools and companies who want an excuse to avoid training?
...unless we're talking about "unused" Keychain files.
Suppose a desktop Mac has been compromised. Then we can assume, for the purposes of security, that the local Keychain binaries have been compromised. Thus the attacker has free access to the cleartext of any keychain used ("unlocked") on the system. But this is hardly a flaw in Keychain, since it's true, by design, for any credential cache whatsoever.
(disclaimer: I am a Mac user, though I have over a decade's experience maintaining and developing for both Windows and *nix and tend to use bash more than the Finder)
In my experience, these are some of the "smartest" people in fields of "knowledge work" — natural and social sciences, liberal and creative arts, in both academia and the private sector — not primarily interested in "computers for their own sake." Hell, it's not unusual for researchers in computer science to "gravitate towards Macs" in IT support-poor environments where they're expected to maintain their own systems.
For that matter, I worked in business IT administration and software development for a decade and have had a Mac as my primary personal system since the release of OS X, and as my exclusive choice of personal system since the Intel transition. The average client isn't delighted with the excuse that you were "eating your own dog food" when you deliver a project late, and Apple's offerings have always been geared more towards "self-support" in ordinary, run-of-the-mill senses that don't involve kernel modifications and hardware hacks (of course, in the "middle years," they were also crap — during this period, I was using a combination of FreeBSD, Windows NT, and NeXTSTEP on a slab I recovered from a uni dumpster).
Do you honestly think PhD biologists, say, are "bringing down the averages" because they don't give a damn about device drivers?
Unfortunately this is not true — far from being "expert wordsmiths," many lawyers have famously poor written language skills, and rely heavily on "standard form" responses in situations like these. The net result is that these sorts of "purely inter-lawyer transactions" are somewhat comedic to read, as the letters often reflect misunderstanding and even outright non sequitur — because lazy lawyers often skim correspondence and "assume" they know what it says!
You can't gruntle all the people all the time — especially if your employes have high-value marketable skills you're not yet successful enough to pay for.
Get your paperwork in order, ask your employees to remove any "stray software" they may have personally installed, and do your best to convince yourself that the "disaster scenarios" you've heard are a combination of carefully crafted BSA public relations and the simple fact that "what bleeds, leads." Cases that go nowhere are, above all, uninteresting — if nine out of ten cases were marked at random to get no attention whatsoever beyond the first "nasty letter," you'd still hear virtually nothing about any case other than those of the "tenth men."
If what you say about "not being able to afford a lawyer" is true, you can scarcely afford a settlement that, additionally, covers BSA's own legal fees, let alone "profit." So it's quite possible that a simple, curt response on a lawyer's letterhead will suffice to quash the matter, for no other reason than that the BSA won't invest significant resources into your case without knowing something about your finances. Rest assured they'll run a credit check before committing significant non-secretarial human resources.
So write a short, confident*, non-threatening letter informing them only that their source is mistaken — then hire an inexpensive lawyer not affiliated with a large firm — a pricey lawyer from a "big name" firm is evidence that you have "something to lose" in a settlement — to revise it, print it, sign it, and send it. This shouldn't cost you more than a billable hour or two.
After that, don't panic! Get back to running your business as usual. You've done all you can, and mulling over "worst-case scenarios" will cause you nothing but grief. If the sky will certainly fall tomorrow, you may as well dance today.
Needless to say, I'm not a lawyer. I have, however, argued successfully against the recommendations of several I've hired, no harm has ever arisen on account of this, and most have subsequently suggested I should consider the profession.
* As much as is possible, avoid weasel phrases like "to the best of my knowledge" at this stage. Since it'll be written in the person of the lawyer, insist he express the confidence of your claim: "according to my client, he has no improperly-licensed software installed..." Your response isn't "under penalty of perjury" even if you were lying, and you certainly won't be thrown under a bus for expressing your honest beliefs with "insufficient linguistic skepticism" in an informal response.
What I don't get is why they're adopting something modeled on one of the key weaknesses of traditional relational database management systems. "Familiarity," perhaps, but this seems likely to be superficial, and the stated goal of "creat[ing] some form of commonality among non-SQL databases" strikes me as similar to the goal of finding "some form of commonality among non-elephant mammals."
That there exist applications for data storage where a relational database isn't the appropriate tool is trivial, and well-understood by the relational database community, as is the fact that integrity guarantees are not, in general, available "for free." This has nothing at all to do with one's choice of query language, incidentally.
The whole "NoSQL" thing strikes me as an attempt to use straw man arguments to drum up publicity, which, as I pointed out in response to another article, can be quite brilliant if done artfully. Unfortunately, the NoSQL community is hardly Groucho Marx, and the relational database "establishment," taken as a whole, is hardly comparable to a bunch of money-grubbing, back-stabbing studio executives.
The result, predictably, seems to be even more misinformed skepticism in a field already full of it, sort of like Twain's line about "lies, damn lies, and statistics" being mistakenly invoked as a general indictment of mathematical modeling (and, by extension, most of empirical science).
To say he was being "a bit disingenuous" is a bit disingenuous: he himself claimed his goal was to manufacture a controversy to generate publicity for his film; that he did this by "out-lawyering the lawyers" — using bullshit historical and moral claims to preempt bullshit legal claims— is actually quite brilliant. It's not "as if" he wanted Warner Bros. to sue — he actually wanted Warner Bros. to sue, as this would generate even more publicity for the film. Alternatively, he wanted to be left alone to make his movie without legal review of each and every comedic detail to ensure "compliance" with some mythical "good-faith effort to avoid infringing on Warner Bros. rights."
To wit: his "publicity stunt" is itself carefully-crafted satire. In particular, note how Groucho's letter is a virtual minefield of double entendre, unverifiable half-truths, outright lies, and facts that are "wrong only in detail," carefully crafted to force any conceivable response to read like a parody of itself. And don't think these things weren't intentional, Marx was quite familiar with the things he's speaking of, and with the law. Consider his jab against "confusing and misleading customers": he begins by saying that it's absurd that consumers would mistake someone with a "face only a brother could love" for Ingrid Bergman, and goes on to compare the head of the studio to Jack the Ripper, "who," according to Marx, "cut quite a figure in his day" (emphasis mine).
Incidentally, those familiar with the Marx Brothers' other work will recognize that Groucho's irreverent attitude towards the "legal establishment" was hardly without well-known precedent, and is generally quite consistent with the tradition of "social ridicule" the Marxes represent.
Perhaps this is pedantry, but wouldn't that be classical mechanics? The classical "action" is mass times velocity times length, so it would vanish identically for massless particles —though modern formulations tend to substitute Hamilton's principle (discovered, incidentally, by Lagrange): admissible paths are critical points for the map from paths to real numbers given by integrating the system's Lagrangian over the path. But still, this only holds for quantum systems in the limit as the Planck constant goes to zero —hence Feynman's formalism that effectively reduces Hamilton's principle to a "stationary phase approximation" of an infinite-dimensional path integral.
When it comes down tobrass tacks, I'm pretty sure QED doesn't say anything about the "path" of a single photon — to the extent paths are introduced at all, one considers integrals over spaces of paths, including, in the usual formulation, paths where "photons travel faster than light."
The end result, as I recall, indicates that the probability that any given experiment would reveal a photon traveling faster than light is zero. And I'm not really sure how you would "prove" the difference between "zero probability" and "unimaginably small nonzero probability" experimentally; I'm pretty sure these "virtual tachyons" are just "unobservable intermediate results" in the formalism, that "faster than light photons" implies a violation of local conservation of energy that is generally held to be true by hypothesis.
So I'm confused by the summary and the press release from the outset, rather generally, since it's impossible in principle to "prove" that something cannot occur by "direct observation." Observation of what? All possible photon trajectories?
So you're right — it's certainly not obvious!
This
strikes me as rather wrong-headed. It's just that formulations of quantum mechanics have been more rigorous and less "intuitive" than formulations of classical physics, thus nothing seems obviously or "intuitively" impossible. Or, for that matter, possible. The point is simply that quantum physics is neither obvious nor intuitive.
The previous posts noting that "photons do not exceed the speed of light" is actually a good example of this. What is a "photon"? How do you define "speed"? Given that the formalisms of relativistic quantum theory are still very much an active research area, this appears to be a result that requires a bit more than a Slashdot summary to grasp.
To give a rough idea of the problems involved in "intuitive explanations," individual photons are indistinguishable, thus we might say "we create a photon at point A at time t0" and "we detect a photon at point B at time t1," but how can we be sure it's the "same photon"? Does the question even make sense? Probably not, since photons are not "practically indistinguishable," they are indistinguishable even in theory — the underlying mathematical models do not admit the concept.
As an analogy, given particular conditions, sound travels at a certain finite speed, significantly slower than light. Now encode the sound and send the encoded representation as an optical signal through a vacuum to a decoder that reproduces the original sound from a speaker. Have we demonstrated that, under certain conditions, sound travels at the speed of light?
If not, why not?
Rather, it's intended for small businesses that primarily use Mac desktops and don't have an IT department — thus Apple focused on removing things from the basic GUI admin tools that didn't directly support this application — are there seriously admins out there who are familiar enough with Apache and bind to run a nontrivial server, yet "uncomfortable" with command-line tools and configuration files?
The fact that the only hardware Apple markets as a "server" is a Mac mini should be the first clue.
As for "lack of Windows support," this is just Apple's typical "angling for new rather than old" — Active Directory has never been a good fit for small businesses with a single server. The main reason it shows up in this environment other than "because Microsoft documentation implies there is no alternative" is "because some application requires it" — and vendors whose applications make nontrivial use of AD are unlikely to support non-Microsoft AD servers in the first place, even if Apple's servers could pass some hypothetical industry-standard Active Directory regression test suite, which doesn't even exist in the first place. And not tilting at windmills is generally regarded as good business sense.
Given that small businesses will almost surely be either "mostly Mac" or "mostly Windows," it doesn't strike me as "stupid" for Apple to make things as easy as possible for "mostly Mac" organizations, given especially the potential for growth in this market, rather than trying to compete with other vendors' products "on their own terms," even at the expense of the very small number of "enterprise IT shops" heavily invested in Apple servers.
Funny — this could as easily describe how physicists often write mathematics.
In this paper (the paper itself is here), Feynman notes that
Feynman's "exoskeleton" nevertheless led him to some reasonably well-respected work in quantum electrodynamics. But my point is simply that the problem isn't with "scientists," it's with intelligent people confusing 'ability, in principle to understand X' with 'actually understanding X in practice' —a fallacy that is very common in IT, and one Feynman quite consciously worked to avoid. Life is short, "all one surveys," quite long. Besides, it cuts both ways: it's not at all clear that developers who don't understand the underlying science would do a better job with scrupulous documentation, because even if they bothered to RTFM, they wouldn't have the necessary background to understand it. The net result might be a loss stemming from a "false sense of comprehension."
Finally, it is not unusual for engineers to "understand how hard it [will be] to turn [a given] exoskeleton into [the required] self-sufficient robot" only in retrospect, thus it seems quite silly to expect anyone else to understand this at the outset —here I did not say "believe one understands."
For "turning an exoskeleton into a robot," write "double-entry bookkeeping," "plumbing," "formal mathematical proof," "horseback archery," or "dating," and nothing much changes— it's hard to have a good working knowledge of something one has no experience doing.
Updates. Web apps always run at the latest version, desktop apps do not.
This is false: suppose that a given Web application's releases are linearly ordered, that is to say, given any two distinct release versions, one is always "later" than the other. Then any hosting organization with sufficient resources can run twodistinct versions —at most one of these versions can be the "latest," contradicting your claim that "Web apps always run at the latest version."
I point this out because it's a red herring often used to retroactively justify the decision to write a "Web(bish) app" with little or no business justification beyond "not getting fired by doing the same thing everyone else claims to be doing," and projects fail because your claim is successfully used to avoid discussions of the real virtues and vices of various architectural decisions.
I've been involved with a number of projects that "failed along these lines," and one thing I find uncanny is that the Web developers seemed to be almost universally ignorant of what they were actually claiming — usually it boiled down to "we only have to support the latest version." Except subsequent versions would depend on the availability of various bits on the client end, whether this is compliance with newer standards or the presence of a certain ActiveX control, and when a product is being used by a large number of autonomous organizations, one cannot simply demand that they use Foobar = 5.0 before using the application in the next month.
This sort of "Panglossian optimism" with respect to "magical Web beans" seems to be a common occurrence: in many cases, the developer simply chooses to "always run at the latest version" on the server, then blames the customer for not "meeting the requirements of the new version."
In the case of a desktop applicationor "traditional" client-server app, if the previous version worked yesterday, and nothing changes today, it will very likely also work tomorrow. According to "Web application developers," this is an unreasonable expectation — customers must ensure they "stay up to date" with the technologies required to support the vendor's ever-changing priorities.