This is the most insiteful thread I've ever read on Slashdot. The education system is broken at all levels.
In college, I took an uppor level math class for fun. I watched everyone in class scuddle about doing homework instead of actually thinking about the problem. I spent my time only thinking about and relating the problem, and pretty much only during the class itself. By not opening the book more than 4 times throughout the semester, I was able to think about the problems the way that I do, so I didn't have to memorize any stupid formulae or other non-sense.
My way of learning was shown to be a considerably better way of learning on just the first test. In fact, on every test in the class, I made at least a 95%, but I completed several perfect tests.
However, since I missed a lot of class, and didn't do any homework the entire semester, I got a B in the class. I would have failed the class had it not been a Math class where the prof. had a little knowledge about the goals of the class and me accomplishing them. I'm sure the only reason I got a B instead of an A was she was afraid that I was always lazy. Maybe I'll do an experiment and try to go back and get a math major without doing any homework at all.
Public education is a tricky thing. There are always people that just don't care about learning. You might as well send these students home because all they do is disrupt the others. You can't force anyone to learn. Make their parents deal with their issues for a while, and I'm sure they will make sure their children understand the importance of learning real quick when they have to hire a baby-sitter while they are at work, etc.
If teachers can't disipline children (and rightly so I think they can't) then parents should have to deal with their undisiplined children. Give them a tax rebate they can use to send their children to a military school or whatever they think will fix the problem. If you make the parents have to deal with their problem children, they children will be dealt with more often than they are now. Teachers don't get paid enough to put up with the shit they get handed. If you aren't going to give them the money to do the job and the freedom to do the job, ship the children back to the source of the problem to be dealt with. Then we can all go back to a public high school for mature, responsible youngsters. They need to start learning to manage their own time and other self-disciplines.
Now if only I would check my spelling before I posted.
Just saying this before I get attacked by a Grammar Nazi that aspires to one day be a secretary or an expensive spell checker for some lazy guy that can't use a word processor.
This is the third story in a month about speculation that SUN would be bought. These rumours have been roaming the world since Java was first born. Everyone gasped in horror that MS was going to buy SUN.
Honestly, this is getting REALLY OLD!!!
Why do/. editors let this speculation through over and over? Or better yet, why just now? It's been said 80 times in the past 3 years.
Anyhow, like I've said the last 80 times, if anybody buys SUN, it's going to be IBM. IBM has invested DEAPLY in Java, and they have said many times before that they would love to have Java. Can you think of anyone that would outbid them?
Well... that's not what bothered me about the episode. That episode seemed to make light of oppression. I can't remember a Trek episode ever before this one where the captain would have disagreed with helping the opressed of a post-warp culture.
Is Burman trying to say it's ok to treat people as inferior?
I turned to my friend at the end of that episode when we both looked at each other in horror that Trek could have been so far off the original Rodenberry idea (remember the half-black half-white people episode?), and I said Burman must have wrote this one, because he is the only person that seems to screw up Trek to that degree.
After poking around on the Internet, sure enough, this one was Burman's handy work. I don't care if it ends in tragedy, as long as they don't act like it's ok for civilized people to opress any part of their population.
From the looking at the fact that the final episode will be another Burman episode, I'm prepared to jump ship on Enterprise. Burman is killing Trek, I wish Rodenbury was still around:(... he would jab a sharp stick through Burman's eye for such a pervertion of his ideas.
You must have a two-phase commit in order to maintain ACID compliance. (or you'll have to pre-lock rows which will cost more performance than you'll gain)
Since you can't implement a two-phase commit at the driver level, you would have to run a pass-through server that handles the two-phase commit. You would need to distribute this server so that a client could connect to any one server in order to get any kind of redundancy.
I bet this was a lot of really hard work to do if it works right. Also, I wouldn't expect it to support stored procedures or database specific functions the way you would expect either. (I'm betting in another version they'll support putting stored procedures on the C-JDBC side of things.)
You can't use the fact that an event hasn't occured to boost the chances of it occuring. If you met two girls, how does that even matter what the other person is going to be? Seems totally unrelated to me. How is it any different than meeting 2 girls, then guessing if their cousin is male of female. You don't know their birth order either. What's the chances that their cousin is male?
I hope at some point I'll be able to explain this in some rational way that you will understand better. You've had me think and rethink the problem over and over. I still can't figure out why you think that the two sisters have anything to do with the gender of the third child. All the statistics that could have been done are out the window as soon as you know the geneder of all but one child. Unless the father is running out of X chromosomes, how can it matter?
Lets say we have: XFF FXF FFX
Those are the birth orders. lets substitute in Xm and Xf for female and male XfFF - 1/6 FXfF - 1/6 FFXf - 1/6 XmFF - 1/6 FXmF - 1/6 FFXm - 1/6
These are the possibilities and the probabilities, correct?
So, Xm=3/6 and Xf=3/6. It's the same.
You can look at the problem with that logic as being that you are omitting 3 possibly outcomes (the girl was born first, second or third) since you are saying it matters if the boy is born first, second, or third. Or, you could choose to look at the simple fact that there being 2 girls doesn't matter for the probability of the third being male or female since you already know that two are girls (thus you are adding too many cases, it should just be FFM or FFF). Either way, it's 50% chance that the third is male.
If you can just explain to me why you think that the order in which the male was born matters so much more than the order in which the females were born, then maybe I would understand... I dunno.
Well... my table is wrong, but I'm sure if you draw out every possible option, you will see it will turn out to be 50% chance.
Yet another way to think about it:
There are 6 different orders of birth that could result in fff. There are 2 each orders of births that can result in MFF, FMF, and FFM. 2+2+2/2+2+2+6=.5
The order of birth is relevant to the probability of a gender.
MMM MMF MFF FFF are the only possible outcomes of a family that have 3 children.
I wish I had the real data on the population, because I think there are the same number of families with three girls as 2 girls and a boy.
If you want to include the unneeded variable of order of birth, then you have to order the females as well as the males. In order to do this, you have to uniquely identify every sibling. Lets name the children A,B, and C.
The possible order of births are ABC ACB BAC BCA CAB CBA
Now lets consider the different combinations of male and female:
ABC = MMM,MMF,MFM,MFF,FMM,FMF,FFM,FFF The only possibilities that we are concerned with are MFF,FMF,FFM vs FFF
substitute these back into the original ABC, ACB, etc.
You are saying that 1+2+3/1+2+3+4 =75% chance, and you would be right. That's not the probability though. If you look at lines 1, 2, and 3, you will notice that they are all the same. You are counting the same occurances 3 times as the possibility that the third child is male.
This is a classic mistake of confusion of combinations and permutations. It's just the most clever I've ever heard.:)
Basically... you were screwing up the permutations and left out a lot of possible outcomes by not uniquely identifying the females. If the order of birth matters for the male, then it should also matter for the females.
I like your arguement though... I'll have to let some stat teachers I know in on that question just in time for their finals. *evil grin*
If you make 40 decisions of 95% probability, and they were all right, you still have a 95% chance of being right the next time still.
What you meant to say is given 40 decisions, choosing a an answer that is 95% right will only give you 50% chance of being right all 40 times.
I have to keep telling people this. If you flip a coin a million times, and lands on heads every time, you still have a 50% chance of landing on heads the next time. If you say you are going to flip the coin a million + 1 times, the chances of not getting tails once is astronomical.
Basically, as they say, "Chance has no memory." You can't expect the quarter to know how many times it was flipped and make a decision based upon this criteria.
(I know it's only wording this time, but I just had to say it in some mass media one more time to teach some clueless people a little more about stats.)
Also... the 50% point of guesing right X times in a row at a 95% chance per decision is 13.51340733396488610643078228019 guesses.
I think the point I see trying to be made is that validating any belief with another belief that hasn't been validated, or rather in the case can't be validated, is meaningless.
Unless religion is an axiom, it will require justification. Religion is "faith" based. Faith is a belief without justification. Basically, the very definition of religion, as in faith-based organization, is an unfounded belief.
You can't use one unfounded belief to justify another.
If I could use one unfounded belief to justify another, I could say that there are no gods. I could use this as justification for putting people in homes for believing that there is a god. If I could justify my belief that there is no god, then I would be right to do so.
Just to relate this back to the original topic:
Christians, among other religions, often have been guilty of believing that disease comes from God. The Bible even says this plainly. It would be against their beliefs, and thus a conflict of interest, for them to treat a disease that God sent intentionally. Are they christian first or are they doctors first???
I've met several christians that think AIDS and Cancer was sent by God to take out the evil people (gay, promiscious people, etc.).
I don't know about you, but if I get sick, I don't want a doctor that thinks God is punishing me for being naughty trying to help me.
I'm biased though, because I think religion has been the worst thing to happen to man-kind. People use religion to "validate" a lot of their crazy killing. If anyone believes that religion actually validates anything, you're off your rocker in my mind:)
Disks will never die. Most of everyone's drives are filled with multimedia. Disks, of some form, will always be the preferred format of this kind of information. All the functionality you could ask for is inherent in the media. You can seek and play. That's all you need, and you really only need to play one multimedia file at a time. With compression, I could get out really old 2MB/s drives and be more than happy if it would hold enough data.
Augmenting disk storage is where it's at. Putting the OS on Flash is such a great idea. Programs and the OS should be stored on some non-mechanical fast media, not neccisarily the same media. Flash will work for programs too. Program data should be stored on Compact Flash or some small, non-mechanical, portable media so that you can carry around your data in case you need it elsewhere.
Multimedia, on the other hand, will probably always be stored on some horrible media.
The idea of storing meta data on battery backed ram sounds a bit dumb to me though. I can't see how this would be any better than more system ram. If it is cheaper ram, then why not just build a better disk controller and have smart cache on it. If they have a more efficient way of using memory to access a disk, then it would seem that all they have done is make a better cacheing algorithm.
Is there any science to this article at all? I see references to numbers, but no ways that they obtained them other than asking MS.
This seems like a lot of BS to me. Women just don't seem interested in 3d games like most men. Therefore, I would suggest that we men develop more skill in the 3d world of computers than women at an earlier age. Most 3d games are about violence which is undeniably a greater part of male human mentality than female.
I happen to know women that will destroy you in counter-strike, and I'm sure most of you do too. If a girl played as much video games as men, then I bet you wouldn't notice a difference. Also, women using computers more slowly than men can be attributed to the fact that men are also generally more interested in technology at a younger age.
I don't think interest in technology is genetic though. I think it's a product of society. Girls are encouraged to imagine the perfect guy and starve themselves until they are married it seems. Boys are taught to protect siblings, themselves, women, and property with violence or by violence from a child that learned that violence is a solution to problems from fighting parents. (or even television like The 3 Ninjas, TMNT, etc.)
I dare them to try children with equal experience with computers. If it had been a reputable "discovery" I think that is where the research would have began. Or try men from third world countries where technology isn't available.
I think the trend will change the more technology is required to live and the more games are made for women (The Sims, Sim Park, etc.) or at least genderless (snood et al).
Well... I have to give Half-Life a tie with the original Quake (still being modded).
I still play both. The original quake, that now supports opengl, also has CustomTF, which IMO is much better than the standard TF.
Take a look at it if you haven't.
Also, for Half-Life, there is NeoTF, which is the my second favority not-counter-strike mod.
Re:Is this strickly legal?
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Exactly... I'm greatly thrilled that someone did this. The developers can get on with real work like Vice City, and the old game will still sell because of it's multiplayer support. I would be thrilled if I were a Rockstar investor as well. Charge people to make their own game... that's the way to do it:)
It's not Eclipse fast yet, but I was really impressed. I'm glad there are a couple of good free IDE's to compete. If it weren't for eclipse, I think NetBeans would remain slow forever. NetBeans, as it stands, has about 2x the functionality of Eclipse, but Eclipse is closing in from that angle as well.
They'll probably meet in the middle, and there will be a holy war about as bad as Vi vs Emacs (except we all learned that different people like different interfaces from that war, so it will never get quite that bad I would say.). Although there is that stupid SWT vs Swing holy war of FUD (SWT is not really faster, but.dispose isn't that big of a deal either.)
So, I would urge everyone to give it a spin when they get some time, but use whichever works best for you (just like SWT vs AWT vs Swing vs Thinlets vs etc.).
VB people may feel more at home with NetBeans (with the GUI designer).
VC++ people will probably like Eclipse.
jEdit + ANT people will keep doing their thing and probably not care about either.
I like both Eclipse and NetBeans. Everytime one releases a new update, I usually like them better. It's like watching them play poker. "I call your performance and raise ANT support."
Just so you guys know, don't try to run Eclipse on a slow machine either. Eclipse can take a LONG time to load. Both suck if you have less than 128M of RAM.
Honestly though, as you pointed out, I'm sure Taco realized this, and thought it was humor. You have to admit, news has been slow lately. I can't think of a better time for some humor. Maybe they won't even post it twice?
When Apple posting earnings and denying a bid that no one actually thought ever happened anyhow is news, it's pretty slow:)
Or a new version of wine has been released.
Or OpenGL for X display is news. (Put in a VooDoo2 and tell X to use it for it's primary display... it will use Glide, but same principal has been around for quite some time.) Not to mention, alpha shading is easy, and shouldn't require anything to that extent.
And a Sci-Fi shrine???
I could probably go over every story, but the whole industry has been slow and boring lately. The war kinda distracts people anyway. What with Rummsfield practically declaring war on Iran and Syria too.
It's not the editor's fault, it's just a very boring time.
Exactly, and I think you should have pointed out for those unfortunate programmers that have never used JDBC that you can query the schema in an independant way, then create the schema in another database in that same way such that from JDBC, the two datasources would be indestinguishable except for constraints, views, and stored procedures.
That's your typical Slashdot idiocy. Most Slashdotters don't know the percentages of Fortune 500 companies that are already using WebSphere that will be more than happy to have a unified system for their whole business.
From then on, they only have to upgrade one product every year instead of 2. For some businesses, buy WebSphere for there network may turn out to be cheaper than 400$/machine with Office.
I guess there aren't many Slashdotters that actually think about the possibilities before the make sweeping remarks like "Microsoft doesn't care."
IBM has billions of dollars that say MS will care. In fact, I would expect the next logical step for MS is to port MS Office to.Net.
I would still rather run a heart monitor on a SUN system than an Intel-esque. Unless you are comparing IBM to SUN, in such case you may be correct, I don't think there is going to be any less demand for Sparc in the near future. IBM still has a lot of vendor lock-in issues going. At least with SUN you can get a reasonably cheap system (compared to IBM) that is rock solid (compared to x86).
I have to admit, x86 is getting better, but I have to been able to put an x86 system in a closet and forget about it for a decade. Something will go bad, other than the SCSI disks.
Sparc is still big in large companies that bleed more money with a 5 minute unscheduled down time than they would to just buy rock solid hardware in the first place.
This is the same arguement as with Cisco routers. Sure a 50$ off the shelf cheap router will get the job done, but Cisco has redundant power supplies, processors, etc. such that you can usually hit them with a hammer a couple of times without anyone ever knowing.
Licenses for those things I think are tied to the computer.
I would duct tape the broken laptop to the side of the computer you want to run 98SE on and dare them to take you to court. "It's an external upgrade to my laptop!"
Of course, if you just removed the sticker with the OEM lisence on it, and moved that to another computer, I think they would have a hard time differentiating which parts of the hardware make up a computer. Is 98SE licensed only to the LCD, the CPU or the HDD. If one breaks, can you not get a replacement without relicensing the software?
Software/service tied to a specific peice of hardware doesn't work on modular systems. Dell may not support your computer if you add memory. Since software is licensed like a service, it may be that your computer is no longer licensed for 98SE if you replace a defective hard drive that has a 3 year shelf life.
(The obligatory IANAL.. but if licensing is so confusing it requires a lawyer to understand, it should be pretty hard to enforce too with all the possible interpretations.)
Anyone have a license around for one of these... What is the defination of computer, or "This Computer" as defined by the license?
Yeah, they are. Exceptions are made for logo testing from SUN, but the spec itself is open. Apache is actually on the JCP board now that SUN has allowed access to the testing suites as well. AFAIK, the first API from SUN to be included in this new license will be J2EE 1.4. Apache's Jakarta project already makes use of some of these API's.
However, you are free to implement any of them from what I can tell. SUN doesn't want people to use their logo or claim compatiblity until you have been certified, but certification, AFAIK, is free for non-profit organizations (or will be soon).
JBoss doesn't fall under this category, however, because they are a for profit organization trying to certify an Open Source application server. They are making money off their product, so they have to pay, but from what we can tell, it's only about 10% of the usual costs.
I'm a little uncertain on some of this, but a lot of the APIs is released by other companies than SUN, and is now mixed in with other APIs. I think the only thing SUN holds an actual patent on is a couple of things in the VM (which I could be mistaken). SUN does hold trademark and copyrights on everything they have though. Technically, I think it's possible to write a complete Java VM with all the libraries without getting in trouble with patents. If.Net doesn't break any patents, then it's likely any clean-room implementation of Java would also be just fine.
The API's that go through the JCP do actually make them open. The company relinquishes the patents to everyone in the community that might want to implement it. The JCP is made up of many companies (developers and product/tool makers) and they really have the best interests of the technology at heart. Most of the companies in the JCP have a lot riding on Java.
So, I think the JCP qualifies for your "fully free, free to use, free of patent claims, etc." clause. The biggest barrier is political to developers. Whenever someone mentions Java on slashdot, 8 people scream "slow, proprietary, dead" when in fact none are true.
What we need is several independant standards bodies. One big monolith like ISO just isn't all that good. If there is enough momentum behind a technology, they could set up their own body like SUN did with Java. This way you have a more personal experience in the standard. More people that should be heard will be heard by a smaller group of people with one common interest of promoting and culturing their idea. Also, smaller bodies are more nimble, and are quick to fix things without breaking backwards compatibility when unnecessary.
If you can give a product to the ISO body as a standard, then still file patent claims against people, then what does the ISO standard mean???
Does this not pave the way for MS to enforce patents on anyone implementing their.Net functionality?
Also, why is it that people say Java is proprietary, but ISO standards are not? In the JCP, in order to get anything accepted, you must relinquish all patent rights in it. Sounds to me like the JCP is better than ISO of ensuring that a standard is not proprietary.
Obviously business would be effected a lot, but I meant my question for more of an average Joe than a corperate entity. I don't think most user's will want or need quantum computing power as his/her main form of processing. My point is, you're average user doesn't need to solve NP complete problems. Can a quantum computer calculate 2^N instructions per second such that CPU's will be replaced by something faster, or will quantum computers be in the same boat as already engineered silicon at executing polynomial algorithms?
Another thing I think you are missing about the real world is that more often than not, random occurances and general storage has more influence on the tasks that you are saying they would be good at. At least scheduling projects and routing delivery trucks are more based on other factors like traffic to actually get proper weighting etc.
Packing of goods in minimal space doesn't seem to be what companies are going for... I get enough patroleum products to keep me out of most products I buy for at least 5 minutes:)
Code optimization would be a great place for things to work. It would be ironic though if you were using a quantum computer to optimize code for X86:)
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This is the most insiteful thread I've ever read on Slashdot. The education system is broken at all levels.
In college, I took an uppor level math class for fun. I watched everyone in class scuddle about doing homework instead of actually thinking about the problem. I spent my time only thinking about and relating the problem, and pretty much only during the class itself. By not opening the book more than 4 times throughout the semester, I was able to think about the problems the way that I do, so I didn't have to memorize any stupid formulae or other non-sense.
My way of learning was shown to be a considerably better way of learning on just the first test. In fact, on every test in the class, I made at least a 95%, but I completed several perfect tests.
However, since I missed a lot of class, and didn't do any homework the entire semester, I got a B in the class. I would have failed the class had it not been a Math class where the prof. had a little knowledge about the goals of the class and me accomplishing them. I'm sure the only reason I got a B instead of an A was she was afraid that I was always lazy. Maybe I'll do an experiment and try to go back and get a math major without doing any homework at all.
Public education is a tricky thing. There are always people that just don't care about learning. You might as well send these students home because all they do is disrupt the others. You can't force anyone to learn. Make their parents deal with their issues for a while, and I'm sure they will make sure their children understand the importance of learning real quick when they have to hire a baby-sitter while they are at work, etc.
If teachers can't disipline children (and rightly so I think they can't) then parents should have to deal with their undisiplined children. Give them a tax rebate they can use to send their children to a military school or whatever they think will fix the problem. If you make the parents have to deal with their problem children, they children will be dealt with more often than they are now. Teachers don't get paid enough to put up with the shit they get handed. If you aren't going to give them the money to do the job and the freedom to do the job, ship the children back to the source of the problem to be dealt with. Then we can all go back to a public high school for mature, responsible youngsters. They need to start learning to manage their own time and other self-disciplines.
Now if only I would check my spelling before I posted.
Just saying this before I get attacked by a Grammar Nazi that aspires to one day be a secretary or an expensive spell checker for some lazy guy that can't use a word processor.
This is the third story in a month about speculation that SUN would be bought. These rumours have been roaming the world since Java was first born. Everyone gasped in horror that MS was going to buy SUN.
/. editors let this speculation through over and over? Or better yet, why just now? It's been said 80 times in the past 3 years.
Honestly, this is getting REALLY OLD!!!
Why do
Anyhow, like I've said the last 80 times, if anybody buys SUN, it's going to be IBM. IBM has invested DEAPLY in Java, and they have said many times before that they would love to have Java. Can you think of anyone that would outbid them?
Well... that's not what bothered me about the episode. That episode seemed to make light of oppression. I can't remember a Trek episode ever before this one where the captain would have disagreed with helping the opressed of a post-warp culture.
:( ... he would jab a sharp stick through Burman's eye for such a pervertion of his ideas.
Is Burman trying to say it's ok to treat people as inferior?
I turned to my friend at the end of that episode when we both looked at each other in horror that Trek could have been so far off the original Rodenberry idea (remember the half-black half-white people episode?), and I said Burman must have wrote this one, because he is the only person that seems to screw up Trek to that degree.
After poking around on the Internet, sure enough, this one was Burman's handy work. I don't care if it ends in tragedy, as long as they don't act like it's ok for civilized people to opress any part of their population.
From the looking at the fact that the final episode will be another Burman episode, I'm prepared to jump ship on Enterprise. Burman is killing Trek, I wish Rodenbury was still around
I was wondering the same thing.
You must have a two-phase commit in order to maintain ACID compliance. (or you'll have to pre-lock rows which will cost more performance than you'll gain)
Since you can't implement a two-phase commit at the driver level, you would have to run a pass-through server that handles the two-phase commit. You would need to distribute this server so that a client could connect to any one server in order to get any kind of redundancy.
I bet this was a lot of really hard work to do if it works right. Also, I wouldn't expect it to support stored procedures or database specific functions the way you would expect either. (I'm betting in another version they'll support putting stored procedures on the C-JDBC side of things.)
If you are ordering then you have to work on my original principal:
MFF=MF1F2 + MF2F1=2 possibilities
FMF=F1MF2 + F2MF1=2 possibilities
FFM=2 possibilities
FFF=F1F2F3 + F1F3F2 + F2F1F3 + F2F3F1 + F3F1F2 + F3F2F1 = 6 possibilities.
So there are 12 total possibilities.
MFF=16.6%
FMF=16.6%
FFM=16.6%
FFF=50.0%
Either way you add it up, it's 50%.
You can't use the fact that an event hasn't occured to boost the chances of it occuring. If you met two girls, how does that even matter what the other person is going to be? Seems totally unrelated to me. How is it any different than meeting 2 girls, then guessing if their cousin is male of female. You don't know their birth order either. What's the chances that their cousin is male?
I hope at some point I'll be able to explain this in some rational way that you will understand better. You've had me think and rethink the problem over and over. I still can't figure out why you think that the two sisters have anything to do with the gender of the third child. All the statistics that could have been done are out the window as soon as you know the geneder of all but one child. Unless the father is running out of X chromosomes, how can it matter?
Lets say we have:
XFF
FXF
FFX
Those are the birth orders. lets substitute in Xm and Xf for female and male
XfFF - 1/6
FXfF - 1/6
FFXf - 1/6
XmFF - 1/6
FXmF - 1/6
FFXm - 1/6
These are the possibilities and the probabilities, correct?
So, Xm=3/6 and Xf=3/6. It's the same.
You can look at the problem with that logic as being that you are omitting 3 possibly outcomes (the girl was born first, second or third) since you are saying it matters if the boy is born first, second, or third. Or, you could choose to look at the simple fact that there being 2 girls doesn't matter for the probability of the third being male or female since you already know that two are girls (thus you are adding too many cases, it should just be FFM or FFF). Either way, it's 50% chance that the third is male.
If you can just explain to me why you think that the order in which the male was born matters so much more than the order in which the females were born, then maybe I would understand... I dunno.
Well... my table is wrong, but I'm sure if you draw out every possible option, you will see it will turn out to be 50% chance.
Yet another way to think about it:
There are 6 different orders of birth that could result in fff. There are 2 each orders of births that can result in MFF, FMF, and FFM. 2+2+2/2+2+2+6=.5
The order of birth is relevant to the probability of a gender.
:)
MMM MMF MFF FFF are the only possible outcomes of a family that have 3 children.
I wish I had the real data on the population, because I think there are the same number of families with three girls as 2 girls and a boy.
If you want to include the unneeded variable of order of birth, then you have to order the females as well as the males. In order to do this, you have to uniquely identify every sibling.
Lets name the children A,B, and C.
The possible order of births are
ABC ACB BAC BCA CAB CBA
Now lets consider the different combinations of male and female:
ABC = MMM,MMF,MFM,MFF,FMM,FMF,FFM,FFF
The only possibilities that we are concerned with are MFF,FMF,FFM vs FFF
substitute these back into the original ABC, ACB, etc.
ABC ACB BAC BCA CAB CBA
1: MFF MFF FMF FFM FMF FFM
2: FMF FFM MFF MFF FFM MFM
3: FFM FMF FFM FMF MFF MFF
4: FFF FFF FFF FFF FFF FFF
You are saying that 1+2+3/1+2+3+4 =75% chance, and you would be right. That's not the probability though. If you look at lines 1, 2, and 3, you will notice that they are all the same. You are counting the same occurances 3 times as the possibility that the third child is male.
This is a classic mistake of confusion of combinations and permutations. It's just the most clever I've ever heard.
That's clever, but still wrong :)
You use a set of possible out comes based on a permutation with only combination data. Lets do this a more proper way:
M1F1F2 M1F2F1 F1M1F2 F2M1F1 F1F2M1 F2F1M1 VS
F1F2F3 F1F3F2 F2F1F3 F2F3F1 F3F1F2 F3F2F1
Basically... you were screwing up the permutations and left out a lot of possible outcomes by not uniquely identifying the females. If the order of birth matters for the male, then it should also matter for the females.
I like your arguement though... I'll have to let some stat teachers I know in on that question just in time for their finals. *evil grin*
I think you didn't do so well in stats. :)
I'm probably just nit-picking though.
If you make 40 decisions of 95% probability, and they were all right, you still have a 95% chance of being right the next time still.
What you meant to say is given 40 decisions, choosing a an answer that is 95% right will only give you 50% chance of being right all 40 times.
I have to keep telling people this. If you flip a coin a million times, and lands on heads every time, you still have a 50% chance of landing on heads the next time. If you say you are going to flip the coin a million + 1 times, the chances of not getting tails once is astronomical.
Basically, as they say, "Chance has no memory." You can't expect the quarter to know how many times it was flipped and make a decision based upon this criteria.
(I know it's only wording this time, but I just had to say it in some mass media one more time to teach some clueless people a little more about stats.)
Also... the 50% point of guesing right X times in a row at a 95% chance per decision is 13.51340733396488610643078228019 guesses.
I think the point I see trying to be made is that validating any belief with another belief that hasn't been validated, or rather in the case can't be validated, is meaningless.
:)
Unless religion is an axiom, it will require justification. Religion is "faith" based. Faith is a belief without justification. Basically, the very definition of religion, as in faith-based organization, is an unfounded belief.
You can't use one unfounded belief to justify another.
If I could use one unfounded belief to justify another, I could say that there are no gods. I could use this as justification for putting people in homes for believing that there is a god. If I could justify my belief that there is no god, then I would be right to do so.
Just to relate this back to the original topic:
Christians, among other religions, often have been guilty of believing that disease comes from God. The Bible even says this plainly. It would be against their beliefs, and thus a conflict of interest, for them to treat a disease that God sent intentionally. Are they christian first or are they doctors first???
I've met several christians that think AIDS and Cancer was sent by God to take out the evil people (gay, promiscious people, etc.).
I don't know about you, but if I get sick, I don't want a doctor that thinks God is punishing me for being naughty trying to help me.
I'm biased though, because I think religion has been the worst thing to happen to man-kind. People use religion to "validate" a lot of their crazy killing. If anyone believes that religion actually validates anything, you're off your rocker in my mind
Disks will never die. Most of everyone's drives are filled with multimedia. Disks, of some form, will always be the preferred format of this kind of information. All the functionality you could ask for is inherent in the media. You can seek and play. That's all you need, and you really only need to play one multimedia file at a time. With compression, I could get out really old 2MB/s drives and be more than happy if it would hold enough data.
Augmenting disk storage is where it's at. Putting the OS on Flash is such a great idea. Programs and the OS should be stored on some non-mechanical fast media, not neccisarily the same media. Flash will work for programs too. Program data should be stored on Compact Flash or some small, non-mechanical, portable media so that you can carry around your data in case you need it elsewhere.
Multimedia, on the other hand, will probably always be stored on some horrible media.
The idea of storing meta data on battery backed ram sounds a bit dumb to me though. I can't see how this would be any better than more system ram. If it is cheaper ram, then why not just build a better disk controller and have smart cache on it. If they have a more efficient way of using memory to access a disk, then it would seem that all they have done is make a better cacheing algorithm.
Is there any science to this article at all? I see references to numbers, but no ways that they obtained them other than asking MS.
This seems like a lot of BS to me. Women just don't seem interested in 3d games like most men. Therefore, I would suggest that we men develop more skill in the 3d world of computers than women at an earlier age. Most 3d games are about violence which is undeniably a greater part of male human mentality than female.
I happen to know women that will destroy you in counter-strike, and I'm sure most of you do too. If a girl played as much video games as men, then I bet you wouldn't notice a difference. Also, women using computers more slowly than men can be attributed to the fact that men are also generally more interested in technology at a younger age.
I don't think interest in technology is genetic though. I think it's a product of society. Girls are encouraged to imagine the perfect guy and starve themselves until they are married it seems. Boys are taught to protect siblings, themselves, women, and property with violence or by violence from a child that learned that violence is a solution to problems from fighting parents. (or even television like The 3 Ninjas, TMNT, etc.)
I dare them to try children with equal experience with computers. If it had been a reputable "discovery" I think that is where the research would have began. Or try men from third world countries where technology isn't available.
I think the trend will change the more technology is required to live and the more games are made for women (The Sims, Sim Park, etc.) or at least genderless (snood et al).
Well... I have to give Half-Life a tie with the original Quake (still being modded).
I still play both. The original quake, that now supports opengl, also has CustomTF, which IMO is much better than the standard TF.
Take a look at it if you haven't.
Also, for Half-Life, there is NeoTF, which is the my second favority not-counter-strike mod.
Exactly... I'm greatly thrilled that someone did this. The developers can get on with real work like Vice City, and the old game will still sell because of it's multiplayer support. I would be thrilled if I were a Rockstar investor as well. Charge people to make their own game... that's the way to do it :)
It's not Eclipse fast yet, but I was really impressed. I'm glad there are a couple of good free IDE's to compete. If it weren't for eclipse, I think NetBeans would remain slow forever. NetBeans, as it stands, has about 2x the functionality of Eclipse, but Eclipse is closing in from that angle as well.
.dispose isn't that big of a deal either.)
They'll probably meet in the middle, and there will be a holy war about as bad as Vi vs Emacs (except we all learned that different people like different interfaces from that war, so it will never get quite that bad I would say.). Although there is that stupid SWT vs Swing holy war of FUD (SWT is not really faster, but
So, I would urge everyone to give it a spin when they get some time, but use whichever works best for you (just like SWT vs AWT vs Swing vs Thinlets vs etc.).
VB people may feel more at home with NetBeans (with the GUI designer).
VC++ people will probably like Eclipse.
jEdit + ANT people will keep doing their thing and probably not care about either.
I like both Eclipse and NetBeans. Everytime one releases a new update, I usually like them better. It's like watching them play poker. "I call your performance and raise ANT support."
Just so you guys know, don't try to run Eclipse on a slow machine either. Eclipse can take a LONG time to load. Both suck if you have less than 128M of RAM.
News for nerds, stuff that never happened.
:)
Honestly though, as you pointed out, I'm sure Taco realized this, and thought it was humor. You have to admit, news has been slow lately. I can't think of a better time for some humor. Maybe they won't even post it twice?
When Apple posting earnings and denying a bid that no one actually thought ever happened anyhow is news, it's pretty slow
Or a new version of wine has been released.
Or OpenGL for X display is news. (Put in a VooDoo2 and tell X to use it for it's primary display... it will use Glide, but same principal has been around for quite some time.) Not to mention, alpha shading is easy, and shouldn't require anything to that extent.
And a Sci-Fi shrine???
I could probably go over every story, but the whole industry has been slow and boring lately. The war kinda distracts people anyway. What with Rummsfield practically declaring war on Iran and Syria too.
It's not the editor's fault, it's just a very boring time.
Exactly, and I think you should have pointed out for those unfortunate programmers that have never used JDBC that you can query the schema in an independant way, then create the schema in another database in that same way such that from JDBC, the two datasources would be indestinguishable except for constraints, views, and stored procedures.
That's your typical Slashdot idiocy. Most Slashdotters don't know the percentages of Fortune 500 companies that are already using WebSphere that will be more than happy to have a unified system for their whole business.
.Net.
From then on, they only have to upgrade one product every year instead of 2. For some businesses, buy WebSphere for there network may turn out to be cheaper than 400$/machine with Office.
I guess there aren't many Slashdotters that actually think about the possibilities before the make sweeping remarks like "Microsoft doesn't care."
IBM has billions of dollars that say MS will care. In fact, I would expect the next logical step for MS is to port MS Office to
Because modifying hardware you purchased is stealing. You should buy the better model.
Tune your car to get better mileage, go to jail for not buying a car with better gas mileage.
Seriously though, it's going to happen.
I would still rather run a heart monitor on a SUN system than an Intel-esque. Unless you are comparing IBM to SUN, in such case you may be correct, I don't think there is going to be any less demand for Sparc in the near future. IBM still has a lot of vendor lock-in issues going. At least with SUN you can get a reasonably cheap system (compared to IBM) that is rock solid (compared to x86).
I have to admit, x86 is getting better, but I have to been able to put an x86 system in a closet and forget about it for a decade. Something will go bad, other than the SCSI disks.
Sparc is still big in large companies that bleed more money with a 5 minute unscheduled down time than they would to just buy rock solid hardware in the first place.
This is the same arguement as with Cisco routers. Sure a 50$ off the shelf cheap router will get the job done, but Cisco has redundant power supplies, processors, etc. such that you can usually hit them with a hammer a couple of times without anyone ever knowing.
Licenses for those things I think are tied to the computer.
I would duct tape the broken laptop to the side of the computer you want to run 98SE on and dare them to take you to court. "It's an external upgrade to my laptop!"
Of course, if you just removed the sticker with the OEM lisence on it, and moved that to another computer, I think they would have a hard time differentiating which parts of the hardware make up a computer. Is 98SE licensed only to the LCD, the CPU or the HDD. If one breaks, can you not get a replacement without relicensing the software?
Software/service tied to a specific peice of hardware doesn't work on modular systems. Dell may not support your computer if you add memory. Since software is licensed like a service, it may be that your computer is no longer licensed for 98SE if you replace a defective hard drive that has a 3 year shelf life.
(The obligatory IANAL.. but if licensing is so confusing it requires a lawyer to understand, it should be pretty hard to enforce too with all the possible interpretations.)
Anyone have a license around for one of these... What is the defination of computer, or "This Computer" as defined by the license?
-Sam
Yeah, they are. Exceptions are made for logo testing from SUN, but the spec itself is open. Apache is actually on the JCP board now that SUN has allowed access to the testing suites as well. AFAIK, the first API from SUN to be included in this new license will be J2EE 1.4. Apache's Jakarta project already makes use of some of these API's.
.Net doesn't break any patents, then it's likely any clean-room implementation of Java would also be just fine.
However, you are free to implement any of them from what I can tell. SUN doesn't want people to use their logo or claim compatiblity until you have been certified, but certification, AFAIK, is free for non-profit organizations (or will be soon).
JBoss doesn't fall under this category, however, because they are a for profit organization trying to certify an Open Source application server. They are making money off their product, so they have to pay, but from what we can tell, it's only about 10% of the usual costs.
I'm a little uncertain on some of this, but a lot of the APIs is released by other companies than SUN, and is now mixed in with other APIs. I think the only thing SUN holds an actual patent on is a couple of things in the VM (which I could be mistaken). SUN does hold trademark and copyrights on everything they have though. Technically, I think it's possible to write a complete Java VM with all the libraries without getting in trouble with patents. If
The API's that go through the JCP do actually make them open. The company relinquishes the patents to everyone in the community that might want to implement it. The JCP is made up of many companies (developers and product/tool makers) and they really have the best interests of the technology at heart. Most of the companies in the JCP have a lot riding on Java.
So, I think the JCP qualifies for your "fully free, free to use, free of patent claims, etc." clause. The biggest barrier is political to developers. Whenever someone mentions Java on slashdot, 8 people scream "slow, proprietary, dead" when in fact none are true.
What we need is several independant standards bodies. One big monolith like ISO just isn't all that good. If there is enough momentum behind a technology, they could set up their own body like SUN did with Java. This way you have a more personal experience in the standard. More people that should be heard will be heard by a smaller group of people with one common interest of promoting and culturing their idea. Also, smaller bodies are more nimble, and are quick to fix things without breaking backwards compatibility when unnecessary.
If you can give a product to the ISO body as a standard, then still file patent claims against people, then what does the ISO standard mean???
.Net functionality?
Does this not pave the way for MS to enforce patents on anyone implementing their
Also, why is it that people say Java is proprietary, but ISO standards are not? In the JCP, in order to get anything accepted, you must relinquish all patent rights in it. Sounds to me like the JCP is better than ISO of ensuring that a standard is not proprietary.
Obviously business would be effected a lot, but I meant my question for more of an average Joe than a corperate entity. I don't think most user's will want or need quantum computing power as his/her main form of processing. My point is, you're average user doesn't need to solve NP complete problems. Can a quantum computer calculate 2^N instructions per second such that CPU's will be replaced by something faster, or will quantum computers be in the same boat as already engineered silicon at executing polynomial algorithms?
:)
:)
Another thing I think you are missing about the real world is that more often than not, random occurances and general storage has more influence on the tasks that you are saying they would be good at. At least scheduling projects and routing delivery trucks are more based on other factors like traffic to actually get proper weighting etc.
Packing of goods in minimal space doesn't seem to be what companies are going for... I get enough patroleum products to keep me out of most products I buy for at least 5 minutes
Code optimization would be a great place for things to work. It would be ironic though if you were using a quantum computer to optimize code for X86