A friend of mine took the same program, but was a few semesters behind, her tuition during the last semester was almost exactly double what I had been paying, not to mention the hundreds of dollars for overpriced books, parking pass fees, various other student fees, etc.
To be entirely honest, I don't know how it is at "most" schools. I was lucky enough (or whatever enough) to get into an Ivy League school. Tuition there is through the roof, all costs together are almost $40000 a year. But I hardly paid anything close to that. My father puts roofs on houses (though he easily could have been an engineer, and does have a college degree) and my mother is a homemaker (does a lot of volunteer stuff w/ the local church etc). People from families like mine can afford to get a first-rate education precisely because the tuition is so high that there is tons of money for financial aid, courteousy of people like my roommates, whose parents were... well off.
I think a lot of colleges realize that simply having "rich" students will not serve their long-term interest, in terms of prestige and alumni funding. They try to attract and maintain individuals who excel despite having poor financial backing... higher tuition fees help with this, and maybe I'm biased but this is a good thing.
I, like many thousands, have had the pleasure of working with Rob. I used to run #maestro to support software I co-authored at JPL, and thanks to Rob taking care of numerous problems, the support channel works beautifully, finally evolving into what is now #space.
I know our channel would not have been a success without Rob's patience and wisdom, and I enjoyed several really great discussions with the man. I had always been hoping to take him out for a beer someday... guess we should do things like that sooner rather than later.
Rob really believed in the work he was doing, and I think that that has really showed because freenode, while not perfect, is still a very productive place for develoment and support of FOSS. I hope that his dreams continue on long after today, I know that is what he would have wanted. We're going to miss you, Rob.
I consult for a small Asterisk host, Lylix.net, and our customers couldn't be happier. It's a bitch to configure (hence we can charge $$$ for the service) but I'll be damned if it isn't a solid piece of FOSS, much like Apache. My hats are off to the Asterisk guys, it's likely to become one of the most important FOSS projects in the next 5 years or so.
I love how "ad hominem" is now a synonym for "any attack I feel is baseless." I did not mention the professional by name because it could be detrimental to his career. You can choose to believe me (I have known this person for the last 6 years), or you can choose to think I am full of it. To be honest, I do not really care. All I do care about, as far as this story is concerned, is that Apple releases a product that I won't be embarassed by.
I worked on special effects for an IMAX film (yes, I do have an IMDB entry for that) and we found some very... interesting bugs in Final Cut. Let's just say that Apple's Pro software is nowhere near as polished as their OS, etc. Doesn't play well with NFS, for one thing.
The individuals "gripes" were adequately addressed my the community at large. I very much enjoy Apple and its products (I've had a Mac since the classic in '91), however I do believe you would benefit from reading the Wikipedia articleon Ad Hominem attacks as you seem rather confused. At least you didn't post AC.
Newton's formulas are not merely missing a few parameters... they involve concepts that simply stop making any logical sense once you get down to very small scales. The idea of a "particle" even existing in a single position, as far as we can tell with modern QM, is completely absurd and meaningless. The concept of an exact momentum is equally so. The "clockwork universe" which contains action at a distance (causal nonlocality) and non-discrete space, time, energy etc (rather than discrete geometry and quanta) is simply so far from the "truth" that our experiments reveal - namely that particles act as if they are in infinite numbers of places at once (or nearly so, given plank limits on spaceitme).
You will, however, find that if you wish to predict the path of a simple artillary shell or design an automobile they are "correct," they have predictive value, specifically because the phenomenon exist within the limits of the model's significance. Taking Relativity into account does nothing but complicate the math to provide a bogus level of significance and Quantum Theory is completely irrelevant.
Back at university, I used these "wrong" theories all the time, as they are useful (if erroneous) abstractions. The problem is that theories are not merely useful for their ability to predict things within the realm of known experience, but also new and different things beyond the current frontiers. Newton's theories, as elegant and beautiful as they are, were long ago surpassed and are now almost useless when it comes to generating new predictions about unobserved phenomena in the universe. The mark of a truly good theory is not that it can compress the set of known expimental results well, but that it can predict entirely new ones, outside the original domain in which it was devised.
Newton was a far smarter man than anyone posting here on slashdot, but like Einstein, he got so very much fundamental very wrong. I think if he lived here today, he'd get new and exciting things wrong (like modern theorists) and that that's a very valuable part of science, but we really shouldn't pretend his theories are anything more than a bunch of mathematical approximations that reference intuitive concepts that have almost no meaning at very small (and possible very large) scales.
You can't measure position in quantum physics - you can only use device which responds probabilistically to a quantum 'waveform' (yes, I know it's not exactly a wave, I do have a degree in physics despite not being a physicist myself). As far as we known, the "particle" *NEVER* has an exact position or momentum, but rather is at an infinite set of locations (more strongly than others) with an infinite set of momenta, and the same with energy/time (yes, I'm abstracting away light cones and plank space/time).
Yes the position/momentum/energy/time *operators* themselves have meaning, but giving a particle these properties, which it doesn't strictly even appear to have... that's simply ridiculous. Our intuitions don't work at these levels, the best we can do is trust to the math and come up with great ideas based on the equations we find in QM.
Relativity is still "classical" physics in that it's deterministic, but its very concepts of mass, energy, time, space, and propagation of information are fundamentally different. I'm sorry, but it's just so very different from what Newton had in mind.
Within its limits of significance Newton's theory of gravitation is still just as "correct" as Relativity.
That's like saying "for whatever region of the hypothesis space a given theory gives usably correct predictions, it's useful." Of course that's true, however part of using a theory correctly is knowing how far it goes. Quantum theory has demonstrated that the fundamental concepts in newtonian physics (position, momentum, energy, time, etc) are not really meaningful when you boil things down to the lowest levels we can observe.
I mean, you can tell someone that a VCR works because there's a little man in there that knows when you said you wanted something taped and writes all the TV programs down on tape. I mean, I don't think people actually believe this, but their black-box model of a VCR is essentially equivilent to this. The reality of how a VCR works, of course, is much more complex in many ways, and involves failure modes that non-electronic type people will likely fail to predict because of their incomplete view of the situation.
Newtonian physics is not merely an appoximation error, the fundamental set of concepts and intuitions are just completely unhelpful at any scale but mezoscale (that on which we exist, somewhere between atom and star).
I, for one, really hope Apature is far improved from the original version. I have a friend who is a senior photojournalist for Time Magazine - one of the first at the magazine to use digital photography, back in the old $2000-for-three-megapixel days. He was very interested in Apature until he saw what an utter piece of junk the software was. With Apple re-organizing the development effort, one can hope they've really learned from their mistakes, and make something worth buying here.
I for one am a huge fan of Apple software, and there's little that dissapoints me more than something like that. Good luck guys!
For whatever reason I'm able to suspend disblief when it comes to radioactive spiders, glowing meteorites, and even some of the more ridiculous time travel (flying around the world really fast?!?!). These all deal with things that are so far outside of my daily life experience that they seem "fantastic" rather than merely inaccurate and sloppy.
The real problem I have is the "super strength" type characters, and how they interact with the rest of the physical world. I'm down with super strength, that's actually one of the lead imaginative powers, and I'll even buy that their bones and ligaments are stronger to compensate. What I can't deal with, however, is that strong characters picking up amazingly heavy objects must be exerting a tremendous force with their feet on whatever they are standing. This is compounded when they use their super strength to catch or throw said item, at which time the reaction force from their inertia is also so ridiculously huge that this should cause structural failure in most materials under their feet.
This concept extends also to the point of contact with whatever they are holding. The sheer amount of force on many of these items would be more than enough to cause very severe damage. Also, the torque generated when said hero swings/flings the object around would bend or break many of these items at structural weak points, if it did not simply tear off the part that they had grabbed onto.
I think the problem for me is that, having seen how materials act all of my life (and perhaps also having a rather useless degree in Physics) has caused these things to destroy suspension of disbelief. Yes, I also know that hitting superman with a large explosion should destroy his costume, or that no one could fail to recognize Clark Kent as Superman (especially considering they are basically never seen together), that radioactive animals don't give people superpowers (yet), and that gamma ray exposure is indefinitely more likely to cause cancer than it is to cause helpful mutation, but... these do not violate my intuition about the world the same way as horribly inaccurate structural mechanics.
And yes, I know it's all just make believe, and I still watch the movies and enjoy them... most of the time.
This article seems a bit lame, so I'll propose a rather pertinent question to the/.ers that decided to hang around for discussion: what forms of monetization of social networks do you think are a good idea? Are there any that won't piss off users while still making good returns? Are here any you are surprised no one is doing yet? Yes, there's advertising, but there has to be so much more there just waiting to be realized.
Yes, GDP is an unfortunate measurement for this type of analysis... I honestly don't know how to quantify the value of something like Linux (especially considering that most stuff done on linux could just as easily be done on BSD, you don't really "need" both [yes that's a complex statement and I'm only approximating the truth here]).
Yeah, well here's a news flash: Corporate America views innovation only as that which can be converted into profit.
I'm not sure that level of cynicism is exactly warrented... I mean strictly speaking, that's essentially correct, however I would add that corporations have also (at least, historically) viewed things that had potential to be monetarized as innovative and important.
Indeed many (if not all) innovations which are undertaken to serve the profit motive are extremely beneficial to individuals and society as a whole. Often times corporations will conduct basic research for the prestige/marketing, to attract highly skilled workers, or banking on long-term returns.
I would humbly suggest that economic impact (though sometimes difficult to measure) is often a very good way to estimate the importance of an innovation. After all, if it's not impacting the economy, directly or indirectly, how is it impacting people's lives?
Alright, I'm sorry but this is just too funny. I didn't RTFA (trying to be an early poster) and I responded to the article as if "handicapping" meant "crippling" rather than "giving odds." I probably shouldn't be posting so late:)
In the spirit of the old bash.org quote: I am Justin Wick of Pennsylvania, and I am an idiot.
I think Apple's priorities here are fairly close to the average consumers (especially those who support copyright even if they dislike restrictive DRM). I trust Steve Jobs' business intuition enough that I don't believe the next generation iPod will be crippled, etc. Who knows what features apple has coming? It could be a new look, a new feel, maybe lighter and brighter? To be honest, I don't know what else I want out of an MP3 player, except easier booting of linux on the damn thing, for whatever reason I'd want that..
Eh, I don't worry about the assholes w/ cell phones in theatres. I figure give it a few more years till they start with the brain cancer... *chuckles maniacally*
According to the Wikipedia article, the Wiimote uses a 1 megapixel imaging sensor to detect (what is most likely) IR light from the "sensor bar" that's placed at the bottom of your screen. To see how that works, try pointing a remote control at a digital camera or a camcorder - if you press buttons the remote, it will light up brilliantly, yet not be a distraction to humans.
To be honest, I'm not sure how they plan to get full positioning information from a horizontal bar, as I don't think any of their other sensors are absolute, which could lead to serious drift problems. They likely use Kalman filtering or some such to minimize the error, but I really do want to know how they stabilize this.
I suppose it would be theoretically possible for the Wiimote to also lock on to the display (the frequency would not matter, just the overall size and shape) and use that to reduce uncertainty, but for now we can only speculate on the inner workings. I for one can't wait to get my hands on one!
Martian Software has an interesting (if somewhat dated) piece on using statistics to cause spammers pain. Essentially it's a real-time spam filtering system that slows down messages according to how "spammy" they seem to be. For individual messages, a few seconds or more delay would cause little if any problems, but when sending millions of spams, this is a very big issue indeed.
Personally I'd like to make the spammers pay - in CPU cycles - using methods like this. Of course I'd rather beat them witha baseball bat, but that's a wee bit illegal/impractical.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend of mine took the same program, but was a few semesters behind, her tuition during the last semester was almost exactly double what I had been paying, not to mention the hundreds of dollars for overpriced books, parking pass fees, various other student fees, etc.
To be entirely honest, I don't know how it is at "most" schools. I was lucky enough (or whatever enough) to get into an Ivy League school. Tuition there is through the roof, all costs together are almost $40000 a year. But I hardly paid anything close to that. My father puts roofs on houses (though he easily could have been an engineer, and does have a college degree) and my mother is a homemaker (does a lot of volunteer stuff w/ the local church etc). People from families like mine can afford to get a first-rate education precisely because the tuition is so high that there is tons of money for financial aid, courteousy of people like my roommates, whose parents were... well off.
I think a lot of colleges realize that simply having "rich" students will not serve their long-term interest, in terms of prestige and alumni funding. They try to attract and maintain individuals who excel despite having poor financial backing... higher tuition fees help with this, and maybe I'm biased but this is a good thing.
I, like many thousands, have had the pleasure of working with Rob. I used to run #maestro to support software I co-authored at JPL, and thanks to Rob taking care of numerous problems, the support channel works beautifully, finally evolving into what is now #space.
I know our channel would not have been a success without Rob's patience and wisdom, and I enjoyed several really great discussions with the man. I had always been hoping to take him out for a beer someday... guess we should do things like that sooner rather than later.
Rob really believed in the work he was doing, and I think that that has really showed because freenode, while not perfect, is still a very productive place for develoment and support of FOSS. I hope that his dreams continue on long after today, I know that is what he would have wanted. We're going to miss you, Rob.
Note to Mods: this isn't flamebate. I heart Canada. Please send me all of your magnetic money.
I consult for a small Asterisk host, Lylix.net, and our customers couldn't be happier. It's a bitch to configure (hence we can charge $$$ for the service) but I'll be damned if it isn't a solid piece of FOSS, much like Apache. My hats are off to the Asterisk guys, it's likely to become one of the most important FOSS projects in the next 5 years or so.
I love how "ad hominem" is now a synonym for "any attack I feel is baseless." I did not mention the professional by name because it could be detrimental to his career. You can choose to believe me (I have known this person for the last 6 years), or you can choose to think I am full of it. To be honest, I do not really care. All I do care about, as far as this story is concerned, is that Apple releases a product that I won't be embarassed by.
I worked on special effects for an IMAX film (yes, I do have an IMDB entry for that) and we found some very... interesting bugs in Final Cut. Let's just say that Apple's Pro software is nowhere near as polished as their OS, etc. Doesn't play well with NFS, for one thing.
The individuals "gripes" were adequately addressed my the community at large. I very much enjoy Apple and its products (I've had a Mac since the classic in '91), however I do believe you would benefit from reading the Wikipedia articleon Ad Hominem attacks as you seem rather confused. At least you didn't post AC.
Congratulations, you can use spell check. I'm sure your mom upstairs is very proud. Mine isn't.
It's errors are completely quantifiable.
Newton's formulas are not merely missing a few parameters... they involve concepts that simply stop making any logical sense once you get down to very small scales. The idea of a "particle" even existing in a single position, as far as we can tell with modern QM, is completely absurd and meaningless. The concept of an exact momentum is equally so. The "clockwork universe" which contains action at a distance (causal nonlocality) and non-discrete space, time, energy etc (rather than discrete geometry and quanta) is simply so far from the "truth" that our experiments reveal - namely that particles act as if they are in infinite numbers of places at once (or nearly so, given plank limits on spaceitme).
You will, however, find that if you wish to predict the path of a simple artillary shell or design an automobile they are "correct," they have predictive value, specifically because the phenomenon exist within the limits of the model's significance. Taking Relativity into account does nothing but complicate the math to provide a bogus level of significance and Quantum Theory is completely irrelevant.
Back at university, I used these "wrong" theories all the time, as they are useful (if erroneous) abstractions. The problem is that theories are not merely useful for their ability to predict things within the realm of known experience, but also new and different things beyond the current frontiers. Newton's theories, as elegant and beautiful as they are, were long ago surpassed and are now almost useless when it comes to generating new predictions about unobserved phenomena in the universe. The mark of a truly good theory is not that it can compress the set of known expimental results well, but that it can predict entirely new ones, outside the original domain in which it was devised.
Newton was a far smarter man than anyone posting here on slashdot, but like Einstein, he got so very much fundamental very wrong. I think if he lived here today, he'd get new and exciting things wrong (like modern theorists) and that that's a very valuable part of science, but we really shouldn't pretend his theories are anything more than a bunch of mathematical approximations that reference intuitive concepts that have almost no meaning at very small (and possible very large) scales.
You can't measure position in quantum physics - you can only use device which responds probabilistically to a quantum 'waveform' (yes, I know it's not exactly a wave, I do have a degree in physics despite not being a physicist myself). As far as we known, the "particle" *NEVER* has an exact position or momentum, but rather is at an infinite set of locations (more strongly than others) with an infinite set of momenta, and the same with energy/time (yes, I'm abstracting away light cones and plank space/time).
Yes the position/momentum/energy/time *operators* themselves have meaning, but giving a particle these properties, which it doesn't strictly even appear to have... that's simply ridiculous. Our intuitions don't work at these levels, the best we can do is trust to the math and come up with great ideas based on the equations we find in QM.
Relativity is still "classical" physics in that it's deterministic, but its very concepts of mass, energy, time, space, and propagation of information are fundamentally different. I'm sorry, but it's just so very different from what Newton had in mind.
Within its limits of significance Newton's theory of gravitation is still just as "correct" as Relativity.
That's like saying "for whatever region of the hypothesis space a given theory gives usably correct predictions, it's useful." Of course that's true, however part of using a theory correctly is knowing how far it goes. Quantum theory has demonstrated that the fundamental concepts in newtonian physics (position, momentum, energy, time, etc) are not really meaningful when you boil things down to the lowest levels we can observe.
I mean, you can tell someone that a VCR works because there's a little man in there that knows when you said you wanted something taped and writes all the TV programs down on tape. I mean, I don't think people actually believe this, but their black-box model of a VCR is essentially equivilent to this. The reality of how a VCR works, of course, is much more complex in many ways, and involves failure modes that non-electronic type people will likely fail to predict because of their incomplete view of the situation.
Newtonian physics is not merely an appoximation error, the fundamental set of concepts and intuitions are just completely unhelpful at any scale but mezoscale (that on which we exist, somewhere between atom and star).
At last, now there is something an Aibo can properly hump. Here boy!
blinks at 1/1000 of a kWh
In these parts, we call that a Watt-hour. What are you, some kind of Canadian?
I, for one, really hope Apature is far improved from the original version. I have a friend who is a senior photojournalist for Time Magazine - one of the first at the magazine to use digital photography, back in the old $2000-for-three-megapixel days. He was very interested in Apature until he saw what an utter piece of junk the software was. With Apple re-organizing the development effort, one can hope they've really learned from their mistakes, and make something worth buying here.
I for one am a huge fan of Apple software, and there's little that dissapoints me more than something like that. Good luck guys!
I scrolled down the entire set of comments just to see this. I know, after all, that someone would have said it.
For whatever reason I'm able to suspend disblief when it comes to radioactive spiders, glowing meteorites, and even some of the more ridiculous time travel (flying around the world really fast?!?!). These all deal with things that are so far outside of my daily life experience that they seem "fantastic" rather than merely inaccurate and sloppy.
The real problem I have is the "super strength" type characters, and how they interact with the rest of the physical world. I'm down with super strength, that's actually one of the lead imaginative powers, and I'll even buy that their bones and ligaments are stronger to compensate. What I can't deal with, however, is that strong characters picking up amazingly heavy objects must be exerting a tremendous force with their feet on whatever they are standing. This is compounded when they use their super strength to catch or throw said item, at which time the reaction force from their inertia is also so ridiculously huge that this should cause structural failure in most materials under their feet.
This concept extends also to the point of contact with whatever they are holding. The sheer amount of force on many of these items would be more than enough to cause very severe damage. Also, the torque generated when said hero swings/flings the object around would bend or break many of these items at structural weak points, if it did not simply tear off the part that they had grabbed onto.
I think the problem for me is that, having seen how materials act all of my life (and perhaps also having a rather useless degree in Physics) has caused these things to destroy suspension of disbelief. Yes, I also know that hitting superman with a large explosion should destroy his costume, or that no one could fail to recognize Clark Kent as Superman (especially considering they are basically never seen together), that radioactive animals don't give people superpowers (yet), and that gamma ray exposure is indefinitely more likely to cause cancer than it is to cause helpful mutation, but... these do not violate my intuition about the world the same way as horribly inaccurate structural mechanics.
And yes, I know it's all just make believe, and I still watch the movies and enjoy them... most of the time.
This article seems a bit lame, so I'll propose a rather pertinent question to the /.ers that decided to hang around for discussion: what forms of monetization of social networks do you think are a good idea? Are there any that won't piss off users while still making good returns? Are here any you are surprised no one is doing yet? Yes, there's advertising, but there has to be so much more there just waiting to be realized.
Yes, GDP is an unfortunate measurement for this type of analysis... I honestly don't know how to quantify the value of something like Linux (especially considering that most stuff done on linux could just as easily be done on BSD, you don't really "need" both [yes that's a complex statement and I'm only approximating the truth here]).
Are you aware of a better concrete measure?
Yeah, well here's a news flash: Corporate America views innovation only as that which can be converted into profit.
I'm not sure that level of cynicism is exactly warrented... I mean strictly speaking, that's essentially correct, however I would add that corporations have also (at least, historically) viewed things that had potential to be monetarized as innovative and important.
Indeed many (if not all) innovations which are undertaken to serve the profit motive are extremely beneficial to individuals and society as a whole. Often times corporations will conduct basic research for the prestige/marketing, to attract highly skilled workers, or banking on long-term returns.
I would humbly suggest that economic impact (though sometimes difficult to measure) is often a very good way to estimate the importance of an innovation. After all, if it's not impacting the economy, directly or indirectly, how is it impacting people's lives?
Alright, I'm sorry but this is just too funny. I didn't RTFA (trying to be an early poster) and I responded to the article as if "handicapping" meant "crippling" rather than "giving odds." I probably shouldn't be posting so late :)
In the spirit of the old bash.org quote: I am Justin Wick of Pennsylvania, and I am an idiot.
I think Apple's priorities here are fairly close to the average consumers (especially those who support copyright even if they dislike restrictive DRM). I trust Steve Jobs' business intuition enough that I don't believe the next generation iPod will be crippled, etc. Who knows what features apple has coming? It could be a new look, a new feel, maybe lighter and brighter? To be honest, I don't know what else I want out of an MP3 player, except easier booting of linux on the damn thing, for whatever reason I'd want that..
I think they may be talking about two different things (Hot Earths and Normal Earths).
I'm sorry to inform you, sir, but I have prior art.
Where is it you say? I'm wearing it, baby!
Eh, I don't worry about the assholes w/ cell phones in theatres. I figure give it a few more years till they start with the brain cancer... *chuckles maniacally*
Step 1: Steal Underpants
Step 2: Re-sell w/ sewn-in camera cell phone
Step 3: Profit!
According to the Wikipedia article, the Wiimote uses a 1 megapixel imaging sensor to detect (what is most likely) IR light from the "sensor bar" that's placed at the bottom of your screen. To see how that works, try pointing a remote control at a digital camera or a camcorder - if you press buttons the remote, it will light up brilliantly, yet not be a distraction to humans.
To be honest, I'm not sure how they plan to get full positioning information from a horizontal bar, as I don't think any of their other sensors are absolute, which could lead to serious drift problems. They likely use Kalman filtering or some such to minimize the error, but I really do want to know how they stabilize this.
I suppose it would be theoretically possible for the Wiimote to also lock on to the display (the frequency would not matter, just the overall size and shape) and use that to reduce uncertainty, but for now we can only speculate on the inner workings. I for one can't wait to get my hands on one!
Martian Software has an interesting (if somewhat dated) piece on using statistics to cause spammers pain. Essentially it's a real-time spam filtering system that slows down messages according to how "spammy" they seem to be. For individual messages, a few seconds or more delay would cause little if any problems, but when sending millions of spams, this is a very big issue indeed.
Personally I'd like to make the spammers pay - in CPU cycles - using methods like this. Of course I'd rather beat them witha baseball bat, but that's a wee bit illegal/impractical.