One advantage I see to installing Linux on computers of family members, though, is the ease of administration/patch etc. As long as the computer is on a constant-on internet link (and who doesn't in the day of broadband), and as long as SSHD didn't break, I can always ssh in, su to root, fix whatever broke in whoever's directory, run whatever update I need, without having to leave my house/dorm, drive over and pop in a CD-ROM. Think about it, with the prevalence of remote system administering, why not take the burden off of your parents/siblings? For all my mother cared, KDE is just like Windows (okay, the four virtual desktop thing scared her the first time, but she got over it quick enough).
I don't keep a blog for just blog's sake, I keep it as a random scrap book as what I've been doing: what programming projects I was working on, how much progress I made, or what-ever the heck interests me at the moment. It is mostly stuff I know I will forget sooner or later but would like to remember. Now, friends and family come and check it out (which is extremely useful when you have both scattered all around the world, makes a good way to keep in contact with everyone who cares without spamming 100 or so people).
But I don't think I would ever keep a blog on places like livejournal and such. I also like to have room for other things on my website... the blog is only part of it.
On the third thought, what exactly is the difference between/. journal and a weblog? I don't write in the former because, well, I cannot post to/. from the commandline, and I can for my blog. But aren't they practically the same? Except that/. actually allows moderation?
Assignation here is Legalese for the transfer of rights or property, so the poster and the article are using the word in its correct meaning. cf. Oxford English Dictionary (funny, None of the online dictionaries that I know of actually show this meaning besides the OED, which requires an institutional license for access).
So no, I don't think he really counts as a mathematician as far as Nobel committee is concerned; I think the prize was more for his political activism and his writings relating to that (for example: The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism or The Freedom and Organisation 1814-1914) rather than his Principles of Mathematics or Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
since I would hope you wouldn't need much of a bang to move in the Martian gravity
Martian gravity is 0.38g, so the 180kg rover would weigh in at 72kg equivalent force, or around 150lbs for the metric challenged.
If by smallest model rocket engines you are referring to these babies, then you are definitely out of luck... they only produce force on the hundred-gram scale. Furthermore, considering that model rocket engines typically do not come with its own oxygen source, I expect that light atmosphere conditions on Mars would decrease the burn rate, and only make the output less.
So it prolly ain't gonna work unless you attach a custom-built rocket, then you might as well spend the money on making the Rover less prone to getting stuck....
I've considered doing that many times, and even wrote my own scripts to do so. But if massive number of people adopt to flooding web forms, I see a natural medium for DDoS attacks:
Cracker: hum, I don't like [insert site name here], hah, they have a contact us page... now...
[sends out SPAM containing links to that page]
Instant/.!
Most people using cable and ADSL, unless they've been on an extended trip, or has the habit of bringing their laptops around, composing emails, and bring them home to send it, will NOT do the compose message offline, mail them online activities typical of dialup users.
Unless you are running a mailing list, or are CC'ing your entire social group, it really shouldn't matter.
The picture is actually correct, for the C-60. The C-60 bucky ball IS shaped like a soccerball. It doesn't have 60 sides. It has 60 carbon atoms. The soccerball (a truncated icosahedron) has 12 pentagons on it whose vertices accounts for all the vertices of the solid.
RTFA. The second link specifically mentions that it also holds the title of the World's highest occupied floor. A few posts down is an analysis of the four different ranking schemes to determine tallest. Taipei 101 got 3 out of the 4. And since Petronas is kinda a fake.. perhaps Sears still has the last one?
W
It is not so much what is outside. The important part is the geometry of the universe.
By saying that our universe is shaped like X, we are saying that it adopts the same geometric characteristics as X. For example, if X is a sphere (the surface of a ball), light travels in great circles, and every path eventually comes back to itself, and every two path eventually intersect on the other side of the universe (by path I mean the route taken by light). If X is just one big amorphous infinite blob (R^3) as usually assumed, if you send a signal in one direction, it will never come back on its own. And two light paths starting from the same point should never intersect. (Of course, I am ignoring gravitation effects of GR here. Just talking about a plain ole' empty universe)
On the other hand, if X is a torus (think the surface of a donut, or bagel, or inner tube), then the paths you can take becomes more interesting: you can go "around" the universe in two different routes which, unlike in the case of the sphere, will not intersect each other.
So my friend, it makes a heck of a lot of a difference what the universe "looks like".
Gentoo and Knoppix ISOs.
Stuff like the Blood Gulch Chronicles
or the LoTR and Matrix trailers
Bittorrent speeds up the downloads for these by quite some factors. I believe the speed up might even be linear to the number of users for the first 4 or 5.
I am not kidding. P2P just doesn't do it for me. The music I listen to are either too old or too obscure to find on p2p networks. It is much easier to borrow a CD from the music library or talk to your friends and listen to their CD's.
Is it really possible to "scan inside the computer"? I know that with many of my peers, the computer is so poorly locked down that anyone on the subnet can get read/write priv. to their Windows boxes. But there are also a great number who pay attention to such things. And wouldn't bypassing security/privacy for PC's constitute cyber-crime?
Since the article didn't really elaborate, my best guess is that for Icarus to be legit, all they can really do is to do a port scan on the machines. The "worms and viruses" they refer too often open up otherwise unused ports, and the classic 6*** ports used by P2P apps can be easily determined.
The article mentions that
Icarus then scans their computer, detects any worms, viruses or programs that act as a server, such as Kazaa.
One way to read is the program scans the computer's contents and look for files, viruses and apps. Another way to look at it is the program scans the computer's ports and see if there's anything listening on ports that is "not allowed" to be open, i.e. worms that act as servers, viruses that act as servers AND apps that act as servers.
My school implemented a similar policy last year, when they monitor the traffic going to and from common p2p ports, and only allow us to have one upload going on at a given time. (The school acknowledges the legit uses of p2p, and so long as you don't violate copyright, you are wellcome to use it, if you do not overburden the university network. It was a purely bandwidth issue.) Other servers, such as the ones for games, or http or ftp (and as far as I can tell, SMTP too) are left to the owner's discretion.
My reading of the article is that the school created nothing more than an automated Portscan->Winpopup->Email->Access-Shutdow n system.
On a different note, I found it quite perculiar that no student have spoken up against UF's guilty until proven innocent stance. And blocking LAN games? That hardly consumes any bandwidth (going in and out of the university infrastructure), and I certainly hope that the Dorms are not so crowded that half a dozen guys playing Unreal Tournament drags down the network for the entire building! If that's the case, you wouldn't want to live there to start with.
Then again, I loved the quote
The no file-servers policy has actually been in place for several years because several enterprising students had used the university network covertly to run their own commercial websites, some of which were illegal, according to Bird.
"One of the more popular websites for creating fake IDs was run off one of the student computers in the residence halls," he said. "It was up for about a month and a half. That example highlights exactly what you don't want to happen.
"The peer-to-peer file-sharing policy is a direct extension of that," he said.
Yep. University life should be just like real life. We banned the making of bicycles because some hoodlum terrorized pedestrians and committed robbery on one.
Formatting and writing are two completely different things. It doesn't matter whether you decide to do one or the other first. And TeX (and variants like LaTeX or tetex) lets you do exactly that. Granted, there are a few things to get used to: \$ instead of $, '' instead of ", but that learning curve is extremely low. And doesn't slow down production at all once it's gotten used to.
And I think editing in some editor (vi, emacs, take your pick) and typing in some TeX compatible way is probably one way most similar to actually doing so on a typewriter. Most non-graphical editors don't feature page break lines, which, really only ought to matter when you require to start a new page for a new chapter etc. All those can be done by simple commands.
And speaking of graphical editors, have you experienced the pain of having your careful setup, with a new page for every chapter, completely ruined by adding one line to the second paragraph of the first chapter?
Not true. I parsed it perfectly at first sight, (except for the "cheerio" bit) at speeds equal to my normal reading. I believe experience is the key. Even though English is my second/third language, it is still one I've been in contact with for 10 years or so. I am more inclined to suggest an alternate solution proposed above, regarding whether someone is fluent both in reading and speaking. It is possible that your parents did not have extensive experience reading English text.
To bring the whole discussion into perspective, I also suggest another test I tried when I was younger with Chinese. It being my native language, and I started reading around the age of 4, I realized that by 4th grade, I stopped deciphering words on paper one by one. I read them in whole sentences/lines. I.e. I visually take in the contents of a entire block of text between punctuation marks and parse them all at the same time. What's more is that there are a rather large number of words that I could recognize on paper but that I could not write myself. See, after a certain point, my brain is trained that it only perceive the general shape of a character, a sort of fuzzy matching that allows it to translate the words into ideas, and this fuzzy logic prevented me from truly grasping the details in the making of the characters, and hence my difficulty in writing. Furthermore, Chinese is still a fairly redundant language. So 9 times out of 10 I can probably guess what an entire paragraph of 100 words is about by randomly polling around 20 of the words. That ability to "fill in the blank" is what allowed me to read in blocks.
Now to bring this back into the discussion, I think one clue that was neglected is the natural flow of English. I mean, if I just have a jumble of 20 random words each passed through the scrambling filter, I'd bet many people would have difficult times reading them. Try
mhmettaacis sanpk gdaratue bguoh sliiocn
I think the fact that there are very many none-scramblable words ( (In case you are wondering, the five words are Mathematics Spank Graduate Bough and Silicon)
W
Re:the dark side of gentoo...
on
Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 1
My bad. My wording wasn't quite clear. Someone pointed out that the ebuilds and rc scripts are bash scripts. Whereas that put me in doubt of the validity of my claim that rc scripts are python, I am certain that ebuilds are at least partially python scripts. Quoth Gentoo.org:
The Portage system is a merge of a Python core with Bash script based Ebuilds. Instead of dealing with Makefiles and the make command, Portage leverages the power of Python and the ease of use of shell scripting with some object oriented characteristics to make a uniquely powerful system we dare think puts Portage ahead of all current ports systems.
Re:I've switched to gentoo then off and now return
on
Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 1
I had one of those intel motherboards with sound built in, and wasn't supported back when I was using the 2.4.19 kernel (I had to use.20-ac to get it recognized at all).
Not so recently I started using the 2.5 kernel branch, and I got no sound. At first I thought it was a kernel problem again. But no, it wasn't. After some digging around, I've narrowed it down to ALSA. But no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to work.
I tried various versions of ALSA and no luck.
And then, one day, while messing around, I typed alsa/tab/tab/ and in the list was a program called "alsamixer".
For some reason, the compilation of alsa-tools is such that everytime you reboot, the default setting for volume in alsa is that everything is muted (In alsamixer, you see MM on top of the muted volume control). So it turns out that the sound works all along! All I needed to do was turn on the volume.... -grumble-
Not saying that this is your case, but heck, I know many a geeks who overlooks the simplest solution to a problem.
Cheers,
W
Re:the dark side of gentoo...
on
Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 1
hum, point 1 already resolved by another post.
point 2: gcc is not a python script. though everything else is. The ebuilds are written in python, so are all the rc scripts if you haven't figured that out. But if you are building anything from source, you would most likely be going through a configure script to get your makefile anyway. The ebuild script just simplifies everything in one step.
And why would you need a cli to check options in ebuild scripts anyway? go edit it with your favorite text editor, and emerge with your own version. You can specify specific ebuild script to use on command line.
W
Excellent view?
on
Gentoo Reviewed
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· Score: 4, Interesting
Isn't 1900 words a tadbit short for an "excellent view" of Gentoo linux?
Personally, I don't think the article did a fair job describing the Gentoo philosophy. Having widely sampled flavors of linux and bsd, I found the installation process to be most similar to that of OpenBSD. It is commandline all the way. Which is good for me, because I don't really go for the eyecandies of a GUI installation (they make me dizzy). And after the basic install, what you get is much similar to the base system you get after the openbsd install: a system that boots, can access the network, with some simple tools.
I think the main reason Gentoo won me over was the portage system. After having used the BSD ports system, I found the concept very pleasurable. the gentoo emerge is truly wonderful, it solves the dependency issue with source compiles automatically, while still allowing the control over compilation options.
A note about the compilation time though. Whereas a typical compile of KDE or GNOME would take forever (a whole day and some on my P4 2Ghz), Gentoo recently started the Gentoo Refernce Platform, with certain packages offered in binary form. Mostly the packages that would take a long time to compile.
Also on the analogy to Debian's stable v. unstable versions, I don't think the article was quite correct in saying that Gentoo has "one branch". By using the "~ARCH" keyword in the configuration, Gentoo allows the using to emerge from packages still in testing, not unlike Debian's unstable branch. There were quite a few packages that were only available in the unstable branch (until recently), one example that I remember is bittorrent. And for many packages present in the stable branch, the unstable branch is, as its name suggests, a few releases more up to date.
And I don't think Gentoo was a release "designed for geeks only". The forums often give wonderful aid to newbs, and the documentation pretty much let you do everything with a step by step instruction if you so choose. As for the complaint about etc-update, personally I found the software very self-explanatory, and it is basically just a script that searches the directories for updates to config files and offer you the option of running sdiff on the old and the new (which, incidentally, I've been doing for 5 months by hand before discovering etc-update).
The only complaint, after running Gentoo for 7 months, is the occasionally lack of packages. But given that it is a relatively new distro, it really isn't all that surprising that some items that I would find helpful do not come in nice little ebuild scripts. I guess I could go and contribute by writing my own...
But all in all, I think that to truly appreciate/understand the experience, the only way is to install Gentoo yourself and try it out.
Neither the accusations of the plaintiffs, nor the response provided by the company, had any indication that the two techs involved were fired for "snooping around". The official reason for dismissal after two probation letters were things like "repeated tardiness" or "combative attitude toward superiours". That had nothing to do with them looking at the contents of the clients.
The plaintiffs brought suit because they believed that they were fired for actions that cause the company and the client to lose face. And the "official" reason for their dismissal, quoth the plaintiffs (even if they believe those to be just excuses) had nothing to do with their actions in that particular incidents. Putting those togather does not tell you that the company "allegedly fired the employees for looking around in the client's computers."
What would you do if somebody send in a computer for repairs suspected of having a virus? Granted that chances of finding a virus infected file in a subdirectory of "C:/My Music" is low, if I can't find the virus anywhere else, I would still go in a look, at least to make sure there aren't say, any sketchy looking executables downloaded off KaZaA or anything.
But that is all just an aside, see. If the company had fired the techs for "unethical" actions, than your point would have been valid. But the question in point is not whether the techs did the right thing, it is whether their unemployment is an indirect result of the "right thing" embarassing their company.
W
Re:This is why Human Interface Design is important
on
Making Change
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· Score: 4, Informative
Some egghead thinks "optimal" means "fewest coins returned in change, on average."
No no no. Academia don't have to think about definitions. We just define it that way.
Be seriously, RTFA, people. The important part of this result is not that 18 or 83 cent recommendations. The author did it in jest in reference to the phrase "What this country needs is a good five cent cigar". (cited in the footnote of the paper). Just wait for/. to come along and rip everything out of context.
The important part of this paper is the second half, the general analysis of methods for finding "optimal" denominations or "optimal" change returns (the first defined to minimize the number of coins returned on average, the second defined as given a set denomination, finding the best way to represent a given amount). It gives asymtotic results. It is more of a computer science excercise then anything else.
W
Re:Forget it.
on
Making Change
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· Score: 5, Informative
Quoth Terry Pratchett and/or Neil Gaimen (as they coauthored, and I have no idea which came up with this) in Good Omens:
NOTE FOR YOUNG PEOPLE AND AMERICANS: One shilling = Five Pee. It helps to understand the antique finances of the Witchfinder Army if you know the original British monetary system:
Two farthings = One Ha'penny. Two ha'pennies = One Penny. Three pennies = A Thrupenny Bit. Two Thrupences = A Sixpence. Two Sixpences = One Shilling, or Bob. Two Bob = A Florin. One Florin and one Sixpence = Half a Crown. Four Half Crowns = Ten Bob Note. Two Ten Bob Notes = One Pound (or 240 pennies). One Pound and One Shilling = One Guinea.
The British resisted decimalized currency for a long time because they thought it was too complicated.
But does it apply in real life?
on
Making Change
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· Score: 1
From what I gather in the paper itself, this is more an excercise in optimization and linear algebra than actual viable suggestion.
In the paper itself, the author acknowledges the obvious problem with his analysis: the assumption that prices are equidistributive. He cited two possible sources for non-equidistribution of prices, that of Benford's law and that of the fact that many "labeled" prices we see today ends in the digit "9".
Personally, I don't think Benford's law should play a big influence, at least in the U.S. Since it mostly applies to the leading digit, and I would have a hard time believing that most items sold in the US are priced at $0.1x. In Canada, however, with the smallest bill being 5 dollars, the law might favor purchases of $1.xx over say those with $4.xx.
Also, in regards to the speculation about prices ending in the digit "9", it is well known in analysis that the quantity N*a, where N is an integer and a = p/q irreducible, is equidistributive up to the nearest 1/q. Applying that to the prices, even if the prices have a tendency to end at the digit "9", after the tax, we should consider $0.09 * (1+tax) + some integer * (1+tax)/10 . Which would smooth out the distribution.
Though I speculate that given the current implementation of a sales tax, neither of the author's speculation by themselves would cause a skewed distribution in final amount of change required, we see that combining the two might cause a problem. Since with Branford's law our choice of integer to multiply the tax rate with would not have even distribution, and this might cause a difference. But the analysis is too complicated, and I will leave that for greater minds (or minds not preparing for a final exam) to ponder.
Slashdot Mirror
Sesequepedalianism? That's not even spelled right!
Per the OED:
sesquipedalian. adj. and n. of and related to the use of long words.
One advantage I see to installing Linux on computers of family members, though, is the ease of administration/patch etc. As long as the computer is on a constant-on internet link (and who doesn't in the day of broadband), and as long as SSHD didn't break, I can always ssh in, su to root, fix whatever broke in whoever's directory, run whatever update I need, without having to leave my house/dorm, drive over and pop in a CD-ROM. Think about it, with the prevalence of remote system administering, why not take the burden off of your parents/siblings? For all my mother cared, KDE is just like Windows (okay, the four virtual desktop thing scared her the first time, but she got over it quick enough).
hear hear!
/. journal and a weblog? I don't write in the former because, well, I cannot post to /. from the commandline, and I can for my blog. But aren't they practically the same? Except that /. actually allows moderation?
I don't keep a blog for just blog's sake, I keep it as a random scrap book as what I've been doing: what programming projects I was working on, how much progress I made, or what-ever the heck interests me at the moment. It is mostly stuff I know I will forget sooner or later but would like to remember. Now, friends and family come and check it out (which is extremely useful when you have both scattered all around the world, makes a good way to keep in contact with everyone who cares without spamming 100 or so people).
But I don't think I would ever keep a blog on places like livejournal and such. I also like to have room for other things on my website... the blog is only part of it.
On the third thought, what exactly is the difference between
No no no!
Assignation here is Legalese for the transfer of rights or property, so the poster and the article are using the word in its correct meaning. cf. Oxford English Dictionary (funny, None of the online dictionaries that I know of actually show this meaning besides the OED, which requires an institutional license for access).
Well, he was awarded the nobel prize for literature for "his varied and significant writings in which he champions humanitarian ideals and freedom of thought"
So no, I don't think he really counts as a mathematician as far as Nobel committee is concerned; I think the prize was more for his political activism and his writings relating to that (for example: The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism or The Freedom and Organisation 1814-1914) rather than his Principles of Mathematics or Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy
Nope. This really isn't stuff that matters, nor is it news. Chu won the Nobel for it 7 years ago (along with Claude-Tannoudji and Phillips).
Martian gravity is 0.38g, so the 180kg rover would weigh in at 72kg equivalent force, or around 150lbs for the metric challenged.
If by smallest model rocket engines you are referring to these babies, then you are definitely out of luck... they only produce force on the hundred-gram scale. Furthermore, considering that model rocket engines typically do not come with its own oxygen source, I expect that light atmosphere conditions on Mars would decrease the burn rate, and only make the output less.
So it prolly ain't gonna work unless you attach a custom-built rocket, then you might as well spend the money on making the Rover less prone to getting stuck....
I've considered doing that many times, and even wrote my own scripts to do so. But if massive number of people adopt to flooding web forms, I see a natural medium for DDoS attacks:
/.!
Cracker: hum, I don't like [insert site name here], hah, they have a contact us page... now...
[sends out SPAM containing links to that page]
Instant
Most people using cable and ADSL, unless they've been on an extended trip, or has the habit of bringing their laptops around, composing emails, and bring them home to send it, will NOT do the compose message offline, mail them online activities typical of dialup users.
Unless you are running a mailing list, or are CC'ing your entire social group, it really shouldn't matter.
W
Yes, actually an infinite number of values. The same way that the integers in discrete, but infinite in number.
The picture is actually correct, for the C-60. The C-60 bucky ball IS shaped like a soccerball. It doesn't have 60 sides. It has 60 carbon atoms. The soccerball (a truncated icosahedron) has 12 pentagons on it whose vertices accounts for all the vertices of the solid.
W
RTFA. The second link specifically mentions that it also holds the title of the World's highest occupied floor. A few posts down is an analysis of the four different ranking schemes to determine tallest. Taipei 101 got 3 out of the 4. And since Petronas is kinda a fake.. perhaps Sears still has the last one? W
It is not so much what is outside. The important part is the geometry of the universe.
By saying that our universe is shaped like X, we are saying that it adopts the same geometric characteristics as X. For example, if X is a sphere (the surface of a ball), light travels in great circles, and every path eventually comes back to itself, and every two path eventually intersect on the other side of the universe (by path I mean the route taken by light). If X is just one big amorphous infinite blob (R^3) as usually assumed, if you send a signal in one direction, it will never come back on its own. And two light paths starting from the same point should never intersect. (Of course, I am ignoring gravitation effects of GR here. Just talking about a plain ole' empty universe)
On the other hand, if X is a torus (think the surface of a donut, or bagel, or inner tube), then the paths you can take becomes more interesting: you can go "around" the universe in two different routes which, unlike in the case of the sphere, will not intersect each other.
So my friend, it makes a heck of a lot of a difference what the universe "looks like".
Gentoo and Knoppix ISOs.
Stuff like the Blood Gulch Chronicles
or the LoTR and Matrix trailers
Bittorrent speeds up the downloads for these by quite some factors. I believe the speed up might even be linear to the number of users for the first 4 or 5.
I am not kidding. P2P just doesn't do it for me. The music I listen to are either too old or too obscure to find on p2p networks. It is much easier to borrow a CD from the music library or talk to your friends and listen to their CD's.
W
Since the article didn't really elaborate, my best guess is that for Icarus to be legit, all they can really do is to do a port scan on the machines. The "worms and viruses" they refer too often open up otherwise unused ports, and the classic 6*** ports used by P2P apps can be easily determined.
The article mentions that One way to read is the program scans the computer's contents and look for files, viruses and apps. Another way to look at it is the program scans the computer's ports and see if there's anything listening on ports that is "not allowed" to be open, i.e. worms that act as servers, viruses that act as servers AND apps that act as servers.
My school implemented a similar policy last year, when they monitor the traffic going to and from common p2p ports, and only allow us to have one upload going on at a given time. (The school acknowledges the legit uses of p2p, and so long as you don't violate copyright, you are wellcome to use it, if you do not overburden the university network. It was a purely bandwidth issue.) Other servers, such as the ones for games, or http or ftp (and as far as I can tell, SMTP too) are left to the owner's discretion.
My reading of the article is that the school created nothing more than an automated Portscan->Winpopup->Email->Access-Shutdow n system.
On a different note, I found it quite perculiar that no student have spoken up against UF's guilty until proven innocent stance. And blocking LAN games? That hardly consumes any bandwidth (going in and out of the university infrastructure), and I certainly hope that the Dorms are not so crowded that half a dozen guys playing Unreal Tournament drags down the network for the entire building! If that's the case, you wouldn't want to live there to start with.
Then again, I loved the quote Yep. University life should be just like real life. We banned the making of bicycles because some hoodlum terrorized pedestrians and committed robbery on one.
W
One word. TeX.
Formatting and writing are two completely different things. It doesn't matter whether you decide to do one or the other first. And TeX (and variants like LaTeX or tetex) lets you do exactly that. Granted, there are a few things to get used to: \$ instead of $, '' instead of ", but that learning curve is extremely low. And doesn't slow down production at all once it's gotten used to.
And I think editing in some editor (vi, emacs, take your pick) and typing in some TeX compatible way is probably one way most similar to actually doing so on a typewriter. Most non-graphical editors don't feature page break lines, which, really only ought to matter when you require to start a new page for a new chapter etc. All those can be done by simple commands.
And speaking of graphical editors, have you experienced the pain of having your careful setup, with a new page for every chapter, completely ruined by adding one line to the second paragraph of the first chapter?
To bring the whole discussion into perspective, I also suggest another test I tried when I was younger with Chinese. It being my native language, and I started reading around the age of 4, I realized that by 4th grade, I stopped deciphering words on paper one by one. I read them in whole sentences/lines. I.e. I visually take in the contents of a entire block of text between punctuation marks and parse them all at the same time. What's more is that there are a rather large number of words that I could recognize on paper but that I could not write myself. See, after a certain point, my brain is trained that it only perceive the general shape of a character, a sort of fuzzy matching that allows it to translate the words into ideas, and this fuzzy logic prevented me from truly grasping the details in the making of the characters, and hence my difficulty in writing. Furthermore, Chinese is still a fairly redundant language. So 9 times out of 10 I can probably guess what an entire paragraph of 100 words is about by randomly polling around 20 of the words. That ability to "fill in the blank" is what allowed me to read in blocks.
Now to bring this back into the discussion, I think one clue that was neglected is the natural flow of English. I mean, if I just have a jumble of 20 random words each passed through the scrambling filter, I'd bet many people would have difficult times reading them. Try I think the fact that there are very many none-scramblable words (
(In case you are wondering, the five words are Mathematics Spank Graduate Bough and Silicon)
W
W
I had one of those intel motherboards with sound built in, and wasn't supported back when I was using the 2.4.19 kernel (I had to use .20-ac to get it recognized at all).
/tab/tab/ and in the list was a program called "alsamixer".
Not so recently I started using the 2.5 kernel branch, and I got no sound. At first I thought it was a kernel problem again. But no, it wasn't. After some digging around, I've narrowed it down to ALSA. But no matter what I tried, I couldn't get it to work.
I tried various versions of ALSA and no luck.
And then, one day, while messing around, I typed alsa
For some reason, the compilation of alsa-tools is such that everytime you reboot, the default setting for volume in alsa is that everything is muted (In alsamixer, you see MM on top of the muted volume control). So it turns out that the sound works all along! All I needed to do was turn on the volume.... -grumble-
Not saying that this is your case, but heck, I know many a geeks who overlooks the simplest solution to a problem.
Cheers,
W
hum, point 1 already resolved by another post.
point 2: gcc is not a python script. though everything else is. The ebuilds are written in python, so are all the rc scripts if you haven't figured that out. But if you are building anything from source, you would most likely be going through a configure script to get your makefile anyway. The ebuild script just simplifies everything in one step.
And why would you need a cli to check options in ebuild scripts anyway? go edit it with your favorite text editor, and emerge with your own version. You can specify specific ebuild script to use on command line.
W
Isn't 1900 words a tadbit short for an "excellent view" of Gentoo linux?
Personally, I don't think the article did a fair job describing the Gentoo philosophy. Having widely sampled flavors of linux and bsd, I found the installation process to be most similar to that of OpenBSD. It is commandline all the way. Which is good for me, because I don't really go for the eyecandies of a GUI installation (they make me dizzy). And after the basic install, what you get is much similar to the base system you get after the openbsd install: a system that boots, can access the network, with some simple tools.
I think the main reason Gentoo won me over was the portage system. After having used the BSD ports system, I found the concept very pleasurable. the gentoo emerge is truly wonderful, it solves the dependency issue with source compiles automatically, while still allowing the control over compilation options.
A note about the compilation time though. Whereas a typical compile of KDE or GNOME would take forever (a whole day and some on my P4 2Ghz), Gentoo recently started the Gentoo Refernce Platform, with certain packages offered in binary form. Mostly the packages that would take a long time to compile.
Also on the analogy to Debian's stable v. unstable versions, I don't think the article was quite correct in saying that Gentoo has "one branch". By using the "~ARCH" keyword in the configuration, Gentoo allows the using to emerge from packages still in testing, not unlike Debian's unstable branch. There were quite a few packages that were only available in the unstable branch (until recently), one example that I remember is bittorrent. And for many packages present in the stable branch, the unstable branch is, as its name suggests, a few releases more up to date.
And I don't think Gentoo was a release "designed for geeks only". The forums often give wonderful aid to newbs, and the documentation pretty much let you do everything with a step by step instruction if you so choose. As for the complaint about etc-update, personally I found the software very self-explanatory, and it is basically just a script that searches the directories for updates to config files and offer you the option of running sdiff on the old and the new (which, incidentally, I've been doing for 5 months by hand before discovering etc-update).
The only complaint, after running Gentoo for 7 months, is the occasionally lack of packages. But given that it is a relatively new distro, it really isn't all that surprising that some items that I would find helpful do not come in nice little ebuild scripts. I guess I could go and contribute by writing my own...
But all in all, I think that to truly appreciate/understand the experience, the only way is to install Gentoo yourself and try it out.
W
Read the article please!
Neither the accusations of the plaintiffs, nor the response provided by the company, had any indication that the two techs involved were fired for "snooping around". The official reason for dismissal after two probation letters were things like "repeated tardiness" or "combative attitude toward superiours". That had nothing to do with them looking at the contents of the clients.
The plaintiffs brought suit because they believed that they were fired for actions that cause the company and the client to lose face. And the "official" reason for their dismissal, quoth the plaintiffs (even if they believe those to be just excuses) had nothing to do with their actions in that particular incidents. Putting those togather does not tell you that the company "allegedly fired the employees for looking around in the client's computers."
What would you do if somebody send in a computer for repairs suspected of having a virus? Granted that chances of finding a virus infected file in a subdirectory of "C:/My Music" is low, if I can't find the virus anywhere else, I would still go in a look, at least to make sure there aren't say, any sketchy looking executables downloaded off KaZaA or anything.
But that is all just an aside, see. If the company had fired the techs for "unethical" actions, than your point would have been valid. But the question in point is not whether the techs did the right thing, it is whether their unemployment is an indirect result of the "right thing" embarassing their company.
W
Some egghead thinks "optimal" means "fewest coins returned in change, on average."
/. to come along and rip everything out of context.
No no no. Academia don't have to think about definitions. We just define it that way.
Be seriously, RTFA, people. The important part of this result is not that 18 or 83 cent recommendations. The author did it in jest in reference to the phrase "What this country needs is a good five cent cigar". (cited in the footnote of the paper). Just wait for
The important part of this paper is the second half, the general analysis of methods for finding "optimal" denominations or "optimal" change returns (the first defined to minimize the number of coins returned on average, the second defined as given a set denomination, finding the best way to represent a given amount). It gives asymtotic results. It is more of a computer science excercise then anything else.
W
From what I gather in the paper itself, this is more an excercise in optimization and linear algebra than actual viable suggestion.
In the paper itself, the author acknowledges the obvious problem with his analysis: the assumption that prices are equidistributive. He cited two possible sources for non-equidistribution of prices, that of Benford's law and that of the fact that many "labeled" prices we see today ends in the digit "9".
Personally, I don't think Benford's law should play a big influence, at least in the U.S. Since it mostly applies to the leading digit, and I would have a hard time believing that most items sold in the US are priced at $0.1x. In Canada, however, with the smallest bill being 5 dollars, the law might favor purchases of $1.xx over say those with $4.xx.
Also, in regards to the speculation about prices ending in the digit "9", it is well known in analysis that the quantity N*a, where N is an integer and a = p/q irreducible, is equidistributive up to the nearest 1/q. Applying that to the prices, even if the prices have a tendency to end at the digit "9", after the tax, we should consider $0.09 * (1+tax) + some integer * (1+tax)/10 . Which would smooth out the distribution.
Though I speculate that given the current implementation of a sales tax, neither of the author's speculation by themselves would cause a skewed distribution in final amount of change required, we see that combining the two might cause a problem. Since with Branford's law our choice of integer to multiply the tax rate with would not have even distribution, and this might cause a difference. But the analysis is too complicated, and I will leave that for greater minds (or minds not preparing for a final exam) to ponder.
Cheers,
W