I rode through Germany last weekend and couldn't believe all the solar cells I saw. Balconies, rooftops, entire sides of buildings. It's quite impressive. I'm not surprised that they generate so much power even with their climate.
It's really tautological; information is entirely non-physical and therefore fundamentally can not be a physical good. It can have physical manifestations...
That's silly. Information must have a physical manifestation. It's in your brain cells, it's in electromagnetic waves, it's on paper -- otherwise it doesn't exist. Information theory even defines it in terms of entropy which is a property of matter. Maxwell's daemon and all that.
Well, if you want to motivate a child, perhaps you do have to have the latest and greatest, or at least something with some cool factor.
I'm not so sure. The "cool" part of playing with the old machines is that there was little abstraction back then keeping you away from the bits. If you poked the right memory location with the right number, the pixels on your screen would change. Poke another bit and you'll hear a click on your speaker. That's very cool, in my old timer opinion, and something the kids today almost never get to see. Everything they're learning is so abstract that they don't understand why anything actually works. How boring that would be...
If you estimate a 40 hour effort, and it turns into 120, that means you suck.
Absolutely. I work a mix of fixed and hourly contracts. Hourly is necessary if the specs aren't clear and the job is to help them figure out what they want. But for a defined project, I've never had any trouble providing fixed, competitive prices and coming in on schedule. All these comments about "losing your shirt" by working for a fixed price sound very unprofessional to me.
After becoming a pilot, I became a firm believer in checklists and brought them into my computer work. I make checklists for software delivery processes, framework installations, toner cartridge changes, etc. Then I ask someone else in the team to carry them out while I watch over their shoulder. And then I make improvements and put them in a well-known directory. My vacations are never interrupted anymore.;-)
I've run the C-172M checklist several hundred times, and let me tell you, it's *very* easy to lose track of your place in the list, and forget whether your memory of having completed a given item is from this evening's flight, or from the one you did this morning.
Try reading the list out loud. This helps me for some reason.
Adding another point to your feature space, I'll put in a plug for a technique called Stochastic Discrimination. It's not well known but is quite good at pattern recognition and avoids a lot of the weaknesses of neural networks such as over-training. Since it's not so well known, you have to go to the few academic papers to read up on it. Or visit the website http://kappa.math.buffalo.edu/. But it's got a very solid mathematical foundation (developed by a former math professor if mine) and isn't as "hacky" as other techniques.
For cake, I'd expect you to have the opcodes memorized, too. At least if it's good cake. LD HL... 0x21... LD A,A... 0x7F... And I haven't coded Z80 in 20 years.;-)
Back when the Morris worm hit in '88, I was teaching assembly language. We'd spent the whole day on the worm (making sure it hadn't planted or destroyed any files on our machines) and I didn't have a lecture prepared by class time. So I told them I'd explain the worm instead but that they could leave if they wanted since it wouldn't be on the exam. Our topic the week before was how the stack was changed during function calls so they already had the background. No one left and I got the pleasure of watching faces light up around the room as it dawned on people where my explanation was going. Ah, those were the days...
A while back I wrote an app that was key activated. The key had two components. The first was the name of the person that it was sold to (from the credit card) and the other was a hash of that name, the version number, etc. The user needed to enter both in order for it to work. (And the two needed to match, of course.) My thinking was that using the name in plain text would make it personal and encourage the user to not give it away while still allowing them to do what they thought was reasonable (running on both a laptop and desktop, for example). Basically, a gentle reminder to help honest people stay honest. The dishonest people are just going to hack your binaries anyway.
Statements like this make a sweeping assumption: that the fundamental theorems of mathematics are not the formalization of concepts hard-wired into the brain. For instance, the existence of prime numbers wouldn't be obvious to an organism that never used integers.
There are "idiot savants" (maybe someone can help here with a better term) that derive pleasure from hearing prime numbers. They were, of course, never taught the concept of primes. I always found that interesting.
The initials after your name are a "social shorthand" that (in the US, at least) symbolize expert knowledge of a subject.
Well, the initials I was referring to were "CEO". They don't really imply any kind of expert knowledge except for possibly in the internal workings of a company. And even then only in the best of cases.;-)
An expert's opinion ought to be worth more than a layman's.
Absolutely. But why are you assuming the poster is any less expert than a corporate executive? Being an expert has to do with your knowledge of a subject, not how much money you have or how many initials come after your name.
I think you're confusing the bends with an embolism.
When you breathe at the surface and descend to 90', the air in your lungs will still be under 90' of water pressure (plus atmospheric pressure on top of that). Just like the air you would breathe from a tank at that depth. There will be less volume in your lungs but the pressure is the same and it will still be driven into (absorbed by) your tissues. When you ascend, bubbles will form in your tissues and cause the bends. People breathing from the surface don't often get bent because they spend little time at depth - not because they breathed surface air. A 90' depth dive requires more than 10 minutes to be a significant bends danger (from memory and it depends on the model, ascent rate, etc). But there are cases of breath-holding divers with the bends.
An embolism is when you breathe at depth and then come up with full lungs. As you ascend, the air expands to the point where your lungs can't hold it anymore and your lungs burst. The air then leaks into your chest cavity, your lungs can deflate, and bubbles can reach your brain. Nasty stuff.
Are we talking about the same America that was creating camps for its Japanese citizens at the very time the Captain was incarnated? America has its good side and its bad. Always has. Its recent history has just helped people see that.
There is, in fact, at least one company out there that writes good specs. I had the pleasure of working a few contracts for them. I never had more than one or two small questions about what they sent me. They sent it, I wrote it, they paid me. Their customer always got it on time and with no surprises. It was surreal.
Devon
Re:This is an inference -- not a prediction
on
New Ice Age Theory
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· Score: 1
In pattern recognition, this is called training on the test set. When you don't have enough data to make separate training and test sets, you're almost sure to get models that perfectly fit the data yet have no predictive ability. That's not to say the theory is wrong, just that it we have no way of knowing that it's right.
Absolutely. But when you say "West" I think you mean "America". I'd say the average number of languages spoken by my friends that live outside of America is somewhere around 3. And it's the Americans in that group that bring the average down since most of us are only effectively bilingual. However, for those friends that live in America it's exactly 1. (No, sorry, that year of Spanish in high school doesn't count.)
I contract once in a while for a company that does great specs. Good enough that I've never even met them or talked to them on the phone. They specify exactly what they want and I write it - on time every time. Sure, maybe I need to ask one or two questions in a short email, but generally everything is well thought out and described. Not once have we had an "oh shit we need to redesign". And this stability allows us to work on a fixed-price-on-delivery basis which means they can precisely budget and be sure they won't have any surprises. It can work that way. I've done it many times.
But most companies don't want to do that. Rather than tell the upper managers that the design will take much longer (because they don't understand that good design should be the lion's share of the project time) they get the software people working before the specs are done. This shows the upper managers that there is progress even if it's not real. Of course, doing this makes delivery later and increases final cost. But, hey, everyone knows that's how software development is, right? Whatever. I'll take their money, too. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Slashdot Mirror
The Phoenix mission used names like Neverland, Wicked Witch, Snow White, and Peter Pan.
Devon
Hmm... which people do you mean? Huxley, for example, said of "The Origin of Species": How exceedingly stupid not to have thought of that.
Devon
I rode through Germany last weekend and couldn't believe all the solar cells I saw. Balconies, rooftops, entire sides of buildings. It's quite impressive. I'm not surprised that they generate so much power even with their climate.
Devon
It's really tautological; information is entirely non-physical and therefore fundamentally can not be a physical good. It can have physical manifestations...
That's silly. Information must have a physical manifestation. It's in your brain cells, it's in electromagnetic waves, it's on paper -- otherwise it doesn't exist. Information theory even defines it in terms of entropy which is a property of matter. Maxwell's daemon and all that.
Devon
Well, if you want to motivate a child, perhaps you do have to have the latest and greatest, or at least something with some cool factor.
I'm not so sure. The "cool" part of playing with the old machines is that there was little abstraction back then keeping you away from the bits. If you poked the right memory location with the right number, the pixels on your screen would change. Poke another bit and you'll hear a click on your speaker. That's very cool, in my old timer opinion, and something the kids today almost never get to see. Everything they're learning is so abstract that they don't understand why anything actually works. How boring that would be...
Devon
If you estimate a 40 hour effort, and it turns into 120, that means you suck.
Absolutely. I work a mix of fixed and hourly contracts. Hourly is necessary if the specs aren't clear and the job is to help them figure out what they want. But for a defined project, I've never had any trouble providing fixed, competitive prices and coming in on schedule. All these comments about "losing your shirt" by working for a fixed price sound very unprofessional to me.
Devon
After becoming a pilot, I became a firm believer in checklists and brought them into my computer work. I make checklists for software delivery processes, framework installations, toner cartridge changes, etc. Then I ask someone else in the team to carry them out while I watch over their shoulder. And then I make improvements and put them in a well-known directory. My vacations are never interrupted anymore. ;-)
Devon
I've run the C-172M checklist several hundred times, and let me tell you, it's *very* easy to lose track of your place in the list, and forget whether your memory of having completed a given item is from this evening's flight, or from the one you did this morning.
Try reading the list out loud. This helps me for some reason.
Devon
Adding another point to your feature space, I'll put in a plug for a technique called Stochastic Discrimination. It's not well known but is quite good at pattern recognition and avoids a lot of the weaknesses of neural networks such as over-training. Since it's not so well known, you have to go to the few academic papers to read up on it. Or visit the website http://kappa.math.buffalo.edu/. But it's got a very solid mathematical foundation (developed by a former math professor if mine) and isn't as "hacky" as other techniques.
Devon
For cake, I'd expect you to have the opcodes memorized, too. At least if it's good cake. LD HL... 0x21... LD A,A... 0x7F... And I haven't coded Z80 in 20 years. ;-)
Devon
I have a different rule:
1) Is this thing improving my quality of life?
I found the answer was almost always no. Lots of things seem to be more trouble than they are worth. The TV was the first to go.
Devon
Back when the Morris worm hit in '88, I was teaching assembly language. We'd spent the whole day on the worm (making sure it hadn't planted or destroyed any files on our machines) and I didn't have a lecture prepared by class time. So I told them I'd explain the worm instead but that they could leave if they wanted since it wouldn't be on the exam. Our topic the week before was how the stack was changed during function calls so they already had the background. No one left and I got the pleasure of watching faces light up around the room as it dawned on people where my explanation was going. Ah, those were the days...
Devon
A while back I wrote an app that was key activated. The key had two components. The first was the name of the person that it was sold to (from the credit card) and the other was a hash of that name, the version number, etc. The user needed to enter both in order for it to work. (And the two needed to match, of course.) My thinking was that using the name in plain text would make it personal and encourage the user to not give it away while still allowing them to do what they thought was reasonable (running on both a laptop and desktop, for example). Basically, a gentle reminder to help honest people stay honest. The dishonest people are just going to hack your binaries anyway.
Devon
What's more is that NPR's Science Friday had a guest that found that just being overweight isn't as bad as the PR campaigns suggest.
Heard that. She was a journalist, not a scientist. Read "Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy" for a research scientist's view.
DevonThese are just from memory so may be partly wrong. But the extended mission clearly stands out:
10 - Opportunity provides tantalizing glimpse of Victoria crater.
EXTENDED. Very extended.
9 - Evidence of volcanic origin for Gusev crater.
ORIGINAL mission. But the extended mission has clarified things a lot.
8 - First meteorite identified on another planet.
EXTENDED. I think. It was close to the heat shield so it was found early but I think it was still in the extended portion of the mission.
7 - Discover of sulfur suggests Mars stink.
No idea.
6 - Helps scientists determine that Mars had three distinct geological eras.
No idea.
5 - Martian dust devils captured on film.
EXTENDED.
4 - First shot of Earth from distant planet.
EXTENDED.
3 - Photographs Earth-like clouds on Mars.
EXTENDED.
2 - Helps scientists create first atmospheric temperature profile of Mars.
No idea. The temp profiles I know about are from Mars Express and not the rovers.
1 - First definitive evidence that water flowed on mars, including blueberries, hematite, and silica.
BOTH. Blueberries and hematite was in the original mission and amorphous silica was just a few months ago.
Statements like this make a sweeping assumption: that the fundamental theorems of mathematics are not the formalization of concepts hard-wired into the brain. For instance, the existence of prime numbers wouldn't be obvious to an organism that never used integers.
There are "idiot savants" (maybe someone can help here with a better term) that derive pleasure from hearing prime numbers. They were, of course, never taught the concept of primes. I always found that interesting.
Devon
The initials after your name are a "social shorthand" that (in the US, at least) symbolize expert knowledge of a subject.
Well, the initials I was referring to were "CEO". They don't really imply any kind of expert knowledge except for possibly in the internal workings of a company. And even then only in the best of cases. ;-)
DevonAn expert's opinion ought to be worth more than a layman's.
Absolutely. But why are you assuming the poster is any less expert than a corporate executive? Being an expert has to do with your knowledge of a subject, not how much money you have or how many initials come after your name.
DevonThere was a hurricane forecaster on NPR's Science Friday a few weeks back and he talked about this at length.
DevonI think you're confusing the bends with an embolism.
When you breathe at the surface and descend to 90', the air in your lungs will still be under 90' of water pressure (plus atmospheric pressure on top of that). Just like the air you would breathe from a tank at that depth. There will be less volume in your lungs but the pressure is the same and it will still be driven into (absorbed by) your tissues. When you ascend, bubbles will form in your tissues and cause the bends. People breathing from the surface don't often get bent because they spend little time at depth - not because they breathed surface air. A 90' depth dive requires more than 10 minutes to be a significant bends danger (from memory and it depends on the model, ascent rate, etc). But there are cases of breath-holding divers with the bends.
An embolism is when you breathe at depth and then come up with full lungs. As you ascend, the air expands to the point where your lungs can't hold it anymore and your lungs burst. The air then leaks into your chest cavity, your lungs can deflate, and bubbles can reach your brain. Nasty stuff.
Devon
Are we talking about the same America that was creating camps for its Japanese citizens at the very time the Captain was incarnated? America has its good side and its bad. Always has. Its recent history has just helped people see that.
Devon
There is, in fact, at least one company out there that writes good specs. I had the pleasure of working a few contracts for them. I never had more than one or two small questions about what they sent me. They sent it, I wrote it, they paid me. Their customer always got it on time and with no surprises. It was surreal.
Devon
In pattern recognition, this is called training on the test set. When you don't have enough data to make separate training and test sets, you're almost sure to get models that perfectly fit the data yet have no predictive ability. That's not to say the theory is wrong, just that it we have no way of knowing that it's right.
Devon
Absolutely. But when you say "West" I think you mean "America". I'd say the average number of languages spoken by my friends that live outside of America is somewhere around 3. And it's the Americans in that group that bring the average down since most of us are only effectively bilingual. However, for those friends that live in America it's exactly 1. (No, sorry, that year of Spanish in high school doesn't count.)
Devon
I contract once in a while for a company that does great specs. Good enough that I've never even met them or talked to them on the phone. They specify exactly what they want and I write it - on time every time. Sure, maybe I need to ask one or two questions in a short email, but generally everything is well thought out and described. Not once have we had an "oh shit we need to redesign". And this stability allows us to work on a fixed-price-on-delivery basis which means they can precisely budget and be sure they won't have any surprises. It can work that way. I've done it many times.
But most companies don't want to do that. Rather than tell the upper managers that the design will take much longer (because they don't understand that good design should be the lion's share of the project time) they get the software people working before the specs are done. This shows the upper managers that there is progress even if it's not real. Of course, doing this makes delivery later and increases final cost. But, hey, everyone knows that's how software development is, right? Whatever. I'll take their money, too. But it doesn't have to be that way.
Devon