What the difference between contaminating Europe today, or doing it a million years from now? The point is to avoid contamination, right?
Well, by a million years, hopefully we will have gone back in person to clean up our mess.
Re:Mathematical equations
on
KDE 3.0 is Out
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· Score: 1
I think you are missing the point. Equation Editor is fine for editing small equations, but most mathematicians/scientists prefer workhorses like LaTeX to get real, equation intensive work done.
And keep in mind, mathematicians are not computer geeks. Many are more distrustful of computers than your typical mothers. But when a mathematician tries using a gui tool like Equation editor to get real work done, he goes right back to LaTeX. Even graduate students --who used Equation editor since high school, but only encountered LaTeX as a grad student-- flock to LaTeX. You can't argue with its reasonable syntax (not much harder to pick up than html), or its ability to get work done.
I know, because I am one of those grad students.
Equation editing GUIs are a joke when it comes time to start banging out math intensive papers. And now that I know LaTeX, I even use it for non-math stuff.
Of course, what they haven't told you is that in the time it took for those choppers to lay down the rat poison, enough of those "rare seabirds" flew through the propellors to ensure their extinction.
Its not so silly. With an organization as large as the DOE, they can't assume that they can trust every user and every machine even on their own private network. Espionage is real, and the DOE must assume that a spy could have access to their network, so the question, "How is information protected in this distributed computing scheme?" is important to them.
What? I get modded down for suggesting that calculating mersenne primes is a waste of hardware? It is! There is no need to calculate m-primes of the size people are calculating today, and there is nothing fun about it either. If you can't think to do anything useful with distributed computing, at least do something fun...
Here is an idea. Make a skeleton of an animated cartoon, and then let the actual ray tracing be done by a network of machines. Ray tracing lends itself nicely to this sort of thing; you can even have a team of computers work on a single frame simultaneously. Its not useful, but it sure as hell would be more fun than calculating m-primes and processing SETI data.
Yeah, except that anytime someone gets the idea to pool PC power, the only thing they can think of to use the hardware on is wanker projects like calculating mersenne primes or processing SETI dumps. Personnally, I'd rather my machine sat around wasting cycles...
Evil Scientology Kingpin: Gentlemen, we need to bring down Xenu.net. Their truthspeak can be tolerated no more.
Pimply Henchman: But Sire, we've been trying to get their ISP to remove them. It hasn't worked so far. I fear the task is impossible.
Evil Scientology Kingpin:Fool! We are Scientologists! Nothing is impossible to us! Bring me my trusted cronie, Michael of Slashdot...
Michael enters, and bows before the kingpin
Michael:My Lord.
Evil Scientology Kingpin: Michael, I want you to post a story about Scientology. In it, I want a prominent link to Xenu.net.
Michael: But Sire, why do you encourage negative publicity?
Evil Scientology Kingpin: Not for publicity, Michael, but for The Slashdot effect!. Xenu.net's servers will burst into flames when all of the Slashdot minions click on your little link. When its done, we will threaten to expose our pornographic pictures of CowboyNeal to the world unless the article you write is removed....No lasting negative press, and Xenu.net is finally removed.
Ximian wants to make money. Ximian makes friendly programs like Evolution and Gnumeric. If Ximian were to require me to pay for the convenience of their testing and packaging and download servers, I would pay. And the software would still be "free".
OpenOffice is built by Sun. Sun wants to make money. Sun makes money off off of OO by using it to build StarOffice. They get free contributions to their code base in exchange for a free (libre) version of StarOffice.
Similarly for AOL and Mozilla/Netscape.
Perhaps TheKompany could consider a scheme like these two have: Have a free and commercial product, with the free one constantly in a development state for people to contribute to, and a polished, tested version suitable for sale.
Just ignore Katz and maybe he'll go away
on
Heart of the Net
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· Score: 1
So once again I'm reading the comments attached to a Katz article, and once again people are complaining that Katz has the intelligence of a llama, the integrity of a breached wall, and that/. is insane to let this fraud post with impunity.
/. is not insane. Katz gets to post because Katz consistently generates comments. In the past 30 posts to/., Katz has generated over 400 comments per post on average. It doesn't matter whether the comments are for good or ill. If that many are posting, then even more are reading, and that means/. has an audience.
If you really want Katz to go away, just don't post to his articles. It's not hard. Why just in those last 30 posts, Katz scored a low 14 and 5 comments. So its not like he is impossible to ignore, you know.
PS: It pisses me off that this man shares his name with the most beloved comedian of all time...
Am I the only one that recognized Taco's "real world" comment as sarcasm?
No. But you may be the only one who doesn't understand why everyone is upset with Taco's comment.
Taco was insinuating that it is unrealistic to penalize a student for <euphemism>code replication</euphemism> when in the real world collaberation and cooperation are good things. Many/. readers take issue with this because the job of CS courses is to teach CS first and teach collaberation second.
It's no good if all your worker bees are good collaberators but none of them can code. You see, when everybody in your group is unskilled, it is no better than the sum of its parts.
The Moderating Sucks
on
VIM 6.0 is Out
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· Score: 2, Insightful
The moderating sucks on this article, and I think I know why:
How can
anyone be expected to be impartial in the middle of the primordial flame war.
You know, I'm sick and tired of hearing people blame US agencies for the WTC tragedy.
Why do you say these agencies were criminally negligent? Do you just automatically equate failure with negligence? Until I see some evidence to the contrary, I think I will assume that these agencies do their very best to protect the American people with the resources they have. This disaster hurts and angers them as much as it does any of us, and they are undoubtably reviewing their proceedures very thoroughly.
Of course this was a failure for US intelligence, but was it really a failure caused by their own incompetence? Can you verify that?
Let's worry less about what blame to place on the FBI/CIA/NSA and concentrate more on placing it squarely upon the monsters who carried this attack out.
I've been reading your comments in this thread and have come to the conclusion that
Ockham's Razor is this new theoretical toy you've just found out about, and now you want to knock all kinds of shit over with it. You wield it like it is a magic wand that can take any experimental data and come up with the appropriate hypothesis to fit it. Well, "Sorry for the cold glass of reality", but Ockham don't do that.
I've graciously provided a link above that can tell you what the Razor is all about, but for now lemme tell you why you just don't go using Ockham in this case:
Various people have been giving different possible hypotheses for the increased number of bugzilla entries. Each hypothesis predicts different statements about the individual bugzilla data and events surrounding the data.
For instance, one./er suggests that the increased bug reports come from increased numbers of eyes looking at Mozilla, and that the bugs are actually old and hitherto undocumented. A closer look at the bug reports would be able to see if in fact the bugs pertain to old unchanging segments in the code.
Since Ockam's Razor can only be applied to situations where two competing hypotheses would predict the same data, and since your hypothesis (Mozilla is getting buggier) would imply that the new bug reports are pertaining to newer segments in the Mozilla code--in contrast to the competing hypothesis--you can't use the Razor to imply your hypothesis is better suited to the data. In general, one should never use the Razor to circumvent more careful examination of data and further experimentation. If further experimentation can be used to distinguish between two competing hypotheses, then Ockham does not apply.
Though, secretly I must admit it would be helluva cool if there did exist a magic wand that could give me the perfect hypothesis for any data set. It would greatly simplify my life.
Open Source and Free software means having the right to use and and modify source code. It does not include the right to take credit for that code. Quite the contrary, the GPL says that the only way you can modify code is if you continue to keep the GPL as the license for the new code. Thats a very real application of the author wanting to have credit. If the author didn't have credit for the original code at all times then how could he enforce the GPL?
Enforcing trademarks are more related to credit for the code than for licensing the code, and OS licenses need code credit to be enforced to enforce the license.
Sit-ups do wonders for me, in addition to keeping good posture. Posture is hard to maintain with weak abdominals. Strong ones mean less work for the back when it comes to stabilizing the torso.
Okay, either The company making these things or I need a re-introduction to the basics of electrostatics.
If I remember correctly, the reason your computer and your harddrive are encased in metal has little to do with grounding and everything to do with one of the fundamental rules of electrostatics: If you put a hollow metal box in an electric field, the electric field inside the box is unchanged.
This is why computers are encased in metal, airplanes are encased in metal, and especially why hard drives are encased in metal. No matter what is going on outside (electrical storms, static discharges, etc), your electric field inside is unaffected.
Sure, I let my machine run with the case open now and again (like right now); Most modern components in a computer are pretty resiliant. But everything is definitely safer in the metal box. And there is no way in hell I would let my harddrive run encased in plastic.
I loved hypercard as a kid. My family's first computer was a mac-in-the-box, and I first learned to teach a computer tricks with hypertalk and hypercard.
The actor Harry Anderson came to my elementary school to talk about macs way back when, and he showed me a "slot machine" that he wrote in Hypertalk. He was especially proud of it because it cheated. And then I showed him how to get the babel fish in his ear in Hitchhikers... Aw, to be young again.
Sorry, I know this is off topic, but Hypercard makes me gush with fond memories.
No no no... Users don't want a lear jet, they want a toaster. They want bread to go in, and toast to come out.
See that is the difference between hard-core computer-philes and end users. The former regards the computer as this cool, powerful device like a fast car or a powerful jet. The end user just sees another appliance taking up desk space.
My 'tard cousin just wants to press buttons on a flashy box without it breaking, man.
Slashdot Mirror
Hello....?
Hello....?
Anyone there?...
there?...
Do you know how to spell?...
how to spell?...
Well, by a million years, hopefully we will have gone back in person to clean up our mess.
And keep in mind, mathematicians are not computer geeks. Many are more distrustful of computers than your typical mothers. But when a mathematician tries using a gui tool like Equation editor to get real work done, he goes right back to LaTeX. Even graduate students --who used Equation editor since high school, but only encountered LaTeX as a grad student-- flock to LaTeX. You can't argue with its reasonable syntax (not much harder to pick up than html), or its ability to get work done.
I know, because I am one of those grad students. Equation editing GUIs are a joke when it comes time to start banging out math intensive papers. And now that I know LaTeX, I even use it for non-math stuff.
Oh well, getting to use GPS is cool.
Its not so silly. With an organization as large as the DOE, they can't assume that they can trust every user and every machine even on their own private network. Espionage is real, and the DOE must assume that a spy could have access to their network, so the question, "How is information protected in this distributed computing scheme?" is important to them.
What? I get modded down for suggesting that calculating mersenne primes is a waste of hardware? It is! There is no need to calculate m-primes of the size people are calculating today, and there is nothing fun about it either. If you can't think to do anything useful with distributed computing, at least do something fun...
Here is an idea. Make a skeleton of an animated cartoon, and then let the actual ray tracing be done by a network of machines. Ray tracing lends itself nicely to this sort of thing; you can even have a team of computers work on a single frame simultaneously. Its not useful, but it sure as hell would be more fun than calculating m-primes and processing SETI data.
Yeah, except that anytime someone gets the idea to pool PC power, the only thing they can think of to use the hardware on is wanker projects like calculating mersenne primes or processing SETI dumps. Personnally, I'd rather my machine sat around wasting cycles...
Pimply Henchman: But Sire, we've been trying to get their ISP to remove them. It hasn't worked so far. I fear the task is impossible.
Evil Scientology Kingpin:Fool! We are Scientologists! Nothing is impossible to us! Bring me my trusted cronie, Michael of Slashdot...
Michael enters, and bows before the kingpin
Michael:My Lord.
Evil Scientology Kingpin: Michael, I want you to post a story about Scientology. In it, I want a prominent link to Xenu.net.
Michael: But Sire, why do you encourage negative publicity?
Evil Scientology Kingpin: Not for publicity, Michael, but for The Slashdot effect!. Xenu.net's servers will burst into flames when all of the Slashdot minions click on your little link. When its done, we will threaten to expose our pornographic pictures of CowboyNeal to the world unless the article you write is removed....No lasting negative press, and Xenu.net is finally removed.
Evil Scientology Kingpin laughs maniacally
Michael: It shall be done, my Lord.
It's your responsibility to make sure your robot violates no copyright laws when singing.
Sadly, I'd be more impressed if it had stuff like facial hair.
Ximian wants to make money. Ximian makes friendly programs like Evolution and Gnumeric. If Ximian were to require me to pay for the convenience of their testing and packaging and download servers, I would pay. And the software would still be "free".
OpenOffice is built by Sun. Sun wants to make money. Sun makes money off off of OO by using it to build StarOffice. They get free contributions to their code base in exchange for a free (libre) version of StarOffice.
Similarly for AOL and Mozilla/Netscape.
Perhaps TheKompany could consider a scheme like these two have: Have a free and commercial product, with the free one constantly in a development state for people to contribute to, and a polished, tested version suitable for sale.
/. is not insane. Katz gets to post because Katz consistently generates comments. In the past 30 posts to
If you really want Katz to go away, just don't post to his articles. It's not hard. Why just in those last 30 posts, Katz scored a low 14 and 5 comments. So its not like he is impossible to ignore, you know.
PS: It pisses me off that this man shares his name with the most beloved comedian of all time...
If I had mod points Id spend them all on you...
Fucking hilarious!
No. But you may be the only one who doesn't understand why everyone is upset with Taco's comment.
Taco was insinuating that it is unrealistic to penalize a student for <euphemism>code replication</euphemism> when in the real world collaberation and cooperation are good things. Many /. readers take issue with this because the job of CS courses is to teach CS first and teach collaberation second.
It's no good if all your worker bees are good collaberators but none of them can code. You see, when everybody in your group is unskilled, it is no better than the sum of its parts.
PS Emacs rules!
Why do you say these agencies were criminally negligent? Do you just automatically equate failure with negligence? Until I see some evidence to the contrary, I think I will assume that these agencies do their very best to protect the American people with the resources they have. This disaster hurts and angers them as much as it does any of us, and they are undoubtably reviewing their proceedures very thoroughly.
Of course this was a failure for US intelligence, but was it really a failure caused by their own incompetence? Can you verify that?
Let's worry less about what blame to place on the FBI/CIA/NSA and concentrate more on placing it squarely upon the monsters who carried this attack out.
I've been reading your comments in this thread and have come to the conclusion that Ockham's Razor is this new theoretical toy you've just found out about, and now you want to knock all kinds of shit over with it. You wield it like it is a magic wand that can take any experimental data and come up with the appropriate hypothesis to fit it. Well, "Sorry for the cold glass of reality", but Ockham don't do that.
I've graciously provided a link above that can tell you what the Razor is all about, but for now lemme tell you why you just don't go using Ockham in this case:
Various people have been giving different possible hypotheses for the increased number of bugzilla entries. Each hypothesis predicts different statements about the individual bugzilla data and events surrounding the data.
For instance, one ./er suggests that the increased bug reports come from increased numbers of eyes looking at Mozilla, and that the bugs are actually old and hitherto undocumented. A closer look at the bug reports would be able to see if in fact the bugs pertain to old unchanging segments in the code.
Since Ockam's Razor can only be applied to situations where two competing hypotheses would predict the same data, and since your hypothesis (Mozilla is getting buggier) would imply that the new bug reports are pertaining to newer segments in the Mozilla code--in contrast to the competing hypothesis--you can't use the Razor to imply your hypothesis is better suited to the data. In general, one should never use the Razor to circumvent more careful examination of data and further experimentation. If further experimentation can be used to distinguish between two competing hypotheses, then Ockham does not apply.
Though, secretly I must admit it would be helluva cool if there did exist a magic wand that could give me the perfect hypothesis for any data set. It would greatly simplify my life.
Enforcing trademarks are more related to credit for the code than for licensing the code, and OS licenses need code credit to be enforced to enforce the license.
Sit-ups do wonders for me, in addition to keeping good posture. Posture is hard to maintain with weak abdominals. Strong ones mean less work for the back when it comes to stabilizing the torso.
If I remember correctly, the reason your computer and your harddrive are encased in metal has little to do with grounding and everything to do with one of the fundamental rules of electrostatics: If you put a hollow metal box in an electric field, the electric field inside the box is unchanged.
This is why computers are encased in metal, airplanes are encased in metal, and especially why hard drives are encased in metal. No matter what is going on outside (electrical storms, static discharges, etc), your electric field inside is unaffected.
Sure, I let my machine run with the case open now and again (like right now); Most modern components in a computer are pretty resiliant. But everything is definitely safer in the metal box. And there is no way in hell I would let my harddrive run encased in plastic.
Gilbert is extremely loud and annoying. He is the parrot in Alladin among other things.
You're a fun-hater.
The actor Harry Anderson came to my elementary school to talk about macs way back when, and he showed me a "slot machine" that he wrote in Hypertalk. He was especially proud of it because it cheated. And then I showed him how to get the babel fish in his ear in Hitchhikers... Aw, to be young again.
Sorry, I know this is off topic, but Hypercard makes me gush with fond memories.
See that is the difference between hard-core computer-philes and end users. The former regards the computer as this cool, powerful device like a fast car or a powerful jet. The end user just sees another appliance taking up desk space.
My 'tard cousin just wants to press buttons on a flashy box without it breaking, man.
Forgive me. I a moron am making no sense. You catchen me in with your clever semantic logics.