I have mod points right now. I could have just modded him down. I would prefer some insight as to why his posts are usually pro-Microsoft and anti-Linux. I assume my comments give him an opportunity to prove me wrong and, more importantly, to explain his position. I certainly do not think Linux is perfect and I find problems with Linux occasionally. However, as a Math Professor I find that so many good programs are available (e.g. there is a Debian package for Ken Brakke's Surface Evolver program) that I would never return to Windows. I was using xfig yesterday to prepare figures for a new paper. My coauthor in Australia has limited bandwidth; I used ps2pdf to turn the postscript file to a pdf file for her. Things (e.g. tools) are so easy under Linux that the minor bugs (e.g. really minor KDE problems) are not a big deal to me.
I hope you are correct about improved Windows security. I agree that Gentoo (and Linux in general) gives you much more control over your computer and a greater opportunity to mess things up. Portage is not the same package manager as that used by Red Hat, for example, and you could "screw things up." If you let a five year old drive your car, he/she could also "screw things up."
Your opinions are suspect, however, and the validity of your information is uncertain. As I mentioned on a previous occasion, I wonder if you are a MS employee working to offer favorable comments about MS and unfavorable comments about FOOS. Who knows?
"And don't ask why I used un/salted butter above. I'm really not sure.."
Because it is a slippery slope and once you get on it, you can't get off. It is better to just "butter up" your potential opponents and stay friends with both sides. Just don't drop the... (toast)... ball.:-)
The article does not address my real concern, which is that MS "buys" new laws or "buys" DRM which eliminate Linux in the US (and then in Europe when the EU adopts "US rules" (on copyright, etc.)).
I feel inclined to send a link to the article to colleagues using MS. On the other hand, if you are using MS, how smart are you anyway? (Sigh)
When computerized tomography first came out, it had many problems. The most important (in my opinion) was the presence of "mathematical (or imaging) artifacts" in the computed image which did not represent actual tissue or body structure. Over many years, these problems were overcome. The history is rather interesting. (People in the UK do not understand the word "rather".)
One of the principal people who solved the artifact probem was Kennan T. Smith from Oregon State University. He was a mathematician who worked with
physicians (e.g.
Erik L. Ritman) on problems in tomography. Smith was already very well known for work such as that on functional completion and on Bessel potentials with Aronszajn. To give you an idea about his publications, consider
"Reconstruction of objects from radiographs and the location of brain tumors." Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 71 (1974), 4884--4886. (authors: Guenther, R. B.; Kerber, C. W.; Killian, E. K.; Smith, K. T.; Wagner, S. L.).
He is largely responsible for the strong tomography group at Oregon State.
(He died about two years ago.)
On to the story (as told to me by KT Smith, Don Solmon and others):
Smith would look at the images produced by CT machines (at the University of Oregon, I believe) and try to relate these to the mathematics of tomography. He would publish a paper on mathematically equivalent (to the "standard") reconstruction formulas which did not produce these artifacts. Magically and
without any mention or attribution to Smith or his colleagues, this type of artifact would disappear from all of the commercial CT machines a few months later. This happened several times.
My point is that two mathematically equivalent formulas may not produce the same CT image. On infinite precision computers, the images should be the same but on actual machines (with "machine epsilon", roundoff errors, etc.), they were not the same and a lot of work by Smith, Solmon, Guenther, Natterer and others went into finding formulas which eliminated artifacts.
I find the comment
"In MRI, the raw output is in frequency domain and typically a Fast Fourier Transform is needed to bring it to spatial terms."
by SimoM (30771) to be so simplistic as to be misleading.
I am sure that readers here know about the limited precision of computers but I suspect that they are not aware that this can make an important difference in some (medical) cases. (What is that spot on the image? Either cancer or an artifact; don't worry about it.)
Am I qualified to criticize SimoM (30771)? Well, I have published research on tomography and I refereed one of Smith's last tomography papers. I know several of the researchers on this subject (e.g. Finch, Kuchment, Quinto, Solmon) and have talked with many others (e.g. Berenstein, Cheney, Kunyansky, Natterer). I received my original academic appointment because of Smith's recommendation and remained in (infrequent) contact with him over a period of 20+ years.
Actually, I was thinking of "information issues" (incorrect prescription/drug interaction, incorrect tomographic data or CT/SPECT/PET/NMR/EIT reconstruction, lack of monitoring of patients,
loss of power to hospital due to computer error, etc.). Hospital PHBs don't know that much about computers. If something goes wrong, they will say "the computer person (or IT professional) never told us about this risk. It all comes down to "Who was negligent?" (or who can their lawyers say was negligent?).
The "real money" in traditional IT comes from services; open source has nothing to do with employment.
Of course, I must be completely wrong! After all, there are no examples in which people can freely obtain the necessary information (like source code) and yet employment in "services" remains high. Right?
Let's consider my area, mathematics. Calculus was invented (or discovered, if you prefer) almost 400 years ago. While there are huge advances going on in math right now, you would not understand them and they may not influence the economy for a long time. As a practical matter, the mathematical skills required for almost 100% of the job market were discovered over 100 years ago. Your local or university library has (possibly old) books which contain all the information you need. So, there must not be any demand for mathematicians.
Right?
The truth is that learning math can be hard and most people need help. All the information you need is freely available but you cannot understand it (well enough). Check with any school district; the odds are that they need more math teachers. You would (OK, might) be shocked to learn how little mathematical knowledge "professionals" (e.g. PhD engineers, chemists, physicists, computer scientists) have. (One of my colleagues has two PhDs, in physics and statistics. He was a physics professor in Penn. and left to work on a stat. PhD. He has told me that, as a physicist, he had no idea of how little math he knew until he worked on a stat. PhD. I have many more examples.) Mathematicians need help from other mathematicians for topics outside their areas. "Service" is the name of the game; even trivial areas of math like calculus and ODEs are hard before you understand them and the fact that it is open source does not help.
Have you configured SENDMAIL? (Correctly?) Easy? Not for everyone. Even though it is open source, having a knowledgable person around (i.e. service) is very useful. I hope you get my point.
"For crying out loud, your mom doesn't set the standards of progress in information technology."
I hate to tell you, but his mom does. When she finally decides to upgrade, it will open a flood gate of upgrades and "they" won't be able to hire IT people fast enough. All these jobs are waiting on his mom and you can't even talk nicely about her.:-)
I've noticed that ABET has been reducing the amount of "knowledge" (e.g. math and science) and increasing the amount of "practice" required for an engineering degree for some time. ABET used to prescribe (fairly) rigid standards (e.g. math from mathematicians) and now lets universities (i.e. colleges of engineering) decide what makes up an engineering degree to a large extent. I think this is driven, in part, by engineering faculty (deans?) who want to use increased student credit hour production to justify additional money (but I am not certain about this).
The bottom line is that engineering (in the US) has been going downhill for 30 years. People in "industry" (aviation industry) have told me that in the 1960s and 70s a company could hire a new engineering graduate with a 2.0 (C) grade point average and have no problems with this employee while in the 1990s and now, a company could hire a new 4.0 (A) gpa engineering graduate and not necessarily get a knowledgable or skilled employee.
(I do not think ABET is that old and one cannot blame them for all the problems in engineering.)
"I'm looking to get out of IT after being in it since 1977."
Young kids think they know everything. You don't see
Sid
leaving IT, do you? How many punch cards do you still have? Is writing FORTRAN code still second nature to you?
(COBOL? What is that?)
I believe Fred Gallagher still has a "day job" but it would not surprise me if someday MagaToyko pays his bills (e.g. books (of MegaToyko strips), conventions (e.g. Dallas, June 2004)).
Does UF take care of Illiad? (I hope so. How many video cards is YOUR kingdom worth?)
I think the future in a lot of "IT employment" will come from the knowledge/creativity of individuals and will use IT as a tool.
If you live in a small city (say 500,000) and you would like to be an "artist", your opportunities would have been very limited ten years ago but are much better now;
MegaToyko and UserFriendly are two examples of opportunities (i.e. content/entertainment offered without a middleman) which were not available 10-20 years ago .
I think the "future" (a future) lies in content rather than delivery. So you are a great "flash programmer"; who cares? Do you have something worth seeing or reading? Do you have specialized knowledge? Are you a leet mathematician or chemist with something interesting to say? (Mandatory
link.) (If you want to hear my talk at ANU later, there is no charge.)
Anyway, I think outsourcing is bad (e.g. call a credit card company or airline and try to get good service) but it is reality. I think content (mostly from people in the US/Canada or Europe, although there are extremely smart people everywhere) is the real opportunity. Copy Illiad or create your own path. Your content might be humor or entertainment. It might be your specialized knowledge of the XYZ industry. "We" are all over-weight; who is using the Internet and making money by poking fun at us and offering us free "health advice" (and selling books with the "health strips" strips ala UF)?
PS If I had any really good ideas, I would be working on them rather than posting here. You "guys" are the smart ones; find a niche market so you can get rich and afford a "Doom 3 computer".
Russian (probably) "hackers" went to the trouble of introducing a "browser helper object" so they harvest a few (or a few thousand) credit card numbers through M$ IIS. Considering that supporters of one of the main political parties (in this case the "right wing party") called people in the KC area and told untrue stories about Rep. Moore and considering the results of the last election in Georgia, I think some concern about e-voting is reasonable.
PS Listen to Led Zeppelin (or Dylan, the Band, etc.) while doing math;
it makes it easier. (Yeah, I just figured out how to complete a math paper
I started last October and it looks really good. Now to present the results
in Australia in a few months!)
What are you doing on/.? Doom 3 is out, you do not have a fast enough machine and you are waiting until OCTOBER to get one? Man... your priorities???:-)
From here,
"Playboy magazine has twice published their own rankings of America's top party schools:
"The 2002 list read as follows:
22. University of California, Santa Barbara
Of course, UCSB is a SERIOUS place. (Kohn stays there because the coeds are so... serious.):-)
Thanks for the information. It is my experience that contributions from "outside one's area (discipline)" are often overlooked or ignored; thus contributions from geology (wavelets?) are not always given credit in math and contributions from math are not always given credit in engineering. I will read the paper by Seebass and George but I will not accept it as "the final word" (until I look further).
The
review by N. Geffen of "Analysis of Transonic Airfoils",
Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 24 (1971), 841--851 by Garabedian, P. R.; Korn, D. G.
"Calculation of inviscid, subsonic-supercritical flow around prescribed airfoils is described. This supplements the authors' previous design of a shockless transonic wing using real and complex characteristics in the hodograph plane. The flow about the designed wing is calculated for a range of off-design conditions.
"Neumann's problem for the flow-potential equation is solved numerically in a plane where the exterior of the airfoil is conformally (also numerically) mapped onto the interior of the unit circle. Following E. M. Murman and J. D. Cole [AIAA J. 9 (1971), 114--121], a second-order finite-difference scheme is used in the subsonic region, while an implicit second-order scheme is used in the hyperbolic zone, introducing artificial viscosity of the right sign. The Kutta condition is satisfied by an iterative scheme. Results with relatively narrow shocks (i.e., steep gradients) are given and compared with wind-tunnel experiments."
I may be incorrect about this, but I seem to recall that the mathematician
Paul Garabedian independently developed the mathematical theory for shockless supersonic flight at the same time that people in AE developed a theory. The Popular Science article does not mention Garabedian.
"Maybe MS *is* doing something right."
No, you are doing something wrong.:-)
Your problems with SP2 will arise at some future time when you have not
"allotted time for troubleshooting" and you cannot afford a blue screen.
Sometimes you do find facts here, however. I find the opinions of the "IT community" to be worth reading; the general tone (and some specific comments) can be very interesting.
On this particular story, we will soon find out (from several sources - e.g. CNN, "linux" news sites) if the groklaw story is right or wrong. My guess is that it is correct. Even if we are kind of tired of SCO stories, "we" are still interested in seeing SCO die and will always find stories like this interesting or, at least, entertaining.
"Hemi" is an
old type of engine and it is an
ad campaign.
It sounds to me like you bought into the hype on tv.
From the first link:
"It was once called the "finest engine of its kind in the world," the Hemi Magnum engine once ruled the track and the streets. If your muscle car had the Hemi under the hood, very few other vehicles could beat you off the line. They had that much power. But when the oil crisis of the 1970s hit, the Hemi lost its luster. Sure, it was still fast, but it wasn't as fuel efficient as other engines, especially the ones produced by Japanese auto makers. So Chrysler shelved the demon and moved on to more civilized ideas like minivans."
From here:
"If HEMI engines have all these advantages, why aren't all engines using hemispherical heads? It's because there are even better configurations available today.
"One thing that a hemispherical head will never have is four valves per cylinder. The valve angles would be so crazy that the head would be nearly impossible to design. Having only two valves per cylinder is not an issue in drag racing or NASCAR because racing engines are limited to two valves per cylinder in these categories. But on the street, four slightly smaller valves let an engine breathe easier than two large valves. Modern engines use a pentroof design to accommodate four valves.
"Another reason most high-performance engines no longer use a HEMI design is the desire to create a smaller combustion chamber. Small chambers further reduce the heat lost during combustion, and also shorten the distance the flame front must travel during combustion. The compact pentroof design is helpful here, as well."
"As for stealing, maybe one day the RIAA will have it such that you have to pay a royalty every time you learn how to play a new song."
Actually, you may have to pay for each time you play the song.
My community has no municipal taxes. I was divorced in December and so rent right now; I do not (directly) pay property tax.
My health insurance cost ($5.5K) is independent of Medicare and is my portion of (one of) the university health plan(s).
"The other thing that affects tax rates is the things you can deduct. For instance, if I put money away for retirement, that comes off my gross income but also reduces my available disposable income (and thus affects the calculation for the sales tax). Who knows what rate the retirement savings will actually be taxed at when I come to withdraw them."
What are you doing on slashdot if you are going to make insightful comments?:-)
Seriously, you bring up a good point. Some of my salary is not subject to income tax. Lets see, deductions from gross income include retirement ($4.8K), "flex. spending - health" ($1.4K) and health premiums ($5.5K). The "flexible spending" account (actually the wrong name but I do not recall the correct one) takes (pre-tax) money from your "check" (direct deposit) and lets you repay medical bills (after health insurance) including dental bills and drugs; you never pay income tax on this money but any money you do not use (over the course of a year) is lost. The kids came with me after the divorce and one "child tax credit" of $1000 (actually $800) reduced my federal tax approximately from $7K to $6K.
Now, on to you: (i) Could you do a similar 2003 salary and tax summary for yourself so we have more data? (I know, salary CN$250,000 just to make me feel bad.) (ii) In the US, there is no mandatory retirement age (ended in 1993 for university faculty) and I like teaching and doing research, so as long as I have good health and am doing a good job, retirement will remain in the far future (and I am not old enough to worry about this yet). What is the retirement situation like in Canada? (In Germany, you are required to retire at 65.)
I have only been to Edmonton once (in 1993) and I enjoyed my visit. From the view of IT, however, Edmonton and UA fall below Waterloo and UW. Lots of people used WAT4 and WAT5, Maple, etc. Waterloo and
Berlin form a nice community. While UW looks rather strange, I like visiting there.
If you can get a Maple job, go for it. (I took a tour in 1997 of the Maple company; very nice.)
Slashdot Mirror
I have mod points right now. I could have just modded him down. I would prefer some insight as to why his posts are usually pro-Microsoft and anti-Linux. I assume my comments give him an opportunity to prove me wrong and, more importantly, to explain his position. I certainly do not think Linux is perfect and I find problems with Linux occasionally. However, as a Math Professor I find that so many good programs are available (e.g. there is a Debian package for Ken Brakke's Surface Evolver program) that I would never return to Windows. I was using xfig yesterday to prepare figures for a new paper. My coauthor in Australia has limited bandwidth; I used ps2pdf to turn the postscript file to a pdf file for her. Things (e.g. tools) are so easy under Linux that the minor bugs (e.g. really minor KDE problems) are not a big deal to me.
I hope you are correct about improved Windows security. I agree that Gentoo (and Linux in general) gives you much more control over your computer and a greater opportunity to mess things up. Portage is not the same package manager as that used by Red Hat, for example, and you could "screw things up." If you let a five year old drive your car, he/she could also "screw things up."
Your opinions are suspect, however, and the validity of your information is uncertain. As I mentioned on a previous occasion, I wonder if you are a MS employee working to offer favorable comments about MS and unfavorable comments about FOOS. Who knows?
"And don't ask why I used un/salted butter above. I'm really not sure.." ... (toast) ... ball. :-)
Because it is a slippery slope and once you get on it, you can't get off. It is better to just "butter up" your potential opponents and stay friends with both sides. Just don't drop the
The article does not address my real concern, which is that MS "buys" new laws or "buys" DRM which eliminate Linux in the US (and then in Europe when the EU adopts "US rules" (on copyright, etc.)).
I feel inclined to send a link to the article to colleagues using MS. On the other hand, if you are using MS, how smart are you anyway? (Sigh)
When computerized tomography first came out, it had many problems. The most important (in my opinion) was the presence of "mathematical (or imaging) artifacts" in the computed image which did not represent actual tissue or body structure. Over many years, these problems were overcome. The history is rather interesting. (People in the UK do not understand the word "rather".)
One of the principal people who solved the artifact probem was Kennan T. Smith from Oregon State University. He was a mathematician who worked with physicians (e.g. Erik L. Ritman) on problems in tomography. Smith was already very well known for work such as that on functional completion and on Bessel potentials with Aronszajn. To give you an idea about his publications, consider
"Reconstruction of objects from radiographs and the location of brain tumors." Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 71 (1974), 4884--4886. (authors: Guenther, R. B.; Kerber, C. W.; Killian, E. K.; Smith, K. T.; Wagner, S. L.). He is largely responsible for the strong tomography group at Oregon State. (He died about two years ago.)
On to the story (as told to me by KT Smith, Don Solmon and others): Smith would look at the images produced by CT machines (at the University of Oregon, I believe) and try to relate these to the mathematics of tomography. He would publish a paper on mathematically equivalent (to the "standard") reconstruction formulas which did not produce these artifacts. Magically and without any mention or attribution to Smith or his colleagues, this type of artifact would disappear from all of the commercial CT machines a few months later. This happened several times.
My point is that two mathematically equivalent formulas may not produce the same CT image. On infinite precision computers, the images should be the same but on actual machines (with "machine epsilon", roundoff errors, etc.), they were not the same and a lot of work by Smith, Solmon, Guenther, Natterer and others went into finding formulas which eliminated artifacts. I find the comment
"In MRI, the raw output is in frequency domain and typically a Fast Fourier Transform is needed to bring it to spatial terms."
by SimoM (30771) to be so simplistic as to be misleading. I am sure that readers here know about the limited precision of computers but I suspect that they are not aware that this can make an important difference in some (medical) cases. (What is that spot on the image? Either cancer or an artifact; don't worry about it.)
Am I qualified to criticize SimoM (30771)? Well, I have published research on tomography and I refereed one of Smith's last tomography papers. I know several of the researchers on this subject (e.g. Finch, Kuchment, Quinto, Solmon) and have talked with many others (e.g. Berenstein, Cheney, Kunyansky, Natterer). I received my original academic appointment because of Smith's recommendation and remained in (infrequent) contact with him over a period of 20+ years.
Actually, I was thinking of "information issues" (incorrect prescription/drug interaction, incorrect tomographic data or CT/SPECT/PET/NMR/EIT reconstruction, lack of monitoring of patients, loss of power to hospital due to computer error, etc.). Hospital PHBs don't know that much about computers. If something goes wrong, they will say "the computer person (or IT professional) never told us about this risk. It all comes down to "Who was negligent?" (or who can their lawyers say was negligent?).
" ... I don't think anyone will die."
Would you bet "everything" (civil, criminal??) on this?
The "real money" in traditional IT comes from services; open source has nothing to do with employment.
Of course, I must be completely wrong! After all, there are no examples in which people can freely obtain the necessary information (like source code) and yet employment in "services" remains high. Right?
Let's consider my area, mathematics. Calculus was invented (or discovered, if you prefer) almost 400 years ago. While there are huge advances going on in math right now, you would not understand them and they may not influence the economy for a long time. As a practical matter, the mathematical skills required for almost 100% of the job market were discovered over 100 years ago. Your local or university library has (possibly old) books which contain all the information you need. So, there must not be any demand for mathematicians. Right?
The truth is that learning math can be hard and most people need help. All the information you need is freely available but you cannot understand it (well enough). Check with any school district; the odds are that they need more math teachers. You would (OK, might) be shocked to learn how little mathematical knowledge "professionals" (e.g. PhD engineers, chemists, physicists, computer scientists) have. (One of my colleagues has two PhDs, in physics and statistics. He was a physics professor in Penn. and left to work on a stat. PhD. He has told me that, as a physicist, he had no idea of how little math he knew until he worked on a stat. PhD. I have many more examples.) Mathematicians need help from other mathematicians for topics outside their areas. "Service" is the name of the game; even trivial areas of math like calculus and ODEs are hard before you understand them and the fact that it is open source does not help.
Have you configured SENDMAIL? (Correctly?) Easy? Not for everyone. Even though it is open source, having a knowledgable person around (i.e. service) is very useful. I hope you get my point.
"For crying out loud, your mom doesn't set the standards of progress in information technology." :-)
I hate to tell you, but his mom does. When she finally decides to upgrade, it will open a flood gate of upgrades and "they" won't be able to hire IT people fast enough. All these jobs are waiting on his mom and you can't even talk nicely about her.
I've noticed that ABET has been reducing the amount of "knowledge" (e.g. math and science) and increasing the amount of "practice" required for an engineering degree for some time. ABET used to prescribe (fairly) rigid standards (e.g. math from mathematicians) and now lets universities (i.e. colleges of engineering) decide what makes up an engineering degree to a large extent. I think this is driven, in part, by engineering faculty (deans?) who want to use increased student credit hour production to justify additional money (but I am not certain about this).
The bottom line is that engineering (in the US) has been going downhill for 30 years. People in "industry" (aviation industry) have told me that in the 1960s and 70s a company could hire a new engineering graduate with a 2.0 (C) grade point average and have no problems with this employee while in the 1990s and now, a company could hire a new 4.0 (A) gpa engineering graduate and not necessarily get a knowledgable or skilled employee.
(I do not think ABET is that old and one cannot blame them for all the problems in engineering.)
"I'm looking to get out of IT after being in it since 1977."
Young kids think they know everything. You don't see Sid leaving IT, do you? How many punch cards do you still have? Is writing FORTRAN code still second nature to you? (COBOL? What is that?)
Would a "Beowulf cluster" of average calculus 1 students yield a good math (research) paper?
I didn't think so.
I believe Fred Gallagher still has a "day job" but it would not surprise me if someday MagaToyko pays his bills (e.g. books (of MegaToyko strips), conventions (e.g. Dallas, June 2004)).
Does UF take care of Illiad? (I hope so. How many video cards is YOUR kingdom worth?)
I think the future in a lot of "IT employment" will come from the knowledge/creativity of individuals and will use IT as a tool. If you live in a small city (say 500,000) and you would like to be an "artist", your opportunities would have been very limited ten years ago but are much better now; MegaToyko and UserFriendly are two examples of opportunities (i.e. content/entertainment offered without a middleman) which were not available 10-20 years ago .
I think the "future" (a future) lies in content rather than delivery. So you are a great "flash programmer"; who cares? Do you have something worth seeing or reading? Do you have specialized knowledge? Are you a leet mathematician or chemist with something interesting to say? (Mandatory link.) (If you want to hear my talk at ANU later, there is no charge.)
Anyway, I think outsourcing is bad (e.g. call a credit card company or airline and try to get good service) but it is reality. I think content (mostly from people in the US/Canada or Europe, although there are extremely smart people everywhere) is the real opportunity. Copy Illiad or create your own path. Your content might be humor or entertainment. It might be your specialized knowledge of the XYZ industry. "We" are all over-weight; who is using the Internet and making money by poking fun at us and offering us free "health advice" (and selling books with the "health strips" strips ala UF)?
PS If I had any really good ideas, I would be working on them rather than posting here. You "guys" are the smart ones; find a niche market so you can get rich and afford a "Doom 3 computer".
Russian (probably) "hackers" went to the trouble of introducing a "browser helper object" so they harvest a few (or a few thousand) credit card numbers through M$ IIS. Considering that supporters of one of the main political parties (in this case the "right wing party") called people in the KC area and told untrue stories about Rep. Moore and considering the results of the last election in Georgia, I think some concern about e-voting is reasonable.
PS Listen to Led Zeppelin (or Dylan, the Band, etc.) while doing math; it makes it easier. (Yeah, I just figured out how to complete a math paper I started last October and it looks really good. Now to present the results in Australia in a few months!)
What are you doing on /.? Doom 3 is out, you do not have a fast enough machine and you are waiting until OCTOBER to get one? Man ... your priorities??? :-)
From here,
... serious.) :-)
"Playboy magazine has twice published their own rankings of America's top party schools:
"The 2002 list read as follows:
22. University of California, Santa Barbara
Of course, UCSB is a SERIOUS place. (Kohn stays there because the coeds are so
Thanks for the information. It is my experience that contributions from "outside one's area (discipline)" are often overlooked or ignored; thus contributions from geology (wavelets?) are not always given credit in math and contributions from math are not always given credit in engineering. I will read the paper by Seebass and George but I will not accept it as "the final word" (until I look further).
The review by N. Geffen of "Analysis of Transonic Airfoils", Comm. Pure Appl. Math. 24 (1971), 841--851 by Garabedian, P. R.; Korn, D. G.
"Calculation of inviscid, subsonic-supercritical flow around prescribed airfoils is described. This supplements the authors' previous design of a shockless transonic wing using real and complex characteristics in the hodograph plane. The flow about the designed wing is calculated for a range of off-design conditions.
"Neumann's problem for the flow-potential equation is solved numerically in a plane where the exterior of the airfoil is conformally (also numerically) mapped onto the interior of the unit circle. Following E. M. Murman and J. D. Cole [AIAA J. 9 (1971), 114--121], a second-order finite-difference scheme is used in the subsonic region, while an implicit second-order scheme is used in the hyperbolic zone, introducing artificial viscosity of the right sign. The Kutta condition is satisfied by an iterative scheme. Results with relatively narrow shocks (i.e., steep gradients) are given and compared with wind-tunnel experiments."
I may be incorrect about this, but I seem to recall that the mathematician Paul Garabedian independently developed the mathematical theory for shockless supersonic flight at the same time that people in AE developed a theory. The Popular Science article does not mention Garabedian.
"Maybe MS *is* doing something right." :-)
Your problems with SP2 will arise at some future time when you have not
"allotted time for troubleshooting" and you cannot afford a blue screen.
No, you are doing something wrong.
Sometimes you do find facts here, however. I find the opinions of the "IT community" to be worth reading; the general tone (and some specific comments) can be very interesting.
On this particular story, we will soon find out (from several sources - e.g. CNN, "linux" news sites) if the groklaw story is right or wrong. My guess is that it is correct. Even if we are kind of tired of SCO stories, "we" are still interested in seeing SCO die and will always find stories like this interesting or, at least, entertaining.
"Hemi" is an old type of engine and it is an ad campaign. It sounds to me like you bought into the hype on tv.
From the first link:
"It was once called the "finest engine of its kind in the world," the Hemi Magnum engine once ruled the track and the streets. If your muscle car had the Hemi under the hood, very few other vehicles could beat you off the line. They had that much power. But when the oil crisis of the 1970s hit, the Hemi lost its luster. Sure, it was still fast, but it wasn't as fuel efficient as other engines, especially the ones produced by Japanese auto makers. So Chrysler shelved the demon and moved on to more civilized ideas like minivans."
From here:
"If HEMI engines have all these advantages, why aren't all engines using hemispherical heads? It's because there are even better configurations available today.
"One thing that a hemispherical head will never have is four valves per cylinder. The valve angles would be so crazy that the head would be nearly impossible to design. Having only two valves per cylinder is not an issue in drag racing or NASCAR because racing engines are limited to two valves per cylinder in these categories. But on the street, four slightly smaller valves let an engine breathe easier than two large valves. Modern engines use a pentroof design to accommodate four valves.
"Another reason most high-performance engines no longer use a HEMI design is the desire to create a smaller combustion chamber. Small chambers further reduce the heat lost during combustion, and also shorten the distance the flame front must travel during combustion. The compact pentroof design is helpful here, as well."
Also.
"As for stealing, maybe one day the RIAA will have it such that you have to pay a royalty every time you learn how to play a new song."
Actually, you may have to pay for each time you play the song.
My community has no municipal taxes. I was divorced in December and so rent right now; I do not (directly) pay property tax. My health insurance cost ($5.5K) is independent of Medicare and is my portion of (one of) the university health plan(s).
:-)
"The other thing that affects tax rates is the things you can deduct. For instance, if I put money away for retirement, that comes off my gross income but also reduces my available disposable income (and thus affects the calculation for the sales tax). Who knows what rate the retirement savings will actually be taxed at when I come to withdraw them."
What are you doing on slashdot if you are going to make insightful comments?
Seriously, you bring up a good point. Some of my salary is not subject to income tax. Lets see, deductions from gross income include retirement ($4.8K), "flex. spending - health" ($1.4K) and health premiums ($5.5K). The "flexible spending" account (actually the wrong name but I do not recall the correct one) takes (pre-tax) money from your "check" (direct deposit) and lets you repay medical bills (after health insurance) including dental bills and drugs; you never pay income tax on this money but any money you do not use (over the course of a year) is lost. The kids came with me after the divorce and one "child tax credit" of $1000 (actually $800) reduced my federal tax approximately from $7K to $6K.
Now, on to you: (i) Could you do a similar 2003 salary and tax summary for yourself so we have more data? (I know, salary CN$250,000 just to make me feel bad.) (ii) In the US, there is no mandatory retirement age (ended in 1993 for university faculty) and I like teaching and doing research, so as long as I have good health and am doing a good job, retirement will remain in the far future (and I am not old enough to worry about this yet). What is the retirement situation like in Canada? (In Germany, you are required to retire at 65.)
I have only been to Edmonton once (in 1993) and I enjoyed my visit. From the view of IT, however, Edmonton and UA fall below Waterloo and UW. Lots of people used WAT4 and WAT5, Maple, etc. Waterloo and Berlin form a nice community. While UW looks rather strange, I like visiting there. If you can get a Maple job, go for it. (I took a tour in 1997 of the Maple company; very nice.)