Although he has several complaints a large number of them is summed up in this one Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals.
He seems to complain over and over again that nobody is explaining to him how to do the problems. He wants a magical subroutine that he can run a question through that will give him an answer. I'm teaching mathematics at a university so I've seen this same request before. The vast majority of the time you do a little prodding and you find that the student has spent no time struggling with the problem. They looked at it, didn't immediately know how to do it, then came to my office hour. Given very little prodding these very same students are often able to solve the problem while I'm watching. So what's happening? These students are refusing to struggle with a problem. Spend some time with it in their heads while not knowing the answer.
The reality with teaching math (at higher levels) is virtually none of the learning happens in the class room during lectures. Fortunately I have the luxury to be able to work shop problems in class where I say virtually nothing and the students figure out parts together in groups. But even better than that the vast majority of the learning will always happen with the assignments. In other words you can't learn math listening; you can only learn math doing.
Maybe he's the sort of asshole who doesn't think he should be required to attend lectures that aren't useful to him.
There certainly are people who attend lectures and are fine doing that. But nothing about the original poster sugested that. He was complaining about not being taught well enough and not being given examples. This sounds like someone who (as the replier said) wasn't able to pick up the material from the lecture and was either unable or unwilling to attempt it on his own.
Open source does not mean the project leaders will solve every problem for the asking. Open source means you have the freedom and the information required to solve the problem yourself.
A lot of people seem to be responding to you saying that you are wrong about what open source is. Clearly you're right about what open source is though. However I think that point is neither here nor there. What the grandparent (mine not yours) was commenting on was how the dev team structure of the Opera team was more efficient at solving his problem than the dev team structure of the firefox team. Unfortunately he had to link the idea of quick response to the idea of open source (which you did appropriately respond to). I think really the lesson learned here is that, open or closed, nothing replaces a good dev team.
He claims that sines and cosines are hard because the poor student can't calculate them by hand. How many here can extract a square root by hand?
Actually this is part of his point. The reason why he doesn't use distance is because distance requires the use of a lot of square roots that quadrance avoids. There are parts of his idea which I do take a little issue to (generally the idea that linearity isn't all that important) but this idea is not only reasonable it isn't new. It is an old idea (which he comments on) to leave all lengths squared while doing a calculation until you are done with them. Essentially we deal with quadrances all the time so he asks why should we be using its square root.
I am of course being rhetorical. This story is really nothing more than a comment on another slashdot story. If only slashdot had the ability to such a thing with out creating a whole new story on the front page. Wait! That's what the comment system is.
Unlike a lot of readers I usually have no issue with zonk's stories and often find them interesting. I have no intention of blocking his stories from my front page (however I should note that a lot of others do not share this interest and have already blocked him). But this is silly. Please, fellow slashdot reader/commenter, if you have a comment to make about the revolution consider posting it in the original revolution story. If you want to complain about Zonk then comment on that on this story. For those of you who share my irritation this can be our form of protest.
How do you figure you have enough information to make a judgement one way or the other on how these movies will be. If you know who these characters are then all you know is a nugget of the premise. You don't know when in the characters story the movie will take place. You don't know the structure, the pacing or even the director. There are so many things that can make or break a movie that just knowing the pitch isn't anything more than statistical noise.
There have been a lot of terrible comic book movies; there have been a lot of great comic book movies. Why would Punisher fail when Batman succeeds? Maybe because Burton is a better director than Hensleigh. I'm sure a good film maker could make a great film that has a basic premise of Punisher. And there have been several poor films (by poor film makers) based on the premise of Batman.
They really seem not to have learned the right lessons from DVD
To what lesson are you referring to? DVD's have a ton of copy prevention and region encoding built into them that the vast majority of people can't circumvent. And what are the results? DVD sales are far larger than video sales have ever been. You might not use DVDs but I'm not sure anybody cares.
I'm really not being a devil's advocate here; I am genuinely glad to see this article on slashdot.
People seem to be complaining that/. is posting a humour story from the onion when we are all already aware that the onion post humour stories. Although the onion always posts humour stories they don't always post humour stories about tech and links to tech stories is something we expect on/..
But secondly I think this belongs here because it is actually a really funny story: much funnier than that which I've usually read in the onion. I'm not much of an onion fan personally but I have several friends who like to email me links from the onion from time to time. So I've seen a few stories and when I received this one I thought it was hilarious.
I agree with you and I want to extend on your point a bit. I also make some money playing online and at casinos though I certainly don't make a living off it.
Your're right that there would need to be a miracle program for it to be a better player than even someone with a bit of experience. However let's assume such a program did exist. I claim it's still not a serious threat to a professional poker player if one is sitting at the table. Even if three are sitting at the table. Why not? Because most of the time you're not making money off of players. Most of the time you're making money off of gamblers (ie the elephant): people who don't distinguish the difference between poker and slot machines.
My point is as long as there are enough loose players at the table (you only need a few) there will probably be enough money to go around. I know this because I have definitely made money at the casino when there have been several players better than me at the table. You have to think a little bit more when going up against them but most of the time you will get you're opportunities when they aren't in the hand (because most strong players that I know are not in a lot of hands).
As to your comment about collusion if I'm not mistaken I believe winholdem has the option that it will collude with any other winholdem players at the table.
I'm guessing by that price you are either in Alberta or Southern Ontario. Most provinces are already over 96 cents and several are selling at over a dollar.
You do realize that that hybrid cars do not need to be recharged from an external source. They run on normal gasoline. And this certainly is an issue to do with the US. Your guys gasoline is artificially cheap due to government subsidizing ($3 a gallon is about 96 cents a litre in canada which is not cheap but it's not considered ridiculously expensive).
I'm sorry I think my humour was too subtle. The idea was the logic proves analysis. Analysis proves calculus. And so calculus must prove logic.
It's also generally a bad idea to tell a mathematician that math is merely logic. Logic is certainly used in mathematics much like how mathematics is used in physics. However math is not just an extension of logic. Guys like Russel and Godel certainly fall in a grey area between mathematician and logician (well Godel's later work at least) but there are just too many problems and topics in mathematics that clearly do not have a logic as a centre to call it logic (not to mention how many topics have nothing to do with quantification either).
I'm sorry but clearly evolution is scientific however can you give a prediction that Darwinism makes so that we may construct an experiment in an attempt to disprove it? The idea that science is simply that which follows the scientific method is a simplistic and out dated concept. I have read many articles in well respected scientific publications that are strictly about analytical theories and reasoning. The reason why we dismiss ID is that Darwinism makes more sense analytically since it is simpler yet still explains everything.
Clearly it is important that when experimental evidence and analytical theory contradict each other that we dismiss the theory in favour of the experiment. However when we do not have the luxury of a scientifically controlled experiment it is perfectly acceptable to refer to strictly analytical theory as scientific.
Even though the article says these are "test boxes" apple should see that wIthout DRM they would have the perfect weapon to gain market share.
I'm always surprised when I read comments like this. Especially highly modded. What percentage of the market share do you think would really change there buying decision to preference a non-DRM computer. Do you think it is even 1% when you consider how high a percentage is just bought by schools and businesses in bulk. Plus I don't know how much it matters to the consumer crowd either. DRM computers will still play their DVDs and mp3s. Sure they probably won't rip DVDs but how many care.
Actually I think quite a large percentage of the consumer market will care about a DRM in their computer. Most will want it when it comes to playing DRM media. Do you remember when DVD-Rom drives first became available to the public? I do. I had a dual boot machine at the time (I've since gotten rid of windows). Playing dvds was a royal pain in linux. You could either get audio sync and stability with mplayer or menus with ogle but not both (xine was the worst of both at the time). And forget about subtitles (though alternate audio tracks worked pretty easily). However on the windows side the dvd player would crash from time to time but sync was good and you had all the features. Eventually watching dvds in linux became a pleasure since you can play any region and you can skip over warnings; plus all the stability and feature became available. But my point is this took a took a while. I'm betting it will be just as hard - if not harder - to get DRM media playing on non-DRM enabled boxes.
So personally I think not having DRM not only will not gain you market share but it has a good chance losing you customers.
I had an even more impressive experience with Debian. My motherboard died so I replaced it along with a new cpu. The new motherboard has built in ethernet and sound. Plugged the harddrive into the computer and it booted up and everything was already working. I was extremely impressed.
Later I plugged in a bluetooth dongle that was recognized though connecting the bluetooth keyboard took a little more research than I would have liked.
I really don't get the motivation for free internet unless you're in a highly competitive area where you're fighting for every customer. If that's the environment why are you opening a café there. If on the other hand there is a wealth of customers your main focus has to be turn around. Certainly you don't want to discourage customers from hanging around but you don't really want to encourage them either with free services.
Why not offer the reverse for those who do want a drink or two but really just want a place to use their laptop. Ie charge them an hourly rate for the internet but while they are their you keep them comfortable and offer them free pop and coffee (and maybe discounted machiatos)?
With all the complaints about the 5500 in this discussion I have to ask has anyone found any decent alternatives. Specifically I would love to know if there's anything with 802.11 and a decent web browser (maybe even one that could run java apps). Really I'm just thinking about something that would let me check gmail in the morning while I eat my fruit loops.
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
It seems to me that you are just completely glossing over the non-obvious part. The part where the members with the mutations stop reproducing with the rest of the non-mutated species for long enough that the two branches are unable to breed with each other at all after a certain point. Why should a mutation stop breeding with members who haven't mutated. Or if it is built in to the behaviour that the species will not breed with mutants then how do the mutants not have this behaviour so that they may breed with each other. It is this stage that is being observed in the article.
Your butterfly question seems cute but quaint. Really, I think if it seems obvious to you how eyes evolved then I doubt you fully understand the problem. There are just too many very bright people out there who are interested in this as a problem (I'm talking about people who believe in evolution but can't explain all the mechanics) for it to be trivial.
Just a note. My G4 just crapped out 4 or so months out of warranty (issue with the power cable between the mainboard and the display). I called up apple and they are repairing everything free of charge. So yes there isn't a recall but the problems are much less frequent than they were with the G3's and they are repairing them out of warranty. I'm actually pretty impressed at how apple will take care of their customers.
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The program you want to use is called "discover" or "hotplug." Does exactly what you want.
Although he has several complaints a large number of them is summed up in this one
Write textbooks that are more than just glorified problem set manuals.
He seems to complain over and over again that nobody is explaining to him how to do the problems. He wants a magical subroutine that he can run a question through that will give him an answer. I'm teaching mathematics at a university so I've seen this same request before. The vast majority of the time you do a little prodding and you find that the student has spent no time struggling with the problem. They looked at it, didn't immediately know how to do it, then came to my office hour. Given very little prodding these very same students are often able to solve the problem while I'm watching. So what's happening? These students are refusing to struggle with a problem. Spend some time with it in their heads while not knowing the answer.
The reality with teaching math (at higher levels) is virtually none of the learning happens in the class room during lectures. Fortunately I have the luxury to be able to work shop problems in class where I say virtually nothing and the students figure out parts together in groups. But even better than that the vast majority of the learning will always happen with the assignments. In other words you can't learn math listening; you can only learn math doing.
Maybe he's the sort of asshole who doesn't think he should be required to attend lectures that aren't useful to him.
There certainly are people who attend lectures and are fine doing that. But nothing about the original poster sugested that. He was complaining about not being taught well enough and not being given examples. This sounds like someone who (as the replier said) wasn't able to pick up the material from the lecture and was either unable or unwilling to attempt it on his own.
Just my reading.
Open source does not mean the project leaders will solve every problem for the asking. Open source means you have the freedom and the information required to solve the problem yourself.
A lot of people seem to be responding to you saying that you are wrong about what open source is. Clearly you're right about what open source is though. However I think that point is neither here nor there. What the grandparent (mine not yours) was commenting on was how the dev team structure of the Opera team was more efficient at solving his problem than the dev team structure of the firefox team. Unfortunately he had to link the idea of quick response to the idea of open source (which you did appropriately respond to). I think really the lesson learned here is that, open or closed, nothing replaces a good dev team.
He claims that sines and cosines are hard because the poor student can't calculate them by hand. How many here can extract a square root by hand?
Actually this is part of his point. The reason why he doesn't use distance is because distance requires the use of a lot of square roots that quadrance avoids. There are parts of his idea which I do take a little issue to (generally the idea that linearity isn't all that important) but this idea is not only reasonable it isn't new. It is an old idea (which he comments on) to leave all lengths squared while doing a calculation until you are done with them. Essentially we deal with quadrances all the time so he asks why should we be using its square root.
I am of course being rhetorical. This story is really nothing more than a comment on another slashdot story. If only slashdot had the ability to such a thing with out creating a whole new story on the front page. Wait! That's what the comment system is.
Unlike a lot of readers I usually have no issue with zonk's stories and often find them interesting. I have no intention of blocking his stories from my front page (however I should note that a lot of others do not share this interest and have already blocked him). But this is silly. Please, fellow slashdot reader/commenter, if you have a comment to make about the revolution consider posting it in the original revolution story. If you want to complain about Zonk then comment on that on this story. For those of you who share my irritation this can be our form of protest.
Those movies sound terrible.
How do you figure you have enough information to make a judgement one way or the other on how these movies will be. If you know who these characters are then all you know is a nugget of the premise. You don't know when in the characters story the movie will take place. You don't know the structure, the pacing or even the director. There are so many things that can make or break a movie that just knowing the pitch isn't anything more than statistical noise.
There have been a lot of terrible comic book movies; there have been a lot of great comic book movies. Why would Punisher fail when Batman succeeds? Maybe because Burton is a better director than Hensleigh. I'm sure a good film maker could make a great film that has a basic premise of Punisher. And there have been several poor films (by poor film makers) based on the premise of Batman.
They really seem not to have learned the right lessons from DVD
To what lesson are you referring to? DVD's have a ton of copy prevention and region encoding built into them that the vast majority of people can't circumvent. And what are the results? DVD sales are far larger than video sales have ever been. You might not use DVDs but I'm not sure anybody cares.
By the way, does anyone happen to know Jesus's handicap?
I thought it was Judas.
I'm really not being a devil's advocate here; I am genuinely glad to see this article on slashdot.
/. is posting a humour story from the onion when we are all already aware that the onion post humour stories. Although the onion always posts humour stories they don't always post humour stories about tech and links to tech stories is something we expect on /..
People seem to be complaining that
But secondly I think this belongs here because it is actually a really funny story: much funnier than that which I've usually read in the onion. I'm not much of an onion fan personally but I have several friends who like to email me links from the onion from time to time. So I've seen a few stories and when I received this one I thought it was hilarious.
[...]Apple is the largest single hardware vendor[...]
Where did you get that idea from. They are certainly in the top 5 but they are way behind dell in terms of sales.
I agree with you and I want to extend on your point a bit. I also make some money playing online and at casinos though I certainly don't make a living off it.
Your're right that there would need to be a miracle program for it to be a better player than even someone with a bit of experience. However let's assume such a program did exist. I claim it's still not a serious threat to a professional poker player if one is sitting at the table. Even if three are sitting at the table. Why not? Because most of the time you're not making money off of players. Most of the time you're making money off of gamblers (ie the elephant): people who don't distinguish the difference between poker and slot machines.
My point is as long as there are enough loose players at the table (you only need a few) there will probably be enough money to go around. I know this because I have definitely made money at the casino when there have been several players better than me at the table. You have to think a little bit more when going up against them but most of the time you will get you're opportunities when they aren't in the hand (because most strong players that I know are not in a lot of hands).
As to your comment about collusion if I'm not mistaken I believe winholdem has the option that it will collude with any other winholdem players at the table.
Like making love? Try making love with 1,000 other transhumans all at the same time. Who knows what would be possible.
So you're ideal future includes the perfected gang bang?
I'm guessing by that price you are either in Alberta or Southern Ontario. Most provinces are already over 96 cents and several are selling at over a dollar.
You do realize that that hybrid cars do not need to be recharged from an external source. They run on normal gasoline. And this certainly is an issue to do with the US. Your guys gasoline is artificially cheap due to government subsidizing ($3 a gallon is about 96 cents a litre in canada which is not cheap but it's not considered ridiculously expensive).
I think I've been getting your email.
I'm sorry I think my humour was too subtle. The idea was the logic proves analysis. Analysis proves calculus. And so calculus must prove logic.
It's also generally a bad idea to tell a mathematician that math is merely logic. Logic is certainly used in mathematics much like how mathematics is used in physics. However math is not just an extension of logic. Guys like Russel and Godel certainly fall in a grey area between mathematician and logician (well Godel's later work at least) but there are just too many problems and topics in mathematics that clearly do not have a logic as a centre to call it logic (not to mention how many topics have nothing to do with quantification either).
And what do we use to "prove" logic?
Calculus?
I'm sorry but clearly evolution is scientific however can you give a prediction that Darwinism makes so that we may construct an experiment in an attempt to disprove it? The idea that science is simply that which follows the scientific method is a simplistic and out dated concept. I have read many articles in well respected scientific publications that are strictly about analytical theories and reasoning. The reason why we dismiss ID is that Darwinism makes more sense analytically since it is simpler yet still explains everything.
Clearly it is important that when experimental evidence and analytical theory contradict each other that we dismiss the theory in favour of the experiment. However when we do not have the luxury of a scientifically controlled experiment it is perfectly acceptable to refer to strictly analytical theory as scientific.
Even though the article says these are "test boxes" apple should see that wIthout DRM they would have the perfect weapon to gain market share.
I'm always surprised when I read comments like this. Especially highly modded. What percentage of the market share do you think would really change there buying decision to preference a non-DRM computer. Do you think it is even 1% when you consider how high a percentage is just bought by schools and businesses in bulk. Plus I don't know how much it matters to the consumer crowd either. DRM computers will still play their DVDs and mp3s. Sure they probably won't rip DVDs but how many care.
Actually I think quite a large percentage of the consumer market will care about a DRM in their computer. Most will want it when it comes to playing DRM media. Do you remember when DVD-Rom drives first became available to the public? I do. I had a dual boot machine at the time (I've since gotten rid of windows). Playing dvds was a royal pain in linux. You could either get audio sync and stability with mplayer or menus with ogle but not both (xine was the worst of both at the time). And forget about subtitles (though alternate audio tracks worked pretty easily). However on the windows side the dvd player would crash from time to time but sync was good and you had all the features. Eventually watching dvds in linux became a pleasure since you can play any region and you can skip over warnings; plus all the stability and feature became available. But my point is this took a took a while. I'm betting it will be just as hard - if not harder - to get DRM media playing on non-DRM enabled boxes.
So personally I think not having DRM not only will not gain you market share but it has a good chance losing you customers.
I had an even more impressive experience with Debian. My motherboard died so I replaced it along with a new cpu. The new motherboard has built in ethernet and sound. Plugged the harddrive into the computer and it booted up and everything was already working. I was extremely impressed.
Later I plugged in a bluetooth dongle that was recognized though connecting the bluetooth keyboard took a little more research than I would have liked.
I really don't get the motivation for free internet unless you're in a highly competitive area where you're fighting for every customer. If that's the environment why are you opening a café there. If on the other hand there is a wealth of customers your main focus has to be turn around. Certainly you don't want to discourage customers from hanging around but you don't really want to encourage them either with free services.
Why not offer the reverse for those who do want a drink or two but really just want a place to use their laptop. Ie charge them an hourly rate for the internet but while they are their you keep them comfortable and offer them free pop and coffee (and maybe discounted machiatos)?
With all the complaints about the 5500 in this discussion I have to ask has anyone found any decent alternatives. Specifically I would love to know if there's anything with 802.11 and a decent web browser (maybe even one that could run java apps). Really I'm just thinking about something that would let me check gmail in the morning while I eat my fruit loops.
Mutations occur, and when they occur in parallel for members of the same species, and those mutations survive into succeeding generations, you achieve speciation. End of story. What am I missing?
It seems to me that you are just completely glossing over the non-obvious part. The part where the members with the mutations stop reproducing with the rest of the non-mutated species for long enough that the two branches are unable to breed with each other at all after a certain point. Why should a mutation stop breeding with members who haven't mutated. Or if it is built in to the behaviour that the species will not breed with mutants then how do the mutants not have this behaviour so that they may breed with each other. It is this stage that is being observed in the article.
Your butterfly question seems cute but quaint. Really, I think if it seems obvious to you how eyes evolved then I doubt you fully understand the problem. There are just too many very bright people out there who are interested in this as a problem (I'm talking about people who believe in evolution but can't explain all the mechanics) for it to be trivial.
Just a note. My G4 just crapped out 4 or so months out of warranty (issue with the power cable between the mainboard and the display). I called up apple and they are repairing everything free of charge. So yes there isn't a recall but the problems are much less frequent than they were with the G3's and they are repairing them out of warranty. I'm actually pretty impressed at how apple will take care of their customers.