I am, technically, a partial CS-grad from a UK university - but I deliberately choose to do Mathematics as the "major" (not a term we use in the UK, but it explains it well enough) because the CS was so dire.
Sounds like you went to a place where the CS school is poor. Which is a shame for you, but what happens when you don't research the quality of teaching in the relevant subject(s) before picking where to apply to. No university is uniformly good for all subjects; the good ones still have courses worth a damn and students able to keep up.
But it's genuinely useful for students to learn about team working and keeping things going for a year. Done right, that teaches those greenhorns about what matters when it comes to software maintenance, which is a very important part of any real programming job. New programmers always find it hard to remember to document things, to keep things in version control, to test stuff, to be careful not to break the build, to keep backups. If the students can learn to get past those things, they're much more employable since, while they may need to learn the details of the API or language, they'll be starting out with good habits.
Therefore, it makes zero sense to throw huge warnings for untrusted certs and yet do nothing for plain old unencrypted HTTP.
Except that everyone and his dog (provided they can wade through the openssl instructions; no mean feat) can have as many self-signed certificates as they want. They don't take long to create by hand, and the generation is almost-trivial to script. The only security you can possibly get from them is against eavesdropping (a fairly rare attack in practice) unless you already know the public keys of everyone you ever want to communicate with, ever. Which doesn't scale.
So how are you going to learn the public key of some other organization? (It changes from time to time; keys expire after a while and that is a good thing as it helps to limit other kinds of problems.) Asking someone you trust - a CA - is the best solution found so far, but some CAs should never have been trusted in the first place and should be kicked out. At the very least, they should be properly liable for what happens if they make false assertions.
Just to expand, Einstein's relativity deals with relative motion approaching the speed of light (how distance & time warp) - hence the term relativistic speed. If you're not at relativistic speeds, then Newton's laws work just fine.
Special relativity isn't hugely more involved than what you get when you think of Newton's laws in their real form (not the usual handwavy-forms you're taught) under frames obeying Lorenz invariance (which is really a kind of rotation in spacetime). The real form of Newton's laws is as differential equations, relating momentum changes to instantaneous impulses. It's really very clever indeed, and the consequences of it are very deep, but it is accessible to about the level of introductory college math since it's still clearly a classical theory.
General relativity is trickier and beyond my mathematical ability/training. I can just about handle the handwavy explanations there and I've read enough to know I don't get the rest.
It proposes increased CNG use while ignoring the energy density and transportation issues.
It's among the easiest of fuels to transport as you can pipe it around easily and it doesn't have nearly as great a problem with groundwater contamination as heavier hydrocarbons. The energy density argument is rather bogus too; gas power plants are more efficient these days than oil or coal plants as they're run at much higher temperatures, and you don't transport it in the same way. One of the main ways in which the UK has reduced its carbon output over the past 2 decades has been by switching to producing electricity using gas, and this is despite the amount of electrical power required not decreasing (I think it's increased).
You would think, based on this, that natural gas is the be-all, end-all of fuels and is damn near perfect in every way. While it is lower carbon than coal, and slightly lower than oil, this is absolutely not the case. Effectively, this focuses on only the best aspects of gas and only the worst of nuclear and every other energy source. it uses the best case for gas and worst case for all others
OTOH, they can point to real case studies where the benefits are directly quantifiable. The technology exists now, and has done for decades; the kinks in it have been ironed out. It's definitely practical. (It also doesn't preclude investing in other technologies as well.)
Now, this should not surprise anyone: the major funding for this came almost entirely from the gas industry, who has recently been using heavy PR to cultivate a much "greener" image than it really is entitled to. The major funding and supporting agency is "The American Clean Skies Foundation." This foundation is funded almost exclusively by Chesapeake Energy corporation - one of the largest natural gas producers in the US. YES, THAT'S RIGHT - THIS WAS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY A GAS COMPANY
You'd rather it was funded by the nuclear industry? Or the RIAA maybe? (Powering America on the burning ambitions of a generation of artists!!) Seriously, while you're absolutely right to be careful of what they say, you can't just reject it out of hand because there actually is evidence that it is better (i.e., more flexible, cheaper, more efficient per ton of CO2, etc. There's quite a few metrics.) The companies involved think they can make money (duh!) and serve some other goals at the same time. To claim that their natural financial interest makes them ineligible to say anything on the topic just marks you out as one of the Loony Left (or perhaps the Raving Right; I've lost track of which part of the political spectrum is currently claiming the forefront of rabid anti-corporatism at the moment).
Of course hydroelectric is great for peaking, too - especially if practiced like France and Switzerland. The Swiss buy power from the French (nuclear) during off-peak and use it to pump water into dammed lakes, then generate power through those dams during peak periods and sell it back to the French. The challenege is that there are only so many areas which can be powered this way do to the need for proper topography.
Pumped storage is quite an expensive way to do electricity generation; there are considerable inherent losses in the system due to things like friction in pumps. On the other hand, it's the only known-viable large scale energy storage scheme; the other alternatives I've seen articles about (various kinds of batteries, pressurized gas, etc.) are neat but haven't demonstrated at anything like the scale of a pumped storage plant.
And all you need to build one is two lakes/reservoirs close to each other with a big height difference. So, maybe not in most of the Mid-West, but there's got to be plenty of suitable places in the Appalachians or the Cascades. Maybe others too.
The bigest force actually working against this is the evangelical right, which usually sees no difference between a Girls Gone Wild video and Underaged Wet Mule Sodomizers part 83.
Of course they can't see the difference. To see it, they would have to watch it.:-)
And there I was thinking that their preachers did see a difference; Girls Gone Wild is filth, and the other belongs in their personal collections.
You can't publish it verbatim from a conference to a journal, but there are quite a few people who publish essentially the same thing in a conference and a journal. You just have to rewrite it with a different spin or maybe a little more work/discussion/etc.
The usual rule is that a journal paper needs more depth than a conference paper and the maximum page count is correspondingly higher to give you space to go into detail. One reason you can't (normally) just take your conference paper verbatim is that it will be just too lightweight for a journal.
Ideally, you will want to iteratively search through combinations of input variables to determine an optimum in terms of output variables.
One thing you can do with enough computing power is work in near real time, interactively steering the simulation towards a situation that is interesting. Gamers will be familiar with why this can be a good idea, but it very useful when the effect you are actually studying is an emergent one of some physical situation where the input parameters have to be very exact to trigger. Certain types of mixing of immiscible fluids (on the way to making emulsions) can be very interesting, and the physics there is both tricky and commercially valuable.
Well, what is it about weather simulation that requires so much work?
It's a scientific model with a boatload of variables and dependencies. Ask these guys.
In particular, it's a fluid dynamics problem and they tend to be difficult to scale up to distributed computing because of the amount of coupling between adjacent simulation cells. Supercomputers (with their expensive interconnects and very high memory bandwidth) tend to be far better at this sort of problem.
The amount of work to make LaTeX not look like an academic article is boggling.
Then you're doing it wrong. The usual first trick is to make sure you've chosen the fonts right; most people don't understand the difference between styles and fonts and you sound ignorant enough to also make that blunder.
Hell, the amount of work just to figure out how the fuck you escape basic punctuation so your file compiles is boggling.
You have a library for that. Going all hair-shirt and doing it by hand is just foolish.
Just use a normal PDF library.
Depends on the size and complexity of the document being produced. If it's really rather large and complex, then build it as XML, use XSLT to map to XSL-FO, and then convert that to printable form. (IIRC, at least one XSL-FO system uses LaTeX as a back end...)
So, yeah, 48 hrs gameplay per day.....definitely possible.
[emphasis added]
You play two games at once? For 24 hours straight? Even with a dual machine set up, I just can't quite grasp how you can concentrate on something for that long. (Well, not unless it's a JRPG with interminably long cut scenes. They'd do for sleeping time...)
Returning to unit tests - ironically, for large projects written in dynamic languages, big parts of their respective unit tests could be thrown out completely if static typing was in place, because they effectively test type safety, only in an ad-hoc way (i.e. if programmer writing the test forgets about some corner case, too bad).
The problem with static typing in large projects is that a significant proportion of the code becomes devoted to writing bridging delegates from one type domain to another. This isn't so much a problem with smaller projects because it's often possible to force the use of a single type system, but when things get large that becomes impossible; you just can't coordinate the various developers well enough (typically because some of the code is written externally and can't be changed). Dynamic typing can significantly reduce the amount of glue required, at a cost of compile-time safety; dynamic languages typically enforce run-time checks strictly of course, whereas more static languages use their type system to perform those checks during compilation. (Great when it works, horrendous when it doesn't.)
The real advantage is delegating the task of managing all this to something else, along with the responsibility.
Only some parts of the responsibility can be delegated. Other parts cannot. Clouds (which are just a kind of low-overhead outsourcing) just make this responsibility stuff – which was always there – easier to see past the thicket of other more-technical things.
Ultimately, there's a huge range of ancient brews that might be very popular but next-to-zero research on the subject and absolutely zero interest from the stores and bars.
The big issue is that ancient beers tended not to keep for very long, which is really important when it comes to commercial sales! Up until the introduction of hops (from the 11th century in Germany, from the 17th in the US) beer would only stay drinkable for a few days. I suppose you could substitute pasteurization these days...
Seriously though why wasnt this thought of this before?
Thought of? Sure, it's probably been thought of many times by people in the field. But having the technical ability to make it happen for real, that's new. There's several parts to that too, such as the ability to analyze the virus at that level (not been around very long, expensive but not as costly as it used to be), the ability to figure out what bits to interfere with where the virus will find it difficult to mutate and yet which won't harm the host (hard!) and the ability to manufacture and deliver the result. In particular, delivery of RNAi-based vaccines has been problematic in the past; if that's been cracked, it's a big breakthrough in itself.
especially as the previous government had a truly shocking record on both data security and large-scale IT projects.
Don't worry. I fully expect this government to be exactly no better on that front, except for the additional problems caused by scrapping schemes that were actually working and delivering value for money. Right now, they seem to have problems detecting babies amid all the bathwater...
Ok, I'm no writer. But damn I would like to see an EVE movie.
The problem is, in order for the movie to not suck like an overblown arthouse film, it has to have a good story. OK, the story can have loads of cheese, but it still needs to be there. Getting a good story out of EVE would be tricky precisely because the game (as with any MMORPG) is so much about users making their own stories.
By that criterion, Mass Effect is much simpler to make into a movie because it is so much more focussed on a single player being the badass hero in a pretty strongly-determined story. (Of course, story's only part of what makes a great movie; fluff the execution with bad direction or poor acting or lame SFX and it will still suck ass.)
Slashdot Mirror
I am, technically, a partial CS-grad from a UK university - but I deliberately choose to do Mathematics as the "major" (not a term we use in the UK, but it explains it well enough) because the CS was so dire.
Sounds like you went to a place where the CS school is poor. Which is a shame for you, but what happens when you don't research the quality of teaching in the relevant subject(s) before picking where to apply to. No university is uniformly good for all subjects; the good ones still have courses worth a damn and students able to keep up.
But it's genuinely useful for students to learn about team working and keeping things going for a year. Done right, that teaches those greenhorns about what matters when it comes to software maintenance, which is a very important part of any real programming job. New programmers always find it hard to remember to document things, to keep things in version control, to test stuff, to be careful not to break the build, to keep backups. If the students can learn to get past those things, they're much more employable since, while they may need to learn the details of the API or language, they'll be starting out with good habits.
Therefore, it makes zero sense to throw huge warnings for untrusted certs and yet do nothing for plain old unencrypted HTTP.
Except that everyone and his dog (provided they can wade through the openssl instructions; no mean feat) can have as many self-signed certificates as they want. They don't take long to create by hand, and the generation is almost-trivial to script. The only security you can possibly get from them is against eavesdropping (a fairly rare attack in practice) unless you already know the public keys of everyone you ever want to communicate with, ever. Which doesn't scale.
So how are you going to learn the public key of some other organization? (It changes from time to time; keys expire after a while and that is a good thing as it helps to limit other kinds of problems.) Asking someone you trust - a CA - is the best solution found so far, but some CAs should never have been trusted in the first place and should be kicked out. At the very least, they should be properly liable for what happens if they make false assertions.
Just to expand, Einstein's relativity deals with relative motion approaching the speed of light (how distance & time warp) - hence the term relativistic speed. If you're not at relativistic speeds, then Newton's laws work just fine.
Special relativity isn't hugely more involved than what you get when you think of Newton's laws in their real form (not the usual handwavy-forms you're taught) under frames obeying Lorenz invariance (which is really a kind of rotation in spacetime). The real form of Newton's laws is as differential equations, relating momentum changes to instantaneous impulses. It's really very clever indeed, and the consequences of it are very deep, but it is accessible to about the level of introductory college math since it's still clearly a classical theory.
General relativity is trickier and beyond my mathematical ability/training. I can just about handle the handwavy explanations there and I've read enough to know I don't get the rest.
It proposes increased CNG use while ignoring the energy density and transportation issues.
It's among the easiest of fuels to transport as you can pipe it around easily and it doesn't have nearly as great a problem with groundwater contamination as heavier hydrocarbons. The energy density argument is rather bogus too; gas power plants are more efficient these days than oil or coal plants as they're run at much higher temperatures, and you don't transport it in the same way. One of the main ways in which the UK has reduced its carbon output over the past 2 decades has been by switching to producing electricity using gas, and this is despite the amount of electrical power required not decreasing (I think it's increased).
You would think, based on this, that natural gas is the be-all, end-all of fuels and is damn near perfect in every way. While it is lower carbon than coal, and slightly lower than oil, this is absolutely not the case. Effectively, this focuses on only the best aspects of gas and only the worst of nuclear and every other energy source. it uses the best case for gas and worst case for all others
OTOH, they can point to real case studies where the benefits are directly quantifiable. The technology exists now, and has done for decades; the kinks in it have been ironed out. It's definitely practical. (It also doesn't preclude investing in other technologies as well.)
Now, this should not surprise anyone: the major funding for this came almost entirely from the gas industry, who has recently been using heavy PR to cultivate a much "greener" image than it really is entitled to. The major funding and supporting agency is "The American Clean Skies Foundation." This foundation is funded almost exclusively by Chesapeake Energy corporation - one of the largest natural gas producers in the US. YES, THAT'S RIGHT - THIS WAS BOUGHT AND PAID FOR BY A GAS COMPANY
You'd rather it was funded by the nuclear industry? Or the RIAA maybe? (Powering America on the burning ambitions of a generation of artists!!) Seriously, while you're absolutely right to be careful of what they say, you can't just reject it out of hand because there actually is evidence that it is better (i.e., more flexible, cheaper, more efficient per ton of CO2, etc. There's quite a few metrics.) The companies involved think they can make money (duh!) and serve some other goals at the same time. To claim that their natural financial interest makes them ineligible to say anything on the topic just marks you out as one of the Loony Left (or perhaps the Raving Right; I've lost track of which part of the political spectrum is currently claiming the forefront of rabid anti-corporatism at the moment).
Of course hydroelectric is great for peaking, too - especially if practiced like France and Switzerland. The Swiss buy power from the French (nuclear) during off-peak and use it to pump water into dammed lakes, then generate power through those dams during peak periods and sell it back to the French. The challenege is that there are only so many areas which can be powered this way do to the need for proper topography.
Pumped storage is quite an expensive way to do electricity generation; there are considerable inherent losses in the system due to things like friction in pumps. On the other hand, it's the only known-viable large scale energy storage scheme; the other alternatives I've seen articles about (various kinds of batteries, pressurized gas, etc.) are neat but haven't demonstrated at anything like the scale of a pumped storage plant.
And all you need to build one is two lakes/reservoirs close to each other with a big height difference. So, maybe not in most of the Mid-West, but there's got to be plenty of suitable places in the Appalachians or the Cascades. Maybe others too.
Of course they can't see the difference. To see it, they would have to watch it. :-)
And there I was thinking that their preachers did see a difference; Girls Gone Wild is filth, and the other belongs in their personal collections.
You can't publish it verbatim from a conference to a journal, but there are quite a few people who publish essentially the same thing in a conference and a journal. You just have to rewrite it with a different spin or maybe a little more work/discussion/etc.
The usual rule is that a journal paper needs more depth than a conference paper and the maximum page count is correspondingly higher to give you space to go into detail. One reason you can't (normally) just take your conference paper verbatim is that it will be just too lightweight for a journal.
Ideally, you will want to iteratively search through combinations of input variables to determine an optimum in terms of output variables.
One thing you can do with enough computing power is work in near real time, interactively steering the simulation towards a situation that is interesting. Gamers will be familiar with why this can be a good idea, but it very useful when the effect you are actually studying is an emergent one of some physical situation where the input parameters have to be very exact to trigger. Certain types of mixing of immiscible fluids (on the way to making emulsions) can be very interesting, and the physics there is both tricky and commercially valuable.
Well, what is it about weather simulation that requires so much work?
It's a scientific model with a boatload of variables and dependencies. Ask these guys.
In particular, it's a fluid dynamics problem and they tend to be difficult to scale up to distributed computing because of the amount of coupling between adjacent simulation cells. Supercomputers (with their expensive interconnects and very high memory bandwidth) tend to be far better at this sort of problem.
Either that or maybe it's time to get a bit further away from that makeup factory.
You sir fail at humanity. Congrats, you can now enroll in US politics.
To be fair, lack of humanity is useful for entrants to politics in other countries too.
The amount of work to make LaTeX not look like an academic article is boggling.
Then you're doing it wrong. The usual first trick is to make sure you've chosen the fonts right; most people don't understand the difference between styles and fonts and you sound ignorant enough to also make that blunder.
Hell, the amount of work just to figure out how the fuck you escape basic punctuation so your file compiles is boggling.
You have a library for that. Going all hair-shirt and doing it by hand is just foolish.
Just use a normal PDF library.
Depends on the size and complexity of the document being produced. If it's really rather large and complex, then build it as XML, use XSLT to map to XSL-FO, and then convert that to printable form. (IIRC, at least one XSL-FO system uses LaTeX as a back end...)
Obama is a close second..
Technically, only if he gets reelected. The Bush administration lasted 8 years, Obama has so far done less than 2.
So, yeah, 48 hrs gameplay per day.....definitely possible.
[emphasis added]
You play two games at once? For 24 hours straight? Even with a dual machine set up, I just can't quite grasp how you can concentrate on something for that long. (Well, not unless it's a JRPG with interminably long cut scenes. They'd do for sleeping time...)
The please is implied. As in please do your @#$%ing job, you petty idiot.
OK, but in order for my job to be done correctly, there's a few trifling forms that ought to be filled out. Won't take you more than a few minutes...
Returning to unit tests - ironically, for large projects written in dynamic languages, big parts of their respective unit tests could be thrown out completely if static typing was in place, because they effectively test type safety, only in an ad-hoc way (i.e. if programmer writing the test forgets about some corner case, too bad).
The problem with static typing in large projects is that a significant proportion of the code becomes devoted to writing bridging delegates from one type domain to another. This isn't so much a problem with smaller projects because it's often possible to force the use of a single type system, but when things get large that becomes impossible; you just can't coordinate the various developers well enough (typically because some of the code is written externally and can't be changed). Dynamic typing can significantly reduce the amount of glue required, at a cost of compile-time safety; dynamic languages typically enforce run-time checks strictly of course, whereas more static languages use their type system to perform those checks during compilation. (Great when it works, horrendous when it doesn't.)
A few months ago I needed to contact Google UK over an unpaid fee for their use of a photograph.
If they make it too damn awkward, use the courts.
The real advantage is delegating the task of managing all this to something else, along with the responsibility.
Only some parts of the responsibility can be delegated. Other parts cannot. Clouds (which are just a kind of low-overhead outsourcing) just make this responsibility stuff – which was always there – easier to see past the thicket of other more-technical things.
"...a 3400-year-old Mesoamerican beer recreated from a chemical analysis of pottery fragments."
How do we know the pottery fragments weren't from a piss pot?
By the lack of a carbamide signal from the spectrographic analysis.
Ultimately, there's a huge range of ancient brews that might be very popular but next-to-zero research on the subject and absolutely zero interest from the stores and bars.
The big issue is that ancient beers tended not to keep for very long, which is really important when it comes to commercial sales! Up until the introduction of hops (from the 11th century in Germany, from the 17th in the US) beer would only stay drinkable for a few days. I suppose you could substitute pasteurization these days...
Seriously though why wasnt this thought of this before?
Thought of? Sure, it's probably been thought of many times by people in the field. But having the technical ability to make it happen for real, that's new. There's several parts to that too, such as the ability to analyze the virus at that level (not been around very long, expensive but not as costly as it used to be), the ability to figure out what bits to interfere with where the virus will find it difficult to mutate and yet which won't harm the host (hard!) and the ability to manufacture and deliver the result. In particular, delivery of RNAi-based vaccines has been problematic in the past; if that's been cracked, it's a big breakthrough in itself.
Perhaps when India or China start their mars missions congress will sober up.
I wouldn't count on it. It would be a truly remarkable event for recent Congresses.
especially as the previous government had a truly shocking record on both data security and large-scale IT projects.
Don't worry. I fully expect this government to be exactly no better on that front, except for the additional problems caused by scrapping schemes that were actually working and delivering value for money. Right now, they seem to have problems detecting babies amid all the bathwater...
Steve ballmer with devil ears is already being used for BSD so we are stuck with Borg Gates until MSFT folds or a new CEO is put into place.
I thought that the BSD logo was just Ballmer without his makeup on.
Ok, I'm no writer. But damn I would like to see an EVE movie.
The problem is, in order for the movie to not suck like an overblown arthouse film, it has to have a good story. OK, the story can have loads of cheese, but it still needs to be there. Getting a good story out of EVE would be tricky precisely because the game (as with any MMORPG) is so much about users making their own stories.
By that criterion, Mass Effect is much simpler to make into a movie because it is so much more focussed on a single player being the badass hero in a pretty strongly-determined story. (Of course, story's only part of what makes a great movie; fluff the execution with bad direction or poor acting or lame SFX and it will still suck ass.)