First of all, there is a difference between a final product and the original discovery. For example, plasma televisions are a product.
Secondly, during early days of semiconductor industry almost all US output was bought up by the military - to the degree that first consumer transistor radios were made by Japanese who were prohibited from having their own military. CCDs and digital cameras were widely used in satellite imaging - Hubble had at least two military twins that were pointing down to look at Soviet Union. Robots and automation dates centuries back when most consumers could not afford its products
(for examples take a look at screw machines or Leonardo's sketches).
Thirdly, commercial companies did a lot of R&D when there was a military consumer tasked with opposing Soviet Union. After the latter collapsed most companies quickly downsized or got rid of their labs - this includes AT&T, Xerox, GM, GE, HP and others I don't recall. As of now, corporate labs employ a small fraction of scientists they once had.
The sad fact is that so far the societies as a whole have never pursued the scientific frontier unless threatened by outside force, preferring instead to concentrate on improving quality of life, socialization between themselves and redistribution of wealth. The "good" news is that with the rest of the world coming into the modern age the competition for resources will only increase along with tensions between nations and, if we are lucky, will confine itself to pursuit of science and technology.
Hmm... my only printer is local, but it was found easily.
Cups has the ability to identify remote printers by network broadcasts and make them available automatically when you connect to the network. This is very convenient and is the preferred way to configure remote printers. For some reason this does not work properly.
Dolphin is not my preferred application. Two recommended options: either change the default file browsing application in the KDE configuration, or just put a link to Konqueror (in Filemanager mode) on your desktop or pinned to the K menu or similar.
This is exactly what I done. However, desktop and panel still call up Dolphin, which is inconvenient.
Middle-click opens links in a new tab for me, the way it has done for years. I'm pretty sure this is optional. What I really like is that I can now tell Konqueror to *close* a tab when I middle-click on it (in the tab bar) which is the behavior of all other browsers, and which I find intuitive and convenient.
Yes, except in the old Konqueror in file manager mode middle click opened files in an external application instead of in the same tab. In the new konqueror if you middle click a file konqueror does not know about it makes a new tab and complains that it does not know how to display contents.
Re:KDE 4 looks promising
on
KDE 4.2.4 Released
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
KDE 4.2 is usable, but not perfectly.
No kprinter, does not see my shared cups printer (previous version worked ok), dolphin instead of konqueror, middle click is broken in konqueror when browsing files (used to open in a standlane application), no kasbar, start menu does not add newly installed programs without restart.
But the goal is to make nuke plants impractical and any excuse will serve. Because if we were to build a crapload of the newer safe plants we would have plenty of energy, build enough and somebody would find a way to store it in vehicles. But none of that is green. The whole point of green is creating an Age of Less.
It is worse than you think. I was at the APS meeting a few days ago and there was a nice talk about fission reactors and energy crisis. The upshot is that the reactors we do have will exceed their safe lifespans in several years (2014 ?) and should really be shut down or require maintenance. New reactors cost a lot of money to build because we lost the domestic industry. Old school nuclear engineers have retired, there are no new ones and we cannot even make large forgings - containment vessels need to be bought in Japan. Thus, at best, fission power could have an impact in 40-50 years, if we start building now.
The opinion of the presenter (which I consider sensible) is that Yucca was a wrong thing to do anyway. The "spent" fuel is not really spent - it has most of its energy in it, just needs to be reprocessed or deployed in reactors of different type. Reprocessing is expensive and, guess what, USA is spending all of its effort trying to catch up with Japan and France. Interestingly enough, the Japanese reprocessing plant turned out to be extremely expensive that suggests that we should really try an alternate approach.
any programmer who can't do a list, hash table, bubble sort, or btree at the drop of a hat ought to be kicked out of the industry.
Why?
Because if these well known tasks are difficult for them their job title is really typist, not programmer. The challenge is not to write bubble sort day in and day out, but being several levels above that so it is as easy as computing six times seven or reading road signs.
Don't pick your research area based on profitability or popularity. There are always "hot" areas of research but these things are usually cyclic. Pick something interesting that excites you, and that you can spend the next 4 (or 5 or 6 or 7) years working on.
I generally agree with this. I would like to add a few more points from personal experience:
Financial mathematics booms when hedge funds or similar businesses proliferate. I remember financial mathematics being depressed after LTCP blew up, then went up again.
One trend you should be concerned about is proliferation of computing power. What used to be done with approximate equations is more often than not is done with over-complicated Monte-Carlo simulations (whether they are warranted or not). These usually are hard to get statistically meaningful, so statistics is ignored as well. There will still be demand from people that think because you have a Ph.D. you just might come up with something useful (and are willing to spend $10-50k just in case), but if you do achieve anything it won't be because of Ph.D. level math.
However, it does pay to be familiar with terminology and current trends. Find a few applied areas and get familiar with what they do and how they talk about it.
There are no quantum-entanglement phenomena going on in the body.
Let's be careful here - there are quantum processes going on in the body (all the time !) and, unless something really weird is going on, at least some of them will show entanglement. Indeed, if you take two quantum particles in a random state they will be partially entangled.
Secondly, the argument in the article is quite specific to the proposed mechanism and there is just so much we don't know ! In particular, why is it not possible to have an analog of error correction in quantum computation ?
I would agree though that exact mechanism suggested by Penrose is unlikely - but does make an interesting example.
First take a look at Quantum magazine (http://www.nsta.org/quantum/) it had many interesting articles, it was an attempt to port over Russian magazine "Quant" famous for many high-quality mathematics and physics articles.
Also AMS has some translated (or written anew) books from Russian mathematical tradition. The books that I read personally (and liked a lot):
Stories about Maxima and Minima, Vladimir Mikhailovich Tikhomirov
Knots : Mathematics with a Twist, A. B. Sossinsky
Intuitive Topology, Vol. 4, V. V. Prasolov, A. B. Sossinsky ( Translator)
I am forgetting quite a few. There should be books on number theory that talk about properties of Euler function, books about foundations of mathematics, Graph theory by Orr (american author) is very good, books on elementary group theory are quite good.
Also, find some old (1920-1930) calculus books - well written ones are a whole lot easier to read and understand than todays texts (my own favorite was written by Fikhtengoltz - not sure whether the spelling is correct).
I would also add PCB (for design of printed circuit boards) and Qucs. The latter is great for prototyping that quick and dirty resonator or opamp circuit.
For my work I extensively use Tcl, R and C. Verilog for FPGAs. Tried a few programs in python, the gpib module mentioned above sounds interesting. Maxima is great for making quick simulators - it has the ability to use variables as parameters that will get carried through, so you can look at how one part of the system is affected by changing parameters of another.
There was a time, before surface mount components, when US manufacturers made products to last. Products that were repairable. Products of quality. About the time that surface mount components came along, everything turned to 'throw away' production values.
Surface mount components are not to blame. They are very desirable when working with high frequencies as you don't have to worry about lead inductance.
Also, some of them make repairing boards easier - a through-hole component needs much care when removing and after several iterations you can break the pad - let alone through hole cladding. In contrast surface mount caps and resistors can be heated and lifted from their pads many times, I have not screwed up a pad yet.
The true problem is lack of schematics for devices and the misguided implementation of intellectual property. Misguided because the rewards are thought to come from compromising the most important quality of ideas and information - ease of sharing.
A proper solution would focus on solving actual problems - providing some stability to companies and people while they do research and insuring wider availability of intellectual products.
My question: is it worth it to jump to kernel 2.6, or better to stick with the old and proven 2.4?
Old and proven on a different hardware. Chances are your new hardware will have some issues (if only caused by you misunderstanding something) and then it would help to have the latest kernel that more people are using.
Also, Atom is a newer processor, perhaps with PCI Express in the chipset - does 2.4 support that ?
Yes, I am a molecular biologist by training. This won't work. The reason genetic engineering is carried out in labs is because it requires expert knowledge of protocols, and expensive equipment. In TFA, one of the people interviewed is trying to insert a targeted florescent marker, and struggling. This is fairly trivial to do in the lab, but only with good understanding of basic principles, hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of gear and consumables, and tested/documented protocols.
A few counterpoints:
Expensive equipment is there to help you be several months faster than the competition. If you just want to get the job done (and are willing to wait) there is a lot of second-hand used equipment out there.
A lot of big labs are using said expensive equipment to do what essentially amounts to brute force search - iterate through many combinations to see what matches. With DIY approach you get a brute force search distributed across intelligent beings - far superior.
There was plenty of bio research done in Russia with nothing but glassware, chemicals and a lot of patience. Not cutting edge, but you can manipulate genes that way.
There are companies willing to do sequencing for you. I would not be surprised that in a few years this would be similar to making a 4-layer PCB - not something I would do at home, but e-mail design to a manufacturer and get the result back in a few weeks.
So now to the big worry-- how are developers going to make money? I'm not sure. There will be demand for software development, and where there's demand, there's money to be made. I don't know if it's through support and services alone, or if there's something else. Maybe you just have a shorter term to make your money, and that term starts when you offer a new innovation first, and ends when other people get around to offering it.
Actually, when Open Source is more widely used I expect the demand for computer experts to go up. Back in the days when computers just got to the sizes to be useful the programmers wrote all software from scratch - in assembly or fortran. Their Open Source foundation consisted of centuries of accumulated mathematical knowledge.
As proprietary codebases grew there was first increased demand for programmers to replicate competitors functionality, but than it shrunk as industry consolidation kicked in.
Now the growth is limited by what you can develop for existing proprietary product.
On the other hand, with more Open Source software there many more points to innovate. And very few packages can be used without some customization. So customers would need an expert anyway - and if they buy expert services they would also be inclined to pay a somewhat smaller fee for a commodity addon.
I fear you are mistaken, in a strict legal sense. Whether you are allowed to take a recording (audio or visual) of a presentation is up to the organizers of the conference, not you. Smaller conferences generally allow it by default, and larger conferences generally do not. Generally. I have organized two smaller conferences and have paid specific attention to this issue.
I hope you made the right choice:) Personally, I would consider the conference where one cannot take notes several notches away from science.
Showing unreviewed data in a traditionally transient form (ie, a slide presentation) is not publishing it.
Not every publication has to be etched in stone. And flashing things quickly so that the viewer has no time to remember what happenned is stage magic not science. The point of presentation is to provide a human interaction component that might not be present when reading a paper and allow audience to ask questions.
Why? Because the scientific world works not on money but on reputation and that is build through citations. And what, pray tell, are the authors of the second study going to reference as their data source -- a slide at a conference presentation? That is not verifiable data, as it is not in the literature, and one hopes that the peer review of the paper raises this serious issue.
This is an unfortunate corruption of the scientific method by the current grant system of running science. The original idea was that a claim is judged by its merit - as verified by experiment or derivation (which could be viewed as experiment in mechanical logic).
In this case, the are only three sources of review - internal PAMELA review, as they have the best knowledge of the instrument that took many years to accumulate, comparison with other experiments and comparison with theory. The authors of the paper we discuss did the last two - they are the review, all the more valuable as we can actually read it.
I am not familiar with the conference in Stockholm that the PAMELA data were originally presented at, but at every large conference I have attended, it is official policy that no photographs are allowed. Taking unpublished data without permission of the authors is theft, pure and simple. Submitting a paper on that data before the original authors do is unethical.
Not everyone thinks that way. Some of us think that publicly presented information is fair game. And just because I have not spent the necessary effort to develop exact memory does not mean I cannot augment it with a device.
Furthermore, the whole point of doing science is that others can verify your claims by experiment or derivation. That this also leads to finding other people you can discuss your results with (let alone ecstatic enough to write a paper based on a snapshot) is a big bonus.
Nope, FAT lacks the "owner" principle, the issue here is the 'System' bit.
These are the file attributes FAT knows: - Read - Write - System
Yes, but when you mount FAT in Linux the files are assigned an owner - which is is either specified via options or, in their absence, is the user running mount.
I think he would have the same problem with a ntfs drive.
The issue is that his Linux user setup and Windows user setup are different. So when he mounts the partition all files are owned by root (as shown on the screen), and some files have public permissions turned off - a reasonable thing.
Thus what he needs to do is specify the owner of the files using uid=value option in/etc/fstab (uid value can be found via "getent passwd", it is numeric).
What they should have done, from the beginning of USB, was to have the connector truly symmetric, so that you could plug it in either way.
Connecting +5V to ground with a wire is inadvisable. The magic smoke is let out of the chip, which then ceases to work.
Seriously, how many connectors out there do you know of that let you plug it in any way you feel like? All connectors have to be oriented so that the signals and power goes to the right place.
Please do not come if I ask for someone to jump my car.
Trivial, my dear Watson - just have two sets of contacts on the male connector that are centrally symmetric. This way regardless of orientation you have proper polarity.
If you are worried about EM properties of the connector make the host have two sets as well - this way you will not have dangling ends.
Knowing nothing of the engineering involved here I have a laymans question. Why is it limited to 6km? Why can't they fill the sub with a non-conductive liquid like mineral oil, thus negating the effect of pressure on the hull of the sub? If they are carefull about the electronics that they install, they can make sure that there are no air pockets that can be compressed.
Seems much too simple not to work, so why doesn't it?
They actually partially do it - the PDF boasts that the lithium polymer battery pack is not housed in pressurized compartment.
One could, theoretically, imagine a loosely mounted design that can withstand high pressures, but it would certainly be an interesting research project in itself. For example, one would likely have to mount bare chips and avoid electrolytic capacitors - which have plastic-like substance inside.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet - buy it once, download in HTML or other format and read as much as you like.
There are people who get it.
You have many bad examples.
First of all, there is a difference between a final product and the original discovery. For example, plasma televisions are a product.
Secondly, during early days of semiconductor industry almost all US output was bought up by the military - to the degree that first consumer transistor radios were made by Japanese who were prohibited from having their own military. CCDs and digital cameras were widely used in satellite imaging - Hubble had at least two military twins that were pointing down to look at Soviet Union. Robots and automation dates centuries back when most consumers could not afford its products (for examples take a look at screw machines or Leonardo's sketches).
Thirdly, commercial companies did a lot of R&D when there was a military consumer tasked with opposing Soviet Union. After the latter collapsed most companies quickly downsized or got rid of their labs - this includes AT&T, Xerox, GM, GE, HP and others I don't recall. As of now, corporate labs employ a small fraction of scientists they once had.
The sad fact is that so far the societies as a whole have never pursued the scientific frontier unless threatened by outside force, preferring instead to concentrate on improving quality of life, socialization between themselves and redistribution of wealth. The "good" news is that with the rest of the world coming into the modern age the competition for resources will only increase along with tensions between nations and, if we are lucky, will confine itself to pursuit of science and technology.
Hmm... my only printer is local, but it was found easily.
Cups has the ability to identify remote printers by network broadcasts and make them available automatically when you connect to the network. This is very convenient and is the preferred way to configure remote printers. For some reason this does not work properly.
Dolphin is not my preferred application. Two recommended options: either change the default file browsing application in the KDE configuration, or just put a link to Konqueror (in Filemanager mode) on your desktop or pinned to the K menu or similar.
This is exactly what I done. However, desktop and panel still call up Dolphin, which is inconvenient.
Middle-click opens links in a new tab for me, the way it has done for years. I'm pretty sure this is optional. What I really like is that I can now tell Konqueror to *close* a tab when I middle-click on it (in the tab bar) which is the behavior of all other browsers, and which I find intuitive and convenient.
Yes, except in the old Konqueror in file manager mode middle click opened files in an external application instead of in the same tab. In the new konqueror if you middle click a file konqueror does not know about it makes a new tab and complains that it does not know how to display contents.
No kprinter, does not see my shared cups printer (previous version worked ok), dolphin instead of konqueror, middle click is broken in konqueror when browsing files (used to open in a standlane application), no kasbar, start menu does not add newly installed programs without restart.
This is on a system that I only use occasionally.
Good work, but it is not 3.5 yet.
Yes, but the 2014 figure is after extensions that were already made. New ones will be much tougher.
It is worse than you think. I was at the APS meeting a few days ago and there was a nice talk about fission reactors and energy crisis. The upshot is that the reactors we do have will exceed their safe lifespans in several years (2014 ?) and should really be shut down or require maintenance. New reactors cost a lot of money to build because we lost the domestic industry. Old school nuclear engineers have retired, there are no new ones and we cannot even make large forgings - containment vessels need to be bought in Japan. Thus, at best, fission power could have an impact in 40-50 years, if we start building now.
The opinion of the presenter (which I consider sensible) is that Yucca was a wrong thing to do anyway. The "spent" fuel is not really spent - it has most of its energy in it, just needs to be reprocessed or deployed in reactors of different type. Reprocessing is expensive and, guess what, USA is spending all of its effort trying to catch up with Japan and France. Interestingly enough, the Japanese reprocessing plant turned out to be extremely expensive that suggests that we should really try an alternate approach.
Because if these well known tasks are difficult for them their job title is really typist, not programmer. The challenge is not to write bubble sort day in and day out, but being several levels above that so it is as easy as computing six times seven or reading road signs.
Of course - terminals and text editors. I can see myself using 4 of these in a square. My notebook had that resolution for several years now.
I generally agree with this. I would like to add a few more points from personal experience:
No - this is a derivative of the 1960s Apollo capsule. But look at the bright side - all the relevant patents have expired by now.
We have made some progress since then. For once, we know that Earth is round and that Universe is 14 billion years old.
Modern statement would be "there are many interesting questions to investigate".
Let's be careful here - there are quantum processes going on in the body (all the time !) and, unless something really weird is going on, at least some of them will show entanglement. Indeed, if you take two quantum particles in a random state they will be partially entangled.
Secondly, the argument in the article is quite specific to the proposed mechanism and there is just so much we don't know ! In particular, why is it not possible to have an analog of error correction in quantum computation ?
I would agree though that exact mechanism suggested by Penrose is unlikely - but does make an interesting example.
Also AMS has some translated (or written anew) books from Russian mathematical tradition. The books that I read personally (and liked a lot):
I am forgetting quite a few. There should be books on number theory that talk about properties of Euler function, books about foundations of mathematics, Graph theory by Orr (american author) is very good, books on elementary group theory are quite good.
Also, find some old (1920-1930) calculus books - well written ones are a whole lot easier to read and understand than todays texts (my own favorite was written by Fikhtengoltz - not sure whether the spelling is correct).
I would also add PCB (for design of printed circuit boards) and Qucs. The latter is great for prototyping that quick and dirty resonator or opamp circuit.
For my work I extensively use Tcl, R and C. Verilog for FPGAs. Tried a few programs in python, the gpib module mentioned above sounds interesting. Maxima is great for making quick simulators - it has the ability to use variables as parameters that will get carried through, so you can look at how one part of the system is affected by changing parameters of another.
Surface mount components are not to blame. They are very desirable when working with high frequencies as you don't have to worry about lead inductance.
Also, some of them make repairing boards easier - a through-hole component needs much care when removing and after several iterations you can break the pad - let alone through hole cladding. In contrast surface mount caps and resistors can be heated and lifted from their pads many times, I have not screwed up a pad yet.
The true problem is lack of schematics for devices and the misguided implementation of intellectual property. Misguided because the rewards are thought to come from compromising the most important quality of ideas and information - ease of sharing.
A proper solution would focus on solving actual problems - providing some stability to companies and people while they do research and insuring wider availability of intellectual products.
Old and proven on a different hardware. Chances are your new hardware will have some issues (if only caused by you misunderstanding something) and then it would help to have the latest kernel that more people are using.
Also, Atom is a newer processor, perhaps with PCI Express in the chipset - does 2.4 support that ?
A few counterpoints:
Actually, when Open Source is more widely used I expect the demand for computer experts to go up. Back in the days when computers just got to the sizes to be useful the programmers wrote all software from scratch - in assembly or fortran. Their Open Source foundation consisted of centuries of accumulated mathematical knowledge.
As proprietary codebases grew there was first increased demand for programmers to replicate competitors functionality, but than it shrunk as industry consolidation kicked in.
Now the growth is limited by what you can develop for existing proprietary product.
On the other hand, with more Open Source software there many more points to innovate. And very few packages can be used without some customization. So customers would need an expert anyway - and if they buy expert services they would also be inclined to pay a somewhat smaller fee for a commodity addon.
I hope you made the right choice :) Personally, I would consider the conference where one cannot take notes several notches away from science.
Not every publication has to be etched in stone. And flashing things quickly so that the viewer has no time to remember what happenned is stage magic not science. The point of presentation is to provide a human interaction component that might not be present when reading a paper and allow audience to ask questions.
This is an unfortunate corruption of the scientific method by the current grant system of running science. The original idea was that a claim is judged by its merit - as verified by experiment or derivation (which could be viewed as experiment in mechanical logic).
In this case, the are only three sources of review - internal PAMELA review, as they have the best knowledge of the instrument that took many years to accumulate, comparison with other experiments and comparison with theory. The authors of the paper we discuss did the last two - they are the review, all the more valuable as we can actually read it.
Not everyone thinks that way. Some of us think that publicly presented information is fair game. And just because I have not spent the necessary effort to develop exact memory does not mean I cannot augment it with a device.
Furthermore, the whole point of doing science is that others can verify your claims by experiment or derivation. That this also leads to finding other people you can discuss your results with (let alone ecstatic enough to write a paper based on a snapshot) is a big bonus.
Nope, FAT lacks the "owner" principle, the issue here is the 'System' bit.
These are the file attributes FAT knows:
- Read
- Write
- System
Yes, but when you mount FAT in Linux the files are assigned an owner - which is is either specified via options or, in their absence, is the user running mount.
I think he would have the same problem with a ntfs drive.
The issue is that his Linux user setup and Windows user setup are different.
So when he mounts the partition all files are owned by root (as shown on the screen), and some files have public permissions turned off - a reasonable thing.
Thus what he needs to do is specify the owner of the files using uid=value /etc/fstab (uid value can be found via "getent passwd", it is numeric).
option in
For more info read "man mount" carefully.
What they should have done, from the beginning of USB, was to have the connector truly symmetric, so that you could plug it in either way.
Connecting +5V to ground with a wire is inadvisable. The magic smoke is let out of the chip, which then ceases to work.
Seriously, how many connectors out there do you know of that let you plug it in any way you feel like? All connectors have to be oriented so that the signals and power goes to the right place.
Please do not come if I ask for someone to jump my car.
Trivial, my dear Watson - just have two sets of contacts on the male connector
that are centrally symmetric. This way regardless of orientation you have proper polarity.
If you are worried about EM properties of the connector make the host have two sets as well - this way you will not have dangling ends.
Knowing nothing of the engineering involved here I have a laymans question. Why is it limited to 6km? Why can't they fill the sub with a non-conductive liquid like mineral oil, thus negating the effect of pressure on the hull of the sub? If they are carefull about the electronics that they install, they can make sure that there are no air pockets that can be compressed.
Seems much too simple not to work, so why doesn't it?
They actually partially do it - the PDF boasts that the lithium polymer battery pack is not housed in pressurized compartment.
Pressure at 6km is around 60 mega pascals which will deform titanium or glass by about 0.05-0.1 percent. Plastics deform more, in a few percent range. This will pretty much rip apart a conventional PCB. Accordingly the submarine has a titanium pressure vessel for electronics.
One could, theoretically, imagine a loosely mounted design that can withstand high pressures, but it would certainly be an interesting research project in itself. For example, one would likely have to mount bare chips and avoid electrolytic capacitors - which have plastic-like substance inside.
One more step to the last invention man ever need make... hooker bot. (mine would be a Buffy Bot, but that's just personal preference)
Here you go: one robotic buffing cell