Well, the "polynomial brisket sandwich" problem sounds more complicated, and the "polynomial reuben sandwich" actually involves a greater number of objects due to the increased number of pieces of meat, the sauerkraut and the pickle... so it's actually higher complexity. You could wave away some of that by saying the meat is all one "piece" for purposed of discussion, but that might only appease the physicists and engineers.
The Fields Medal winner named in the article has a blog about using it to prove the Szemeredi-Trotter theorem and of course there's the wikipedia article on the generalized form of it.
You know, when I googled for "Ham Sandwich Theorem", wiki didn't even show up in the first page, so I assumed there wasn't one.
Oddly enough, the first paragraph nicely summarized what it boils down to:
In measure theory, a branch of mathematics, the ham sandwich theorem, also called the Stone-Tukey theorem after Arthur H. Stone and John Tukey, states that given n measurable "objects" in n-dimensional space, it is possible to divide all of them in half (according to volume) with a single (n - 1)-dimensional hyperplane. Here the "objects" should be sets of finite measure (or, in fact, just of finite outer measure) for the notion of "dividing the volume in half" to make sense.
So, cutting a sandwich in half, but expanded to a higher number of dimensions. Specifically, where the number of objects corresponds to the number of dimensions -- so, by crude extension, add lettuce, tomato and cheese to your sandwich and do it in six dimensions (yes, I know, that is a horrible over-simplification and I can't think of a car analogy).
Really? That's the coolest name for something I don't understand ever.
Hell, I'd have posted some of the google links to try to explain WTF it means... but, quite frankly, I have no idea what any of them say. Can anybody put this wonderful sounding theorem into something that a layman has at least a passing chance of getting the gist of?
I'm sure whatever else the authors did was cool, but frickin' ham sammiches... in math!! Awesome!
Good point in the irony - though I wonder if their protectionism is driven by agreements with content companies that allowed Sony to defend BluRay in the first place? After all the hardware manufacturers shouldn't care much about how their hardware is used, unless they need help from the big studios etc. to push their hardware formats.
Well, if Sony wasn't a content company by the time the Betamax decision happened (I can't remember anymore), they have become since. So, they don't allow anybody to do anything with content that they don't explicitly approve of. They're as involved in the *AAs as just about anybody.
Nowadays, if you try to make hardware that the content providers don't like, they'll sue you into oblivion and basically say that the entire purpose of the hardware is theft, and therefore illegal. I believe Sony's default legal position now would be that the VCR isn't fair use and legal -- but piracy and illegal. I vaguely recall that they were fighting simultaneous court battles, each using the opposite argument, but I have nothing to back that up.
The way we're going, I won't be surprised if the notion of general purpose computing as we know it goes away -- Microsoft is already starting with their 'trusted' initiatives, whereby the user is presumed to be evil, and until they scour everything on the computer and vet you, you can't do anything with it.
The PS3 and the win for BluRay exorcised some of the ghosts of the Betamax era
And brought in new ones.
Sure, Betamax was a superior technology. But, Sony also fought for the right of people to own a device which allowed them to record content and watch it at their leisure -- well, deep down they fought for their right to sell them I guess. Some of the (eroding) consumer rights we have now with respect to content were, ironically, established due to Sony.
Now, Sony is leading the spearhead to make sure consumers don't have any rights any more, and that anything which is actually capable of recording is bordering on illegal. So, they got a technology win, but they've become major assholes in the process. They've also had a huge number of flops that nobody cared about -- I only know one person who owned a Sony Minidisc system. And it was annoying as hell at the time.
their real flagship - The Walkman - has been deprecated by apple
Deprecated?? I think not. Made Redundant, pointless, and irrelevant in the marketplace; totally outclassed and left for dead -- but not 'deprecated'.
I'm pretty sure I've not bought anything by Sony in over a decade, and I don't really see that changing. Less likely the more I hear news about them.
So, why does PayPal insist on the ability to withdraw from the account of an organization which is being used for donations.
I've never trusted PayPal, and continue not to. I don't give anybody the ability to withdraw money from my accounts. You can have a credit card on a per-transaction basis, but you sure as hell don't get blanket access to my accounts.
It's the only place people can get VMS, or HP's UNIX.
Wow... I'm shocked that VMS still exists. I haven't heard anybody mention that in a long time.
Which is a shame, because VMS has some interesting and nice features
Like what? It's been so long since I've seen it, I've long since forgotten almost everything about it. I'm surprised there's cool OS features that everyone else hasn't stolen -- that is, of course, assuming they're actually useful for anybody.
I am not simply some University student. I am a PhD student.
*laugh* Piled Higher and Deeper. Post Hole Digger. If anybody needs to take some humanities classes, date a hippie chick, and get laid, it's you. Of course, at this point, it might be too late for at least two of those things.;-)
guess who uses Macs? The students with wealthy parents who give them anything they want
Well, there will always be people who have more than you. It's a fact of life. Worrying about the status symbols of other people is a waste of your time and energy. If being a perpetual student has made you bitter and sulky that other people have things that you don't... well, you chose it.
and the professors that staple their names to your papers when all they do is edit them and give you a meager sum to live off of. And by meager, I mean I could make more money at McDonald's.
Yup, poor starving graduate student... I don't regret for a minute that I didn't finish graduate school.
Truthfully, the people I know with Master's degrees don't know anything more practical than I do, and they will likely end up never actually using anything they studied after their undergrad. (OK, that's a bit unfair, but I do know people with Master's degrees who don't know stuff they should have learned as an undergrad.) The people I know who started PhD's all either decided to go the industry route and left, or ended up too qualified to actually work anywhere.
So, either you've wasted all of those years, or you'll be one of the few lucky ones who gets to do something with it and get paid for it -- besides, of course, become a prof and abusing your own graduate students. Once you're getting paid, you might realize that some of the things you call status symbols, the rest of us call "nice things" that are worth the money. Seems the people who can least afford such things are most worried about them being status symbols.
But, you should not confuse something being purely a status symbol, and realizing that those that can afford it think it's worth the money. Especially if you're only basing it off college life. Believe it or not, lots of smart people who don't want to muck about with the fiddly bits use Macs because they find it to be a far better system for what they use it for.
When people make choices that aren't the ones you made, they aren't automatically wrong.
Those coders use a Mac because its as easy or easier than Windows but its Linux friendly.
See, now you're actually speaking out of your ass. The guys that I know with Macs, are not going home and dropping to the UNIX command line. They're using the GUI. They're not going home in the evening and coding in PHP, they're looking up recipes and sending email.
I am saying that buying a Macbook is a not a purchase you can justify by simply saying "the user experience" is superior unless you are willing to say an operating system is worth a 500-1000 dollar premium upcharge.
Yes, and the people who prefer their Macs believe that the overall system is worth that much more... do you not get that? Yes, you make a strong case that among superficial college students, it's a status symbol... but we're not all college students.
I know its hard to see, or maybe you are not exposed to it on a daily basis like I am, but Macs and Apple products ARE a status symbol. Its evident by the sheer volume of students on my campus that use it as one
Look, University was a long time ago. I don't measure myself according to the standards of some whiny 20 year old... maybe you should realize that there is more to life than how you perceive it at this age.
Many times you will have students who in no way could possibly afford themselves to buy an iPad/iPhone combo or a iPhone/Macbook combo themselves, yet they act like they are part of some elite club of notebook users or part of some Apple subculture and try to show it off to their friends.
Again, college students... a couple of years ago, everybody was putting fancy rims on their POS car.
I'm not going to seriously debate your assertion that all people who buy a Mac are buying it as a status symbol based on the fact that your entire sample seems to be based on college kids.
Use that big, fancy college brain of yours to realize that for many of the Apple market (it's not all college kids), it is about functionality. When you get out into the real world, and actually have a paycheck, you might understand that for many people, they'll gladly pay the premium to get what they perceive to be a better overall experience.
Part of what you should be learning is to see the world outside of your own self and how you've experienced it. When you go around making the categorical statement that all people with Macs have bought them as status symbols, you're completely seeing the world from the eyes of a college student and how you perceive life on campus.
The world changes when you're out in it, and one of the things is that messing around with a &*^%*& computer i your spare time is a waste of your time.
Dude, seriously, take a couple of humanities courses, date some hippy chick who smells like patchouli, broaden your horizons... and stop worrying about what other people buy. That's what I'd do if I was back in college.
Yes, but you've simply confirmed what I've been saying all along - your friends think its cool meaning that it's a feature designed to improve the look of the device rather than the functionality.
No, he has confirmed that the feature is cool because it provides functionality, not because it's pretty. ABS in a car is pretty cool too, and it used to be something you had to pay extra for -- was it a status symbol, or a safety feature? Might it have been both?
I could argue that I've never been in a situation such that I couldn't use a computer keyboard because it was too dark - therefore, as a feature it adds little in the way of actual functionality.
I could argue that I have never needed the oxygen mask in an airplane. That doesn't mean that I don't think it's functional. A lighted keyboard would be cool -- not in a "Type R" kinda way, but in a "this is useful" kinda way.
Just because you have never had occasion to use a feature, doesn't make it a cosmetic feature.
Another reason people are so obsessed with them is that they have made themselves become status symbols by their cost and appearance. If you fork out 2000 for a laptop people look at you like you have money. Also, people are under the impression that increased cost means better performance.
Has it occurred to you that people don't necessarily buy it because it's a status symbol, or because they feel they're getting better 'performance'?
No, really. I know guys with Master's degrees in computer science, who are perfectly capable coders, and who can get into the grotty bits of hardware just like everyone else. When they go home in the evening, their personal machine is a Mac -- not to show off to their friends, but because in their experience, the Mac simply is easier to use and doesn't give them half the headaches as their work laptops do.
To a person, the people I know with Macs are willing to pay a premium for what they perceive as a better experience. That is, usability, stability, and less fiddling with it.
Maybe you're not including enough things in your evaluation of "better" and "quality" -- if you don't need a million frames per second on a high end gaming rig, or you just want to do basic things and not get mired down in forcing the computer to do what you want -- for some people's standards that slower computer with less RAM is a better computer.
At the end of the day, it's only the functional aspects of my computer I really care about. And my personal machine is a big honking Vista box with what used to be obscene amounts of RAM and disk. I've thought many times of adding a Mac to my flock of computers.
Apple's marketing strategy is brilliant. Unlike other companies, they don't release products with incomprehensible names like the KDH-4001. They don't have to address a myriad of OS compatibility issues (for example, A4-based devices are eligible for iOS updates, the older ones aren't). They have streamlined product lines
You know, that's as much an engineering/manufacturing strategy as it is marketing. Two sides of the same coin, and more representative of an entirely different end-to-end philosophy.
If your product line isn't cluttered with 16 variations of the same thing that nobody can decipher, you can focus on making one and doing it "right" (for however you define right).
There's no Starter, Home, Deluxe, Ultimate, Enterprise, and Shiny Sparkly versions to deal with... just a single product which can be articulated to the consumer. Even if you have different sizes (like the iPad or some of the iPods), this can be easily explained to the consumer -- this one has more storage than that one, if you have more stuff, buy the bigger one.
That makes for good copy and makes technophobic users feel somewhat comfortable.
Again, not just "marketing" -- once they get it home they feel comfortable when they're actually using it.
It's one thing to say "easy and intuitive to use" in the marketing glossy... it's another to actually be easy and intuitive. Now, for the hard-core geeks around here, Apple may offer too "easy" of an experience -- but, for the rest of the people who use it, it does precisely what they've been told it would do.
That's kind more than you can accomplish with just marketing.
Now the iPad update will probably have some feature that should have been released with the first generation but for whatever reason *cough* BUT TO MAKE PEOPLE BUY IT AGAIN *cough* was not included.
Ever read the "Mythical Man Month"? Nine women can't have a baby in a month, and you can't put every possible feature into a new product.
If every product waited to release until they could include all technologies it would ever have, well, we'd never actually see products due to all of the new stuff that gets built.
Like them or not, Apple releases a product that people are free to buy or not. And then, quite predictably, the ones that sell get near-annual refreshes to add features to them -- smaller, better, faster, more storage, touch screen. I've lost count of how many generations of each of the kinds of iPods there are.
And, really, Microsoft has been bragging about coming out with an iPad killer since about two weeks before the product launched. To the best of my knowledge, that doesn't exist yet.
Then, I fear, you grossly underestimate what doing encrypted traffic in a 'repressive regime' might cause for personal ramifications.
There isn't a lot of room to quietly do things The Government of such a country might not want you to do.
What you may think is perfectly reasonable might, in your comfortable Western existence, not get you very far in a practical situation in such a country. Any government which might be willing to use force against it's own citizens might not actually give a fsck about you... You could become an 'example'... I bet that would be bad.
Flaunting local laws in such a country might not be a wise choice. The consequences might be, well, unfavorable. Standing back from your basement, I posit that you may not actually fully grasp this as something as scary as what the poster faces. Sidestepping state control in a country in which the leader has supreme power does NOT make one safe... It might make you a target.
Before you start trying to figure out how to circumvent being spied upon by the host government, maybe you should look into the possible consequences of this. It may well be that if they find out that you're doing this, things could really turn out bad for you.
It's generally a good idea to try to actually obey the laws of the country you're going to, especially if it's as volatile as you say it is. If you're a foreign national and don't have any sort of diplomatic protections, you could be playing a risky game.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, the "polynomial brisket sandwich" problem sounds more complicated, and the "polynomial reuben sandwich" actually involves a greater number of objects due to the increased number of pieces of meat, the sauerkraut and the pickle ... so it's actually higher complexity. You could wave away some of that by saying the meat is all one "piece" for purposed of discussion, but that might only appease the physicists and engineers.
It's only hypothetical ham, it's OK.
You know, when I googled for "Ham Sandwich Theorem", wiki didn't even show up in the first page, so I assumed there wasn't one.
Oddly enough, the first paragraph nicely summarized what it boils down to:
So, cutting a sandwich in half, but expanded to a higher number of dimensions. Specifically, where the number of objects corresponds to the number of dimensions -- so, by crude extension, add lettuce, tomato and cheese to your sandwich and do it in six dimensions (yes, I know, that is a horrible over-simplification and I can't think of a car analogy).
Ignore the hot blond, go for her plainer friends.
Words to live by.
Really? That's the coolest name for something I don't understand ever.
Hell, I'd have posted some of the google links to try to explain WTF it means ... but, quite frankly, I have no idea what any of them say. Can anybody put this wonderful sounding theorem into something that a layman has at least a passing chance of getting the gist of?
I'm sure whatever else the authors did was cool, but frickin' ham sammiches ... in math!! Awesome!
Well, if Sony wasn't a content company by the time the Betamax decision happened (I can't remember anymore), they have become since. So, they don't allow anybody to do anything with content that they don't explicitly approve of. They're as involved in the *AAs as just about anybody.
Nowadays, if you try to make hardware that the content providers don't like, they'll sue you into oblivion and basically say that the entire purpose of the hardware is theft, and therefore illegal. I believe Sony's default legal position now would be that the VCR isn't fair use and legal -- but piracy and illegal. I vaguely recall that they were fighting simultaneous court battles, each using the opposite argument, but I have nothing to back that up.
The way we're going, I won't be surprised if the notion of general purpose computing as we know it goes away -- Microsoft is already starting with their 'trusted' initiatives, whereby the user is presumed to be evil, and until they scour everything on the computer and vet you, you can't do anything with it.
And brought in new ones.
Sure, Betamax was a superior technology. But, Sony also fought for the right of people to own a device which allowed them to record content and watch it at their leisure -- well, deep down they fought for their right to sell them I guess. Some of the (eroding) consumer rights we have now with respect to content were, ironically, established due to Sony.
Now, Sony is leading the spearhead to make sure consumers don't have any rights any more, and that anything which is actually capable of recording is bordering on illegal. So, they got a technology win, but they've become major assholes in the process. They've also had a huge number of flops that nobody cared about -- I only know one person who owned a Sony Minidisc system. And it was annoying as hell at the time.
Deprecated?? I think not. Made Redundant, pointless, and irrelevant in the marketplace; totally outclassed and left for dead -- but not 'deprecated'.
I'm pretty sure I've not bought anything by Sony in over a decade, and I don't really see that changing. Less likely the more I hear news about them.
So, why does PayPal insist on the ability to withdraw from the account of an organization which is being used for donations.
I've never trusted PayPal, and continue not to. I don't give anybody the ability to withdraw money from my accounts. You can have a credit card on a per-transaction basis, but you sure as hell don't get blanket access to my accounts.
How do you differentiate between "normal"-cat weird, and "earthquake"-cat weird??
I find cats act weird at the best of times.
So, barring an actual earthquake, how do they know this thing works?
I assume this isn't predicting, but setting off alarm bells as soon as possible?
Ah, yes. I had forgotten that one ... that came in handy when I was in university.
Yo Dawg, I hear you liked to browse ... so I put a browser in your browser, so now you can browse while you're browsing.
Eerie, isn't it?
Wow ... I'm shocked that VMS still exists. I haven't heard anybody mention that in a long time.
Like what? It's been so long since I've seen it, I've long since forgotten almost everything about it. I'm surprised there's cool OS features that everyone else hasn't stolen -- that is, of course, assuming they're actually useful for anybody.
This one melts right through them.
Not true. Chuck Norris himself find them funny -- disagreeing with him could ... aw, fuck it ... they are stupid.
*laugh* Piled Higher and Deeper. Post Hole Digger. If anybody needs to take some humanities classes, date a hippie chick, and get laid, it's you. Of course, at this point, it might be too late for at least two of those things. ;-)
Well, there will always be people who have more than you. It's a fact of life. Worrying about the status symbols of other people is a waste of your time and energy. If being a perpetual student has made you bitter and sulky that other people have things that you don't ... well, you chose it.
Yup, poor starving graduate student ... I don't regret for a minute that I didn't finish graduate school.
Truthfully, the people I know with Master's degrees don't know anything more practical than I do, and they will likely end up never actually using anything they studied after their undergrad. (OK, that's a bit unfair, but I do know people with Master's degrees who don't know stuff they should have learned as an undergrad.) The people I know who started PhD's all either decided to go the industry route and left, or ended up too qualified to actually work anywhere.
So, either you've wasted all of those years, or you'll be one of the few lucky ones who gets to do something with it and get paid for it -- besides, of course, become a prof and abusing your own graduate students. Once you're getting paid, you might realize that some of the things you call status symbols, the rest of us call "nice things" that are worth the money. Seems the people who can least afford such things are most worried about them being status symbols.
But, you should not confuse something being purely a status symbol, and realizing that those that can afford it think it's worth the money. Especially if you're only basing it off college life. Believe it or not, lots of smart people who don't want to muck about with the fiddly bits use Macs because they find it to be a far better system for what they use it for.
When people make choices that aren't the ones you made, they aren't automatically wrong.
See, now you're actually speaking out of your ass. The guys that I know with Macs, are not going home and dropping to the UNIX command line. They're using the GUI. They're not going home in the evening and coding in PHP, they're looking up recipes and sending email.
Yes, and the people who prefer their Macs believe that the overall system is worth that much more ... do you not get that? Yes, you make a strong case that among superficial college students, it's a status symbol ... but we're not all college students.
Look, University was a long time ago. I don't measure myself according to the standards of some whiny 20 year old ... maybe you should realize that there is more to life than how you perceive it at this age.
Again, college students ... a couple of years ago, everybody was putting fancy rims on their POS car.
I'm not going to seriously debate your assertion that all people who buy a Mac are buying it as a status symbol based on the fact that your entire sample seems to be based on college kids.
Use that big, fancy college brain of yours to realize that for many of the Apple market (it's not all college kids), it is about functionality. When you get out into the real world, and actually have a paycheck, you might understand that for many people, they'll gladly pay the premium to get what they perceive to be a better overall experience.
Part of what you should be learning is to see the world outside of your own self and how you've experienced it. When you go around making the categorical statement that all people with Macs have bought them as status symbols, you're completely seeing the world from the eyes of a college student and how you perceive life on campus.
The world changes when you're out in it, and one of the things is that messing around with a &*^%*& computer i your spare time is a waste of your time.
Dude, seriously, take a couple of humanities courses, date some hippy chick who smells like patchouli, broaden your horizons ... and stop worrying about what other people buy. That's what I'd do if I was back in college.
No, he has confirmed that the feature is cool because it provides functionality, not because it's pretty. ABS in a car is pretty cool too, and it used to be something you had to pay extra for -- was it a status symbol, or a safety feature? Might it have been both?
I could argue that I have never needed the oxygen mask in an airplane. That doesn't mean that I don't think it's functional. A lighted keyboard would be cool -- not in a "Type R" kinda way, but in a "this is useful" kinda way.
Just because you have never had occasion to use a feature, doesn't make it a cosmetic feature.
Has it occurred to you that people don't necessarily buy it because it's a status symbol, or because they feel they're getting better 'performance'?
No, really. I know guys with Master's degrees in computer science, who are perfectly capable coders, and who can get into the grotty bits of hardware just like everyone else. When they go home in the evening, their personal machine is a Mac -- not to show off to their friends, but because in their experience, the Mac simply is easier to use and doesn't give them half the headaches as their work laptops do.
To a person, the people I know with Macs are willing to pay a premium for what they perceive as a better experience. That is, usability, stability, and less fiddling with it.
Maybe you're not including enough things in your evaluation of "better" and "quality" -- if you don't need a million frames per second on a high end gaming rig, or you just want to do basic things and not get mired down in forcing the computer to do what you want -- for some people's standards that slower computer with less RAM is a better computer.
At the end of the day, it's only the functional aspects of my computer I really care about. And my personal machine is a big honking Vista box with what used to be obscene amounts of RAM and disk. I've thought many times of adding a Mac to my flock of computers.
You know, that's as much an engineering/manufacturing strategy as it is marketing. Two sides of the same coin, and more representative of an entirely different end-to-end philosophy.
If your product line isn't cluttered with 16 variations of the same thing that nobody can decipher, you can focus on making one and doing it "right" (for however you define right).
There's no Starter, Home, Deluxe, Ultimate, Enterprise, and Shiny Sparkly versions to deal with ... just a single product which can be articulated to the consumer. Even if you have different sizes (like the iPad or some of the iPods), this can be easily explained to the consumer -- this one has more storage than that one, if you have more stuff, buy the bigger one.
Again, not just "marketing" -- once they get it home they feel comfortable when they're actually using it.
It's one thing to say "easy and intuitive to use" in the marketing glossy ... it's another to actually be easy and intuitive. Now, for the hard-core geeks around here, Apple may offer too "easy" of an experience -- but, for the rest of the people who use it, it does precisely what they've been told it would do.
That's kind more than you can accomplish with just marketing.
Ever read the "Mythical Man Month"? Nine women can't have a baby in a month, and you can't put every possible feature into a new product.
If every product waited to release until they could include all technologies it would ever have, well, we'd never actually see products due to all of the new stuff that gets built.
Like them or not, Apple releases a product that people are free to buy or not. And then, quite predictably, the ones that sell get near-annual refreshes to add features to them -- smaller, better, faster, more storage, touch screen. I've lost count of how many generations of each of the kinds of iPods there are.
And, really, Microsoft has been bragging about coming out with an iPad killer since about two weeks before the product launched. To the best of my knowledge, that doesn't exist yet.
At least Apple actually released something.
*laugh* Rule 34 man, rule 34.
Someone, somewhere, wants to watch gay nerd porn.
Facebook terms if service isn't 'the law', don't confuse the two.
The most Facebook could do is to yank your account, there would be no legal ramifications.
That's not to say the employer isn't an asshat for asking, but there is no 'law' involved in this.
Then, I fear, you grossly underestimate what doing encrypted traffic in a 'repressive regime' might cause for personal ramifications.
There isn't a lot of room to quietly do things The Government of such a country might not want you to do.
What you may think is perfectly reasonable might, in your comfortable Western existence, not get you very far in a practical situation in such a country. Any government which might be willing to use force against it's own citizens might not actually give a fsck about you ... You could become an 'example' ... I bet that would be bad.
Flaunting local laws in such a country might not be a wise choice. The consequences might be, well, unfavorable. Standing back from your basement, I posit that you may not actually fully grasp this as something as scary as what the poster faces. Sidestepping state control in a country in which the leader has supreme power does NOT make one safe ... It might make you a target.
Before you start trying to figure out how to circumvent being spied upon by the host government, maybe you should look into the possible consequences of this. It may well be that if they find out that you're doing this, things could really turn out bad for you.
It's generally a good idea to try to actually obey the laws of the country you're going to, especially if it's as volatile as you say it is. If you're a foreign national and don't have any sort of diplomatic protections, you could be playing a risky game.