I had a professor like that. Adjunct Professor Bob LaBarre, taught Discrete Math (and a bit of Algorithms and Complexity, I think, though I didn't get to take that) at the University of Connecticut one night a week. The first day we saw him, he reminded us all of Milton from "Office Space", but he turned out to be one of the best instructors I ever had.
We were consistently a chapter or more ahead of the other sections in the same class, our final was a three-hour ordeal of fifteen relatively short-answer questions that I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment at answering. In whatever theory classes I took in the following two years, I had already seen the first few weeks' of material. When we had an extra class left over because we'd finished the scheduled material, we learned about Arrow's impossibility theorem.
And then he got fired because he was apparently making the class too hard. Not that he flunked more people than he was supposed to---just that he made the class too challenging. Pfah. Stupid administration.
The best physics demo I ever saw may have been in high school.
The teacher connected a big PVC drainage pipe (the kind with a row of holes on the top) to the gas. He turned on the gas, and lit the holes so they made a row of little flames. He then put a small boombox at one end of the pipe, turned on some music, and we all watched the flames dance to it in a discrete demonstration of sound waves.
I still can't believe that actually worked, but it was the most memorable bit of high school physics for me.
I don't think 52X was the physical limit of spinning CDs; I think it's the limit of the IDE bus transfer rate, and you get diminishing returns faster than that because of the long spin-up times.
Didn't someone get some mechanical engineering testbench equipment and figure out that CDs didn't start to fragment until 100,000X or something insane like that?
I was more referring to the distinctly-dressing religious minority being hunted down and killed by fascists led by a fella with some Jedi heritage of his own.
The whole story is a little horrifying if you think about it for long enough.
Somehow I think a large-scale coal plant will be more energy-efficient (optimized for steady production) than an ICE (optimized for quick power) which starts and stops combustion thousands of times per minute.
I don't actually know, though, and I'd be curious how a coal plant compares to a gas engine in terms of kg of carbon emissions per kWh of energy produced. (Is that kind of comparison even useful?)
Not only are emissions from large, dedicated powerplants easier to manage, it's easier to change a few large coal plants to nuclear (or whatever) than to change over a massive installed base of cars.
I'm curious; which plane was that? Wikipedia has a pretty good article about the Zero, with stats and all; I'd be interested in comparing it to the Americans' response.
Yeah, I plan on tacking a decent set of home-theater speakers to a computer and a projector. Y'know, when I win the lottery. (Until then, I'll settle for decent TV-out or a large flatpanel.)
Any idea how good Linux support is for this whole nForce-based 5.1 channel audio? What sort of motherboard or (grumble) standalone card I should get? Presuming I'm not an audiophile, and don't give two shits about the distinction between "good", "fabulous" and "audiophile quality" audio.
My apologies if I came off as a zealot. I had one of my biweekly crashes last night, and I'm trying to remember a third of the Firefox tabs I had open at the time.
I'll reply to this again when I get home and can give you the full rundown on my hardware. I only blame the Windows because I have a Linux machine running on slightly older hardware (and I'm nearly certain it's VIA-based) right alongside and it never kernel-panics on me.
Unless by 'hardware' you mean Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, S/390, ARM, m68k, Sparc or a variety of other platforms, in which case you get some halfhearted support from NT4 for a few of those other platforms, which was dropped along the way. Or you mean large-scale multiprocessor machines. Or you mean self-reconfiguring ad-hoc supercomputing clusters.
Unless by 'the business world' you mean a preponderance of server equipment, or the core mission-critical systems that are still running on mainframes because no desktop-based operating system will do what they do.
Unless by 'stable' you mean that for mission-critical stability (that five-nines sort of thing), no one in their right mind uses Windows. (I doubt they use Linux, either, but they certainly don't use Windows.)
Unless by 'catch-up ball' you mean that Linux had the ability to turn old hardware into a useful router, small-scale webserver or PBX before Windows. Hell, Windows still doesn't. Or IPv6 support. Or support for so many filesystems. Or genuine random number generation (I *think* this was a Linux innovation) instead of using pseudorandom methods. Or native user-space support for arbitrary binary formats.
And, of course, unless by 'facts' you mean a list of suppositions, unsupported by anything but bluster.
I get a BSOD every week or two on my Win2k box, (that IRQL one mentioned somewhere around here), and I don't know what piece of hardware is causing it. I've run a number of diagnostics off Hiren's bootCD, memtest86 gives the all-okay signal, nothing is running excessively hot. So what's the problem?
We Americans get all shocked and "send him to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison!" at the sight of sixteen year old pornstars, but you Aussies are quite copacetic with the idea.
(No, seriously. Go to Hush-Hush.com and read their terms of service. I can't paste it in here, 'cause I'm at work and we have a proxy filter.)
You mean 5.1 channel output? I've seen a number of motherboards that have 5.1 SPDIF audio jacks. (Heck, some even have those fancy-schmancy optical jacks.)
Look at his userinfo page---he's averaging one, maybe two replies per post. Perhaps if he worked some sort of "M$" reference into his posts, he'd get a bigger bite.
There are plenty of non-self-evident things we teach in school. Plate tectonics, the circulation of blood, the germ theory of medicine and even the equations of motion (F=ma instead of F=mv) aren't readily apparent, and didn't occur to people for a very long time. I suppose the difference is that you can demonstrate them. (Though I'm curious as to how one replicates plate tectonics in the lab.)
Besides, Newton's big insight with gravity wasn't that (gasp) things fall down; it was that the force which makes the planets orbit in the heavens is the same force that makes the apple fall to the earth. Which isn't obvious.
And lastly, you're setting the bar unnaturally high by demanding that evolution be shown on a convenient timescale, in the lab. It's going to a hell of a lot to convince me that the Superhero From Outer Space theory of life on earth has any credence whatsoever.
That's not what Godel proved. You're talking about the need to start from some axioms, which is pretty obvious. Axioms aren't exactly undefined, they're just statements or rules that define the game we're playing, and we see what we can derive from those axioms.
Godel proved that any sufficiently complex system will contain either contradictions or undecidable (neither true nor false) statements. (I'm skimming on this next part; someone with mightier math feel free to pimp-slap me.) For instance, the mathematical system consisting of the whole numbers (..., -1, 0, 1, 2,...) and the operation of addition (and by implication, subtraction) isn't complex enough, but when you start talking about the rational numbers (anything that can be written as a fraction) along with multiplication and division on top of addition and multiplication, you create an inconsistent system.
This put a lot of bees into a lot of bonnets when Godel came up with is, because people like their systems to be internally consistent, at the very least.
I dunno, I get most of my paperbacks from my local used book store. The selection isn't that good, and the books are pretty well broken in, but they're a buck or two, and you can find some decent old reads. (Last time I was there, I got "Triplanetary" and "Norstrilia" for about three bucks.)
Did anyone catch Bill Gates on NPR this week, complaining that he has to go to India to find qualified engineers and programmers, because the Unites States has such a shoddy educational system? They read off a few furious emails from listeners pointing out that Bill Gates really wished the United States would produce more dirt-cheap engineers and programmers.
This is the same bullshit he and everyone else in the tech industry was spitting ten years ago, and still no one's learned.
And he's gotta know he's being disingenuous, and inspiring hordes of kids to take up engineering and programming, jobs in which they'll have a lovely time getting employed.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there some sort of clever reference (e.g., Xerox PARC) here which I'm not getting?
--grendel drago
I had a professor like that. Adjunct Professor Bob LaBarre, taught Discrete Math (and a bit of Algorithms and Complexity, I think, though I didn't get to take that) at the University of Connecticut one night a week. The first day we saw him, he reminded us all of Milton from "Office Space", but he turned out to be one of the best instructors I ever had.
We were consistently a chapter or more ahead of the other sections in the same class, our final was a three-hour ordeal of fifteen relatively short-answer questions that I felt a genuine sense of accomplishment at answering. In whatever theory classes I took in the following two years, I had already seen the first few weeks' of material. When we had an extra class left over because we'd finished the scheduled material, we learned about Arrow's impossibility theorem.
And then he got fired because he was apparently making the class too hard. Not that he flunked more people than he was supposed to---just that he made the class too challenging. Pfah. Stupid administration.
--grendel drago
The best physics demo I ever saw may have been in high school.
The teacher connected a big PVC drainage pipe (the kind with a row of holes on the top) to the gas. He turned on the gas, and lit the holes so they made a row of little flames. He then put a small boombox at one end of the pipe, turned on some music, and we all watched the flames dance to it in a discrete demonstration of sound waves.
I still can't believe that actually worked, but it was the most memorable bit of high school physics for me.
--grendel drago
I don't think 52X was the physical limit of spinning CDs; I think it's the limit of the IDE bus transfer rate, and you get diminishing returns faster than that because of the long spin-up times.
Didn't someone get some mechanical engineering testbench equipment and figure out that CDs didn't start to fragment until 100,000X or something insane like that?
--grendel drago
I was more referring to the distinctly-dressing religious minority being hunted down and killed by fascists led by a fella with some Jedi heritage of his own.
The whole story is a little horrifying if you think about it for long enough.
--grendel drago
Somehow I think a large-scale coal plant will be more energy-efficient (optimized for steady production) than an ICE (optimized for quick power) which starts and stops combustion thousands of times per minute.
I don't actually know, though, and I'd be curious how a coal plant compares to a gas engine in terms of kg of carbon emissions per kWh of energy produced. (Is that kind of comparison even useful?)
Not only are emissions from large, dedicated powerplants easier to manage, it's easier to change a few large coal plants to nuclear (or whatever) than to change over a massive installed base of cars.
--grendel drago
I'm curious; which plane was that? Wikipedia has a pretty good article about the Zero, with stats and all; I'd be interested in comparing it to the Americans' response.
--grendel drago
That was Il Duce. Can't you even get your mid-20th century dictators straight?
--grendel drago
Do you want to know what the whole story, the whole character arc, of Anakin Skywalker is? Here it is, in a nutshell:
JESUS GROWS UP TO BE HITLER.
Search your feelings, you know it to be true.
--grendel drago
Yeah, I plan on tacking a decent set of home-theater speakers to a computer and a projector. Y'know, when I win the lottery. (Until then, I'll settle for decent TV-out or a large flatpanel.)
Any idea how good Linux support is for this whole nForce-based 5.1 channel audio? What sort of motherboard or (grumble) standalone card I should get? Presuming I'm not an audiophile, and don't give two shits about the distinction between "good", "fabulous" and "audiophile quality" audio.
--grendel drago
My apologies if I came off as a zealot. I had one of my biweekly crashes last night, and I'm trying to remember a third of the Firefox tabs I had open at the time.
I'll reply to this again when I get home and can give you the full rundown on my hardware. I only blame the Windows because I have a Linux machine running on slightly older hardware (and I'm nearly certain it's VIA-based) right alongside and it never kernel-panics on me.
Thanks for the help.
--grendel drago
Unless by 'hardware' you mean Alpha, MIPS, PowerPC, S/390, ARM, m68k, Sparc or a variety of other platforms, in which case you get some halfhearted support from NT4 for a few of those other platforms, which was dropped along the way. Or you mean large-scale multiprocessor machines. Or you mean self-reconfiguring ad-hoc supercomputing clusters.
Unless by 'the business world' you mean a preponderance of server equipment, or the core mission-critical systems that are still running on mainframes because no desktop-based operating system will do what they do.
Unless by 'stable' you mean that for mission-critical stability (that five-nines sort of thing), no one in their right mind uses Windows. (I doubt they use Linux, either, but they certainly don't use Windows.)
Unless by 'catch-up ball' you mean that Linux had the ability to turn old hardware into a useful router, small-scale webserver or PBX before Windows. Hell, Windows still doesn't. Or IPv6 support. Or support for so many filesystems. Or genuine random number generation (I *think* this was a Linux innovation) instead of using pseudorandom methods. Or native user-space support for arbitrary binary formats.
And, of course, unless by 'facts' you mean a list of suppositions, unsupported by anything but bluster.
--grendel drago
Linux is 32-bit? Crap, now I have to uninstall it from that Sparc64 server.
--grendel drago
I get a BSOD every week or two on my Win2k box, (that IRQL one mentioned somewhere around here), and I don't know what piece of hardware is causing it. I've run a number of diagnostics off Hiren's bootCD, memtest86 gives the all-okay signal, nothing is running excessively hot. So what's the problem?
--grendel drago
He said motherboard. Not CPU type. Not architecture. Motherboard. It has jack to do with the HAL.
--grendel drago
We Americans get all shocked and "send him to federal pound-me-in-the-ass prison!" at the sight of sixteen year old pornstars, but you Aussies are quite copacetic with the idea.
(No, seriously. Go to Hush-Hush.com and read their terms of service. I can't paste it in here, 'cause I'm at work and we have a proxy filter.)
--grendel drago
You mean 5.1 channel output? I've seen a number of motherboards that have 5.1 SPDIF audio jacks. (Heck, some even have those fancy-schmancy optical jacks.)
--grendel drago
Look at his userinfo page---he's averaging one, maybe two replies per post. Perhaps if he worked some sort of "M$" reference into his posts, he'd get a bigger bite.
--grendel drago
There are plenty of non-self-evident things we teach in school. Plate tectonics, the circulation of blood, the germ theory of medicine and even the equations of motion (F=ma instead of F=mv) aren't readily apparent, and didn't occur to people for a very long time. I suppose the difference is that you can demonstrate them. (Though I'm curious as to how one replicates plate tectonics in the lab.)
Besides, Newton's big insight with gravity wasn't that (gasp) things fall down; it was that the force which makes the planets orbit in the heavens is the same force that makes the apple fall to the earth. Which isn't obvious.
And lastly, you're setting the bar unnaturally high by demanding that evolution be shown on a convenient timescale, in the lab. It's going to a hell of a lot to convince me that the Superhero From Outer Space theory of life on earth has any credence whatsoever.
--grendel drago
That's not what Godel proved. You're talking about the need to start from some axioms, which is pretty obvious. Axioms aren't exactly undefined, they're just statements or rules that define the game we're playing, and we see what we can derive from those axioms.
...) and the operation of addition (and by implication, subtraction) isn't complex enough, but when you start talking about the rational numbers (anything that can be written as a fraction) along with multiplication and division on top of addition and multiplication, you create an inconsistent system.
Godel proved that any sufficiently complex system will contain either contradictions or undecidable (neither true nor false) statements. (I'm skimming on this next part; someone with mightier math feel free to pimp-slap me.) For instance, the mathematical system consisting of the whole numbers (..., -1, 0, 1, 2,
This put a lot of bees into a lot of bonnets when Godel came up with is, because people like their systems to be internally consistent, at the very least.
--grendel drago
I dunno, I get most of my paperbacks from my local used book store. The selection isn't that good, and the books are pretty well broken in, but they're a buck or two, and you can find some decent old reads.
(Last time I was there, I got "Triplanetary" and "Norstrilia" for about three bucks.)
--grendel drago
I'm seriously considering picking up *something* to occupy my attention on the flights I'm going to start taking over the next couple of months
There's this fascinating device, you have have heard of it. It's called a "book", and it's rather cheaper than a PSP.
Snark, snark, snark.
-grendel drago
I don't own a house, though I'm currently seeking an apartment.
Who is this "you" that you're replying to?
--grendel drago
Really? I'd thought that they pronounced 'eclipse' as "uh-CLIPS", meaning that 'the clips', pronounced "thuh-CLIPS", would be similar enough.
But then again, it's been a while.
--grendel drago
Did anyone catch Bill Gates on NPR this week, complaining that he has to go to India to find qualified engineers and programmers, because the Unites States has such a shoddy educational system? They read off a few furious emails from listeners pointing out that Bill Gates really wished the United States would produce more dirt-cheap engineers and programmers.
This is the same bullshit he and everyone else in the tech industry was spitting ten years ago, and still no one's learned.
And he's gotta know he's being disingenuous, and inspiring hordes of kids to take up engineering and programming, jobs in which they'll have a lovely time getting employed.
Yecch. How does he sleep at night?
--grendel drago