I have a PhD in CS. I cut my teeth on the PET and the Vic-20 starting around gr 4, and a TRS-80 CoCo later. After about Gr 7 we had a computer in the home, but I only used it for games. No programming. In high school I focused on math, science and music, and really knew nothing about modern machines or programming when I started my B.Eng.
If I were sitting on a university admissions cttee, I'd certainly accept the core of students who got good marks in their computer classes, but I'd flag kids with top marks in math and music as the ones most likely to succeed. Good math skills mean you can think algorithmically and systematically about a problem. Good musicianship implies that, given a certain set of algorithmic constraints, you can think creatively and express that creativity. There is a quote attributed to Steve Jobs (whether he said it or not I don't know): All the best programmers I know are musicians.
If you've got to choose between a high school programming class, and your school's music program- my advice is to take the music classes.
Not to mention that this study is about heart disease whereas other studies were about cancer. People seem to have a hard time grokking that any given food/drug/vice can be beneficial in some ways and detrimental in others.
Better still, unplug them or cut their power using a powerbar when not in use. The cumulative energy consumption of all the modern electronics and appliances when they're 'off' is about as much as keeping one or two 100W bulbs illuminated all the time.
The old mozilla code-base was indeed a nightmare that took hours to download and compile. I learned how tangled it was when I barely survived an attempt to fix a file:// url bug on unix platforms. The need for portability had produced this many-headed demon. But a lot of really great things came out of that early mess- bugzilla is probably the most notable.
I've never looked at the firefox code but I've always assumed that the firefox team took the useful parts of mozilla- gecko and the portability libraries and produced something smaller and cleaner... but maybe I'm wrong.
One quote in TFA really resonated with me: As is often the case with ideas and prototypes, the fun quickly deteriorates into tedium as the magnitude of the task becomes clearer.
How many times have I been down that road?! When a complex system nears completion, one always feels like there could have been a better, cleaner way. Sometimes there is. But most of the time you spend a week or so trying your new ideas and the project quickly gets bogged down in new problems that only reflect the complexity of the problem.
All the same, I love firefox, and considering its roots I'd rate it as a real open-source success story.
Inference has predefined boundaries, and so of course Bayesian logic doesn't require a bunch of data to lead to a correct conclusion because the boundaries are already so tightened that only those that randomly guess, and don't use historical data points (e.g. their freaking memories) are going to blow the answers.
I'm not sure I agree with you. What is remarkable about these experiments is not that the population gets the right answer, where right answer here is a number, like 42. It's that the population correctly modelled the prior distribution that a Bayesian would use to infer the correct answer. Not only can they get 42, but they can decide whether it's 42 with Gaussian, Laplacian, Bernoulli, whatever, noise, with it's attendant parameters. In other words, take a population, give it a context and a data point, and it will succeed at the model selection problem (which prior do I use?), and provide the correct parameters for the model.
Of course, all this hinges on whether the 'true' model for the context is really a well-defined (in the mathematical sense) distribution.
Simple solution: the submitter URL in the story should point to their slashdot user page (for *all* slashdot stories, btw). They can post their home page url in their user page, if they like, but it will be minimum two clicks away from the front page. They get the reward of recognition, but its diluted. This might reduce the incentive for people like BB to submit a lot of stories, and will hopefully reduce the jealous ranting in the discussions.
I've been thinking that this move by sony might be the last the nail in the coffin for DRM, and this got me wondering whether there was some method behind the madness- surely the drm people at Sony would have known that this kind of stuff would be frowned on, and then to release bad fixes, violate the LGPL, etc, etc, seems a little too over the top to be for real. Maybe someone at Sony decided that to take a hit like this would have other desirable consequences (for sony) that reach beyond the bottom line of the music division. I can't for the life of me imagine what they would be though...
I installed Mandrake 9.2 on my laptop in Dec 2003. Since then, with each new release I've just updated the urpmi media and run urpmi --auto-select and poof, instant upgrade. It's a risky path, but the only time I had any trouble was with the 2006 release- grub wasn't updated properly and I had to go in with a rescue disk. Otherwise, I love urpmi- its my best friend. I can do without most of the drak stuff, though- old hand editing habits die hard.
Working @ home doesn't work so well with small kids around- "Honey can you change DD's diaper?", "Honey can you watch DD while I hop in the shower/run to the store/etc/etc?" Make sure you've got your own work space that is strictly off-limits to kids and significant others while you're "@ work". Otherwise you'll find your productivity is a fraction of what it should be.
I think anyone, italian or american, can figure out the reason for this disagreement by watching a cowering family of american tourists trying to cross the street in Rome or any other large italian city.
god, yes. I'll never forget the first time I tried to cross a roman street. It took a good five minutes or so to realize that taking advantage of a 'break' in traffic involves jumping in front of a fast moving car and hoping he sees you and slows down while you decide whether the next lane is safer to jump into.. all those years of frogger really paid off.:-)
With all the hand-wringing about coming up with non-infringing uses for p2p software for the Grokster case, I'm surprised no one has suggested that we take an open source p2p client and give it some version smarts...
The MDR product is a stereo camera (a PGR Bumblebee), making the reconstruction significantly easier (but not necessarily easy). Also, all the intrinsic camera parameters are constant, whereas they're dynamic in most movie footage (changing focal length, etc). So, the reconstruction from movies problem remains pretty hard. That said, lots of people are working on it...
I have to confess that I'm guilty of this too, but you'll gain much greater speedup out of your code when you understand your data structures.
Classic example-- in the middle of a loop, calling size() on std::list<T>. (for the ignorant, that's typically O(n), although I suspect the ISO standard simply doesn't guarantee that it's constant time). I'll abuse it simply because I'm lazy, but it makes me cringe every time I see it in otherwise well-written code.
Wow, considering that very few people actually try to overclock, the percentage of overclockers who fry their systems must be pretty large. Any guesses? 80%? more? less?
Re:The company should own things that concern them
on
Who Owns Weblog Content?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
People should really treat blogs just like anything that they would say in public.
Trouble is, many people forget what 'in public' really means. It doesn't mean grousing about your job to a small group of friends. When you complain about management on your blog, you might as well have called a press conference, made your comments and had it play on CNN. Every night. Forever. Sooner or later the boss is going to catch wind. And that's when it gets tricky-- you haven't broken any NDA's, you're just advertising your dissatisfaction with your employer. That's probably enough reason for them to express their dissatisfaction with your job performance...
Second off, we should create only single passenger cars as talking to other people in the vehicle requires you to be actively involved in conversation and we should ban CB radios from all delivery vehicles and Police cars. Should this move on to airplanes as well?
Don't get carried away. The data indicates that cell phone use impairs your driving skills. That's all it indicates. Maybe talking on a CB does too, but there's no data, nor does anyone really care-- CB use is much less common than cell use.
And what? I don't see the point here. The elderly can still drive. Insurance figures would seem to indicate they're much less likely to engage in dangerous driving in the first place. If a 20-something is already pre-disposed to dangerous driving, *and* they drive and talk, then it can be safely argued they're much more dangerous than a 70-year-old on the road. Maybe the point is moot-- it's already well-established that 20-something drivers are more dangerous than 70-somethings, without a cell in hand.
Ahhhh yes, this affects your children! This affects everybody that uses the roads. I can think of very few deaths more pointless than a traffic fatality, despite the fact that they happen all the time. I don't necessarily think we should outlaw driving and talking (except maybe for those SUV-driving soccer moms who simultaneously fix their makeup *and* talk *and* sip their lattes;-), but I do think we should be aware of the attendant risks.
If we were to take your point of view to its logical conclusion, we would legalize drinking and driving, to hell with the data.
Do we know that increased CO2 is correlated with global temperature? I won't say either way because I haven't read a paper on the topic.
Should we be concerned that *maybe*, just *maybe* our activities might be rendering the planet unlivable? I think so. If there were a 1 in 1000 chance buying car make X would result in a fatal (for you) car accident, would you buy it? Are we at the point where there's a 1 in 1000 chance that human activity is having an impact on the weather? It seems reasonable to me that we've established all kinds of local correlations (acid rain, anyone?), and if the global system is a little too complex to predict with any certainty we can at least posit that all of this local activity is sooner or later going to add up to a global trend.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a PhD in CS. I cut my teeth on the PET and the Vic-20 starting around gr 4, and a TRS-80 CoCo later. After about Gr 7 we had a computer in the home, but I only used it for games. No programming. In high school I focused on math, science and music, and really knew nothing about modern machines or programming when I started my B.Eng.
If I were sitting on a university admissions cttee, I'd certainly accept the core of students who got good marks in their computer classes, but I'd flag kids with top marks in math and music as the ones most likely to succeed. Good math skills mean you can think algorithmically and systematically about a problem. Good musicianship implies that, given a certain set of algorithmic constraints, you can think creatively and express that creativity. There is a quote attributed to Steve Jobs (whether he said it or not I don't know): All the best programmers I know are musicians.
If you've got to choose between a high school programming class, and your school's music program- my advice is to take the music classes.
$0.02
Not to mention that this study is about heart disease whereas other studies were about cancer. People seem to have a hard time grokking that any given food/drug/vice can be beneficial in some ways and detrimental in others.
Better still, unplug them or cut their power using a powerbar when not in use. The cumulative energy consumption of all the modern electronics and appliances when they're 'off' is about as much as keeping one or two 100W bulbs illuminated all the time.
The old mozilla code-base was indeed a nightmare that took hours to download and compile. I learned how tangled it was when I barely survived an attempt to fix a file:// url bug on unix platforms. The need for portability had produced this many-headed demon. But a lot of really great things came out of that early mess- bugzilla is probably the most notable.
.. but maybe I'm wrong.
I've never looked at the firefox code but I've always assumed that the firefox team took the useful parts of mozilla- gecko and the portability libraries and produced something smaller and cleaner.
One quote in TFA really resonated with me:
As is often the case with ideas and prototypes, the fun quickly deteriorates into tedium as the magnitude of the task becomes clearer.
How many times have I been down that road?! When a complex system nears completion, one always feels like there could have been a better, cleaner way. Sometimes there is. But most of the time you spend a week or so trying your new ideas and the project quickly gets bogged down in new problems that only reflect the complexity of the problem.
All the same, I love firefox, and considering its roots I'd rate it as a real open-source success story.
Inference has predefined boundaries, and so of course Bayesian logic doesn't require a bunch of data to lead to a correct conclusion because the boundaries are already so tightened that only those that randomly guess, and don't use historical data points (e.g. their freaking memories) are going to blow the answers.
I'm not sure I agree with you. What is remarkable about these experiments is not that the population gets the right answer, where right answer here is a number, like 42. It's that the population correctly modelled the prior distribution that a Bayesian would use to infer the correct answer. Not only can they get 42, but they can decide whether it's 42 with Gaussian, Laplacian, Bernoulli, whatever, noise, with it's attendant parameters. In other words, take a population, give it a context and a data point, and it will succeed at the model selection problem (which prior do I use?), and provide the correct parameters for the model.
Of course, all this hinges on whether the 'true' model for the context is really a well-defined (in the mathematical sense) distribution.
Simple solution: the submitter URL in the story should point to their slashdot user page (for *all* slashdot stories, btw). They can post their home page url in their user page, if they like, but it will be minimum two clicks away from the front page. They get the reward of recognition, but its diluted. This might reduce the incentive for people like BB to submit a lot of stories, and will hopefully reduce the jealous ranting in the discussions.
1. Check yr email once a day.
2. Ditch the dual head for a single 19 inch monitor (save some money and yr neck).
3. Browse the web after work.
I've been thinking that this move by sony might be the last the nail in the coffin for DRM, and this got me wondering whether there was some method behind the madness- surely the drm people at Sony would have known that this kind of stuff would be frowned on, and then to release bad fixes, violate the LGPL, etc, etc, seems a little too over the top to be for real. Maybe someone at Sony decided that to take a hit like this would have other desirable consequences (for sony) that reach beyond the bottom line of the music division. I can't for the life of me imagine what they would be though...
Why does a supposedly benevolent designer hate amputees and love slavery?!
I installed Mandrake 9.2 on my laptop in Dec 2003. Since then, with each new release I've just updated the urpmi media and run urpmi --auto-select and poof, instant upgrade. It's a risky path, but the only time I had any trouble was with the 2006 release- grub wasn't updated properly and I had to go in with a rescue disk. Otherwise, I love urpmi- its my best friend. I can do without most of the drak stuff, though- old hand editing habits die hard.
Working @ home doesn't work so well with small kids around- "Honey can you change DD's diaper?", "Honey can you watch DD while I hop in the shower/run to the store/etc/etc?" Make sure you've got your own work space that is strictly off-limits to kids and significant others while you're "@ work". Otherwise you'll find your productivity is a fraction of what it should be.
Are you crazy? First thing I'd do is implement bandwidth charges and make sure everyone calls me Sir. BOFH them into submission....
I think anyone, italian or american, can figure out the reason for this disagreement by watching a cowering family of american tourists trying to cross the street in Rome or any other large italian city.
:-)
god, yes. I'll never forget the first time I tried to cross a roman street. It took a good five minutes or so to realize that taking advantage of a 'break' in traffic involves jumping in front of a fast moving car and hoping he sees you and slows down while you decide whether the next lane is safer to jump into.. all those years of frogger really paid off.
Last I heard, pointing a loaded gun at someone and pulling the trigger amounts to attempted murder.
The reg: ... we just made that quote up.
With all the hand-wringing about coming up with non-infringing uses for p2p software for the Grokster case, I'm surprised no one has suggested that we take an open source p2p client and give it some version smarts...
my 2 cents...
Though never heard from a recruiter after that day :)
No wonder-- you served them Busch Light!
The MDR product is a stereo camera (a PGR Bumblebee), making the reconstruction significantly easier (but not necessarily easy). Also, all the intrinsic camera parameters are constant, whereas they're dynamic in most movie footage (changing focal length, etc). So, the reconstruction from movies problem remains pretty hard. That said, lots of people are working on it...
I have to confess that I'm guilty of this too, but you'll gain much greater speedup out of your code when you understand your data structures.
Classic example-- in the middle of a loop, calling size() on std::list<T>. (for the ignorant, that's typically O(n), although I suspect the ISO standard simply doesn't guarantee that it's constant time). I'll abuse it simply because I'm lazy, but it makes me cringe every time I see it in otherwise well-written code.
Wow, considering that very few people actually try to overclock, the percentage of overclockers who fry their systems must be pretty large. Any guesses? 80%? more? less?
People should really treat blogs just like anything that they would say in public.
Trouble is, many people forget what 'in public' really means. It doesn't mean grousing about your job to a small group of friends. When you complain about management on your blog, you might as well have called a press conference, made your comments and had it play on CNN. Every night. Forever. Sooner or later the boss is going to catch wind. And that's when it gets tricky-- you haven't broken any NDA's, you're just advertising your dissatisfaction with your employer. That's probably enough reason for them to express their dissatisfaction with your job performance...
Second off, we should create only single passenger cars as talking to other people in the vehicle requires you to be actively involved in conversation and we should ban CB radios from all delivery vehicles and Police cars. Should this move on to airplanes as well?
;-), but I do think we should be aware of the attendant risks.
Don't get carried away. The data indicates that cell phone use impairs your driving skills. That's all it indicates. Maybe talking on a CB does too, but there's no data, nor does anyone really care-- CB use is much less common than cell use.
And what? I don't see the point here. The elderly can still drive.
Insurance figures would seem to indicate they're much less likely to engage in dangerous driving in the first place. If a 20-something is already pre-disposed to dangerous driving, *and* they drive and talk, then it can be safely argued they're much more dangerous than a 70-year-old on the road. Maybe the point is moot-- it's already well-established that 20-something drivers are more dangerous than 70-somethings, without a cell in hand.
Ahhhh yes, this affects your children!
This affects everybody that uses the roads. I can think of very few deaths more pointless than a traffic fatality, despite the fact that they happen all the time. I don't necessarily think we should outlaw driving and talking (except maybe for those SUV-driving soccer moms who simultaneously fix their makeup *and* talk *and* sip their lattes
If we were to take your point of view to its logical conclusion, we would legalize drinking and driving, to hell with the data.
IANAClimatologist, but this chart doesn't look like some kind of noisy trend: Atmospheric CO2... (from Antarctic Ice Cores and Environmental Change).
Do we know that increased CO2 is correlated with global temperature? I won't say either way because I haven't read a paper on the topic.
Should we be concerned that *maybe*, just *maybe* our activities might be rendering the planet unlivable? I think so. If there were a 1 in 1000 chance buying car make X would result in a fatal (for you) car accident, would you buy it? Are we at the point where there's a 1 in 1000 chance that human activity is having an impact on the weather? It seems reasonable to me that we've established all kinds of local correlations (acid rain, anyone?), and if the global system is a little too complex to predict with any certainty we can at least posit that all of this local activity is sooner or later going to add up to a global trend.
Better safe than sorry?
... an educated, informed citizen is far more dangerous to theocracy than a thug with a gun.
I hire blue-collars for odd-jobs, pay them cash and then call the IRS. ;-)