We get about 300 days of sun a year in the Bay Area. If you choose Stanford there is a non-negligible chance that you will become significantly less interested in algorithms, and much more interested in things like hiking, cycling, partying, etc. Stanford has a much greater "normal person" component (athletes, dumb rich kids) than MIT. Consequently, you will wind up a little more normal as well. Based on the people I know who went to MIT, if you choose that route almost the exact opposite will occur. You will exit a significantly better engineer at the expense of learning social niceties and basic grooming. Both skills (engineering & people) can take you far in life. You can't neglect either.
BTW, something tells me you know your USACO score by heart.:-)
Anybody who is nerdy enough to write in to Slashdot bemoaning the probable demise of these shows is going to have no problem clearing up their busy Friday night social schedule in order to watch them.
That is definitely the CW, but I wonder about it. It seems like it was much more the case before Adobe came along and started crushing QuarkXPress into oblivion. The UI for Mac and Win InDesign is practically identical now. What's the argument for spending extra money for a Mac as a publisher or designer nowadays?
I thought the same thing, but then wondered why MSFT would be so stupid as to put cheap Macs into the hands of users. I mean let's be honest, the Apple tax is the only thing keeping an additional like 25% of the Windows user base from switching.
I therefore posit that Steve Jobs is actually financing PsyStar. Although he would never be down with such a retarded name.
People who take the time to search out and install ad-blocking software are not interested in clicking on banner ads anyways. I can probably count on my right hand the number of times I've (purposely) clicked on ad in the 15 years I've been surfing the web. Anyone who is annoyed at the mere act of having to look at a banner ad is highly unlikely to click on one. Thus the marginal impact on ad revenue is probably low.
And, just like every discussion ever about torrenting, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what anyone thinks about it, because the practice will continue regardless:-) Moreso for ad blockers since they are 100% legal. So might as well stop crying.
I think "little effort" overstates things a bit. Real names seem like a large-enough keyspace if you go outside of middle America and take the entire world into account. The name of a famous world leader, properly capitalized, hashes to 82f028fc9a88d87445a91190400a5516c55e8973. If anybody can identify it, I'd be fascinated to hear how they did it. And to save you the trouble no this hash is not found in Google:-)
Contribute using the SHA1 hash of your real name as your anonymous nickname. If you ever want to be identified you can verify that it was you who made the contributions.
As someone who is starting a math grad program next year and got an 800 on the GRE verbal, I can't tell you how happy I am to hear you say that:-) Boasting aside, I have always felt that people miss out on the distinction between mathematics and computation. Performing mathematical operations sequentially to arrive at an answer, a la a computer, is what you do on the SAT (and I assume the ACT as well.) This is a very different feat from sitting down with a math book and trying to wrap your ahead around a theoretical concept. To me, writing a proof has always felt like far more of a right-brained activity than a left-brained one. When I'm thinking deeply about something mathematical, the feeling I get is akin to what I experience when playing music or drawing--completely different from performing addition and subtraction. I theorize that this is why a lot of math professors are crummy arithmeticians.
We have way more arable land than we do water to irrigate it. It takes 50x as much fresh water to grow a pound of beef as a pound of rice or soy beans. The fresh water constraint will bind long, long before we ever run out of places to grow or graze--in fact it's already being reached in the developing world. In your terms, we could stretch this planet a lot further as vegetarians than as omnivores.
I hate to be that guy on/. who can't take a joke, but... brine shrimp have a really important niche role in the food chain. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but basically without brine shrimp and things like it, there would be none of the larger tasty fish that we like so much to eat so much. This is why it drives conservationists nuts when people bitch and moan about environmental regulations aimed at protecting something which seems insignificant to the layperson. You fail to see the interconnectedness of it all.
I can't think of a better use for streaming the presidential debates online than enabling all us expats who can't see it live on our local stations. Which is why I found it really annoying when I logged on to Hulu for debate #2 that I got a big fat denial message stating they can only serve content to people in the US. Thankfully, the BBC had it live and uninterrupted.
Sorry, but I think you got your figures backwards. Most people need Office in the sense that it works, they know it, and they're not keen on learning something else. Obscure functions don't enter into it. I've administered various tests using OpenOffice--the mom test, the grandparent test, the girlfriend test--and it fails every time. Trust me: if what I were saying were not true, I think you'd see a whole lot more people switching over considering Microsoft's licensing rates for MS Office.
Also, there are a lot of people outside of America, and some of us even use computers! Greetings from Berlin.
The closedness of the iPhone platform is what makes it desirable to so many people. I think this is a really hard point for the/. crowd to understand. I perused the Android SDK yesterday the first thing that jumped out at me was the following:
Any app on the mobile device can be replaced or extended -- even core components such as the dialer or home.
IMO this is the exact opposite of what most users want. I'd bet you dollars to donuts that the average, non-technical (i.e. the majority) user would much prefer an extremely well thought-out, immutable UI to having some apps rip out the guts of the phone and replace them with something foreign, less pretty, and almost certainly more poorly designed that what the iPhone offers out of the box.
The only people really affected by these much ballyhooed rejections are the developer, his/her fans, and people who have philosophical qualms about a closed platform (and if you're reading this, you probably number among them.) The average user couldn't care less. The apps available on App store are entertaining or, at best, marginally useful, but it's mostly a profit vehicle for Apple. Certainly no killer apps have yet to emerge because let's face it, if one did, Apple would simply usurp it and add it to the next major firmware release. Does this stifle innovation? Sure. But I argue that this strategy, of leaving the bulk of innovating to in-house, professional designers and artists, enriches the user experience in ways that leaving it to bands of indie developers won't.
Anyone who's older than about 15 would certainly remember the last the time American public got fed this crap about how our awesome new laser weapons are the "future of modern warfare" and would enable us "precisely" kill scads of baddies while minimizing collateral damage. Remember good ol' Norm Schwarzkopf up there on CNN with those gripping black and white films of F-117 dropping GBUs down stovepipes? I do!
Well, it turns out that those laser-guided bombs hit their target a whopping sixty percent of the time!! (Although, strangely, 100% of the TV images shown to the public were direct hits. Hmm.) I wonder where the rest went? Pardon the pun, but would a 40% failure rate fly in the hallowed field of aeronautical engineering? Or would you admit your product is a piece of crap and go back to the drawing board?
Or, if you were really smart, would you admit that there is forever a disconnect between the structured, theoretical world of the engineer, and the imperfect, nonlinear world of the layman who will be putting your creation to use? Your directed energy weapon system may perform great in the lab, but do you really trust somebody with a high school education operating in a high stress environment not to accidentally kill an innocent civilians with it? How bout a whole bunch of these people working in tandem?
I'm an Emacs guy who can't stand Nano and can't be bothered to learn Vim. Then I discovered e3, a ridiculously fast little editor written entirely in assembler. It has key bindings for Emacs, VIM, Pico, and every other major text editor out there. Actually I think it's now what pops up on Ubuntu when you type in "emacs" by default.
I just this morning listened to Woodward's interview on Fresh Air and he talked specifically about this in a very vague, shadowy manner. Basically his point was that although the surge is credited with improving security, the gains are in large part due to some double-super secret new method we have of killing large amounts of people quietly, precisely and from afar. It seriously sounded as if the we had developed a death ray or something. It was creeeepy.
Ubuntu (i.e. Kubuntu) would already rule the desktop.
I assume you mean the Linux part of the desktop. Because nothing I have seen in the FOSS world approaches even OS X Puma in terms of usability, aesthetics or intuitiveness. There's something fundamental missing from the equation in Gnome and KDE, and that something is artists. I'm not just talking about making pretty desktops with lots of gradients and plasticky buttons. Use any Apple product for five minutes and you instantly realize that some seriously right-brained shit goes into developing these things. There's very little of that going on in the Gnome or KDE camps, and what little there is seems is mostly derivative of something Mac or, worse, Windows, already did. Please understand that I'm not trying to belittle anyone or, in particular, the tens of thousands of hours of donated hard work that has gone into these projects, both of which I use and am impressed with. But it's time we stopped clicking our heels waiting for Linux to "finally" overtake OS X. Why? Because the open source culture of giving away your hard work, so prevalent in the software world, simply has no equivalent in the artistic world. Apropos the post, it appears someone finally realized this and is throwing down some cash to address things like UI design and documentation, but I remain extremely skeptical how worthwhile this will be given Apple's decade-long lead.
Actually, a great example of what I'm talking about will be comparing Android, which I'm guessing was designed by a bunch of CS grads, with the iPhone. If the Gnome or KDE guys had to build a cell phone, they could have built Android. No one except Apple could have made the iPhone.
Re:research to application life cycle
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 1
I disagree. First, math as we know it was invented to describe physical phenomena. Probably the most obvious example of this is calculus, which Newton/Leibniz arrived at while trying to better explain gravity. In our own time, one of the most important theoretical physicists alive (Edward Witten) is a renowned mathematician, even winning a Fields medal. His insights in physics are widely regarded as having advanced the field of mathematics.
Re:Realtime LHC Data
on
LHC Success!
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Slashdot Mirror
use haskell;
We get about 300 days of sun a year in the Bay Area. If you choose Stanford there is a non-negligible chance that you will become significantly less interested in algorithms, and much more interested in things like hiking, cycling, partying, etc. Stanford has a much greater "normal person" component (athletes, dumb rich kids) than MIT. Consequently, you will wind up a little more normal as well. Based on the people I know who went to MIT, if you choose that route almost the exact opposite will occur. You will exit a significantly better engineer at the expense of learning social niceties and basic grooming. Both skills (engineering & people) can take you far in life. You can't neglect either.
BTW, something tells me you know your USACO score by heart. :-)
Yeah, I have to say I was pretty on the fence between MIT and Walla Walla Community College (go Warriors!). But this has really sealed the deal.
Anybody who is nerdy enough to write in to Slashdot bemoaning the probable demise of these shows is going to have no problem clearing up their busy Friday night social schedule in order to watch them.
Who's objecting? There's a difference between naysaying and simply pointing out the downsides, as well as the upsides, of some potential solutions.
Ignorance is what got us into this predicament in the first place, sheesh.
That is definitely the CW, but I wonder about it. It seems like it was much more the case before Adobe came along and started crushing QuarkXPress into oblivion. The UI for Mac and Win InDesign is practically identical now. What's the argument for spending extra money for a Mac as a publisher or designer nowadays?
I thought the same thing, but then wondered why MSFT would be so stupid as to put cheap Macs into the hands of users. I mean let's be honest, the Apple tax is the only thing keeping an additional like 25% of the Windows user base from switching.
I therefore posit that Steve Jobs is actually financing PsyStar. Although he would never be down with such a retarded name.
People who take the time to search out and install ad-blocking software are not interested in clicking on banner ads anyways. I can probably count on my right hand the number of times I've (purposely) clicked on ad in the 15 years I've been surfing the web. Anyone who is annoyed at the mere act of having to look at a banner ad is highly unlikely to click on one. Thus the marginal impact on ad revenue is probably low.
And, just like every discussion ever about torrenting, it doesn't make a damn bit of difference what anyone thinks about it, because the practice will continue regardless :-) Moreso for ad blockers since they are 100% legal. So might as well stop crying.
I think "little effort" overstates things a bit. Real names seem like a large-enough keyspace if you go outside of middle America and take the entire world into account. The name of a famous world leader, properly capitalized, hashes to 82f028fc9a88d87445a91190400a5516c55e8973. If anybody can identify it, I'd be fascinated to hear how they did it. And to save you the trouble no this hash is not found in Google :-)
Contribute using the SHA1 hash of your real name as your anonymous nickname. If you ever want to be identified you can verify that it was you who made the contributions.
As someone who is starting a math grad program next year and got an 800 on the GRE verbal, I can't tell you how happy I am to hear you say that :-) Boasting aside, I have always felt that people miss out on the distinction between mathematics and computation. Performing mathematical operations sequentially to arrive at an answer, a la a computer, is what you do on the SAT (and I assume the ACT as well.) This is a very different feat from sitting down with a math book and trying to wrap your ahead around a theoretical concept. To me, writing a proof has always felt like far more of a right-brained activity
than a left-brained one. When I'm thinking deeply about something mathematical, the feeling I get is akin to what I experience when playing music or drawing--completely different from performing addition and subtraction. I theorize that this is why a lot of math professors are crummy arithmeticians.
We have way more arable land than we do water to irrigate it. It takes 50x as much fresh water to grow a pound of beef as a pound of rice or soy beans. The fresh water constraint will bind long, long before we ever run out of places to grow or graze--in fact it's already being reached in the developing world. In your terms, we could stretch this planet a lot further as vegetarians than as omnivores.
I hate to be that guy on /. who can't take a joke, but... brine shrimp have a really important niche role in the food chain. This is a bit of an oversimplification, but basically without brine shrimp and things like it, there would be none of the larger tasty fish that we like so much to eat so much. This is why it drives conservationists nuts when people bitch and moan about environmental regulations aimed at protecting something which seems insignificant to the layperson. You fail to see the interconnectedness of it all.
No kidding, I thought the same thing. Hope that guy has Lifelock.
I can't think of a better use for streaming the presidential debates online than enabling all us expats who can't see it live on our local stations. Which is why I found it really annoying when I logged on to Hulu for debate #2 that I got a big fat denial message stating they can only serve content to people in the US. Thankfully, the BBC had it live and uninterrupted.
Sorry, but I think you got your figures backwards. Most people need Office in the sense that it works, they know it, and they're not keen on learning something else. Obscure functions don't enter into it. I've administered various tests using OpenOffice--the mom test, the grandparent test, the girlfriend test--and it fails every time. Trust me: if what I were saying were not true, I think you'd see a whole lot more people switching over considering Microsoft's licensing rates for MS Office.
Also, there are a lot of people outside of America, and some of us even use computers! Greetings from Berlin.
Microsoft. Office.
The money's better, I imagine...
The closedness of the iPhone platform is what makes it desirable to so many people. I think this is a really hard point for the /. crowd to understand. I perused the Android SDK yesterday the first thing that jumped out at me was the following:
IMO this is the exact opposite of what most users want. I'd bet you dollars to donuts that the average, non-technical (i.e. the majority) user would much prefer an extremely well thought-out, immutable UI to having some apps rip out the guts of the phone and replace them with something foreign, less pretty, and almost certainly more poorly designed that what the iPhone offers out of the box.
The only people really affected by these much ballyhooed rejections are the developer, his/her fans, and people who have philosophical qualms about a closed platform (and if you're reading this, you probably number among them.) The average user couldn't care less. The apps available on App store are entertaining or, at best, marginally useful, but it's mostly a profit vehicle for Apple. Certainly no killer apps have yet to emerge because let's face it, if one did, Apple would simply usurp it and add it to the next major firmware release. Does this stifle innovation? Sure. But I argue that this strategy, of leaving the bulk of innovating to in-house, professional designers and artists, enriches the user experience in ways that leaving it to bands of indie developers won't.
Anyone who's older than about 15 would certainly remember the last the time American public got fed this crap about how our awesome new laser weapons are the "future of modern warfare" and would enable us "precisely" kill scads of baddies while minimizing collateral damage. Remember good ol' Norm Schwarzkopf up there on CNN with those gripping black and white films of F-117 dropping GBUs down stovepipes? I do!
Well, it turns out that those laser-guided bombs hit their target a whopping sixty percent of the time!! (Although, strangely, 100% of the TV images shown to the public were direct hits. Hmm.) I wonder where the rest went? Pardon the pun, but would a 40% failure rate fly in the hallowed field of aeronautical engineering? Or would you admit your product is a piece of crap and go back to the drawing board?
Or, if you were really smart, would you admit that there is forever a disconnect between the structured, theoretical world of the engineer, and the imperfect, nonlinear world of the layman who will be putting your creation to use? Your directed energy weapon system may perform great in the lab, but do you really trust somebody with a high school education operating in a high stress environment not to accidentally kill an innocent civilians with it? How bout a whole bunch of these people working in tandem?
I'm an Emacs guy who can't stand Nano and can't be bothered to learn Vim. Then I discovered e3, a ridiculously fast little editor written entirely in assembler. It has key bindings for Emacs, VIM, Pico, and every other major text editor out there. Actually I think it's now what pops up on Ubuntu when you type in "emacs" by default.
I just this morning listened to Woodward's interview on Fresh Air and he talked specifically about this in a very vague, shadowy manner. Basically his point was that although the surge is credited with improving security, the gains are in large part due to some double-super secret new method we have of killing large amounts of people quietly, precisely and from afar. It seriously sounded as if the we had developed a death ray or something. It was creeeepy.
Good to know it's only sort of a death ray.
Ubuntu (i.e. Kubuntu) would already rule the desktop.
I assume you mean the Linux part of the desktop. Because nothing I have seen in the FOSS world approaches even OS X Puma in terms of usability, aesthetics or intuitiveness. There's something fundamental missing from the equation in Gnome and KDE, and that something is artists. I'm not just talking about making pretty desktops with lots of gradients and plasticky buttons. Use any Apple product for five minutes and you instantly realize that some seriously right-brained shit goes into developing these things. There's very little of that going on in the Gnome or KDE camps, and what little there is seems is mostly derivative of something Mac or, worse, Windows, already did. Please understand that I'm not trying to belittle anyone or, in particular, the tens of thousands of hours of donated hard work that has gone into these projects, both of which I use and am impressed with. But it's time we stopped clicking our heels waiting for Linux to "finally" overtake OS X. Why? Because the open source culture of giving away your hard work, so prevalent in the software world, simply has no equivalent in the artistic world. Apropos the post, it appears someone finally realized this and is throwing down some cash to address things like UI design and documentation, but I remain extremely skeptical how worthwhile this will be given Apple's decade-long lead.
Actually, a great example of what I'm talking about will be comparing Android, which I'm guessing was designed by a bunch of CS grads, with the iPhone. If the Gnome or KDE guys had to build a cell phone, they could have built Android. No one except Apple could have made the iPhone.
I disagree. First, math as we know it was invented to describe physical phenomena. Probably the most obvious example of this is calculus, which Newton/Leibniz arrived at while trying to better explain gravity. In our own time, one of the most important theoretical physicists alive (Edward Witten) is a renowned mathematician, even winning a Fields medal. His insights in physics are widely regarded as having advanced the field of mathematics.
Wow... you, sir, are dense.