I like the way some Dell PR flack can submit a puff piece to the media and then a bunch of morons spread the story around, making it seem like the "next big thing". This piece of crap is 18 pounds, has only as much power as a Mac PowerBook having less than half the weight, and people think that this is interesting? Oh yeah, the keys backlight when you press them making the computer look like it's "blushing". Heavy *and* annoying. What are they going to call this model - the Rosanne Barr?
Shame on Slashdot's editors for passing on this piece of PR crap disguised as a story...
You've acheived a stalemate (at best) and are claiming it as a victory.
IMHO, atheist wins on points, with Fr. William of Ockham awarding the final decision.
Even though the good friar's initial argument was actually made in support of belief in the deity, I like to think that he was rationalist enough to understand the elegance behind evolutionary theory and that he would likely have come up with an argument that would have found synthesis with the idea...
Why should anyone be rational if the Christian God does not exist? Why are men under any obligation to be rational in a materialistic universe?
Because the world works better when people are rational than when they aren't? Because one can recognize reciprocality as a principal that leads to better outcomes for all?
I think that the need for some deity to enforce ones morality with threats of eternal damnation says more about their rationality and moral character than about the nature of reality.
...just goes to show how cool it is to bash religion, especially Christianity...
Oh yes! Christians are soooo repressed and vilified in this country! Just the other day I was saying to a friend how nice it was that we got Beltane off as a nationally recognized holiday. And I was signing up for one of the weekly Bible burnings we hold in each city. And of course, thinking of the upcoming day of thanks to Brahma for all the good in our lives, I was so happy that we had elected so many atheists to national office.
Tell me, does that persecution complex of yours get old after a while?
But climatologists haven't been able to predict much in the past...
Oddly enough, neither have the economists who say that we're going to screw up the economy by doing something about this. Both academic groups have a couple of things in common: they're both studying complex systems where very little experimental evidence is available and they've both had a mixed track record. In most cases when a hard science (like climatology) comes up against a soft science (like economics), the scientific peanut gallery tends to believe the hard science. The fact that this is not the case here is a clear indication that something is seriously being spun on the other side. All I can say is that I go with the hard science. Past experience shows that you ignore hard science at your own peril, but that ignoring economists is not nearly as hazardous to your health.
What type of platform would you like to see delivering the 'true' Web 2.0 in the not too distant future?
Well, I think a good replacement would have a rich set of controls packaged with a robust windowing system so that the user could easily dynamically interact with the system. But, in some cases, latency is a problem, so it might be a good thing to offload some of the caching and processing locally and just send messages back to the server when necessary to garner information. Yeah, the more I think about it, that's what we nee... Oh!? 1970 called? They want their VM-driven desktop systems back? But it talks XML now - slowness and non-readability - all in the same package. Oh, alright... But you better not screw it up again this time...
VHDL (1993) especially is defined in such a way as to make massive amounts of typing (not to mention copy/pasting) inescapable.
The answer, of course, is to write a code generator. Writing a parser for round-tripping is difficult but, to me at least, so is typing hideous standard package names.
You know, back in the early eighties, the most advanced EDA systems were built in Lisp using Lisp machines. Oddly enough, the simple syntax of the language made round-tripping simple and the macro generation facilities made it quite simple to write hardware generators. It is much more difficult to do this work in VHDL. Maybe it's time to go back to the future.
Of course, we'll probably settle for System C or some other such dreck, that will be easier to type, but still will be hard to round-trip or generate.
No need to waste a second of your time with these idiots.
Except that "these idiots" are highly placed and have the ears of the administration and Congress who write laws allowing idiocy. Ignoring them, while more palatable than listening to them, is a losing proposition. The better response is to listen to what they have to say, understand their idiocy, and use it to fight them. That at least gives you a chance. Capitulation to idiocy is idiocy in itself.
Is this problem really so hard that nobody can write the software without a major cluster-f***k?
Oddly enough, yes.
Health care management systems are a royal pain to build. They need to (if you want to be inclusive) do all of the following: billing, insurance submission, pharmacy and supply ordering both provider and vendor side (including inventory management), lab work integration, patient record management, facility booking, scheduling, and or interfacing with all of the above. You're doing this in a highly distributed system (both logically and physically), where fault tolerant behavior is required (and the 99.5% uptime mentioned is drastically too low). You're trying to do this while gathering inputs from hundreds or thousands of different systems, both internal and external, all of which talk different protocols using different vocabulary, all of which need to be reconciled, and all of which have their own quirks. To operate this system you have your standard IT grunt that has no more than 2 years of ITT Tech training. All of this needs to be done in a high-security environment where information is compartmentalized, both at the functional and the individual level. The users of this system range from physicians who don't know how to use a keyboard to administrators who want customized reporting and statistics out of the thing. A large subset of the users are prima donnas who *are* essential to your operation and who *will* walk if you don't satisfy their whims. Now go up another level - you also want a system that's easy to customize and extend (medical science doesn't stand still). Without a doubt, due to the fragmentation of the health care provision in our country, the range of users and functions these systems have to cover, and the extension requirements in place, these systems are some of the most complex that are constructed. K-P actually had an easier time of it, because of their vertical nature where so much of their operations are internal, but even so they needed to interface with hundreds of external contractor's systems (they contract out specialty care like heart surgery).
So, no, it's not an easy job; no, you can't just buy one off the shelf; and, unless you want to go to a much more regimented and controlled health care system, it's not going to get any easier. There's a reason why there are hundreds of companies in this business and why multi-billion dollars worth of this type of work is being done each year.
It will result, at worst, in a gradual increase in oil prices, causing people and countries to shift slowly away from oil-consuming technologies.
Actually, no. That's not the way markets works. Although statistically the mean price over the past N days/weeks/months might increase steadily, the market also becomes more volatile as supplies run out and supplier delivery becomes more unreliable. It's very hard to run an economy on supplies that one can't rely on.
It might be messy...
That's an understatement. Call back in a few years and we'll see what you have to say.
It's less than two years of supply for the US. It's deeper than any current deposit, requiring new technology to exploit, so it's at least 10 years off if we can get it at all. It's still unclear whether it can ever be exploited economically. In short, do your homework. Don't just read the press release.
I'm not quite sure how you're planning to teach statistics in any meaningful way without using calculus.
Amen. You don't necessarily need to know formal definitions of measure and understand Borel spaces (though that doesn't hurt), but you at least need something approaching calculus. The only thing you can teach about stats without calculus is a bit of sampling theory and some formulaic definitions of terms. And even that's only over discrete spaces. As far as I know, you can't even explain the Law of Large Numbers without limits (and that's the weak law - the strong law requires at least Taylor's theorem). And, if you're looking at continuous distributions (which most of the world actually is best modeled by) you can't do *anything* without calculus. The bottom line is that stats without calculus is almost useless.
How will we feed it? How will it be tamed? And how soon will it, in its inevitable turn, become a dinosaur?
So let me get this straight... Wwe're going to be putting the InterWeb pipes into a dinosaur? I don't think I'd want that job - no matter which end you're sticking them into.
I guess that's why we have a Chief Lizard Wrangler...
As a Democrat, I just really hope that bitch doesn't get the nomination in 2008.
I also hope that she doesn't get the nod - she has enough negative baggage with so many people that we would probably lose in 2008. Plus there's still that whole "Are the American people ready to accept a female president?" thing. But she's raised so much money it's likely that she'll be able to get the nomination. Even if we don't get her specifically, because the main reins of the party's power are held in the hands of the DLC, we're likely to get another DINO candidate as a replacement.
And it's not just video games - it's the war, it's the sucking up to big business, it's the free trade uber alles viewpoint. All of these things make most of the "mainstream" Democratic candidates fairly uninteresting to me. Yes, I'll vote for them because the alternative is awful, but I already vote for Greens in "sure thing" elections and send money to actual progressive candidates. And, BTW, the latter is really needed, as the DLC is holding onto power by preferably funding their candidates - the head of the DLC has stated that he'd be happy with a one seat majority as long as the DLC is able to keep control of the party.
This isn't about cheering on a party or hoping the Democrats go to the World Series.
No, it's about preserving our national values and our constitution, something I think is a bit more important and would hope that even "Nerds" have a bit of an interest in.
Besides, if you don't like the political artcles, you can always choose not to read them, unless you're too stupid to find the preference page and click a checkbox.
Well, not necessarily - people just don't like sitting with their backs to an open door (That's why most cubicles make folks feel very uncomfortable - they are set up so that supervisors can sneak up on the drones and see what they're doing - not for human psychological comfort, regardless of the bullshit about "communications". Just think - cubes could be set up so that you faced toward the opening and you could (a) have your back to an actual wall, (b) you could have privacy WRT to what was on your screen and (c) you could still hear everything around you. Also, if cubicles were to "foster communication", why do we let people who sit in them wear headphones to keep out the "communication". The only reason for cubes is that they're cheap and have the added benefit of imposing the feeling of control so essential to the modern business world, but this is another rant...). South-facing windows are better because of the sun they let in - even better when they are mulletted and somewhat shaded via tree branches (for those hot summer days).
It may not be feng shui, but there are real psychological impacts that depend on movement flow, layout and other architectural tangibles that have been built into us evolutionarily and convenience-wise. And before you think that this is totally bullshit (P&T notwithstanding) - set up a room such that you need to walk around a sofa to get from a door on one side to a door on the other and tell me how long it takes you to move the sofa out of the way.
And the web really does have a whole ton of legitimate references to illegal and immoral acts by any politican.
Really? Any politician? I was right with you up until the time you got all cynical on us. This could have been avoided by you saying, "And the web really does have a whole ton of legitimate references to illegal and immoral acts by many politicans." This way, you make it clear you mean a lot, but not all politicians are corrupt, unless you really can prove that the Mayor of Bogusville, Montana has a web page that points out a ligitimate reference to illegal and immoral acts by him/her.
BTW, just as a question - suppose every Democratic congressperson had gotten a speeding ticket and every Republican had been convicted of bribery - would you still make the same argument you did above? There are degrees in corruption, just as there are shades of gray. Being the party in power, I have no doubt that the Republicans, especially with the advent of Tom DeLay's K Street Project, whose very purpose was to lock Democrats away from contributions (usually the source of most corruption trouble), have racked up more than their fair share of corrupt influences over the past ten or so years.
If you really think both parties are equally bad, your cynicism is very sad and is probably leading you towards doing nothing that will ever improve the situation. On the other hand, if you're just another partisan hack but for the other side, trying to say "Everyone does it, so everyone is equally bad!" so that you can rebut the OP with an aire of non-partisan superiority, I despise you and your hypocritical little charade.
Slashdot Mirror
Shame on Slashdot's editors for passing on this piece of PR crap disguised as a story...
Slashdot is simply a metaphor for intelligent people as a whole. Idiocy is in the mind of the beholder...
IMHO, atheist wins on points, with Fr. William of Ockham awarding the final decision.
Even though the good friar's initial argument was actually made in support of belief in the deity, I like to think that he was rationalist enough to understand the elegance behind evolutionary theory and that he would likely have come up with an argument that would have found synthesis with the idea...
Because the world works better when people are rational than when they aren't? Because one can recognize reciprocality as a principal that leads to better outcomes for all?
I think that the need for some deity to enforce ones morality with threats of eternal damnation says more about their rationality and moral character than about the nature of reality.
Oh yes! Christians are soooo repressed and vilified in this country! Just the other day I was saying to a friend how nice it was that we got Beltane off as a nationally recognized holiday. And I was signing up for one of the weekly Bible burnings we hold in each city. And of course, thinking of the upcoming day of thanks to Brahma for all the good in our lives, I was so happy that we had elected so many atheists to national office.
Tell me, does that persecution complex of yours get old after a while?
Oddly enough, neither have the economists who say that we're going to screw up the economy by doing something about this. Both academic groups have a couple of things in common: they're both studying complex systems where very little experimental evidence is available and they've both had a mixed track record. In most cases when a hard science (like climatology) comes up against a soft science (like economics), the scientific peanut gallery tends to believe the hard science. The fact that this is not the case here is a clear indication that something is seriously being spun on the other side. All I can say is that I go with the hard science. Past experience shows that you ignore hard science at your own peril, but that ignoring economists is not nearly as hazardous to your health.
Well, I think a good replacement would have a rich set of controls packaged with a robust windowing system so that the user could easily dynamically interact with the system. But, in some cases, latency is a problem, so it might be a good thing to offload some of the caching and processing locally and just send messages back to the server when necessary to garner information. Yeah, the more I think about it, that's what we nee... Oh!? 1970 called? They want their VM-driven desktop systems back? But it talks XML now - slowness and non-readability - all in the same package. Oh, alright... But you better not screw it up again this time...
The answer, of course, is to write a code generator. Writing a parser for round-tripping is difficult but, to me at least, so is typing hideous standard package names.
You know, back in the early eighties, the most advanced EDA systems were built in Lisp using Lisp machines. Oddly enough, the simple syntax of the language made round-tripping simple and the macro generation facilities made it quite simple to write hardware generators. It is much more difficult to do this work in VHDL. Maybe it's time to go back to the future.
Of course, we'll probably settle for System C or some other such dreck, that will be easier to type, but still will be hard to round-trip or generate.
Except that "these idiots" are highly placed and have the ears of the administration and Congress who write laws allowing idiocy. Ignoring them, while more palatable than listening to them, is a losing proposition. The better response is to listen to what they have to say, understand their idiocy, and use it to fight them. That at least gives you a chance. Capitulation to idiocy is idiocy in itself.
See HL7. You can have a clusterf**k at the individual level or at the standards level - but it will still be one.
Oddly enough, yes.
Health care management systems are a royal pain to build. They need to (if you want to be inclusive) do all of the following: billing, insurance submission, pharmacy and supply ordering both provider and vendor side (including inventory management), lab work integration, patient record management, facility booking, scheduling, and or interfacing with all of the above. You're doing this in a highly distributed system (both logically and physically), where fault tolerant behavior is required (and the 99.5% uptime mentioned is drastically too low). You're trying to do this while gathering inputs from hundreds or thousands of different systems, both internal and external, all of which talk different protocols using different vocabulary, all of which need to be reconciled, and all of which have their own quirks. To operate this system you have your standard IT grunt that has no more than 2 years of ITT Tech training. All of this needs to be done in a high-security environment where information is compartmentalized, both at the functional and the individual level. The users of this system range from physicians who don't know how to use a keyboard to administrators who want customized reporting and statistics out of the thing. A large subset of the users are prima donnas who *are* essential to your operation and who *will* walk if you don't satisfy their whims. Now go up another level - you also want a system that's easy to customize and extend (medical science doesn't stand still). Without a doubt, due to the fragmentation of the health care provision in our country, the range of users and functions these systems have to cover, and the extension requirements in place, these systems are some of the most complex that are constructed. K-P actually had an easier time of it, because of their vertical nature where so much of their operations are internal, but even so they needed to interface with hundreds of external contractor's systems (they contract out specialty care like heart surgery).
So, no, it's not an easy job; no, you can't just buy one off the shelf; and, unless you want to go to a much more regimented and controlled health care system, it's not going to get any easier. There's a reason why there are hundreds of companies in this business and why multi-billion dollars worth of this type of work is being done each year.
Actually, no. That's not the way markets works. Although statistically the mean price over the past N days/weeks/months might increase steadily, the market also becomes more volatile as supplies run out and supplier delivery becomes more unreliable. It's very hard to run an economy on supplies that one can't rely on.
It might be messy...
That's an understatement. Call back in a few years and we'll see what you have to say.
It's less than two years of supply for the US. It's deeper than any current deposit, requiring new technology to exploit, so it's at least 10 years off if we can get it at all. It's still unclear whether it can ever be exploited economically. In short, do your homework. Don't just read the press release.
Amen. You don't necessarily need to know formal definitions of measure and understand Borel spaces (though that doesn't hurt), but you at least need something approaching calculus. The only thing you can teach about stats without calculus is a bit of sampling theory and some formulaic definitions of terms. And even that's only over discrete spaces. As far as I know, you can't even explain the Law of Large Numbers without limits (and that's the weak law - the strong law requires at least Taylor's theorem). And, if you're looking at continuous distributions (which most of the world actually is best modeled by) you can't do *anything* without calculus. The bottom line is that stats without calculus is almost useless.
The poster above is dead-on.
Yeah, but how many Alaskan pipelines of data can it put out? That's the one that Ted Stevens uses. It's not just truckloads of tape, you know...
So let me get this straight... Wwe're going to be putting the InterWeb pipes into a dinosaur? I don't think I'd want that job - no matter which end you're sticking them into.
I guess that's why we have a Chief Lizard Wrangler...
... doesn't need to be walked if you don't mind it using your house as a toilet.
I also hope that she doesn't get the nod - she has enough negative baggage with so many people that we would probably lose in 2008. Plus there's still that whole "Are the American people ready to accept a female president?" thing. But she's raised so much money it's likely that she'll be able to get the nomination. Even if we don't get her specifically, because the main reins of the party's power are held in the hands of the DLC, we're likely to get another DINO candidate as a replacement.
And it's not just video games - it's the war, it's the sucking up to big business, it's the free trade uber alles viewpoint. All of these things make most of the "mainstream" Democratic candidates fairly uninteresting to me. Yes, I'll vote for them because the alternative is awful, but I already vote for Greens in "sure thing" elections and send money to actual progressive candidates. And, BTW, the latter is really needed, as the DLC is holding onto power by preferably funding their candidates - the head of the DLC has stated that he'd be happy with a one seat majority as long as the DLC is able to keep control of the party.
It's not a day late! It's 364 days early!
You know, you could use some pointers on debate.
No, it's about preserving our national values and our constitution, something I think is a bit more important and would hope that even "Nerds" have a bit of an interest in.
Besides, if you don't like the political artcles, you can always choose not to read them, unless you're too stupid to find the preference page and click a checkbox.
Well, not necessarily - people just don't like sitting with their backs to an open door (That's why most cubicles make folks feel very uncomfortable - they are set up so that supervisors can sneak up on the drones and see what they're doing - not for human psychological comfort, regardless of the bullshit about "communications". Just think - cubes could be set up so that you faced toward the opening and you could (a) have your back to an actual wall, (b) you could have privacy WRT to what was on your screen and (c) you could still hear everything around you. Also, if cubicles were to "foster communication", why do we let people who sit in them wear headphones to keep out the "communication". The only reason for cubes is that they're cheap and have the added benefit of imposing the feeling of control so essential to the modern business world, but this is another rant...). South-facing windows are better because of the sun they let in - even better when they are mulletted and somewhat shaded via tree branches (for those hot summer days).
It may not be feng shui, but there are real psychological impacts that depend on movement flow, layout and other architectural tangibles that have been built into us evolutionarily and convenience-wise. And before you think that this is totally bullshit (P&T notwithstanding) - set up a room such that you need to walk around a sofa to get from a door on one side to a door on the other and tell me how long it takes you to move the sofa out of the way.
The use of culture in the same context as the South seems oxymoronic to me.
Unless, of course, you mean in the sense of a bacterial culture...
Really? Any politician? I was right with you up until the time you got all cynical on us. This could have been avoided by you saying, "And the web really does have a whole ton of legitimate references to illegal and immoral acts by many politicans." This way, you make it clear you mean a lot, but not all politicians are corrupt, unless you really can prove that the Mayor of Bogusville, Montana has a web page that points out a ligitimate reference to illegal and immoral acts by him/her.
BTW, just as a question - suppose every Democratic congressperson had gotten a speeding ticket and every Republican had been convicted of bribery - would you still make the same argument you did above? There are degrees in corruption, just as there are shades of gray. Being the party in power, I have no doubt that the Republicans, especially with the advent of Tom DeLay's K Street Project, whose very purpose was to lock Democrats away from contributions (usually the source of most corruption trouble), have racked up more than their fair share of corrupt influences over the past ten or so years.
If you really think both parties are equally bad, your cynicism is very sad and is probably leading you towards doing nothing that will ever improve the situation. On the other hand, if you're just another partisan hack but for the other side, trying to say "Everyone does it, so everyone is equally bad!" so that you can rebut the OP with an aire of non-partisan superiority, I despise you and your hypocritical little charade.