I've just started consciously focusing on functional programming techniques in Mathematica. It's almost religiously advanced in most of the Mathematica texts I've read as being easier to read and, ultimately, faster to program than most procedural algorithms one could implement to do the same things. I've definitely adopted it for some operations on lists and things, but I'll have to get more comfortable with it to apply it to everything I do in Mm. As far as I know, the Mathematica Journal even has a column devoted to solving problems with "one-liners", using only functional programming techniques. (Of course, if one is really interested in it, he could go to Journal of Functional Programming and educate us all.) I'm too cheap to find out for sure.
It seems to me that Mathematica is extremely powerful in this respect: one can choose which paradigm to program in, and successfully mix paradigms, almost to the heart's content, and get useful information out. Of course, the execution speed may not be so hot, but for ease of use, it can't be beaten. What other programs out there allow such mixing?
I very much agree with the parent post, about bats being effective and rather fun controllers of adult mosquitos. However, the poster raised the question of how effectively ultrasonic acoustic signals propagate through water. The answer: very effectively.
I work with ultrasonics (just got done with an experiment about 1/2 hour ago, at 510kHz and 2.25MHz). There's no problem propagating signals of these "medium" frequencies through water for several meters without significant attenuation, up to tens of meters. At higher frequencies, the attenuation is generally higher (in the regime of linear acoustics, which I'll bet these devices work in), but for something about 1mm in diameter,(as I'm guessing these air sacs are), the resonance frequency is going to be around 165kHz (assuming an "organ pipe" mode to the vibration; if these are modeled as Helmholtz resonators, the frequency will be significantly lower). This will propagate through water just fine for a long way.
Murky water, of course, will pose more of a problem, but I'd not worry too much.
This method, by the way, has been pondered for quite a while in air, but coupling sound into air, and getting it to propagate for a ways is much more difficult. The most interesting thing I've heard in a long time was at a recent acoustics conference, where some researchers gave quite a lot of evidence that some buggies use acoustic signals propagating through trees and other plants (specific plants for specific bug species) to communicate. If one disrupts these signals, the bugs will leave those particular plants alone.
... get (if the thing doesn't come with one built in) an external floppy drive -- USB or whatever. It CAN save your OS, and they're awfully nice when you can't network some comps together and have to transfer a little bit of data.
'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'
You're correct: To make a good case for a particular set of software packages, one has to know what a person is going to do, and the tools they might want to use. This is the point of the original poster, and I do not dispute it.
My point is that I (and, admittedly, a relatively small percentage of computer users) am in an environment (a major research institute) where people are actively seeking new solutions for problems, and need *flexibility* every day. There really isn't a killer, do-it-all app out there for the tasks I--or any of my colleagues--end up doing, but some are definitely better than others. I've become quite comfortable and proficient in a small set of tools, and ones which could probably be adapted to quite a few of the NEW challenges which will be thrown at me next week or tomorrow. Unfortunately, because I'm in a kind of unstable environment, I can't guarantee that the software at my disposal now (especially if it's a small set of apps) will accomplish what I need it to do later. Every single one of my geeky friends is in the same position, except most of them are stuck on Windows, and don't have the same range of tools at their disposal that I do. Thus MY solution (and it's not going to be the solution of most, or even a large minority, of people, especially in business environments) will be to pick *several* applications to do, e.g., scientific graphics, and bundle that with a relatively nice GUI. In fact, about the only bit of software which I could confidently put on every hand-rolled distro is a fully-featured window manager, and one which isn't TOO alien to a MS user -- KDE and Gnome seem to be the reigning champions, for the moment, at least.
That's true -- a hand-picked bunch of apps may help keep a newbie from being overwhelmed. HOWEVER, one has to compile a new set of apps for each person, and probably change these over time, which seems like a bit of work, and would use a great number of CDs.
I (and everyone I know) uses a "lightweight" text editor for quick things -- Abiword's not bad; Kedit's not bad, etc. But for actual scientific papers, you use LyX, or MikTeX, or actual, rude, evil-red-tex LaTeX itself. Or OpenOffice or Word, and then parse things through LaTeX. My dad recently set himself the daunting task (for a computer newbie; and, as it turns out, for several veterans, too!) of typesetting a poem he wrote. Using an actual, genuine typewriter made the task phenomenally easy and transparent; in Word it was inexecrable; in OpenOffice, it was doable, but not easy (the final solution, it turned out).
For scientific graphics, we use Excel's or OpenOffice's spreadsheets' capabilities for quick work, but for professional work, we use Origin or Scigraphica or Grace, or -- heavens! -- Mathematica. There are, no doubt, lots and lots of examples I could give, for different tasks (and some of the tools aren't open-source).
All these examples mean is that if I'm going to give someone a distro to try out, I'm going to be damned sure to include several different applications, because I never know what this person will want to do.
The danger of picking single apps for a given task is that the app won't DO what a person wants to do, or at least won't do it easily. A newbie (who are the people these distros are aimed at, apparently) will not realize that there are apps which CAN do what they want out there SOMEWHERE, and one runs the risk of turning the noob off of linux (or whatever OS you're bundling) permanently, because they think that there are no tools available to do what they want, no matter how much handholding you give them. "Oh, you mean I have to burn a new CD every time I want to do this task? Fuhgedaboutit! I'm sticking with Windows!".
Dunno the frequency, but I'm not sure I'd want it posted on/. anyway. If it were, about 90% of the geeks seeing it would:
1) immediately have orgasms -- this stuff is SO leet, ya know?;
2) reverse-engineer the thing so that they could drive the Rover;
3) using the results from step 2, play Martian Quake, or Planetary Doom 3, and probably run over lots of shit, including (quite likely, since there's bugger all down here) the only intelligent forms of life in the known universe. Luckily, those life forms would have a LOT of Mars->Earth->Mars delay time, but I'm not sure I'd want the stuff in the sweaty hands of 13-year old geeks who haven't yet gotten terrestrial drivers' licenses.
Well, having seen A Bug's Life just a little bit ago, there were definitely at least two "bloopers" which were NOT actor screw-ups, and there may have been others: 1) the bird breaking down when it was going to eat some buggies; and 2) the caterpillar getting yanked out of the walking stick's hands while he was eating the grass. I have a hard time seeing how THOSE suckers were accidental voice-over blunders, unless they were some totally unrelated sound effects.
You know, I attended a conference on ultra-low-frequency acoustic monitoring (of things like nuclear test explosions), and there's a big push to install all these large acoustic arrays for sensors, in various places around the world. Each site has its own problems, of course: the Bahamian lands are simply tremendously expensive; the Arctic and Antarctic installations have a bit of wind noise interference, and THE INSTALLATIONS IN THE WILDS OF WASHINGTON STATE GET SHOT AT BY REDNECKS.
Does it perform NTFS resizing? I just checked their webpage, and the "Desktop Standard" version says specifically that NTFS partitions cannot be resized _during_installation_. Perhaps this means that AFTER you've got it installed, you can use the tools to resize those nasty NTFS bits? Doesn't make much sense to me, frankly.
Besides, once something like true NTFS resizing shows up in one distribution, you can bet that it'll soon make appearances in some other major distros.
Well, I'm stuck on linux, but sometimes I have to run Windows for applications. And usually, Win4lin is able to come through very well, saving me from rebooting. Since Windows98 is the most recent version of that OS's ilk which will work in Win4lin (OK, OK, so WinMe will run on it, but I'm not entrusting anything to that POS), I use '98. Sometimes.
"At MIT in the thirties the nerd did not exist; a penholder worn in the shirt pocket represented no particular gaucherie; a boy could not become a figure of fun merely by studying. This was fortunate for Feynman and others like him, socially inept, athletically feeble, miserable in any but a science course, risking laughter every time he pronounced an unfamiliar name, so worried about the other sex that he trembled when he had to take the mail out past girls sitting on the stoop. America's future scientists and engineers, many of them rising from the working class, valued studiousness without question. How could it be otherwise, in theknots that gathered almost around the clock in fraternity study rooms, filling dappled cardboard notebooks with course notes to be handed down to generations?"
Of course, then it goes on to say that there was something a little lacking socially in these guys:)
(Oh, yeah: and props to the text search at Amazon.com to allow me to find that quote, since my copy of the book is away for the moment!)
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, you managed to work the word 'tit' into the code. + Mega-points for that.
I've just started consciously focusing on functional programming techniques in Mathematica . It's almost religiously advanced in most of the Mathematica texts I've read as being easier to read and, ultimately, faster to program than most procedural algorithms one could implement to do the same things. I've definitely adopted it for some operations on lists and things, but I'll have to get more comfortable with it to apply it to everything I do in Mm . As far as I know, the Mathematica Journal even has a column devoted to solving problems with "one-liners", using only functional programming techniques. (Of course, if one is really interested in it, he could go to Journal of Functional Programming and educate us all.) I'm too cheap to find out for sure.
It seems to me that Mathematica is extremely powerful in this respect: one can choose which paradigm to program in, and successfully mix paradigms, almost to the heart's content, and get useful information out. Of course, the execution speed may not be so hot, but for ease of use, it can't be beaten. What other programs out there allow such mixing?
Xminicam ~ 10^6... Xfreeporn ~ 1.1
Phew! First read that as "full-on balling". Thought, "Damn, boy, them's some mighty powerful flowers!"
I very much agree with the parent post, about bats being effective and rather fun controllers of adult mosquitos. However, the poster raised the question of how effectively ultrasonic acoustic signals propagate through water. The answer: very effectively.
I work with ultrasonics (just got done with an experiment about 1/2 hour ago, at 510kHz and 2.25MHz). There's no problem propagating signals of these "medium" frequencies through water for several meters without significant attenuation, up to tens of meters. At higher frequencies, the attenuation is generally higher (in the regime of linear acoustics, which I'll bet these devices work in), but for something about 1mm in diameter,(as I'm guessing these air sacs are), the resonance frequency is going to be around 165kHz (assuming an "organ pipe" mode to the vibration; if these are modeled as Helmholtz resonators, the frequency will be significantly lower). This will propagate through water just fine for a long way.
Murky water, of course, will pose more of a problem, but I'd not worry too much.
This method, by the way, has been pondered for quite a while in air, but coupling sound into air, and getting it to propagate for a ways is much more difficult. The most interesting thing I've heard in a long time was at a recent acoustics conference, where some researchers gave quite a lot of evidence that some buggies use acoustic signals propagating through trees and other plants (specific plants for specific bug species) to communicate. If one disrupts these signals, the bugs will leave those particular plants alone.
... get (if the thing doesn't come with one built in) an external floppy drive -- USB or whatever. It CAN save your OS, and they're awfully nice when you can't network some comps together and have to transfer a little bit of data.
bersk.com
I held myself back from that one, and I think you've just fulfilled that prophecy. Cheers!
I've stopped screwing around on the computer, thus freeing me up for other more important life activites (wife, for instance).
You're new here, aren't you?
grammer?
'First shalt thou take out the Holy Pin. Then, shalt thou count to three. No more. No less. Three shalt be the number thou shalt count, and the number of the counting shall be three. Four shalt thou not count, nor either count thou two, excepting that thou then proceed to three. Five is right out. Once the number three, being the third number, be reached, then, lobbest thou thy Holy Hand Grenade of Antioch towards thy foe, who, being naughty in My sight, shall snuff it.'
"Here, now, I used to be an EE, so rather than give you a shot for that root canal, we'll just hook up these jumper cables here, and HERE..."
I'm sorry: There's a $699 licensing fee for that technology.
You're correct: To make a good case for a particular set of software packages, one has to know what a person is going to do, and the tools they might want to use. This is the point of the original poster, and I do not dispute it.
:)
My point is that I (and, admittedly, a relatively small percentage of computer users) am in an environment (a major research institute) where people are actively seeking new solutions for problems, and need *flexibility* every day. There really isn't a killer, do-it-all app out there for the tasks I--or any of my colleagues--end up doing, but some are definitely better than others. I've become quite comfortable and proficient in a small set of tools, and ones which could probably be adapted to quite a few of the NEW challenges which will be thrown at me next week or tomorrow. Unfortunately, because I'm in a kind of unstable environment, I can't guarantee that the software at my disposal now (especially if it's a small set of apps) will accomplish what I need it to do later. Every single one of my geeky friends is in the same position, except most of them are stuck on Windows, and don't have the same range of tools at their disposal that I do. Thus MY solution (and it's not going to be the solution of most, or even a large minority, of people, especially in business environments) will be to pick *several* applications to do, e.g., scientific graphics, and bundle that with a relatively nice GUI. In fact, about the only bit of software which I could confidently put on every hand-rolled distro is a fully-featured window manager, and one which isn't TOO alien to a MS user -- KDE and Gnome seem to be the reigning champions, for the moment, at least.
ONLY my $0.02
That's true -- a hand-picked bunch of apps may help keep a newbie from being overwhelmed. HOWEVER, one has to compile a new set of apps for each person, and probably change these over time, which seems like a bit of work, and would use a great number of CDs.
I (and everyone I know) uses a "lightweight" text editor for quick things -- Abiword's not bad; Kedit's not bad, etc. But for actual scientific papers, you use LyX, or MikTeX, or actual, rude, evil-red-tex LaTeX itself. Or OpenOffice or Word, and then parse things through LaTeX. My dad recently set himself the daunting task (for a computer newbie; and, as it turns out, for several veterans, too!) of typesetting a poem he wrote. Using an actual, genuine typewriter made the task phenomenally easy and transparent; in Word it was inexecrable; in OpenOffice, it was doable, but not easy (the final solution, it turned out).
For scientific graphics, we use Excel's or OpenOffice's spreadsheets' capabilities for quick work, but for professional work, we use Origin or Scigraphica or Grace, or -- heavens! -- Mathematica. There are, no doubt, lots and lots of examples I could give, for different tasks (and some of the tools aren't open-source).
All these examples mean is that if I'm going to give someone a distro to try out, I'm going to be damned sure to include several different applications, because I never know what this person will want to do.
The danger of picking single apps for a given task is that the app won't DO what a person wants to do, or at least won't do it easily. A newbie (who are the people these distros are aimed at, apparently) will not realize that there are apps which CAN do what they want out there SOMEWHERE, and one runs the risk of turning the noob off of linux (or whatever OS you're bundling) permanently, because they think that there are no tools available to do what they want, no matter how much handholding you give them. "Oh, you mean I have to burn a new CD every time I want to do this task? Fuhgedaboutit! I'm sticking with Windows!".
Pfaugh.
i) ...is worth two in the bush. ...is worth two in the Bush.
I)
Which do you prefer?
hehehe. A WHAT kind of geek?
Dunno the frequency, but I'm not sure I'd want it posted on /. anyway. If it were, about 90% of the geeks seeing it would:
1) immediately have orgasms -- this stuff is SO leet, ya know?;
2) reverse-engineer the thing so that they could drive the Rover;
3) using the results from step 2, play Martian Quake, or Planetary Doom 3, and probably run over lots of shit, including (quite likely, since there's bugger all down here) the only intelligent forms of life in the known universe. Luckily, those life forms would have a LOT of Mars->Earth->Mars delay time, but I'm not sure I'd want the stuff in the sweaty hands of 13-year old geeks who haven't yet gotten terrestrial drivers' licenses.
Well, having seen A Bug's Life just a little bit ago, there were definitely at least two "bloopers" which were NOT actor screw-ups, and there may have been others: 1) the bird breaking down when it was going to eat some buggies; and 2) the caterpillar getting yanked out of the walking stick's hands while he was eating the grass. I have a hard time seeing how THOSE suckers were accidental voice-over blunders, unless they were some totally unrelated sound effects.
I'd better run out to Wal-Mart and buy a life now, before they're all snapped up by these people!
You know, I attended a conference on ultra-low-frequency acoustic monitoring (of things like nuclear test explosions), and there's a big push to install all these large acoustic arrays for sensors, in various places around the world. Each site has its own problems, of course: the Bahamian lands are simply tremendously expensive; the Arctic and Antarctic installations have a bit of wind noise interference, and THE INSTALLATIONS IN THE WILDS OF WASHINGTON STATE GET SHOT AT BY REDNECKS.
Does it perform NTFS resizing? I just checked their webpage, and the "Desktop Standard" version says specifically that NTFS partitions cannot be resized _during_installation_. Perhaps this means that AFTER you've got it installed, you can use the tools to resize those nasty NTFS bits? Doesn't make much sense to me, frankly.
Besides, once something like true NTFS resizing shows up in one distribution, you can bet that it'll soon make appearances in some other major distros.
Well, I'm stuck on linux, but sometimes I have to run Windows for applications. And usually, Win4lin is able to come through very well, saving me from rebooting. Since Windows98 is the most recent version of that OS's ilk which will work in Win4lin (OK, OK, so WinMe will run on it, but I'm not entrusting anything to that POS), I use '98. Sometimes.
In Gleick's biography of Feynman, he says,
:)
"At MIT in the thirties the nerd did not exist; a penholder worn in the shirt pocket represented no particular gaucherie; a boy could not become a figure of fun merely by studying. This was fortunate for Feynman and others like him, socially inept, athletically feeble, miserable in any but a science course, risking laughter every time he pronounced an unfamiliar name, so worried about the other sex that he trembled when he had to take the mail out past girls sitting on the stoop. America's future scientists and engineers, many of them rising from the working class, valued studiousness without question. How could it be otherwise, in theknots that gathered almost around the clock in fraternity study rooms, filling dappled cardboard notebooks with course notes to be handed down to generations?"
Of course, then it goes on to say that there was something a little lacking socially in these guys
(Oh, yeah: and props to the text search at Amazon.com to allow me to find that quote, since my copy of the book is away for the moment!)
Bradbury, too.
Perhaps not so much sci-fi as "life-fi", but a phenomenal, prodigious author. Try "Twice-22".