That's too bad. There's some really amazing classical music. You'd probably be surprised to find that many tunes are already familiar to you.
I listened to quite a bit of classical music when I was a kid, but during high school I switch to rock. During college I rekindled my interest in it when I found that classical had the same-- if not better-- calming effect on my brain that some kinds of metal music had. In particular, almost everything by J.S. Bach and Girolamo Frescobaldi. I especially like Glenn Gould's Bach recordings (piano) and Colin Tilney's Frescobaldi recordings (harpischord).
I've found that the structure and depth of much classical music is much more complex and satisfying than most contemporary music. Don't get me wrong, I still listen to rock music, rap, folk, and electronica music, and I do like a good amount of what I hear-- but I think for many "artists", making a living is more important to them than making art, and this is really where a lot of the old masters excel.
Here are some good "beginner" pieces to listen to. They're accessible, and have catchy tunes, and they run the whole spectrum of expression. They're not dull at all!
Antonio Vivaldi's The Four Seasons (I like the Boston Symphony Orchestra recording with Ozawa conducting)
J. S. Bach's Goldberg Variations (I like Glenn Gould's second recording, from 1988) or Brandenburg Concertos
I'm not a huge Mozart fan, but you've probably heard (and might) like much of his stuff
pretty much anything by Beethoven
Niccolo Paganini's 24 Caprices for Solo Violin (I like Midori's recording-- wow!)
Modest Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition (the orchestral re-work done by Ashkenazy is amazing)
G. F. Handel's Water Music (Hogwood/Academy of Ancient Music recording is my favorite)
Not only did The Blind Watchmaker explain how the theory of evolution works, by the selection and accretion of countless mutations, it actually provided software models that you could run on your own computer, so that you could see these effects in 'accelerated time'.
Dawkins may be very vocal about his criticism of religion, but I think the world is big enough to have his voice in it. After all, religions have been saying (and doing) truly awful things about scientists for nearly a millennium. Dawkins provides a well-reasoned counter to religion. I don't think we need to make science fluffy and nice, because unlike religion, the end-goal of science is always the Truth, and the scientific process must allow us to alter its own methods if and when we find that it fails at that task.
BTW, since you are a systems guy, do any US schools stand out in your mind for their systems work? I am nearing the completion of my undergraduate CS degree. I'm limited to the US because my wife is a doctor here, and understandably does not want to leave the country. Sorry, it looks like you're not in the US, but I'm asking anyone I think might have some good insights because many CS departments seem to regard systems as passe (especially my current department-- they have a real thing for security-- blech!). I think this attitude is odd because this seems to be to be a very exciting time for systems work, especially OS and networks.
Threads like this remind me of why Linux will never make it as a mainstream OS.
I converted two people in my office to Ubuntu recently. One is an accountant. The other is an attorney. Both of them were shocked at how reliable and low-maintenance Ubuntu was. Both of them wanted to know why no one else knows about this. The only thing they needed help with was installing the proprietary media codecs (and I should point out all I did was send them links). They installed Ubuntu themselves, and they regularly tell me how happy they are with their computers now.
How many people have you converted to Linux recently?
So... from what I gather from your post, you can't just graft an OSS API on top of ALSA (or PulseAudio for that matter) because ALSA and PulseAudio run in userspace? Why are we putting sound daemons in userspace anyway?
On the other hand, cost drives innovation. As the article stated, it may take several years to bring the old rare-earth mines back into operation. In that time, we either pay more, or use our engineering degrees and come up with workarounds. I have a feeling that the latter may frequently be the case. For instance, if rare-earths are required to manufacture hard disk drives, SSDs (which I assume do not require these metals since they require no magnets) will probably become favorable.
China's move may affect regular people but I suspect not. This is probably more important to you if you're in manufacturing or trade.
It depends on the BIOS, but with the exception of some server BIOS, I've rarely seen the ability to manipulate BIOS via serial console on Intel-type hardware.
One notable exception are the boxes made by Soekris. You can (and are expected to) do everything via serial console. For low-demand services (e.g., internal DNS server), we stick them on these things. Diskless, fanless, usually consume something like 1W. You have to develop a process for setting them up, though, because it's not as easy as popping a CD in and installing. I make images in VMWare and then dd them to CompactFlash.
I think "crowdsourcing" is so popular because we have a business culture that wants stuff NOW without having to think about how to actually get it. In some limited cases (e.g., wikipedia) where there is lots of expertise out there but artificial barriers in place to prevent the spread of that knowledge (e.g., publishers), this model works well because there is a "network effect" with something like Wikipedia. But as you say, it's not a universally-applicable thing, and regardless, someone, somewhere has to do the work.
As far as I can tell, the MBAs are being fed this crap in school. We (as in people I work with, but not me) recently hired (and fired) one of these people, and she literally spoke in pure buzztalk. Attempts to get her to clarify what she meant resulted in more buzzwords and circular logic. She even plagiarized a technical explanation of mine (verbatim) on her blog once, and when we called her out on it (by asking her to clarify what she... er, I said), it was more crap. Good riddance.
The diagram makes me want to hurl. It's like a buzzword flower or something.
Do you mean Entourage? We've never encountered that particular problem, but we didn't start using it until Entourage 2004.
Outlook 97-2002 format PST files had this problem. They basically stopped working past 2GB, and there was nothing to warn or otherwise stop you from doing this. Outlook 2003 PST files don't have this limitation.
Does anyone here know if Microsoft is being required to license ActiveSync under the terms of their antitrust settlement? I suspect that Microsoft is now prohibited from changing the protocol in any kind of blatantly anticompetitive way, especially given that they've licensed it out to paying customers. Given their past behavior, though, this still might not stop them.
For IT shops, though, being able to connect to Exchange without Outlook is a huge enabler. Entourage 2008 is much better than the previous Mac OS X offerings, but it still sucks in some big ways (e.g., free/busy in multi-domain ADs). I just got my copy of 10.6 on Friday. If it turns out to work better than Entourage, you can bet your ass we'll buy more Macs the next time around. OpenOffice is already at feature parity with MS Office as far as we're concerned.
would be to give them a real life problem, ask them to solve it, and tell them that they can ask you whatever they want to, because that's the way it works in real life. If they know the answer immediately, well ok, but really what you want to see is their problem-solving strategy. I firmly believe that it's not about what someone knows that makes them a valuable employee, it's how they figure it out. How they solve the problem. People who rely on the resources around them, generally speaking, are better to have around then people who think they have to have learned the answer in a textbook somewhere. If the nature of your job is such that answers are already known, then you don't need smart people. You just need workers. Such a test doesn't need to concern itself with being culturally sensitive.
I'm starting to think that our interviews here should literally be: give them a day's work and see how they do.
The internet has tons of information but little of it will be credible for humanities students.
This just highlights a problem that's always existed: what cognitive authority do you trust? Before the Internet, you really only had the appearance of authority, because very few people could afford the expense of publishing a book. The cost of publishing on the Internet is negligible (by comparison, at least), and so more people can do it. But I'm not sure that the wackjob:scholar ratio has changed; e.g., Andrew Weil's alternative medicine empire has been spewing out unsubstantiated claims for years.
Scientists always check their facts. This is how our body of knowledge grows. There's no way around it.
I, too, am a big fan of the physical book. I have lots of them. They're the thing that makes moving to a new apartment unpleasant, but they add so much to my life that they're worth it. And I especially love to browse a bookshelf, pick one up, and flip to a random page.
That said, e-books are very compelling to me for one reason: I could carry my entire library with me at all times. My 32GB hacked iPod mini really changed the way I listen to and enjoy music. Before, if I went somewhere, I had to think ahead of what CDs I might want to listen to. Now I put my entire music collection on one tiny device. Awesome! I can even take it with me when I go for a run.
I think e-books will end up being the same kind of enabler. We're just in the same place we were with MP3 players before Apple entered the game: functional but kind of unpleasant to use. If other technology serves as a guide, I have no doubt that we'll solve these problems. I'm looking at this early tech as a fun time to be a computer scientist and programmer.
We used to watch that film in college to intentionally scare the crap out of us. It was the one movie that didn't seem to lose its creepiness on repeat viewings.
But there was one part that's always bugged me-- and it's the same thing that bugs me about Sunshine-- and that's the open pools of fluid (water? coolant? whatever?). What kind of asshole engineer has open pools of fluid on a spaceship? Sure, in both of those movies, there's artificial gravity (eh, such a cop-out, but OK), but, hey, artificial gravity must be supplied by a machine somehow, and machines break. When that happens, all your shit goes flying around. When you look at the lengths that real space vehicles go to to contain fluids, I just find this really irritating.
I guess artificial gravity bugs me too. Star Trek... OK, we're in the 23rd century or something, but Event Horizon is in the near future. I think artificial gravity is at least on par with interstellar drive, but it doesn't even get a mention... I'd love to see a [good] film version of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, because creative use of gravity is a major plot device in the book.
It's too much work for applications to have to worry about errors. That's within the scope of the filesystem, because the filesystem's job is to provide reliable access to data for applications. With error-detection and error-correction, you tend to want to catch the problem as soon as possible; that usually means lower in the stack.
ACM has an article on latent disk error rates here. IIRC, Seagate's figures were about one latent error for every 10^15 bits; this figure was confirmed by Sun when they were doing the heavy lifting on ZFS. The important thing is that the latent error rate is not decreasing as disk capacities increase. ZFS specifically addresses this problem using checksum trees.
I think that bit-flips at all are unacceptable. I know that guaranteeing that they can't happen is not possible, but we're willing to spend extra money to ensure that they happen infrequently.
Slashdot Mirror
I listened to quite a bit of classical music when I was a kid, but during high school I switch to rock. During college I rekindled my interest in it when I found that classical had the same-- if not better-- calming effect on my brain that some kinds of metal music had. In particular, almost everything by J.S. Bach and Girolamo Frescobaldi. I especially like Glenn Gould's Bach recordings (piano) and Colin Tilney's Frescobaldi recordings (harpischord).
I've found that the structure and depth of much classical music is much more complex and satisfying than most contemporary music. Don't get me wrong, I still listen to rock music, rap, folk, and electronica music, and I do like a good amount of what I hear-- but I think for many "artists", making a living is more important to them than making art, and this is really where a lot of the old masters excel.
Here are some good "beginner" pieces to listen to. They're accessible, and have catchy tunes, and they run the whole spectrum of expression. They're not dull at all!
Anyhow, give it an honest try. You might like it.
Not only did The Blind Watchmaker explain how the theory of evolution works, by the selection and accretion of countless mutations, it actually provided software models that you could run on your own computer, so that you could see these effects in 'accelerated time'.
Dawkins may be very vocal about his criticism of religion, but I think the world is big enough to have his voice in it. After all, religions have been saying (and doing) truly awful things about scientists for nearly a millennium. Dawkins provides a well-reasoned counter to religion. I don't think we need to make science fluffy and nice, because unlike religion, the end-goal of science is always the Truth, and the scientific process must allow us to alter its own methods if and when we find that it fails at that task.
Thanks for the book link. I'll check it out.
BTW, since you are a systems guy, do any US schools stand out in your mind for their systems work? I am nearing the completion of my undergraduate CS degree. I'm limited to the US because my wife is a doctor here, and understandably does not want to leave the country. Sorry, it looks like you're not in the US, but I'm asking anyone I think might have some good insights because many CS departments seem to regard systems as passe (especially my current department-- they have a real thing for security-- blech!). I think this attitude is odd because this seems to be to be a very exciting time for systems work, especially OS and networks.
Threads like this remind me of why Linux will never make it as a mainstream OS.
I converted two people in my office to Ubuntu recently. One is an accountant. The other is an attorney. Both of them were shocked at how reliable and low-maintenance Ubuntu was. Both of them wanted to know why no one else knows about this. The only thing they needed help with was installing the proprietary media codecs (and I should point out all I did was send them links). They installed Ubuntu themselves, and they regularly tell me how happy they are with their computers now.
How many people have you converted to Linux recently?
So... from what I gather from your post, you can't just graft an OSS API on top of ALSA (or PulseAudio for that matter) because ALSA and PulseAudio run in userspace? Why are we putting sound daemons in userspace anyway?
On the other hand, cost drives innovation. As the article stated, it may take several years to bring the old rare-earth mines back into operation. In that time, we either pay more, or use our engineering degrees and come up with workarounds. I have a feeling that the latter may frequently be the case. For instance, if rare-earths are required to manufacture hard disk drives, SSDs (which I assume do not require these metals since they require no magnets) will probably become favorable.
China's move may affect regular people but I suspect not. This is probably more important to you if you're in manufacturing or trade.
Ah, Australia. The world's Mexico.
It depends on the BIOS, but with the exception of some server BIOS, I've rarely seen the ability to manipulate BIOS via serial console on Intel-type hardware.
One notable exception are the boxes made by Soekris. You can (and are expected to) do everything via serial console. For low-demand services (e.g., internal DNS server), we stick them on these things. Diskless, fanless, usually consume something like 1W. You have to develop a process for setting them up, though, because it's not as easy as popping a CD in and installing. I make images in VMWare and then dd them to CompactFlash.
Save yourself some pain and put something like this in your /etc/profile:
export PS1="${USER}@`hostname -s`:\w$ "
That particular one is for ksh; it might work for bash, too. I don't really use bash.
You could even make the machine name flash red if you wanted to.
I think "crowdsourcing" is so popular because we have a business culture that wants stuff NOW without having to think about how to actually get it. In some limited cases (e.g., wikipedia) where there is lots of expertise out there but artificial barriers in place to prevent the spread of that knowledge (e.g., publishers), this model works well because there is a "network effect" with something like Wikipedia. But as you say, it's not a universally-applicable thing, and regardless, someone, somewhere has to do the work.
As far as I can tell, the MBAs are being fed this crap in school. We (as in people I work with, but not me) recently hired (and fired) one of these people, and she literally spoke in pure buzztalk. Attempts to get her to clarify what she meant resulted in more buzzwords and circular logic. She even plagiarized a technical explanation of mine (verbatim) on her blog once, and when we called her out on it (by asking her to clarify what she... er, I said), it was more crap. Good riddance.
The diagram makes me want to hurl. It's like a buzzword flower or something.
Yeah, but he's got a really pretty diagram. The fact that the diagram is largely meaningless is beside the point.
You gotta have a good diagram if you're going to go around proclaiming things.
I, too, always make it a policy never to hire people who accidentally hit the wrong keys.
Do you mean Entourage? We've never encountered that particular problem, but we didn't start using it until Entourage 2004.
Outlook 97-2002 format PST files had this problem. They basically stopped working past 2GB, and there was nothing to warn or otherwise stop you from doing this. Outlook 2003 PST files don't have this limitation.
Does anyone here know if Microsoft is being required to license ActiveSync under the terms of their antitrust settlement? I suspect that Microsoft is now prohibited from changing the protocol in any kind of blatantly anticompetitive way, especially given that they've licensed it out to paying customers. Given their past behavior, though, this still might not stop them.
For IT shops, though, being able to connect to Exchange without Outlook is a huge enabler. Entourage 2008 is much better than the previous Mac OS X offerings, but it still sucks in some big ways (e.g., free/busy in multi-domain ADs). I just got my copy of 10.6 on Friday. If it turns out to work better than Entourage, you can bet your ass we'll buy more Macs the next time around. OpenOffice is already at feature parity with MS Office as far as we're concerned.
would be to give them a real life problem, ask them to solve it, and tell them that they can ask you whatever they want to, because that's the way it works in real life. If they know the answer immediately, well ok, but really what you want to see is their problem-solving strategy. I firmly believe that it's not about what someone knows that makes them a valuable employee, it's how they figure it out. How they solve the problem. People who rely on the resources around them, generally speaking, are better to have around then people who think they have to have learned the answer in a textbook somewhere. If the nature of your job is such that answers are already known, then you don't need smart people. You just need workers. Such a test doesn't need to concern itself with being culturally sensitive.
I'm starting to think that our interviews here should literally be: give them a day's work and see how they do.
The internet has tons of information but little of it will be credible for humanities students.
This just highlights a problem that's always existed: what cognitive authority do you trust? Before the Internet, you really only had the appearance of authority, because very few people could afford the expense of publishing a book. The cost of publishing on the Internet is negligible (by comparison, at least), and so more people can do it. But I'm not sure that the wackjob:scholar ratio has changed; e.g., Andrew Weil's alternative medicine empire has been spewing out unsubstantiated claims for years.
Scientists always check their facts. This is how our body of knowledge grows. There's no way around it.
I, too, am a big fan of the physical book. I have lots of them. They're the thing that makes moving to a new apartment unpleasant, but they add so much to my life that they're worth it. And I especially love to browse a bookshelf, pick one up, and flip to a random page.
That said, e-books are very compelling to me for one reason: I could carry my entire library with me at all times. My 32GB hacked iPod mini really changed the way I listen to and enjoy music. Before, if I went somewhere, I had to think ahead of what CDs I might want to listen to. Now I put my entire music collection on one tiny device. Awesome! I can even take it with me when I go for a run.
I think e-books will end up being the same kind of enabler. We're just in the same place we were with MP3 players before Apple entered the game: functional but kind of unpleasant to use. If other technology serves as a guide, I have no doubt that we'll solve these problems. I'm looking at this early tech as a fun time to be a computer scientist and programmer.
Great post. I'm sorry I used up all my mod points.
Hey, forget about bread bowls, here come meat bowls. Awesome! Grow your own turducken.
Yeah but fish are ugly.
The ISS has no corridors. It's just a bunch of modules linked together. One of the advantages of zero-g, I suppose.
How'd you get that picture of my office?
We used to watch that film in college to intentionally scare the crap out of us. It was the one movie that didn't seem to lose its creepiness on repeat viewings.
But there was one part that's always bugged me-- and it's the same thing that bugs me about Sunshine-- and that's the open pools of fluid (water? coolant? whatever?). What kind of asshole engineer has open pools of fluid on a spaceship? Sure, in both of those movies, there's artificial gravity (eh, such a cop-out, but OK), but, hey, artificial gravity must be supplied by a machine somehow, and machines break. When that happens, all your shit goes flying around. When you look at the lengths that real space vehicles go to to contain fluids, I just find this really irritating.
I guess artificial gravity bugs me too. Star Trek... OK, we're in the 23rd century or something, but Event Horizon is in the near future. I think artificial gravity is at least on par with interstellar drive, but it doesn't even get a mention... I'd love to see a [good] film version of The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, because creative use of gravity is a major plot device in the book.
It's too much work for applications to have to worry about errors. That's within the scope of the filesystem, because the filesystem's job is to provide reliable access to data for applications. With error-detection and error-correction, you tend to want to catch the problem as soon as possible; that usually means lower in the stack.
ACM has an article on latent disk error rates here. IIRC, Seagate's figures were about one latent error for every 10^15 bits; this figure was confirmed by Sun when they were doing the heavy lifting on ZFS. The important thing is that the latent error rate is not decreasing as disk capacities increase. ZFS specifically addresses this problem using checksum trees.
I think that bit-flips at all are unacceptable. I know that guaranteeing that they can't happen is not possible, but we're willing to spend extra money to ensure that they happen infrequently.
IP over IP, duh. Look, it's been lying dormant in BSD networking code for years! Below that, it's turtles all the way down.