Have you discussed this with the professor? I'm one. If a student told me what you're telling me, I would try to figure out some procedural change. Even if it's too late for you, you might help out the next group by speaking up.
Profs make mistakes, and changes have unintended consequences. I think we're going to see a lot of mistakes (as well as some revelations) over the next few years as people tinker with pedagogy.
I believe the Obama health-care law prohibits the use of genetic information in setting health-care premiums. I think life insurers can use the information if they get it, but not health insurers.
i'm not surprised. Consider that Microsoft shipped Office 2008 (for OS X) without VBA. VBA was not restored until Office 2011. Given this kind of behavior, why on earth would anyone put themselves at Microsoft's mercy by developing *new* systems for closed-source apps using a proprietary langauge subject to change and removal? (I understand that legacy systems need to be maintained.)
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? It's fine that you don't like the language, but the claim that it's only reliable from the command line just sounds stupid without an example. How about some concrete examples illustrating errors in the documentation or inappropriate coercion or inconsistencies between a script and the command line?
Your colleague needs to know that R functions have named parameters, the use of which avoids the problem he encountered.
What advanced stats do you have in mind that can be done easily in Matlab but not in R? And I think your assessment of the relative acceptance of the two is out of date. R awareness is growing fast.
The choice really depends on what you are doing. Matlab is industrial strength engineering software. R is a a powerful statistics oriented programming language. In my experience, R's statistical capabilities are a strength relative to Matlab. Data handling (such as reading a csv file without barfing) is much easier in R than in Matlab. Moreover, Matlab is quite expensive. This is fine in a professional setting, but a showstopper if you're a small operation. The poster can get a student license, but why not use Octave or R? The two languages are actually similar in many respects, see David Heibeler's page.
I know researchers who have ditched Matlab in favor of R/C++. It really depends on what you're doing.
I bought a Wacom that did not work on Ubuntu 12.04. The kernel version did not yet recognize the new Wacom release (version 5 or some such), so I ended up buying an older model that did work. It was probably something that someone more knowledgable could have dealt with, but that's the point. I couldn't easily deal with it.
I tried to contact Wacom. They don't care. If it had been a problem with OS X, I bet I would have had an answer.
I think a debate about Khan's specific videos is beside the point. For years, people have been talking about online education and we got these dreadful videos of a professor lecturing, shot from the back of the room. Khan shows us a realistic vision of how online education can happen at reasonable cost. It will not necessarily replace the teachers, but it will replace a teacher who repeats the same material multiple times a day. And it will help to level the playing field.
People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom. This model is most obviously applicable to STEM classes, and if you haven't been following the developments, this site at NC State offers an overview of what's going on with one kind of flipped classroom and where it's happening. The University of Minnesota has recently made a huge investment in this kind of classroom.
Whatever happens with Khan specifically, he's energized a process of transformation that everyone knew had to happen eventually. Kudos to him.
Yes, people do say what you're saying, but I've always thought it was an investment banking marketing pitch. It's what the banker tells the shell-shocked founder as they leave the bar.
The truth is that Facebook will live or die on its product and its financial results going forward. A first-day stock price pop is just a transfer of funds from one set of pockets to another.
The press coverage of Facebook's IPO is completely idiotic. For years the investment banks have been sticking it to companies doing IPOs. If the stock gets sold at $38 and it ends the day at $100, that means the company *should* have raised more than twice as much as it did. And it means that the employees participating in the IPO also got shafted. The people who benefit in that scenario are the privileged investors who get to buy at $38 and sell a few hours later at $100.
If Facebook ends up close to $38 at the end of the day, it will be a rare example of the stock having been priced correctly at the start. Where it goes from here is anyone's guess, but I have increased respect for Zuckerberg. Google had a different IPO process but also didn't give away a lot of money. They knew what the banks were trying to do to them.
"More work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing"
My experience is exactly the opposite: With LaTeX you write your document and let LaTeX handle the formatting. Word is much more oriented towards ad hoc formatting. It's true that beginning LaTeX users usually don't understand this, but it's because they're trying to use LaTeX the same way they used Word.
There are two issues addressed by class actions. First is compensating the consumers who've been harmed. Second is punishing miscreants and thereby providing firms an incentive for firms to behave correctly in the future.
I would argue that in most cases the individual compensation is too small to matter, but add up all the compensation and the incentives for a firm can be quite important. A successful class action suit puts all firms on notice that misbehavior leads to lawsuits and penalties.
It may not seem just that the class action attorneys get rich, but I'm not sure it's "just" that most of the rich are rich. It's just a consequence of the way the system works.
If you do go with R, be sure to check out Rstudio (rstudio.org), which is a very nice front-end for R.
In response to the posters who tell you that R is low quality because it's open source, I can tell you that's nonsense. I have Stata, Matlab, and R on my machine, and access to SAS on a research server. There are times to use each, but all else equal I use R. It's not trivial to learn, but it's a powerful high-quality piece of software, widely used in the statistics community. Whether it's appropriate for your use depends on you and the task. But it's great software.
I got fed up with Firefox's creeping RAM consumption. I would have firefox and a bunch of other stuff running, then I'd launch Virtualbox and the whole machine would come to a grinding halt. I would check and discover that Firefox was consuming 2gb out of 4. Switching to Chrome fixed that problem. I love Firefox, but it simply wasn't working well. They say they've finally fixed the RAM consumption problem, but then they said the same thing a few versions back.
I want to do a quick calculation in mathematica. I don't have a mathematica license on my personal machine. I log in to the research server, launch mathematica remotely, do my thing, log off.
Are you really claiming this is use case is no longer important? At my university I see it all the time.
Out of curiousity, what do you dislike about the nook + cm7? I ask because I have the same. I put swype on it, and it works quite well for my purposes (browsing, pdf reading). The absence of GPS and camera is unfortunate, but I knew they'd be missing. Only problem I've noticed is that for some reason gmail doesn't sync well.
I liked labs, but I like great *finished* software even more. In my experience Google is great at rolling out early versions of cool software but often failing (or taking ridiculously long) to add critical features that would really make it complete.
If Larry Page is telling the troops that they now have to finish that final 10%, I'm all for it.
And for those complaining about innovation: G+ isn't innovative??
Are you using LaTeX to write your papers? If so, I *highly* recommend Beamer, which is a LaTeX style. It's pretty customizable, so you should be able to create eye candy with a little investment. But I love its straightforward use of LaTeX syntax. You display a presentation with a pdf viewer such as Acrobat. If LaTeX is installed correctly, there should not be problems with red X's. And you can just cut and paste equations and includegraphics commands from your papers.
If you're not using LaTeX, well, then, never mind!
The "better option" that the airlines almost never take is to book you on another airline. Of course, that would cost them money as opposed to making you wait for an empty seat, which costs them almost nothing.
You have a legitimate beef, but shouldn't you be complaining to congress? (I just now clicked your link -- nice site! -- and I see that you live in Scotland. Not sure who you should complain to.) Instead of dealing with copyright in a serious and thoughtful way, in the US we get asinine and cynical legislation like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act and the DMCA. It's no wonder that average folks have no respect for copyright, and one certainly can't expect Google to show more respect than is required by the law.
I feel at least some of your pain -- I've written a textbook and pdfs of my book are widely available. I'm not sure what the new world will look like (and not sure that my current work on a new edition will ever be repaid). But I also recognize --- speaking here about my case, not yours --- that a large percentage of the effort devoted to a new textbook edition is all about marketing and killing the used book market, which for most books is a social waste. These incentives *should* go away. The current model is broken. (My editor argued with me about this until she read Chris Anderson's "Free".) I don't know enough about photography to have an opinion in your case. But we need a less corrupt legal framework for sure.
Thank you for quoting this. I saw this yesterday and was trying to square it with the google video in TFA that suggests that only your contacts will see your +1s. After they got keel-hauled for Buzz, I can't believe that Google is introducing this without being completely explicit about the control you have (or don't) over who sees your recommendations.
If I could select a group of contacts who would see my +1s, I would use it.
One loan application that he acknowledges filling out had true income information from a recent year. For another, in which the income was clearly exaggerated, he claims he did not fill out the application and handwriting evidence may support him.
Moreover the jury found him not guilty of providing false information to the bank, but guilty of mortgage fraud. Huh?
The guy doesn't come off as clean, but it's not clear he should be in jail. It's an astonishing story and worth a read.
I started computing over 30 years ago. For a long time I was a Windows user, on the upgrade treadmill and I found it fun, but these days it's Emacs, LaTeX, Octave, and bash shell scripting. One of the great things about these tools, for me, is that they are all about the getting the task done and the interface is *not* changing all the time. Of course some things change over time. But for writing I am pretty much working the way I did 10 years ago (emacs/latex). I'm a fan of changes where I'm lured to do something new (learning R for example, which I'm now doing), rather than being coerced into it.
As I said, I haven't used Gnome 3, so I don't have an opinion. And yes, I know that I can always use KDE or fluxbox or whatever. But I repeat: I see no reason to force UI changes on users.
I haven't used Gnome 3 so I don't know if I like this change. But I have one request for the devs: ***PLEASE*** make it *easily* possible to retain the Gnome 2 look and feel if a user prefers that. TFA wasn't clear about whether this would be possible.
You become comfortable working in a particular way. Then you upgrade ---all your reflexes are wrong and you have to waste time relearning the interface. If I'm productive, let me stick with what I know. For a developer to alter the UI without a downgrade path (as MS did with the Office ribbon) is the height of solipsistic arrogance.
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Have you discussed this with the professor? I'm one. If a student told me what you're telling me, I would try to figure out some procedural change. Even if it's too late for you, you might help out the next group by speaking up.
Profs make mistakes, and changes have unintended consequences. I think we're going to see a lot of mistakes (as well as some revelations) over the next few years as people tinker with pedagogy.
Did you get your dd command backwards? Shouldn't it be "dd if=image_file of=some_device"?
I realize you weren't writing a dd howto, but it's a potentially dangerous utility.
The first link here is a place to start.
I believe the Obama health-care law prohibits the use of genetic information in setting health-care premiums. I think life insurers can use the information if they get it, but not health insurers.
i'm not surprised. Consider that Microsoft shipped Office 2008 (for OS X) without VBA. VBA was not restored until Office 2011. Given this kind of behavior, why on earth would anyone put themselves at Microsoft's mercy by developing *new* systems for closed-source apps using a proprietary langauge subject to change and removal? (I understand that legacy systems need to be maintained.)
Do you have any idea what you're talking about? It's fine that you don't like the language, but the claim that it's only reliable from the command line just sounds stupid without an example. How about some concrete examples illustrating errors in the documentation or inappropriate coercion or inconsistencies between a script and the command line?
Your colleague needs to know that R functions have named parameters, the use of which avoids the problem he encountered.
What advanced stats do you have in mind that can be done easily in Matlab but not in R? And I think your assessment of the relative acceptance of the two is out of date. R awareness is growing fast.
The choice really depends on what you are doing. Matlab is industrial strength engineering software. R is a a powerful statistics oriented programming language. In my experience, R's statistical capabilities are a strength relative to Matlab. Data handling (such as reading a csv file without barfing) is much easier in R than in Matlab. Moreover, Matlab is quite expensive. This is fine in a professional setting, but a showstopper if you're a small operation. The poster can get a student license, but why not use Octave or R? The two languages are actually similar in many respects, see David Heibeler's page.
I know researchers who have ditched Matlab in favor of R/C++. It really depends on what you're doing.
I bought a Wacom that did not work on Ubuntu 12.04. The kernel version did not yet recognize the new Wacom release (version 5 or some such), so I ended up buying an older model that did work. It was probably something that someone more knowledgable could have dealt with, but that's the point. I couldn't easily deal with it.
I tried to contact Wacom. They don't care. If it had been a problem with OS X, I bet I would have had an answer.
I think a debate about Khan's specific videos is beside the point. For years, people have been talking about online education and we got these dreadful videos of a professor lecturing, shot from the back of the room. Khan shows us a realistic vision of how online education can happen at reasonable cost. It will not necessarily replace the teachers, but it will replace a teacher who repeats the same material multiple times a day. And it will help to level the playing field.
People in universities are talking a lot about is the "flipped classroom", which means the lecture is online and clarification and working of problems occur in the classroom. This model is most obviously applicable to STEM classes, and if you haven't been following the developments, this site at NC State offers an overview of what's going on with one kind of flipped classroom and where it's happening. The University of Minnesota has recently made a huge investment in this kind of classroom.
Whatever happens with Khan specifically, he's energized a process of transformation that everyone knew had to happen eventually. Kudos to him.
Yes, people do say what you're saying, but I've always thought it was an investment banking marketing pitch. It's what the banker tells the shell-shocked founder as they leave the bar.
The truth is that Facebook will live or die on its product and its financial results going forward. A first-day stock price pop is just a transfer of funds from one set of pockets to another.
The press coverage of Facebook's IPO is completely idiotic. For years the investment banks have been sticking it to companies doing IPOs. If the stock gets sold at $38 and it ends the day at $100, that means the company *should* have raised more than twice as much as it did. And it means that the employees participating in the IPO also got shafted. The people who benefit in that scenario are the privileged investors who get to buy at $38 and sell a few hours later at $100.
If Facebook ends up close to $38 at the end of the day, it will be a rare example of the stock having been priced correctly at the start. Where it goes from here is anyone's guess, but I have increased respect for Zuckerberg. Google had a different IPO process but also didn't give away a lot of money. They knew what the banks were trying to do to them.
"More work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing"
My experience is exactly the opposite: With LaTeX you write your document and let LaTeX handle the formatting. Word is much more oriented towards ad hoc formatting. It's true that beginning LaTeX users usually don't understand this, but it's because they're trying to use LaTeX the same way they used Word.
There are two issues addressed by class actions. First is compensating the consumers who've been harmed. Second is punishing miscreants and thereby providing firms an incentive for firms to behave correctly in the future.
I would argue that in most cases the individual compensation is too small to matter, but add up all the compensation and the incentives for a firm can be quite important. A successful class action suit puts all firms on notice that misbehavior leads to lawsuits and penalties.
It may not seem just that the class action attorneys get rich, but I'm not sure it's "just" that most of the rich are rich. It's just a consequence of the way the system works.
If you do go with R, be sure to check out Rstudio (rstudio.org), which is a very nice front-end for R.
In response to the posters who tell you that R is low quality because it's open source, I can tell you that's nonsense. I have Stata, Matlab, and R on my machine, and access to SAS on a research server. There are times to use each, but all else equal I use R. It's not trivial to learn, but it's a powerful high-quality piece of software, widely used in the statistics community. Whether it's appropriate for your use depends on you and the task. But it's great software.
I got fed up with Firefox's creeping RAM consumption. I would have firefox and a bunch of other stuff running, then I'd launch Virtualbox and the whole machine would come to a grinding halt. I would check and discover that Firefox was consuming 2gb out of 4. Switching to Chrome fixed that problem. I love Firefox, but it simply wasn't working well. They say they've finally fixed the RAM consumption problem, but then they said the same thing a few versions back.
I want to do a quick calculation in mathematica. I don't have a mathematica license on my personal machine. I log in to the research server, launch mathematica remotely, do my thing, log off.
Are you really claiming this is use case is no longer important? At my university I see it all the time.
Maybe I'm missing something.
Out of curiousity, what do you dislike about the nook + cm7? I ask because I have the same. I put swype on it, and it works quite well for my purposes (browsing, pdf reading). The absence of GPS and camera is unfortunate, but I knew they'd be missing. Only problem I've noticed is that for some reason gmail doesn't sync well.
I liked labs, but I like great *finished* software even more. In my experience Google is great at rolling out early versions of cool software but often failing (or taking ridiculously long) to add critical features that would really make it complete.
If Larry Page is telling the troops that they now have to finish that final 10%, I'm all for it.
And for those complaining about innovation: G+ isn't innovative??
Are you using LaTeX to write your papers? If so, I *highly* recommend Beamer, which is a LaTeX style. It's pretty customizable, so you should be able to create eye candy with a little investment. But I love its straightforward use of LaTeX syntax. You display a presentation with a pdf viewer such as Acrobat. If LaTeX is installed correctly, there should not be problems with red X's. And you can just cut and paste equations and includegraphics commands from your papers.
If you're not using LaTeX, well, then, never mind!
The "better option" that the airlines almost never take is to book you on another airline. Of course, that would cost them money as opposed to making you wait for an empty seat, which costs them almost nothing.
You have a legitimate beef, but shouldn't you be complaining to congress? (I just now clicked your link -- nice site! -- and I see that you live in Scotland. Not sure who you should complain to.) Instead of dealing with copyright in a serious and thoughtful way, in the US we get asinine and cynical legislation like the Sonny Bono copyright extension act and the DMCA. It's no wonder that average folks have no respect for copyright, and one certainly can't expect Google to show more respect than is required by the law.
I feel at least some of your pain -- I've written a textbook and pdfs of my book are widely available. I'm not sure what the new world will look like (and not sure that my current work on a new edition will ever be repaid). But I also recognize --- speaking here about my case, not yours --- that a large percentage of the effort devoted to a new textbook edition is all about marketing and killing the used book market, which for most books is a social waste. These incentives *should* go away. The current model is broken. (My editor argued with me about this until she read Chris Anderson's "Free".) I don't know enough about photography to have an opinion in your case. But we need a less corrupt legal framework for sure.
Anyway, best of luck with your work.
Thank you for quoting this. I saw this yesterday and was trying to square it with the google video in TFA that suggests that only your contacts will see your +1s. After they got keel-hauled for Buzz, I can't believe that Google is introducing this without being completely explicit about the control you have (or don't) over who sees your recommendations.
If I could select a group of contacts who would see my +1s, I would use it.
One loan application that he acknowledges filling out had true income information from a recent year. For another, in which the income was clearly exaggerated, he claims he did not fill out the application and handwriting evidence may support him.
Moreover the jury found him not guilty of providing false information to the bank, but guilty of mortgage fraud. Huh?
The guy doesn't come off as clean, but it's not clear he should be in jail. It's an astonishing story and worth a read.
I'm not sure if you're joking or not.
I started computing over 30 years ago. For a long time I was a Windows user, on the upgrade treadmill and I found it fun, but these days it's Emacs, LaTeX, Octave, and bash shell scripting. One of the great things about these tools, for me, is that they are all about the getting the task done and the interface is *not* changing all the time. Of course some things change over time. But for writing I am pretty much working the way I did 10 years ago (emacs/latex). I'm a fan of changes where I'm lured to do something new (learning R for example, which I'm now doing), rather than being coerced into it.
As I said, I haven't used Gnome 3, so I don't have an opinion. And yes, I know that I can always use KDE or fluxbox or whatever. But I repeat: I see no reason to force UI changes on users.
I haven't used Gnome 3 so I don't know if I like this change. But I have one request for the devs: ***PLEASE*** make it *easily* possible to retain the Gnome 2 look and feel if a user prefers that. TFA wasn't clear about whether this would be possible.
You become comfortable working in a particular way. Then you upgrade ---all your reflexes are wrong and you have to waste time relearning the interface. If I'm productive, let me stick with what I know. For a developer to alter the UI without a downgrade path (as MS did with the Office ribbon) is the height of solipsistic arrogance.