Why is the preterite of run ran, yet the preterite of shun is shunned?I do not know the actual answer to this question, but there are normally two explanations for this, both working together. The change of vowel sound: run->ran is generally derived from Arabic, while the change of ending is a European (Greek, Latin) technique.
Euh, sorry to correct you here, but the changing vowel is a typical feature of Germanic language. It's the difference between strong verbs and weak verbs, one of the two retains their vowel but changes the ending, the other changes the vowel.
In the above example: "I run, "I ran" would be in German "Ich renne", "Ich rannte". Pretty similar eh? "I can, I could" -> "Ich kann, Ich konnte". In some cases the English verbs have lost their irregularities (like English lost a lot of Germanic grammar): "I help, I helped" -> "Ich helfe, Ich half". Although the regularization of verbs is a general trend in German too.
Sorry to say that man, but you really got lost on the irony in the text. Or you are so used to skimming over 100+ pages of literature at insane speeds doing your PhD research that you just can't slow down while reading anymore.:-)
I have heard this argument about the US and China a couple of times, it doesn't get more true by repeating it. The US is (still by far) the main producer of CO2 at least producing 150 % as much as China which is number two.
The US is producing 25 % of all worldwide CO2 with only 4% of the population while China's contribution is exactly in parallel with their percentage of world population.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily apply equally to NOx pollution. If I remember correctly, NOx gases are filtered by modern cars' catalysators which are obligatory in Europe for quite some years already causing a significant drop in Ozone levels (on the ground of course) and therefore a drop in smog.
I remember regular smog warnings when I was younger but they don't exist anymore, ozone ground levels are exceeded occasionally during summer times.
So, to sum it up, NOx levels might be more affected by technological progress and money than CO2 levels.
Sorry, but I can't here that caveman argument anymore. It's certainly funny if you watch it in the actual "caveman" Broadway show, but when you look closer at it, it becomes pretty far-fetched. The evolution at work is doubtful as long as homo sapiens' ancestors as well as their live-style is not fully known - there were eg. purely vegetarian homo species - and I doubt that any kind of hunting vs keeping a look out for the children is genetically determined. Humans are too flexible for things like that, what made them so successfull is their ability to change the ways of doing things. This is what ultimately killed our fellow ancestors like homo erectus etc.
Finally, understanding programs as pretty complex systems, I fail to see why focussing on one thing is an advantage compared to "female multitasking".
I don't doubt the differences between men and women, I just doubt that those differences predetermine the things we can do and the subjects we're good in etc. That's all nonsense. Never overestimate the impact of genes OR society on human development. Both extremes are wrong, as always the truth lies in the middle.
I certainly don't agree with you. The reason why girls are less attracted to sciences is not some god-given natural fact. It's how boys and girls are raised and possibly lots of prejudices and sexist comments from science teachers etc. I remember quite some anecdotes of physics teachers mocking the girls in class that they don't even know how a washing machine works. And I was on a mathematical and natural sciences high-school, that was an all geeky place. Guess what the boys/girls ratio was.
Ignoring the discrimination of women means to waste a lot of potential. That, by the way, is the most important reason against gender based discrimination in the first place. 50 % of the best students you haven't even found yet!
In the line of keeping the comparison fair, I think you should also mention, that your selected motherboard does not only lack the AGP slot as you admitted, it also neither supports DDR400, nor Firewire 800 and 400 as the G5's do, I believe. Let alone that it's "only" 1.8 GHz Opteron vs 2 GHz PPC970. Performance-wise, this is probably irrelevant, regarding the marketing and the price it is not. From my experiences prices for new processors increase sharply the higher the frequencies.
I couldn't check the case you selected, however I would expect Apple's case to look much better:-) Besides, it's metal not plastic. For some people, this doesn't mean much, too me however, it does. Although I am a computer science student and am mostly able to deal with the more nasty subtleties of a Windows box, I just don't want to. I'm not a system administrator and don't want to be one. I want a system which gets the job done as nicely and with as little fuss as possible. Usually, this rules out Windows as well as Linux. OS X together with a more recent Mac is an excellent coalition of Unix and an elegant UI.
Additionally, the most successful language analyzers in the VERBMOBIL project were based on pure statistics. All that fancy logical induction and deduction didn't work. The search trees to evaluate logically get huge very quickly. These approaches were always stopped by the timeout function:-)
It doesn't seem to be more than a bit of bad psycho-babble quoting a lot of doubtful 60ies "psychology" books. He's even referring to some books on self-help psychology, that's probably the most dangerous thing you could do. Besides that, it seems to be some way of marketing his own book under "Related projects".
However, there's not a single reference to any kind of computer linguistics or AI work at all. The German VERBMOBIL project comes to my mind. It was pretty much state of the art in computer linguistics, live translation of common language German - English - Japanese, although it was restricted to a special application domain, to keep the vocabulary small. All they did was translate, which only needs a very shallow understanding of a sentence's meaning. What this guy claims to do is actually respond in a meaningful way! Additionally, he just claims to make up some kind of huge dictionnary with obscure ethical terms and some kind of definition in a AI-wise completely outfashioned expert systems.
Well, surprise, one of the interesting findings in the VERBMOBIL project was, that humans actually make up words or at least redefine the meaning of words during an verbal interaction. How does he handle that?
As a last note, he has some funny opinions about 5th generation computing. In a revolutionary way, according to the usual unnamed experts, it will be made of logic circuits! No?! It can't be. That's incredible. Logic! I have to take a break now. I'm shocked.
I can only speak from my experience at my current employer. The company is founded by two CS PhDs, so no PHB trouble. We don't follow any formal process in our development, we don't even comment the code, which really pissed me off in the beginning. However, what we do rather successfully is to make everything as simple as possible.
If you run over some code and you figure it could be done simpler, even if it's not your code, do it simpler NOW. If you find something has been done in a quirky way, fix it NOW. The general rule is that the code has to be understood for the next let's say ten years. We have strict coding guidelines regarding method naming and variable naming. If names are not fully self-explanatory they are replaced immediately even if they're scattered through the whole application. If critical parts like persistence suffer from a bad architecture, it is fixed immediately no matter how much work the rewriting involves. Finally, this leads to very understandable code and once you've understood the general application architecture the code is very easy to read, very clean and mostly pretty correct. There are hardly any quick hacks, sometimes they are inevitable though, to circumvent bugs in the software environment for example.
If you're suffering from lay-offs and don't mind 170 days of rain per year, consider think-cell (I'm only a student employee myself, neither owner nor partner, so it's not advertisement, just advice).
I can see that Apple might have cheated a bit on their SPEC benchmarks. Not more though, than anyone else does. I'm still wondering why so many serious mac users (you don't seem to be a fanatic) criticize Apple's credibility now. For years all they had was to say "But the G4 is really faster in Photoshop!" which was not true most of the time.
Now that Apple is entering the SPEC arena because for the first time in years they have a platform that is comparable in performance, you start criticizing their credibility. I think it's just the rules of the GHz game. Apple has ignored that for too long already. As much as Apple insisted, it does matter. I'm using my 500 MHz IBook and am very happy with it. I like it far better than the GHz++ ovens with the noise of a starting airplane most of my student friends use. Still, performance matters, hard disk size matters. Maybe less on a Mac, but still.
I agree with you in principle. Of course, this basically is an infringement of the right to speech.
I have a lot of sympathy for the liberal American constitution but on the other hand, judging from history, I have also a lot of understanding for the German concept of a well-fortified democracy.
Besides the core parts of the constitution which are not alterable, this includes several mechanisms forbidding any nazi propaganda, denial of the holocaust or any other political agitation which at its heart, aims at removing the constitutional order itself. It even goes far enough to forbid political parties although this was used only once and is indeed a very extreme measure in a democracy. How could a democratic constitution give the right to agitate towards its abolition? It's abolished as soon as the majority doesn't believe in it anymore, but no minority should have the right to do so.
In general, this limitation to the right of expression is agreed upon by a large majority thereby saying that indeed anyway of thinking so is plain wrong. And rightly so.
As long as the freedom of expression is limited only in exactly this sense, it is ok with me. Luckily, there's the constitutional court to guarantee above all politics that it stays that way.
Still you're right, that Germany doesn't qualify as the most liberal country. I fear, Germany is eternally conservative until the end of times. History didn't prove me wrong yet.:-)
This is not quite true. In any liberal democracy including germany only things you say or do can be outlawed. Being a nazi isn't a crime. Running around in a SS uniform denying the holocaust is.
Besides that, I can understand that CC Generals was put on the index. I like war strategy games myself, but seriously, building suicide bombers as part of a game is a bit tasteless. Not to speak of attacking humanitarian aid convoys etc. This is pure cynism if it's meant to be a game.
At my university (Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany) most of the computers in the CS department are Linux or Sparc stations. Thats what the students do most of the work on and thats also what most of the stuff uses. In anyway we have Windows machines for several good reasons I think.
First, there is a public Windows NT computer pool for the students which is used for several things courses which depend on Windows Software. Chip design comes to my mind. We use the Altera Max circuit design software and the corresponding PGA chips to develop 4 bit processors in the 2nd year. It is free for students to use at home.
Second, try to find a good secretary who knows how to write a text with anything else but Word. I guess you will have troubles doing so. Professors (and students likewise) depend on the secretaries:-)
Third, of course students should have access to as many different platforms as possible. We also have a public Mac pool with a couple of PowerMacs.
Last but not least, many other departments than the CS people will have to learn how to do stuff on Windows because in fact that is what they'll have to use later anyway. For CS people it's not a big deal if you have never seen Visual Studio in your courses. If you know what a compiler is and how to debug (and what a stack is:-) than you won't have many problems using Visual Studio. You won't master all its features, but you'll come to it when you need them.
Economics or business students just learn how to use Excel and Powerpoint. You can laugh about it, I do so too at times, but in fact, that's what suits them best. They will simply not have a choice when they start at any company.
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Why is the preterite of run ran, yet the preterite of shun is shunned?I do not know the actual answer to this question, but there are normally two explanations for this, both working together. The change of vowel sound: run->ran is generally derived from Arabic, while the change of ending is a European (Greek, Latin) technique.
:-) but IANAL (linguist)
Euh, sorry to correct you here, but the changing vowel is a typical feature of Germanic language. It's the difference between strong verbs and weak verbs, one of the two retains their vowel but changes the ending, the other changes the vowel.
In the above example: "I run, "I ran" would be in German "Ich renne", "Ich rannte". Pretty similar eh? "I can, I could" -> "Ich kann, Ich konnte". In some cases the English verbs have lost their irregularities (like English lost a lot of Germanic grammar): "I help, I helped" -> "Ich helfe, Ich half". Although the regularization of verbs is a general trend in German too.
Glad I could help
Sorry to say that man, but you really got lost on the irony in the text. Or you are so used to skimming over 100+ pages of literature at insane speeds doing your PhD research that you just can't slow down while reading anymore. :-)
I have heard this argument about the US and China a couple of times, it doesn't get more true by repeating it. The US is (still by far) the main producer of CO2 at least producing 150 % as much as China which is number two.
The US is producing 25 % of all worldwide CO2 with only 4% of the population while China's contribution is exactly in parallel with their percentage of world population.
Of course, this doesn't necessarily apply equally to NOx pollution. If I remember correctly, NOx gases are filtered by modern cars' catalysators which are obligatory in Europe for quite some years already causing a significant drop in Ozone levels (on the ground of course) and therefore a drop in smog.
I remember regular smog warnings when I was younger but they don't exist anymore, ozone ground levels are exceeded occasionally during summer times.
So, to sum it up, NOx levels might be more affected by technological progress and money than CO2 levels.
Sorry, but I can't here that caveman argument anymore. It's certainly funny if you watch it in the actual "caveman" Broadway show, but when you look closer at it, it becomes pretty far-fetched. The evolution at work is doubtful as long as homo sapiens' ancestors as well as their live-style is not fully known - there were eg. purely vegetarian homo species - and I doubt that any kind of hunting vs keeping a look out for the children is genetically determined. Humans are too flexible for things like that, what made them so successfull is their ability to change the ways of doing things. This is what ultimately killed our fellow ancestors like homo erectus etc.
Finally, understanding programs as pretty complex systems, I fail to see why focussing on one thing is an advantage compared to "female multitasking".
I don't doubt the differences between men and women, I just doubt that those differences predetermine the things we can do and the subjects we're good in etc. That's all nonsense. Never overestimate the impact of genes OR society on human development. Both extremes are wrong, as always the truth lies in the middle.
I certainly don't agree with you. The reason why girls are less attracted to sciences is not some god-given natural fact. It's how boys and girls are raised and possibly lots of prejudices and sexist comments from science teachers etc. I remember quite some anecdotes of physics teachers mocking the girls in class that they don't even know how a washing machine works. And I was on a mathematical and natural sciences high-school, that was an all geeky place. Guess what the boys/girls ratio was.
Ignoring the discrimination of women means to waste a lot of potential. That, by the way, is the most important reason against gender based discrimination in the first place. 50 % of the best students you haven't even found yet!
In the line of keeping the comparison fair, I think you should also mention, that your selected motherboard does not only lack the AGP slot as you admitted, it also neither supports DDR400, nor Firewire 800 and 400 as the G5's do, I believe. Let alone that it's "only" 1.8 GHz Opteron vs 2 GHz PPC970. Performance-wise, this is probably irrelevant, regarding the marketing and the price it is not. From my experiences prices for new processors increase sharply the higher the frequencies.
:-) Besides, it's metal not plastic. For some people, this doesn't mean much, too me however, it does. Although I am a computer science student and am mostly able to deal with the more nasty subtleties of a Windows box, I just don't want to. I'm not a system administrator and don't want to be one. I want a system which gets the job done as nicely and with as little fuss as possible. Usually, this rules out Windows as well as Linux. OS X together with a more recent Mac is an excellent coalition of Unix and an elegant UI.
I couldn't check the case you selected, however I would expect Apple's case to look much better
Additionally, the most successful language analyzers in the VERBMOBIL project were based on pure statistics. All that fancy logical induction and deduction didn't work. The search trees to evaluate logically get huge very quickly. These approaches were always stopped by the timeout function :-)
It doesn't seem to be more than a bit of bad psycho-babble quoting a lot of doubtful 60ies "psychology" books. He's even referring to some books on self-help psychology, that's probably the most dangerous thing you could do. Besides that, it seems to be some way of marketing his own book under
"Related projects".
However, there's not a single reference to any kind of computer linguistics or AI work at all. The German VERBMOBIL project comes to my mind. It was pretty much state of the art in computer linguistics, live translation of common language German - English - Japanese, although it was restricted to a special application domain, to keep the vocabulary small. All they did was translate, which only needs a very shallow understanding of a sentence's meaning. What this guy claims to do is actually respond in a meaningful way! Additionally, he just claims to make up some kind of huge dictionnary with obscure ethical terms and some kind of definition in a AI-wise completely outfashioned expert systems.
Well, surprise, one of the interesting findings in the VERBMOBIL project was, that humans actually make up words or at least redefine the meaning of words during an verbal interaction. How does he handle that?
As a last note, he has some funny opinions about 5th generation computing. In a revolutionary way, according to the usual unnamed experts, it will be made of logic circuits! No?! It can't be. That's incredible. Logic! I have to take a break now. I'm shocked.
I can only speak from my experience at my current employer. The company is founded by two CS PhDs, so no PHB trouble. We don't follow any formal process in our development, we don't even comment the code, which really pissed me off in the beginning. However, what we do rather successfully is to make everything as simple as possible.
If you run over some code and you figure it could be done simpler, even if it's not your code, do it simpler NOW. If you find something has been done in a quirky way, fix it NOW. The general rule is that the code has to be understood for the next let's say ten years. We have strict coding guidelines regarding method naming and variable naming. If names are not fully self-explanatory they are replaced immediately even if they're scattered through the whole application. If critical parts like persistence suffer from a bad architecture, it is fixed immediately no matter how much work the rewriting involves. Finally, this leads to very understandable code and once you've understood the general application architecture the code is very easy to read, very clean and mostly pretty correct. There are hardly any quick hacks, sometimes they are inevitable though, to circumvent bugs in the software environment for example.
If you're suffering from lay-offs and don't mind 170 days of rain per year, consider think-cell (I'm only a student employee myself, neither owner nor partner, so it's not advertisement, just advice).
I can see that Apple might have cheated a bit on their SPEC benchmarks. Not more though, than anyone else does. I'm still wondering why so many serious mac users (you don't seem to be a fanatic) criticize Apple's credibility now. For years all they had was to say "But the G4 is really faster in Photoshop!" which was not true most of the time. Now that Apple is entering the SPEC arena because for the first time in years they have a platform that is comparable in performance, you start criticizing their credibility. I think it's just the rules of the GHz game. Apple has ignored that for too long already. As much as Apple insisted, it does matter. I'm using my 500 MHz IBook and am very happy with it. I like it far better than the GHz++ ovens with the noise of a starting airplane most of my student friends use. Still, performance matters, hard disk size matters. Maybe less on a Mac, but still.
I agree with you in principle. Of course, this basically is an infringement of the right to speech.
:-)
I have a lot of sympathy for the liberal American constitution but on the other hand, judging from history, I have also a lot of understanding for the German concept of a well-fortified democracy.
Besides the core parts of the constitution which are not alterable, this includes several mechanisms forbidding any nazi propaganda, denial of the holocaust or any other political agitation which at its heart, aims at removing the constitutional order itself. It even goes far enough to forbid political parties although this was used only once and is indeed a very extreme measure in a democracy. How could a democratic constitution give the right to agitate towards its abolition? It's abolished as soon as the majority doesn't believe in it anymore, but no minority should have the right to do so.
In general, this limitation to the right of expression is agreed upon by a large majority thereby saying that indeed anyway of thinking so is plain wrong. And rightly so.
As long as the freedom of expression is limited only in exactly this sense, it is ok with me. Luckily, there's the constitutional court to guarantee above all politics that it stays that way.
Still you're right, that Germany doesn't qualify as the most liberal country. I fear, Germany is eternally conservative until the end of times. History didn't prove me wrong yet.
This is not quite true. In any liberal democracy including germany only things you say or do can be outlawed. Being a nazi isn't a crime. Running around in a SS uniform denying the holocaust is.
Besides that, I can understand that CC Generals was put on the index. I like war strategy games myself, but seriously, building suicide bombers as part of a game is a bit tasteless. Not to speak of attacking humanitarian aid convoys etc. This is pure cynism if it's meant to be a game.
At my university (Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany) most of the computers in the CS department are Linux or Sparc stations. Thats what the students do most of the work on and thats also what most of the stuff uses. In anyway we have Windows machines for several good reasons I think.
:-)
:-) than you won't have many problems using Visual Studio. You won't master all its features, but you'll come to it when you need them.
First, there is a public Windows NT computer pool for the students which is used for several things courses which depend on Windows Software. Chip design comes to my mind. We use the Altera Max circuit design software and the corresponding PGA chips to develop 4 bit processors in the 2nd year. It is free for students to use at home.
Second, try to find a good secretary who knows how to write a text with anything else but Word. I guess you will have troubles doing so. Professors (and students likewise) depend on the secretaries
Third, of course students should have access to as many different platforms as possible. We also have a public Mac pool with a couple of PowerMacs.
Last but not least, many other departments than the CS people will have to learn how to do stuff on Windows because in fact that is what they'll have to use later anyway. For CS people it's not a big deal if you have never seen Visual Studio in your courses. If you know what a compiler is and how to debug (and what a stack is
Economics or business students just learn how to use Excel and Powerpoint. You can laugh about it, I do so too at times, but in fact, that's what suits them best. They will simply not have a choice when they start at any company.