Isn't there a huge difference between the companies you list (IBM and MS) and Facebook? IBM and Microsoft got big through hard work and smart business behavior and it took them a quite a long time and a lot of persistence. In the case of MS the products may have been crap but they were crap people wanted. for example, to carnoivres steaks are great but they take skill to prepare so there is actually a lot more revenue in hot dogs which we all know are crap but what we love. MS made crappy software but it did in a way that let oem equipment makers mass market the PC at cheap prices. You got what you paid for, but it was designed carefully to be what you were willing to buy.
Facebook seems to have gotten big mainly by chance. like being the only bacteria in the pietry dish. The only savvy they had was realizing the peitre dish was available and rushing to get there first. But because it happened so fast-- basically just at the moment it was technically possible it happened-- we suspect that maybe even they did not realize it. It's like Yahoo, ebay or craigslist. Someone was going to do it. One lucky bacteria got there first.
How we humans love to tear down success. It's in our social nature. So it's perhaps ironic that Facebook, the top predator in the land of social acceleration, is having a bad week and we are all enjoying the schadenfreude.
That observed, one can realize there are good reasons to hate face book, and overblown ones. Facebook is changing social norms, including privacy norms, faster than the older generations are comfortable with. This could be good in some cases, but there's also can be excellent reasons why traditions became traditions. For example I try to keep a tight hold on my personal information but I can't exactly tell you why I care so much. I just innately think it could come back and bite me. Also it seems a little unseemly to burden others with oversharing. Also people are mean.
My hope is that as the bad reasons get debunked we don't lose sight of the good reasons for hating facebook.
The best way to distribute a Python environment is to tar the whole thing up and send it to whomever. An alternative is just to tar up the site-packages directory. For a long time I had a separate, easily accessible site-packages that could be packaged and distributed to everyone in the lab on a regular basis. On OS X you can even make a pretty double click installer in about five minutes.
I'd love some advice on this if you would care to share. I'm always afraid that when I do an install it will end up putting something into a tree I'll miss in a tar ball. The other problem is that when I'm using a distro like fink, I'm not sure how to make sure I include everything I need to send python in a self contained way without sending all of fink. Tips wold be apreciated. I'm not a python nuts and bolts genius, more of an end user.
If your chosen python packager doesn't do an adequate job of including matplotlib then install it yourself. It's a double click (or equivalent) on the major platforms. Certainly not dead.
ha! have you ever tried to install the 3d packages or any of the advanced math stuff. it's most definitely not easy. it's dependency hell. hence the package manager is the only way that seems to work. It is true you can find a few binary distros out there. but again everything I said is true: the 3D depends on unmaintained packages and you can't find them in all distros. As a result it makes distributing code to other scientist a problem.
Matplotlib which I use a lot, has really sucky documentation so this 250 pages would amount to basically all the documents. Additionally, you have to realize that matplot lib is not one coherent entity. it's a mish mash of many many things in numberical analysis much of it having to manage legacy cases and pertending to ape matlab syntax. So there's lots of special cases to cover.
On the otherhand I really have ot wonder sometimes if matplotlib is a dead project. All of the standard distro's have 3D plotting that doesn't work anymore or depend on packages that are not maintained. The only modern 3d plotting in matplot lib is available through the enthought distro that folds in mayav. But since it does not support the full syntax of matplot lib and invents it's own new object structure, it's hard to write programs that one can distribute. Your end users may not be using enthought.
Mat plot lib is wonderful because it lets matlab users switch to python. But it sucks because it seems like it's not being maintained well.
Exactly. And even if this webOS fails to catch fire for HP, the fall back to google Android is just as bad for them. Microsoft needs to corner the low power device OS market before Google closes the door. On the other hand if HP does succeed at a middling level then it's actually good for microsoft in a way. It will mean the non-ipad world will be running a mixture of OS's and there will be no settled standard. This will give breathing room to others like say 1) microsoft, 2) symbian, 3) maybe even OLPC.
SO does this invalidate the claims in Nokia V. Apple lawsuit. If wireless connectiviry was anticipated in 1909, are practical methods for carrying that out truly surprising 100 years later?
The master told me
on
Zen Coding
·
· Score: 4, Funny
The master told me to mediate on the sound of one parenthesis closing. I am ashamed that I don't know what this means. Or was that his point.
when my computer is "idle" the flash plug in on my mac usually consumes 15% of the CPU. One has to wonder if that translates to the wall plug at all. It certainly shows up in how long my laptop lasts and how often my laptop fans cycle on. This happens all all 5 of my computers varying from about 8 to 15% depending on the machine. Even when I use flash block, the plugin still is the dominant CPU hog on an idle machine.
Does it really take a General to tell us that ?;-))
It might take a general to say the emperor has no clothes.
Here's a pro tip: increase your font size to almost the headline size. Does your message not fit anymore? then delete it. Use words and figures instead.
The problem with information packed slides is that the audience is momentarily given lots of information but having too little time to parse it won't recall it later. And they won't be able to concentrate on your words either. instead put details in slide notes and include those on a printed out version.
There is one exception to this rule: the military quad chart. But quad charts are intentionally dense because you are supposed to linger on them for a long long time.
One more thing: Always label the axes on a plot dammit. and then always tell people in words what the axes are BEFORE you tell them what the plot says.
Hmmm the plot thickens. Nokia does have a major axe to grind with apple. If all google maps come from a company owned by nokia you could see them not agreeing to lic them to google for use on apple.
Man, I sure miss Strategic Conquest and Crystal quest. So no I don't care if the graphics are old school. they remain awesomely engaging games. they just don't run on intel macs.
Before apple switched to Intel, they warned developers they ought to stick to the cocoa coding guidelines uber strictly. Those that apps that did were nearly just a recompile away from being native fat binaries for intel/ppc after switch.
Adobe took over 2 years to release native photoshop and acrobat readers. The only reason those apps even ran was because Apple had purchased the company Rosetta to make an emulator. If no emulator had existed then they would have lost photoshop!! Even then graphic arts folks were not thrilled to be having to retain their PPC computers just to run native.
You can see why apple would not want to have an adobe flash layer running apps on the iphone. Assuming adobe did not update the flash player for two years, apps would not even run on the platform switch. There might not be a suitable emulator that could run on a resource starved iphone.
Apple would lose a lot of apps. Consumers would be confused. And Developers would blame apple for the platform switch going so ugly.
Now is it reasonable to presume that Adobe is not using Xcode to develope their apps? yes. One might even speculate they are using adobe AIR or some other cross platform API since their apps run on many more platforms than xcode supports.
Why bet the farm on adobe's good will when they screwed apple over photoshop and Acrobat
I agree that if you bought it you own it. ANd would you agree that if you break it or want service it's okay for apple not to supply it? And if something bricks it, it's not apple's problem?
THe trouble with computing devices is that the grey area of "normal use" is so broad it's hard to know where to draw a reasonable line. For example, if I buy a water resistant timex watch and I wear it in the shower and it gets wet inside. was directed water under pressure normal use for a water resistant watch. Should I have done the reasonable precaution of avoiding the bathing with it? it's a grey area. Imight see it as normal and timex might not but one can see it both ways quite easily.
with a software/hardware device if you mod it with hardware clearly this was not normal use. But what if you modded the firmware when it said not too. That's probably your fault too. and finally what if you ran software that they said you should not? it gets morally grey but legally it's pretty clear you violated the warantee (don't like it? dont' buy it).
But y'know what is going to happen if you brick it after jail breaking? are you going to man-up and say oh well. Or are going to go lie to apple and say "it just broke". Or are you going to blog about all the apple's that are bricking for "no reason" and spoil their reputation?
I'd bet that people that jail break and brick make more than their share of service requests and cause more than their share of replacements.
The thing is, it still wouldn't look 3D, even if it had head tracking. It would be quite a weird effect for you to move and be able to look around but it would still be flat.
because the objects are at a distance you won't have any binocular ability so it will look just fine in 3D. The real weirdness is going to be latency. you move your head and the scene lags. It will give you the sensation you are falling over or falling into the scene.
Nice party joke if you don't mind cleaning up vomit.
The Toshiba had a 129-MHz Toshiba TMPR3912U CPU which is something like 2 to 3 orders of magnitude slower than the 1Ghz A4. Sure it functioned but would you use it? Value s not just what you pay but what you get.
You could say that in principle one could have made a Victorian mechanical turing machine into an ipad too.
Apple is what is known as an early settler. ("pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land."). Apple is also an early adopter. (e.g. see Gui, mouse, postscript printing,.... ) Thus they tred right at the line between pioneer and settler.
How do they know when it's time to settle a market? Steve tells them the wine is ready now. Till then they make fun of the pioneers.
Apple and Jobs sometimes jumps the gun too ( see NeXT or Newton or apples game console if you even remember that).
Apple has more success lately, because it avoids the pitfall that most pioneers have in converting to settlers: undercapitalization. Apple has the resources to design things right and to set up ancilliary markets (see itunes) that an undercapitalized firm cannot. So for apple the wine is ready to serve early than the competition.
Slashdot Mirror
Cool! now I can play mario kart while I drive to work.
Isn't there a huge difference between the companies you list (IBM and MS) and Facebook? IBM and Microsoft got big through hard work and smart business behavior and it took them a quite a long time and a lot of persistence. In the case of MS the products may have been crap but they were crap people wanted. for example, to carnoivres steaks are great but they take skill to prepare so there is actually a lot more revenue in hot dogs which we all know are crap but what we love. MS made crappy software but it did in a way that let oem equipment makers mass market the PC at cheap prices. You got what you paid for, but it was designed carefully to be what you were willing to buy.
Facebook seems to have gotten big mainly by chance. like being the only bacteria in the pietry dish. The only savvy they had was realizing the peitre dish was available and rushing to get there first. But because it happened so fast-- basically just at the moment it was technically possible it happened-- we suspect that maybe even they did not realize it. It's like Yahoo, ebay or craigslist. Someone was going to do it. One lucky bacteria got there first.
How we humans love to tear down success. It's in our social nature. So it's perhaps ironic that Facebook, the top predator in the land of social acceleration, is having a bad week and we are all enjoying the schadenfreude.
That observed, one can realize there are good reasons to hate face book, and overblown ones. Facebook is changing social norms, including privacy norms, faster than the older generations are comfortable with. This could be good in some cases, but there's also can be excellent reasons why traditions became traditions. For example I try to keep a tight hold on my personal information but I can't exactly tell you why I care so much. I just innately think it could come back and bite me. Also it seems a little unseemly to burden others with oversharing. Also people are mean.
My hope is that as the bad reasons get debunked we don't lose sight of the good reasons for hating facebook.
The source code for the scientific part of it is freely available from RosettaCommons.org for academic use.
thanks a lot. that really helped.
because it's slow as a dog and it lacks the amenities like of a for loop construct.
Well since apple came out with the 4 minute Abs, I assume google will have to go with the 3 minute abs. ie. the A3.
The best way to distribute a Python environment is to tar the whole thing up and send it to whomever. An alternative is just to tar up the site-packages directory. For a long time I had a separate, easily accessible site-packages that could be packaged and distributed to everyone in the lab on a regular basis. On OS X you can even make a pretty double click installer in about five minutes.
I'd love some advice on this if you would care to share. I'm always afraid that when I do an install it will end up putting something into a tree I'll miss in a tar ball. The other problem is that when I'm using a distro like fink, I'm not sure how to make sure I include everything I need to send python in a self contained way without sending all of fink. Tips wold be apreciated. I'm not a python nuts and bolts genius, more of an end user.
If your chosen python packager doesn't do an adequate job of including matplotlib then install it yourself. It's a double click (or equivalent) on the major platforms. Certainly not dead.
ha! have you ever tried to install the 3d packages or any of the advanced math stuff. it's most definitely not easy. it's dependency hell. hence the package manager is the only way that seems to work. It is true you can find a few binary distros out there. but again everything I said is true: the 3D depends on unmaintained packages and you can't find them in all distros. As a result it makes distributing code to other scientist a problem.
Matplotlib which I use a lot, has really sucky documentation so this 250 pages would amount to basically all the documents. Additionally, you have to realize that matplot lib is not one coherent entity. it's a mish mash of many many things in numberical analysis much of it having to manage legacy cases and pertending to ape matlab syntax. So there's lots of special cases to cover.
On the otherhand I really have ot wonder sometimes if matplotlib is a dead project. All of the standard distro's have 3D plotting that doesn't work anymore or depend on packages that are not maintained. The only modern 3d plotting in matplot lib is available through the enthought distro that folds in mayav. But since it does not support the full syntax of matplot lib and invents it's own new object structure, it's hard to write programs that one can distribute. Your end users may not be using enthought.
Mat plot lib is wonderful because it lets matlab users switch to python. But it sucks because it seems like it's not being maintained well.
Exactly. And even if this webOS fails to catch fire for HP, the fall back to google Android is just as bad for them. Microsoft needs to corner the low power device OS market before Google closes the door. On the other hand if HP does succeed at a middling level then it's actually good for microsoft in a way. It will mean the non-ipad world will be running a mixture of OS's and there will be no settled standard. This will give breathing room to others like say 1) microsoft, 2) symbian, 3) maybe even OLPC.
Every keystroke in the address bar is sent to google by default according to microsoft. How else are they supposed to do google-suggest?
Since google merged the google-bar and URL bar into one, it sends all your browsing to google does it not? If so, I really wonder why people use this.
SO does this invalidate the claims in Nokia V. Apple lawsuit. If wireless connectiviry was anticipated in 1909, are practical methods for carrying that out truly surprising 100 years later?
The master told me to mediate on the sound of one parenthesis closing. I am ashamed that I don't know what this means. Or was that his point.
when my computer is "idle" the flash plug in on my mac usually consumes 15% of the CPU. One has to wonder if that translates to the wall plug at all. It certainly shows up in how long my laptop lasts and how often my laptop fans cycle on. This happens all all 5 of my computers varying from about 8 to 15% depending on the machine. Even when I use flash block, the plugin still is the dominant CPU hog on an idle machine.
"PowerPoint makes us stupid"
Does it really take a General to tell us that ? ;-))
It might take a general to say the emperor has no clothes.
Here's a pro tip: increase your font size to almost the headline size. Does your message not fit anymore? then delete it. Use words and figures instead.
The problem with information packed slides is that the audience is momentarily given lots of information but having too little time to parse it won't recall it later. And they won't be able to concentrate on your words either. instead put details in slide notes and include those on a printed out version.
There is one exception to this rule: the military quad chart. But quad charts are intentionally dense because you are supposed to linger on them for a long long time.
One more thing: Always label the axes on a plot dammit. and then always tell people in words what the axes are BEFORE you tell them what the plot says.
Navteq belongs to Nokia
Hmmm the plot thickens. Nokia does have a major axe to grind with apple. If all google maps come from a company owned by nokia you could see them not agreeing to lic them to google for use on apple.
Man, I sure miss Strategic Conquest and Crystal quest. So no I don't care if the graphics are old school. they remain awesomely engaging games. they just don't run on intel macs.
Before apple switched to Intel, they warned developers they ought to stick to the cocoa coding guidelines uber strictly. Those that apps that did were nearly just a recompile away from being native fat binaries for intel/ppc after switch.
Adobe took over 2 years to release native photoshop and acrobat readers. The only reason those apps even ran was because Apple had purchased the company Rosetta to make an emulator. If no emulator had existed then they would have lost photoshop!! Even then graphic arts folks were not thrilled to be having to retain their PPC computers just to run native.
You can see why apple would not want to have an adobe flash layer running apps on the iphone. Assuming adobe did not update the flash player for two years, apps would not even run on the platform switch. There might not be a suitable emulator that could run on a resource starved iphone.
Apple would lose a lot of apps. Consumers would be confused. And Developers would blame apple for the platform switch going so ugly.
Now is it reasonable to presume that Adobe is not using Xcode to develope their apps? yes. One might even speculate they are using adobe AIR or some other cross platform API since their apps run on many more platforms than xcode supports.
Why bet the farm on adobe's good will when they screwed apple over photoshop and Acrobat
I agree that if you bought it you own it. ANd would you agree that if you break it or want service it's okay for apple not to supply it? And if something bricks it, it's not apple's problem?
THe trouble with computing devices is that the grey area of "normal use" is so broad it's hard to know where to draw a reasonable line. For example, if I buy a water resistant timex watch and I wear it in the shower and it gets wet inside. was directed water under pressure normal use for a water resistant watch. Should I have done the reasonable precaution of avoiding the bathing with it? it's a grey area. Imight see it as normal and timex might not but one can see it both ways quite easily.
with a software/hardware device if you mod it with hardware clearly this was not normal use. But what if you modded the firmware when it said not too. That's probably your fault too. and finally what if you ran software that they said you should not? it gets morally grey but legally it's pretty clear you violated the warantee (don't like it? dont' buy it).
But y'know what is going to happen if you brick it after jail breaking? are you going to man-up and say oh well. Or are going to go lie to apple and say "it just broke". Or are you going to blog about all the apple's that are bricking for "no reason" and spoil their reputation?
I'd bet that people that jail break and brick make more than their share of service requests and cause more than their share of replacements.
SO I assert it's rarely the end.
too
The thing is, it still wouldn't look 3D, even if it had head tracking. It would be quite a weird effect for you to move and be able to look around but it would still be flat.
because the objects are at a distance you won't have any binocular ability so it will look just fine in 3D. The real weirdness is going to be latency. you move your head and the scene lags. It will give you the sensation you are falling over or falling into the scene.
Nice party joke if you don't mind cleaning up vomit.
Uh no. 1990 called to remind you about the megahertz myth.
does a 2Ghz i7 run faster than a 2Ghz P4? yes by more than a factor of 10.
processors have been increasing in flops/ghz than they have in ghz alone.
The Toshiba had a 129-MHz Toshiba TMPR3912U CPU which is something like 2 to 3 orders of magnitude slower than the 1Ghz A4. Sure it functioned but would you use it? Value s not just what you pay but what you get.
You could say that in principle one could have made a Victorian mechanical turing machine into an ipad too.
Apple is what is known as an early settler. ("pioneers get the arrows, settlers get the land."). Apple is also an early adopter. (e.g. see Gui, mouse, postscript printing, .... ) Thus they tred right at the line between pioneer and settler.
How do they know when it's time to settle a market? Steve tells them the wine is ready now. Till then they make fun of the pioneers.
Apple and Jobs sometimes jumps the gun too ( see NeXT or Newton or apples game console if you even remember that).
Apple has more success lately, because it avoids the pitfall that most pioneers have in converting to settlers: undercapitalization. Apple has the resources to design things right and to set up ancilliary markets (see itunes) that an undercapitalized firm cannot. So for apple the wine is ready to serve early than the competition.