In your example, the various birth dates should clue you into the birth date being questionable; you can then do your own research to see if there's a good reason for doubt. Whereas, in a traditional encyclopaedia, they'd have changed all the dates to be consistent, and you'd have no suggestion that there was any doubt (unless they chose to tell you).
Seconded. I've been spending quite a bit of time recently doing some engraving (the music equivalent of typesetting) with Lilypond, having previous done a lot of stuff in Cubase and a smidgen in Harmony Assistant.
Cubase gets me 80% of the way there quicker. But that last 20% is a nightmare (and needs redoing every time the music changes). Lilypond gets me 95% of the way there at reasonable speed; and the last 5% gets easier as you learn it.
What I have noticed is how much more natural its output is. Engraving isn't just a matter of putting the right notes in the right order on the right staves; there are an awful lot of subtleties in the layout and getting it to 'feel right' and be easily readable, making best use of the space. Most other packages (I've seen a lot from Cubase and Sibelius) are reasonably readable, but they feel robotic and unnatural. Lilypond isn't perfect, but it has far far better instincts about how to do layout.
And, like most programming languages, the more you use it, the easier it gets, and the more you can do with it!
It seems to be slowly supplanting ABC and other common formats as the format of choice for online music libraries. Musipedia uses it, for example.
The Babel fish is small, yellow and leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brain-wave energy not from its carrier but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brain-wave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them.
In other words, it doesn't do anything to sound waves; the ear is just a convenient place. It does something to your brain, teaching you other languages telepathically. I can't think of a reason why this teaching wouldn't apply to written as well as aural language.
It seems like a technology that was released just a little before its time.
I disagree. The problem with Bluetooth is that it's massively over-specified. And, if anything, a couple of years after its time.
There are two major wireless specs: Bluetooth and WiFi (aka AirPort, 802.11). Now, in an ideal world, each would be properly adapted and tuned to its own field of use.
Originally, Bluetooth was seen as a replacement for IrDA (infra-red) and serial connections to and from small devices like PDAs and phones. And WiFi was seen as a replacement for network cables. So there are obvious differences: Bluetooth needed to be short-range, slow, low-power, and simple enough for small devices to implement cheaply and efficiently. WiFi needed to be fast, secure, have reasonable range, and masses of bandwidth.
Bluetooth, though, got ideas above its station, and wanted to take over some of WiFi's market too. Result: it's too complex, takes too much electrical and processing power, took too long to standardise, and not enough devices implement it (properly).
If they'd stuck to doing one thing and doing it well, we wouldn't be in this mess now...
At least, that's how I understand things. Please correct as necessary. I don't really care, anyway: my Psion and my phone still talk fine over IrDA...
I think we're talking about different things here. What's being discouraged is the sort of metadata that's extrinsic -- separate from the file. On the Mac's file system, each file has a 4-character type code and a 4-character creator code, and also any amount of data in the resource fork, all of which is separate from the normal datastream. This is all at risk when moving files to or from different file systems or machines, and can be a pain to maintain and use. I think OS X is right not to need it (though it still handles it well).
However, from what I've seen, that's not the sort of thing Spotlight is about. The plugins we're talking about make use of intrinsic metadata - information extracted from the datastream itself. Many common file types include some descriptive information: EXIF data in pictures, MP3 tags in audio files, meta tags in HTML files, and so on. Spotlight is a way of extracting and using that data.
The practical differences include, OTTOMH:
Spotlight's information won't be lost when files get stored on other file systems, sent over email, processed on other platforms, &c.
Spotlight uses information that's already in the files - you won't have to set it up manually.
You can use existing tools to see and edit the metadata - MP3 taggers, photo editors, whatever. And you can do so on any machine and OS.
This is probably one of those rare cases when that foul word 'leverage' might be appropriate -- Spotlight should allow you to make much better use of an existing resource. As such, it sounds like a jolly neat idea!
There are some good reasons why IRV isn't necessarily the best voting method to choose. Approval voting, for example, is much simpler to understand and to implement, and actually provides a better picture of voters' preferences. In fact, most of the other voting methods solve one major problem with IRV: it's not monotonic; increasing your preference for a candidate can actually hurt their chances, so people will still vote tactically).
But I agree with your general idea. Almost any voting method would be better than the current system, and people need to be aware just how much it's hurting the political landscape in many countries.
(People also need to be aware that political character is more than just a one-dimensional left-vs-right range. People's assessments of the balance of power between government and people, between government and business, between minorities and the mainstream, &c. aren't necessarily the same. There's a thought-provoking site here which explains this rather well.)
I don't know the deep maths (didn't do anything like that in my maths degree...) but one issue occurs to me: are objects with very different gravitational fields stable? If a roughly spherical shape is deformed (plastic flow due to gravity, impact, fragmentation, accretion, whatever), then its gravitational field will maintain a roughly spherical shape; but is that true of toroidal objects, for example?
I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of shapes with radically non-spherical gravitational fields are unstable, and that the sort of spherical symmetry we see becomes extremely probable after enough disturbances and deformations.
(meaning the late and much-lamented Douglas Adams, not his or anyone else's deoxyribonucleic acid):
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
He was talking about devices such as air-conditioning systems, but I think the principle applies here just as much.
So what powers those machines that build the materials for the reactors, produce the reactor fuel, build the roads the stuff is transported on, build the transmission lines, blah, blah, blah....?
Presumably, exactly the same as powers the machines that build coal, oil, and gas power stations, that dig up and transport their raw materials, blah, blah, blah.
Interesting. My uninformed, ignorant approach would be to do tons and tons of motion capture, both real people and dummies &c, but instead of recreating it verbatim, use it to 'train' some software -- maybe neural net-based, or something of that ilk -- and then use that software should be able to create natural-looking movements for just about any situation. Is that at all feasible?
I for one would love to see in seven channels of vision
Considering that pretty much all colour printing and colour displays rely on people having roughly the three channels we have, and so would look rather poor viewed with extra channels, that might be a rather mixed blessing...
Yes, of course the US has a much larger land mass than almost anywhere else, and a great cultural diversity. But there's also an awful lot of commonality. You watch the same TV networks, see the same films, live under much the same legal system and very similar laws, vote in the same elections, say the same pledge of allegiance, shop in the same chain stores and buy similar products, drive the same cars, learn similar things in similar schools at the same ages, share the same national history, constitution, armed forces, and so on and so on. Diverse as the US is, it's culturally relatively homogeneous compared to the difference between many countries.
Land area isn't everything. Here in the UK, we have something like a quarter of your population, squeezed into something like a fiftieth of the space. There are places in the UK a couple of hundred miles away where I can't understand most of what they're saying -- and others where they speak a totally different language altogether. You have large populations of Central American and Hispanic origin; we have large populations originating in the Indian subcontinent, and many other immigrants from the Pacific rim and from eastern Europe (though not as many as the newspapers go on about...).
And in much of Europe, it's only a short drive to somewhere where they have completely different language, TV broadcasts, books, newspapers, history, traditions, culture, food, government, laws, attitude, working practices, architecture, popular music... Of course, these differences are less than they used to be, but IMO they amount to a substantially greater culture differential than you'd find in the US.
Most people think the US is not interested in the rest of the world and in a way they are right.
Only when it comes to responsibilities, peaceful coexistence, and mature give-and-take. When they think they can steam in and use it for target practice, or take oil from it -- or use it for political fear campaigns -- then they're interested enough...
But the thing about the HP LaserJets (<=4) is that they were built like tanks, and last effectively forever. I picked one up for free a few months ago (a company was chucking it out); it needed a new roller (ten quid), but otherwise it still works fine despite being the best part of a decade old. And I expect it to keep going for a similar time. I haven't even changed the toner cartridge yet, but when I do I have no worries about being able to find one.
It's a big beast, and I'd prefer something smaller, but it works perfectly, first time, every time, even if I don't use it for a few weeks -- unlike my Epson inkjet, which usually needs ten minutes and umpteen cleaning cycles before most of the jets are clear...
'Support our troops'... Hmmm... Here's a quick multiple -hoice question for the folks who can say that with a straight face. If you really cared about your troops, if you really wanted to 'support' them, would you:
a) Let them stay at home, in (relative) comfort, and (relative) safety, or
b) Send them out into the most unstable part of the world, surrounded by tens of thousands of natives who resent their presence and spend much of their time shooting at them, bombing them, and otherwise making their lives a misery?
Even if listeners are getting more numerous (which other posts dispute), it still doesn't follow that radio stations are playing the things that people want to hear.
All it shows is that people prefer what they're playing to not listening at all. It doesn't mean there aren't many other things that they'd much rather hear instead.
Re: interesting but it's not really true
on
Murphy's Law Rules NASA
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Assume that a well-trained, expert engineer has a 5% chance of making a material error. This implies that 5% of the things s/he designs have flaws.
Now suppose this output is double-checked by another engineer, who also has a 5% chance of error. 95% of the first engineer's errors will be caught...
That doesn't follow. It's only true if the two errors are completely independent, which is a very big 'if'. In practice, the chances are that some types of error are more likely than others, and that the processes/standards/ways of thinking which are common to both will also affect the types of errors they make. All of which makes it more likely that if one engineer has made a particular mistake, another engineer might make that same mistake as well. So the second engineer will catch less than 95% of the first engineer's errors -- maybe a lot less.
Of course, things are far better when there's little or no commonality between the two engineers -- different companies, processes, methods, approaches, and cultures will all help to make their work independent, and help to reduce the errors that get missed. Anyone know if NASA does anything like this?
I believe it's common practice in some mission-critical situations to use three different systems, each built from the ground up by three entirely separate groups of people, with nothing by the specification in common, for exactly this reason.
I think it depends on the language, and on what's being taught.
C++ would be a totally stupid first language; I don't think it's suited as a teaching language at all. Even C is too finicky in many ways.
But Java is a fairly clean language. I'm biased coz I use it a lot, but I'm quite happy with the idea of using it as a teaching language, especially for OO. Its object model is sufficiently similar to C++ &c that the general concepts it teaches will be applicable elsewhere, and its syntax and semantics are simple enough that it shouldn't cause too much head-scratching or wasted time.
So no, I don't think there's anything wrong per se in teaching a professional language, as long as that language is suitably clear and orthogonal that the concepts being taught come over well, and other areas of the language don't interfere.
But no course should teach just one language! I'd suggest at least one strongly-typed and one weakly-typed (e.g. a 'traditional' one and a 'scripting') language, including at least one OO language, and if there's time, a declarative language, a functional one, and some assembler as well. All of these can give valuable insight into the nature of computers, and approaches to problem-solving.
The byte-character dichotomy is a very important point, and one that's often overlooked. But I don't really agree that:
FileReader and FileWriter are miscreants that should be deprecated
Sometimes you do want to use the platform's default encoding. In fact, I'd suggest, most of the time. In particular, it's the right default setting; if your program knows what encoding it wants to use, then it can go right ahead and use it -- but a lot of the time, it won't know, and the platform default is the Right Thing.
I know what encoding my files use, and I don't want some program hardcoding something different!
(Anyway, a user can change the platform default via environment vars or command-line switches if needed.)
Yes, programmers should certainly be aware that those classes do byte-to-character conversion. But unless they know better, it'll probably be doing the right conversion.
Don't some of the same arguments apply to this as applied to mobile phone (cellphone) jamming devices in a recent story?
If you don't like televisions being installed and turned on in places like reception areas, then do something constructive: complain to the management, for example. If enough people do this, then maybe they'll change their policy, and everyone will benefit. (And if not enough people do it, then maybe the majority prefer the TV, in which case you have arguably no right to deprive them.)
Either way, using a 'jammer' like this may make you feel good, but it's likely to annoy people without achieving anything in the long term.
Slashdot Mirror
In your example, the various birth dates should clue you into the birth date being questionable; you can then do your own research to see if there's a good reason for doubt. Whereas, in a traditional encyclopaedia, they'd have changed all the dates to be consistent, and you'd have no suggestion that there was any doubt (unless they chose to tell you).
Just like any other encyclopaedia. Where Wikipedia differs is that any of us can fix a ruined article.
Cubase gets me 80% of the way there quicker. But that last 20% is a nightmare (and needs redoing every time the music changes). Lilypond gets me 95% of the way there at reasonable speed; and the last 5% gets easier as you learn it.
What I have noticed is how much more natural its output is. Engraving isn't just a matter of putting the right notes in the right order on the right staves; there are an awful lot of subtleties in the layout and getting it to 'feel right' and be easily readable, making best use of the space. Most other packages (I've seen a lot from Cubase and Sibelius) are reasonably readable, but they feel robotic and unnatural. Lilypond isn't perfect, but it has far far better instincts about how to do layout.
And, like most programming languages, the more you use it, the easier it gets, and the more you can do with it!
It seems to be slowly supplanting ABC and other common formats as the format of choice for online music libraries. Musipedia uses it, for example.
I disagree. The problem with Bluetooth is that it's massively over-specified. And, if anything, a couple of years after its time.
There are two major wireless specs: Bluetooth and WiFi (aka AirPort, 802.11). Now, in an ideal world, each would be properly adapted and tuned to its own field of use.
Originally, Bluetooth was seen as a replacement for IrDA (infra-red) and serial connections to and from small devices like PDAs and phones. And WiFi was seen as a replacement for network cables. So there are obvious differences: Bluetooth needed to be short-range, slow, low-power, and simple enough for small devices to implement cheaply and efficiently. WiFi needed to be fast, secure, have reasonable range, and masses of bandwidth.
Bluetooth, though, got ideas above its station, and wanted to take over some of WiFi's market too. Result: it's too complex, takes too much electrical and processing power, took too long to standardise, and not enough devices implement it (properly).
If they'd stuck to doing one thing and doing it well, we wouldn't be in this mess now...
At least, that's how I understand things. Please correct as necessary. I don't really care, anyway: my Psion and my phone still talk fine over IrDA...
However, from what I've seen, that's not the sort of thing Spotlight is about. The plugins we're talking about make use of intrinsic metadata - information extracted from the datastream itself. Many common file types include some descriptive information: EXIF data in pictures, MP3 tags in audio files, meta tags in HTML files, and so on. Spotlight is a way of extracting and using that data.
The practical differences include, OTTOMH:
- Spotlight's information won't be lost when files get stored on other file systems, sent over email, processed on other platforms, &c.
- Spotlight uses information that's already in the files - you won't have to set it up manually.
- You can use existing tools to see and edit the metadata - MP3 taggers, photo editors, whatever. And you can do so on any machine and OS.
This is probably one of those rare cases when that foul word 'leverage' might be appropriate -- Spotlight should allow you to make much better use of an existing resource. As such, it sounds like a jolly neat idea!But I agree with your general idea. Almost any voting method would be better than the current system, and people need to be aware just how much it's hurting the political landscape in many countries.
(People also need to be aware that political character is more than just a one-dimensional left-vs-right range. People's assessments of the balance of power between government and people, between government and business, between minorities and the mainstream, &c. aren't necessarily the same. There's a thought-provoking site here which explains this rather well.)
I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of shapes with radically non-spherical gravitational fields are unstable, and that the sort of spherical symmetry we see becomes extremely probable after enough disturbances and deformations.
Presumably, exactly the same as powers the machines that build coal, oil, and gas power stations, that dig up and transport their raw materials, blah, blah, blah.
An Electric Critic? Mmmm. It'd go nicely with your VCR and Electric Monk.
Interesting. My uninformed, ignorant approach would be to do tons and tons of motion capture, both real people and dummies &c, but instead of recreating it verbatim, use it to 'train' some software -- maybe neural net-based, or something of that ilk -- and then use that software should be able to create natural-looking movements for just about any situation. Is that at all feasible?
Considering that pretty much all colour printing and colour displays rely on people having roughly the three channels we have, and so would look rather poor viewed with extra channels, that might be a rather mixed blessing...
Yes, of course the US has a much larger land mass than almost anywhere else, and a great cultural diversity. But there's also an awful lot of commonality. You watch the same TV networks, see the same films, live under much the same legal system and very similar laws, vote in the same elections, say the same pledge of allegiance, shop in the same chain stores and buy similar products, drive the same cars, learn similar things in similar schools at the same ages, share the same national history, constitution, armed forces, and so on and so on. Diverse as the US is, it's culturally relatively homogeneous compared to the difference between many countries.
Land area isn't everything. Here in the UK, we have something like a quarter of your population, squeezed into something like a fiftieth of the space. There are places in the UK a couple of hundred miles away where I can't understand most of what they're saying -- and others where they speak a totally different language altogether. You have large populations of Central American and Hispanic origin; we have large populations originating in the Indian subcontinent, and many other immigrants from the Pacific rim and from eastern Europe (though not as many as the newspapers go on about...).
And in much of Europe, it's only a short drive to somewhere where they have completely different language, TV broadcasts, books, newspapers, history, traditions, culture, food, government, laws, attitude, working practices, architecture, popular music... Of course, these differences are less than they used to be, but IMO they amount to a substantially greater culture differential than you'd find in the US.
Only when it comes to responsibilities, peaceful coexistence, and mature give-and-take. When they think they can steam in and use it for target practice, or take oil from it -- or use it for political fear campaigns -- then they're interested enough...
But the thing about the HP LaserJets (<=4) is that they were built like tanks, and last effectively forever. I picked one up for free a few months ago (a company was chucking it out); it needed a new roller (ten quid), but otherwise it still works fine despite being the best part of a decade old. And I expect it to keep going for a similar time. I haven't even changed the toner cartridge yet, but when I do I have no worries about being able to find one.
It's a big beast, and I'd prefer something smaller, but it works perfectly, first time, every time, even if I don't use it for a few weeks -- unlike my Epson inkjet, which usually needs ten minutes and umpteen cleaning cycles before most of the jets are clear...
Lots of people got Speccies coz they were cheap. People who were serious about computing got* a Real Computer, like a Beeb!
[fx: rush of nostalgia...]
(* Or, as in my case, our dads got :-)
Yeah, but I can't help thinking that they're the reason some of it's hostile in the first place...
Sounds like a great idea. But of course, there are already terrorists in the US, too. Better to get rid of those ones first.
- a) Let them stay at home, in (relative) comfort, and (relative) safety, or
- b) Send them out into the most unstable part of the world, surrounded by tens of thousands of natives who resent their presence and spend much of their time shooting at them, bombing them, and otherwise making their lives a misery?
Huh?'BLUE' HAS AN 'E' IN IT!!!
Thank you. I feel better now.
All it shows is that people prefer what they're playing to not listening at all. It doesn't mean there aren't many other things that they'd much rather hear instead.
That doesn't follow. It's only true if the two errors are completely independent, which is a very big 'if'. In practice, the chances are that some types of error are more likely than others, and that the processes/standards/ways of thinking which are common to both will also affect the types of errors they make. All of which makes it more likely that if one engineer has made a particular mistake, another engineer might make that same mistake as well. So the second engineer will catch less than 95% of the first engineer's errors -- maybe a lot less.
Of course, things are far better when there's little or no commonality between the two engineers -- different companies, processes, methods, approaches, and cultures will all help to make their work independent, and help to reduce the errors that get missed. Anyone know if NASA does anything like this?
I believe it's common practice in some mission-critical situations to use three different systems, each built from the ground up by three entirely separate groups of people, with nothing by the specification in common, for exactly this reason.
C++ would be a totally stupid first language; I don't think it's suited as a teaching language at all. Even C is too finicky in many ways.
But Java is a fairly clean language. I'm biased coz I use it a lot, but I'm quite happy with the idea of using it as a teaching language, especially for OO. Its object model is sufficiently similar to C++ &c that the general concepts it teaches will be applicable elsewhere, and its syntax and semantics are simple enough that it shouldn't cause too much head-scratching or wasted time.
So no, I don't think there's anything wrong per se in teaching a professional language, as long as that language is suitably clear and orthogonal that the concepts being taught come over well, and other areas of the language don't interfere.
But no course should teach just one language! I'd suggest at least one strongly-typed and one weakly-typed (e.g. a 'traditional' one and a 'scripting') language, including at least one OO language, and if there's time, a declarative language, a functional one, and some assembler as well. All of these can give valuable insight into the nature of computers, and approaches to problem-solving.
I know what encoding my files use, and I don't want some program hardcoding something different!
(Anyway, a user can change the platform default via environment vars or command-line switches if needed.)
Yes, programmers should certainly be aware that those classes do byte-to-character conversion. But unless they know better, it'll probably be doing the right conversion.
If you don't like televisions being installed and turned on in places like reception areas, then do something constructive: complain to the management, for example. If enough people do this, then maybe they'll change their policy, and everyone will benefit. (And if not enough people do it, then maybe the majority prefer the TV, in which case you have arguably no right to deprive them.)
Either way, using a 'jammer' like this may make you feel good, but it's likely to annoy people without achieving anything in the long term.
Anyway, don't TVs have 'Off' switches these days?