yeah, after the first two systems i built, i was gung ho, and advised all my friends to do the same.
then the one i built last summer... bad motherboard, returned for (payed shipping twice more) bad processor, no response from vendor, had to buy a new one bad harddrive, returned (paid shipping twice more bizarre conflict with soundcard + motherboard
all in all it took nearly an extra month of troubleshooting and dealing with online vendors, and an extra $150, killing any price advantage i had.
in the future, i'm going to a local shop, one that's been around for a while, and getting a custom built box. i may pay an extra $100 or so for it, but i'll know what goes in, and if i need tech support, i'll have a warranty, and only need to drive it over to the shop.
building your own system is fun. i suggest everyone try it once. but there are risks, especially when dealing with the kind of companies that give you the best prices. (www.pricewatch.com)
the tech support you get from the OEMs is aweful, and they use second rate components.
local shops are the way to go. i like a place where 3 years warranty actually means "if at any time in the next 3 years, something breaks, drive it in, and we'll fix it as fast as possible."
3 dimensional spaces are exceptionally strange. there are a large number of theorems that have trivial proofs for 1 or 2 dimensional spaces, and work out very easily for 4 or more, but for some reason, 3-space is highly irregular.
My knowledge of topology isn't terribly deep, so you'll have to ask others for more info.
Actually, even in those cases, there are better algorithms that run in a similar amount of time.
But running time isn't the only consideration.
In applications where speed of production matters more than speed of operation. (Prototyping, scripting, etc. etc.) bubble sort is just fine. it can be coded quickly with minimal debugging.
unless your job is doing data structures all the time, you'll probably have to look up QuickSort and go through a few debug cycles to get the thing working. there are times when this inconvenience outweighs performance considerations.
(for instance, in a timed coding contest, such as the one mentioned the other day, i'd use a simpler sort to save time to concentrate on the more difficult aspects of the program)
of course i'm not advocating this for final, published, software in any case i can think of.
The fresh-outta grad school hipster advertising agent that came up with the idea probably finds it hilariously ironic.
Last year there was a Gatoraid ad with a Monks song in it. *that* surprised me.
but no, commercial radio and music television are more commercial than the ads. at least the ads are honest that they're just selling you something. i'm thankful that there's any good music at all on tv, and usually the commercials they accompany are better than most music videos.
I guess they come up with this stuff for team building retreats etc.
It amazes me that corporations hope to improve moral using the same insulting tricks they tried on us in 7th grade. If they just treated people like adult human beings, you'd see results a lot faster than making by making them clap and sing in unison.
But I wonder... Was there ever an Enron song? I know of some punk bands that would love to do a cover.
actually Gossford Park is a good Blade 2 analogue.
The individual scenes are great, the whole just doesn't add up though. If Blade had been a comic book, it would have gone back for a few re-writes. If Gossford Park were a novel, the author probably would have been a bit more subtle (oh! I wonder who his mother could *be* )
Go to Blade if you want to see fight scenes.
Go to GP if you want brittish people wittily mocking one another and generally acting at their BBC-ish best.
If you want movies that work as a whole rather than just on a scene-by-scene basis, I'd suggest Lord of the Rings for fights, The Panic Room for scares, Royal Tennenbaums for "quality," and Y Tu Mama Tambien for laughs and subtitles.
I'm serious about Y Tu Mama Tambien, it's worth the drive to wherever it's showing remotely near you.
obviously the kid is on apple's side (or was) and wasn't going to do anything against them. if they hadn't done anything about it, it wouldn't be in the news, no problem for them. this is a classic example of a kneejerk, lawyer reaction that nobody thinks to question.
So I'm not a developer, and I don't know that much about programming. (Teaching myself QT 3 for the heck of it, but can't really do much worthwhile)
Anyway here would be my two suggestions:
1) Quit ripping off Microsoft and Apple. or at least think before you do. Using any Linux GUI you can immediately see the areas where the team said "lets make this more like Windows." on the one hand, this makes things more familiar and easy for the new users, but on the other hand, it repeats a bunch of bad and arbitrary GUI conventions that should be re-examined. For instance, in Mozilla by default, there's the same irritating password remember feature as in IE. This should not be a default-on option, the security risk is huge, whoever made that mistake at MS ought to be fired. Why do we continue it?
2) Drop the in-jokes please. Calling everything "GNU-" putting funny little things in the help files etc. etc. etc. we want to convince people that we're making a professional quality product. And nothing spoils that faster than giving the appearance of a hack.
and my suggestion to the non-developing members of the community would be:
spending some of your time filling out bug reports and posting (well thought out, politely worded) suggestions is much more effective than posting "linux roolz" on public news services.
here on Slashdot we like to speculate that Microsoft has hired a group of people to spread anti-opensource FUD in our midsts. the lamers who do nothing but insult "Micro$oft" all the time are the free equivalent.
However, this article is about a scientific study, and in science, especially when talking about an *adaptation* the word "mutation" has a very specific connotation.
1) Nothing is random. Actually logic and science teach you the exact opposite. At a quantum level, everything is random, you don't know if a particular particle will decay at a given moment or not, and as far as science can tell, there is no way of knowing. In larger systems, tiny variables add uncertainty until the system becomes completely unpredictable. We will probably never have accurate 1 year weather forcasts. Theoretically if you knew the position and speed of every particle in the system (note: this is by definition impossible) you could theoretically predict, and perhaps if we knew the exact state of the world at 4 Billion BC, an infinitely powerful computer could predict the outcome of evolution. But since this is unimaginably difficult, the individual events that influence evolution, and the mutations that give it material to work with, are for all intents and purposes "random." *
2) Nothing is absolute, nothing is for sure. An arguable point. According to pragmatic philosophers at the turn of the (last) century, there is no absolute truth, and scientific knowledge in its current state represents the closest thing to an absolute that we have. This philosophy generally fell out of favor by the 30s. I don't really see what it has to do with your point though.
3) Say what? Let me get this straight... if our actions control revolution, we with our brains control evolution? Why, because they rhyme? I'm sorry, but I don't get you here.
Nobody is arguing for a "mysterious force of nature" a mysterious force of nature would imply some sort of push or outside control. Evolution is an almost mathematical trend to all self-replicating systems. In survival situations the best genes survive, and those genes get passed on, making for a more fit next generation. That's all there is, really. Modern alterations to the theory come from discoveries about how the genetic code is structured, how major structural changes can be achieved with the change of just a few genes. All this means is that the process can be faster than we previously thought, but the basic idea remains unchanged from Darwin.
The language of some can confuse the point. It's hard to phrase sentences about evolution that don't make it sound like evolving is something that individual creatures actively do, or that evolution is some giant ghost nudging the little critters in the right direction. The best analogy I can think of is the Adam Smith's invisible hand. (The "force" that generates more wealth in capitalist systems) there is no hand, there is no mysterious force, it's just a typical result of free market economies, it goes with the system. Evolution is just a natural product of populations of reproducing things.
* Here's the source of a very common misconception. While the events that make up evolutionary process are random, the process itself is anything but. Think of an ideal gas, while the individual particles are moving in a basically "random" fashion, the gas itself will expand according to very strict laws. Evolution works on populations. While a mutation or an accident has an effect on the genes of a particular member of this population, for the population as a whole, such chance events work out to be constants in the equation rather than noise that throws the whole thing out of whack. And like gasses, evolution behaves simply and predictably in the lab, throw it out in the wild, where those gasses become warm and cold fronts in a storm system, and predictability goes out the window. Evolution is a chaotic process made of random events, on the short term it is predictable, but due to the system it is in, it rapidly becomes unpredictable. But it is *not* random in the sense of a tornado flying through a scrapyard and creating a 747.
Richard Dawkins does a better job of explaining this than I do.
Abstract
The high bandwidth required by live streaming video greatly limits the
number of clients that can be served by a source. In this work, we
discuss and evaluate an architecture, called SpreadIt, for streaming
live media over a network of clients, using the resources of the clients
themselves. Using SpreadIt, we can distribute bandwidth requirements
over the network. The key challenge is to allow an application level
multicast tree to be easily maintained over a network of transient
peers, while ensuring that quality of service does not degrade. We
propose a basic peering infrastructure layer for streaming applications,
which uses a redirect primitive to meet the challenge successfully.
Through empirical and simulation studies, we show that SpreadIt provides
a good quality of service, which degrades gracefully with increasing
number of clients. Perhaps more significantly, existing applications can
be made to work with SpreadIt, without any change to their code base.
The paper is more about solving the problems with streaming multicasts. That is, it is prohibitively expensive for small time providers to stream to more than a few users.
I work for an unlicensed college radio station, and since our broadcast radius is so small, we stream everything with RealAudio (not my choice) once we hit about 20 online listeners or so, things start crapping out.
We're upgrading our server, but that won't change things dramatically. This paper suggests a way that high bandwidth listeners could relay the stream and reduce the server's load. It uses P2P software, but the focus is streaming.
You're forgetting the bizarre engineering constraints that NASA faces.
It's cheaper for them to use 1 pound of $10,000 material than 10 pounds of free material
Lifting a hydroponic greenhouse large enough to sustain a whole ship's crew into orbit would be ridiculously expensive, not to even mention the inertia it would add, making actually getting anywhere that much harder.
so yes, a 100 pound multi-million dollar experimental meat vat makes a lot more sense than a cheap, regular, garden.
I mean after all, there seems to be no shortage of people whose only contribution to the Open Source movement is to spread FUD about commercial software.
Windows is only intuitive to you because you know how to use it already. Try taking someone who's never used a computer before and teaching them to use it. Nothing makes any sense, you click start to shut down, the same menus don't contain the same options in different programs, there are a thousand different ways to change settings.
Of course every single Linux window manager has all of these problems as well. It seems very silly to me that while condeming Microsoft, we knock ourselves out trying to ape their functionality. The new Mandrake even advertises a more Outlook-like email client.
I would love to see a WM based around actually simple and intuitive design, not just copying the 15 year old accepted ways of doing GUI.
I hate the people who only like bands because they're underground. I was talking to a guy about the Strokes the other day and he said "yeah I saw 'em a few times and I really liked them, but then vanity fair started writing about them, so forget that."
you should like something or use something because *it works for you* not because it is "alternative" or "underground" or anything else. If windows is working for you, then don't switch to Linux because it's "cool." switch to Linux because it's a better product.
For the best in laptop assisted musical extravaganzas, I suggest you catch CEX. He's currently touring with the Dismemberment Plan and Deathcab for Cutie (two excellent bands)
If you've never heard and MC proclaim "People say I have a Messiah complex / but, I forgive them" or rap an ode to bmx bikes, you haven't lived.
Download Moz 9.9 and IE 6.0 and compare for yourself.
The only thing that MS is faster at is startup, and this is comparing Win32 to Win32. Moz is even faster on Linux.
I use Moz as my Windows browser 99% of the time, the only time I load up IE is to test pages I design for compatibility, and to view corporate sites that insist on using non-standard HTML. ("Best viewed with IE = Not W3C compliant")
Slashdot Mirror
yeah, after the first two systems i built, i was gung ho, and advised all my friends to do the same.
then the one i built last summer...
bad motherboard, returned for (payed shipping twice more)
bad processor, no response from vendor, had to buy a new one
bad harddrive, returned (paid shipping twice more
bizarre conflict with soundcard + motherboard
all in all it took nearly an extra month of troubleshooting and dealing with online vendors, and an extra $150, killing any price advantage i had.
in the future, i'm going to a local shop, one that's been around for a while, and getting a custom built box. i may pay an extra $100 or so for it, but i'll know what goes in, and if i need tech support, i'll have a warranty, and only need to drive it over to the shop.
building your own system is fun. i suggest everyone try it once. but there are risks, especially when dealing with the kind of companies that give you the best prices. (www.pricewatch.com)
the tech support you get from the OEMs is aweful, and they use second rate components.
local shops are the way to go. i like a place where 3 years warranty actually means "if at any time in the next 3 years, something breaks, drive it in, and we'll fix it as fast as possible."
as Thelonious Monk once said "Simple ain't easy"
yes, but most math is based on Peano and Euclid (or variations)
those axioms are pretty hard to deny.
3 dimensional spaces are exceptionally strange. there are a large number of theorems that have trivial proofs for 1 or 2 dimensional spaces, and work out very easily for 4 or more, but for some reason, 3-space is highly irregular.
My knowledge of topology isn't terribly deep, so you'll have to ask others for more info.
"[We'll] get Microsoft involved. They have lots of experience with data corruption."
You can say that again!
if you are a company and you're satisfied with not owning the world, you end up being owned by one who isn't.
modern capitalism is a hot dog eating contest: you gotta be the biggest and the fastest, or there's no point in even sitting down at the table.
Actually, even in those cases, there are better algorithms that run in a similar amount of time.
But running time isn't the only consideration.
In applications where speed of production matters more than speed of operation. (Prototyping, scripting, etc. etc.) bubble sort is just fine. it can be coded quickly with minimal debugging.
unless your job is doing data structures all the time, you'll probably have to look up QuickSort and go through a few debug cycles to get the thing working. there are times when this inconvenience outweighs performance considerations.
(for instance, in a timed coding contest, such as the one mentioned the other day, i'd use a simpler sort to save time to concentrate on the more difficult aspects of the program)
of course i'm not advocating this for final, published, software in any case i can think of.
The fresh-outta grad school hipster advertising agent that came up with the idea probably finds it hilariously ironic.
Last year there was a Gatoraid ad with a Monks song in it. *that* surprised me.
but no, commercial radio and music television are more commercial than the ads. at least the ads are honest that they're just selling you something. i'm thankful that there's any good music at all on tv, and usually the commercials they accompany are better than most music videos.
I guess they come up with this stuff for team building retreats etc.
It amazes me that corporations hope to improve moral using the same insulting tricks they tried on us in 7th grade. If they just treated people like adult human beings, you'd see results a lot faster than making by making them clap and sing in unison.
But I wonder...
Was there ever an Enron song? I know of some punk bands that would love to do a cover.
actually Gossford Park is a good Blade 2 analogue.
The individual scenes are great, the whole just doesn't add up though. If Blade had been a comic book, it would have gone back for a few re-writes. If Gossford Park were a novel, the author probably would have been a bit more subtle (oh! I wonder who his mother could *be* )
Go to Blade if you want to see fight scenes.
Go to GP if you want brittish people wittily mocking one another and generally acting at their BBC-ish best.
If you want movies that work as a whole rather than just on a scene-by-scene basis, I'd suggest Lord of the Rings for fights, The Panic Room for scares, Royal Tennenbaums for "quality," and Y Tu Mama Tambien for laughs and subtitles.
I'm serious about Y Tu Mama Tambien, it's worth the drive to wherever it's showing remotely near you.
actually they could have ignored it entirely.
obviously the kid is on apple's side (or was) and wasn't going to do anything against them. if they hadn't done anything about it, it wouldn't be in the news, no problem for them. this is a classic example of a kneejerk, lawyer reaction that nobody thinks to question.
So I'm not a developer, and I don't know that much about programming. (Teaching myself QT 3 for the heck of it, but can't really do much worthwhile)
Anyway here would be my two suggestions:
1) Quit ripping off Microsoft and Apple. or at least think before you do. Using any Linux GUI you can immediately see the areas where the team said "lets make this more like Windows." on the one hand, this makes things more familiar and easy for the new users, but on the other hand, it repeats a bunch of bad and arbitrary GUI conventions that should be re-examined. For instance, in Mozilla by default, there's the same irritating password remember feature as in IE. This should not be a default-on option, the security risk is huge, whoever made that mistake at MS ought to be fired. Why do we continue it?
2) Drop the in-jokes please. Calling everything "GNU-" putting funny little things in the help files etc. etc. etc. we want to convince people that we're making a professional quality product. And nothing spoils that faster than giving the appearance of a hack.
and my suggestion to the non-developing members of the community would be:
spending some of your time filling out bug reports and posting (well thought out, politely worded) suggestions is much more effective than posting "linux roolz" on public news services.
here on Slashdot we like to speculate that Microsoft has hired a group of people to spread anti-opensource FUD in our midsts. the lamers who do nothing but insult "Micro$oft" all the time are the free equivalent.
However, this article is about a scientific study, and in science, especially when talking about an *adaptation* the word "mutation" has a very specific connotation.
They could have easily phrased themselves better.
A Refutation:
1) Nothing is random. Actually logic and science teach you the exact opposite. At a quantum level, everything is random, you don't know if a particular particle will decay at a given moment or not, and as far as science can tell, there is no way of knowing. In larger systems, tiny variables add uncertainty until the system becomes completely unpredictable. We will probably never have accurate 1 year weather forcasts. Theoretically if you knew the position and speed of every particle in the system (note: this is by definition impossible) you could theoretically predict, and perhaps if we knew the exact state of the world at 4 Billion BC, an infinitely powerful computer could predict the outcome of evolution. But since this is unimaginably difficult, the individual events that influence evolution, and the mutations that give it material to work with, are for all intents and purposes "random." *
2) Nothing is absolute, nothing is for sure. An arguable point. According to pragmatic philosophers at the turn of the (last) century, there is no absolute truth, and scientific knowledge in its current state represents the closest thing to an absolute that we have. This philosophy generally fell out of favor by the 30s. I don't really see what it has to do with your point though.
3) Say what? Let me get this straight... if our actions control revolution, we with our brains control evolution? Why, because they rhyme? I'm sorry, but I don't get you here.
Nobody is arguing for a "mysterious force of nature" a mysterious force of nature would imply some sort of push or outside control. Evolution is an almost mathematical trend to all self-replicating systems. In survival situations the best genes survive, and those genes get passed on, making for a more fit next generation. That's all there is, really. Modern alterations to the theory come from discoveries about how the genetic code is structured, how major structural changes can be achieved with the change of just a few genes. All this means is that the process can be faster than we previously thought, but the basic idea remains unchanged from Darwin.
The language of some can confuse the point. It's hard to phrase sentences about evolution that don't make it sound like evolving is something that individual creatures actively do, or that evolution is some giant ghost nudging the little critters in the right direction. The best analogy I can think of is the Adam Smith's invisible hand. (The "force" that generates more wealth in capitalist systems) there is no hand, there is no mysterious force, it's just a typical result of free market economies, it goes with the system. Evolution is just a natural product of populations of reproducing things.
* Here's the source of a very common misconception. While the events that make up evolutionary process are random, the process itself is anything but. Think of an ideal gas, while the individual particles are moving in a basically "random" fashion, the gas itself will expand according to very strict laws. Evolution works on populations. While a mutation or an accident has an effect on the genes of a particular member of this population, for the population as a whole, such chance events work out to be constants in the equation rather than noise that throws the whole thing out of whack. And like gasses, evolution behaves simply and predictably in the lab, throw it out in the wild, where those gasses become warm and cold fronts in a storm system, and predictability goes out the window. Evolution is a chaotic process made of random events, on the short term it is predictable, but due to the system it is in, it rapidly becomes unpredictable. But it is *not* random in the sense of a tornado flying through a scrapyard and creating a 747.
Richard Dawkins does a better job of explaining this than I do.
Abstract
The high bandwidth required by live streaming video greatly limits the number of clients that can be served by a source. In this work, we discuss and evaluate an architecture, called SpreadIt, for streaming live media over a network of clients, using the resources of the clients themselves. Using SpreadIt, we can distribute bandwidth requirements over the network. The key challenge is to allow an application level multicast tree to be easily maintained over a network of transient peers, while ensuring that quality of service does not degrade. We propose a basic peering infrastructure layer for streaming applications, which uses a redirect primitive to meet the challenge successfully. Through empirical and simulation studies, we show that SpreadIt provides a good quality of service, which degrades gracefully with increasing number of clients. Perhaps more significantly, existing applications can be made to work with SpreadIt, without any change to their code base. The paper is more about solving the problems with streaming multicasts. That is, it is prohibitively expensive for small time providers to stream to more than a few users.
I work for an unlicensed college radio station, and since our broadcast radius is so small, we stream everything with RealAudio (not my choice) once we hit about 20 online listeners or so, things start crapping out.
We're upgrading our server, but that won't change things dramatically. This paper suggests a way that high bandwidth listeners could relay the stream and reduce the server's load. It uses P2P software, but the focus is streaming.
You're forgetting the bizarre engineering constraints that NASA faces.
It's cheaper for them to use 1 pound of $10,000 material than 10 pounds of free material
Lifting a hydroponic greenhouse large enough to sustain a whole ship's crew into orbit would be ridiculously expensive, not to even mention the inertia it would add, making actually getting anywhere that much harder.
so yes, a 100 pound multi-million dollar experimental meat vat makes a lot more sense than a cheap, regular, garden.
I mean after all, there seems to be no shortage of people whose only contribution to the Open Source movement is to spread FUD about commercial software.
Windows is only intuitive to you because you know how to use it already. Try taking someone who's never used a computer before and teaching them to use it. Nothing makes any sense, you click start to shut down, the same menus don't contain the same options in different programs, there are a thousand different ways to change settings.
Of course every single Linux window manager has all of these problems as well. It seems very silly to me that while condeming Microsoft, we knock ourselves out trying to ape their functionality. The new Mandrake even advertises a more Outlook-like email client.
I would love to see a WM based around actually simple and intuitive design, not just copying the 15 year old accepted ways of doing GUI.
Limewire is just gnutella right? How about just downloading a different Windows gnutella client?
I'm reminded of an Onion editorial:
"I'm not afraid to try new and popular things"
"mainly because alternate OSs are cool."
oh no, please God no.
I hate the people who only like bands because they're underground. I was talking to a guy about the Strokes the other day and he said "yeah I saw 'em a few times and I really liked them, but then vanity fair started writing about them, so forget that."
you should like something or use something because *it works for you* not because it is "alternative" or "underground" or anything else. If windows is working for you, then don't switch to Linux because it's "cool." switch to Linux because it's a better product.
I'm new to the whole Linux thing. I've been downloading the latest iso's of the various distros. Once I find one that suits me, I plan to pay.
For the best in laptop assisted musical extravaganzas, I suggest you catch CEX. He's currently touring with the Dismemberment Plan and Deathcab for Cutie (two excellent bands)
If you've never heard and MC proclaim "People say I have a Messiah complex / but, I forgive them" or rap an ode to bmx bikes, you haven't lived.
of course that was 0.99
but if Moz numbered like MS, where the first semi-stable build was 4.0, that probably wouldn't be too far off the mark.
Download Moz 9.9 and IE 6.0 and compare for yourself.
The only thing that MS is faster at is startup, and this is comparing Win32 to Win32. Moz is even faster on Linux.
I use Moz as my Windows browser 99% of the time, the only time I load up IE is to test pages I design for compatibility, and to view corporate sites that insist on using non-standard HTML. ("Best viewed with IE = Not W3C compliant")