As the Cheif Scientist of a Big Name Physics Laboratory, I have to do a lot of hiring of physicists, janitors and programmers. While MIT is an adequate school for physics or janitorial supply ordering procedures (though CalTech is really the best for both), without fail the worst programmers I see came from MIT. If you are going to learn to program (and in today's economy, I actually don't recommend that) please steer clear of MIT.
and part-time mathematician, I have to agree with this: The geeks amongst us should use this commonality to rise up and use our voice for progress and not petty squabbling.
Ever since the days of the caveman and the invention of the fire and wheel by the First Geek, Man has been arguing and warring. All arguments are based on misunderstandings, which indicates that two suitably intelligent people would always get along. For too long we have been trying to educate the stupider among us to reach this ideal state and I say that now is the time to give up.
Geeks! Abandon your non-geek wives/husbands and friends! Come with me into the wilderness where we will forge a new society based on intelligence and anime! We will eat naught but pizza and drink naught but Mountain Dew! We may be smelly, but dammit, we won't need tech support numbers either! You have nothing to lose but your dignity!
Significant new facts are coming to light in regards to cancer-causing radiation from cellphones. These facts are turning out to be difficult to dispute because of the high integrity and completeness of the scientists and their research. Even some mobile companies are starting to rethink their position on what have become known as "handheld nukes".
So, while I would love to have an integrated PDA/cellphone, I have to ask first: How safe is it?
They froze the person in liquid nitrogen and then photographed him from the top. Then they shaved off a thin layer and photographed again. They continued until they worked their way down his body to the bottoms of his heels.
This would be a great method because not only would you be guaranteed not to miss anything, but you'd all see all the old construction techniques inside the walls and stuff (and maybe find hidden treasure!).
We don't see genetic algorithms and evolutionarily-created software taking over the software industry. If it was truly better, you think we would see some startup in a meteoric rise or at least see some "old" companies like MS taking advantage of it. Instead the entire world of practical software is based on a creationism model, where a master designer plans and executes each step.
I think this is an important demonstration of the lack of real substance to Darwin's ideas. Perhaps those inefficiencies in the human body (appendix and so forth) are really just bugs or backwards compatibility modules in an engineered product.
As for USB, there's a problem. Recall your electronics. A rapidly oscillating charge creates electromagnetic waves, i.e. radio. For normal computer devices this is no big deal. But for high speed USB, conducted over an unshielded cable, this means that all your data is going to be transmitted out to the world, just like it would be over 802.11b.
Three dimensional vectors are composed of three numbers. 2d vectors have two. This much is obvious. What's slightly less obvious is that moving from 3d to 2d results in a loss of information (50%, in fact). If any of you followed the Shannon story from the other day you'd know that Loss of information = increase in entropy = heat. Therefore, when you hit the switch to move from 3d to 2d mode, your computer is going to get hot. Exactly how hot will be dictated by the amount of data on-screen and in-memory but my back of the envelope calculations here indicate that it will be roughly 3 GeV. Assuming a tower-sized case and 19" monitor made of metal and plastic, that translates to a 50F increase, which would probably melt the thing.
So I call hoax.
Slashdot is all grown up
on
Slashdot Turns 5
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I remember back in the day when Slashdot would post stories about degenerate companies that used proxies and firewalls to block people from certain sites and when evil corporations would censor their bulletin boards to erase any dissension. It was a heady time, full of youth and idealism.
But I'm glad to see Slashdot has matured since then. Now they realize that sometimes banning someone's netblock is just plain necessary when that person is posting non-factual information. If some innocent net neighbors are gagged for a few days, that's simply the price we pay for informational freedom. And deleting posts, while morally abhorrent, is the only way to keep ourselves from accidentally reading a 3 page long "taco snotting" FAQ.
Thank you, Slashdot, for making the trains run on time.
The Spanish "scientist" is obviously a green whacko. He even contradicts himself. Are the skys clear or are they filled with ice blocks and ice clouds? And what's with the sizes jumping around, from 10 kg to 16 kg to 300 kg?
I think it's clear from inspection that this is just not happening and we don't need to investigate any further.
You see, the only way for non-Windows to beat Windows is for every single person to create their own operating system with slightly different interpretations of the standards. Once this low-level heterogeneity exists, software companies will need to create slightly different versions of each of their products to sell to us (or we could each create our own IRC client, calendar app, webmail frontend, etc). This virtually guarantees our freedom as well as making us immune to virii and girlfriends.
It has become a truism that the internet "treats censorship like damage and routes around it" and in general I agree. This feature is possible because of the decentralized (nowadays called "P2P") nature of TCP/IP. What I would like to know is, what are your feelings about services built on top of TCP/IP that are NOT decentralized (but could be)?
Obviously it would be difficult to make a web page "available from anywhere", that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm talking about a site like Slashdot. It professes to be an open, community-moderated discussion site. Yet in reality it suffers from a top-down moderation scheme (with a tiny bit of distributed moderation thrown in). Does Slashdot's moderation system follow the open principles of the Internet? In general, would you say that people who try to exert fascist control over what is essentially a public forum are kinda...stupid?
I use KDE myself and have for years, so I can't speak to the accuracy of this review, but I found the below very helpful.
From the article: "I fully expected KDE to blow GNOME out of the water (because they follow good engineering and UI design standards) but even I was shocked at the shoddy state of the GNOME code. It was like looking at a trainwreck. No wonder RedHat is starting to edge away from this embarassment."
You will be able to play DVDs on your mp3 as much as you want without crashing UT Quake. However, I suggest you avoid GPL 8.1, due out next month, because it has a clause that requires planned obsolescence.
Just in case there are people who don't get it, tps12 is confusing several things. Here's the real breakdown:
X Windows, which is the graphical design environment of Linux, is at version 3.
Because of this, Linus Torvalds is thinking of calling the next version of the kernel[1] version 3.0 as well to reduce confusion.
What RedHat is releasing is Linux 2.4 with GPL version 8.0.
[1] The software that provides math emulation, graphical buffers, virtualized serialization and any other odds and ends that the chip microware doesn't provide by itself,
3d displays cannot work
on
3D LCD Display
·
· Score: 0, Funny
Let me enlighten you on a few vision science basics.
Objects are perceived as the same distance away when light takes the same amount of time to traverse from each of the objects. Therefore you can imagine the world as a series of concentric spheres about your eyes, each sphere representing a "plane" of distance. In order to create the illusion of 3d on a 2d surface, it is required that the light traversal time be increased for those parts of the scene that are to be perceived as "deep". The problem is, while there are ways to make light go slower, the thickness of a sheet of paper (or even a computer monitor) isn't enough space in which to do it.
Therefore, until some fundamental hurdles are overcome, 3d computing is only a pipedream.
Linux has a tool called Kudzu that detects hardware really well. I bought a new videocard, a Banshee, and it found it right away and configured it for me. It also told me what programs would need to reconfigured including one called "X". Linux 8.0 is due out on Monday, you should check it out.
That their plan to fight against globalization is to ship high-tech devices "downhill" (economically speaking) from the US to Ecuador. This is exactly what multi-national companies do but I guess this is a "good cause" so who cares about the means...
As much as I enjoy helping people, this isn't really very good news for Linux from a marketing perspective. "Media activists" are generally hairy-armpitted girls and non-shower-taking guys. And "free computer clinic" brings to mind a dank, messy and smelly closet with an aging clunker of a PC inside. Do we really want computer students in Ecuador (and the US, for that matter) thinking of Linux as the bottom of the barrel that will be replaced with "standard Windows" when they have the money?
CPAN is one of the coolest inventions of the Internet Age. First of all, it makes Perl even more usuable by putting programmers in touch with the hundreds and thousands of other little tiny script writers out there, allowing us to pool our knowledge and perhaps create something useful from this report-writing language. Second, check out the cool step-by-step HOWTO use CPAN:
1) Try to remember the command for accessing CPAN. It isn't cpan--that would be too easy.
2) Run it.
3) Realize that, because you aren't in the ivory-tower college environment, you will need to figure out the difference between "firewall" and "proxy" settings, both of which work differently, if they work at all.
4) Figure out how to search for a module.
5) Request module be downloaded
6) Wait for module download to timeout so it moves to the next site (you may have to do this a few dozen times)
7) Tell module to install itself
8) Reinstall Linux because module hosed your system.
When only %10 of people have DSL, those people are kings among men. They can download the small pages faster, they have their pick of self-hosted domain names and they win all the good online games.
Once Joe Sixpack is able to get DSL, stupid web "designers" will bloat their pages even more, little MacKenzie will register great domain names to show us pictures of her Barbies and little Billy will set up his UT bot, preventing us from having any fun.
I say keep the price high. It keeps out the losers.
It's too bad that Slashdot (and other geeks sites, like MSNBC) have to use such impenetrable techno-jargon in their writeups. The public is not well served by this kind of obscurantism. One of the number one issues facing America today the terrible understanding that Americans have of American technology.
You know how children's TV shows are required to display good moral lessons and homilies about stewardship and good citizenship? I would be in favor of a measure that would require TV programs, like Friends, to insert adult-educational tidbits into the dialogue. They do this to some extent with Ross' excellent paleological viewpoint and I think we can attribute the popular success of movies like Jurassic Park to our increased understand of dinosaurs from this innocent-seeming sitcom.
Back to the point, I think/. should embark on a writing campaign to the networks they patronize, offering to serve as technical guides for the creation of Will & Grace episodes that contain deep insights into Computer Science.
I just noticed that they even made code changes to both platforms to "take advantage of underlying technology". This top-level mandate entirely short-circuits the user-driven Open Source process.
Slashdot Mirror
As the Cheif Scientist of a Big Name Physics Laboratory, I have to do a lot of hiring of physicists, janitors and programmers. While MIT is an adequate school for physics or janitorial supply ordering procedures (though CalTech is really the best for both), without fail the worst programmers I see came from MIT. If you are going to learn to program (and in today's economy, I actually don't recommend that) please steer clear of MIT.
Ever since the days of the caveman and the invention of the fire and wheel by the First Geek, Man has been arguing and warring. All arguments are based on misunderstandings, which indicates that two suitably intelligent people would always get along. For too long we have been trying to educate the stupider among us to reach this ideal state and I say that now is the time to give up.
Geeks! Abandon your non-geek wives/husbands and friends! Come with me into the wilderness where we will forge a new society based on intelligence and anime! We will eat naught but pizza and drink naught but Mountain Dew! We may be smelly, but dammit, we won't need tech support numbers either! You have nothing to lose but your dignity!
So, while I would love to have an integrated PDA/cellphone, I have to ask first: How safe is it?
This would be a great method because not only would you be guaranteed not to miss anything, but you'd all see all the old construction techniques inside the walls and stuff (and maybe find hidden treasure!).
I think this is an important demonstration of the lack of real substance to Darwin's ideas. Perhaps those inefficiencies in the human body (appendix and so forth) are really just bugs or backwards compatibility modules in an engineered product.
As for USB, there's a problem. Recall your electronics. A rapidly oscillating charge creates electromagnetic waves, i.e. radio. For normal computer devices this is no big deal. But for high speed USB, conducted over an unshielded cable, this means that all your data is going to be transmitted out to the world, just like it would be over 802.11b.
I think I'll stick with null-modem cables.
So I call hoax.
But I'm glad to see Slashdot has matured since then. Now they realize that sometimes banning someone's netblock is just plain necessary when that person is posting non-factual information. If some innocent net neighbors are gagged for a few days, that's simply the price we pay for informational freedom. And deleting posts, while morally abhorrent, is the only way to keep ourselves from accidentally reading a 3 page long "taco snotting" FAQ.
Thank you, Slashdot, for making the trains run on time.
The Spanish "scientist" is obviously a green whacko. He even contradicts himself. Are the skys clear or are they filled with ice blocks and ice clouds? And what's with the sizes jumping around, from 10 kg to 16 kg to 300 kg?
I think it's clear from inspection that this is just not happening and we don't need to investigate any further.
You see, the only way for non-Windows to beat Windows is for every single person to create their own operating system with slightly different interpretations of the standards. Once this low-level heterogeneity exists, software companies will need to create slightly different versions of each of their products to sell to us (or we could each create our own IRC client, calendar app, webmail frontend, etc). This virtually guarantees our freedom as well as making us immune to virii and girlfriends.
It has become a truism that the internet "treats censorship like damage and routes around it" and in general I agree. This feature is possible because of the decentralized (nowadays called "P2P") nature of TCP/IP. What I would like to know is, what are your feelings about services built on top of TCP/IP that are NOT decentralized (but could be)?
Obviously it would be difficult to make a web page "available from anywhere", that's not the kind of thing I'm talking about. I'm talking about a site like Slashdot. It professes to be an open, community-moderated discussion site. Yet in reality it suffers from a top-down moderation scheme (with a tiny bit of distributed moderation thrown in). Does Slashdot's moderation system follow the open principles of the Internet? In general, would you say that people who try to exert fascist control over what is essentially a public forum are kinda...stupid?
From the article: "I fully expected KDE to blow GNOME out of the water (because they follow good engineering and UI design standards) but even I was shocked at the shoddy state of the GNOME code. It was like looking at a trainwreck. No wonder RedHat is starting to edge away from this embarassment."
(I claim an extra 2 "Informatives" by reason that it was the same editor that posted this both times)
You will be able to play DVDs on your mp3 as much as you want without crashing UT Quake. However, I suggest you avoid GPL 8.1, due out next month, because it has a clause that requires planned obsolescence.
[1] The software that provides math emulation, graphical buffers, virtualized serialization and any other odds and ends that the chip microware doesn't provide by itself,
Objects are perceived as the same distance away when light takes the same amount of time to traverse from each of the objects. Therefore you can imagine the world as a series of concentric spheres about your eyes, each sphere representing a "plane" of distance. In order to create the illusion of 3d on a 2d surface, it is required that the light traversal time be increased for those parts of the scene that are to be perceived as "deep". The problem is, while there are ways to make light go slower, the thickness of a sheet of paper (or even a computer monitor) isn't enough space in which to do it.
Therefore, until some fundamental hurdles are overcome, 3d computing is only a pipedream.
Linux has a tool called Kudzu that detects hardware really well. I bought a new videocard, a Banshee, and it found it right away and configured it for me. It also told me what programs would need to reconfigured including one called "X". Linux 8.0 is due out on Monday, you should check it out.
The problem is lack of freedom. The solution is not more restrictions. I will call it whatever the hell I want to.
That their plan to fight against globalization is to ship high-tech devices "downhill" (economically speaking) from the US to Ecuador. This is exactly what multi-national companies do but I guess this is a "good cause" so who cares about the means...
As much as I enjoy helping people, this isn't really very good news for Linux from a marketing perspective. "Media activists" are generally hairy-armpitted girls and non-shower-taking guys. And "free computer clinic" brings to mind a dank, messy and smelly closet with an aging clunker of a PC inside. Do we really want computer students in Ecuador (and the US, for that matter) thinking of Linux as the bottom of the barrel that will be replaced with "standard Windows" when they have the money?
1) Try to remember the command for accessing CPAN. It isn't cpan--that would be too easy.
2) Run it.
3) Realize that, because you aren't in the ivory-tower college environment, you will need to figure out the difference between "firewall" and "proxy" settings, both of which work differently, if they work at all.
4) Figure out how to search for a module.
5) Request module be downloaded
6) Wait for module download to timeout so it moves to the next site (you may have to do this a few dozen times)
7) Tell module to install itself
8) Reinstall Linux because module hosed your system.
Once Joe Sixpack is able to get DSL, stupid web "designers" will bloat their pages even more, little MacKenzie will register great domain names to show us pictures of her Barbies and little Billy will set up his UT bot, preventing us from having any fun.
I say keep the price high. It keeps out the losers.
You know how children's TV shows are required to display good moral lessons and homilies about stewardship and good citizenship? I would be in favor of a measure that would require TV programs, like Friends, to insert adult-educational tidbits into the dialogue. They do this to some extent with Ross' excellent paleological viewpoint and I think we can attribute the popular success of movies like Jurassic Park to our increased understand of dinosaurs from this innocent-seeming sitcom.
Back to the point, I think /. should embark on a writing campaign to the networks they patronize, offering to serve as technical guides for the creation of Will & Grace episodes that contain deep insights into Computer Science.
[me@myRHbox]$ rm -rf /