Try GNU-Octave, a fine software with a similar interface.
If all you do is stick to the text part of Matlab. There's a lot of helpful guides (menus and such) that come with Matlab.
(I've only used either a small amount, so I didn't always know it as well as I'd like and the aids came in handy.)
If you want to plot Column E vs Column C in Excel, to the best of my knowledge, you are SOL in Excel
You're not SOL. Excel uses the same idiom as almost every graphical toolkit on every OS for doing multiple selections, ctrl+click. Want to select A1 and C3 only? Click A1, ctrl+click C3. Want to select columns A and C? Click the column header for A, then ctrl+click the column header for C.
Granted, I think this is not common knowledge and MS odesn't go out of their way to make it known, but the actual process I think can't be improved.
(Incidentally, in Word you can select discontiguous regions in the same manner.)
Oh yeah, and I think you could also manually type in the ranges in the chart wizard, though I'm too lazy to try that now.
No arbitrary limits on the number of columns/row, besides your hardware
You sure about that?
I bet that if I were to take a look at the Octave source (or Matlab), that 1, 2, 3, and 5 you entered are stored as ints. That means an artifical limit of 4 billion.
Granted, it's a damn high artifical limit, but it's an artifical limit nonetheless.
4. More power: you can plot rows against rows rather than just doing columns against columns, etc etc (plot x(1,:),x(2:,)) will do the trick
If you put 1/10 the time you spent learning the matlab into just playing with Excel's, you'd know that plotting rows vs. rows is just as easy as columns vs. columns. If you choose a X-Y scatter plot and have, say, a 2x3 area selected, it will plot the top row as X and bottom row as Y. If you have 3x2 selected, it'll plot the left column as X and right column as Y.
If you have a 2x2 square selected... a radio button selection "series in ()row ()column" works "right".
You might be able to do some things in Visual Basic, but is it cross platform? Will it work 10 years from now?
I have a suspicion that everything I said here is applicable to almost every decent spreadsheet out there. For instance, the only change if you move to OpenOffice Calc is that if your data is in rows it won't detect it and you have to manually change to series in rows.
Come on, if you're storing that much data in a spreadsheet, it's GOING to cause troubles
You mean it DID cause troubles; there's no reason why it must.
The thing that so many of you seem to be forgetting is it's not Excel or database. You can have Excel AND database.
You don't always need both. Just like Excel isn't a hammer that shouldn't be used to do everything, nor is Excel+DB. For something quick and dirty, Excel alone might do all right, and be worth not going through the overhead of using a db.
If you throw all that data into a spreadsheet blossoming into > 20MB sizes and decide to solve the problem by buying Office 2007 just so you get more rows...
True, this is a lousy reason to upgrade. But it's still a worthwhile and potentially useful improvement....you WILL regret it down the road.
What if there is no "down the road" and it's just a one-off thing?
No, he's thinking of the original copyrigt terms, but getting the number wrong. (It was 14 years.) Unless the 17 was supposed to be not the copyright breakpoint.
Of course, when he says "by rights" he means what he thinks his rights should be.
Civilization and culture flourished for thousands of years, and we've only had copyright for about a hundred.
If by insanely long copyright terms", much less than a hundred. If you mean copyright in general, you're completely wrong. Copyright (& patents) are written into our (I am assuming you're from the US; if not, I apologize and adjust the pronouns accordingly) Constitution. You know, the one that is about 219 years old. And you think our founding fathers got the idea, you should look back further. Say, at the 1710 Statute of Ann. Earlier than that, there were other forms of copyright in place. This means that you are at least off by about 200%.
And then we get to the point about there being far less need for copyright much previous. How are you going to copy a book for instance before the printing press?
I, for one, like to purchase things once and be done with it. If i have to buy it on credit, that is one thing - a house or car is a major purchase. but music does not require long term financial consideration.
Then buy it. It's not like they stopped offering CDs or iTunes. But some people will find it more convienient to rent. For instance, I will be moving into an apartment soon.
"Renting" music, no matter how you see it or DRM, is entirely different that buying on credit, and there are plenty of reasons why you might want a model like that.
A commander-in-chief who is committed to this conflict
But who only has another 2 1/2 years to win, something that is far from certain will happen, and has a growing unrest with his policies at home.
Our training of the Iraqi National Army so they can stand up to the insurgents when we leave.
Which has been working *so* well so far
The fact that most of the insurgents are driven to fight by our very prescence. When we leave, much of the motivation for the majority of terrorist groups in Iraq leaves with us.
Either you're wrong, or the insurgents are pretty stupid. Because if they agreed with you, then their best course of action would be to stop fighting for a few weeks. So either they don't agree that they just want us out of Iraq, or they are too obtuse to recognize the shortest path to their goal. Which do you think it is?
It matters if you're assigning blame, but if the service sucks I'm not going to use it. I wouldn't go "oh, well, Vonage gets an A for effort" and use it anyway, I'd change to something that works.
Really? I have my doubts that it could be unobtrusive. The actual encryption/signing of mail could be done invisibly or nearly, but what about key management? You need some sort of web of trust. Which means you need to tell the system who you trust to sign keys, and how much. I don't think there's any automated way around that, which means that you MUST put the burden on the user. And explaining what they are doing (setting up the "web of trust" or whatever you want to call it) is NOT going to be an easy task. I've read about it and other PKIs, and I still don't know all the details. (And the user WOULD have to know what they are doing to do it correctly; a poorly set up web of trust could be just as bad (if not worse, because you think you're safe) than no encryption at all.)
Apple, this coming winter I'm buying a X41 or successor. (Probably -- there are some drawbacks I don't like about it, like the lack of a touchpad, but the overall construction of IBM laptops will probably overshadow them.) If you announce a tablet before then, I guarantee that I will not purchase the IBM until yours is released and I have a chance to try it. There's a decent chance I'll buy it. Which will be my "switch" so to speak. (Though I think I'll stay with PCs and Linux for my future desktops.)
-EvanED
But seriously, are they working on a tablet? Not known? Too secret? But if not, why not?
a. Use Nvidia's driver, unless your philosophy is to run absolutely nothing propriatary.
b. Are you really going to be running Linux on a Macbook? If you're not a free software only person, OS X probably gives you most of what you want from Linux, and if you are a free software only person you're not going to be running OS X anyway so might as well get a PC laptop.
My standard uptime for my XP box during the school year (when I didn't shut it down at night because of noise issues) was a couple weeks too. When I had to reboot, it was usually because of a Windows update. Again, reasonably well-cared for. I've seen a blue screen on my machine only a few times, mostly caused by my TV Wonder.
There was CmdrTaco's proposal if you didn't see it...
Your ID is lower than mine and I remember that story so it's very possible that you did, but in case not, and also for any third parties who didn't see it, I bring it up.
keep the spelling the same if you mean to refer to the same thing
Camel casing is an exception to this rule. Making it so that the M at the "beginning" of the identifier was caps would break consistency with other identifiers. And unless there really is a distinction between Mega and mega, and both had meanings within the code, I think the latter is more important.
I'd rather know too. But, take a risk-benefit analysis. If there is a widespread vulnerabiblity and it's not being exploited, probably black hats don't know about it. If you then release the exploit, they can start expoliting it. Even if YOU would take steps to prevent, many others wouldn't because they don't keep on top of third party security alerts and fixes. The person releasing the exploit must worry about them too. Also, even if you say every man for himself and if they don't patch then they deserve what they get, then you could still be affected by excess network traffic (think code red), DOS attacks, etc.
I'm not opposed at all to saying "hey, I found a vulnerability in the RPC server, you should turn it off at least until MS releases a patch", but I am definitely opposed to saying "hey, I found a vulnerability in the RPC server, and here's a proof-of-concept exploit" before the vendor has a chance to patch. Doing so is, IMO, irresponsibly and the Internet equivalent to antisocial behavior.
Don't go around strutting Mythbusters as good proof of anything. It's good TV, and you can learn a lot from it, but as far as scientific conclusions go it's usually pretty bad.
(One egregious example -- which is a pity because it's something that would actually be useful to know -- was when they were testing gas mileage of windows down vs. A/C. They "busted" the myth that a/c is more efficient then decreasing the aerodynamics of your car. But they did so by running the a/c at it's highest setting, causing whoever was driving it to comment on being cold despite wearing a hat, scarf, and gloves! Yeah, real useful result guys. It would have also been nice to test it on a car that was also aerodynamic already instead of a SUV.)
I'd personally be surprised if a cell phone would cause interference in anything but the dinkiest of sport planes, and if you're in one of them there's a good chance you're flying VFR anyway. But it is a somewhat reasonable concern -- when I had a cell phone (I dropped coverage for a while) I could always tell it was going to ring because my speakers would make a popping noise and (if I had it on) my TV would go staticy. Phones DO cause quite a bit of interference to things that aren't shielded.
I think he's saying they can tell them there is a problem, but not tell them what the problem is.
Not according to the blurb ("InfoWorld.com reports that Independent researcher Tom Ferris said there were still holes in Safari, QuickTime, and iTunes that he reported to Apple") or the article ("the latest patch doesn't cover other critical holes he reported to Apple").
If you find there is a flaw in all cars which could cause them to spontaniously explode, should you have to wait until the car companies fix the problem before you tell anyone?
Your analogy is flawed because general knowledge of the problem won't increase the probability that they'll spontaneously explode. Releasing information about an exploit MAY reveal it to bad guys as well. And just as a lot of the time black hats find vulnerabilities before white hats, a lot of the time the white hats are no doubt first. And in those cases, you DON'T want to release information.
My general thought I think is somewhat the norm. If you find a vulnerability, report it only to the company. Give them a "reasonable" time to patch it. (Defining what is reasonable is the hard part. Maybe a couple weeks? For MS, I'd say wait until after the first "patch tuesday" after a week or two from when you notify them. For other vendors that follow a similar schedule, wait until the corresponding time.) If they patch it within that period, wait another couple weeks for the patches to spread to at least a fair number of machines. After those weeks, or if a patch ISN'T released, or if a black hat exploit is released at any point in the process (including the patch development stage), release information. It's sorta complicated, but each rule is there for a reason.
Reread the article. Nothing has changed, unless the article left something out, from the end of who breaks in. The kid who changes his grades would be tried under the same laws as he would be today. (And, I would argue, rightfully so if he's in college, which he is if he's hacking a system with 10K students.)
The changes in the laws effect the owner of the system which was hacked, not whoever hacked it.
Slashdot Mirror
Try GNU-Octave, a fine software with a similar interface.
:-p
If all you do is stick to the text part of Matlab. There's a lot of helpful guides (menus and such) that come with Matlab.
(I've only used either a small amount, so I didn't always know it as well as I'd like and the aids came in handy.)
If you want to plot Column E vs Column C in Excel, to the best of my knowledge, you are SOL in Excel
You're not SOL. Excel uses the same idiom as almost every graphical toolkit on every OS for doing multiple selections, ctrl+click. Want to select A1 and C3 only? Click A1, ctrl+click C3. Want to select columns A and C? Click the column header for A, then ctrl+click the column header for C.
Granted, I think this is not common knowledge and MS odesn't go out of their way to make it known, but the actual process I think can't be improved.
(Incidentally, in Word you can select discontiguous regions in the same manner.)
Oh yeah, and I think you could also manually type in the ranges in the chart wizard, though I'm too lazy to try that now.
No arbitrary limits on the number of columns/row, besides your hardware
You sure about that?
I bet that if I were to take a look at the Octave source (or Matlab), that 1, 2, 3, and 5 you entered are stored as ints. That means an artifical limit of 4 billion.
Granted, it's a damn high artifical limit, but it's an artifical limit nonetheless.
4. More power: you can plot rows against rows rather than just doing columns against columns, etc etc (plot x(1,:),x(2:,)) will do the trick
If you put 1/10 the time you spent learning the matlab into just playing with Excel's, you'd know that plotting rows vs. rows is just as easy as columns vs. columns. If you choose a X-Y scatter plot and have, say, a 2x3 area selected, it will plot the top row as X and bottom row as Y. If you have 3x2 selected, it'll plot the left column as X and right column as Y.
If you have a 2x2 square selected... a radio button selection "series in ()row ()column" works "right".
You might be able to do some things in Visual Basic, but is it cross platform? Will it work 10 years from now?
I have a suspicion that everything I said here is applicable to almost every decent spreadsheet out there. For instance, the only change if you move to OpenOffice Calc is that if your data is in rows it won't detect it and you have to manually change to series in rows.
LaTeX + Gnuplot is all that I need anyway...
LaTeX is my God.
Come on, if you're storing that much data in a spreadsheet, it's GOING to cause troubles
...you WILL regret it down the road.
You mean it DID cause troubles; there's no reason why it must.
The thing that so many of you seem to be forgetting is it's not Excel or database. You can have Excel AND database.
You don't always need both. Just like Excel isn't a hammer that shouldn't be used to do everything, nor is Excel+DB. For something quick and dirty, Excel alone might do all right, and be worth not going through the overhead of using a db.
If you throw all that data into a spreadsheet blossoming into > 20MB sizes and decide to solve the problem by buying Office 2007 just so you get more rows...
True, this is a lousy reason to upgrade. But it's still a worthwhile and potentially useful improvement.
What if there is no "down the road" and it's just a one-off thing?
No, he's thinking of the original copyrigt terms, but getting the number wrong. (It was 14 years.) Unless the 17 was supposed to be not the copyright breakpoint.
Of course, when he says "by rights" he means what he thinks his rights should be.
Civilization and culture flourished for thousands of years, and we've only had copyright for about a hundred.
If by insanely long copyright terms", much less than a hundred. If you mean copyright in general, you're completely wrong. Copyright (& patents) are written into our (I am assuming you're from the US; if not, I apologize and adjust the pronouns accordingly) Constitution. You know, the one that is about 219 years old. And you think our founding fathers got the idea, you should look back further. Say, at the 1710 Statute of Ann. Earlier than that, there were other forms of copyright in place. This means that you are at least off by about 200%.
And then we get to the point about there being far less need for copyright much previous. How are you going to copy a book for instance before the printing press?
Effect as a verb:
"This new administration will effect change."
Affect as a noun:
"His affect displayed little change when informed of the bad news."
Granted, in 90% of usage "effect" is a noun and "affect" is a verb, but this needn't necessarily be true.
I, for one, like to purchase things once and be done with it. If i have to buy it on credit, that is one thing - a house or car is a major purchase. but music does not require long term financial consideration.
Then buy it. It's not like they stopped offering CDs or iTunes. But some people will find it more convienient to rent. For instance, I will be moving into an apartment soon.
"Renting" music, no matter how you see it or DRM, is entirely different that buying on credit, and there are plenty of reasons why you might want a model like that.
A commander-in-chief who is committed to this conflict
But who only has another 2 1/2 years to win, something that is far from certain will happen, and has a growing unrest with his policies at home.
Our training of the Iraqi National Army so they can stand up to the insurgents when we leave.
Which has been working *so* well so far
The fact that most of the insurgents are driven to fight by our very prescence. When we leave, much of the motivation for the majority of terrorist groups in Iraq leaves with us.
Either you're wrong, or the insurgents are pretty stupid. Because if they agreed with you, then their best course of action would be to stop fighting for a few weeks. So either they don't agree that they just want us out of Iraq, or they are too obtuse to recognize the shortest path to their goal. Which do you think it is?
Who cares whose fault it is?
It matters if you're assigning blame, but if the service sucks I'm not going to use it. I wouldn't go "oh, well, Vonage gets an A for effort" and use it anyway, I'd change to something that works.
So maybe the solution will mean that nobody with an insecure OS will be allowed back on the net.
What OSs are secure?
This is not a facetious question. Define "insecure".
Really? I have my doubts that it could be unobtrusive. The actual encryption/signing of mail could be done invisibly or nearly, but what about key management? You need some sort of web of trust. Which means you need to tell the system who you trust to sign keys, and how much. I don't think there's any automated way around that, which means that you MUST put the burden on the user. And explaining what they are doing (setting up the "web of trust" or whatever you want to call it) is NOT going to be an easy task. I've read about it and other PKIs, and I still don't know all the details. (And the user WOULD have to know what they are doing to do it correctly; a poorly set up web of trust could be just as bad (if not worse, because you think you're safe) than no encryption at all.)
Agreed.
An open letter to Apple from EvanED:
Apple, this coming winter I'm buying a X41 or successor. (Probably -- there are some drawbacks I don't like about it, like the lack of a touchpad, but the overall construction of IBM laptops will probably overshadow them.) If you announce a tablet before then, I guarantee that I will not purchase the IBM until yours is released and I have a chance to try it. There's a decent chance I'll buy it. Which will be my "switch" so to speak. (Though I think I'll stay with PCs and Linux for my future desktops.)
-EvanED
But seriously, are they working on a tablet? Not known? Too secret? But if not, why not?
a. Use Nvidia's driver, unless your philosophy is to run absolutely nothing propriatary.
b. Are you really going to be running Linux on a Macbook? If you're not a free software only person, OS X probably gives you most of what you want from Linux, and if you are a free software only person you're not going to be running OS X anyway so might as well get a PC laptop.
That doesn't mean they don't have it. Turn of the default reboot and, like magic, the BSOD reappears!
At least, as much as it does in XP, which is very rarely for most machines.
My standard uptime for my XP box during the school year (when I didn't shut it down at night because of noise issues) was a couple weeks too. When I had to reboot, it was usually because of a Windows update. Again, reasonably well-cared for. I've seen a blue screen on my machine only a few times, mostly caused by my TV Wonder.
There was CmdrTaco's proposal if you didn't see it...
Your ID is lower than mine and I remember that story so it's very possible that you did, but in case not, and also for any third parties who didn't see it, I bring it up.
There are also servers, where the "never crashes" would also probably be important over speed.
I mean, there are servers out there that have been running for years.
Yeah, but Windows is on XP! I'm just going to assume that's a base 26 number, and so is 640!
(That should be high enough for anybody.)
Mega and mega are not the same thing
Really? What's the difference?
keep the spelling the same if you mean to refer to the same thing
Camel casing is an exception to this rule. Making it so that the M at the "beginning" of the identifier was caps would break consistency with other identifiers. And unless there really is a distinction between Mega and mega, and both had meanings within the code, I think the latter is more important.
I'd rather know too. But, take a risk-benefit analysis. If there is a widespread vulnerabiblity and it's not being exploited, probably black hats don't know about it. If you then release the exploit, they can start expoliting it. Even if YOU would take steps to prevent, many others wouldn't because they don't keep on top of third party security alerts and fixes. The person releasing the exploit must worry about them too. Also, even if you say every man for himself and if they don't patch then they deserve what they get, then you could still be affected by excess network traffic (think code red), DOS attacks, etc.
I'm not opposed at all to saying "hey, I found a vulnerability in the RPC server, you should turn it off at least until MS releases a patch", but I am definitely opposed to saying "hey, I found a vulnerability in the RPC server, and here's a proof-of-concept exploit" before the vendor has a chance to patch. Doing so is, IMO, irresponsibly and the Internet equivalent to antisocial behavior.
Doesn't work for me (1.5.0.3). If I hit ctrl-f and type "doe" (start of "doesn't work") the find field turns red. What bulid are you using?
Don't go around strutting Mythbusters as good proof of anything. It's good TV, and you can learn a lot from it, but as far as scientific conclusions go it's usually pretty bad.
(One egregious example -- which is a pity because it's something that would actually be useful to know -- was when they were testing gas mileage of windows down vs. A/C. They "busted" the myth that a/c is more efficient then decreasing the aerodynamics of your car. But they did so by running the a/c at it's highest setting, causing whoever was driving it to comment on being cold despite wearing a hat, scarf, and gloves! Yeah, real useful result guys. It would have also been nice to test it on a car that was also aerodynamic already instead of a SUV.)
I'd personally be surprised if a cell phone would cause interference in anything but the dinkiest of sport planes, and if you're in one of them there's a good chance you're flying VFR anyway. But it is a somewhat reasonable concern -- when I had a cell phone (I dropped coverage for a while) I could always tell it was going to ring because my speakers would make a popping noise and (if I had it on) my TV would go staticy. Phones DO cause quite a bit of interference to things that aren't shielded.
The state secret priviledge is almost always successful. Sorry to be the bearer of bad news.
Oops, ignore my first comment in my other reply. I misread your post.
I think he's saying they can tell them there is a problem, but not tell them what the problem is.
Not according to the blurb ("InfoWorld.com reports that Independent researcher Tom Ferris said there were still holes in Safari, QuickTime, and iTunes that he reported to Apple") or the article ("the latest patch doesn't cover other critical holes he reported to Apple").
If you find there is a flaw in all cars which could cause them to spontaniously explode, should you have to wait until the car companies fix the problem before you tell anyone?
Your analogy is flawed because general knowledge of the problem won't increase the probability that they'll spontaneously explode. Releasing information about an exploit MAY reveal it to bad guys as well. And just as a lot of the time black hats find vulnerabilities before white hats, a lot of the time the white hats are no doubt first. And in those cases, you DON'T want to release information.
My general thought I think is somewhat the norm. If you find a vulnerability, report it only to the company. Give them a "reasonable" time to patch it. (Defining what is reasonable is the hard part. Maybe a couple weeks? For MS, I'd say wait until after the first "patch tuesday" after a week or two from when you notify them. For other vendors that follow a similar schedule, wait until the corresponding time.) If they patch it within that period, wait another couple weeks for the patches to spread to at least a fair number of machines. After those weeks, or if a patch ISN'T released, or if a black hat exploit is released at any point in the process (including the patch development stage), release information. It's sorta complicated, but each rule is there for a reason.
Reread the article. Nothing has changed, unless the article left something out, from the end of who breaks in. The kid who changes his grades would be tried under the same laws as he would be today. (And, I would argue, rightfully so if he's in college, which he is if he's hacking a system with 10K students.)
The changes in the laws effect the owner of the system which was hacked, not whoever hacked it.