In a way, academics do get paid to write in journals. They get their salary, part of which is payment for doing research.
But there's another way to look at it. In many fields, academics pay to publish. The "page charges" for my latest paper amounted to 1/4 of the median federal grant in my research area. That's just insane. Since I was a graduate student in the 1980s, I've seen page charges go up and up and up, and I've seen the value added by the journal fall to zero. The reviewing is done for free, and the authors submit professionally typeset documents.
In my field, Oceanography, we have not moved to the Arxiv model used in Physics... yet.
In case you're wondering, it holds recent versions of software (Evolution 2.0, Gnome 2.8,...).
The main thing, it seems, is that this disto provides a spoonful of sugar to make the Debian medicine go down. But this sugar may not be enough for laptop users. Quoting from the article, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Ubuntu did not detect or configure the wireless card in our laptop. So that spoonful of sugar may be deceptive... some real skill may be required after the pointy-clicky stage. Is it a good thing to mix the difficult and the simple?
OK, let's move along from the name of the donor to the name of the department. This building is not for "Computer Science", since "Science" on a university campus is shorthand for Natural Science, i.e. the study of nature. (By the same token, Mathematics is not Natural Science and therefore in many universities it is place in an Arts faculty.)
At least to my ear, the "Science" in "Computer Science" sounds a lot like the "Science" in "Social Science", or "Library Science", or "Marketing Science", or, moving from the campus to the commercial world, "Shampoo Science". The intention seems to be more to inflate than to describe -- to distinguish the work of folks who think logically and who are not afraid of technology from the work of the chin-strokers and pipe-puffers on the other end of campus, where they dress better and mainly in black.
Better names for CS might be "Information Technology", or perhaps "Computing Studies". Even "Computing" is catchy and rings true..
After many years in the solaris world, and then a few years in the linux world, I got a mac. I didn't like that dopey single-button mouse, so I unplugged it WITH THE POWER ON and then plugged in a well-worn scrollmouse.
Jeeze, the thing just worked, to quote the key phrase of this thread. At that moment, I knew I'd not be going back to solaris or linux anytime soon. After a year with the box, I've yet to plug in anything and find it not working right away.
Apple wants you to think that the GUI is the best thing about their OS, but that's wrong. The GUI is OK, mind you, but it's more awkward than GNOME in some respects. But the hardware support, that's the jewel.
Unfortunately, the Fedora-supplied notice is long on humour, short on detail. What does this disto contain, e.g. what versions of gcc, apache, openoffice, etc.?
This/. thread has lots of hints, but until the Fedora websites detail the software list, it might be best to stand by and watch others jump in the water.
Or maybe I'm just wary since I spent so many hours getting various FC1 and FC2 test versions to work (or fail).
One of the big worries about the Arctic is climate change. Much of the ecosystem relies on the presence of ice, and this ice seems to be disappearing. See fig 16.3 of the IPCC report for a timeseries going back 100 years. In the past few decades we have had adequate measurements of wate temperature in the Actic, and it appears to be rising; see the diagrams in
a recent essay at the NOAA site, for example.
As ice changes, so does the ecosystem. Polar bears cannot walk on water, for example.
There are also global consequence of Arctic change that worry climate scientists. For one thing, there is a nonlinear feedback loop since ice has a high albedo. Thus, ice reflects solar radiation back to space, which keeps the system cool. But water has a much lower albedo than ice. This yields a nonlinear feedback loop. Melting ice creates open water, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice. There was a time when USSR scientists suggested we could open up a northwest passage through the Arctic simply by painting the ice black, setting this feedback loop into action.
Of course, if the ice melts, navigation will be easier through the Arctic. Traffic may avoid Panama and go through a more direct route. Part of this traffic could be oil tankers, which can run aground, causing great damage to a system already damaged by the climate change.
Even if you're not interested in 'Compile', the website is well worth visiting. These folks have some new ideas, and they don't seem to be just gratuitously new. (By 'gratuitous' I'm thinking of changes that yield no new power, such as the differences in directory structures between some of the linux distos.) Slashdot readers might find it particularly interesting to consider the alternate ideas about system/application directories used in this system.
I've recently switched from linux to OSX, and I've learned that the latter has some clever ideas (e.g. bundles) that can leverage developer effort. Given this context of learning by changing, my own view is that this new direction for linux is worth investigating... not that I'll likely leave OSX anytime soon.
Not science folks like me, given the lack of (f2c or g77) fortran, which means no Octave for my analysis and no R for statistics.
Not home users, given the non-inclusion of e.g. a working movie viewer. (Their java media player was completely busted -- it showed a few frames and then died.)
Not cutting-edge linuxers, given the use of
the 2.4 kernel.
Not the home market, given the use of
soffice (aka openoffice) which still won't handle complex msoffice documents well, and given the use of a stumbling movie viewer.
Not future java-app users, since the java
apps included (movie viewer, text editor) are ugly and slow.
Having noted the above in my own tests, I switched back to Fedora for my home box [my work boxes are osx and solaris]. Using fedora [core 2] gives me (a) a newer kernel, (b) newer versions of software such as openoffice and mozilla and
(c) easier updates.
The real advantage may be in work-groups that have loads of existing Suns as well as linux boxes; there is benefit in having a similar GUI and similar software on each. This reveals the answer to the question of my subjectline, I argue.
I am running Fedora Core 2 Test 3, so I figured it might make sense to upgrade to the official release. (BTW: FC2T3 is pretty well-constructed, so I'm guessing FC2official will be fine.) For fun, I decided to try Bit Torrent.
Unfortunately, when I followed the story's link to bit torrent, and then looked for a bit torrent RPM for to use on my Fedora system, I learned that... there doesn't seem to be such an RPM available.
I guess I'll be downloading this Fedora update in the old-fashioned way.
I've run all the Redhat versions since 4.x, and I decided to try Fedora when it came out.
I tried each of the systems in the subjectline, and I record below the results of my testing.
It was difficult to get Fedora Core 1 working (I don't remember which test # it was). Similar problems arose with Fedora Core 2 test 1. I won't bore you with details since these versions are water under the bridge; you could surf to a dozen serious bug reports if you were morbidly curious. Eventually I got both of these Fedoras to limp along, but only just.
Frustrated, I dropped Fedora, reformatted the drive and switched to Sun Java Desktop (SJD). This was recommended by our sysadmin at work; his hope is to have the linux boxes and the solaris boxes looking alike, so that users won't be such a pain.
Unfortunately (I'm a Sun investor), I cannot recommend SJD for scientific work. The CDROMS did not contain expected things like f2c or g77, which means that you won't be able to build R (the stats language I use) or the other scientific applications using fortran. Actually, the list of things not included with SJD CDROMS is quite long. Well, you might think, I'll just surf the web and pick these things up. Good luck on that. For one thing, Sun makes it damn hard to access their website to get updates. (This inconvenience alone suggests that they are not serious about SJD.) And it doesn't seem that other folks are rushing to wrap RPMs for this platform. Maybe folks are disinclined to do that for a commercial system like SJD. Given all of this, I recommend you steer clear of SJD if you're doing anything technical. (PS: no, just because it's coming straight from Sun doesn't mean that staroffice is workable, either. It does not import MSword documents faithfully, and I think you'd be crazy to try to export them if you're collaborating with MSword users.)
And that brings me to Fedora Core 2 test 3 (FC2T3). I installed it the other night, and the procedure went quite smoothly (unlike FC2T2, which was a total mess, the installation program even flaking out on reading the cdrom... same happened to other folks on the hard disk). Although I have not pressed the box much yet, I do think that FC2T3 is useable.
Thus, I can recommend you dip your toe into FC2T3. It gives you the 2.6 kernel, and updated versions of some of your favourite applications. But before you jump into this water, I advise testing. Unless you have some time on your hands, you might want to sit it out until the official (non-test) FC2.
So, you think, why not switch to FC1 (the non-test version) right now? I think that's a bad idea because it doesn't give you much you have now (e.g. same 2.4 kernel as redhat9), and FC2 will probably be ready by summer.
What confuses me is the direction of the arrow. The notation
my $point = Point.new(x => 2, y => 3);
just sort of reads wrong to my eye. Writing
x <= 2
is easier (again, for my eye), perhaps because it
echoes other languages (perhaps a bad criterion),
and mathematical notation (probably a good criterion).
I'm sure there is a way to visualize this syntax, but as it's written, it looks to be storing the value of x in the container 2.
PS. I should note that I've never used the OO aspects of perl. I use only perl4 features; since I use other languages for OO work, I've not had the need to learn the perl way. So my comment might be useless; I'm sorry if so.
IPCC reports on climate change
on
A New Ice Age?
·
· Score: 1
There are unresolved research questions regarding the issue of climate shifts in response to changes in high-latitude convection. Our qualitative sketches are gradually being filled in through numerical simulation, and we are still in an interesting stage of debate about mechanisms. The cited WHOI documents are particularly readible, and I would encourage/.ers to study them.
You might also like to read more about the science of climate change, you should check out the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports. Various aspects of the IPCC reports are accessible to readers with various technical backgrounds.
This link might be a good starting point.
I skimmed the site and the/. comments, but didn't learn (a) what eblocks cost or (b) where/if they can be purchased Perhaps someone can post a reply that answers these questions.
My guesses:
(a) > $10/unit. (Somewhere on the site I read about $1/CPU. That's probably an in-bulk price. The board, case, battery, etc. are not zero cost.)
(b) Units are not available, and there is no firm timetable for availability. (Otherwise something would be prominent on the site, or in the/. thread.)
If my guesses is wrong, then eblocks are something I'll put on my list of toys to buy!
Then again, everytime I've bought the stock, I've watched it halve in value.
Seriously, though, if I could use ms-office docs on a Sun, then I might go back to having a Sun on my desk. (No, staroffice isn't there yet. Close enough for hand grenades, but not for effective collaboration with ms-office users.)
In the first lesson we read that windows systems were designed with printing in mind, thus explaining the pretty gui interfaces, etc. Then we read that linux was designed with the network in mind, so that (quoting) "Since plain text works well across a network, text has always been the base for Linux configuration and data."
Q: is the quoted idea historically accurate, given the development of unix, which begat linux?
As a long-time unix/linux user and sometime x11 developer, and as somebody who has switched to Apple's OSX (for reasons unrelated to this thread), I wish open-source desktops would stop weilding x11 to imitate/extend the mswindows interface, and instead imitate/extend the OSX interface.
For the user, OSX it is a dream. But for developers, it's a wet dream. Creating slick interfaces is simple, the PDF-inspired graphical model is a breath of fresh air, and the interfaces inherit impressive functionality automatically.
Because its code-development process leverages effort powerfully, perhaps more so than for the comparable GNOME/KDE tools, I think OSX offers good potential for the open-source movement, given well-fashioned attitudes and licenses.
I make these remarks with some trepidation, since I think the fragmentation across GNOME and KDE dilutes developer momentum. Also, I make these remarks to evoke discussion by those more technically-aware than myself.
Normally, very little is lost by skipping ahead in a technical book. You're in a rush, and you just want to know how the new language maps into other languages you know. It is probably a mistake to read in this skip-ahead way, but in many cases the writing is so unengaging that we cannot stomach reading it all.
Well, the defining characteristic of this "book" is that some readers will find it enormously engaging, so much so that they will read all the words, starting at the start. This is quite an accomplishment for the writer, and it might be very beneficial for readers who enjoy the style, since Ruby is probably not best learned by analogy to the other popular languages.
The book is aimed at newbies, but experts might also find it amusing or perhaps even insightful.
The use of amphetamines by U.S. aviators has been proposed as an explanation for the accidental bombing of Canadian troops on the ground in Afghanistan. The aviators mistook the Canadian ground-to-ground practice rounds as a ground-to-air attack on the planes, and they bombed before they got permission to do so. I've heard the pilot-controller audio tapes, and they are heart-breaking. A moment's more waiting for confirmation, and lives would have been saved.
In the early days after the accident, it was suspected that the cause of the pilot error was the use of "go pills", i.e. amphetamines, which are apparently are in common (and approved) use by pilots.
I have no idea whether the pilots were actually on such pills; the news started getting vague as courts martial started. I also have no comment on whether go pills might lead to greater safety (than if pilots were sleepy). My point in posting here is not to forward any theories, or to darken any reputations, or to disrespect anyone involved. My purpose is just to point out the incident, and the discussion of a connection to drugs, in case readers of/. haven't heard about this incident.
Slashdot Mirror
But there's another way to look at it. In many fields, academics pay to publish. The "page charges" for my latest paper amounted to 1/4 of the median federal grant in my research area. That's just insane. Since I was a graduate student in the 1980s, I've seen page charges go up and up and up, and I've seen the value added by the journal fall to zero. The reviewing is done for free, and the authors submit professionally typeset documents.
In my field, Oceanography, we have not moved to the Arxiv model used in Physics ... yet.
The main thing, it seems, is that this disto provides a spoonful of sugar to make the Debian medicine go down. But this sugar may not be enough for laptop users. Quoting from the article, we were disappointed (but not surprised) that Ubuntu did not detect or configure the wireless card in our laptop. So that spoonful of sugar may be deceptive ... some real skill may be required after the pointy-clicky stage. Is it a good thing to mix the difficult and the simple?
The author has also written about a ''Secret Teenage Sex Cult'', so I guess he is qualified to write about back seats, anyhow.
At least to my ear, the "Science" in "Computer Science" sounds a lot like the "Science" in "Social Science", or "Library Science", or "Marketing Science", or, moving from the campus to the commercial world, "Shampoo Science". The intention seems to be more to inflate than to describe -- to distinguish the work of folks who think logically and who are not afraid of technology from the work of the chin-strokers and pipe-puffers on the other end of campus, where they dress better and mainly in black.
Better names for CS might be "Information Technology", or perhaps "Computing Studies". Even "Computing" is catchy and rings true..
Jeeze, the thing just worked, to quote the key phrase of this thread. At that moment, I knew I'd not be going back to solaris or linux anytime soon. After a year with the box, I've yet to plug in anything and find it not working right away.
Apple wants you to think that the GUI is the best thing about their OS, but that's wrong. The GUI is OK, mind you, but it's more awkward than GNOME in some respects. But the hardware support, that's the jewel.
This /. thread has lots of hints, but until the Fedora websites detail the software list, it might be best to stand by and watch others jump in the water.
Or maybe I'm just wary since I spent so many hours getting various FC1 and FC2 test versions to work (or fail).
As ice changes, so does the ecosystem. Polar bears cannot walk on water, for example.
There are also global consequence of Arctic change that worry climate scientists. For one thing, there is a nonlinear feedback loop since ice has a high albedo. Thus, ice reflects solar radiation back to space, which keeps the system cool. But water has a much lower albedo than ice. This yields a nonlinear feedback loop. Melting ice creates open water, which absorbs more heat, which melts more ice. There was a time when USSR scientists suggested we could open up a northwest passage through the Arctic simply by painting the ice black, setting this feedback loop into action. Of course, if the ice melts, navigation will be easier through the Arctic. Traffic may avoid Panama and go through a more direct route. Part of this traffic could be oil tankers, which can run aground, causing great damage to a system already damaged by the climate change.
FYI, a 1/100th of a degC change in temperature alters water density in the 6th digit.
I've recently switched from linux to OSX, and I've learned that the latter has some clever ideas (e.g. bundles) that can leverage developer effort. Given this context of learning by changing, my own view is that this new direction for linux is worth investigating ... not that I'll likely leave OSX anytime soon.
Whatever their mummies tell them to wrap themselves in ;-)
Thanks!
- Not science folks like me, given the lack of (f2c or g77) fortran, which means no Octave for my analysis and no R for statistics.
- Not home users, given the non-inclusion of e.g. a working movie viewer. (Their java media player was completely busted -- it showed a few frames and then died.)
- Not cutting-edge linuxers, given the use of
the 2.4 kernel.
- Not the home market, given the use of
soffice (aka openoffice) which still won't handle complex msoffice documents well, and given the use of a stumbling movie viewer.
- Not future java-app users, since the java
apps included (movie viewer, text editor) are ugly and slow.
Having noted the above in my own tests, I switched back to Fedora for my home box [my work boxes are osx and solaris]. Using fedora [core 2] gives me (a) a newer kernel, (b) newer versions of software such as openoffice and mozilla and (c) easier updates.The real advantage may be in work-groups that have loads of existing Suns as well as linux boxes; there is benefit in having a similar GUI and similar software on each. This reveals the answer to the question of my subjectline, I argue.
Unfortunately, when I followed the story's link to bit torrent, and then looked for a bit torrent RPM for to use on my Fedora system, I learned that ... there doesn't seem to be such an RPM available.
I guess I'll be downloading this Fedora update in the old-fashioned way.
It was difficult to get Fedora Core 1 working (I don't remember which test # it was). Similar problems arose with Fedora Core 2 test 1. I won't bore you with details since these versions are water under the bridge; you could surf to a dozen serious bug reports if you were morbidly curious. Eventually I got both of these Fedoras to limp along, but only just.
Frustrated, I dropped Fedora, reformatted the drive and switched to Sun Java Desktop (SJD). This was recommended by our sysadmin at work; his hope is to have the linux boxes and the solaris boxes looking alike, so that users won't be such a pain.
Unfortunately (I'm a Sun investor), I cannot recommend SJD for scientific work. The CDROMS did not contain expected things like f2c or g77, which means that you won't be able to build R (the stats language I use) or the other scientific applications using fortran. Actually, the list of things not included with SJD CDROMS is quite long. Well, you might think, I'll just surf the web and pick these things up. Good luck on that. For one thing, Sun makes it damn hard to access their website to get updates. (This inconvenience alone suggests that they are not serious about SJD.) And it doesn't seem that other folks are rushing to wrap RPMs for this platform. Maybe folks are disinclined to do that for a commercial system like SJD. Given all of this, I recommend you steer clear of SJD if you're doing anything technical. (PS: no, just because it's coming straight from Sun doesn't mean that staroffice is workable, either. It does not import MSword documents faithfully, and I think you'd be crazy to try to export them if you're collaborating with MSword users.)
And that brings me to Fedora Core 2 test 3 (FC2T3). I installed it the other night, and the procedure went quite smoothly (unlike FC2T2, which was a total mess, the installation program even flaking out on reading the cdrom ... same happened to other folks on the hard disk). Although I have not pressed the box much yet, I do think that FC2T3 is useable.
Thus, I can recommend you dip your toe into FC2T3. It gives you the 2.6 kernel, and updated versions of some of your favourite applications. But before you jump into this water, I advise testing. Unless you have some time on your hands, you might want to sit it out until the official (non-test) FC2.
So, you think, why not switch to FC1 (the non-test version) right now? I think that's a bad idea because it doesn't give you much you have now (e.g. same 2.4 kernel as redhat9), and FC2 will probably be ready by summer.
just sort of reads wrong to my eye. Writing
is easier (again, for my eye), perhaps because it echoes other languages (perhaps a bad criterion), and mathematical notation (probably a good criterion).
I'm sure there is a way to visualize this syntax, but as it's written, it looks to be storing the value of x in the container 2.
PS. I should note that I've never used the OO aspects of perl. I use only perl4 features; since I use other languages for OO work, I've not had the need to learn the perl way. So my comment might be useless; I'm sorry if so.
You might also like to read more about the science of climate change, you should check out the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) reports. Various aspects of the IPCC reports are accessible to readers with various technical backgrounds. This link might be a good starting point.
My guesses:
(a) > $10/unit. (Somewhere on the site I read about $1/CPU. That's probably an in-bulk price. The board, case, battery, etc. are not zero cost.)
(b) Units are not available, and there is no firm timetable for availability. (Otherwise something would be prominent on the site, or in the /. thread.)
If my guesses is wrong, then eblocks are something I'll put on my list of toys to buy!
What was it that joke about the n chickens and m oxen?
Then again, everytime I've bought the stock, I've watched it halve in value.
Seriously, though, if I could use ms-office docs on a Sun, then I might go back to having a Sun on my desk. (No, staroffice isn't there yet. Close enough for hand grenades, but not for effective collaboration with ms-office users.)
It's amazing, how hardware changes.
But human-scale things remain the same. It still takes the same time to write a /. comment, or to sigh.
Q: is the quoted idea historically accurate, given the development of unix, which begat linux?
...mozilla, which seems just as fast, and more full-featured (e.g. mail, calendar). I must be missing something in the enthusiasm for firefox.
For the user, OSX it is a dream. But for developers, it's a wet dream. Creating slick interfaces is simple, the PDF-inspired graphical model is a breath of fresh air, and the interfaces inherit impressive functionality automatically. Because its code-development process leverages effort powerfully, perhaps more so than for the comparable GNOME/KDE tools, I think OSX offers good potential for the open-source movement, given well-fashioned attitudes and licenses.
I make these remarks with some trepidation, since I think the fragmentation across GNOME and KDE dilutes developer momentum. Also, I make these remarks to evoke discussion by those more technically-aware than myself.
Normally, very little is lost by skipping ahead in a technical book. You're in a rush, and you just want to know how the new language maps into other languages you know. It is probably a mistake to read in this skip-ahead way, but in many cases the writing is so unengaging that we cannot stomach reading it all.
Well, the defining characteristic of this "book" is that some readers will find it enormously engaging, so much so that they will read all the words, starting at the start. This is quite an accomplishment for the writer, and it might be very beneficial for readers who enjoy the style, since Ruby is probably not best learned by analogy to the other popular languages.
The book is aimed at newbies, but experts might also find it amusing or perhaps even insightful.
In the early days after the accident, it was suspected that the cause of the pilot error was the use of "go pills", i.e. amphetamines, which are apparently are in common (and approved) use by pilots.
I have no idea whether the pilots were actually on such pills; the news started getting vague as courts martial started. I also have no comment on whether go pills might lead to greater safety (than if pilots were sleepy). My point in posting here is not to forward any theories, or to darken any reputations, or to disrespect anyone involved. My purpose is just to point out the incident, and the discussion of a connection to drugs, in case readers of /. haven't heard about this incident.