This is incorrect. An English major must learn how to write effectively. That takes practice and learning new skills.
Nah. I mean, you're right, it's important, sure, but writing skills don't really build on one another, and having developed a strong technique (or not) has nothing to do with the knowledge gained in the classes. Learning to not dangle participles or expanding your vocabulary or learning that a five-paragraph essay is NOT the ideal structure isn't going to keep you from learning Shakespeare's sonnets or the difference between "affect" and "effect" or to avoid stating opinions.
That aside, English degrees don't give you jack in the way of writing courses, there will be one or two, but most of it will be survey courses, American Lit, British Lit, Poetry, Shakespeare, etc. Even with the few writing programs available in the US, it'll be courses in short stories and journalistic reporting and poetry and whatnot. There are certainly fundamentals to pick up, but it's much more of a personal development - if you just can't get your conclusions to flow, it just doesn't have the same impact on your career that an inability to grasp kinematics does.
Also, I feel you on the physics courses - when I started my first undergrad degree in '99, it was the first year of the CS program at the University of Cincinnati. I could not BELIEVE they made us take a year of physics. It ended up not being too bad, though, because when I came back for my chem degree in '05, my physics and calc classes transferred, saving me that effort.
You'd be really surprised what your brain is capable of. If you had trouble learning languages in high school or undergrad, it was because you had bad teachers, or weren't putting any effort into learning your vocab, declension endings, etc. Language is the oldest invention of humankind - we have millions of years of evolution selecting for genes that promote communication skills, versus a few thousand years where anyone, let alone a majority of humankind, was able to do any sort of math. If you were suddenly submerged in classical German, you would pick up a lot more than you suspect. Not to downplay your wife's achievement (I have no desire to increase the difficulty of any task via the addition of a language barrier), but I bet you would do a lot better than you suspect. I know I would do better with the Latin and the German, than I would with the actual art history.
I didn't mean to imply that other majors have no fundamentals at all, just that reinforcement is so codependent in the sciences it almost approaches insanity. Earning my BS in chemistry, every major class (with the exception of an elective "History of Chemistry" course), was involved with every other course. As an example, calc and physics were required for physical chemistry, the kinetics discussed in p-chem affected our discussion of activity in analytical chemistry, our knowledge of chemical activities was crucial to all of our chromatography in instrumental chem, which came into play discussing appropriate techniques in environmental chem. And then for my chemical writing class, my term paper was about using dendrimers (organic chem) for sequestering (analytical, p-chem) uranium and copper (inorganic) from contaminated water (environmental chem, biochem, molecular bio (and yes, those last two are different)).
Amusingly, my grad-level classes are less intertwined, I've not really used anything besides inorganic and p-chem (and thus calc and physics), with a slight sprinkling of organic when discussing metal/organic frameworks.
...because STEM majors are so much more demanding than others. In addition to having heavier workloads, everything builds on everything else - if you fall behind, or don't master a particular fundamental like calculus or kinematics or chemical bonding, you're fucked. If you're getting a degree in English, and you don't master Blake, it's not going to have any impact on your study of Wordsworth, unless your thesis is a comparison of the two.
They went to the effort of scanning it, or converting it, or typing it, or paying the company that did the work, or something to get it into a format that can be displayed on their reader. They deserve a bit of profit for that - a buck might be high, but would a quarter be okay? And if you don't like their version, just get a text file from Gutenberg for free.
You're kidding, right? I've tried that typing thing, and it sucks. Give me a voice interface any day - don't have to strain myself doing simple things like setting an alarm on my phone.
I expect Intel to continue dropping the price on their low- to medium-end offerings in order to compete, but I also don't expect to see them drop very far since 1) the low end has tighter profit margins and 2) Intel has volume (in terms of production capabilities) plus market share in their favor--don't expect that combination to allow for much generosity on their behalf.
On the other hand, now that Intel has AMD up against the ropes, Intel might be content to put the squeeze on them, and take a hit (or just break even) on the low-end chips to push them even further out. Intel is certainly pulling in more than enough cash to buffer a bit of a hit in that market.
Actually, a lot of companies are hitting R&D the heaviest, since they require lots of space, supplies, and equipment (overhead) and are often the highest-paid non-management/attorney positions. Usually a terrible, terrible plan for any company as a whole, since THAT'S HOW A COMPANY STAYS COMPETITIVE, but it keeps the stock healthy for a long-enough period that management can cash out and then get the fuck out of Dodge before the house of cards comes tumbling down. For a thrill, keep an eye on the big pharma companies over the next two to three years, it's not gonna be pretty.
I don't know how long it's been since they've done this, but when I built my very first system more than ten years ago, I put a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird in the system, and it came with a 1"x1" (or whatever) AMD sticker to put on the case where the "Intel Inside" stickers always went.
Unfortunately for AMD, my case also came with an "Antec Outside" case, which suited my sense of humor much better.
From what I understand, Bulldozer isn't designed poorly - the implementation is just lacking. Sounds to me like they pushed a beta product out for quarterly product presence, but the real product isn't far behind...
I don't know jack about this, so I'll just quote what an acquaintance of mine wrote on my gaming community forum:
The main issue is that the Windows 7 scheduler doesn't understand the effective use of the modules, which drastically cuts down on the ability of the processor to turn off cores and run in turbo mode.
The bottom line in the end unfortunately will be that most desktop work loads still will not take advantage of the Bulldozer architecture. It'll fair much better in the server world but it's going to be a while before the desktop software truly shifts to the style of programming Bulldozer requires. A long while. Probably a lot longer than 5+ years. . .
[I ask a stupid question]
. ..Intel also disables cores. The idle cores are turned off to reduce the thermal foot print while running the active cores at higher clock speeds. Bulldozer's method is a little more complicated than Intel's though, and Windows 7 doesn't understand how to deal with it. For example, for two integer heavy threads with shared data, it should schedule them to a single module and throw the turbo on. Two integer heavy threads, with non-shared data? Two modules. Two floating point threads? Two modules. There's a lot of conditionals about the work load, based on the new longer pipeline, the dual integer unitss, but only a single fp unit.
Piledriver will improve the FP a lot since it'll have the GPU on die, which is what AMD is really aiming to do. They don't really want FP units at all in the module, they want to push that work to GPU-style modules. Which makes sense, as they're a hundred times better at it. But programs aren't written to take advantage of that yet.
I have no idea if he's correct, but that's the extent of my understanding.
Honestly they haven't been performing and it's understandable they got the axe.
The products haven't been performing lately either - hell, the marketing people did their job too well, and got us thinking that Bulldozer might actually be worth waiting for. Oops.
The company that owned my last apartment* does that, but it also charges a $10 "convenience fee" each month - fuck that. What's especially interesting is that it's more of a convenience for them, since they don't have to go the bank to deposit and they don't have to worry about a bounced check.
*Empirian Properties - avoid them at all cost. Shady business practices, dick spent on maintenance, and you have to threaten them with legal action to get your deposit back - both I and a friend two states away went through that, so it wasn't just a fluke
Many of the companies for which I have worked have required that the DD be set up in the system for the entirety of the payroll period, or else they would just give you a check. Seeing as how most companies have you do that kind of paperwork on your first day, you're looking at your first (and sometimes second or third if the HR department is slow) check coming to you on a dead tree, even if you set up the DD on your first day.
Even with this,* and the Creation Museum, and the Democratic Governor approving a $40M tax incentive to a Noah's Ark theme park (which I would at least partially forgive if they would just name it Noah's Park) and continuing huge subsidies to coal mining companies, I'd still rather live here than Ohio.
*I don't blame the state or the denizens for this particular action, though - it's totally on Haught and Rabel.
Your argument is weak. They do own or control most of the funding for those peer reviewers.
What? NSF and DoE provide 90% of my group's solar research funding, and we've never heard a peep about which papers we've rejected or recommended. I mean, I guess it's POSSIBLE that my boss is overwriting my recommendations when I email them to him, and he's spending Big X's kickbacks on blow instead of replacing his eight-year-old Aztek (amusingly, it's the same model, and almost the same color (the stock gold) as Walter White's). But when I review a paper, it's based on the science, not whether or not it agrees with my worldview. It's actually one of the best ways to learn in higher education, reviewing others' work for scientific inaccuracy and logical fallacies, and researching concepts you aren't familiar with. Anyway, NSF and DoE grant approval is too decentralized for Big X to be able to affect like they do with Congress - they can't be bribing thousands of scientists every year AND keeping track of which reviewers are following their dictates.
Let's try arguing Thomas Gold's theories. Why was he the only one to predict oil underneath Siberian rock? What make you so sure he wasn't given something 10 years before to cause heart disease because he was getting too close to popping the big lie?
You sound like a shill for big oil.
Gold was just as big of a problem as the people who disagreed with him. He absolutely refused to admit that oil POSSIBLY could have migrated down from the surface, while arguing that the oil on the surface had migrated up from 100 km or whatever depth. Meanwhile, his detractors argued that oil couldn't POSSIBLY have migrated up to the surface, while arguing that it had migrated down. Both sets of idiots argued that the mantle was impenetrable except under their very special circumstances. This, in my opinion, is the biggest problem with science - people get attached to their ideas, and refuse to accept that anything else could also be accurate. Abiological production of larger hydrocarbons does occur, as does biological production - we've done both in laboratories. It's certainly possible that BOTH occur in the wild, and BOTH are responsible for oil deposits that we've found. We see this all the time in biology, it's called convergent evolution, two completely independent species evolve to the point where they have functionally identical adaptations.
As to his death, nothing makes me sure that he wasn't given something to cause his heart disease when he was 75, except that we currently have nothing to cause heart disease that isn't based on french fries. But maybe Big X has developed injectable NanoFries (TM), and just hasn't told us yet.
And as to being a shill for Big Oil, I guess I'm just lucky they don't know my $22K/year stipend is paid for by a DoE grant for photocatalyzed water splitting, or I'd be really screwed when they up and cancelled my funding. How would I buy my ramen packs then?!
But that's okay, you sound like a shill for Big Aluminum Foil.*
*Get it? For hats? To keep your brainwaves safe from my ramen-providing benefactors? Nuts to this, I've been booed off better shows than this!
I think his point was that it is what it is and he can't change it i.e. he doesn't deal in hypotheticals.
And would rather spend his time writing music than learning the intricacies of a system he cannot affect. Just pay the postage, or deposit the check, and get back to what's fun.
What? I use heat capacity as a proxy for the IR and Raman spectra, as the addition of the area under the peaks of those two spectra are proportional to it.
How is that useful? Raman is about measuring the difference in wavelengths between the excitation and emission wavelengths to calculate density of vibrational states. I can see the other way around, looking at two Raman spectra and saying, "Hmm, water vapor has more vibrational states than CO2, so it must have a higher heat capacity." But spectroscopy is all about wavelengths, I don't see how a Cp of 50 J/mol*k can be useful at all to a spectroscopist.
Slashdot Mirror
This is incorrect. An English major must learn how to write effectively. That takes practice and learning new skills.
Nah. I mean, you're right, it's important, sure, but writing skills don't really build on one another, and having developed a strong technique (or not) has nothing to do with the knowledge gained in the classes. Learning to not dangle participles or expanding your vocabulary or learning that a five-paragraph essay is NOT the ideal structure isn't going to keep you from learning Shakespeare's sonnets or the difference between "affect" and "effect" or to avoid stating opinions.
That aside, English degrees don't give you jack in the way of writing courses, there will be one or two, but most of it will be survey courses, American Lit, British Lit, Poetry, Shakespeare, etc. Even with the few writing programs available in the US, it'll be courses in short stories and journalistic reporting and poetry and whatnot. There are certainly fundamentals to pick up, but it's much more of a personal development - if you just can't get your conclusions to flow, it just doesn't have the same impact on your career that an inability to grasp kinematics does.
Also, I feel you on the physics courses - when I started my first undergrad degree in '99, it was the first year of the CS program at the University of Cincinnati. I could not BELIEVE they made us take a year of physics. It ended up not being too bad, though, because when I came back for my chem degree in '05, my physics and calc classes transferred, saving me that effort.
You'd be really surprised what your brain is capable of. If you had trouble learning languages in high school or undergrad, it was because you had bad teachers, or weren't putting any effort into learning your vocab, declension endings, etc. Language is the oldest invention of humankind - we have millions of years of evolution selecting for genes that promote communication skills, versus a few thousand years where anyone, let alone a majority of humankind, was able to do any sort of math. If you were suddenly submerged in classical German, you would pick up a lot more than you suspect. Not to downplay your wife's achievement (I have no desire to increase the difficulty of any task via the addition of a language barrier), but I bet you would do a lot better than you suspect. I know I would do better with the Latin and the German, than I would with the actual art history.
I didn't mean to imply that other majors have no fundamentals at all, just that reinforcement is so codependent in the sciences it almost approaches insanity. Earning my BS in chemistry, every major class (with the exception of an elective "History of Chemistry" course), was involved with every other course. As an example, calc and physics were required for physical chemistry, the kinetics discussed in p-chem affected our discussion of activity in analytical chemistry, our knowledge of chemical activities was crucial to all of our chromatography in instrumental chem, which came into play discussing appropriate techniques in environmental chem. And then for my chemical writing class, my term paper was about using dendrimers (organic chem) for sequestering (analytical, p-chem) uranium and copper (inorganic) from contaminated water (environmental chem, biochem, molecular bio (and yes, those last two are different)).
Amusingly, my grad-level classes are less intertwined, I've not really used anything besides inorganic and p-chem (and thus calc and physics), with a slight sprinkling of organic when discussing metal/organic frameworks.
...because STEM majors are so much more demanding than others. In addition to having heavier workloads, everything builds on everything else - if you fall behind, or don't master a particular fundamental like calculus or kinematics or chemical bonding, you're fucked. If you're getting a degree in English, and you don't master Blake, it's not going to have any impact on your study of Wordsworth, unless your thesis is a comparison of the two.
Siri can access the iPhone cam now? Sweet!
They went to the effort of scanning it, or converting it, or typing it, or paying the company that did the work, or something to get it into a format that can be displayed on their reader. They deserve a bit of profit for that - a buck might be high, but would a quarter be okay? And if you don't like their version, just get a text file from Gutenberg for free.
You're kidding, right? I've tried that typing thing, and it sucks. Give me a voice interface any day - don't have to strain myself doing simple things like setting an alarm on my phone.
This isn't exactly true for computers, but it sure is true for tablets
But it is still true for phones and mp3 players. So Apple only compares in 1 out of 4 categories they're in.
I expect Intel to continue dropping the price on their low- to medium-end offerings in order to compete, but I also don't expect to see them drop very far since 1) the low end has tighter profit margins and 2) Intel has volume (in terms of production capabilities) plus market share in their favor--don't expect that combination to allow for much generosity on their behalf.
On the other hand, now that Intel has AMD up against the ropes, Intel might be content to put the squeeze on them, and take a hit (or just break even) on the low-end chips to push them even further out. Intel is certainly pulling in more than enough cash to buffer a bit of a hit in that market.
Yeah, that and the DMV are about it.
Actually, a lot of companies are hitting R&D the heaviest, since they require lots of space, supplies, and equipment (overhead) and are often the highest-paid non-management/attorney positions. Usually a terrible, terrible plan for any company as a whole, since THAT'S HOW A COMPANY STAYS COMPETITIVE, but it keeps the stock healthy for a long-enough period that management can cash out and then get the fuck out of Dodge before the house of cards comes tumbling down. For a thrill, keep an eye on the big pharma companies over the next two to three years, it's not gonna be pretty.
I don't know how long it's been since they've done this, but when I built my very first system more than ten years ago, I put a 1.4 GHz Athlon Thunderbird in the system, and it came with a 1"x1" (or whatever) AMD sticker to put on the case where the "Intel Inside" stickers always went.
Unfortunately for AMD, my case also came with an "Antec Outside" case, which suited my sense of humor much better.
From what I understand, Bulldozer isn't designed poorly - the implementation is just lacking. Sounds to me like they pushed a beta product out for quarterly product presence, but the real product isn't far behind...
I don't know jack about this, so I'll just quote what an acquaintance of mine wrote on my gaming community forum:
The main issue is that the Windows 7 scheduler doesn't understand the effective use of the modules, which drastically cuts down on the ability of the processor to turn off cores and run in turbo mode.
The bottom line in the end unfortunately will be that most desktop work loads still will not take advantage of the Bulldozer architecture. It'll fair much better in the server world but it's going to be a while before the desktop software truly shifts to the style of programming Bulldozer requires. A long while. Probably a lot longer than 5+ years. . .
[I ask a stupid question]
. . .Intel also disables cores. The idle cores are turned off to reduce the thermal foot print while running the active cores at higher clock speeds. Bulldozer's method is a little more complicated than Intel's though, and Windows 7 doesn't understand how to deal with it. For example, for two integer heavy threads with shared data, it should schedule them to a single module and throw the turbo on. Two integer heavy threads, with non-shared data? Two modules. Two floating point threads? Two modules. There's a lot of conditionals about the work load, based on the new longer pipeline, the dual integer unitss, but only a single fp unit.
Piledriver will improve the FP a lot since it'll have the GPU on die, which is what AMD is really aiming to do. They don't really want FP units at all in the module, they want to push that work to GPU-style modules. Which makes sense, as they're a hundred times better at it. But programs aren't written to take advantage of that yet.
I have no idea if he's correct, but that's the extent of my understanding.
Considering how much higher quality Intel chips have been the last two years, they don't even need to bribe anyone.
The 6 series equivalent to the 5970 is the 6990, not the 6970 like any sane person would expect.
And who's to blame for that? Marketing.
Honestly they haven't been performing and it's understandable they got the axe.
The products haven't been performing lately either - hell, the marketing people did their job too well, and got us thinking that Bulldozer might actually be worth waiting for. Oops.
The company that owned my last apartment* does that, but it also charges a $10 "convenience fee" each month - fuck that. What's especially interesting is that it's more of a convenience for them, since they don't have to go the bank to deposit and they don't have to worry about a bounced check.
*Empirian Properties - avoid them at all cost. Shady business practices, dick spent on maintenance, and you have to threaten them with legal action to get your deposit back - both I and a friend two states away went through that, so it wasn't just a fluke
Many of the companies for which I have worked have required that the DD be set up in the system for the entirety of the payroll period, or else they would just give you a check. Seeing as how most companies have you do that kind of paperwork on your first day, you're looking at your first (and sometimes second or third if the HR department is slow) check coming to you on a dead tree, even if you set up the DD on your first day.
That was Radioactive Wolves. I had to watch it just for the title, even before I found out it was about the Exclusion Zone.
Sounds like the kind of thing Anonymous is good for.
Even with this,* and the Creation Museum, and the Democratic Governor approving a $40M tax incentive to a Noah's Ark theme park (which I would at least partially forgive if they would just name it Noah's Park) and continuing huge subsidies to coal mining companies, I'd still rather live here than Ohio.
*I don't blame the state or the denizens for this particular action, though - it's totally on Haught and Rabel.
Your argument is weak. They do own or control most of the funding for those peer reviewers.
What? NSF and DoE provide 90% of my group's solar research funding, and we've never heard a peep about which papers we've rejected or recommended. I mean, I guess it's POSSIBLE that my boss is overwriting my recommendations when I email them to him, and he's spending Big X's kickbacks on blow instead of replacing his eight-year-old Aztek (amusingly, it's the same model, and almost the same color (the stock gold) as Walter White's). But when I review a paper, it's based on the science, not whether or not it agrees with my worldview. It's actually one of the best ways to learn in higher education, reviewing others' work for scientific inaccuracy and logical fallacies, and researching concepts you aren't familiar with. Anyway, NSF and DoE grant approval is too decentralized for Big X to be able to affect like they do with Congress - they can't be bribing thousands of scientists every year AND keeping track of which reviewers are following their dictates.
Let's try arguing Thomas Gold's theories. Why was he the only one to predict oil underneath Siberian rock? What make you so sure he wasn't given something 10 years before to cause heart disease because he was getting too close to popping the big lie?
You sound like a shill for big oil.
Gold was just as big of a problem as the people who disagreed with him. He absolutely refused to admit that oil POSSIBLY could have migrated down from the surface, while arguing that the oil on the surface had migrated up from 100 km or whatever depth. Meanwhile, his detractors argued that oil couldn't POSSIBLY have migrated up to the surface, while arguing that it had migrated down. Both sets of idiots argued that the mantle was impenetrable except under their very special circumstances. This, in my opinion, is the biggest problem with science - people get attached to their ideas, and refuse to accept that anything else could also be accurate. Abiological production of larger hydrocarbons does occur, as does biological production - we've done both in laboratories. It's certainly possible that BOTH occur in the wild, and BOTH are responsible for oil deposits that we've found. We see this all the time in biology, it's called convergent evolution, two completely independent species evolve to the point where they have functionally identical adaptations.
As to his death, nothing makes me sure that he wasn't given something to cause his heart disease when he was 75, except that we currently have nothing to cause heart disease that isn't based on french fries. But maybe Big X has developed injectable NanoFries (TM), and just hasn't told us yet.
And as to being a shill for Big Oil, I guess I'm just lucky they don't know my $22K/year stipend is paid for by a DoE grant for photocatalyzed water splitting, or I'd be really screwed when they up and cancelled my funding. How would I buy my ramen packs then?!
But that's okay, you sound like a shill for Big Aluminum Foil.*
*Get it? For hats? To keep your brainwaves safe from my ramen-providing benefactors? Nuts to this, I've been booed off better shows than this!
I think his point was that it is what it is and he can't change it i.e. he doesn't deal in hypotheticals.
And would rather spend his time writing music than learning the intricacies of a system he cannot affect. Just pay the postage, or deposit the check, and get back to what's fun.
What? I use heat capacity as a proxy for the IR and Raman spectra, as the addition of the area under the peaks of those two spectra are proportional to it.
How is that useful? Raman is about measuring the difference in wavelengths between the excitation and emission wavelengths to calculate density of vibrational states. I can see the other way around, looking at two Raman spectra and saying, "Hmm, water vapor has more vibrational states than CO2, so it must have a higher heat capacity." But spectroscopy is all about wavelengths, I don't see how a Cp of 50 J/mol*k can be useful at all to a spectroscopist.
My favorite part of all this is that people with the screennames of Gibbs and Moseley are arguing about this.
Any sales contract will be void if there is fraud.
That doesn't do you any good if your money has already been spent.