This seems like unnecessary pedantry. We're talking about market share percentages as a unit: the change from 40% of market share to 50% of market share is a gain of 10% of the market. The change from 40% of market share to 100% of market share would be a gain of 60% of the market. It may be sloppy to talk about this as "60% growth", since that could mean several things, but in context it's clear that it means "we will add 60% of the market to our current share of the market". In other words, it's using "60% growth" analogously to how you might say that a tree underwent "3 inches' growth": it is growth by a particular amount of a particular unit.
Well, it depends on what you count as a "frame". NTSC does 60 interlaced "fields" per second, but each field is only every other line, so you get a full screen refresh at around 30 fps, though that's admittedly a different effect from noninterlaced 30 fps.
There's a pretty wide range of when people die when they're "old". If someone's 70, sure, you have to expect there's some chance they'll die this month, but odds are, they won't--- they might not die for 10 or 20 years, with a median around 15. So it'd be surprising if they died tomorrow.
I think the pictures and videos are the important elements, because they constitute actual evidence. Otherwise, there are fairly stringent tests for what makes something a legitimate confession that's admissible in court. People do sometimes brag about things they didn't actually do, especially in pseudo-anonymous environments, and that isn't a crime. It may be stupid, and it may cause you a lot of hassle as you try to convince police / a judge that you were just making empty boasts, but courts do still have to try to sort that out: if they determine the confession was indeed not a genuine confession, it isn't sufficient for conviction.
For things of this sort, I don't think police would normally pursue it even IRL unless there were more evidence (like the photos/video in this case). If someone in a high-school hallway tells their friend that they were going 90 last night, that's pretty weak evidence, since it's quite likely to just be bravado.
Indie coffee shops used to have free wifi as a differentiator, while Starbucks charged. Now Starbucks has free wifi, so they're going to no/limited wifi as their differentiator. I guess it doesn't matter how it's different, so long as they just do something different.
No, there really are solutions (not approximations) for many NP-complete problems that are fast on most inputs. For example, current SAT algorithms are fast on most instances. There are, however, pathological cases on which the algorithms are slow. The fact that a problem is NP-complete just means that, if P!=NP, there is no algorithm that is guaranteed to be polynomial-time for all inputs. It is still quite possible to devise algorithms that are fast for almost all inputs, but slow on a few pathological ones.
Statistical ML is one of my areas of research, so I'm fairly familiar with the basics.;-)
Generally mashing two individuals together is only better than hill-climbing if you have a useful bit-string encoding and crossover operator that results in the mashing operating on nice units. The vast majority of published successful GA results I've seen have quite heroically engineered encodings that include a lot of human domain knowledge. If you just take some random data structure and serialize it to bits directly, and use a crossover operator of "break the bitstring anywhere", you're not likely to get good results.
You do have to be a bit careful, though--- sometimes there is a hidden trainer in the system. In evolutionary algorithms, there are often a lot of parameters and data structures to tweak at the beginning, e.g., what kinds of crossover and mutation operators do you have, and what's your bit-string encoding? There are a whole lot of ways to slip in human domain knowledge of which things are important into the up-front engineering.
Don't let the name confuse you -- it's about as reliable as most distributions' released versions. It's "unstable" in the sense that it gets constant updates, which means that things are always changing. Every once in a blue moon, a change will actually seriously break something for a day or so. Maybe once every 3-4 years in my experience.
While I agree with this, and run unstable myself (for the past 8 years or so), running it does require some degree of technical savvy when it comes to dependency resolution. Aptitude often gets things right, but it often doesn't, and you then have to figure out why trying to upgrade a package resulted in aptitude suggesting you uninstall 93 packages and page through the solution candidates. And sometimes you need to recognize when you should just cancel a particular upgrade, because it depends on packages not yet uploaded (sometimes dependent updates don't get uploaded at exactly the same time, especially if staging from experimental). It's not difficult per se, but I wouldn't recommend it to the average desktop user, since you lose a good deal of the "it just works" niceness of apt package management.
In addition, they didn't do any of the benchmarks on which Thunderbird 3 is much faster as a result. For example, in Thunderbird 2, it takes forever to do a full-text search of an IMAP inbox. In Thunderbird 3 it's nearly instant.
The conflict of interest is pretty obvious, but it also makes some sense--- if a physics prof is going to choose a physics book to teach from, why would he choose any book besides the one he wrote himself? Of all the books out there, it's presumably the one that: 1) he is most familiar with; and that 2) covers the material closest to the way he wants to cover it in his class.
The advantages of using your own textbook are high enough that I've had profs actually assign their own unpublished book for free (sent us PDFs to download), rather than deal with adapting someone else's textbook to the goals of their course.
If the linked post is an accurate overview, at least, it looks like Red Hat is doing a lot more contributing to GNOME's core, while Canonical is doing a lot more building of apps, widgets, and other miscellaneous desktop stuff on top of GNOME. Both seem like reasonable things for an open-source company to contribute. Linux desktop environments need more hacking on the core, and need more interesting things built on top of that core too.
Well, yeah. But I'm arguing that if someone's buying something and it isn't a smart purchase, the main person at fault is the purchaser, not the seller.
I certainly agree, but I think the main problem is that a bunch of people who really want vocational training are going to research universities as undergrads, because the degree-prestige thing is misaligned. If someone wants to learn to program well, for a future job in a large enterprise-software company, there is no particular reason they should go to a university with a prestigious theoretical-CS division. While they should learn the basics of theory, most competent CS profs can teach that. The students would be much better served by going somewhere with a strong vocational/industry-focused angle, if that's what they want to do. Among CA state schools, for example, Cal Poly is probably a better school to learn programming/software-eng than UC Berkeley is. But a lot of people who have a choice of both will go to Berkeley instead, because it's more prestigious.
It doesn't seem to me that that's mainly the fault of the research universities, but the fault of employers and students ordering their preferences weirdly: everyone, both student and employer, seems to prefer degrees from prestigious research universities, when what they want out of a degree is unrelated to research quality.
I even agree with a lot of the criticisms, but "entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing" is a downside? He seems to miss that research universities are at least as much about research as they are about teaching, and that this is a good thing. Research universities are where we get many of our scientific breakthroughs, tech ideas that are later commercialized, and general advancement of knowledge.
Now tenured professors who are doing neither research nor teaching are a real concern, though they aren't that common--- despite tenure meaning they can't be fired, universities have always had a lot of ways to make their lives miserable (bad committee assignments, move their office to somewhere lame, stop giving them even cost-of-living raises, etc.), and increasingly official ones are being added, e.g. at top research universities, you typically now have to pay somewhere around 25-40% of your own salary out of grant money, so if you stop bringing in research grants, you get a big pay cut. But still, we can think of ways to improve that.
But he seems actually worried mainly about tenured professors who are doing good research, because they aren't paying enough attention to teaching. Good teachers need to exist, but so do good researchers--- the problem with today's university is not that there are too many good senior researchers. If anything, the opposite.
You might get the trademark, which may or may not be valuable. At the very least, it throws a wrench in the work of future forks, because they can't use the trademark that you now own to describe themselves, so they have to come up with a new name, and find a way to publicize the fact that they're now operating under a new name. The new name probably can't use the old name as a component, either--- your fork of MySQL would run afoul of trademark law if you named it NewMySQL or something.
Oracle can only really effectively buy open-source companies of the MySQL variety: where the vast majority of development is done by one, medium-sized, for-profit company closely associated with the project. Stretching a little more, they can buy multi-project companies on the lower end of "large" that do a lot of open-source development, like Sun.
But a lot of open-source is done by groups that deviate to either side of that. Either they're more distributed open-source projects with no central entity to buy in the first place, or they're run by very large companies that Oracle couldn't possibly buy, like Google and IBM.
"Cyber-" means 'I do not know what I am talking about'
"Cyber-" is from the Greek root for "steersman" (kybernetikos). Norbert Wiener coined the term "cybernetics" for anything which used feedback to correct things, in the way that you continually steer to left or right to correct the direction of a bicycle or a car. So "cybernetics" really refers to control linkages, the way things are connected to control things.
Because he was writing in the nineteen-forties, and all of this was new, Wiener believed that computers would be principally used for control linkages-- which is if course one area of their use.
But the term "cybernetics" has caused hopeless confusion, as it was used by the uninformed to refer to every area of computers. And people would coin silly words beginning with "cyber-" to expand ideas they did not understand. Words like "cyberware", "cyberculture", "cyberlife" hardly mean anything. In general, then, words beginning with "cyber-" mean "either I do not know what I am talking about, or I am trying to fool and confuse you" (as in my suggested cybercrud).
Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were a number of games with both single-player and multiplayer components, where basically nobody cared about the single-player components, and companies increasingly decided that, as a result, it was hardly worth bothering with them. Starcraft wasn't a success because of its single-player missions, the new single-player missions weren't what sold most copies of the Starcraft: Brood War expansion. Counterstrike was a huge success despite not even having a single-player component. Same with Quake 3 Arena: just ditched the single-player entirely, and did very well.
Sure, but you already can't store significant scientific datasets on consumer-grade equipment. Nobody's saying that hard drives will cease to exist, but it's quite possible that SSDs will displace them in consumer-grade machines, the kind normal people buy.
Despite all that science, the advice in that flickr summary are basically the same as the advice and diagrams in the section of Business Etiquette for Dummies on handshakes.
(Don't ask me how I know that there's a Business Etiquette for Dummies, and that it has a section on handshakes.)
Phelps' protests themselves have been boring since I was in high school. Seriously I don't think he's done anything new since the 1990s; it's still just all "god hates fags" all the time. The satirical counterprotest trend in the past few years livened them up a bit and made him internet-meme-worthy again (instead of a 10-y-o dead meme), but those are now starting to get old too.
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This seems like unnecessary pedantry. We're talking about market share percentages as a unit: the change from 40% of market share to 50% of market share is a gain of 10% of the market. The change from 40% of market share to 100% of market share would be a gain of 60% of the market. It may be sloppy to talk about this as "60% growth", since that could mean several things, but in context it's clear that it means "we will add 60% of the market to our current share of the market". In other words, it's using "60% growth" analogously to how you might say that a tree underwent "3 inches' growth": it is growth by a particular amount of a particular unit.
FreeBSD has ZFS support, but I wouldn't say it's good ZFS support; it's nowhere near as stable or fast as on OpenSolaris, anyway.
Well, it depends on what you count as a "frame". NTSC does 60 interlaced "fields" per second, but each field is only every other line, so you get a full screen refresh at around 30 fps, though that's admittedly a different effect from noninterlaced 30 fps.
There's a pretty wide range of when people die when they're "old". If someone's 70, sure, you have to expect there's some chance they'll die this month, but odds are, they won't--- they might not die for 10 or 20 years, with a median around 15. So it'd be surprising if they died tomorrow.
I think the pictures and videos are the important elements, because they constitute actual evidence. Otherwise, there are fairly stringent tests for what makes something a legitimate confession that's admissible in court. People do sometimes brag about things they didn't actually do, especially in pseudo-anonymous environments, and that isn't a crime. It may be stupid, and it may cause you a lot of hassle as you try to convince police / a judge that you were just making empty boasts, but courts do still have to try to sort that out: if they determine the confession was indeed not a genuine confession, it isn't sufficient for conviction.
For things of this sort, I don't think police would normally pursue it even IRL unless there were more evidence (like the photos/video in this case). If someone in a high-school hallway tells their friend that they were going 90 last night, that's pretty weak evidence, since it's quite likely to just be bravado.
Indie coffee shops used to have free wifi as a differentiator, while Starbucks charged. Now Starbucks has free wifi, so they're going to no/limited wifi as their differentiator. I guess it doesn't matter how it's different, so long as they just do something different.
No, there really are solutions (not approximations) for many NP-complete problems that are fast on most inputs. For example, current SAT algorithms are fast on most instances. There are, however, pathological cases on which the algorithms are slow. The fact that a problem is NP-complete just means that, if P!=NP, there is no algorithm that is guaranteed to be polynomial-time for all inputs. It is still quite possible to devise algorithms that are fast for almost all inputs, but slow on a few pathological ones.
Statistical ML is one of my areas of research, so I'm fairly familiar with the basics. ;-)
Generally mashing two individuals together is only better than hill-climbing if you have a useful bit-string encoding and crossover operator that results in the mashing operating on nice units. The vast majority of published successful GA results I've seen have quite heroically engineered encodings that include a lot of human domain knowledge. If you just take some random data structure and serialize it to bits directly, and use a crossover operator of "break the bitstring anywhere", you're not likely to get good results.
You do have to be a bit careful, though--- sometimes there is a hidden trainer in the system. In evolutionary algorithms, there are often a lot of parameters and data structures to tweak at the beginning, e.g., what kinds of crossover and mutation operators do you have, and what's your bit-string encoding? There are a whole lot of ways to slip in human domain knowledge of which things are important into the up-front engineering.
While I agree with this, and run unstable myself (for the past 8 years or so), running it does require some degree of technical savvy when it comes to dependency resolution. Aptitude often gets things right, but it often doesn't, and you then have to figure out why trying to upgrade a package resulted in aptitude suggesting you uninstall 93 packages and page through the solution candidates. And sometimes you need to recognize when you should just cancel a particular upgrade, because it depends on packages not yet uploaded (sometimes dependent updates don't get uploaded at exactly the same time, especially if staging from experimental). It's not difficult per se, but I wouldn't recommend it to the average desktop user, since you lose a good deal of the "it just works" niceness of apt package management.
In addition, they didn't do any of the benchmarks on which Thunderbird 3 is much faster as a result. For example, in Thunderbird 2, it takes forever to do a full-text search of an IMAP inbox. In Thunderbird 3 it's nearly instant.
The conflict of interest is pretty obvious, but it also makes some sense--- if a physics prof is going to choose a physics book to teach from, why would he choose any book besides the one he wrote himself? Of all the books out there, it's presumably the one that: 1) he is most familiar with; and that 2) covers the material closest to the way he wants to cover it in his class.
The advantages of using your own textbook are high enough that I've had profs actually assign their own unpublished book for free (sent us PDFs to download), rather than deal with adapting someone else's textbook to the goals of their course.
If the linked post is an accurate overview, at least, it looks like Red Hat is doing a lot more contributing to GNOME's core, while Canonical is doing a lot more building of apps, widgets, and other miscellaneous desktop stuff on top of GNOME. Both seem like reasonable things for an open-source company to contribute. Linux desktop environments need more hacking on the core, and need more interesting things built on top of that core too.
That doesn't sound more palatable at all. "You're about to be audited" in most contexts implies, "you're about to be harassed".
Well, yeah. But I'm arguing that if someone's buying something and it isn't a smart purchase, the main person at fault is the purchaser, not the seller.
I certainly agree, but I think the main problem is that a bunch of people who really want vocational training are going to research universities as undergrads, because the degree-prestige thing is misaligned. If someone wants to learn to program well, for a future job in a large enterprise-software company, there is no particular reason they should go to a university with a prestigious theoretical-CS division. While they should learn the basics of theory, most competent CS profs can teach that. The students would be much better served by going somewhere with a strong vocational/industry-focused angle, if that's what they want to do. Among CA state schools, for example, Cal Poly is probably a better school to learn programming/software-eng than UC Berkeley is. But a lot of people who have a choice of both will go to Berkeley instead, because it's more prestigious.
It doesn't seem to me that that's mainly the fault of the research universities, but the fault of employers and students ordering their preferences weirdly: everyone, both student and employer, seems to prefer degrees from prestigious research universities, when what they want out of a degree is unrelated to research quality.
I even agree with a lot of the criticisms, but "entrenched tenured professors more concerned with publishing" is a downside? He seems to miss that research universities are at least as much about research as they are about teaching, and that this is a good thing. Research universities are where we get many of our scientific breakthroughs, tech ideas that are later commercialized, and general advancement of knowledge.
Now tenured professors who are doing neither research nor teaching are a real concern, though they aren't that common--- despite tenure meaning they can't be fired, universities have always had a lot of ways to make their lives miserable (bad committee assignments, move their office to somewhere lame, stop giving them even cost-of-living raises, etc.), and increasingly official ones are being added, e.g. at top research universities, you typically now have to pay somewhere around 25-40% of your own salary out of grant money, so if you stop bringing in research grants, you get a big pay cut. But still, we can think of ways to improve that.
But he seems actually worried mainly about tenured professors who are doing good research, because they aren't paying enough attention to teaching. Good teachers need to exist, but so do good researchers--- the problem with today's university is not that there are too many good senior researchers. If anything, the opposite.
You might get the trademark, which may or may not be valuable. At the very least, it throws a wrench in the work of future forks, because they can't use the trademark that you now own to describe themselves, so they have to come up with a new name, and find a way to publicize the fact that they're now operating under a new name. The new name probably can't use the old name as a component, either--- your fork of MySQL would run afoul of trademark law if you named it NewMySQL or something.
Oracle can only really effectively buy open-source companies of the MySQL variety: where the vast majority of development is done by one, medium-sized, for-profit company closely associated with the project. Stretching a little more, they can buy multi-project companies on the lower end of "large" that do a lot of open-source development, like Sun.
But a lot of open-source is done by groups that deviate to either side of that. Either they're more distributed open-source projects with no central entity to buy in the first place, or they're run by very large companies that Oracle couldn't possibly buy, like Google and IBM.
Here's what Ted Nelson had to say about it:
Around the late 1990s and early 2000s, there were a number of games with both single-player and multiplayer components, where basically nobody cared about the single-player components, and companies increasingly decided that, as a result, it was hardly worth bothering with them. Starcraft wasn't a success because of its single-player missions, the new single-player missions weren't what sold most copies of the Starcraft: Brood War expansion. Counterstrike was a huge success despite not even having a single-player component. Same with Quake 3 Arena: just ditched the single-player entirely, and did very well.
Sure, but you already can't store significant scientific datasets on consumer-grade equipment. Nobody's saying that hard drives will cease to exist, but it's quite possible that SSDs will displace them in consumer-grade machines, the kind normal people buy.
Despite all that science, the advice in that flickr summary are basically the same as the advice and diagrams in the section of Business Etiquette for Dummies on handshakes.
(Don't ask me how I know that there's a Business Etiquette for Dummies, and that it has a section on handshakes.)
Phelps' protests themselves have been boring since I was in high school. Seriously I don't think he's done anything new since the 1990s; it's still just all "god hates fags" all the time. The satirical counterprotest trend in the past few years livened them up a bit and made him internet-meme-worthy again (instead of a 10-y-o dead meme), but those are now starting to get old too.
Satirical counterprotests of Fred Phelps are getting a bit boring, aren't they? That's basically what everyone does these days when they show up.