I have since been convinced that laptops are not the way to go; laptop hardware is just too flaky. Pretty much everything about a laptop is inferior to a desktop machine, in terms of performance, reliability, and expense: their only benefit is that they run off batteries. They're also hellaciously difficult to service: if something goes wrong, you throw the whole thing away and get a new one.
The guy that has to sit next to you and listen to you type will think you're an ass. Double so if he has to sit behind you and is contantly distracted by stuff flashing on your screen.
Perhaps, but it would be a hard case to sell that to a review board when I appeal on grounds that I'm being discriminated against because I have a computer.
Unlikely, as you are not being discriminated against due to your ownership of a computer. You are merely being penalized for refusing to follow the professor's rules, which clearly ban computers in classrooms. You, as a computer owner, are free to leave your computer in your dorm room, and thus suffer no discrimination. The only possible argument towards this end would be if you had a disability that required you to use a computer to take notes, in which case you could explain it to the professor, and most would be happy to make an exception. If you have no disability necessitating your use of a computer, I don't see how it could possibly be discrimination to disallow you (along with everyone else) from bringing one to class.
A public university *is* a legally defined public place.
This is incorrect, at least in most states. A public university is a government-owned property but not a public place. This is why you usually need a student ID or faculty ID to enter buildings -- if it were legally a public place (like a library or park) anyone could enter. However, this is clearly not the case.
As for making recordings, I can turn on my tape recorder anywhere I want and even do it clandestinely with full protection from the law. It does not matter what jursdiction I'm in either because it is a federal law, designed to protect informants. In any case, in a public institution in the USA, I can by rights record any lecture I want and listen to it all I want. What I cannot do is distribute it ad infinum.
Incorrect. In many states it is illegal to tape-record phone conversations without consent of both parties. This has been upheld in court. If it were legal to turn on your tape recorder in any public place, you could tape-record a call without the other party's consent, which is not the case. Laws on non-telephone recording are more nebulous and varied, but it does remain illegal in many states to record people without their consent. There are exceptions for public figures (you can record the Mayor's speech without his consent), but even if these applied to your professor, they would not apply to fellow students in the class, so you would be obligated to turn off your tape recorder every time someone asked a question.
So if a professor tries to take my tape and I refuse, he will likely threaten scholastic punishment (lower grade, etc). That is harrasment and he can be successfully sued/fired/whatever.
It is not harrassment if what you did was clearly against school rules, unless those rules were illegal (which, depending on your state, they very well might not be).
1. If you were sitting next to me typing away on your laptop and did not have a quiet keyboard, I would politely ask you to find a quieter way of taking notes so as to not interfere with my education.
2. What the hell is this bullshit about discrimination? Requiring laptops might be socio-economic discrimination, but banning them is not, unless you have some sort of a disability that prevents you from using pen and paper.
3. The legality of tape-recording depends greatly on the state. In many states is it illegal to tape-record people without their permission. If I were a fellow student in your class, I would object to you tape-recording the questions I asked during the class.
The definition of a public place does not extent to all government-owned facilities. You do not have an absolute right to tape-record in a public university any more than you have an absolute right to tape-record in the White House or near an open window of your local police department headquarters.
If you can find a decent price on a flat-screen monitor, that'll take care of most of the issue. It's really on the bulky CRT that's a problem, not the tower (you can stick that anywhere, and it's not too hard to carry when you move).
You're probably going to have stuff due every day, so is the thing going to beep at you constantly? You just need to learn to check your list of things to do (and keep it updated) every day, probably multiple times a day. Once you learn to do that, whether it's on a PDA or a wall calendar or a notebook doesn't really matter.
At least at my school, the course webpages all have schedule/assignment info on them. Since I can remember the courses I'm in in my head, all I have to do is periodically check the webpages to see what's coming up. And really, why a Palm organizer, not something on your desktop? It's not like you're a businessman scheduling meetings on the go -- the only places you have to be at specific times are classes and tests, and the rest is homework-type-stuff you can take care of in your room (for which a portable gadget is obviously not necessary).
I personally prefer a desktop, because it's a lot cheaper for the same level of performance, and you can play games for a reasonable price (my entire system cost ~$800, including monitor, which doesn't buy you much in the laptop world). My college (along with many others) has plenty of computer labs liberally sprinkled about, so if I need to access anything away from my dorm room, I simply log into one and SSH to my desktop.
As for notes, I rarely take them, because most of my profs make their course notes available on the internet; being CS profs, they have them written up in LaTeX already anyway, so it doesn't take them much effort to put them online. What isn't in the notes I can usually find in a textbook (or google). The few times I do take notes I'll put them in a good old-fashioned pen-and-paper notebook though, because it lets me do things like quickly draw diagrams and make arrows between bits of info I've written down. Many profs don't like laptops clicking away during their lectures anyway (partly because of the irritating clicking sound, partly because it's irritating talking to people hiding behind a monitor, and partly because they know you'll probably be talking on AIM and playing games on it).
So, in summary: unless you're rich or have special needs, go with a desktop. There's no reason to spend over $800 or so for a computer (possibly even less these days), and you'll probably be glad to have the extra money.
there are lots of problems in this class, mostly physics simulation, that just cant be done well on beowulf clusters
Depends on the type of physics simulation. This is correct for some problems, notably fluid modeling, but a lot of physics simulation can be productively done on clusters, notably high-energy particle physics. So it'd make sense to replace those giant supercomputers crunching data from particle accelerator experiments with giant computing clusters and massive quantities of storage, exactly as advocated in the linked article.
he's talking about Real Guinness
on
PeltierBeer
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· Score: 4, Informative
The sort that you get in a pub, not the sort that you get in a can or bottle. Most pubs in Ireland serve Guinness either at room temperature or slightly chilled (around 12 C / 53 F).
The code is (c) Nullsoft, and even AOL is not disputing this. The code is not (c) AOL Time Warner, which is an important distinction (Nullsoft is a subsidiary, and so a separate legal entity). Justin Frankel essentially is Nullsoft; he's a co-founder and principal developer. The code was released on the official Nullsoft website by him, the same way most other Nullsoft software is released. In short, the release followed the standard practice used by most other Nullsoft releases (most of which, like NetMon, are uncontroversial). This is Nullsoft release policy, and Justin is basically their release manager (for at least some of their stuff -- Winamp is handled separately). Simply because AOL disliked this particular release doesn't give them a legal leg to stand on in pulling it.
All indications are that Justin Frankel put the source online. Since he's a co-founder of and main force behind Nullsoft, he is clearly authorized to act on Nullsoft's behalf. Furthermore, Nullsoft, not AOL Time Warner, owns the code (even the retraction page does not dispute this, as it is signed "Nullsoft," not "AOL Time Warner").
So what we basically have is that the official Nullsoft site has made two conflicting statements -- 1) the code is GPL'd; 2) the code is not GPL'd.
The only possible way the GPL release could be invalid is if (1) was not made by an authorized Nullsoft representative, but (2) was. To establish this, they would need to give some evidence of (1) being invalid (for example, saying that their website was hacked, or that an intern posted it online, etc.). Absent such evidence, I have no reason to believe that the license was not granted me by Nullsoft (it certainly appeared to be), and so I can reasonably continue to use the source under the license granted me.
not that competative for its market
on
YOPY Arrives
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· Score: 3, Informative
A 300 MHz Dell Axim X5, which also has SecureDigital (superset of MMC) and Compact Flash slots, costs about $200.
The ambiguity is already there -- when you hear "Mega" in a computer context, you never know if it's referring to 1048576 of something (filesystem Megabyte, RAM Megabyte) or to 1000000 of something (bandwidth Megabit, hard drive Megabyte). So it can't really get any worse. At least with the modification you'll know for certain what someone means when they say a MiB.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to do such a thing, because it's the fine governments of Europe that are extorting the bulk of the money, not my international phone service provider. The governments charge fairly hefty taxes on incoming calls to mobile phones, so I have to pay them regardless of my provider.
An object with a pound of weight in a fixed gravitational field has a fixed mass; thus, the description "weighs 50 pounds at Earth sea-level" is a description of the object's mass. And so "pounds at earth sea level" is a unit of mass, convertible to other units of mass (such as the kilogram) by a fixed constant.
You can use a pound as a unit of mass simply by specifying that the context is Earth sea-level. In some sense "weight in a fixed gravitational field" and "mass" are equivalent concepts.
The various prefixes -- kilo, Mega, Giga, and so on -- are very precisely defined SI prefixes that have been in common use in the sciences for quite some time now. In computing though, 1024 bytes was originally termed a "kilobyte" because it was very close to an actual "kilo" of bytes (1000 bytes), and so was a convenient term to use. In other computer-related disciplines though, in particular engineering, the correct SI usage prevailed, so your 128 kbps mp3s actually have 128000 bits per second, not 128 * 1024.
The big problem is that 2^(10x) and 10^(3x) diverge as x increases: 1024 is 2.4% more than 1000, 1048576 is 4.9% more than 1000000, 1073741824 is 7.4% more than 1000000000, and so on. So obviously the "close enough" thing is getting less and less true -- when there's a 10% difference between the two measurements they're not even close enough for everyday colloquial speech.
So the solution of both the SI and the IEEE is to reassert the original meanings of the SI prefixes (kilo = 1000, Mega = 1000000, etc.), but to add new base-2 prefixes in recognition of their usefulness in computing. These are kibi, Mebi, Gibi, etc. (basically the same as the SI prefixes but with the last two letters replaced by "bi"). Their standard abbreviations are the same as for the SI prefixes, but with a lowercase 'i' appended (so ki, Mi, Gi, etc.).
The conversion is obviously nowhere near complete, and irritates some computer people who don't want to change the terms we've been using for decades, but this seems to be the only really reasonable way of doing things. The only other two options are to either force the rest of the sciences to change to use the base-2 definitions (which is obviously not going to happen, and they got there first anyway), or to maintain the current ambiguity, which is also obviously undesirable.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll quote what jwz has to say about laptops:
I have since been convinced that laptops are not the way to go; laptop hardware is just too flaky. Pretty much everything about a laptop is inferior to a desktop machine, in terms of performance, reliability, and expense: their only benefit is that they run off batteries. They're also hellaciously difficult to service: if something goes wrong, you throw the whole thing away and get a new one.
The guy that has to sit next to you and listen to you type will think you're an ass. Double so if he has to sit behind you and is contantly distracted by stuff flashing on your screen.
Perhaps, but it would be a hard case to sell that to a review board when I appeal on grounds that I'm being discriminated against because I have a computer.
Unlikely, as you are not being discriminated against due to your ownership of a computer. You are merely being penalized for refusing to follow the professor's rules, which clearly ban computers in classrooms. You, as a computer owner, are free to leave your computer in your dorm room, and thus suffer no discrimination. The only possible argument towards this end would be if you had a disability that required you to use a computer to take notes, in which case you could explain it to the professor, and most would be happy to make an exception. If you have no disability necessitating your use of a computer, I don't see how it could possibly be discrimination to disallow you (along with everyone else) from bringing one to class.
A public university *is* a legally defined public place.
This is incorrect, at least in most states. A public university is a government-owned property but not a public place. This is why you usually need a student ID or faculty ID to enter buildings -- if it were legally a public place (like a library or park) anyone could enter. However, this is clearly not the case.
As for making recordings, I can turn on my tape recorder anywhere I want and even do it clandestinely with full protection from the law. It does not matter what jursdiction I'm in either because it is a federal law, designed to protect informants. In any case, in a public institution in the USA, I can by rights record any lecture I want and listen to it all I want. What I cannot do is distribute it ad infinum.
Incorrect. In many states it is illegal to tape-record phone conversations without consent of both parties. This has been upheld in court. If it were legal to turn on your tape recorder in any public place, you could tape-record a call without the other party's consent, which is not the case. Laws on non-telephone recording are more nebulous and varied, but it does remain illegal in many states to record people without their consent. There are exceptions for public figures (you can record the Mayor's speech without his consent), but even if these applied to your professor, they would not apply to fellow students in the class, so you would be obligated to turn off your tape recorder every time someone asked a question.
So if a professor tries to take my tape and I refuse, he will likely threaten scholastic punishment (lower grade, etc). That is harrasment and he can be successfully sued/fired/whatever.
It is not harrassment if what you did was clearly against school rules, unless those rules were illegal (which, depending on your state, they very well might not be).
1. If you were sitting next to me typing away on your laptop and did not have a quiet keyboard, I would politely ask you to find a quieter way of taking notes so as to not interfere with my education.
2. What the hell is this bullshit about discrimination? Requiring laptops might be socio-economic discrimination, but banning them is not, unless you have some sort of a disability that prevents you from using pen and paper.
3. The legality of tape-recording depends greatly on the state. In many states is it illegal to tape-record people without their permission. If I were a fellow student in your class, I would object to you tape-recording the questions I asked during the class.
The definition of a public place does not extent to all government-owned facilities. You do not have an absolute right to tape-record in a public university any more than you have an absolute right to tape-record in the White House or near an open window of your local police department headquarters.
I personally can't stand sitting next to some guy who's typing away all lecture long. It's as irritating as someone chewing gum really loudly.
I only refer to notes when I'm in my room or a computer lab, in which case it's much more convenient to use a real computer.
If you can find a decent price on a flat-screen monitor, that'll take care of most of the issue. It's really on the bulky CRT that's a problem, not the tower (you can stick that anywhere, and it's not too hard to carry when you move).
You're probably going to have stuff due every day, so is the thing going to beep at you constantly? You just need to learn to check your list of things to do (and keep it updated) every day, probably multiple times a day. Once you learn to do that, whether it's on a PDA or a wall calendar or a notebook doesn't really matter.
At least at my school, the course webpages all have schedule/assignment info on them. Since I can remember the courses I'm in in my head, all I have to do is periodically check the webpages to see what's coming up. And really, why a Palm organizer, not something on your desktop? It's not like you're a businessman scheduling meetings on the go -- the only places you have to be at specific times are classes and tests, and the rest is homework-type-stuff you can take care of in your room (for which a portable gadget is obviously not necessary).
Preface: YMMV, of course.
I personally prefer a desktop, because it's a lot cheaper for the same level of performance, and you can play games for a reasonable price (my entire system cost ~$800, including monitor, which doesn't buy you much in the laptop world). My college (along with many others) has plenty of computer labs liberally sprinkled about, so if I need to access anything away from my dorm room, I simply log into one and SSH to my desktop.
As for notes, I rarely take them, because most of my profs make their course notes available on the internet; being CS profs, they have them written up in LaTeX already anyway, so it doesn't take them much effort to put them online. What isn't in the notes I can usually find in a textbook (or google). The few times I do take notes I'll put them in a good old-fashioned pen-and-paper notebook though, because it lets me do things like quickly draw diagrams and make arrows between bits of info I've written down. Many profs don't like laptops clicking away during their lectures anyway (partly because of the irritating clicking sound, partly because it's irritating talking to people hiding behind a monitor, and partly because they know you'll probably be talking on AIM and playing games on it).
So, in summary: unless you're rich or have special needs, go with a desktop. There's no reason to spend over $800 or so for a computer (possibly even less these days), and you'll probably be glad to have the extra money.
there are lots of problems in this class, mostly physics simulation, that just cant be done well on beowulf clusters
Depends on the type of physics simulation. This is correct for some problems, notably fluid modeling, but a lot of physics simulation can be productively done on clusters, notably high-energy particle physics. So it'd make sense to replace those giant supercomputers crunching data from particle accelerator experiments with giant computing clusters and massive quantities of storage, exactly as advocated in the linked article.
The sort that you get in a pub, not the sort that you get in a can or bottle. Most pubs in Ireland serve Guinness either at room temperature or slightly chilled (around 12 C / 53 F).
"the human mind cannot comprehend God's plans" or something like that.
That site has absolutely nothing on it. It's just a project named "waste" that someone forgot to actually upload the waste code to.
More like 100,000 users with 5,900,000 alternate accounts.
The code is (c) Nullsoft, and even AOL is not disputing this. The code is not (c) AOL Time Warner, which is an important distinction (Nullsoft is a subsidiary, and so a separate legal entity). Justin Frankel essentially is Nullsoft; he's a co-founder and principal developer. The code was released on the official Nullsoft website by him, the same way most other Nullsoft software is released. In short, the release followed the standard practice used by most other Nullsoft releases (most of which, like NetMon, are uncontroversial). This is Nullsoft release policy, and Justin is basically their release manager (for at least some of their stuff -- Winamp is handled separately). Simply because AOL disliked this particular release doesn't give them a legal leg to stand on in pulling it.
All indications are that Justin Frankel put the source online. Since he's a co-founder of and main force behind Nullsoft, he is clearly authorized to act on Nullsoft's behalf. Furthermore, Nullsoft, not AOL Time Warner, owns the code (even the retraction page does not dispute this, as it is signed "Nullsoft," not "AOL Time Warner").
So what we basically have is that the official Nullsoft site has made two conflicting statements -- 1) the code is GPL'd; 2) the code is not GPL'd.
The only possible way the GPL release could be invalid is if (1) was not made by an authorized Nullsoft representative, but (2) was. To establish this, they would need to give some evidence of (1) being invalid (for example, saying that their website was hacked, or that an intern posted it online, etc.). Absent such evidence, I have no reason to believe that the license was not granted me by Nullsoft (it certainly appeared to be), and so I can reasonably continue to use the source under the license granted me.
A 300 MHz Dell Axim X5, which also has SecureDigital (superset of MMC) and Compact Flash slots, costs about $200.
...the UK, which measures its speed limits in miles per hour and its beer in pints?
The ambiguity is already there -- when you hear "Mega" in a computer context, you never know if it's referring to 1048576 of something (filesystem Megabyte, RAM Megabyte) or to 1000000 of something (bandwidth Megabit, hard drive Megabyte). So it can't really get any worse. At least with the modification you'll know for certain what someone means when they say a MiB.
Unfortunately, it's not possible to do such a thing, because it's the fine governments of Europe that are extorting the bulk of the money, not my international phone service provider. The governments charge fairly hefty taxes on incoming calls to mobile phones, so I have to pay them regardless of my provider.
An object with a pound of weight in a fixed gravitational field has a fixed mass; thus, the description "weighs 50 pounds at Earth sea-level" is a description of the object's mass. And so "pounds at earth sea level" is a unit of mass, convertible to other units of mass (such as the kilogram) by a fixed constant.
You can use a pound as a unit of mass simply by specifying that the context is Earth sea-level. In some sense "weight in a fixed gravitational field" and "mass" are equivalent concepts.
The various prefixes -- kilo, Mega, Giga, and so on -- are very precisely defined SI prefixes that have been in common use in the sciences for quite some time now. In computing though, 1024 bytes was originally termed a "kilobyte" because it was very close to an actual "kilo" of bytes (1000 bytes), and so was a convenient term to use. In other computer-related disciplines though, in particular engineering, the correct SI usage prevailed, so your 128 kbps mp3s actually have 128000 bits per second, not 128 * 1024.
The big problem is that 2^(10x) and 10^(3x) diverge as x increases: 1024 is 2.4% more than 1000, 1048576 is 4.9% more than 1000000, 1073741824 is 7.4% more than 1000000000, and so on. So obviously the "close enough" thing is getting less and less true -- when there's a 10% difference between the two measurements they're not even close enough for everyday colloquial speech.
So the solution of both the SI and the IEEE is to reassert the original meanings of the SI prefixes (kilo = 1000, Mega = 1000000, etc.), but to add new base-2 prefixes in recognition of their usefulness in computing. These are kibi, Mebi, Gibi, etc. (basically the same as the SI prefixes but with the last two letters replaced by "bi"). Their standard abbreviations are the same as for the SI prefixes, but with a lowercase 'i' appended (so ki, Mi, Gi, etc.).
The conversion is obviously nowhere near complete, and irritates some computer people who don't want to change the terms we've been using for decades, but this seems to be the only really reasonable way of doing things. The only other two options are to either force the rest of the sciences to change to use the base-2 definitions (which is obviously not going to happen, and they got there first anyway), or to maintain the current ambiguity, which is also obviously undesirable.