Does anyone else see these carts as being useful in other situations as well?
They could be especially useful for organizations or companies where most employees don't have/use laptops on a regular basis. They could even make a smaller version of these carts which could be used for portable outdoor instant networks, for conventions, rallies, or other instances to set up an "instant network".
Suen and his collaborators are using supercomputing power from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to do numerical simulations of Einstein's equations to simulate what happens when, say, a neutron star plunges into a black hole. From these simulations, they get waveform templates. The templates can be superimposed on actual gravity wave signals to see if the signal has coincidences with the waveform.
"When we get a signal, we want to know what is generating that signal," Suen explained. "To determine that, we do a numerical simulation of a system, perhaps a neutron star collapsing, in a certain configuration, get the waveform and compare it to what we observe. If it's not a match, we change the configuration a little bit, do the comparison again and repeat the process until we can identify which configuration is responsible for the signal that we observe."
They will be changing the way they observe in order to conform with what they expect to observe. Doesn't this mean that ultimately they're not really going to discover anything new? I mean, if they set up their observation so that when looking at a neutron star collapse it matches the mathematical model, what's the point? Why not just look at the mathematical model?
Re:Good sales process
on
Nosy Vendors?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
If you use an unsupported operating system, and you come to Dell with OS-related issues, they are morally and legally right to tell you that it's no concern of theirs
I am a web developer, and the company I work for provides web hosting and e-mail hosting for my clients. They can choose whatever ISP they want; we always recommend against AOL. We also recommend strongly against Outlook Express.
Technically, when one of our clients called up and asked for help because their internet connection wasn't working ("My website is down" "Your mail server isn't responding") or Outlook is behaving badly we would be "morally and legally right" to tell them to contact their ISP or remind them that we recommended against Outlook. However, we provide support nonetheless, because we can't afford to lose them as customers.
Granted, Dell is a little different in the sense that they've already gotten the money and could care less about you now. That doesn't mean they won't get a ton of people who don't care that the reason their computer isn't working is because of a bad line in a config file: The case says DELL on the outside, dammit, and they want support! The DELL isn't working, never mind why!
I think it has to do with the perceived "users" of these cards.
Like the poster above pointed out, there are perfectly acceptable graphic cards out there for very reasonable prices.
However, when you want the "top of the line" card, you're making a different kind of statement. It's similar to those who purchase top of the line stereo equipment. I have a cheap bookshelf system I bought a K-Mart for around $150 bucks. It's a perfectly fine stereo system, I listen to it all the time. However, if I wanted a top of the line stereo system, I would have to pay at least five times as much, if not more. The price discrepancy is based on quality, on workmanship, but also...on status. Having a really souped up stereo system is also a statement. Part of your purchase price goes into that statement.
The same thing goes for graphics cards. Once you get beyond "normal" use and start wanting to have "the best of the best", expect to pay more, not just for the cost of the item itself, but for the additional "status" benefits that it allows you.
This status thing applies to every aspect of commercial life. Think t-shirts. Just how much better is a Versace t-shirt than the kind you can get at a chain department store?
For all I know, I may be totally wrong. Maybe the price is more because the components or manufacturing process is more expensive. But I think that if the cards were lower priced, some people wouldn't believe that they *were* top of the line.
While telemarketers technically get the brunt of our rage, it's the telemarketing company that's at fault.
I know someone who worked as a telemarketer. She was a nice person. She said that you don't even know who you are calling -- a machine does it for the telemarketer. That's why they frequently stumble pronouncing your name -- they don't see it until the moment you pick up the phone.
Telemarketing is a thankless job, but it pays well, and for someone who doesn't have a degree -- heck, with the economy the way it is now, even people *with* degrees -- it's a job that pays well without requiring physical exertion or long hours.
Have you heard what most telemarketers sound like? They aren't thrilled about their product. They're not excited to tell you about it. They're just running through a script they've been given. Most telemarketers I hear sound tired, they sound stressed, they sound worn out.
If you simply tell them "Put this number on your do not call list" then they are obligated by law to do so and cannot call you for a year. On the other hand, screaming or attacking the person who calls you isn't constructive. It just increases the stress of that person, and, probably, yours.
NASA does have a low budget for a agency, but you have to consider just how many people it actually serves with those dollars. While you could technically argue, "all of humanity", so far tests in space have not, in my mind, led to any huge improvements in human life. Before I get flamed to pieces, I just want to point out that while NASA certainly is doing a lot of good, the Department of Education has a more immediate and obvious positive (hopefully!) effect on the nation as a whole, and it serves millions and millions of children. Its budget is only 56 billion dollars, about 4 times as much as NASA's.
14 billion dollars is a lot of money. I believe that NASA deserves it, even if sometimes it seems that they sometimes do experiments in space just for the hell of it or for publicity. However, I also think that the size of their current budget is about right.
I pay close to $120 a month to keep my apartment 62F year round, and I save a huge amount of money because I don't have to constantly repair and replace equipment.
I think it really depends on the person whether or not low temperatures are troublesome or not. I know some people who love the cold, and I know some people who hate it. 62F is a little cold for my tastes, especially when I get out of the shower.
Here's a solution, if management is unyielding about the cold: put VNC on all the servers. That way, you can access the servers from outside the server room, and it'll be just like you're there, only you'll be warmer, because you won't be in the server room. Unless there's some reason you have to be *in* the server room, it's probably best to manage all of the computers remotely anyways.
<side comment>$120 seems awfully expensive to keep a place heated to 62F </side comment>
Look at this other article posted on CNN.com yesterday, about an astronomer (Feng Ma) observing a black hole eating another star.
It looks like CNN was actually a little late on reporting this actually, here's an article on the 7th about the same event. Actually, it looks like Feng Ma actually observed the "belch" the black hole gave out after consuming the star.
They may be "easily removeable" in the sense that it doesn't require crowbars or solvents to remove, but that doesn't mean that it still doesn't require labor -- workers that the city must pay for to remove these buterflies.
The article states that the stickers obstructed travel for those in wheelchairs or similarly physically disabled. They had to be removed to ensure the safety of those people. Thus, in a sense, the stickers obviously were a threat to public safety, although that threat was limited in its scope and damage. Possibly the worst thing that would have happened is someone would slip and break a hip, but hey -- wouldn't that be great advertising for Microsoft, too? They could offer the poor invalid a laptop with a complimentary 3 month subscription to MSN 8.
Also, let's compare Microsoft to, say, some activist who puts up a bunch of leaflets protesting the war in Iraq.
Do you honestly think the activist would receive a letter saying, "We hope this was just a misunderstanding"? Would the activist pretend that they had received authorization to put up the signs?
From the article:
A single summons was issued, with a $50 penalty, though each butterfly could have been subject to a $50 fine, said Tom Cocola, the assistant commissioner for public affairs at the transportation agency. He said the city's chief goal was seeing to it that the decals are removed.
I say, make them pay for each one. They can certainly afford to.
What infuriates me about Corporate "guerilla" advertising is that it appropriates the methods of groups who use them because they don't have the money for traditional advertising, and because even if they did they would probably not want to support the corporate media system by running commercials on TV or buying full page ads in Newsweek. On the other hand, Microsoft and other companies are resorting to guerilla advertising because people are so jaded and don't respond to traditional Corporate advertising anymore.
Advertising used to be (way back before I was born) about letting consumers know about a product, and what it offered to the consumer in and of itself (Got Dandruff? Try Listerine! I'm not kidding -- that was in an ad from the forties or so). Nowadays, Corporate advertising is attempting to do nothing less than sell us our identity. Our choices, from the soda we drink or the car we drive to the shirts we wear or, yes, the ISP we use -- reflect not simply the need or desire for those products, but rather who we are as people (I'm a Chevrovel Cavalier Dr. Pepper Macintosh myself). However, this is backfiring these days because really most of the identies they offer are pretty much the same. Hence, the need to explore new forms of advertising, such as guerilla advertising.
Suddenly Microsoft, with a 90%+ market share of all software and the biggest, richest corporation in America is seen as rebellious, as deviant, as non-conformist. You just can't pay for that kind of advertising -- you also have to plan it carefully and then make sure the media propogates it.
Microsoft should use its money and influence to introduce positive forms of publicity. How about offering free MSN 8 to various charity organizations?
If you're checking out this article, be sure to notice the helpful informative photo on the right of Arnold Schwartzenegerr (sp? -- but who cares, really) as the Terminator cyborg. The caption, "Research could pave the way for sophisticated robots" really says it all.
It's just like the old SGML module for Word they used to have about 6 years ago. My guess is that there will be some significant drawback to saving documents in XML, such as loss of some formatting information. That would convince users not to save in the XML format... but that isn't the important thing to Microsoft.
Probably not, judging by my experience with documents translated to HTML. Although some features are lost (headers and footers, notably), MS Word has actually been pretty good about using styles and HTML comments to define all the remaining content--including Mail Merge and detailed styles and formatting.
Most of the features that are lost were because those features don't exist on web pages at all (notably, headers and footers), so there wasn't a sensible reason for putting them into the output.
But I think we can actually expect this XML format to offer almost all of the formatting of a standard Word document.
And now Microsoft is introducing compatibility with an open and well-defined markup langauge, in favour of their proprietary language? I'll believe it when I see it.
The key is behavior in reading those XML files. HTML is also an open format, and their documents can be saved in HTML format. But Word-specific features and many of their styles won't work except in Microsoft Word. Even if their documents are 100% xml compliant/compatible, that doesn't mean that the information contained in them is particularly useable in a non-Word application.
Funny, I have never been in the need of a translator from English to English. I always sort of understood it the first time.
Gosh, I really hope you were intending this to be a funny post, because otherwise you're just being an ass and not really looking at the article in its true context:
He's talking about a site-creator's experience with users, so most of your translations don't make sense.
Community members will continually surprise you, especially if you've never really analyzed an online community before.
Translation: If you're a newbie, you will get flamed
How about, "Just like in real life, people's behaviors are not always what you would expect. And if you haven't been analyzing what has happened to other online communities, then you will be even more surprised by their behaviors." Maybe the surprise will be that your site becomes the first place people go to in the morning, and becomes so successful just by word of mouth that one morning when their is a big news event (i.e., 9/11), your server becomes totally overloaded. Maybe the surprise will be that two members of your online community fall in love, get married, and invite the whole community to their wedding party.
The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users. They'll latch onto and chase down ideas you've never found important or even knew existed.
Trans: you may still be a loser even if you run a successful weblog, or more mildly, there is always someone who knows more than you about how some random chip inside some old hardware REALLY works.
How about: "Users may have different agendas, motivations, or purposes in visiting your site than you had in mind. Thus, while you online community may have at one point been geared towards just promoting Open Source software, you may find that someone starts complaining about security problems they are having with Windoze, and your site suddenly becomes a #1 resource for people to discuss and fix security problems with Windows, and it become the most discussed topic on your site.
I think your mistake here was assuming that because two people have different interests, one is a dork with serious brain damage, and the other is a supergod hacker who thinks programming in Assembly is taking the easy way out.
They'll also tend to develop some strange characteristics.
Trans: like first post, links to prOn, and the like...
This is where you get closest. First Posts are definitely one of the "strange characteristics" of Slashdot. I don't think links to porn are a strange characteristic, any more than some guy who's drunk too much puking in the street is a "strange characteristic" of a college town. It's not a particularly pleasant part of the community, but it doesn't represent a community "flavor". Generally, people who post links to porn aren't users in the usual sense. They're spammers who go to every community site that allows anonymous posts and put up links to their sites. Thus, they're not really "users" of the community, although they are users of the site. I'd say examples of "strange characteristics" on Slashdot include the contents of people's sig files, the proliferation of "Funny" comments, and an obsession with putting random links everywhere. Also, let's not forget Karma Whoring..
Not everyone will exhibit every behavior, but these are general trends in every community I've observed.
Trans: there are some people who put a lot of thought into what they say. Thanks be to God/Allah/Buddha/Krishna/The TCP/IP stack/etc...
How about: Some people won't surprise you. Or they will surprise you somewhat, but the issues you find important will resonate with them. Etc., etc. Basically, this is one of those "I'm covering my ass" sentences. He doesn't want to sound like users will always behave the way he has described, so he's allowing for other possibilities too. A lengthened YMMV.
First, let me get out my special padded helmet to protect myself before I get smacked upside the head by some of you.
Our company recently did a website for an organization which was organizing a web broadcast for a governmental organization. So, although we were technically being paid by the organization, we were indirectly being paid by the governmental organization.
But let's remove those distinctions and say the governmental organization themselves had hired us to create the website for them.
Well, our site used software which we had developed in house, at our own expense, prior to being hired. Some of it, however, was developed and coded while hired by them.
Technically, none of the modifcations we made to the software could have worked without the software we had written before.
The question is: if we were required to license this software as Open Source or GPL, would we have had to license *all* of it, including the code that was written prior to the bid?
Also, say that we had had to write the code from scratch. We might have charged less for our work than we could have, thinking, "We can reuse this code and sell it to customers later on."
I think that except in cases where the government is actually purchasing the software outright froma developer, it gets very sticky to say what should and shouldn't be freely developed.
While I agree that there are many cases in which making software open source is a good thing, the truth is if we were required by law to have, say, a section on our website that said, "By the way, here's all the code we've ever written, available for your own use. For free." it is unlikely that we would be able to continue to function as a profitable business. After all, what customer is going to pay for software that is being advertised or described as "free"?
Our tax dollars go to all sorts of projects. For instance, medicines are often developed through the help of government grants. Ever tried to get prescription drugs for free?
Scrum seems to me, just at first glance, to be a sort of "hostile" development process, because of the way the whole project begins:
Describe the project, include how long it's estimated to take, how much it is estimated to cost, how it is expected to perform, etc. Now tell them that their job is to do it in half the time, with half the cost, twice the performance, etc. Tell them how it's done is up to them and explain that your job is to support them with resources. Now leave.
I don't know about you, but being presented with a project in that way would be demoralizing, not to mention weird. Also, their explanation of why it works is weak:
Why does Scrum Work?
The basic premise is that if you are committed to the team and the project, and if your boss really trusts you, then you can spend time being productive instead of justifying your work.
That's not a development methodology. That's just common sense. What I've read so far seems to boil down to, "It's a flattened waterfall cycle that the Japanese developed" and "it's a Rugby term".
Scrum sounds to me more like the sort of thing that you feed to corporate managers who read books like Who Moved My Cheese? rather than developers desperate (or even just interested) in cutting down and refining their development cycle.
At the very least, I'd go for a methodology that has actual printed books (e-texts are great for source code and learning languages, but lousy for the philosophy or process of programming, IMHO) that you can refer to with your back to a computer. Right now it looks like to learn about Scrum, you hire (a) consultant(s) to come to your business and teach it to you, which sounds like an expensive proposition to me.
Rapid Development by Steve McConnell is an excellent book with case studies and descriptions of a variety of development cycles that you can use to get your projects through.
I'm guessing when you say that your main problems are bidding and software development, you mean:
Bidding is usually too low and doesn't cover costs, or is perceived by clients as too high and they don't bite. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to control how a client responds to a bidding process. Ideally, you bid once you have a clear idea of all the work that will go into the project; if you can display just how much work it will be to the client (all the different use cases, all the different interfaces that will be involved, all the testing and re-testing that will be required) they may be more understanding of your bid -- they won't feel they're being ripped off.
In the software development process, there are so many things that can go wrong. The first is that it takes too much time. (Or is over budget, but from my experience budget *is* time--a piece of software is purchased to reduce time, or additional people are hired to reduce time.) This generally occurs because there isn't a clear understanding of the scope of the project in the beginning. The other cause for taking too long is slow response from the customer on its needs.
The solution to this can be creating a non-working prototype that shows every screen and page that the program will use. This doesn't mean creating 26,000 screens if there are 26,000 records in the program. You create screens for one or two sample records (say, one for each major "condition", such as "Approved", "Unapproved", "Expired", etc.). You also create a screen for every entry form and a sample of each report that the program will have.
You show this to your customer and get their approval. Make sure that each form matches all of the fields that they want. Ask them if there is any information they would want to know that isn't on any of the reports or forms. Then you say to your customer, "Is there anything else this program needs?" If they say no, you say, "Okay, judging by x forms, y reports, and z interactive screens, we estimate that it will take at least n months and no more than m months, with a probable time of p months."
The customer is happy because you're giving them what appears (and is) a much more firm time estimate than something off the top of your head, and they understand the complexity and process that will go into the development.
The other advantage to this process is that it kills the other software development dragon: developing the wrong software (it doesn't do what the customer wants, and offers features the customer doesn't need). By developing a prototype of all the screens, you can do a "sanity check" on the software to make sure you have the same understanding of the final project as your client does. Also, once the prototype is built, you hopefully will not have any features that need to be added on mid-project.
I hope these tips work for you. They sure have helped me out. Keep in mind I've only used these for web development, but I'm fairly confident they will work equally well in other areas.
This just shows that conciousness is a function of organised matter - you make the assumption that cold virii don't infect and affect neural tissues in the brain.
The cold was just an example. There are many other physical experiences which affect the way you think that have absolutely no direct physical effect on the brain itself. For instance, I find that my thinking dulls and I feel depressed when I have to pee real bad -- why, I don't know, but whatever is happening in the brain is not *directly* connected to my physical experience, but rather indirectly related.
I don't disagree that the brain is the "center" of the nervous system, but that's "all" that it is--the center of it. My point is not that we don't use our brains to think, just that they aren't the be-all and end-all of consciousness.
Sorry, this makes an assumption that most people make:
It's all in our heads.
Starting with Rene Descartes, all focus on consciousness and being in the scientific world has shifted over to our brain. And yet, clearly that is not the only part of our consciousness. All you need to do is get a cold, and you'll discover just how much your physical body effects your emotional and mental condition.
Our bodies are just as much a part of ourselves as our brains are. Also, don't forget that the makeup of brains is neurons and nerve cell connections. Well, surprise, surprise--we have nerve endings all over our bodies, and I'm willing to bet that they're used, albeit at a low percentage perhaps, when we think and process the world as well.
As far as I understand it, we haven't yet developed the ability to remove a brain and find out what it's thinking -- it only works when it's inside a human body. And unless I'm out of the loop, brain transplantation has not yet been done on humans. So far, "brain transplants" has meant inserting healthy cells into Parkinson patients. In this case, the individual cells are simply subsumed by the whole brain and used as dopamine factories.
The brain is not a hard disk or cpu. It's not running linux, windoze, or even (despite Steve Jobs' assertions) OS X.
Our understanding of the brain organ, and by extension, the "mind" -- which may or may not overlap 100% with the brain -- is so woefully inadequate as to make any talk of uploading or downloading anything on it silly at best.
Maybe I'm just overly skeptical right now (just finished reading some lovely articles at snopes.com, but does anyone else think that the Shakespearean chatter function is highly improbable?
A few things I've noticed:
1) The quotes are all remarkably apt for the moves--in other words, they reflect the emotion and the mental state of Kramnik and the game itself. A computer would not be able to understand the underlying meanings of the Shakespearean quotes, let alone choose the appropriate quote for each moment.
2) It played the words just loud enough for Kramnik alone to hear. How then is it that we have a full and complete transcript of what Fritz said? Never mind -- I just read the transcript again and it looks like an official got the transcript from Fritz. But I still say it's fishy.
3) It hummed the theme from Midsummer's Nights Dream? It whistled. While recordings of these could be made, and I suppose loaded in and played on command, I still find it hard to believe that this would happen.
4) Considering that Krimnik could easily, and without drawing criticism on himself, point out this clear breach, wasn't it way too much of a concern for the people developing the Fritz program? Did they really want to risk disqualification?
I was able to read the transcript once (it's/.ed now, here's the cache) but I would prefer to see at least one other authoritative source confirm that Shakespearean chatter was in fact used.
All right, all right, folks -- read to the end of the transcript. This line gives it away:
And that's what really happened. We thought the world should know.
It's a practical joke placed upon us by, surprise surprise, a "Shakespearean scholar and chess addict" Michael Fischer.
It was delivering the mime type text/html and, yes, it was on an IE browser. One of the problems had been whitespace before the XML declaration, although even when I removed the whitespace, I still had problems.
Also, as it was a dynamic site, I also did not have total control over the content put in by the client. Since they frequently used an & standing alone, that made it a badly formed XML which made the whole page unviewable. It would have been difficult to escape entites *everywhere* they appeared (links, page titles, page content, meta keywords and description and more were all editable by the client), just allowing Internet Explorer to think that it *wasn't* dealing with a stretch of XML even when it was seemed to fix that problem...
The truth is, you can never just tell a client that a browser is non-compliant and leave it at that. They are using that browser, and the website must match what they should be getting.
One of our clients had, for some god-forsaken reason, a font named "Georgia" which was some form of Cyrillic. He thought his whole website was gibberish, because in the style sheet we had defined that font as the default font for body text. Even though it was only the case on his computer which had this bizarre font, we had to change it to Times New Roman so that it would display correctly on his browser.
Not to get on another rant but I have to say, I am a little sick of people who talk about standards and how it's more important to follow the standards than to create solutions that do what clients want, even if they don't comply. Have these people ever created websites for others for money? If so, they must have discovered by now that the mantra "The customer always thinks they're right" applies in their line of work, too. I don't have the luxory of telling some client to "shove off" if they don't want to comply with my standards-following ideals. I have to give them what they want.
Believe it or not as you will, adding the declaration frequently will cause bad behavior -- if it's XHTML on a browser. Often I've had clients call in, complaining about a site displaying bizarrely, or not at all. The thing that has fixed it has been taking out the XML declaration which, according all the specs that I've seen, is optional.
The DOCTYPE declaration often causes problems too. Why, I don't know. I just wish all these vendors would get their acts together and get all of the browsers to respond the same for XHTML-compliant pages. </gripe>
This is a style guide, but notice that it's a style guide specifically geared towards information development. My point was that outside of that field, using an apostrophe is the correct method of pluralizing. While using a lowercase s might be stylistically preferred, using an apostrophe is the traditional form of pluralization, and is thus could be regarded as correct for all fields.
By style and usage work, I really meant one that you would get at, say, your local library. Something like Strunk and White.
And the word is controller. Which pluralizes to controllers, not controlleres.
Nope, nope nope. Pluralization is based on the phonetic quality of the word, not its semantic meaning.
So, you're actually saying "Pee-Ell-Cees". And, as everyone knows, the pluralization of a letter requires an apostrophe, as in:
There are no z's in this sentence.
Which makes much more sense than:
There are no zs in this sentence.
All you have to do is consult any style and usage work, and I'm sure that they will state that pluralization of acronyms require an apostrophe.
The poster earlier was correct. His point was the abbreviation was not a word, not that we should look at the original words that PLC stood for in order to make a determination about pluralization. However, I disagree with him that the apostrophe is intended to represent an 'es' sound. It is simply used to mark the pluralization of the acronym.
E-mail has "revolutionized", in a sense, the way that language is punctuated. For instance, notice that I placed the comma outside of rather than inside of the quote marks around revolutionized. Until recently, punctuation marks always appeared within quotes. This changed, probably due to problems like this:
Your password is "toothbrush."
Copying within the quotes would yield a bad password. So, over time, punctuation moved outside of quotations, and this is the style that is now commonly used within e-mail and other electronic texts. It is still technically incorrect in normal printed work, however, so be careful around your English teacher.
In the same way, a lowercase s used to pluralize abbreviations is a new invention, necessitated, probably, by the huge proliferation of TLA's. Using a lowercase s is, in a sense, an abbreviation of 's. In a forum such as Slashdot, but PLC's and PLCs are both equally correct, although the geek "Elements of Style" might suggest the abbreviated s version. However, use just an s outside of this context, and you, my friend, are making a grammatical error.
Note: I don't think that there are grammatical errors in this posting, but even if there are, what I have said above remains correct.
At Columbia University, we are investigating methods and software to automatically deal with sudden, unpredictable load spikes ala the 'Slashdot effect'.
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone else see these carts as being useful in other situations as well?
They could be especially useful for organizations or companies where most employees don't have/use laptops on a regular basis. They could even make a smaller version of these carts which could be used for portable outdoor instant networks, for conventions, rallies, or other instances to set up an "instant network".
Suen and his collaborators are using supercomputing power from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, to do numerical simulations of Einstein's equations to simulate what happens when, say, a neutron star plunges into a black hole. From these simulations, they get waveform templates. The templates can be superimposed on actual gravity wave signals to see if the signal has coincidences with the waveform.
"When we get a signal, we want to know what is generating that signal," Suen explained. "To determine that, we do a numerical simulation of a system, perhaps a neutron star collapsing, in a certain configuration, get the waveform and compare it to what we observe. If it's not a match, we change the configuration a little bit, do the comparison again and repeat the process until we can identify which configuration is responsible for the signal that we observe."
They will be changing the way they observe in order to conform with what they expect to observe. Doesn't this mean that ultimately they're not really going to discover anything new? I mean, if they set up their observation so that when looking at a neutron star collapse it matches the mathematical model, what's the point? Why not just look at the mathematical model?
If you use an unsupported operating system, and you come to Dell with OS-related issues, they are morally and legally right to tell you that it's no concern of theirs
I am a web developer, and the company I work for provides web hosting and e-mail hosting for my clients. They can choose whatever ISP they want; we always recommend against AOL. We also recommend strongly against Outlook Express.
Technically, when one of our clients called up and asked for help because their internet connection wasn't working ("My website is down" "Your mail server isn't responding") or Outlook is behaving badly we would be "morally and legally right" to tell them to contact their ISP or remind them that we recommended against Outlook. However, we provide support nonetheless, because we can't afford to lose them as customers.
Granted, Dell is a little different in the sense that they've already gotten the money and could care less about you now. That doesn't mean they won't get a ton of people who don't care that the reason their computer isn't working is because of a bad line in a config file: The case says DELL on the outside, dammit, and they want support! The DELL isn't working, never mind why!
I think it has to do with the perceived "users" of these cards.
Like the poster above pointed out, there are perfectly acceptable graphic cards out there for very reasonable prices.
However, when you want the "top of the line" card, you're making a different kind of statement. It's similar to those who purchase top of the line stereo equipment. I have a cheap bookshelf system I bought a K-Mart for around $150 bucks. It's a perfectly fine stereo system, I listen to it all the time. However, if I wanted a top of the line stereo system, I would have to pay at least five times as much, if not more. The price discrepancy is based on quality, on workmanship, but also...on status. Having a really souped up stereo system is also a statement. Part of your purchase price goes into that statement.
The same thing goes for graphics cards. Once you get beyond "normal" use and start wanting to have "the best of the best", expect to pay more, not just for the cost of the item itself, but for the additional "status" benefits that it allows you.
This status thing applies to every aspect of commercial life. Think t-shirts. Just how much better is a Versace t-shirt than the kind you can get at a chain department store?
For all I know, I may be totally wrong. Maybe the price is more because the components or manufacturing process is more expensive. But I think that if the cards were lower priced, some people wouldn't believe that they *were* top of the line.
While telemarketers technically get the brunt of our rage, it's the telemarketing company that's at fault.
I know someone who worked as a telemarketer. She was a nice person. She said that you don't even know who you are calling -- a machine does it for the telemarketer. That's why they frequently stumble pronouncing your name -- they don't see it until the moment you pick up the phone.
Telemarketing is a thankless job, but it pays well, and for someone who doesn't have a degree -- heck, with the economy the way it is now, even people *with* degrees -- it's a job that pays well without requiring physical exertion or long hours.
Have you heard what most telemarketers sound like? They aren't thrilled about their product. They're not excited to tell you about it. They're just running through a script they've been given. Most telemarketers I hear sound tired, they sound stressed, they sound worn out.
If you simply tell them "Put this number on your do not call list" then they are obligated by law to do so and cannot call you for a year. On the other hand, screaming or attacking the person who calls you isn't constructive. It just increases the stress of that person, and, probably, yours.
NASA does have a low budget for a agency, but you have to consider just how many people it actually serves with those dollars. While you could technically argue, "all of humanity", so far tests in space have not, in my mind, led to any huge improvements in human life. Before I get flamed to pieces, I just want to point out that while NASA certainly is doing a lot of good, the Department of Education has a more immediate and obvious positive (hopefully!) effect on the nation as a whole, and it serves millions and millions of children. Its budget is only 56 billion dollars, about 4 times as much as NASA's.
14 billion dollars is a lot of money. I believe that NASA deserves it, even if sometimes it seems that they sometimes do experiments in space just for the hell of it or for publicity. However, I also think that the size of their current budget is about right.
I pay close to $120 a month to keep my apartment 62F year round, and I save a huge amount of money because I don't have to constantly repair and replace equipment.
I think it really depends on the person whether or not low temperatures are troublesome or not. I know some people who love the cold, and I know some people who hate it. 62F is a little cold for my tastes, especially when I get out of the shower.
Here's a solution, if management is unyielding about the cold: put VNC on all the servers. That way, you can access the servers from outside the server room, and it'll be just like you're there, only you'll be warmer, because you won't be in the server room. Unless there's some reason you have to be *in* the server room, it's probably best to manage all of the computers remotely anyways.
<side comment>$120 seems awfully expensive to keep a place heated to 62F </side comment>
Look at this other article posted on CNN.com yesterday, about an astronomer (Feng Ma) observing a black hole eating another star.
It looks like CNN was actually a little late on reporting this actually, here's an article on the 7th about the same event. Actually, it looks like Feng Ma actually observed the "belch" the black hole gave out after consuming the star.
They may be "easily removeable" in the sense that it doesn't require crowbars or solvents to remove, but that doesn't mean that it still doesn't require labor -- workers that the city must pay for to remove these buterflies.
The article states that the stickers obstructed travel for those in wheelchairs or similarly physically disabled. They had to be removed to ensure the safety of those people. Thus, in a sense, the stickers obviously were a threat to public safety, although that threat was limited in its scope and damage. Possibly the worst thing that would have happened is someone would slip and break a hip, but hey -- wouldn't that be great advertising for Microsoft, too? They could offer the poor invalid a laptop with a complimentary 3 month subscription to MSN 8.
Also, let's compare Microsoft to, say, some activist who puts up a bunch of leaflets protesting the war in Iraq.
Do you honestly think the activist would receive a letter saying, "We hope this was just a misunderstanding"? Would the activist pretend that they had received authorization to put up the signs?
From the article:I say, make them pay for each one. They can certainly afford to.
What infuriates me about Corporate "guerilla" advertising is that it appropriates the methods of groups who use them because they don't have the money for traditional advertising, and because even if they did they would probably not want to support the corporate media system by running commercials on TV or buying full page ads in Newsweek. On the other hand, Microsoft and other companies are resorting to guerilla advertising because people are so jaded and don't respond to traditional Corporate advertising anymore.
Advertising used to be (way back before I was born) about letting consumers know about a product, and what it offered to the consumer in and of itself (Got Dandruff? Try Listerine! I'm not kidding -- that was in an ad from the forties or so). Nowadays, Corporate advertising is attempting to do nothing less than sell us our identity. Our choices, from the soda we drink or the car we drive to the shirts we wear or, yes, the ISP we use -- reflect not simply the need or desire for those products, but rather who we are as people (I'm a Chevrovel Cavalier Dr. Pepper Macintosh myself). However, this is backfiring these days because really most of the identies they offer are pretty much the same. Hence, the need to explore new forms of advertising, such as guerilla advertising.
Suddenly Microsoft, with a 90%+ market share of all software and the biggest, richest corporation in America is seen as rebellious, as deviant, as non-conformist. You just can't pay for that kind of advertising -- you also have to plan it carefully and then make sure the media propogates it.
Microsoft should use its money and influence to introduce positive forms of publicity. How about offering free MSN 8 to various charity organizations?
If you're checking out this article, be sure to notice the helpful informative photo on the right of Arnold Schwartzenegerr (sp? -- but who cares, really) as the Terminator cyborg. The caption, "Research could pave the way for sophisticated robots" really says it all.
Gosh, who says robotics research isn't exciting?
It's just like the old SGML module for Word they used to have about 6 years ago. My guess is that there will be some significant drawback to saving documents in XML, such as loss of some formatting information. That would convince users not to save in the XML format... but that isn't the important thing to Microsoft.
Probably not, judging by my experience with documents translated to HTML. Although some features are lost (headers and footers, notably), MS Word has actually been pretty good about using styles and HTML comments to define all the remaining content--including Mail Merge and detailed styles and formatting.
Most of the features that are lost were because those features don't exist on web pages at all (notably, headers and footers), so there wasn't a sensible reason for putting them into the output.
But I think we can actually expect this XML format to offer almost all of the formatting of a standard Word document.
And now Microsoft is introducing compatibility with an open and well-defined markup langauge, in favour of their proprietary language? I'll believe it when I see it.
The key is behavior in reading those XML files. HTML is also an open format, and their documents can be saved in HTML format. But Word-specific features and many of their styles won't work except in Microsoft Word. Even if their documents are 100% xml compliant/compatible, that doesn't mean that the information contained in them is particularly useable in a non-Word application.
Funny, I have never been in the need of a translator from English to English. I always sort of understood it the first time.
Gosh, I really hope you were intending this to be a funny post, because otherwise you're just being an ass and not really looking at the article in its true context:
He's talking about a site-creator's experience with users, so most of your translations don't make sense.
Community members will continually surprise you, especially if you've never really analyzed an online community before.
Translation: If you're a newbie, you will get flamed
How about, "Just like in real life, people's behaviors are not always what you would expect. And if you haven't been analyzing what has happened to other online communities, then you will be even more surprised by their behaviors." Maybe the surprise will be that your site becomes the first place people go to in the morning, and becomes so successful just by word of mouth that one morning when their is a big news event (i.e., 9/11), your server becomes totally overloaded. Maybe the surprise will be that two members of your online community fall in love, get married, and invite the whole community to their wedding party.
The issues and themes you find important may never really resonate with your users. They'll latch onto and chase down ideas you've never found important or even knew existed.
Trans: you may still be a loser even if you run a successful weblog, or more mildly, there is always someone who knows more than you about how some random chip inside some old hardware REALLY works.
How about: "Users may have different agendas, motivations, or purposes in visiting your site than you had in mind. Thus, while you online community may have at one point been geared towards just promoting Open Source software, you may find that someone starts complaining about security problems they are having with Windoze, and your site suddenly becomes a #1 resource for people to discuss and fix security problems with Windows, and it become the most discussed topic on your site.
I think your mistake here was assuming that because two people have different interests, one is a dork with serious brain damage, and the other is a supergod hacker who thinks programming in Assembly is taking the easy way out.
They'll also tend to develop some strange characteristics.
Trans: like first post, links to prOn, and the like...
This is where you get closest. First Posts are definitely one of the "strange characteristics" of Slashdot. I don't think links to porn are a strange characteristic, any more than some guy who's drunk too much puking in the street is a "strange characteristic" of a college town. It's not a particularly pleasant part of the community, but it doesn't represent a community "flavor". Generally, people who post links to porn aren't users in the usual sense. They're spammers who go to every community site that allows anonymous posts and put up links to their sites. Thus, they're not really "users" of the community, although they are users of the site. I'd say examples of "strange characteristics" on Slashdot include the contents of people's sig files, the proliferation of "Funny" comments, and an obsession with putting random links everywhere. Also, let's not forget Karma Whoring..
Not everyone will exhibit every behavior, but these are general trends in every community I've observed.
Trans: there are some people who put a lot of thought into what they say. Thanks be to God/Allah/Buddha/Krishna/The TCP/IP stack/etc...
How about: Some people won't surprise you. Or they will surprise you somewhat, but the issues you find important will resonate with them. Etc., etc. Basically, this is one of those "I'm covering my ass" sentences. He doesn't want to sound like users will always behave the way he has described, so he's allowing for other possibilities too. A lengthened YMMV.
First, let me get out my special padded helmet to protect myself before I get smacked upside the head by some of you.
Our company recently did a website for an organization which was organizing a web broadcast for a governmental organization. So, although we were technically being paid by the organization, we were indirectly being paid by the governmental organization.
But let's remove those distinctions and say the governmental organization themselves had hired us to create the website for them.
Well, our site used software which we had developed in house, at our own expense, prior to being hired. Some of it, however, was developed and coded while hired by them.
Technically, none of the modifcations we made to the software could have worked without the software we had written before.
The question is: if we were required to license this software as Open Source or GPL, would we have had to license *all* of it, including the code that was written prior to the bid?
Also, say that we had had to write the code from scratch. We might have charged less for our work than we could have, thinking, "We can reuse this code and sell it to customers later on."
I think that except in cases where the government is actually purchasing the software outright froma developer, it gets very sticky to say what should and shouldn't be freely developed.
While I agree that there are many cases in which making software open source is a good thing, the truth is if we were required by law to have, say, a section on our website that said, "By the way, here's all the code we've ever written, available for your own use. For free." it is unlikely that we would be able to continue to function as a profitable business. After all, what customer is going to pay for software that is being advertised or described as "free"?
Our tax dollars go to all sorts of projects. For instance, medicines are often developed through the help of government grants. Ever tried to get prescription drugs for free?
Scrum seems to me, just at first glance, to be a sort of "hostile" development process, because of the way the whole project begins:I don't know about you, but being presented with a project in that way would be demoralizing, not to mention weird. Also, their explanation of why it works is weak:That's not a development methodology. That's just common sense. What I've read so far seems to boil down to, "It's a flattened waterfall cycle that the Japanese developed" and "it's a Rugby term".
Scrum sounds to me more like the sort of thing that you feed to corporate managers who read books like Who Moved My Cheese? rather than developers desperate (or even just interested) in cutting down and refining their development cycle.
At the very least, I'd go for a methodology that has actual printed books (e-texts are great for source code and learning languages, but lousy for the philosophy or process of programming, IMHO) that you can refer to with your back to a computer. Right now it looks like to learn about Scrum, you hire (a) consultant(s) to come to your business and teach it to you, which sounds like an expensive proposition to me.
Rapid Development by Steve McConnell is an excellent book with case studies and descriptions of a variety of development cycles that you can use to get your projects through.
I'm guessing when you say that your main problems are bidding and software development, you mean:
Bidding is usually too low and doesn't cover costs, or is perceived by clients as too high and they don't bite. Unfortunately, there's not much you can do to control how a client responds to a bidding process. Ideally, you bid once you have a clear idea of all the work that will go into the project; if you can display just how much work it will be to the client (all the different use cases, all the different interfaces that will be involved, all the testing and re-testing that will be required) they may be more understanding of your bid -- they won't feel they're being ripped off.
In the software development process, there are so many things that can go wrong. The first is that it takes too much time. (Or is over budget, but from my experience budget *is* time--a piece of software is purchased to reduce time, or additional people are hired to reduce time.) This generally occurs because there isn't a clear understanding of the scope of the project in the beginning. The other cause for taking too long is slow response from the customer on its needs.
The solution to this can be creating a non-working prototype that shows every screen and page that the program will use. This doesn't mean creating 26,000 screens if there are 26,000 records in the program. You create screens for one or two sample records (say, one for each major "condition", such as "Approved", "Unapproved", "Expired", etc.). You also create a screen for every entry form and a sample of each report that the program will have.
You show this to your customer and get their approval. Make sure that each form matches all of the fields that they want. Ask them if there is any information they would want to know that isn't on any of the reports or forms. Then you say to your customer, "Is there anything else this program needs?" If they say no, you say, "Okay, judging by x forms, y reports, and z interactive screens, we estimate that it will take at least n months and no more than m months, with a probable time of p months."
The customer is happy because you're giving them what appears (and is) a much more firm time estimate than something off the top of your head, and they understand the complexity and process that will go into the development.
The other advantage to this process is that it kills the other software development dragon: developing the wrong software (it doesn't do what the customer wants, and offers features the customer doesn't need). By developing a prototype of all the screens, you can do a "sanity check" on the software to make sure you have the same understanding of the final project as your client does. Also, once the prototype is built, you hopefully will not have any features that need to be added on mid-project.
I hope these tips work for you. They sure have helped me out. Keep in mind I've only used these for web development, but I'm fairly confident they will work equally well in other areas.
This just shows that conciousness is a function of organised matter - you make the assumption that cold virii don't infect and affect neural tissues in the brain.
The cold was just an example. There are many other physical experiences which affect the way you think that have absolutely no direct physical effect on the brain itself. For instance, I find that my thinking dulls and I feel depressed when I have to pee real bad -- why, I don't know, but whatever is happening in the brain is not *directly* connected to my physical experience, but rather indirectly related.
I don't disagree that the brain is the "center" of the nervous system, but that's "all" that it is--the center of it. My point is not that we don't use our brains to think, just that they aren't the be-all and end-all of consciousness.
Heck, they're probably using the Google API.
Our bodies are just as much a part of ourselves as our brains are. Also, don't forget that the makeup of brains is neurons and nerve cell connections. Well, surprise, surprise--we have nerve endings all over our bodies, and I'm willing to bet that they're used, albeit at a low percentage perhaps, when we think and process the world as well.
As far as I understand it, we haven't yet developed the ability to remove a brain and find out what it's thinking -- it only works when it's inside a human body. And unless I'm out of the loop, brain transplantation has not yet been done on humans. So far, "brain transplants" has meant inserting healthy cells into Parkinson patients. In this case, the individual cells are simply subsumed by the whole brain and used as dopamine factories.
The brain is not a hard disk or cpu. It's not running linux, windoze, or even (despite Steve Jobs' assertions) OS X.
Our understanding of the brain organ, and by extension, the "mind" -- which may or may not overlap 100% with the brain -- is so woefully inadequate as to make any talk of uploading or downloading anything on it silly at best.
A few things I've noticed:
1) The quotes are all remarkably apt for the moves--in other words, they reflect the emotion and the mental state of Kramnik and the game itself. A computer would not be able to understand the underlying meanings of the Shakespearean quotes, let alone choose the appropriate quote for each moment.
2) It played the words just loud enough for Kramnik alone to hear. How then is it that we have a full and complete transcript of what Fritz said? Never mind -- I just read the transcript again and it looks like an official got the transcript from Fritz. But I still say it's fishy.
3) It hummed the theme from Midsummer's Nights Dream? It whistled. While recordings of these could be made, and I suppose loaded in and played on command, I still find it hard to believe that this would happen.
4) Considering that Krimnik could easily, and without drawing criticism on himself, point out this clear breach, wasn't it way too much of a concern for the people developing the Fritz program? Did they really want to risk disqualification?
I was able to read the transcript once (it's
All right, all right, folks -- read to the end of the transcript. This line gives it away: It's a practical joke placed upon us by, surprise surprise, a "Shakespearean scholar and chess addict" Michael Fischer.
It was delivering the mime type text/html and, yes, it was on an IE browser. One of the problems had been whitespace before the XML declaration, although even when I removed the whitespace, I still had problems.
Also, as it was a dynamic site, I also did not have total control over the content put in by the client. Since they frequently used an & standing alone, that made it a badly formed XML which made the whole page unviewable. It would have been difficult to escape entites *everywhere* they appeared (links, page titles, page content, meta keywords and description and more were all editable by the client), just allowing Internet Explorer to think that it *wasn't* dealing with a stretch of XML even when it was seemed to fix that problem...
Widely used browser.
The truth is, you can never just tell a client that a browser is non-compliant and leave it at that. They are using that browser, and the website must match what they should be getting.
One of our clients had, for some god-forsaken reason, a font named "Georgia" which was some form of Cyrillic. He thought his whole website was gibberish, because in the style sheet we had defined that font as the default font for body text. Even though it was only the case on his computer which had this bizarre font, we had to change it to Times New Roman so that it would display correctly on his browser.
Not to get on another rant but I have to say, I am a little sick of people who talk about standards and how it's more important to follow the standards than to create solutions that do what clients want, even if they don't comply. Have these people ever created websites for others for money? If so, they must have discovered by now that the mantra "The customer always thinks they're right" applies in their line of work, too. I don't have the luxory of telling some client to "shove off" if they don't want to comply with my standards-following ideals. I have to give them what they want.
Believe it or not as you will, adding the declaration frequently will cause bad behavior -- if it's XHTML on a browser. Often I've had clients call in, complaining about a site displaying bizarrely, or not at all. The thing that has fixed it has been taking out the XML declaration which, according all the specs that I've seen, is optional.
The DOCTYPE declaration often causes problems too. Why, I don't know. I just wish all these vendors would get their acts together and get all of the browsers to respond the same for XHTML-compliant pages.
</gripe>
This is a style guide, but notice that it's a style guide specifically geared towards information development. My point was that outside of that field, using an apostrophe is the correct method of pluralizing. While using a lowercase s might be stylistically preferred, using an apostrophe is the traditional form of pluralization, and is thus could be regarded as correct for all fields.
By style and usage work, I really meant one that you would get at, say, your local library. Something like Strunk and White.
Nope, nope nope. Pluralization is based on the phonetic quality of the word, not its semantic meaning.
So, you're actually saying "Pee-Ell-Cees". And, as everyone knows, the pluralization of a letter requires an apostrophe, as in:Which makes much more sense than:
All you have to do is consult any style and usage work, and I'm sure that they will state that pluralization of acronyms require an apostrophe.
The poster earlier was correct. His point was the abbreviation was not a word, not that we should look at the original words that PLC stood for in order to make a determination about pluralization. However, I disagree with him that the apostrophe is intended to represent an 'es' sound. It is simply used to mark the pluralization of the acronym.
E-mail has "revolutionized", in a sense, the way that language is punctuated. For instance, notice that I placed the comma outside of rather than inside of the quote marks around revolutionized. Until recently, punctuation marks always appeared within quotes. This changed, probably due to problems like this:Copying within the quotes would yield a bad password. So, over time, punctuation moved outside of quotations, and this is the style that is now commonly used within e-mail and other electronic texts. It is still technically incorrect in normal printed work, however, so be careful around your English teacher.
In the same way, a lowercase s used to pluralize abbreviations is a new invention, necessitated, probably, by the huge proliferation of TLA's. Using a lowercase s is, in a sense, an abbreviation of 's. In a forum such as Slashdot, but PLC's and PLCs are both equally correct, although the geek "Elements of Style" might suggest the abbreviated s version. However, use just an s outside of this context, and you, my friend, are making a grammatical error.
Note: I don't think that there are grammatical errors in this posting, but even if there are, what I have said above remains correct.
At Columbia University, we are investigating methods and software to automatically deal with sudden, unpredictable load spikes ala the 'Slashdot effect'.
Have you tried a...
Beowulf cluster?
*rimshot*