Most religions by now have come to terms with the discoveries of science and natural philosophy, including most forms of Christianity. It is not "Christians" who object to the Theory of Gravity^WRelativity^WEvolution, it is a tiny, but vocal (and annoying, and scary), minority of Christians. Christians who no more represent the mainstream of Christianity than the Muslim suicide bombers (who they strongly resemble) represent the mainstream of Mohammedism.
That's a nice thought, but your claim that it's a tiny vocal minority flies in the face of evidence. The polls I've seen indicate that a majority of Americans disbelieve in evolution.
So maybe for some useless industry conference they use Word, but at top research universities, they use LaTeX. Even if your 15% is accurate, I'll bet those 15% are the papers that actually get accepted.
You'd be wrong. That was the percentage of the accepted papers. And no, it's not "some useless industry conference". It was the Winter Simulation Conference, the main annual conference for the field of discrete event simulation.
(Not to mention that TeX provably produces better output than Word possibly could. Compare professionally typeset documents and TeX -- they share common features like ligatures, intelligent kerning, proper hyphenation, good spacing, etc, etc. Word does none of this, and CAN'T do most of that. Read Knuth's TeXbook for the details on what TeX does right.)
I don't need convincing about the technical merits of TeX, as I said in my original post I'm a TeX user myself. My latest paper was just accepted (two weeks ago) in ACM TOMACS and was done with LaTeX. When confronted with a Word document I have to work hard to suppress the gag reflex. My editorial work has only strengthened my antipathy towards Word and personal preference for TeX. None of which keeps me from seeing the reality that TeX is very much a niche tool in word processing. Granted, it's just my personal conjecture, but if you cross the small proportion of people who use TeX in the first place by the small proportion who are going to choose Linux based on word processing I predict the result is negligible.
Perhaps the Slashdot editors will create a poll for the reasons why people switch to Linux, and TeX will come out as the most popular reason. My own guess is it would come out behind the "Cowboy Neal" option.
Let's get real here. As much as I love TeX/LaTeX, it's not widely used. When I was proceedings editor for a big technical conference (2000+ page proceedings, all papers of a computing/scientific/mathematical nature), LaTeX comprised about 15% of the submissions. If that's the level of adoption in the technical/mathematical community where LaTeX is clearly superior to Word, I doubt that LaTeX represents more than a fraction of a percent of the wider word processing market. As a reason for switching, it probably ranks below toe fungus.
half the population that have taken IQ tests have IQ's below that, thank you.
Bzzzzzt!!!!! Thanks for playing, but that is incorrect! The median/mean IQ is 100 by definition. Test results are then scaled to make it so in practice as well as in definition.
Yes, but the two statements aren't mutually exclusive. For symmetric distributions the median and the mean are the same. IQ is often used as a classic example of the famous (and symmetric) "bell-shaped curve".
An example of asymmetric distributions would be incomes - lots of people at the low end, and some rare but very large extremes. In that case the median and mean can be wildly different. If we're all hanging around some bar, and Bill Gates walks in the door, the median income for people in the room won't shift by much but the average income will go through the roof.
Depends on whether your objective is to use your education towards a job or a career. I went to MIT back in the 1970's and often griped about how theoretical and abstract the courses were. I knew an MIT education was valued, but it wasn't until I was in the working world that I saw the real value in retrospect - I can't think of a single applied skill I learned at the time which is still applicable, but I use the principles on a daily basis. Equally important, while the field was changing under my feet I found I was far better positioned to master the new technologies and stay at the front than were my coworkers who had gone through more applied curricula.
This is not a put down of vocational training, but that's not the same as learning theory and principles, or more importantly, learning how to learn. Getting a good education rather than training will carry you for the next 30-50 years rather than the next 3-5.
A colleague I worked with in the '70's swore that the following really happened to him. He worked in a data center with one of the first IBM 370's ever built. These were the biggest mainframes available at the time, and cost multimillions of dollars back when a million dollars meant something. Since they were big and expensive, the first bunch were pretty much custom built with no two being alike, and maintenance and repairs were always done on site.
One day the building housing the machine took a direct hit by lightning. Despite surge protectors, der blinken lights lit up like a Christmas tree and then went dark. No problem, they powered everything off, waited until power was restored, reset all the circuit breakers, and did a cold start sequence. When this failed, they called IBM in. A couple of hours later the IBM techie arrived with his suit and toolbag, ripped open the access panels and was soon up to his elbows tracing wires and testing circuitry. He started looking more and more worried, and finally backed out of the machine. He asked the head admin to cycle the power on, said "I hope this works!", went around to the back of the machine and carefully kicked it. The lights came on and the machine booted up!
Apparently the power surge had frozen a solenoid which was positioned such that they'd pretty much have to disassemble and then rebuild the entire machine to get at it. This would have taken days or weeks to accomplish. However, the solenoid was physically located right next to the back panel, and the vibration from the kick had been enough to get it to unstick.
You just need to throw in enough buzzwords, like "cell-based turtles" and "multicore Transmeta overlords", and you'd definitely have a good shot at the front page.
Hell, submit it once with each set of buzzwords, and shoot for a dupe.
Jobs has wiped out every single fucking Mac out there, he has killed the true spirit of Mac in one crushing swift blow.
Statements like this are ridiculous. What, your Mac suddenly stopped working after WWDC? You can't browse the web or read e-mail anymore?
In the mid 90's I had owned a NeXT cube for four years when they announced that they weren't going to build hardware anymore, and that they were porting OpenStep to Intel, HP-PA, and Suns. The impact on me? I got a nice consulting job helping a company set up a bunch of new HP-PA OpenStep machines. When I added an Intel box to my home office network, I used NFS to share the fat binaries from my cube to the new machine, and everything "just worked". As a matter of fact, my old cube still works.
To me the spirit of Mac is in the design for usability of both the hardware and the OS. It has nothing to do with what CPU is under the hood. I'm amazed at how many people have their knickers in a knot over this.
It's a plot hole because it's inconsistent with being a Jedi master. There were three basic choices at that point: 1) Dispatch Vader; 2) Try to save him; 3) Walk away, leaving him to die in extreme agony. Choosing number 3 was by far the cruelest.
...the plot was all together rather better than the previous two...
The plot had a hole you could drive a death star through without scraping chrome off the fenders.
<SPOILER WARNING>
When Vader got fried on the volcano planet Obi Wan just walked away. This is an act of extreme cruelty unworthy of a Jedi! Any Jedi worthy of the name would have put the poor lump of melted flesh out of its misery. This would have negated the existence of movies IV - VI.
This is why statistical results should always report methodology and standard errors or confidence intervals.
I know nothing about their methodology from the links provided. Was it a random sample to start? How did they deal with missing data? How did they deal with observations where the parents had opposite classifications? How did they handle multiple child families (one datum per parenting couple, one datum per child, divorce/remarriage/conception outside the marriage)? What was their final sample size (as opposed to their starting sample size of 1500)?
I'm betting that after correcting for any methodological issues the confidence intervals for the reported coefficients overlap, i.e., it's the sort of result you could easily get from sampling error.
What happened to the briQ or whatever from YellowDog?
They priced themselves right out of the market. They were asking about $1300, if memory serves, for a 400Mhz G3, and about $500 more to upgrade it to a G4. And that was after their "big price drop." It reminded me of the old joke about trying to make a profit from each of your customers, as opposed to from all of them.
I would consider any programming language directly run from a text file a scripting language.
You're confusing "scripting" and "interpreted" (as opposed to compiled). The fact that most scripting languages are intepreted doesn't mean that the two concepts are interchangeable. Most people wouldn't consider BASIC a scripting language.
Slashdot Mirror
That's not a reliable measure either. Again, people are self-selected. On top of that the evidence is anecdotal.
Do we really have to rehash the ID thing yet again? The link is to an article dated December 20, there's nothing new here.
The authors of the article are really going to have egg on their face when the aliens land next week.
I told my wife "To prove how much I love you, I'd give up the internet for a year. To prove how much you love me, you won't ask me to."
Perhaps the Slashdot editors will create a poll for the reasons why people switch to Linux, and TeX will come out as the most popular reason. My own guess is it would come out behind the "Cowboy Neal" option.
Let's get real here. As much as I love TeX/LaTeX, it's not widely used. When I was proceedings editor for a big technical conference (2000+ page proceedings, all papers of a computing/scientific/mathematical nature), LaTeX comprised about 15% of the submissions. If that's the level of adoption in the technical/mathematical community where LaTeX is clearly superior to Word, I doubt that LaTeX represents more than a fraction of a percent of the wider word processing market. As a reason for switching, it probably ranks below toe fungus.
Since it's an infinite sequence, you can separate the left-most X and rest still equals 2. Thus X^2 = 2, so X = sqrt(2).
Then you may like this one: X to the X to the X to the... = 2. What is X if the left hand side is an infinite sequence of powers?
An example of asymmetric distributions would be incomes - lots of people at the low end, and some rare but very large extremes. In that case the median and mean can be wildly different. If we're all hanging around some bar, and Bill Gates walks in the door, the median income for people in the room won't shift by much but the average income will go through the roof.
and half the population have IQ's below that...
This is not a put down of vocational training, but that's not the same as learning theory and principles, or more importantly, learning how to learn. Getting a good education rather than training will carry you for the next 30-50 years rather than the next 3-5.
Take that, Lorena Bobbit!
One day the building housing the machine took a direct hit by lightning. Despite surge protectors, der blinken lights lit up like a Christmas tree and then went dark. No problem, they powered everything off, waited until power was restored, reset all the circuit breakers, and did a cold start sequence. When this failed, they called IBM in. A couple of hours later the IBM techie arrived with his suit and toolbag, ripped open the access panels and was soon up to his elbows tracing wires and testing circuitry. He started looking more and more worried, and finally backed out of the machine. He asked the head admin to cycle the power on, said "I hope this works!", went around to the back of the machine and carefully kicked it. The lights came on and the machine booted up!
Apparently the power surge had frozen a solenoid which was positioned such that they'd pretty much have to disassemble and then rebuild the entire machine to get at it. This would have taken days or weeks to accomplish. However, the solenoid was physically located right next to the back panel, and the vibration from the kick had been enough to get it to unstick.
Statements like this are ridiculous. What, your Mac suddenly stopped working after WWDC? You can't browse the web or read e-mail anymore?
In the mid 90's I had owned a NeXT cube for four years when they announced that they weren't going to build hardware anymore, and that they were porting OpenStep to Intel, HP-PA, and Suns. The impact on me? I got a nice consulting job helping a company set up a bunch of new HP-PA OpenStep machines. When I added an Intel box to my home office network, I used NFS to share the fat binaries from my cube to the new machine, and everything "just worked". As a matter of fact, my old cube still works.
To me the spirit of Mac is in the design for usability of both the hardware and the OS. It has nothing to do with what CPU is under the hood. I'm amazed at how many people have their knickers in a knot over this.
It's a plot hole because it's inconsistent with being a Jedi master. There were three basic choices at that point: 1) Dispatch Vader; 2) Try to save him; 3) Walk away, leaving him to die in extreme agony. Choosing number 3 was by far the cruelest.
You think a full body third degree burn doesn't hurt?
<SPOILER WARNING>
When Vader got fried on the volcano planet Obi Wan just walked away. This is an act of extreme cruelty unworthy of a Jedi! Any Jedi worthy of the name would have put the poor lump of melted flesh out of its misery. This would have negated the existence of movies IV - VI.
This is why statistical results should always report methodology and standard errors or confidence intervals. I know nothing about their methodology from the links provided. Was it a random sample to start? How did they deal with missing data? How did they deal with observations where the parents had opposite classifications? How did they handle multiple child families (one datum per parenting couple, one datum per child, divorce/remarriage/conception outside the marriage)? What was their final sample size (as opposed to their starting sample size of 1500)? I'm betting that after correcting for any methodological issues the confidence intervals for the reported coefficients overlap, i.e., it's the sort of result you could easily get from sampling error.
Now we know what Marvin was made out of.