That's where you've got it wrong. The world has moved beyond the point where everything with a CPU is a computer. The iPhone is an appliance. It does all the things it was designed to do. No manufacturer is obligated to make their appliance do anything other than what they claimed it would do when they sold it to you. If you want a different appliance, feel free to vote with your wallet. If there is nothing that does what you want and you can convince some venture capitalists you're right, make a competing product. But Apple doesn't owe it to you to design appliances that work the way you wished they did.
Flash was unstable on Linux for years, but in the last two years the problem has apparently subsided. No more crashes in Firefox, not even in Konqueror. How is this possible?
Uh, because Linux is a different OS and has a separate code base?
I submit for your consideration: Al Gore, Steve Jobs, and Glenn Beck. It should be obvious to even the casual observer that none of these three is remotely human.
Al Gore brought us the internet, while Steve Jobs is the purveyor of "locked down shiny". The internet resulted in massive amounts of free pron, distracting millions of geeks from attempting actual reproduction. Similarly, locked down shiny stuff distracts the remainder of the geeks either directly or by endless arguments about its coolness vs its locked down nature - either way, the distraction again results in self-elimination from the gene pool. Finally, Glenn Beck promotes a level of populist anti-intellectualism that will lead to a pogrom eliminating anybody with an IQ greater than 60, thereby mopping up any remnants left behind by the Gore/Jobs strategy. By the time the mother ships arrive, all that will be left will be the drooling remnants of a once great civilization.
It's not a star . Brown dwarfs generate enough heat at their cores to maintain convection between the core and the surface, which keeps elements from differentiating (separating out), but they don't have enough mass to sustain fusion, which is required to be considered a star.
A more meaningful consideration is why people like it. Do they like Apple's products because of inherent, demonstrable superiority, like more functionality, better battery life, higher quality, or openness/ability to mod? Things that you can objectively examine such that any neutral, disinterested person can see for himself that it's superior to the competition? Many of us are taking a look at Apple's products and deciding that this cannot be the case.
...based on your view of what's important or provides utility. The place where you're falling on your face is in not acknowledging that other people have entirely different utility functions than you do.
Most people have never opened the case of their equipment, have no clue about the difference between memory and storage, and couldn't identify the CPU if you put a gun to their head and told them their life depended on it. They've never replaced a component, applied a patch, or compiled a program. Why would openness/ability to mod have any presence in their decision making process? They want something that works reliably and is easy to use.
As for the other categories of "objective" assessment you listed, most people are aware of tradeoffs in several categories of usability. You don't have to be best in any single category to be best overall. People want a music device which is affordable, rugged, reliable, easy to use, holds "enough" music, and has "enough" battery life. Folks who obsess about any one of those criteria won't want an iPod, but a huge number of people who are balancing several or all of them have concluded that the iPod is a reasonable choice.
I like programming, I like customizing stuff, I like doing admin stuff on my BSD boxes, but I know that most of the people I work with and hang around with want nothing to do with such things. I also don't want to hassle with such things when I'm at work and I'm supposed to be preparing classes or writing papers. A mac is a great tool for me, because day-to-day crap is trivial to do on it, and I can always drop to the command line for full-blown unixy goodness or fire up a VM for full-blown Windowsy evil.
Bottom line - people can have different values than you about what's easy/hard, comfortable/uncomfortable, or useful/useless, and it doesn't make them irrational, idiots, fanbois, or weak-minded victims of marketing.
Depends on what you want. If you want to know what to be on guard against when somebody is trying to lead you down the garden path to false conclusions, I recommend How to Lie with Statistics, which has been mentioned by a few other folks. The examples are dated, but the principles haven't changed and the price makes this one a steal. If you want more of a flavor of statistical thinking, but without the math, then you might consider Statistics by Freedman, Pisani and Purves. People either love it or hate it, and it's substantially pricier.
Neither one of these is adequate preparation to go on and take a second-tier look at the field, but that's not what they were written to do.
...And then it struck me - most of the research I had read had applied parametric statistical tests to their data - that it, the researchers made an assumption that the underlying distribution of results would fall on a normal curve. Yet this simple assumption may be all it takes to skew the data when they should have chosen a non-parametric test instead.
So yes, stats are vitally important, badly taught, and focus too much on the maths rather than the concepts. Remember that we're doctors, not mathematicians - the last set of sums I did were in high school. If I need to analyse data, I'll probably plug it into SPSS - although now with my eyes open.
That's a good insight. I'm a statistics professor, and some of the problems I see are a) people generally get exposed to a single course in statistics; b) they're usually mathematically unprepared for it; c) so much gets squeezed into that one opportunity that heads are exploding; d) because of (a) - (c), everybody wants you to "just give 'em the formula"; e) since statistics is so widely used, there's a plethora of courses that are being taught by people who themselves are victims/products of (a) - (d), and are very happy to "just give 'em the formula"; and so e) most people plug and chug data through a stats package with no idea of the applicability, limitations, and interpretation of the results. The sheer volume of bad analyses is enough to make you weep, and contributes to the widely held perception about "lies, damned lies, and statistics". And that completely ignores the intentional falsehoods propagated by people who are trying to support various advocacy viewpoints, and will happily mislead the public with biased samples, Simpson's paradox, invalid assumptions, etc.
The artist's rendition shows two spherical bodies, but there's no way that can be correct. At the orbital velocities involved these things must have tidal bulges that make Kevin Smith look positively svelte!
If a professor wanted students to interact, they would be handing out notes, instead of requiring everyone to focus on writing them.
Quite the opposite, in fact. I hand out algorithms and code snippets, but I don't use powerpoint or hand out my notes. I want my students to think about what's being presented in front of them, and have the tactile lock-in of taking notes. I also try to get the class involved by pausing in the middle and asking where they would go from there, to get them to engage their brains in the process rather than being passive receptacles. I've had numerous students who started the class by complaining about the lack of powerpoint slides come back later and tell me they retained far more of the material than from their other powerpoint-based courses.
The irony is that under the covers, it's all done with jump instructions anyway.
That's irrelevant. Programming languages exist for humans, not for the computer. The entire development of programming languages has been a drive to abstract away from how the hardware works and towards modes that facilitate expressiveness and power for humans. For example, there are no objects at the machine level, but humans often view the world as classes of similar objects that interact, which makes that a very expressive paradigm for modeling. (The first object-oriented language was Simula, and was created to facilitate simulation modeling way back in the 1960's.)
This is so utterly, completely, absolutely wrong that it's "not even wrong."
Please, for God's sake, read up on the concept of random variables before you attempt to make any judgement whatsoever about anything having to do with random number generation.
What exactly does "more random" mean in the summary? I think something is either random or it isn't. Perhaps this claim should just make us "more skeptical".
True random means that each item in your possibility list has equal chances of occurring.
No, true random means the outcome cannot be predicted with certainty. What you're describing is one particular type of randomness known as the "uniform distribution". Gaussian or binomial random variables, for example, don't have equal likelihood for the outcomes but are still truly random.
You left off the $200 gold-plated HDMI connectors. Since converting to gold plated, I've noticed that the digital signal has 0's which are softer and rounder, while the 1's are slimmer and pointier at the top.
Just wait until it's used in a high population density area, and everybody within three blocks who has a pacemaker keels over. And how many bystanders do you think are going to want their watches, cellphones, laptops, etc., replaced by the cops? Free upgrades for all!
Not useless at all, just have it solve the same problem 5 or 15 times and go with the answer that it gives most often. Plus, for some problems it's much easier to verify an answer than to come up with it -- for those problems, just pair it with a normal computer to check the answers, and keep trying until it says the answer is right.
One of the classic examples of that last one is prime factorization. In general it's very hard to come up with the two primes that were multiplied to create a very large number, but if the quantum computer coughs up a candidate it's downright trivial to check whether that's a solution.
I once coded a function that varied depending on what quadrant (+x,+y; -x, +y; -x,-y; +x,-y) it was in. I couldn't get it to work right in the second quadrant, but finally got it working by chance and said so in my comments. The code worked, but I didn't understand why and said so. Is that bad coding? It worked!
If you don't understand why it worked, then you don't know how it worked. Consequently, you have no idea under what circumstances it won't work. Unless your unit tests enumerated every possible set of inputs, you don't actually know it worked. Just because code works for some inputs doesn't mean it works.
And individuals will come and try to sue hoping an easy way to get rich (after hearing about the women who drop hot coffee on herself and sued McDonalds because they didnt warn *coffee* was *hot*)
Yes, everybody who is capable of ordering coffee knows it's hot. McDonald's coffee was scalding hot, more than 40F higher than the minimum temperature known to produce third degree burns - a 49 cup produced third degree burns over 6% of that woman's body, and lesser burns over another 16%. If you think experiencing that is an easy way to get rich, I have to believe neither you nor anybody you love has ever experienced a serious burn.
Slashdot Mirror
It's a fucking computer.
That's where you've got it wrong. The world has moved beyond the point where everything with a CPU is a computer. The iPhone is an appliance. It does all the things it was designed to do. No manufacturer is obligated to make their appliance do anything other than what they claimed it would do when they sold it to you. If you want a different appliance, feel free to vote with your wallet. If there is nothing that does what you want and you can convince some venture capitalists you're right, make a competing product. But Apple doesn't owe it to you to design appliances that work the way you wished they did.
It works fine on BSD, too.
Is your BSD version based on Carbon or Cocoa?
What part of "separate code base" do you not understand?
Flash was unstable on Linux for years, but in the last two years the problem has apparently subsided. No more crashes in Firefox, not even in Konqueror. How is this possible?
Uh, because Linux is a different OS and has a separate code base?
I submit for your consideration: Al Gore, Steve Jobs, and Glenn Beck. It should be obvious to even the casual observer that none of these three is remotely human.
Al Gore brought us the internet, while Steve Jobs is the purveyor of "locked down shiny". The internet resulted in massive amounts of free pron, distracting millions of geeks from attempting actual reproduction. Similarly, locked down shiny stuff distracts the remainder of the geeks either directly or by endless arguments about its coolness vs its locked down nature - either way, the distraction again results in self-elimination from the gene pool. Finally, Glenn Beck promotes a level of populist anti-intellectualism that will lead to a pogrom eliminating anybody with an IQ greater than 60, thereby mopping up any remnants left behind by the Gore/Jobs strategy. By the time the mother ships arrive, all that will be left will be the drooling remnants of a once great civilization.
Is it rouge, or is it brown?
Oh. Never mind.
No Nobel for you, you overlooked the other solution.
P=NP when N==1 or P==0.
It's not a star . Brown dwarfs generate enough heat at their cores to maintain convection between the core and the surface, which keeps elements from differentiating (separating out), but they don't have enough mass to sustain fusion, which is required to be considered a star.
A more meaningful consideration is why people like it. Do they like Apple's products because of inherent, demonstrable superiority, like more functionality, better battery life, higher quality, or openness/ability to mod? Things that you can objectively examine such that any neutral, disinterested person can see for himself that it's superior to the competition? Many of us are taking a look at Apple's products and deciding that this cannot be the case.
...based on your view of what's important or provides utility. The place where you're falling on your face is in not acknowledging that other people have entirely different utility functions than you do.
Most people have never opened the case of their equipment, have no clue about the difference between memory and storage, and couldn't identify the CPU if you put a gun to their head and told them their life depended on it. They've never replaced a component, applied a patch, or compiled a program. Why would openness/ability to mod have any presence in their decision making process? They want something that works reliably and is easy to use.
As for the other categories of "objective" assessment you listed, most people are aware of tradeoffs in several categories of usability. You don't have to be best in any single category to be best overall. People want a music device which is affordable, rugged, reliable, easy to use, holds "enough" music, and has "enough" battery life. Folks who obsess about any one of those criteria won't want an iPod, but a huge number of people who are balancing several or all of them have concluded that the iPod is a reasonable choice.
I like programming, I like customizing stuff, I like doing admin stuff on my BSD boxes, but I know that most of the people I work with and hang around with want nothing to do with such things. I also don't want to hassle with such things when I'm at work and I'm supposed to be preparing classes or writing papers. A mac is a great tool for me, because day-to-day crap is trivial to do on it, and I can always drop to the command line for full-blown unixy goodness or fire up a VM for full-blown Windowsy evil.
Bottom line - people can have different values than you about what's easy/hard, comfortable/uncomfortable, or useful/useless, and it doesn't make them irrational, idiots, fanbois, or weak-minded victims of marketing.
A cow is actually a rather topologically interesting beast.
Nah, it's just a funny torus.
You're udderly correct. Now if you had said it was just a funny taurus, on the other hand...
Depends on what you want. If you want to know what to be on guard against when somebody is trying to lead you down the garden path to false conclusions, I recommend How to Lie with Statistics, which has been mentioned by a few other folks. The examples are dated, but the principles haven't changed and the price makes this one a steal. If you want more of a flavor of statistical thinking, but without the math, then you might consider Statistics by Freedman, Pisani and Purves. People either love it or hate it, and it's substantially pricier.
Neither one of these is adequate preparation to go on and take a second-tier look at the field, but that's not what they were written to do.
...And then it struck me - most of the research I had read had applied parametric statistical tests to their data - that it, the researchers made an assumption that the underlying distribution of results would fall on a normal curve. Yet this simple assumption may be all it takes to skew the data when they should have chosen a non-parametric test instead.
So yes, stats are vitally important, badly taught, and focus too much on the maths rather than the concepts. Remember that we're doctors, not mathematicians - the last set of sums I did were in high school. If I need to analyse data, I'll probably plug it into SPSS - although now with my eyes open.
That's a good insight. I'm a statistics professor, and some of the problems I see are a) people generally get exposed to a single course in statistics; b) they're usually mathematically unprepared for it; c) so much gets squeezed into that one opportunity that heads are exploding; d) because of (a) - (c), everybody wants you to "just give 'em the formula"; e) since statistics is so widely used, there's a plethora of courses that are being taught by people who themselves are victims/products of (a) - (d), and are very happy to "just give 'em the formula"; and so e) most people plug and chug data through a stats package with no idea of the applicability, limitations, and interpretation of the results. The sheer volume of bad analyses is enough to make you weep, and contributes to the widely held perception about "lies, damned lies, and statistics". And that completely ignores the intentional falsehoods propagated by people who are trying to support various advocacy viewpoints, and will happily mislead the public with biased samples, Simpson's paradox, invalid assumptions, etc.
Any CPU limits should be generous enough to accommodate correct solutions in any of the permissible languages.
Here is the scientific paper. Figure 3 on p. 4 has a realistic diagram, showing one star completely filling its Roche lobe.
Way cool! Thanks for the link.
The artist's rendition shows two spherical bodies, but there's no way that can be correct. At the orbital velocities involved these things must have tidal bulges that make Kevin Smith look positively svelte!
If a professor wanted students to interact, they would be handing out notes, instead of requiring everyone to focus on writing them.
Quite the opposite, in fact. I hand out algorithms and code snippets, but I don't use powerpoint or hand out my notes. I want my students to think about what's being presented in front of them, and have the tactile lock-in of taking notes. I also try to get the class involved by pausing in the middle and asking where they would go from there, to get them to engage their brains in the process rather than being passive receptacles. I've had numerous students who started the class by complaining about the lack of powerpoint slides come back later and tell me they retained far more of the material than from their other powerpoint-based courses.
The irony is that under the covers, it's all done with jump instructions anyway.
That's irrelevant. Programming languages exist for humans, not for the computer. The entire development of programming languages has been a drive to abstract away from how the hardware works and towards modes that facilitate expressiveness and power for humans. For example, there are no objects at the machine level, but humans often view the world as classes of similar objects that interact, which makes that a very expressive paradigm for modeling. (The first object-oriented language was Simula, and was created to facilitate simulation modeling way back in the 1960's.)
This is so utterly, completely, absolutely wrong that it's "not even wrong."
Please, for God's sake, read up on the concept of random variables before you attempt to make any judgement whatsoever about anything having to do with random number generation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasi-random
Perhaps you would be so kind as to explain why the internet is wrong, and what your knowledge is that is so much more different?
I'm not the person you're directly responding to, but let me have a go at it.
What exactly does "more random" mean in the summary? I think something is either random or it isn't. Perhaps this claim should just make us "more skeptical".
True random means that each item in your possibility list has equal chances of occurring.
No, true random means the outcome cannot be predicted with certainty. What you're describing is one particular type of randomness known as the "uniform distribution". Gaussian or binomial random variables, for example, don't have equal likelihood for the outcomes but are still truly random.
You left off the $200 gold-plated HDMI connectors. Since converting to gold plated, I've noticed that the digital signal has 0's which are softer and rounder, while the 1's are slimmer and pointier at the top.
Just wait until it's used in a high population density area, and everybody within three blocks who has a pacemaker keels over. And how many bystanders do you think are going to want their watches, cellphones, laptops, etc., replaced by the cops? Free upgrades for all!
79% accurate. That's pretty useless.
Not useless at all, just have it solve the same problem 5 or 15 times and go with the answer that it gives most often. Plus, for some problems it's much easier to verify an answer than to come up with it -- for those problems, just pair it with a normal computer to check the answers, and keep trying until it says the answer is right.
One of the classic examples of that last one is prime factorization. In general it's very hard to come up with the two primes that were multiplied to create a very large number, but if the quantum computer coughs up a candidate it's downright trivial to check whether that's a solution.
I always write long comments that either have no relation to the surrounding code or tell outright lies about it.
So do the majority of my students.
I once coded a function that varied depending on what quadrant (+x,+y; -x, +y; -x,-y; +x,-y) it was in. I couldn't get it to work right in the second quadrant, but finally got it working by chance and said so in my comments. The code worked, but I didn't understand why and said so. Is that bad coding? It worked!
If you don't understand why it worked, then you don't know how it worked. Consequently, you have no idea under what circumstances it won't work. Unless your unit tests enumerated every possible set of inputs, you don't actually know it worked. Just because code works for some inputs doesn't mean it works.
'Why would a pregnancy test be negative?' is a perfectly reasonable question if you're asking about false negatives.
And individuals will come and try to sue hoping an easy way to get rich (after hearing about the women who drop hot coffee on herself and sued McDonalds because they didnt warn *coffee* was *hot*)
Yes, everybody who is capable of ordering coffee knows it's hot. McDonald's coffee was scalding hot, more than 40F higher than the minimum temperature known to produce third degree burns - a 49 cup produced third degree burns over 6% of that woman's body, and lesser burns over another 16%. If you think experiencing that is an easy way to get rich, I have to believe neither you nor anybody you love has ever experienced a serious burn.