Although it isn't completely clear cut, it seems that KDE takes a lot of inspiration from Windows Explorer (yes I know it does a lot more), while Gnome seems more like MacOS Finder (but isn't as good yet). I guess the majority of computer users (including the/. crowd) comes from a Windows background, which may explain why they feel more at home in KDE than Gnome.
> What isn't correct about what the original poster wrote?
He's claiming that "most standard tools for calculating standard deviation it assume the data has a Gaussian distribution". That is incorrect, the formula works for any distribution (where the variance exists).
Do you really know what the standard deviation is? For example, you know that most standard tools for calculating standard deviation it assume the data has a Gaussian distribution. But what if your data poisson distributed, or hypergeometric, or maxwell-boltzmann... [...]
That is not correct.
The standard deviation of a random variable is the square root of its variance. The variance is the squared expectation of the centralized variable (variable minus its mean). Calculating the variance of a random variable involves integrating (or summing) the probability density function p(x) times x^2. If it's a well known distribution, one would usually look it up in a book, or try to solve the sum or integral (by hand or with Maple or Mathematica). Note that the only thing you need to calculate the standard deviation is the distribution or density function, no actual data is involved.
The things listed as mean and standard deviation in Excel are sample means and sample standard deviations. If you have a list of numbers, and you assume that they were drawn from some distribution with finite expectation and variance, you can calculate the sample mean (simple average), which is an estimate of the expectation. Then you substract this mean from all your numbers and take their squares. The average of that is an estimate of the variance of the distribution, take the square root for the standard deviation. The nice thing is that these estimates converge to the expectation and variance regardless of distribution. If you do make the additional assumption of Gaussianity, you can also say something about the rate of convergence and the distribution of the estimate. But the basic formulas in Excel and such for sample mean and variance work for any distribution that has a mean and variance.
Another idea for an mini-itx box
on
PC In An XP Box
·
· Score: 1
Why not use the actual box from the motherboard? They look attractive enough to me. If I had enough spare time, I might setup one myself.
Sound like patenting hierarchical menus on a media player to me. Also sounds like a template for bogus patents. Remember all those patents for doing [blah blah] ON THE INTERNET? Somebody is probably rushing to patent all those ON A MULTIMEDIA ASSET PLAYER right now.
I guess you're referring to Apple's Fairplay DRM part. But AAC is a patented format, to implement it even without DRM, you also need to pay a share to Dolby. I doubt Apple is going to pay other developers their license fees.
> The 'you can spend it better on other things'-argument.
> Well, see my post 'yeah, right' in answer to that.
Another strawman. Your "answer" is basically, you can, but you wouldn't. My argument was not that I can spend it better on other things, but that the government can, and they do. Your answer is only valid if all the saved money were returned to the taxpayer. (Which is not unthinkable under the current administration, granted.)
But, although economic viability is important to create a mass-usuage of space(travel), I fail to see why it should be the only possible motive to start exploring space. It's a pretty narrowminded, materialistic and typical capitalistic view on things.
You're putting up a strawman argument. What we're dealing with is efficient distribution of finite government resources. Funds not allocated to manned space missioned may be allocated to a host of other research endeavours, education, nature preservation, poverty reduction, decreasing the tax burden, or a thousand other goals. It is not narrowminded at all to always scrutinize how government money (your money!) is allocated.
My question relates to the fact that even with tight security precautions (unpriviledged user, norton antivirus, inactive non essential services and so on) the blaster worm got through to my system. Thankfully it was just meant to hit the windows website off. But how long before something even more disasterous hits the net?
The patch was out before the worms hit, so you probably didn't run Windows Update often enough.
DCOM is not listed in services (it's bound to RPC, but that one can't be disabled). If you don't use apps that depend on DCOM, it's a good idea to shut it down, even if you did apply the patches, see MS KB825759. Summary: start regedit, find EnableDCOM, set it to "N", and/or start dcomcnfg.exe and uncheck "Enable Distributed COM", reboot.
> Too bad one has to learn to code in yet another cryptic language to use it. Some of us would just like to concentrate on the content and the layout, you know.
In the olde days, the content and the layout of a document were handled by different people. An author would write or type his manuscript and send it to a publisher, where professionals would take care of the layout. No one in their right mind would think of publishing the typed document as it is. With the advent of computer "wordprocessors", many authors now act as their own document designers. Maybe it is a good thing that the power of publishers has diminished somewhat, but designing a good document layout is an art and a skill that must be learnt. Giving someone Framemaker or Indesign turns him into a document designer to the same degree as giving him a brush and paint turns him into a painter. If you really want to supply camera-ready documents, (La)TeX rightfully forces you to learn at least some document design principles.
If you can't be bothered to learn document design and don't care about the layout, just write your stuff in TXT or HTML. If you can't be bothered to learn but do care about layout, send the manuscript to a reputable publisher with professional designers.
> X Windows -> the GUI > KDE or GNOME -> the desktop environment
There's no such thing as X Windows, it's either X, X11 or the X Window System. And although most implementations ship with a primitive UI (twm and some Xlib apps), nobody actually uses this as their UI. These days, an X implementation like XFree86 is mostly used as hardware driver and low level drawing engine for toolkit writers. The actual UI is a DE like KDE, Gnome, or a WM like blackbox, Windowmaker.
It is only a natural evolution from character based displays to bitmaps to vector graphics. The main advantage of vector graphics is resolution independence. Imagine installing a very high resolution screen, and instead of everything getting smaller everything gets sharper. Want to display more information on the screen? Just seemlessly zoom in and out of your desktop.
Currently, most windows systems are bitmap based, although there are some kludgy ways of adapting to different resolutions without changing the size of your text and windows and icons.
The big problem is that our current screens are just not good enough. Monitors rarely get over 150dpi, whereas even very old laser printers get 300dpi. On most screens, you can still see the individual dots. This is why zooming in and out like I described above wouldn't work on current hardware: too much detail is lost when the zoomed out desktop is rasterized to the screen. It would be only good for previewing the windows (like Apple's Expose), not for actually working with them. Note that in the area where these issues matters the most, text and font display, there has been a great amount of research and clever solutions to work around this. If (when?) display technology finally catches up, the entire windows system will be arbitrarily scaled with good quality, not just the fonts. Let's hope that when the hardware get's good enough, the software to utilize it will already be in place.
> How is a stock jump from 6 1/2 to about 75 and then a split pure loyalty and not a money making situation?
I don't know where you get your figures, I got them from finance.yahoo.com, AAPL, historical prices. The last split (2:1) occured 21 June 2000, where they went from 98.37 to 50.31. In September 2000 the stock imploded (along with the rest of the market) from 60ish to 20ish.
Of course we should be looking at prices adjusted for splits and dividends (although I don't think they ever paid any). From the Yahoo table, you can calculate that if you invested in AAPL 5, 10 or 15 years ago, you would have made a total return of 43%, 61%, or 67% respectively, which isn't all that great. The Dow Jones returns of the past 5, 10 and 15 years were 5%, 180% and 349%, and as a portfolio much less risky. If you were so unlucky to have bough and held AAPL in Februari or March 1992, you'd still be at loss, 12 years later.
Anyone know / care to comment how these chips compare with apples G3 and G4 laptops? I was under the impression that they were much less power hungry than intel and AMD's chips, which let them be lighter and have better battery life.
They're better than P4Ms and mobile Athlons, but not better than mobile P3s and PMs. Powerbook users are getting nowhere near the claimed 4.5 hours battery life, 2.5 seems more typical. Of the current machines, only the iBooks get 4+ hours. They're lighter than many comparable x86 laptops, but certainly not all, e.g. the IBM T40/41 is lighter than the 15" PB. The new IBM X40 is lighter than the 12" PB even with the CDRW/DVD docking station attached.
Transmeta made a lot of fuss about energy efficiency, but in reality, the Intel LV and ULV mobile Tualatin P3 consumes almost as little power while being much faster. The best power/speed tradeoff seems to be the ULV P3 933mhz, 512kb L2 cache, 1.1V. The typical and maximum power consumption are 4 and 7W respectively.
Intel is now hyping the P-M just as heavily as Transmeta. The P-M can dynamically scale the frequency through a large range, but if you use CPU intensive apps, the power consumption can get suprisingly high (31W for the 1.5-1.7 ghz versions). For more facts and figures, see Sandpile.
> Are there lists of some sort in a standard C library? I could use those in the near future.
Not in the ANSI/ISO libraries, but GLib should do wat you want. Although usually associated with GTK+ and Gnome, it's mostly a collection of low level datatypes and functions, very useful outside the context of GUI programming as well. Follow the links
here for the downloads.
> i mean, who really needs a phone that can do so much more than making phone calls?
Who really needs to carry a phone all the time? Who really needs to talk to someone a mile away at all? People doing fine before the invention of the telephone. Who really needs to carry 10000 hours of music in his pocket? We were doing fine with a Walkman not too long ago. Who needs a Walkman? We were living happily with a turntable at home and live performers elsewhere. Who needs a general purpose computer at home? Weren't people living happily without one 25 years ago? Who needs to see moving images or hear broadcast sound in their living room? Just read books at home and go to a theater or a bar for entertainment.
Besides food, shelter and clothing, there are few things that you really need. But there are a lot of things that can make life more confortable, enjoyable or simpler. For many people, one of these is device that can be used to talk to other people, take pictures, play music, make notes, remind them of appointments, play games (maybe in the future even with a decent enough screen to read books and newspapers), and be so small that they never have to think about whether to bring it along or not. People who want to carry a device only to talk to other people can buy a phone that does not support additional features or simply ignore those features.
No. You do not have to settle for less. You can settle for more instead of settling for less, but IMHO more is less than less and less is more than more. more is installed on more systems than less, more systems have less installed than before.
Re:Most advanced and powerful?
on
KDE 3.2.1 Released
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· Score: 5, Informative
In a recent interview, Jef Raskin remarked that he thinks the one-button designe of the original Mac was a mistake.
As for the one-button mouse, I'd observed at Xerox Parc which had a 3-button mouse, that people were very confused as to its use and when I was designing the software for the Macintosh, in designing the interface, I figured that if there was only one button, there would never be any question on what you have to press the number of ways of using a one-button mouse. I think this was probably a mistake, in fact there is an appendix in my book which discusses why I think this was a mistake and what I think I should have done. One of the reasons I made the mistake is that there is a certain school of industrial design dating back to the Bauhaus which says that designs have to be simple, uncluttered, and clean. In particular, don't put writing on it except for brand names or logos. If we had had a multiple-button mouse with two keys, labeled something like "select" and "activate," it would have been much easier to use, but the idea of putting writing on keys did not
occur to anybody, including me. So if I was designing one today, it would have two buttons and they would be labeled.
Some people have the misconception that "spatial navigation" is about having one window per folder, but that's not really the point. In explorer-like navigation, every window is a partial view of the filesystem. Every window can be used to navigate the fs with browser-like controls (forward, backwards, folder up, folder down). Two windows are just two views of the fs, they can point to the same folder.
The defining characteristic of spatial navigation is that a folder window IS the folder. That's why there cannot be two windows on screen that show the same folder, and why there are no navigation controls. The fact that folders open in the same place as when you left them is just a result of the fact that the position is an attribute of the folder itself, not of a windows which is a viewport of a folder. It's a subtle difference that people who have worked with explorer-like browsers for too long may have some difficulty adapting to.
Personally, I feel more comfortable with an explorer-like fs browser, maybe just because I'm used to it. It seems easier to manage large trees this way. But I can easily see why new computer users would be less confused with the spatial model. It's hard for some people to understand (and remember!) that a dozen of shortcuts to "My Documents" in different places all point to the same folder "underneath".
In this day and age, where computers are so widely used, and our data integrity is vital, we still rely on data storage methods that use moving parts. Nothing lasts forever, but magnetic media always has a nasty habit of failing much sooner, mainly because it still relies on a system vulnerable to friction. Now microdrive technology is rebounding? When is this dinosaur going to die!? Then again, maybe that's the reason it's still around. If it didn't fail, we wouldn't have to buy a new one.
A small rant: why hasn't Compactflash completely obliterated the floppy drive yet? The only thing required would have been replacing the FDD with a small slot for CF. The back of the slot can simply be connected to the IDE connector on the motherboard with a pin-adapter, and every CF card just behaves like a standard IDE hard disk. Every BIOS, OS and motherboard already includes full support, even ancient MS-DOS. All that is needed is a slot and a cable. I blame the fragmentation of flash memory standards for this, with MMC/SD, Smartmedia, xD, Memory Stick, and probably even more wannabe standards, all trying to get a piece of the pie.
Slashdot Mirror
Although it isn't completely clear cut, it seems that KDE takes a lot of inspiration from Windows Explorer (yes I know it does a lot more), while Gnome seems more like MacOS Finder (but isn't as good yet). I guess the majority of computer users (including the /. crowd) comes from a Windows background, which may explain why they feel more at home in KDE than Gnome.
> What isn't correct about what the original poster wrote?
He's claiming that "most standard tools for calculating standard deviation it assume the data has a Gaussian distribution". That is incorrect, the formula works for any distribution (where the variance exists).
The things listed as mean and standard deviation in Excel are sample means and sample standard deviations. If you have a list of numbers, and you assume that they were drawn from some distribution with finite expectation and variance, you can calculate the sample mean (simple average), which is an estimate of the expectation. Then you substract this mean from all your numbers and take their squares. The average of that is an estimate of the variance of the distribution, take the square root for the standard deviation. The nice thing is that these estimates converge to the expectation and variance regardless of distribution. If you do make the additional assumption of Gaussianity, you can also say something about the rate of convergence and the distribution of the estimate. But the basic formulas in Excel and such for sample mean and variance work for any distribution that has a mean and variance.
Why not use the actual box from the motherboard? They look attractive enough to me. If I had enough spare time, I might setup one myself.
Sound like patenting hierarchical menus on a media player to me. Also sounds like a template for bogus patents. Remember all those patents for doing [blah blah] ON THE INTERNET? Somebody is probably rushing to patent all those ON A MULTIMEDIA ASSET PLAYER right now.
> Novels, inventions, music, art all becomes public domain the day you die.
That would create an incentive for Disney et al to employ hitmen (if they haven't already).
> Make it so players can use the codec for FREE.
I guess you're referring to Apple's Fairplay DRM part. But AAC is a patented format, to implement it even without DRM, you also need to pay a share to Dolby. I doubt Apple is going to pay other developers their license fees.
> The 'you can spend it better on other things'-argument.
> Well, see my post 'yeah, right' in answer to that.
Another strawman. Your "answer" is basically, you can, but you wouldn't. My argument was not that I can spend it better on other things, but that the government can, and they do. Your answer is only valid if all the saved money were returned to the taxpayer. (Which is not unthinkable under the current administration, granted.)
> Too bad one has to learn to code in yet another cryptic language to use it. Some of us would just like to concentrate on the content and the layout, you know.
In the olde days, the content and the layout of a document were handled by different people. An author would write or type his manuscript and send it to a publisher, where professionals would take care of the layout. No one in their right mind would think of publishing the typed document as it is. With the advent of computer "wordprocessors", many authors now act as their own document designers. Maybe it is a good thing that the power of publishers has diminished somewhat, but designing a good document layout is an art and a skill that must be learnt. Giving someone Framemaker or Indesign turns him into a document designer to the same degree as giving him a brush and paint turns him into a painter. If you really want to supply camera-ready documents, (La)TeX rightfully forces you to learn at least some document design principles.
If you can't be bothered to learn document design and don't care about the layout, just write your stuff in TXT or HTML. If you can't be bothered to learn but do care about layout, send the manuscript to a reputable publisher with professional designers.
> X Windows -> the GUI
> KDE or GNOME -> the desktop environment
There's no such thing as X Windows, it's either X, X11 or the X Window System. And although most implementations ship with a primitive UI (twm and some Xlib apps), nobody actually uses this as their UI. These days, an X implementation like XFree86 is mostly used as hardware driver and low level drawing engine for toolkit writers. The actual UI is a DE like KDE, Gnome, or a WM like blackbox, Windowmaker.
It is only a natural evolution from character based displays to bitmaps to vector graphics. The main advantage of vector graphics is resolution independence. Imagine installing a very high resolution screen, and instead of everything getting smaller everything gets sharper. Want to display more information on the screen? Just seemlessly zoom in and out of your desktop. Currently, most windows systems are bitmap based, although there are some kludgy ways of adapting to different resolutions without changing the size of your text and windows and icons.
The big problem is that our current screens are just not good enough. Monitors rarely get over 150dpi, whereas even very old laser printers get 300dpi. On most screens, you can still see the individual dots. This is why zooming in and out like I described above wouldn't work on current hardware: too much detail is lost when the zoomed out desktop is rasterized to the screen. It would be only good for previewing the windows (like Apple's Expose), not for actually working with them. Note that in the area where these issues matters the most, text and font display, there has been a great amount of research and clever solutions to work around this. If (when?) display technology finally catches up, the entire windows system will be arbitrarily scaled with good quality, not just the fonts. Let's hope that when the hardware get's good enough, the software to utilize it will already be in place.
> How is a stock jump from 6 1/2 to about 75 and then a split pure loyalty and not a money making situation?
I don't know where you get your figures, I got them from finance.yahoo.com, AAPL, historical prices. The last split (2:1) occured 21 June 2000, where they went from 98.37 to 50.31. In September 2000 the stock imploded (along with the rest of the market) from 60ish to 20ish.
Of course we should be looking at prices adjusted for splits and dividends (although I don't think they ever paid any). From the Yahoo table, you can calculate that if you invested in AAPL 5, 10 or 15 years ago, you would have made a total return of 43%, 61%, or 67% respectively, which isn't all that great. The Dow Jones returns of the past 5, 10 and 15 years were 5%, 180% and 349%, and as a portfolio much less risky. If you were so unlucky to have bough and held AAPL in Februari or March 1992, you'd still be at loss, 12 years later.
No wireless. Larger and more expensive than an ipod. Lame.
Doesn't really take a genius to predict that this would happen :-)
Transmeta made a lot of fuss about energy efficiency, but in reality, the Intel LV and ULV mobile Tualatin P3 consumes almost as little power while being much faster. The best power/speed tradeoff seems to be the ULV P3 933mhz, 512kb L2 cache, 1.1V. The typical and maximum power consumption are 4 and 7W respectively.
Intel is now hyping the P-M just as heavily as Transmeta. The P-M can dynamically scale the frequency through a large range, but if you use CPU intensive apps, the power consumption can get suprisingly high (31W for the 1.5-1.7 ghz versions). For more facts and figures, see Sandpile.
> Are there lists of some sort in a standard C library? I could use those in the near future.
Not in the ANSI/ISO libraries, but GLib should do wat you want. Although usually associated with GTK+ and Gnome, it's mostly a collection of low level datatypes and functions, very useful outside the context of GUI programming as well. Follow the links here for the downloads.
Six of these can probably hold the entire iTunes music store collection.
> i mean, who really needs a phone that can do so much more than making phone calls?
Who really needs to carry a phone all the time? Who really needs to talk to someone a mile away at all? People doing fine before the invention of the telephone. Who really needs to carry 10000 hours of music in his pocket? We were doing fine with a Walkman not too long ago. Who needs a Walkman? We were living happily with a turntable at home and live performers elsewhere. Who needs a general purpose computer at home? Weren't people living happily without one 25 years ago? Who needs to see moving images or hear broadcast sound in their living room? Just read books at home and go to a theater or a bar for entertainment.
Besides food, shelter and clothing, there are few things that you really need. But there are a lot of things that can make life more confortable, enjoyable or simpler. For many people, one of these is device that can be used to talk to other people, take pictures, play music, make notes, remind them of appointments, play games (maybe in the future even with a decent enough screen to read books and newspapers), and be so small that they never have to think about whether to bring it along or not. People who want to carry a device only to talk to other people can buy a phone that does not support additional features or simply ignore those features.
Some people have the misconception that "spatial navigation" is about having one window per folder, but that's not really the point. In explorer-like navigation, every window is a partial view of the filesystem. Every window can be used to navigate the fs with browser-like controls (forward, backwards, folder up, folder down). Two windows are just two views of the fs, they can point to the same folder.
The defining characteristic of spatial navigation is that a folder window IS the folder. That's why there cannot be two windows on screen that show the same folder, and why there are no navigation controls. The fact that folders open in the same place as when you left them is just a result of the fact that the position is an attribute of the folder itself, not of a windows which is a viewport of a folder. It's a subtle difference that people who have worked with explorer-like browsers for too long may have some difficulty adapting to.
Personally, I feel more comfortable with an explorer-like fs browser, maybe just because I'm used to it. It seems easier to manage large trees this way. But I can easily see why new computer users would be less confused with the spatial model. It's hard for some people to understand (and remember!) that a dozen of shortcuts to "My Documents" in different places all point to the same folder "underneath".