This project aims to find conditions that might only appear once in every 2,000 people (though how they intend to do that with half that number is unclear)
Let's try to make it clearer, then.
The probability that a given condition appears in an individual is 1 in 2000, or 0.0005. The probability that it does not appear in that individual is 0.9995. The probability that it does not appear in any of 1000 individuals is 0.9995^1000 = 0.6 approximately; and the probability that at least one of the 1000 individuals has it is 0.4. Not bad at all. (If you used 2000 people, the probability that at least one of them would have it would improve to about 0.6.)
Suppose you aren't interested in just one conditions, but in lots of conditions -- say, ten of them. The probability that at least one individual would have at least one of those conditions is 1 - 0.9995^(1000*10) = 0.993 == ie, practically certain.
They really ought to teach basic probability theory in schools...
All lovers of "the vinyl sound" should read your post.
It's actually worse than that: there were several standards for vinyl equalization. Since 1954, the RIAA equalization has been the de-facto standard, but there were literally dozens earlier, which means if you play it back on the wrong equipment you get the wrong sound. And, as you say, even with the right equipment the equalization was hardly a perfect process.
It appears, from various comments above, that this is a joke by Daniel Lyons, in very poor taste. Given how widely Slashdot is read, I think there should be a prominent clarification in the headline and story, IMMEDIATELY, that the story is dubious.
Apple does enough things that genuinely warrant criticism. Inventing a story like this, and publicising it as fact, is unconscionable.
I don't think they're worse than any other US-based airline. From what I've heard, Northwest is by far the worst, but the rest of them rank pretty close (I've only flown Delta, AA, US Airways). Airlines in Europe and Asia are orders of magnitude better.
Nope. I'm running Ubuntu Gutsy on a two year laptop with a 1.4GHz Intel Celeron, Intel 915GM graphics with shared memory, 512MB RAM. The eyecandy (compiz) works just fine -- spinning cubes, expose, alt-tab switcher that mimics a deck of cards or something, the lot. I'm also running it on a laptop that's over 4 years old and has a retarded ATI IGP340M display card; the eyecandy is a tad sluggish but it's barely noticeable. Consider also the specs of the first generation of computers running Mac OS X. The requirements for aero are simply absurd.
I'm sorry, RMS says "The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted." It is true that he doesn't think it is the best way, but there is no question that the result is free software.
The GP describes copyleft, which was invented by Stallman. (If you disagree, please point me to a prior example.) But Stallman does not claim that all free software must be copyleft.
However, in terms of Free Software, Free doesn't mean "a free exchange of ideas and code that let you do what ever you wanted with it", but rather a limit on distribution rights for the purpose of ensuring that user rights always remain free.
You can define things as you like, as Humpty Dumpty did, but the idea of "Free Software" was invented by Richard Stallman and is mainly used by his Free Software Foundation, and most people would accept their view. (Search that page for "public domain"; the BSD and MIT licences also come close to "letting you do whatever you wanted.") And most of those who don't accept that view would go with "free as in beer." You would find hardly any takers for your view.
and the original URL is large and might get broken into multiple lines.
Some broken e-mail clients (i.e. Outlook) may do this. Those clients have numerous other problems. The solution is to not use them, and to tell your correspondents not to use them. A proper e-mail program will not break a word midway even if it exceeds 80 columns.
(Those same stupid email programs don't break sentences at 72 or 80 columns. Why do they break words?)
I tend to not follow tinyURL links -- I like to know what domain I'm being sent to.
First of all, the comparison would be between BSD and SysV, not BSD and Solaris. Second, ZFS has nothing to do with either SysV or BSD. Third, Mac OS X is not the first BSD-based OS to include ZFS -- FreeBSD has already done so.
Maybe you could try following the links? I counted 6 links, 4 of which will inform you about the issue, and 3 of them require no subscription.
I enjoy slashdot-bashing when appropriate. But it's not wrong that they expect you to RTFA. I thought the summary was pretty clear and concise, provided you know what "open access", "peer review" and so on mean. A summary isn't a review article.
To quote your clotting question: "Did we have blood first and just died as soon as we developed our first cuts and some random mutation came along that caused blood to clot and that was the only one to survive until a second random mutation happened at the same time so those two could mate and continue?"
No, "we" did not have blood first. More primitive organisms had blood first, and that blood evolved into ours, as they evolved into us. They all have clotting mechanisms, but less effective: reptiles clot more slowly but also bleed more slowly. The clotting mechanism evolved together with the circulatory system.
Haemophiliacs don't bleed to death with the most minor cuts, either. If they did, none of them would survive to adulthood. They may lose more blood than us, for longer, from a minor scratch, but they will not bleed to death in the time it takes for the ruptured blood vessels to seal up.
If you're a Christian, a bit of humility concerning your knowledge of biology would be nice. And if you're a doctor, I'd as soon entrust myself to you as to an airline pilot who believed the earth is flat. (Unfortunately one doesn't get to know these things upfront.)
And he dismissed a literal interpretation of Genesis
Where does he say this?
Not in the Wikipedia article perhaps, but his confessions are on wikisource. Try reading Books XI, XII, XIII in particular.
It never says he denies creation.
And I never said he did. In those days there was no reason to doubt it. I said he rejected a literal reading of Genesis, and more generally, rejected using literal Biblical accounts to reject empirical observations.
Perhaps before spouting off, you can read some of the historical commentaries on (what I presume is) your own religion. Mine isn't Christianity -- I claim no religion, but come from a Hindu background. But I do like to stay informed.
The rest of your post merely shows your ignorance of basic biology. Which is not so surprising given your ignorance even of theological literature.
"It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are."
And he dismissed a literal interpretation of Genesis. This was in AD 408! I think every Church recognises his influence and ability as a theologian.
Why do US politicians (who apparently know less biology than was known in St Augustine's time) want to second-guess him on theology?
For instance, Glenn Gould has two recordings of the Goldberg Variations. The 1955 version lasts 38.5 minutes, the 1981 version; 51.25 minutes.
That's because (a) Gould was weird in the way he took tempos, and more importantly, (b) he omitted all repeats in the 1955 recording but played them in the 1981 recording. There are no omittable repeats in the Beethoven.
Most performances of Beethoven's 9th would range from perhaps 70 to 75 minutes. Longer is certainly possible, but 60 minute recordings would sound dreadful; if they exist, they were probably made to fit the whole thing into a single LP (just as, a few decades earlier, many recordings were made at absurdly high tempos to fit them on to 78s).
Other comments have mentioned the G-Wiz, which is a re-branded Reva for the UK market. Personally I'm waiting for it to use lithium ion batteries and to see what the price is then.
I know many physicists, not professional programmers, who write code (using MPI) that scales well to dozens -- sometimes hundreds -- of processors. They are intelligent people, but programming is not their main job or what they were trained in. Also, their code is not user-friendly, but that's a cosmetic matter that can easily be fixed if needed. If they can do it, why can't professionals?
(It's at 2:52, "what's to stop a terrorist takin' over a train and drivin' it into the White House?" "There's no tracks to the White House." "That we know of... How does you know they ain't been buildin' one?")
wobbly burning windows are nothing but a waste of RAM and cycles that could be better spent making the system more responsive.
Actually, on the two systems where I have tried it, Beryl is more responsive than KWin or Metacity -- not less. One is a pretty powerful opteron workstation with an NVidia graphics card, so it's hard to tell except when the system is seriously loaded. The other is a cheap celeron-based laptop with an Intel on-board graphics chip. However, the key point is -- metacity or kwin use the CPU for what few effects they perform, and Compiz/Beryl use the graphics card, sparing the CPU for other things. Graphics cards are pretty powerful these days.
Slashdot Mirror
Let's try to make it clearer, then.
The probability that a given condition appears in an individual is 1 in 2000, or 0.0005. The probability that it does not appear in that individual is 0.9995. The probability that it does not appear in any of 1000 individuals is 0.9995^1000 = 0.6 approximately; and the probability that at least one of the 1000 individuals has it is 0.4. Not bad at all. (If you used 2000 people, the probability that at least one of them would have it would improve to about 0.6.)
Suppose you aren't interested in just one conditions, but in lots of conditions -- say, ten of them. The probability that at least one individual would have at least one of those conditions is 1 - 0.9995^(1000*10) = 0.993 == ie, practically certain.
They really ought to teach basic probability theory in schools...
All lovers of "the vinyl sound" should read your post.
It's actually worse than that: there were several standards for vinyl equalization. Since 1954, the RIAA equalization has been the de-facto standard, but there were literally dozens earlier, which means if you play it back on the wrong equipment you get the wrong sound. And, as you say, even with the right equipment the equalization was hardly a perfect process.
It's not satire. He stepped out of character, not pretending to be SJ. And even if it is satire, it is not advertised as such on slashdot.
It appears, from various comments above, that this is a joke by Daniel Lyons, in very poor taste. Given how widely Slashdot is read, I think there should be a prominent clarification in the headline and story, IMMEDIATELY, that the story is dubious.
Apple does enough things that genuinely warrant criticism. Inventing a story like this, and publicising it as fact, is unconscionable.
the worst Airline i've ever traveled on
I don't think they're worse than any other US-based airline. From what I've heard, Northwest is by far the worst, but the rest of them rank pretty close (I've only flown Delta, AA, US Airways). Airlines in Europe and Asia are orders of magnitude better.
Nope. I'm running Ubuntu Gutsy on a two year laptop with a 1.4GHz Intel Celeron, Intel 915GM graphics with shared memory, 512MB RAM. The eyecandy (compiz) works just fine -- spinning cubes, expose, alt-tab switcher that mimics a deck of cards or something, the lot. I'm also running it on a laptop that's over 4 years old and has a retarded ATI IGP340M display card; the eyecandy is a tad sluggish but it's barely noticeable. Consider also the specs of the first generation of computers running Mac OS X. The requirements for aero are simply absurd.
I'm sorry, RMS says "The simplest way to make a program free software is to put it in the public domain, uncopyrighted." It is true that he doesn't think it is the best way, but there is no question that the result is free software.
The GP describes copyleft, which was invented by Stallman. (If you disagree, please point me to a prior example.) But Stallman does not claim that all free software must be copyleft.
You can define things as you like, as Humpty Dumpty did, but the idea of "Free Software" was invented by Richard Stallman and is mainly used by his Free Software Foundation, and most people would accept their view. (Search that page for "public domain"; the BSD and MIT licences also come close to "letting you do whatever you wanted.") And most of those who don't accept that view would go with "free as in beer." You would find hardly any takers for your view.
Maybe it's just me but I don't know a single person who uses Outlook. And an increasing number don't use Internet Explorer either.
Some broken e-mail clients (i.e. Outlook) may do this. Those clients have numerous other problems. The solution is to not use them, and to tell your correspondents not to use them. A proper e-mail program will not break a word midway even if it exceeds 80 columns.
(Those same stupid email programs don't break sentences at 72 or 80 columns. Why do they break words?)
I tend to not follow tinyURL links -- I like to know what domain I'm being sent to.
look at the number of nimrods who assume gnu grep and use gnu specific switches for their make scripts.
Or, for that matter, assume that /bin/sh means /bin/bash. (Which causes their scripts to break on Ubuntu too, since Ubuntu uses dash for /bin/sh.)
First of all, the comparison would be between BSD and SysV, not BSD and Solaris. Second, ZFS has nothing to do with either SysV or BSD. Third, Mac OS X is not the first BSD-based OS to include ZFS -- FreeBSD has already done so.
You missed the apt-dist-upgrade comment which would upgrade you from feisty to gutsy then ;)
No it won't do that, unless you edit your sources.list.
Maybe you could try following the links? I counted 6 links, 4 of which will inform you about the issue, and 3 of them require no subscription.
I enjoy slashdot-bashing when appropriate. But it's not wrong that they expect you to RTFA. I thought the summary was pretty clear and concise, provided you know what "open access", "peer review" and so on mean. A summary isn't a review article.
To quote your clotting question: "Did we have blood first and just died as soon as we developed our first cuts and some random mutation came along that caused blood to clot and that was the only one to survive until a second random mutation happened at the same time so those two could mate and continue?"
No, "we" did not have blood first. More primitive organisms had blood first, and that blood evolved into ours, as they evolved into us. They all have clotting mechanisms, but less effective: reptiles clot more slowly but also bleed more slowly. The clotting mechanism evolved together with the circulatory system.
Haemophiliacs don't bleed to death with the most minor cuts, either. If they did, none of them would survive to adulthood. They may lose more blood than us, for longer, from a minor scratch, but they will not bleed to death in the time it takes for the ruptured blood vessels to seal up.
If you're a Christian, a bit of humility concerning your knowledge of biology would be nice. And if you're a doctor, I'd as soon entrust myself to you as to an airline pilot who believed the earth is flat. (Unfortunately one doesn't get to know these things upfront.)
Not in the Wikipedia article perhaps, but his confessions are on wikisource. Try reading Books XI, XII, XIII in particular.
And I never said he did. In those days there was no reason to doubt it. I said he rejected a literal reading of Genesis, and more generally, rejected using literal Biblical accounts to reject empirical observations.
Perhaps before spouting off, you can read some of the historical commentaries on (what I presume is) your own religion. Mine isn't Christianity -- I claim no religion, but come from a Hindu background. But I do like to stay informed.
The rest of your post merely shows your ignorance of basic biology. Which is not so surprising given your ignorance even of theological literature.
Is it that easy? What about towns like this one?
"It not infrequently happens that something about the earth, about the sky, about other elements of this world, about the motion and rotation or even the magnitude and distances of the stars, about definite eclipses of the sun and moon, about the passage of years and seasons, about the nature of animals, of fruits, of stones, and of other such things, may be known with the greatest certainty by reasoning or by experience, even by one who is not a Christian. It is too disgraceful and ruinous, though, and greatly to be avoided, that he [the non-Christian] should hear a Christian speaking so idiotically on these matters, and as if in accord with Christian writings, that he might say that he could scarcely keep from laughing when he saw how totally in error they are." And he dismissed a literal interpretation of Genesis. This was in AD 408! I think every Church recognises his influence and ability as a theologian. Why do US politicians (who apparently know less biology than was known in St Augustine's time) want to second-guess him on theology?
That's because (a) Gould was weird in the way he took tempos, and more importantly, (b) he omitted all repeats in the 1955 recording but played them in the 1981 recording. There are no omittable repeats in the Beethoven.
Most performances of Beethoven's 9th would range from perhaps 70 to 75 minutes. Longer is certainly possible, but 60 minute recordings would sound dreadful; if they exist, they were probably made to fit the whole thing into a single LP (just as, a few decades earlier, many recordings were made at absurdly high tempos to fit them on to 78s).
Other comments have mentioned the G-Wiz, which is a re-branded Reva for the UK market. Personally I'm waiting for it to use lithium ion batteries and to see what the price is then.
I know many physicists, not professional programmers, who write code (using MPI) that scales well to dozens -- sometimes hundreds -- of processors. They are intelligent people, but programming is not their main job or what they were trained in. Also, their code is not user-friendly, but that's a cosmetic matter that can easily be fixed if needed. If they can do it, why can't professionals?
You cannot use a train as a weapon.
No? Try telling Ali G that.
(It's at 2:52, "what's to stop a terrorist takin' over a train and drivin' it into the White House?" "There's no tracks to the White House." "That we know of... How does you know they ain't been buildin' one?")
Actually, on the two systems where I have tried it, Beryl is more responsive than KWin or Metacity -- not less. One is a pretty powerful opteron workstation with an NVidia graphics card, so it's hard to tell except when the system is seriously loaded. The other is a cheap celeron-based laptop with an Intel on-board graphics chip. However, the key point is -- metacity or kwin use the CPU for what few effects they perform, and Compiz/Beryl use the graphics card, sparing the CPU for other things. Graphics cards are pretty powerful these days.
"for a girlfriend" isn't the same as "as a girlfriend"
Perhaps my English skills are severely lacking, but "as" seems the wrong preposition to follow "alternative". Do you mean "to"?