My old-ish CRT monitor makes different whining noises depending on the content of the screen.
Your problem may have been a matter of EM emissions from the monitor cable: when the clock was positioned in that way, the EM from the monitor and/or its cable were such that they didn't interfere with the SCSI cable's signal.
I wonder what they'll do when the answer to encryption on Linux laptops is *free* ? There's no vendor to apply for it. Hopefully whoever is managing this effort won't be so stupid as to only consider techniques that cost money.
I've never played MMORPGs, and might never do so. I don't have the time to get sucked into something like that. I'm more into games that I can save and walk away from, then come back later.
However, by adding this game class of game to the open source arsenal, we increase the overall attractiveness of open source systems like Linux to people (especially kids and young adults) who are sitting on the fence. I may donate for that reason, rather than from having a personal attraction to the game.
I think the main military benefit to this technology is that it will force hostile nations to build chum launchers as a countermeasure. The notion is so disgusting it will reduce reenlistment rates for their navies.
Researchers at a Toronto hospital have stumbled upon a dramatic treatment for mouse diabetes
This was a tremendous advancement. Mice diabetes it the country's great silent killer, affecting some 200-300 billion obese mice each year who can't squeak in their own defense. Until then, please, leave out celery sticks instead of cheese.
What the world needs are less programming language books and more books on programming with the language of your choice.
I can't disagree more. Most programmers already know programming pretty well, and don't need their books on specific programming languages to be diluted with general programming instruction. Each of us is a programming amateur just once (I hope), but learns many additional languages throughout his career, and I think we want those non-newbie books to be concise and get to the point.
Every new programmer must learn to program in some language, but we certainly don't need a large variety of books that cater to people at that stage of proficiency - just one or two good ones.
Don't have unrealistically high expectations for an undergrad education. There are many, many problem domains within computer science. And unless you spend 100% of your undergrad coursework taking CS courses like networks, database, graphics, machine vision, AI, embedded systems, compilers, operating systems, assembly language/computer architecture, etc., even to the exclusion of really important courses like graph theory, discrete math, and analysis of algorithms, then you just can't nail it all as a ugrad. Don't feel bad.
Working on various OSS projects, or working at a company that works in your area of interest, or reading books, is one approach. Another is to make sure you live reasonably close to a big-ish university, and take courses to fill in the areas that you feel ignorant on. Maybe you'll also meet most of the coursework requirements for a master's degree or a PhD in the process. But anyway, a undergrad degree just doesn't have enough time for ALL the courses that might be relevant to you.
Re:Stop accepting crap systems research!!!
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 1
2.Why should she need to look it up? She cited it as her own major research project.
Professors often spend most of their research time guiding the work of their grad students, and seeking research grants so those same students can afford to stay in school. It was probably one of her grad students who generated and collected the numbers you wanted, and then they just discussed the significance of the resulting graphs during a few research group meetings.
3.If she can't be bothered to explain it to a prospective student who already noted that he can program and understands technical explanations, why should I believe that she, her teaching or her research are all that great?
I'm going to say this as gently as possible, while still giving you what I think is a much-needed reality check:
Programming and computer science research are very different things. Being able to program in no way identifies you as someone who can understand the interesting aspects of this particular research.
WTF does she care if you think she's great? The people she needs to impress are probably, in this order: her department (to get tenure), her sponsors (either corporate or government), her peers (via good research publications),..., her dog, her cat,..., a package of oatmeal,..., you.
You sound as though you think the world is waiting with bated breath to find out which university you join, so that all the computer science faculty can line up and give you a blow-job out of gratitude. What happened, were you the highest scorer on your math SATs in your school or something? You know, just like the tens of thousands of other students this year?
If you wanted the information from that professor, why didn't you just read one of her research papers on the topic? If she doesn't have any published and yet claims this is her major research area, there's something wrong. If there is something published, why don't you stop bothering busy people and RTFP instead?
Do you have any idea how busy professors typically are, especially during the semester? It was an act of charity that she even responded to your email at all.
Re:Stop accepting crap systems research!!!
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 1
Just slightly bitter that the professor I emailed at a school couldn't tell me what exact storage her storage manager manages and I'm seeing a bleak future for myself in Computer Science but I haven't even gotten into undergrad university yet,
Couldn't tell you, or couldn't be bothered to make the time to look it up for someone she doesn't know, isn't even a student yet, and sounds a bit cranky as well?
And this man is backed by (a) a group of people who want an end to big governement and (b) another group of people who believe an obscure semitic carpenter - turned - Savior - turned - deity is going to come back Real Soon Now, which will bring the end of the world as we know it and the judgement of the unbelievers.
It's just plain wrong to think that Christians in general support Bush's anti-science stance:
Some voted him in because of non-science issues like Supreme Court nominations and anti-abortion stance. (Please don't say abortion isn an issue of science - it's an issue of metaphysics and ethics.)
Many of us who voted for him realized we were getting some good things (Justice nominations, etc.) and accepted that being at the cost of known bad things (leaning toward corporate interests), and never realized how bad a deal we were getting (settlement with Microsoft, ignoring global warming research, lying about and invading Iraq, caving to terrorists by trading away our liberties and refusal to torture, etc.)
There's nothing anti-science about intelligent design. Intelligent design is just saying, "Hey, the universe seems pretty well ordered. What are the chances of that?" It's a metaphysical inquiry that's informed by science. There's no problem with teaching that (or don't you want students to question assumptions, such as reductionistic Darwinism (aka Epicurianism)?) You're probably upset with the teaching of a 6,000 year old earth based on the book of Genesis. I agree that that's a hard one to reconcile with carbon dating, etc., but that's truly a step beyond intelligent design.
So my main point is this: you're being seriously unrealistic if you conceive of most Christians as blithering idiots who can't tell the difference between a telescope and a rectal thermometer.
This is pure drivel. No one ever said, "Gee, I'd really like to understand better how the wave equation breaks down when our assumptions of a linear system aren't valid. But my belief that the universe shows signs of fine tuning just gets in the way."
Being a theist isn't a barrier to accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions, nor to participating in advanced research. Not being able to solve a system of linear equations, or having the good sense when to employ them, is. Not being curious about why the world works the way it does (perhaps because it was burned out of you by a bad education) is a barrier. Being more concerned about playing your PS3 and scoring weed, rather than helping to develop genetic treatments for certain forms of cancer, is a barrier. These are not barriers that can reasonably be attributed to specifically theists.
Stop accepting crap systems research!!!
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
I've studied graduate-level computer science at several American universities, and the one theme that I find most depressing is the lack of reality in the research. I'm afraid that this decoupling from reality keeps many computer scientists from actually being responsible for accurate research. For example:
Many CS papers make motivational statements like, "The typical sensor network has...". That's complete BS. The authors have no accurate way of knowing what a "typical" sensor network is like. Because they've never seen a study that's sampled the world's sensor networks. They write papers that quietly confuse what's *really* typical with what the authors imagine would be typical. So there are two problems: (a) academic dishonesty in their writing, and (b) not facing up to the fact that they're guessing about the relevance of their paper, rather than actually having a well-grounded sense of relevance.
A nearly complete lack of statistical sensibility for simulations and performance characterizations. Hey computer science researchers: how do you know how many repetitions of a simulation to run before you draw your conclusions? Why don't you draw error bars around any numbers in your graphs that represent averaging over multiple repetitions? If you don't have good answers to these questions, then I think it's quite likely that your conclusions are neither reproducible nor sound.
Leaps of logic regarding models. I can't count (maybe because I'm rather dull;- ) the number of ad hoc routing papers I've read that assume a circular-coverage radio model, and yet the papers make no mention of the fact that such a model is known to generally have have no connection to reality http://www.cs.virginia.edu/papers/p125-zhou.pdf. And yet the NSF keeps on funding this crap and not holding the researchers' feet to the fire. If there's peer review before these papers get into journals, it's an indication that even the reviewers don't care about or realize that the research described in such papers has no demonstrated connection to the real world. It's almost as though (gasp) computer science researchers have so much fun dreaming up protocols and programming simulations that they can't be bothered with the pesky work of checking their assumptions or validating their results.
Until we computer science systems researchers stop doing crap, wasted research, it doesn't matter how many papers we produce. Because what matters it the amount of good research we do.
I've read a lot of research papers for computer science, especially in the areas of databases and networking. I've developed the bias that the papers from researchers at companies, rather than universities, tend to suck. They tend to use a lot of column space talking about what commercial tools they employed, be a little heavy on unhelpful graphs, etc.
I don't know what leads to this trend, but I'm pretty sure it's there and I now cringe when I have to read a paper from corporate authors. THAT'S one reason I look down my nose at MS research - it's corporate. Am I the only person who notices this trend?
We know there are some things that are defenatly beyond the range of ethical science.
Yes, but the question is, what is the basis for caring about doing things ethically? If it's just aesthetic, i.e. unethical = that which makes us feel bad, and there's nothing deeper about it than that, then you may as well do an aesthetic cost/benefit analysis for even those actions that at first strike you as unethical. Besides, what one generation finds unethical, the next generation might be more willing to accept, so maybe doing research that kills blastocysts is worth it despite it being troubling, because future generations may benefit from the research without being troubled.
If the grounding for caring about ethics is more than just wanting to avoid feeling icky, however, then there's a possibility that we should act ethically even when doing so seems to cost us. For instance, forgoing a chance to heal Parkinson's victims so that we can avoid unethical science.
So even when Christians and non-Christians agree on that a particular act is unethical, they may disagree on how much other apparent benefit is worth forgoing to avoid that unethical act.
A university education is not about job skills. Trade school is about job skills.
With what authority do you say this? It's not inherent in the colloquial definition of universities. And there's no "ministry of English language definition" that says what a university is.
I'm not (intentionally) saying this in a combative manner. I'm just trying to point out that universities are at their core, post-secondary schools that offer degrees beyond bachelors degrees. That's the most common meaning these days. And if some departments teach to a trade rather than the broader theory, that doesn't make the school any less of a university. At most it means the school doesn't match your ideal of what a university should be like. No?
It's interesting that this appointment was made by a Democrat. After 6 years of the Bush/Republicans catastrophe, it's tempting to thing that the Democrats are going to side with the little guy, unlike the business-whoring Republicans. This appointment should remind us that BOTH parties are, effectively, pro-(insert rich lobbyist name here).
OK, this actually isn't a joke post, despite the subject line...
Many people who grew up in the Soviet Union in the 70's and 80's attribute the influence of bootleg copies of Western rock music to the eventual opening up of the Soviet Union. It seems to me that iPods could potentially have a similar role, and we're cutting that off.
Shouldn't we be flooding N.K. with as much cheap communications / recording equipment as possible?
Is it legal to have, as your stated and acted-upon goal, the destruction of a company?
For instance, one might consider the MPAA to be an utterly evil business. A morally inclined person might see destruction of the MPAA as a moral good. But I've also heard of lawsuits related to "interference with business" or some such.
Does anyone know if it would be legal for us to form the "RIAA/MPAA Bankruptcy League", whose goal is to bring those companies to bankruptcy?
If your moral principles are just grounded in the fact that some acts make you feel icky in a moral sense, then you have a hedonistic framework. In that case, if you think violating your principles will lead to more pleasure than sticking by them, go ahead. Although you'll want to consider the negative feelings of long-term guilt that you may incur for short-term pleasure, for example, cheating on your wife.
If your moral principles are grounded in a love of God, then that presumably trumps and pleasure seeking, and you should in all or almost all cases follow your conscience. But you'll still run into dilemmas about ends justifying means. For instance, I know of a guy who was running some camp in Thailand (I think. Maybe Cambodia. Anyway...) and he had to bribe local officials in order to get food. Neither option was totally guilt free.
If you believe in natural law ("some things are just right because they're right, even if there's no God"), then I'm not sure whether or not there's a reason for you to stick by your principles when doing so will be costly. You may want to use the hedonistic framework described above, because AFAIK natural law can prick your conscience, but will not pass judgment on you the way theists believe God will.
Regardless of what your grounds your morality, you should be aware that there's a huge difference between tactful and tactless approaches to dealing with other people in such situations. Try telling people why you don't want to be a part of it, NOT telling them that what they're doing is wrong and they must stop.
But be prepared that in most cases, when other people already know they're doing something wrong, they take offense when you won't join them because it reminds them that what they're doing is wrong. In those cases people will often call you judgmental or make fun of you, because they want that guilty feeling to go away. Handling these situations with grace is an art that hopefully you can learn without too much pain.
I forget - what exactly were we trying to accomplish, such that a slowdown in productivity growth is a problem?
I was never too keen on helping McDonald's require fewer people in the production of Happy Meal toys, and I'm not too sure I want AK-47 production (or M-16 production, for that matter) to be much cheaper either.
Slashdot Mirror
My old-ish CRT monitor makes different whining noises depending on the content of the screen.
Your problem may have been a matter of EM emissions from the monitor cable: when the clock was positioned in that way, the EM from the monitor and/or its cable were such that they didn't interfere with the SCSI cable's signal.
I wonder what they'll do when the answer to encryption on Linux laptops is *free* ? There's no vendor to apply for it. Hopefully whoever is managing this effort won't be so stupid as to only consider techniques that cost money.
I hear that lots of Navy developers use Linux laptops. I wonder if/how this will apply to them.
It sounds like DoD IT people hate users' freedom! Sounds like we've found an Al Quida sleeper cell right in the DoD!!!
I've never played MMORPGs, and might never do so. I don't have the time to get sucked into something like that. I'm more into games that I can save and walk away from, then come back later.
However, by adding this game class of game to the open source arsenal, we increase the overall attractiveness of open source systems like Linux to people (especially kids and young adults) who are sitting on the fence. I may donate for that reason, rather than from having a personal attraction to the game.
I think the main military benefit to this technology is that it will force hostile nations to build chum launchers as a countermeasure. The notion is so disgusting it will reduce reenlistment rates for their navies.
I can't disagree more. Most programmers already know programming pretty well, and don't need their books on specific programming languages to be diluted with general programming instruction. Each of us is a programming amateur just once (I hope), but learns many additional languages throughout his career, and I think we want those non-newbie books to be concise and get to the point.
Every new programmer must learn to program in some language, but we certainly don't need a large variety of books that cater to people at that stage of proficiency - just one or two good ones.
Don't have unrealistically high expectations for an undergrad education. There are many, many problem domains within computer science. And unless you spend 100% of your undergrad coursework taking CS courses like networks, database, graphics, machine vision, AI, embedded systems, compilers, operating systems, assembly language/computer architecture, etc., even to the exclusion of really important courses like graph theory, discrete math, and analysis of algorithms, then you just can't nail it all as a ugrad. Don't feel bad.
Working on various OSS projects, or working at a company that works in your area of interest, or reading books, is one approach. Another is to make sure you live reasonably close to a big-ish university, and take courses to fill in the areas that you feel ignorant on. Maybe you'll also meet most of the coursework requirements for a master's degree or a PhD in the process. But anyway, a undergrad degree just doesn't have enough time for ALL the courses that might be relevant to you.
I'm going to say this as gently as possible, while still giving you what I think is a much-needed reality check:It's just plain wrong to think that Christians in general support Bush's anti-science stance:
So my main point is this: you're being seriously unrealistic if you conceive of most Christians as blithering idiots who can't tell the difference between a telescope and a rectal thermometer.
This is pure drivel. No one ever said, "Gee, I'd really like to understand better how the wave equation breaks down when our assumptions of a linear system aren't valid. But my belief that the universe shows signs of fine tuning just gets in the way."
Being a theist isn't a barrier to accepting most of the scientific community's conclusions, nor to participating in advanced research. Not being able to solve a system of linear equations, or having the good sense when to employ them, is. Not being curious about why the world works the way it does (perhaps because it was burned out of you by a bad education) is a barrier. Being more concerned about playing your PS3 and scoring weed, rather than helping to develop genetic treatments for certain forms of cancer, is a barrier. These are not barriers that can reasonably be attributed to specifically theists.
-
Many CS papers make motivational statements like, "The typical sensor network has...". That's complete BS. The authors have no accurate way of knowing what a "typical" sensor network is like. Because they've never seen a study that's sampled the world's sensor networks. They write papers that quietly confuse what's *really* typical with what the authors imagine would be typical. So there are two problems: (a) academic dishonesty in their writing, and (b) not facing up to the fact that they're guessing about the relevance of their paper, rather than actually having a well-grounded sense of relevance.
-
A nearly complete lack of statistical sensibility for simulations and performance characterizations. Hey computer science researchers: how do you know how many repetitions of a simulation to run before you draw your conclusions? Why don't you draw error bars around any numbers in your graphs that represent averaging over multiple repetitions? If you don't have good answers to these questions, then I think it's quite likely that your conclusions are neither reproducible nor sound.
-
Leaps of logic regarding models. I can't count (maybe because I'm rather dull
;- ) the number of ad hoc routing papers I've read that assume a circular-coverage radio model, and yet the papers make no mention of the fact that such a model is known to generally have have no connection to reality http://www.cs.virginia.edu/papers/p125-zhou.pdf. And yet the NSF keeps on funding this crap and not holding the researchers' feet to the fire. If there's peer review before these papers get into journals, it's an indication that even the reviewers don't care about or realize that the research described in such papers has no demonstrated connection to the real world. It's almost as though (gasp) computer science researchers have so much fun dreaming up protocols and programming simulations that they can't be bothered with the pesky work of checking their assumptions or validating their results.
Until we computer science systems researchers stop doing crap, wasted research, it doesn't matter how many papers we produce. Because what matters it the amount of good research we do.I've read a lot of research papers for computer science, especially in the areas of databases and networking. I've developed the bias that the papers from researchers at companies, rather than universities, tend to suck. They tend to use a lot of column space talking about what commercial tools they employed, be a little heavy on unhelpful graphs, etc.
I don't know what leads to this trend, but I'm pretty sure it's there and I now cringe when I have to read a paper from corporate authors. THAT'S one reason I look down my nose at MS research - it's corporate. Am I the only person who notices this trend?
Yes, but the question is, what is the basis for caring about doing things ethically? If it's just aesthetic, i.e. unethical = that which makes us feel bad, and there's nothing deeper about it than that, then you may as well do an aesthetic cost/benefit analysis for even those actions that at first strike you as unethical. Besides, what one generation finds unethical, the next generation might be more willing to accept, so maybe doing research that kills blastocysts is worth it despite it being troubling, because future generations may benefit from the research without being troubled.
If the grounding for caring about ethics is more than just wanting to avoid feeling icky, however, then there's a possibility that we should act ethically even when doing so seems to cost us. For instance, forgoing a chance to heal Parkinson's victims so that we can avoid unethical science.
So even when Christians and non-Christians agree on that a particular act is unethical, they may disagree on how much other apparent benefit is worth forgoing to avoid that unethical act.With what authority do you say this? It's not inherent in the colloquial definition of universities. And there's no "ministry of English language definition" that says what a university is.
I'm not (intentionally) saying this in a combative manner. I'm just trying to point out that universities are at their core, post-secondary schools that offer degrees beyond bachelors degrees. That's the most common meaning these days. And if some departments teach to a trade rather than the broader theory, that doesn't make the school any less of a university. At most it means the school doesn't match your ideal of what a university should be like. No?
It's interesting that this appointment was made by a Democrat. After 6 years of the Bush/Republicans catastrophe, it's tempting to thing that the Democrats are going to side with the little guy, unlike the business-whoring Republicans. This appointment should remind us that BOTH parties are, effectively, pro-(insert rich lobbyist name here).
OK, this actually isn't a joke post, despite the subject line...
Many people who grew up in the Soviet Union in the 70's and 80's attribute the influence of bootleg copies of Western rock music to the eventual opening up of the Soviet Union. It seems to me that iPods could potentially have a similar role, and we're cutting that off.
Shouldn't we be flooding N.K. with as much cheap communications / recording equipment as possible?
From someone on government: "We face a threat to dire that you must give up your defenses against government oppression."
I forget, how long as Egypt been in a "state of emergency"?
Maybe New Hampshire's "Live Free or Die" motto is just lip-service?
Is it legal to have, as your stated and acted-upon goal, the destruction of a company?
For instance, one might consider the MPAA to be an utterly evil business. A morally inclined person might see destruction of the MPAA as a moral good. But I've also heard of lawsuits related to "interference with business" or some such.
Does anyone know if it would be legal for us to form the "RIAA/MPAA Bankruptcy League", whose goal is to bring those companies to bankruptcy?
If your moral principles are just grounded in the fact that some acts make you feel icky in a moral sense, then you have a hedonistic framework. In that case, if you think violating your principles will lead to more pleasure than sticking by them, go ahead. Although you'll want to consider the negative feelings of long-term guilt that you may incur for short-term pleasure, for example, cheating on your wife.
If your moral principles are grounded in a love of God, then that presumably trumps and pleasure seeking, and you should in all or almost all cases follow your conscience. But you'll still run into dilemmas about ends justifying means. For instance, I know of a guy who was running some camp in Thailand (I think. Maybe Cambodia. Anyway...) and he had to bribe local officials in order to get food. Neither option was totally guilt free.
If you believe in natural law ("some things are just right because they're right, even if there's no God"), then I'm not sure whether or not there's a reason for you to stick by your principles when doing so will be costly. You may want to use the hedonistic framework described above, because AFAIK natural law can prick your conscience, but will not pass judgment on you the way theists believe God will.
Regardless of what your grounds your morality, you should be aware that there's a huge difference between tactful and tactless approaches to dealing with other people in such situations. Try telling people why you don't want to be a part of it, NOT telling them that what they're doing is wrong and they must stop.
But be prepared that in most cases, when other people already know they're doing something wrong, they take offense when you won't join them because it reminds them that what they're doing is wrong. In those cases people will often call you judgmental or make fun of you, because they want that guilty feeling to go away. Handling these situations with grace is an art that hopefully you can learn without too much pain.
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2004/20040405/badge r.shtml
I forget - what exactly were we trying to accomplish, such that a slowdown in productivity growth is a problem?
I was never too keen on helping McDonald's require fewer people in the production of Happy Meal toys, and I'm not too sure I want AK-47 production (or M-16 production, for that matter) to be much cheaper either.