But I'm not sure if there's so much gain. I find it very useful to have different desktops for different purposes eg one for communication (Mail, Web) one for writing/editing, one for software development, and one empty. The reason is that I actually DO NOT want to see my Web browser or email client when debugging C++ (too much of a temptation;-). I found in general that not being exposed to windows that are unrelated to the current task increases concentration, in the same way that I always clear my office desk when starting a concentration-intensive task (new algorithm, brainstorming session).
Not seeing everything there is is a notion that is also behind abstraction and black box thinking, which is core to computer science.
Another thought: isn't a bigger screen a bit like a bigger flat (US readers: read 'apartment')? More space may also mean more cleaning up related activity (deleting unnecessary windows)....
LaTeX support for scientists? [Re:Goffice?]
on
Google "Office" Released
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
> I'll stick with LaTeX, thanks; but Goffice's real-time collaboration-feature may make concurrent editing easier > than under SVN.
It would be nice if Google added LaTeX support to Goffice, because a lot of scientists author papers together in a distributed collaborative scenario, and the workflow usually consists of mailing fragments and drafts around (ugh!) for the majority, while a minority of more technically versatile researchers use CVS/SVN, both of which approaches suck big time.
So Google, if you read this, please give us a SCIENTIST'S WORKBENCH to author papers more effectively:-). (Thanks in advance!)
The students of the 21st century should perhaps be rewarded, not penalised
for using all resources available to tackle the challenges they are facing.
In my view, exams should not be such that knowledge you can look up on
Wikipedia is tested to a large extend. Instead, they should be such that
difficult situations are to be analysed by the student, taking into account
all data that the student can find (rewarding good findings and careful
selection), and checking for potential conflicts and inconsistencies to
address the question of authoritativeness of sources, which is often used
in the context of Wikipedia, but which applies to all sources, including
books by "experts".
Having said this, students should be penalised for not citing their sources.
It's fine to use Wikipedia, but its use should be property acknowledged.
So this means that if everbody migrates from Windows to Linux instead of upgrading to Vista, there won't be 50,000 new jobs, only (say) half of them? That must imply that Linux' Total Cost of Ownership is much lower... contrary to their own previous claims.
> Yea, but C++ is all about the details, and no external libraries meant you had to implement
> *EVERYTHING*... no parsing tools (flex/yacc), no threading libraries, no file utilities.
> Not even simple things like path normalization.
> In the "real" world you'd be a fool to implement any of those things.
#include
DOS is DOS is DOS remains DOS. It remains true that even when it came out it was far from state of the art, and that's why I consider cloning it a decade later a waste of time. Of course people are free to do what they want with their time (reimplement ED.EXE in FORTRAN IV, anyone?). But I fear that FREEDOS' existence will just give IT people more pain, because they will continue to have to support the old legacy systems using DOS instead of being forced to re-design their IT in a clean way so as to take into account what has happened in technology since.
Ten years for a DOS clone..? You got to be joking!
on
FreeDOS 1.0 Released
·
· Score: 0, Troll
What? It took them 10 years to implement a DOS clone? Congrats for the most useless software project of the 21st century.
DOS was never state of the art, not when it was on sale, not even when conceived by Tim Paterso, who was only
too well aware it was a Qick and Dirty hack (hence the letters Q and D in its intiaial name, QDOS).
Thanks, yes I should indeed have read the complete article first (that's what happens when you read./ and have a gdb session at the same time). And welcome back here after your 4-year break from slashdot!
If there are more good people than vandals, all articles will eventually converge towards better quality, perhaps even towards truth by consensus (Peirce).
The mistake you make here is replacing like-for-like wattage bulbs. I went through my home and replaced the high usage bulbs with CFLs. And as the low usage ones die I replace them. But I replace them with CFLs of a higher equivalent strength. 60w incandescents get replaced with 75w equivalent CFLs, 75w are replaced with 100w.
I had the same problem when I used "eco" light bulbs. Another problem was that they
would take forever to get bright enough, whereas old-style bulbs would reach their
maximum brightness level almost instantly. Any ideas as to whether state-of-the-art
CFL bulbs show similar effects?
The next step up is the TB120 PetaBox, basically a rack of 40 GB3000s and an ethernet switch or two.
Dear Sir or Madam,
I herewith order
QTY.......ITEM 1.(one)...TB120 Storage System
Please deliver it with 42 of the GB3000 19" racks instead of just 40 of then,
since they say you can never have enough space, and I already have an external
switch.
Thank you very much in advance for your quick delivery.
Sincerely
J. Doe (Mr)
Ha, finally everybody can keep their own copy of the Internet at home, instead
of wasting money on expensive broadband....
...while they decide how to divide the salaries of all the people they're about to fire, she better have some CHARTS AND GRAPHS with her or her presentation won't be entertaining enough.
Why care? They are likely to play BULLS**T Bingo in meeting most of the time...
If he forgot his iPod, I hope at least he didn't forget to flush.
The thing that bothers me about the whole securomania is that the authorities
don't really understand the basic principles of security:
(Perfect) security is an illusion.
First things first.
When I accidentally had a pair of scissors in my hand luggage at a London airport
a while ago, it went entirely unnoticed by the scanning staff. Realising what had happened, I reported to my
carrier, explaining what had happened, and telling them that it was an accident on my side.
I then enquired what I was supposed to do with the scissors now.
The lady at the counter just said "just put it back, they won't notice."
Given such attitudes and levels of ignorance all efforts to step up airport security are simply a waste of time.
Apparently they are beginning to find out that Spain has better internet access than the African continent... not to mention food and safety.
But seriously, is access to Wikipedia really the most pressing issue when you can't feed your kids and your town is plagued by genocidal maniacs from alternating rival groups every
other day?
I think we need to talk about the re-distribution of wealth and creating political
stability first, then we can talk about Internet access. I'm not saying education isn't an important ingredient in solving Africa's plight, but humans are fairly bad learners if their weight is smaller than the very book (or laptop, in Wikipedia's case) they are studying.
When animals agree to a set of minimum behavioral norms that define a civil society, then they'll have rights. Until then, it's the law of the jungle that defines the lives and fortunes of animals.
I'm looking forward to the day when homo sapiens agrees on a universal minimum behavioral norm and sticks to it.
Until then, it's the law of the jungle that defines the lives and fortunes of humans.
'A month before delivery, you don't have SPRs,' Azmi said. 'You're making things pretty. . . . You're changing colors.'"
'A month before delivery,' Professor Knuth said looking up through his spectacles 'you can start implementing it if your correctness proofs are complete.'"
While I agree with the majority of posters that it is inexcusible to release a search
log file with user IDs retained (even if only numeric), I would like to point out that
the initial intent of AOL's data release, to help the academic community, is a very
respectable one: researchers often lack data such as that found in query log, and
universities cannot afford (or do not want to buy) the hardware for building their
own search engine, which creates a research gap between industry and academia that
AOL tried to bridge.
What they should have done is taken the user IDs out and semi-automatically anonymize
a subset of the queries for release.
There is at least one PhD thesis that uses the AOL data (by Eric Jensen, see this link).
"Mine Ban Treaty
The Mine Ban Treaty (also known as Ottawa Convention) was signed in December 1997 by 122 nations in Ottawa, Canada.
It bans the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines and became binding international law on 1 March 1999, faster than any other international treaty in history.
To date, more than two thirds of all countries have signed up to the Mine Ban Treaty. (134 by July 2003)."
Warning: mysql_connect(): Too many connections in/home/hsphere/local/home/moonwink/softwareidb.com/ includes/database.mysql.inc on line 31 Too many connections
Of course there are Web search engines. But there is still room for a well-edited
repository of software meta-data, as long as they have good reviews, a very detailled
taxonomy of software types (not just "games", "database", but rather "mobile text adventure", "embedded spatial database").
The question is who is the audience, I couldn't tell because the site is slashdotted
right now. Is it companies? Individuals? Developers? All?
If Google indeed decides to get involved in hardware (or software
that gets compiled into hardware), I welcome the decision, and
joyfully look forward to any innovations that they might come
up with.
Maybe one day we have a GPU (Google Processing Uni) inside our PCs
that has special hardware support for indexing, retrieval and
text processing in general. Independently of Google or any particular
vendor, the theoretical question that intrigues me is: what operations
would you like to have built in to aid the search business?
PageRank in microcode? Porter stemmer as an assembler instruction?
For several decades, CPU design has been driven mostly by traditional
numerical concerns. While ranking algorithms certainly are based
on numerical principles as well, it remains to be investigated whether
there are operations that are worth providing at hardware level, or
(more likely) completely new architectures.
Note that their MapReduce paradigm of parallel data processing is
close to data flow machines in some sense, and while these were not
a success at the time, times have changed (it's always a question
of boundary conditions).
>> Yes they are alive, as any scientist will happily confirm > > Sure, but so are eggs and sperm.
Yes, you are right - they are alive, even human, but not _a human_. A human being (which I equate with a person, although that's jumping a couple of pages in the spelt-out form of the argument). In theoretical biology, a form of autonomy is what is required to make a human being ("indepentent" should be put in triple quotes, since how dependent really is the embryo from his or her mom at that stage, but the cruicial thing here is that _CONCEPTUALLY_ the embryo can become an adult, whereas a sperm cell or live tissue cannot; it is conceptually complete and does not require the sex act or the egg counterpart as requisites that the sperm cell require.
> there's lots of people with cromosonal deficiencies and we don't kill them
Thanks - because you have shown me a potentially weak point of my argumentation in the sense that of course I wouldn't want to exclude e.g. Trisomy-21 patients from being considered persons!
I would perhaps answer that human genetic completeness seems to be required to become a human person, but only in the sense that it's the haploid-diploid dichotomy that appears to matter here and not how many genes you have exactly or if one of them is wrong (consider this a temporary answer, because I'm not entirely happy withit - there's the air of a "hack" about it...).
Another principle that we can invoke when we go in such borderline cases where definitions become difficult is that to act ethically, I think we should act conservatively, to avoid harm, especially in the case of irreversible actions. For instance, when we are faced with the question like "are we allowed to kill X?", and killing is irreversible then we had better not do it. That's of course quite different from what spaceship commanders recommend to unsolicited visitors... [This last paragraph is not part of my original argument, more a supplement.]
Slashdot Mirror
Here is another solution to the question about whether to encypt laptop HDDs: take a deep
breath and chant:
"Security is an illusion."
"Security is an illusion."
"Security is an illusion."
(repeat at least 7 more times)
After that you should be enlightened.
Of course we all want those big displays...
;-). I found in general that not
But I'm not sure if there's so much gain. I find it very useful to have different
desktops for different purposes eg one for communication (Mail, Web) one for
writing/editing, one for software development, and one empty. The reason
is that I actually DO NOT want to see my Web browser or email client
when debugging C++ (too much of a temptation
being exposed to windows that are unrelated to the current task increases
concentration, in the same way that I always clear my office desk when starting
a concentration-intensive task (new algorithm, brainstorming session).
Not seeing everything there is is a notion that is also behind abstraction and
black box thinking, which is core to computer science.
Another thought: isn't a bigger screen a bit like a bigger flat (US readers:
read 'apartment')? More space may also mean more cleaning up related activity
(deleting unnecessary windows)....
> I'll stick with LaTeX, thanks; but Goffice's real-time collaboration-feature may make concurrent editing easier
:-). (Thanks in advance!)
> than under SVN.
It would be nice if Google added LaTeX support to Goffice, because a lot of scientists author papers together in a distributed
collaborative scenario, and the workflow usually consists of mailing fragments and drafts around (ugh!) for the
majority, while a minority of more technically versatile researchers use CVS/SVN, both of which approaches suck
big time.
So Google, if you read this, please give us a SCIENTIST'S WORKBENCH to author papers more effectively
If your need of XYZ is so strong that it means you're losing your freedom, then you're addicted to XYZ.
Real men just input the entire program at the command line using cat>myprog.c A real man writes directly to the disk with a magnetised paperclip.
In my view, exams should not be such that knowledge you can look up on Wikipedia is tested to a large extend. Instead, they should be such that difficult situations are to be analysed by the student, taking into account all data that the student can find (rewarding good findings and careful selection), and checking for potential conflicts and inconsistencies to address the question of authoritativeness of sources, which is often used in the context of Wikipedia, but which applies to all sources, including books by "experts".
Having said this, students should be penalised for not citing their sources. It's fine to use Wikipedia, but its use should be property acknowledged.
So this means that if everbody migrates from Windows to Linux instead of upgrading to Vista, there won't be 50,000 new jobs, only (say) half of them? That must imply that Linux' Total Cost of Ownership is much lower... contrary to their own previous claims.
> Yea, but C++ is all about the details, and no external libraries meant you had to implement > *EVERYTHING* ... no parsing tools (flex/yacc), no threading libraries, no file utilities.
> Not even simple things like path normalization.
> In the "real" world you'd be a fool to implement any of those things.
#include
DOS is DOS is DOS remains DOS. It remains true that even when it came out it was far from state of the art, and that's why I consider cloning it a decade later a waste of time. Of course people are free to do what they want with their time (reimplement ED.EXE in FORTRAN IV, anyone?). But I fear that FREEDOS' existence will just give IT people more pain, because they will continue to have to support the old legacy systems using DOS instead of being forced to re-design their IT in a clean way so as to take into account what has happened in technology since.
What? It took them 10 years to implement a DOS clone? Congrats for the most useless software project of the 21st century. DOS was never state of the art, not when it was on sale, not even when conceived by Tim Paterso, who was only too well aware it was a Qick and Dirty hack (hence the letters Q and D in its intiaial name, QDOS).
Thanks, yes I should indeed have read the complete article first (that's what happens when you read ./ and have a gdb session at the same time). And welcome back here after your 4-year break from slashdot!
If there are more good people than vandals, all articles will eventually converge towards better quality, perhaps even towards truth by consensus (Peirce).
I had the same problem when I used "eco" light bulbs. Another problem was that they would take forever to get bright enough, whereas old-style bulbs would reach their maximum brightness level almost instantly. Any ideas as to whether state-of-the-art CFL bulbs show similar effects?
Dear Sir or Madam,
I herewith order
Please deliver it with 42 of the GB3000 19" racks instead of just 40 of then,since they say you can never have enough space, and I already have an external
switch.
Thank you very much in advance for your quick delivery.
Sincerely
J. Doe (Mr)
Ha, finally everybody can keep their own copy of the Internet at home, instead of wasting money on expensive broadband....
Why care? They are likely to play BULLS**T Bingo in meeting most of the time...
The thing that bothers me about the whole securomania is that the authorities don't really understand the basic principles of security:
When I accidentally had a pair of scissors in my hand luggage at a London airport a while ago, it went entirely unnoticed by the scanning staff. Realising what had happened, I reported to my carrier, explaining what had happened, and telling them that it was an accident on my side. I then enquired what I was supposed to do with the scissors now. The lady at the counter just said "just put it back, they won't notice."
Given such attitudes and levels of ignorance all efforts to step up airport security are simply a waste of time.
But seriously, is access to Wikipedia really the most pressing issue when you can't feed your kids and your town is plagued by genocidal maniacs from alternating rival groups every other day?
I think we need to talk about the re-distribution of wealth and creating political stability first, then we can talk about Internet access. I'm not saying education isn't an important ingredient in solving Africa's plight, but humans are fairly bad learners if their weight is smaller than the very book (or laptop, in Wikipedia's case) they are studying.
I'm looking forward to the day when homo sapiens agrees on a universal minimum behavioral norm and sticks to it.
Until then, it's the law of the jungle that defines the lives and fortunes of humans.
'A month before delivery,' Professor Knuth said looking up through his spectacles 'you can start implementing it if your correctness proofs are complete.'"
Ha! Welcome to the real world, guys.
What they should have done is taken the user IDs out and semi-automatically anonymize a subset of the queries for release.
There is at least one PhD thesis that uses the AOL data (by Eric Jensen, see this link).
Note that Microsoft does not sell a corporate search appliance at all. A lot of barking in front of an empty house.
The Mine Ban Treaty (also known as Ottawa Convention) was signed in December 1997 by 122 nations in Ottawa, Canada.
It bans the use, production, transfer and stockpiling of antipersonnel landmines and became binding international law on 1 March 1999, faster than any other international treaty in history.
To date, more than two thirds of all countries have signed up to the Mine Ban Treaty. (134 by July 2003)."
Has your country already signed this treaty??
* ban
* landmines
* in the US!
Of course there are Web search engines. But there is still room for a well-edited repository of software meta-data, as long as they have good reviews, a very detailled taxonomy of software types (not just "games", "database", but rather "mobile text adventure", "embedded spatial database").
The question is who is the audience, I couldn't tell because the site is slashdotted right now. Is it companies? Individuals? Developers? All?
Maybe one day we have a GPU (Google Processing Uni) inside our PCs that has special hardware support for indexing, retrieval and text processing in general. Independently of Google or any particular vendor, the theoretical question that intrigues me is: what operations would you like to have built in to aid the search business?
PageRank in microcode? Porter stemmer as an assembler instruction?
For several decades, CPU design has been driven mostly by traditional numerical concerns. While ranking algorithms certainly are based on numerical principles as well, it remains to be investigated whether there are operations that are worth providing at hardware level, or (more likely) completely new architectures.
Note that their MapReduce paradigm of parallel data processing is close to data flow machines in some sense, and while these were not a success at the time, times have changed (it's always a question of boundary conditions).
Elley,
>> Yes they are alive, as any scientist will happily confirm
>
> Sure, but so are eggs and sperm.
Yes, you are right - they are alive, even human, but not _a human_. A human
being (which I equate with a person, although that's jumping a couple of
pages in the spelt-out form of the argument). In theoretical biology, a form
of autonomy is what is required to make a human being ("indepentent" should
be put in triple quotes, since how dependent really is the embryo from his
or her mom at that stage, but the cruicial thing here is that _CONCEPTUALLY_
the embryo can become an adult, whereas a sperm cell or live tissue cannot;
it is conceptually complete and does not require the sex act or the egg counterpart
as requisites that the sperm cell require.
> there's lots of people with cromosonal deficiencies and we don't kill them
Thanks - because you have shown me a potentially weak point of my argumentation
in the sense that of course I wouldn't want to exclude e.g. Trisomy-21 patients from being considered persons!
I would perhaps answer that human genetic completeness seems to be required to become
a human person, but only in the sense that it's the haploid-diploid dichotomy that
appears to matter here and not how many genes you have exactly or if one of them
is wrong (consider this a temporary answer, because I'm not entirely happy withit
- there's the air of a "hack" about it...).
Another principle that we can invoke when we go in such borderline cases where
definitions become difficult is that to act ethically, I think we should act
conservatively, to avoid harm, especially in the case of irreversible actions.
For instance, when we are faced with the question like "are we allowed to kill X?",
and killing is irreversible then we had better not do it. That's of course quite
different from what spaceship commanders recommend to unsolicited visitors...
[This last paragraph is not part of my original argument, more a supplement.]
Kindest regards,
JLL
PS: Good luck with the gaming cafe!