Last I checked, MySpace isn't supposed to be open to those under the age of 18... which is why all of the 13 year olds on there have a profile that says that they're 23. Those under 18 are ineligible to sign up. Perhaps these letters to parents should mention that their children are lying about their age in the first place to sign in, instead of implying the MySpace isn't protecting their children.
At least in the south, most of the major highways I've been on have had reflectors to help out when it's raining. When I moved up to Wisconsin three years ago, I was baffled by how difficult it was to drive during rain, despite it being much lighter than the storms I was used to in Florida and Texas. Since they can't have reflectors due to the need to plow in the winter, the lane markers are nearly impossible to see. And when it's snowing.. good luck - You basically guess at how wide the road is, how many lanes there 'should' be, and sort of pick one. Hopefully the car is smart enough to realize there aren't viable markers, and rejects auto-pilot.
I would expect the bigger problem to be construction areas, where lanes 'shift', even though the old lane markers are somewhat still there. I've been run off the road on more than one occasion by humans who aren't paying enough attention and just keep going straight.
Another problem is the inability of the computer to react to stupid drivers. I was once on I-10 and someone in a van saw a rest area at the last moment and decided to take it. Unfortunately, I was in the lane between them and the exit. Because I distrust other drivers, and for some reason expected it, I was able to avoid an accident by pulling onto a dirt/gravel shoulder (yes, at 70 mph). I expect only humans to be able to handle the road hazards that other humans present.
I'm a little confused. Nowhere in TFA does it say that the Dartmouth student's claim is a hoax. It says an earlier claim of a similar incident at UC Santa Cruz was false, but does not directly address the Dartmouth claim, which is what the previous Slashdot story is about. They got some random official to say that he doubts it happened, and would be surprised, but no quote in that article says it didn't happen. They admit that the student requested the book, but by a means other than was originally reported.
Sure, the original story should be looked at with skepticism, but keep looking for better evidence that it really was a hoax before reporting it as such.
There's a part of the Dept of Homeland Security known as NVAC (National Visualization and Analytics Center). I'd suggest taking a look at their research agenda. Particularly the "Grand Challenges" section, and particularly the "Scalability Challenge" part of that.
Their target is to handle 1 billion structured messages/transactions per hour and 1 million unstructured messages/documents per hour. For reference, there are 6.5 billion people in the world, according to the CIA world factbook. 296 million in the US. When these numbers were presented to the IEEE Vis conference in 2004, questions arose as to whether they were going to get warrants for all of these transactions. The basic response was that they were going to 'anonymize' all of the data. First, do you honestly think that will happen? Second, how much do you trust the anonymizer? And lastly, do you trust the government to not turn off the anonymizer switch? It's a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling, isn't it?
I've tried GAIM and Trillian a number of times, but I always end up having to drop back to native clients because of how they manage buddy lists. Perhaps things have changed recently, but I doubt it.
Things are more or less okay if I stick to a single machine, but on a given day, I might be using three or four different machines. Since GAIM and Trillian use local copies of the buddy lists to support off-network features (like renaming buddies), funny things start happening. For instance, say I deleted a buddy with AIM on one machine, but then run GAIM or Trillian on another which previously had that buddy. To synch the lists, these programs re-add the buddy to the server list, making it near impossible to actually delete someone. And if I delete the buddy in GAIM, it tends to not delete the person on the server, but only in the local copy.
Simply place any 18 coins into the second group and flip those over.
If you flip a coin over that was heads, it is now tails and is eliminated from consideration. If you flip a coin over that was tails, it marks with heads a coin selected that was not heads. Therefore after 18 coins are flipped, the number of heads in the second pile is equal to the number of heads that are left in the first pile.
We all knew he was coming, but his schedule was very much secret, and aimed at undergraduates. I hadn't even heard about the drop into the 302 class until now, and I know the guy that was teaching the class. Most of us had to watch a remote feed of the later talk, which I missed the beginning of, but the Q&A was better than most CEOs I've heard talk. Yes, a chunk of his presentation was "Look at the great products Microsoft is about to release" (XBox, Treo phone, etc). Funny thing is that he didn't mention Vista until someone specifically asked him about it.
Anyway, the basic message he was trying to get across, in my opinion, was that no matter what you do these days, technology is going to play a role, so it would be advantageous to embrace it. Technology is becoming ubiquitous in the home. Most sciences rely on some sort of software for simulation or analysis. Traditional blue collar jobs are disappearing because they are being automated. Therefore, if you want a job in the future, you're going to need a better education than you could get away with in the past.
I kind of left with the impression of.. "So, I'm in school longer, and will have to do more work, but will get paid the same or less... why is technology a good thing again?" Frankly though, you can watch the presentation in a few days.
My Windoze boxes have been up unless I choose to reboot them too. Random BSODs are a thing of the past. I'm a graphics grad student at UW-Madison and our graphics lab hasn't had a BSOD on a Win2k box since I started there two years ago. These are research machines with multiple users making strange configuration changes to them with no attempt at cleanliness. In fact, some of us are considering OS reinstalls not because the OS in unstable, but because none of us really know what the configuration is anymore - After six or so students claim a machine as their own and tweak it, who knows what's on there. The failures in the time I've been there:
Graphics card failed - Had to shutdown the machine to replace it, just like any OS.
Fan failed and system shutdown due to overheating - Again, hardware failure, and linux would have been shutdown too.
Memory failure - Had to shutdown to replace
The funny thing is that just last week, one of our linux boxes froze up and didn't respond to input so we had to reboot it. Any system can be hung if you're talented enough, but these days, it's no longer an inherent property of any OS. Frankly, I bet a lot of linux users are windows users of WinME and before - the land of failure. Win2k and XP are orders of magnitude more stable. If a process misbehaves, just kill the process. Most installs don't require reboots anymore, and the ones that do don't really need them.. it's just vendors being over cautious. Yes, you have to reboot for a patch, which is about the only place where linux has an advantage.
IMOH, if Linux really wants to compete with Windows, they have to stop living in the land of five years ago. And get a good UI - I shouldn't have to be a full-time, professional Linux admin to figure out how to change a setting that I change once a year. And agree on a standard so that it's consistent between distros.
"Mr Horton called in Red Hat-recommended contractors to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensure it was configured according to SAP standards, a process which took two weeks."
"After calling in IBM to ensure the hardware wasn't at fault, Mr Horton called on support from Red Hat Australia. Despite Red Hat's efforts to fix the problem, seven months after installing Linux, Mr Horton was forced to switch to Windows."
Yet, the first contingent of those promised military police were not scheduled to arrive until late Thursday night -- and only 100 Guard members would be in that first wave, according to Pentagon officials. Pressed about the other 1,300 promised troops, officials would only say that they were on the way.
They could build tent cities near where people lived (in 3 feet of water is not a good place to set up a tent).
From NYTimes, regarding earlier hurricane disaster training:
Some lapses may have occurred because of budget cuts. For example, Mr. Tolbert, the former FEMA official, said that "funding dried up" for follow-up to the 2004 Hurricane Pam exercise, cutting off work on plans to shelter thousands of survivors.
Brian Wolshon, an engineering professor at Louisiana State University who served as a consultant on the state's evacuation plan, said little attention was paid to moving out New Orleans's "low-mobility" population - the elderly, the infirm and the poor without cars or other means of fleeing the city, about 100,000 people.
At disaster planning meetings, he said, "the answer was often silence."
Also from NY Times:
Late Tuesday, the Pentagon dispatched five ships to the gulf, but four of the ships are coming from Norfolk, Va., four days' sailing time away.
Some military analysts criticized the Pentagon's response.
"Is the problem that they are only just now beginning to understand how serious the damage was?" said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a national security policy group in Washington. "Did they not have a contingency for a disaster of this magnitude?"
...
Martha Madden, who was the Louisiana secretary of environmental quality from 1987-1988, said that the potential for disaster was always obvious and that "FEMA has known this for 20 years."
"Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars were spent, in studies, training and contingency plans, scenarios, all of that," said Ms. Madden, now a consultant in strategic planning.
The Army Corps, she said, should have had arrangements in place with contractors who had emergency supplies at hand, like sandbags or concrete barriers, the way that environmental planners have contracts to handle oil spills.
All the roads weren't knocked out (I think there is 1 highway to there right now).
You've obviously never lived in Florida. There are only three main north/south roads in Florida. The turnpike ends about 100 miles north of Miami. I-75 ends about 60-70 miles north of Miami. I-95 is always the only real road to move supplies into Miami, so this isn't a difference.
On a logistical side, how do you know what you are going to need before the disaster strikes? You can't always take everything, and if you judge wrong it can take longer as you have to redo what you mobilized for in the first place.
It's called emergency planning. Multiple previous scenarios were run in New Orleans because they knew this type of thing could happen. It's a large city in a hurricane area under sea-level, so they were very much aware that they needed these plans.
Frankly, I think part of the reason it's chaos is because it's not a third world country. People in third world countries have better basic survival skills and don't depend on electricity for absolutely everything. Also, the population density would be lower.
I am somewhat confused as to why the handling of the situation seems to be much different than what I remember of Andrew in Florida though. The day after Andrew hit Florida, there was a steady stream of utility and military vehicles speeding toward Miami down the turnpike and I-95. Tent cities were erected, and supply drops were running within days. Private companies were running supplies in U-hauls within a week since the military was able to establish some semblance of order (even though people were sitting in their front yards with shotguns to scare off looters).
In this case, however, it seems like their focus was so narrow on rescue and flood maintnence that they ignored that fact that there's no infrastructure to provide for these people. Bussing them hundreds of miles away to other states seems inefficient and will only handle a small percentage of those in need.
Honestly though, the government's preparation is inexcusable. Katrina a day before landfall was quite obvious to be on the order of magnitude of Andrew, and Andrew hit an area that wasn't being kept dry by pumps and levees. The fact that preparations weren't being made before Katrina even made landfall is ridiculous. If the active duty military is scretched too thin because of overseas deployments, the reservists should have been called up before or as Katrina made landfall, and not several days after.
What I really love is that fact that the page used to have the professor listed on the list of authors, NCSA logos were on the page, UIUC was listed under the authors' affiliation, and it looked much more official. Now that it's been aired out as non-scientific, there's all sorts of disclaimers saying that it was his student's work, and shifting the blame. Too bad it was published on his webspace:P
Perhaps the professor of History and Sociology will think twice next time before attempting to put his name on a study that should have been conducted by people outside of his field.
The point is, I used to get those same things on my old machine all the time and I don't anymore. If it were server lag, I would still have the same thing.. I don't get it anymore. And it's not like I play on a low population server. It's always listed as 'high pop' and is typically queued on busy days.
There's plenty that goes into loading those 'simple' things on the client. It has to load up the icons for all of the items in the auction house and the descriptions for them - there are a lot of items in the game. Some of that stuff is cached in the WDB folder, which is why I have a batch file to delete it every time I start the game. As it gets bloated, odd things happen to those items.
Have you ever gotten an item that comes up as a question mark with a blank description? I have twice (once as a quest reward). And it persists until you delete the WDB folder and restart. There's plenty that happens on the client end to show you those silly icons and item descriptions.
I also know the difference between a busy computer and network lag. My statements are based on more than just assumptions though. I have two machines.. I play on both. One does the things you describe and the other doesn't. I would have blamed it on server lag too, but evidence points to the contrary. The majority of what's there are client issues that they need to address in patches.
It's hard to say what exactly you mean by filtering by that sentence.. but.. I would guess it's more a problem of expasion rather than contraction.
Google will often return pages that had the query word in or around a link on another page that points to it. The query may not resemble anything in the document in any way, shape, or form, but since someone else referred to the document that way, it's returned. There are lots of very good and valid reasons to do this. A simple way to correct for this behavior would be to check how many of the returned results actually have your query in them.... and maybe use a decent word stemmer to be more reasonable.
I was kind of surprised that this had UIUC's name attached to it until I looked at the PhD listed. "Professor of History and Sociology". "Burton's research and teaching interests include the American South...". Okay.. so maybe his statistics aren't as strong as they should be. Or maybe they are and he just doesn't know enough about the implementation issues to do a proper statistical analysis. Perhaps he should talk to some of the AI and Info Retrieval guys on campus before he pops something like this up on the web though.
That said, WoW has had some very disappointing server stability issues that have yet to be corrected (instances, lag), nine months after release.
I'd correct that to be "client and server stability issues". A majority of the lag that people complain about is in fact the client, not the server. I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 9300, and I get very little lag anymore. Yes, I can run through IF without any lag. I've only encountered serious server lag twice in the two months since I've bought the machine.
Most of the other times there's 'lag' I look down at my HD light and it's loading something off disk - and other people don't feel it. I love the guy who complains that the server is lagging to hell when no one else feels it.
They have made a mild attempt to not block on IO by not showing characters while loading their models and textures, and showing half-naked ones while loading clothing models/textures, but they seem to either have some blocking IO still in there, or some decent amount of processing that goes into certain things.
I definitely agree with you on the instance funkiness though. "You spent 2 hours fighting through this instance.. the server will reset in 15 minutes.. prepare to start over. Oh, by the way, when you do.. we'll drop all of the same items that you don't need extras of."
Technically, that "movement" element has two sub-components, either XY or (optimally) angle+speed.
But fine control is not needed it these dimensions. It's either on or off. You can only go in 8 directions at fixed speeds (run/walk). Technically, changing weapons, throwing grenades, etc are all additional dimensions too, but you don't typically do all of those simultaneously or with any fine-grain control. If the game allowed a real dimension for movement, you would need a 6DOF mouse to truly control it.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit in that I was talking about real control, not just on/off. Technically, your keyboard has as many dimensions as keys, but binary dimension control isn't very useful.
An no.. non-binary inputs are not always better than binary inputs. It just depends on how many states you need to represent.
Though I have no idea what the article says since it won't load, counterstrike is a good example for a simple concept - The dimensionality of your input device should be correlated to how many axes you need to simultaneously adjust. Having an input device which has too many degrees of freedom is inefficient. Having one with too few makes you useless.
Some examples.. text editing is for all intensive purposes a single dimensional task (only one dimension is active at a time). 99% of what you do is advancing the cursor, or shifting it in a single, axis-aligned direction. There's no requirement for a mouse here, so a skilled person will be more efficient by not using one.
Counter-strike and similar games typically need three control directions.. pitch, yaw, and movement. Doing this with a keyboard is near impossible, so we add two dimensions with a mouse. Using a 6-DOF (spacemouse) for it is also silly. Flight sims need roll, so add in rudder pedals/joysticks for best control. If you go to high mobility CAD/visualization systems, you'll need a 6-DOF mouse for best interaction.
Bottom line though is that if you can effectively reduce the dimensionality of your task so that you can interact with a lower-dimensional input device, you're better off. Sure, the desktop is 2D, but through alt-tabbing and you can navigate it in 1D. Maybe if you hacked counter-strike to let you tab through aiming at people's heads, you could play better with a keyboard:P World of Warcraft is mostly playable without a mouse (though they don't let you tab through text inputs AFAIK).
A real problem with this device is that your air supply is no longer a closed environment. You've just lost the SC in SCUBA. SCUBA divers are very much attentive to the mixture in their tanks being used at particular depths. Technical divers have to bring down multiple tanks just to have the right types of mixtures with them. Rebreathers are also self-contained, so they know what kind of gases are being dealt with.
This thing on the other hand is grabbing air dissolved in the water. As other posters have pointed out, this may be problematic if it's low in oxygen, but I don't think they've pointed out that you have to worry about other gases that may be dissolved in the water. Maybe if you had the right membranes to separate out all the gases appropriately... but with added complexity comes added points of failure. Stay away from a lake during a fish kill:P Bacteria and other organisms in the water would be much more of a concern related to whatever membranes you have to use.
Frankly, I don't see the traditional SCUBA tank going away any time soon. They're simple, they're predictable.. and when it's the one thing standing between you and drowning, it doesn't make sense to me to add the complexity.
On a submarine, diving shell, or other underwater station, however... maybe.
Personally, I've always been amused by the obvious lack of understanding of how science works when these stories about evolution come up.
For instance, when they raised hell about putting those stickers about how ideas pertaining to our origins are theories that should be examined critically, I was happy that they were finally going to teach students what science was all about. And then non-scientists complained that colleges would think that their students weren't getting a proper education in science.
By claiming that people should simply accept evolution without thinking about it themselves, they are no better than religious zealots claiming the same. If your position holds water, you shouldn't be worried about people looking at the facts. You just have to make sure that people critically examine the opposing position they're considering as well.
Frankly, I think evolution has taken on a religious nature of its own. Evolution is nowhere near as solid as something like our understanding of electrical or atomic properties, and our understanding of those change constantly. I personally think that evolution is certainly our best scientific explanation for our origins to date, but there's definitely a lot more that we need to figure out about how it works. I certainly wouldn't consider someone dumb or crazy for not buying into it completely.
When scientists claim to be infallible, they are no longer scientists.
Yeah, that diverged a little from the parent, but.. owell
Get yourself a good instrumentation system, run the code instrumented once (yeah, slow, but..), and you can get a pretty nice idea of what objects are involved, who called what and why, how they interact, etc.
Knowing how New York tries to get tax money wherever it can, I wouldn't be surprised to see them attempt to extend this to all IBM employees just because the W2's have a New York address.
The problem posed here is that the "scientific" model used to generate the data model they have published is being hidden.... How can their data model be peer reviewed without studying how the researchers developed the model?
No, it's not being hidden. I just skimmed the paper, and it's pretty well laid out. There's nothing voodoo magic about it. They're using Monte Carlo sampling, doing some stuff with principal component analysis, singular value decomposition.. All well known functions and methods. Grab someone who does this sort of thing for a living and they can probably re-write it for you rather quickly.
And, by your explanation, all science should be kept secret as long as possible so the researchers can squeeze every dime (grant, tenure, Nobel prize, etc) out of their project.
I never said that science should be kept secret. I think you and I have a difference of opinion of what science is. I don't believe that science is about the beakers used in the lab. It's not about the code that was written to analyze the data. It's not about a particular dataset. It's about the process that was performed, and the interpretation of the results of that process. The process is laid out in the paper. Just because they don't hand you the code that implements that process doesn't mean that it's covert and commercial. It just means that they're going to make you do the work to recreate it yourself if you want to try and compete with them. Some of that code may in fact been written by someone else who doesn't want them to release it.
But after you've published, you have to release all the details.
You release the details of the process you performed, and that's IN the paper. Practically no academic paper is published with the full dataset. In fact, in computer science, I think you'd be hard pressed to retrieve a dataset from those who published a paper. They might try to recreate it, or recreate something close.. but they're not going to bother to keep that stuff around in most cases.
You really DO NOT want to re-use their dataset to verify their work. In fact, there are bacterial studies that are fundamentally flawed because they have been using the same strains for so long that they have strains that have diverged from the wild strains. What good is a result that is only useful on a single dataset. To verify the results you MUST repeat the experiment with new data.
Any science, or government, that hides it's implementation is inherently suspect to corruption.
Closed science is half a step from religion. You are expected to have faith in the researcher's methodologies, analysis, assumptions, and motives. Sorry, but good science does not rely on faith.
No brainer. I think that means you didn't really think about the problem.
In science, as in industry, there is a necessity to maintain a competitive advantage. The competition isn't over sales, it's over papers. Papers are needed for tenure, grants, etc. By releasing everything, you allow another group to beat you to the punch on followup papers and you screw over your entire group.
Now, any academic researcher worth their meat can take a peer-reviewed, conference accepted paper, and re-create the experiment. Most researchers are nice enough not to patent things, or obstruct others from recreating what they do. Many will share everything if a collaborative agreement is made - they just want credit where credit is due.
In fact, if you're going to verify something, you really don't want their data. If they are in fact lying, their data is probably bogus too. To truly verify it, you need to re-create the data yourself. Note also that if they are lying, it is in other researchers best interest to point it out in the form of a paper.
So, no.. you're not expected to have faith in a researcher. You're expected to have faith in the academic community which reviews, retests, reconsiders, and scrutinizes those papers daily. And if your faith waivers, get off your butt and do the experiment yourself.
As a side note, the public isn't paying researchers to write code, or run experiments.. heck, a lot of that grunt work is done by free, or underpaid undergrads. The public is paying for intellectual development, and that's what they get in return from those papers.
I do some scientific vis work, and when you need 45 meg of texture of a single representation of a single slice.. well, we'll use whatever they'll give us.
Slashdot Mirror
Last I checked, MySpace isn't supposed to be open to those under the age of 18... which is why all of the 13 year olds on there have a profile that says that they're 23. Those under 18 are ineligible to sign up. Perhaps these letters to parents should mention that their children are lying about their age in the first place to sign in, instead of implying the MySpace isn't protecting their children.
At least in the south, most of the major highways I've been on have had reflectors to help out when it's raining. When I moved up to Wisconsin three years ago, I was baffled by how difficult it was to drive during rain, despite it being much lighter than the storms I was used to in Florida and Texas. Since they can't have reflectors due to the need to plow in the winter, the lane markers are nearly impossible to see. And when it's snowing.. good luck - You basically guess at how wide the road is, how many lanes there 'should' be, and sort of pick one. Hopefully the car is smart enough to realize there aren't viable markers, and rejects auto-pilot.
I would expect the bigger problem to be construction areas, where lanes 'shift', even though the old lane markers are somewhat still there. I've been run off the road on more than one occasion by humans who aren't paying enough attention and just keep going straight.
Another problem is the inability of the computer to react to stupid drivers. I was once on I-10 and someone in a van saw a rest area at the last moment and decided to take it. Unfortunately, I was in the lane between them and the exit. Because I distrust other drivers, and for some reason expected it, I was able to avoid an accident by pulling onto a dirt/gravel shoulder (yes, at 70 mph). I expect only humans to be able to handle the road hazards that other humans present.
I'm a little confused. Nowhere in TFA does it say that the Dartmouth student's claim is a hoax. It says an earlier claim of a similar incident at UC Santa Cruz was false, but does not directly address the Dartmouth claim, which is what the previous Slashdot story is about. They got some random official to say that he doubts it happened, and would be surprised, but no quote in that article says it didn't happen. They admit that the student requested the book, but by a means other than was originally reported.
Sure, the original story should be looked at with skepticism, but keep looking for better evidence that it really was a hoax before reporting it as such.
There's a part of the Dept of Homeland Security known as NVAC (National Visualization and Analytics Center). I'd suggest taking a look at their research agenda. Particularly the "Grand Challenges" section, and particularly the "Scalability Challenge" part of that.
Their target is to handle 1 billion structured messages/transactions per hour and 1 million unstructured messages/documents per hour. For reference, there are 6.5 billion people in the world, according to the CIA world factbook. 296 million in the US. When these numbers were presented to the IEEE Vis conference in 2004, questions arose as to whether they were going to get warrants for all of these transactions. The basic response was that they were going to 'anonymize' all of the data. First, do you honestly think that will happen? Second, how much do you trust the anonymizer? And lastly, do you trust the government to not turn off the anonymizer switch? It's a nice, warm, fuzzy feeling, isn't it?
I've tried GAIM and Trillian a number of times, but I always end up having to drop back to native clients because of how they manage buddy lists. Perhaps things have changed recently, but I doubt it.
Things are more or less okay if I stick to a single machine, but on a given day, I might be using three or four different machines. Since GAIM and Trillian use local copies of the buddy lists to support off-network features (like renaming buddies), funny things start happening. For instance, say I deleted a buddy with AIM on one machine, but then run GAIM or Trillian on another which previously had that buddy. To synch the lists, these programs re-add the buddy to the server list, making it near impossible to actually delete someone. And if I delete the buddy in GAIM, it tends to not delete the person on the server, but only in the local copy.
Grab 25 quarters and place them in the second group. Flip the 25 over.
Then, wonder why you are concerned about such things when you have an infinite supply of money.
Simply place any 18 coins into the second group and flip those over.
If you flip a coin over that was heads, it is now tails and is eliminated from consideration. If you flip a coin over that was tails, it marks with heads a coin selected that was not heads. Therefore after 18 coins are flipped, the number of heads in the second pile is equal to the number of heads that are left in the first pile.
We all knew he was coming, but his schedule was very much secret, and aimed at undergraduates. I hadn't even heard about the drop into the 302 class until now, and I know the guy that was teaching the class. Most of us had to watch a remote feed of the later talk, which I missed the beginning of, but the Q&A was better than most CEOs I've heard talk. Yes, a chunk of his presentation was "Look at the great products Microsoft is about to release" (XBox, Treo phone, etc). Funny thing is that he didn't mention Vista until someone specifically asked him about it.
Anyway, the basic message he was trying to get across, in my opinion, was that no matter what you do these days, technology is going to play a role, so it would be advantageous to embrace it. Technology is becoming ubiquitous in the home. Most sciences rely on some sort of software for simulation or analysis. Traditional blue collar jobs are disappearing because they are being automated. Therefore, if you want a job in the future, you're going to need a better education than you could get away with in the past.
I kind of left with the impression of.. "So, I'm in school longer, and will have to do more work, but will get paid the same or less... why is technology a good thing again?" Frankly though, you can watch the presentation in a few days.
My Windoze boxes have been up unless I choose to reboot them too. Random BSODs are a thing of the past. I'm a graphics grad student at UW-Madison and our graphics lab hasn't had a BSOD on a Win2k box since I started there two years ago. These are research machines with multiple users making strange configuration changes to them with no attempt at cleanliness. In fact, some of us are considering OS reinstalls not because the OS in unstable, but because none of us really know what the configuration is anymore - After six or so students claim a machine as their own and tweak it, who knows what's on there. The failures in the time I've been there:
The funny thing is that just last week, one of our linux boxes froze up and didn't respond to input so we had to reboot it. Any system can be hung if you're talented enough, but these days, it's no longer an inherent property of any OS. Frankly, I bet a lot of linux users are windows users of WinME and before - the land of failure. Win2k and XP are orders of magnitude more stable. If a process misbehaves, just kill the process. Most installs don't require reboots anymore, and the ones that do don't really need them.. it's just vendors being over cautious. Yes, you have to reboot for a patch, which is about the only place where linux has an advantage.
IMOH, if Linux really wants to compete with Windows, they have to stop living in the land of five years ago. And get a good UI - I shouldn't have to be a full-time, professional Linux admin to figure out how to change a setting that I change once a year. And agree on a standard so that it's consistent between distros.
From the article:
"Mr Horton called in Red Hat-recommended contractors to install Red Hat Enterprise Linux and ensure it was configured according to SAP standards, a process which took two weeks."
"After calling in IBM to ensure the hardware wasn't at fault, Mr Horton called on support from Red Hat Australia. Despite Red Hat's efforts to fix the problem, seven months after installing Linux, Mr Horton was forced to switch to Windows."
So, apparently they did.
Rescuers and aid providers weren't being shot at.
From CNN:
They could build tent cities near where people lived (in 3 feet of water is not a good place to set up a tent).
From NYTimes, regarding earlier hurricane disaster training:
Also from NY Times:
All the roads weren't knocked out (I think there is 1 highway to there right now).
You've obviously never lived in Florida. There are only three main north/south roads in Florida. The turnpike ends about 100 miles north of Miami. I-75 ends about 60-70 miles north of Miami. I-95 is always the only real road to move supplies into Miami, so this isn't a difference.
On a logistical side, how do you know what you are going to need before the disaster strikes? You can't always take everything, and if you judge wrong it can take longer as you have to redo what you mobilized for in the first place.
It's called emergency planning. Multiple previous scenarios were run in New Orleans because they knew this type of thing could happen. It's a large city in a hurricane area under sea-level, so they were very much aware that they needed these plans.
Frankly, I think part of the reason it's chaos is because it's not a third world country. People in third world countries have better basic survival skills and don't depend on electricity for absolutely everything. Also, the population density would be lower.
I am somewhat confused as to why the handling of the situation seems to be much different than what I remember of Andrew in Florida though. The day after Andrew hit Florida, there was a steady stream of utility and military vehicles speeding toward Miami down the turnpike and I-95. Tent cities were erected, and supply drops were running within days. Private companies were running supplies in U-hauls within a week since the military was able to establish some semblance of order (even though people were sitting in their front yards with shotguns to scare off looters).
In this case, however, it seems like their focus was so narrow on rescue and flood maintnence that they ignored that fact that there's no infrastructure to provide for these people. Bussing them hundreds of miles away to other states seems inefficient and will only handle a small percentage of those in need.
Honestly though, the government's preparation is inexcusable. Katrina a day before landfall was quite obvious to be on the order of magnitude of Andrew, and Andrew hit an area that wasn't being kept dry by pumps and levees. The fact that preparations weren't being made before Katrina even made landfall is ridiculous. If the active duty military is scretched too thin because of overseas deployments, the reservists should have been called up before or as Katrina made landfall, and not several days after.
What I really love is that fact that the page used to have the professor listed on the list of authors, NCSA logos were on the page, UIUC was listed under the authors' affiliation, and it looked much more official. Now that it's been aired out as non-scientific, there's all sorts of disclaimers saying that it was his student's work, and shifting the blame. Too bad it was published on his webspace :P
Perhaps the professor of History and Sociology will think twice next time before attempting to put his name on a study that should have been conducted by people outside of his field.
The point is, I used to get those same things on my old machine all the time and I don't anymore. If it were server lag, I would still have the same thing.. I don't get it anymore. And it's not like I play on a low population server. It's always listed as 'high pop' and is typically queued on busy days.
There's plenty that goes into loading those 'simple' things on the client. It has to load up the icons for all of the items in the auction house and the descriptions for them - there are a lot of items in the game. Some of that stuff is cached in the WDB folder, which is why I have a batch file to delete it every time I start the game. As it gets bloated, odd things happen to those items.
Have you ever gotten an item that comes up as a question mark with a blank description? I have twice (once as a quest reward). And it persists until you delete the WDB folder and restart. There's plenty that happens on the client end to show you those silly icons and item descriptions.
I also know the difference between a busy computer and network lag. My statements are based on more than just assumptions though. I have two machines.. I play on both. One does the things you describe and the other doesn't. I would have blamed it on server lag too, but evidence points to the contrary. The majority of what's there are client issues that they need to address in patches.
It's hard to say what exactly you mean by filtering by that sentence.. but.. I would guess it's more a problem of expasion rather than contraction.
Google will often return pages that had the query word in or around a link on another page that points to it. The query may not resemble anything in the document in any way, shape, or form, but since someone else referred to the document that way, it's returned. There are lots of very good and valid reasons to do this. A simple way to correct for this behavior would be to check how many of the returned results actually have your query in them.... and maybe use a decent word stemmer to be more reasonable.
I was kind of surprised that this had UIUC's name attached to it until I looked at the PhD listed. "Professor of History and Sociology". "Burton's research and teaching interests include the American South...". Okay.. so maybe his statistics aren't as strong as they should be. Or maybe they are and he just doesn't know enough about the implementation issues to do a proper statistical analysis. Perhaps he should talk to some of the AI and Info Retrieval guys on campus before he pops something like this up on the web though.
That said, WoW has had some very disappointing server stability issues that have yet to be corrected (instances, lag), nine months after release.
I'd correct that to be "client and server stability issues". A majority of the lag that people complain about is in fact the client, not the server. I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 9300, and I get very little lag anymore. Yes, I can run through IF without any lag. I've only encountered serious server lag twice in the two months since I've bought the machine.
Most of the other times there's 'lag' I look down at my HD light and it's loading something off disk - and other people don't feel it. I love the guy who complains that the server is lagging to hell when no one else feels it.
They have made a mild attempt to not block on IO by not showing characters while loading their models and textures, and showing half-naked ones while loading clothing models/textures, but they seem to either have some blocking IO still in there, or some decent amount of processing that goes into certain things.
I definitely agree with you on the instance funkiness though. "You spent 2 hours fighting through this instance.. the server will reset in 15 minutes.. prepare to start over. Oh, by the way, when you do.. we'll drop all of the same items that you don't need extras of."
Technically, that "movement" element has two sub-components, either XY or (optimally) angle+speed.
But fine control is not needed it these dimensions. It's either on or off. You can only go in 8 directions at fixed speeds (run/walk). Technically, changing weapons, throwing grenades, etc are all additional dimensions too, but you don't typically do all of those simultaneously or with any fine-grain control. If the game allowed a real dimension for movement, you would need a 6DOF mouse to truly control it.
Perhaps I should have been more explicit in that I was talking about real control, not just on/off. Technically, your keyboard has as many dimensions as keys, but binary dimension control isn't very useful.
An no.. non-binary inputs are not always better than binary inputs. It just depends on how many states you need to represent.
Though I have no idea what the article says since it won't load, counterstrike is a good example for a simple concept - The dimensionality of your input device should be correlated to how many axes you need to simultaneously adjust. Having an input device which has too many degrees of freedom is inefficient. Having one with too few makes you useless.
Some examples.. text editing is for all intensive purposes a single dimensional task (only one dimension is active at a time). 99% of what you do is advancing the cursor, or shifting it in a single, axis-aligned direction. There's no requirement for a mouse here, so a skilled person will be more efficient by not using one.
Counter-strike and similar games typically need three control directions.. pitch, yaw, and movement. Doing this with a keyboard is near impossible, so we add two dimensions with a mouse. Using a 6-DOF (spacemouse) for it is also silly. Flight sims need roll, so add in rudder pedals/joysticks for best control. If you go to high mobility CAD/visualization systems, you'll need a 6-DOF mouse for best interaction.
Bottom line though is that if you can effectively reduce the dimensionality of your task so that you can interact with a lower-dimensional input device, you're better off. Sure, the desktop is 2D, but through alt-tabbing and you can navigate it in 1D. Maybe if you hacked counter-strike to let you tab through aiming at people's heads, you could play better with a keyboard :P World of Warcraft is mostly playable without a mouse (though they don't let you tab through text inputs AFAIK).
A real problem with this device is that your air supply is no longer a closed environment. You've just lost the SC in SCUBA. SCUBA divers are very much attentive to the mixture in their tanks being used at particular depths. Technical divers have to bring down multiple tanks just to have the right types of mixtures with them. Rebreathers are also self-contained, so they know what kind of gases are being dealt with.
This thing on the other hand is grabbing air dissolved in the water. As other posters have pointed out, this may be problematic if it's low in oxygen, but I don't think they've pointed out that you have to worry about other gases that may be dissolved in the water. Maybe if you had the right membranes to separate out all the gases appropriately... but with added complexity comes added points of failure. Stay away from a lake during a fish kill :P Bacteria and other organisms in the water would be much more of a concern related to whatever membranes you have to use.
Frankly, I don't see the traditional SCUBA tank going away any time soon. They're simple, they're predictable.. and when it's the one thing standing between you and drowning, it doesn't make sense to me to add the complexity.
On a submarine, diving shell, or other underwater station, however... maybe.
Personally, I've always been amused by the obvious lack of understanding of how science works when these stories about evolution come up.
For instance, when they raised hell about putting those stickers about how ideas pertaining to our origins are theories that should be examined critically, I was happy that they were finally going to teach students what science was all about. And then non-scientists complained that colleges would think that their students weren't getting a proper education in science.
By claiming that people should simply accept evolution without thinking about it themselves, they are no better than religious zealots claiming the same. If your position holds water, you shouldn't be worried about people looking at the facts. You just have to make sure that people critically examine the opposing position they're considering as well.
Frankly, I think evolution has taken on a religious nature of its own. Evolution is nowhere near as solid as something like our understanding of electrical or atomic properties, and our understanding of those change constantly. I personally think that evolution is certainly our best scientific explanation for our origins to date, but there's definitely a lot more that we need to figure out about how it works. I certainly wouldn't consider someone dumb or crazy for not buying into it completely.
When scientists claim to be infallible, they are no longer scientists.
Yeah, that diverged a little from the parent, but.. owell
Get yourself a good instrumentation system, run the code instrumented once (yeah, slow, but..), and you can get a pretty nice idea of what objects are involved, who called what and why, how they interact, etc.
Knowing how New York tries to get tax money wherever it can, I wouldn't be surprised to see them attempt to extend this to all IBM employees just because the W2's have a New York address.
No, it's not being hidden. I just skimmed the paper, and it's pretty well laid out. There's nothing voodoo magic about it. They're using Monte Carlo sampling, doing some stuff with principal component analysis, singular value decomposition.. All well known functions and methods. Grab someone who does this sort of thing for a living and they can probably re-write it for you rather quickly.
And, by your explanation, all science should be kept secret as long as possible so the researchers can squeeze every dime (grant, tenure, Nobel prize, etc) out of their project.
I never said that science should be kept secret. I think you and I have a difference of opinion of what science is. I don't believe that science is about the beakers used in the lab. It's not about the code that was written to analyze the data. It's not about a particular dataset. It's about the process that was performed, and the interpretation of the results of that process. The process is laid out in the paper. Just because they don't hand you the code that implements that process doesn't mean that it's covert and commercial. It just means that they're going to make you do the work to recreate it yourself if you want to try and compete with them. Some of that code may in fact been written by someone else who doesn't want them to release it.
But after you've published, you have to release all the details.
You release the details of the process you performed, and that's IN the paper. Practically no academic paper is published with the full dataset. In fact, in computer science, I think you'd be hard pressed to retrieve a dataset from those who published a paper. They might try to recreate it, or recreate something close.. but they're not going to bother to keep that stuff around in most cases.
You really DO NOT want to re-use their dataset to verify their work. In fact, there are bacterial studies that are fundamentally flawed because they have been using the same strains for so long that they have strains that have diverged from the wild strains. What good is a result that is only useful on a single dataset. To verify the results you MUST repeat the experiment with new data.
No brainer. I think that means you didn't really think about the problem.
In science, as in industry, there is a necessity to maintain a competitive advantage. The competition isn't over sales, it's over papers. Papers are needed for tenure, grants, etc. By releasing everything, you allow another group to beat you to the punch on followup papers and you screw over your entire group.
Now, any academic researcher worth their meat can take a peer-reviewed, conference accepted paper, and re-create the experiment. Most researchers are nice enough not to patent things, or obstruct others from recreating what they do. Many will share everything if a collaborative agreement is made - they just want credit where credit is due.
In fact, if you're going to verify something, you really don't want their data. If they are in fact lying, their data is probably bogus too. To truly verify it, you need to re-create the data yourself. Note also that if they are lying, it is in other researchers best interest to point it out in the form of a paper.
So, no.. you're not expected to have faith in a researcher. You're expected to have faith in the academic community which reviews, retests, reconsiders, and scrutinizes those papers daily. And if your faith waivers, get off your butt and do the experiment yourself.
As a side note, the public isn't paying researchers to write code, or run experiments.. heck, a lot of that grunt work is done by free, or underpaid undergrads. The public is paying for intellectual development, and that's what they get in return from those papers.
I do some scientific vis work, and when you need 45 meg of texture of a single representation of a single slice.. well, we'll use whatever they'll give us.