Worst math professor I ever had was in Calculus I. He had a Nobel prize in Mathematics. Literally read from his textbook. Best teacher I ever had in any class was Chemistry I. Same school. Same semester. Also a Nobel prize winner. He was such a charismatic and passionate instructor that the entire class stood up and applauded him at the end of the term.
Brilliance in your field, and being able to impart that knowledge to others, are two entirely different skill sets. The latter is less common. Both skills combined in one individual is rare indeed.
It has nothing to do with stupidity. It has everything to do with culture and human conditioning.
If your grandfather fished a certain way, and he taught your father to fish that way, and your father taught you to fish that way, and the same is true for the other children in the village, then that's the way you fish. The odds are, you derive pleasure from fishing that way. It feels right, because that's the way your preteen brain was wired to live. If I now come in and say to the village "Hey. Stop fishing. Use this sophisticated replicator to produce all the fish matter you want from sunlight", the majority of the village will ignore me. Not because they're stupid, but because they're *people that fish*.
Over time, the replicators will be used more, and the fishing will occur less. Some of the older folks will never give up fishing. Some of the children will not learn how to fish. Eventually, the fishing will stop as one generation dies off and another raised in a new way supplants it.
The same thing happens in first world cultures, to blacksmiths, weavers, and eventually C# coders. Some have the capacity to adjust. Many don't.
Really, you need to provide the *aid* to the older generation, and the *education* to the younger and those that can adjust. The reality of most aid programs is that just the opposite occurs, which is why most aid programs are doomed to fail.
True. But I've never understood the U.S. Liberal tendency to fawn over royalty either. The way the liberal press treats a Kennedy or a Clinton, you'd think they were secretly wishing to restore the Monarchy.
Sadly, the batshit-crazy wings are in control of both parties at the moment.
I agree. I use LaTeX all the time; nothing else comes close. But a lot of what I write involves equations, sophisticated embedded postscript graphics and complicated formatting. For those documents I have yet to find a LaTeX GUI front-end that can create them any easier than can vim and a makefile. However, for simpler documents other word processing software is much easier and faster.
Beyond the needs of 99.99% might be extreme, but 98%, well, I'd agree with that.
Uh, last time I checked, that's actually how it works. If both the House and Senate were Republican-controlled, an 'overall minority(?)' Democratic President could veto every bill they sent him. Likewise, the Congress doesn't have to fund squat.
There's no new conspiracy here, just the same age-old one. You youngsters think every new drama you see you just invented. Nothing new about that either.
It's even easier than that. If you have a brilliant contribution to make to science, but the journals reject your letters and the scientists ignore you, well...put up your own web site and discuss it all you want. Post all about it on Facebook. If you truly have solved the P-NP problem the evidence will be irrefutable, sitting there for everyone to see, and the accolades will come pouring in.
OTOH, if people are ignoring your web site and you find yourself having to shout your genius at them in the comments section of some other web site, you might want to reconsider the firmness of your grip on reality.
I've been running the open source radeon driver on my Gentoo box for over a year now. No problems with desktop compositing, no problems with 3D graphic applications such as Blender, no problems running a 3-monitor setup. The binary driver is only necessary if gaming is your thing.
I went for AMD over nVidia solely because of the better open-source support from AMD. I'm happy to see that support is getting better all the time.
No. You, as an individual, are free to use a patented idea for your own personal use any way you see fit. However, you're not allowed to sell or distribute to anyone else anything based on that patented concept until the patent expires. On the other hand, if someone were able to copyright the act of swinging sideways you, as an individual, could be enjoined from swinging sideways. That's in the U.S. Don't know about other countries.
We all know the Internet is populated primarily by educated, thoughtful people who affect the world with their reasoned erudition, and not by those that affect the world like a hairball affects a drain.
Exactly. One of my favorite publishers is Dover. They re-publish a number of the old classic STEM books for just a few dollars each. About as close as you can get in the publishing world these days to the Creative Commons ideal. Thermodynamics, mechanics, ODE, electromagnetic theory, fluid dynamics, and more, most by some of the most renowned names in their fields. It's not like Calculus, Maxwell's equations, or the principles of Statics and Dynamics have been rendered obsolete by Wikipedia.
However, I am surprised by how much some of the old books I have are listed for on Amazon. $30 for the PDP-11/60 Processor handbook? Really?
One of the best uses for old computer books, though, is to whip them out and show them to the Younglings who think they've discovered something new. My dog-eared Lisp 1.5 Primer and stack of punch cards for the first Lisp program I wrote in College long ago are somewhat shocking to those who think Lambdas and functional programming is state-of-the-art computer science.
Actually, Grandma does better with a PC, with a real keyboard and mouse and a large monitor with large easy-to-read fonts. Agreed, she doesn't a tower case with dual water-cooled CrossFire GPUs like her grandson. A simple little cube thing with some USB ports, HDMI/DVI and an audio output are sufficient. Grandma's eyes aren't good enough to see a tablet screen, her hands aren't steady enough to manipulate small touchscreens, and she can't hold a tablet and a small dog/cat in her lap at the same time.
Yes, I used to have only two monitors hooked up to my system (KDE / Gentoo). I did see the issue you're describing on occasion. At least with KDE it seems the multi-monitor support has improved significantly over the last year--I rarely have issues like that anymore even on two screens (I went 3-monitor just a few months ago.) It's only a few apps now that still mis-behave at times, like evince which loves to go full-screen across all the monitors every now and then.
I'm running 5760x1200 across three monitors on an ATI Flex card using the radeon driver. No problems here. But then again, I don't game, I don't run multiple GPUs in a CrossFire setup, and I don't get near the ATI binary drivers, so it's all good.
I'm old enough to remember when Letters to the Editor were actually written on paper and mailed in with a stamp. Even did it myself a few times. Your name and address were required, and your name and city were published. (This was a small county paper that covered about 25,000 folks across a dozen small towns.) There didn't seem to be any shortage of such letters, the tone was generally polite even when the differences of opinion were stark, and the grammar was usually impeccable. About 20-25% of the letters came from the usual 'regulars'; about half of those commented on just about everything, and the other half had strong opinions on certain topics. Everyone knew who they were (sort of like local celebrities.) When you wrote a letter, it wasn't much different than standing up in a town meeting and having your voice heard. It wasn't that hard to correlate who you were with an address in the phone book, but it really wasn't a problem either.
The thing about letters is, they require thought. And time. And effort. Most folks don't mind others with differing opinions. Where they take exception is when idiots fire off spur-of-the-moment personal diatribes against them for their differing opinions. That is what online anonymity allows, and it's a bad thing when it comes to, say, newspaper comment sections. I would argue they didn't kill the commenting system, they fixed it. Newspapers would be better served with a few civil well-though-out comments than the mindless drivel anonymous commenting allows.
OTOH, slashdot isn't really 'News for Nerds', it's 'Entertainment for Nerds'. I expect entertaining mindless drivel, from the Anonymous Coward Microsoft shills defending their crumbling empire, to the Apple fanbois drooling over their latest iShiny while trying to ignore the 'BSD Inside' sticker. I understand it's hard to be civil when the basement is so cold (or hot).
Why must computer nerds always be so 'binary' these days? Back in my day we had analog, and it was OK to use varying levels of anonymity depending on the circumstances. Some web sites work better with it, others without. Nothing to see here. Get off my lawn.
Actually, a lot of pop music today is the *same* as the pop music of 30 years ago, because the studios just have today's current boy/girl-toy act cover the same song that was originally written 40 years ago and re-produced every decade since. Do you think the average 12-year old the music industry is targeting knows that fact?
You're one of the 1% on slashdot that actually has taken the time to stop reading SciFi comic books long enough to understand the issue. I'd love my Roomba to fix that leak under the sink, but first it has to figure out how to get out of the corner behind the sofa.
Sure, you can automate an iShinyToy factory that produces thousands of iShinyToys a day, eliminating almost every human in the place. But not one of those sophisticated machines is going to be able to reset the circuit breaker when the main fuse blows. You might not work at Apple again, but Joe's Plumbing will still be hiring for a long time.
In general, I want to be marketed to, with a caveat. That caveat is that I want companies who sell the things I'm interested in marketing to me. I'm not interested in the new iShiny. I don't want to hear about or see your toothpaste, your beer, or your crap toilet paper. On the other hand, I'm very interested in your new gizmo with the open-source Linux drivers. Tell me about your new oscilloscope. Tease me with new stuff for my 3-D printer. I'm constantly searching the web, and spending big, on tools and materials for my experimental aircraft hobby. I never see any pertinent ads for any of that.
The reality is, they actually don't care at all about 99% of the data they gather from you, or how accurate it is. It's useless. I can post the above interests all day long under my actual slashdot account name and it just doesn't matter. What they're mining is the 1% of what you're interested in that matches up with some advertiser who will actually pay them money. Buy toothpaste off Amazon, and now you're targeted. Follow that up with a spirited debate on waveform crest factor on your favorite google electronics group, and Proctor and Gamble will follow you around for months. That monkey you see waving its arms around is actually quite sober; it's grabbing up cash from all the advertisers who care to fling money at it. What's producing the data-mining results you're complaining about is the simple fact that you're standing on the wrong end of the monkey. That monkey ain't even looking at you.
The average code-hacking basement-dwelling conspiracy-theorist slashdot reader who is most concerned with electronic breadcrumb trails is actually of no interest whatsoever to the Marketing Department at Big Corp. It's your Grandma upstairs they're after.
Yeah, this is the real issue. Young or old, what will set you apart in any work environment is using the right tool for the job. If you need to talk to someone in the next cubicle...walk over and talk. You need the exercise. If you're setting up lunch, text. If you need details, email. If the email thread isn't working, pick up the phone and hash it out. There's also Chat, Skype, and yes, I even use a (gasp) fax machine on occasion.
What's up with all the one-trick ponies around here?
Not necessarily. Dont' forget Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to brilliant malice that which is adequately explained by abject stupidity and greed.
I have found that observing that rule has been a steadfast guide when dealing with my fellow human beings and Slashdotters alike. Rarely is it wrong, and used with precision it helps separate the basic nutters from the conspiracy kooks, the idiots from the clueless, and the noisy dolts from the truly insane.
In this case, I read in a more detailed press report (one of those things you rarely see anymore in this new age of journalism) that it was likely Assad's crazy and ruthless brother who launched this attack. Applying Hanlon's Razor, I imagine the conversations went something like this:
In Damascus: Assad: 'WTF did you just do, moron?' Assad's Brother: 'Used some of those weapons Dad gave us on those d**m m*f'rs.' Assad: 'Idiot. Now we're going to lose a few pharmaceutical factories.'
In D.C.: Analyst: 'The Syrians just gassed a bunch of their people.' Obama: 'Idiots. Why are they goading me into a response?' Analyst: 'No idea sir. As you know, our intelligence network is unreliable outside U.S. borders.'
U.S. Defense Contractor: PHB 1: 'Hey, looks like the Brass will be placing an order for replacement military gear soon.' PHB 2: 'Awesome.'
Russian Defense Contractor: PHB 1: 'Hey, looks like the Syrians will be placing an order for replacement military gear soon.' PHB 2: 'Awesome.'
Where in the above conversations is evil genius required?
Slashdot Mirror
Agreed.
Worst math professor I ever had was in Calculus I. He had a Nobel prize in Mathematics. Literally read from his textbook. Best teacher I ever had in any class was Chemistry I. Same school. Same semester. Also a Nobel prize winner. He was such a charismatic and passionate instructor that the entire class stood up and applauded him at the end of the term.
Brilliance in your field, and being able to impart that knowledge to others, are two entirely different skill sets. The latter is less common. Both skills combined in one individual is rare indeed.
Wrong. F You.
It has nothing to do with stupidity. It has everything to do with culture and human conditioning.
If your grandfather fished a certain way, and he taught your father to fish that way, and your father taught you to fish that way, and the same is true for the other children in the village, then that's the way you fish. The odds are, you derive pleasure from fishing that way. It feels right, because that's the way your preteen brain was wired to live. If I now come in and say to the village "Hey. Stop fishing. Use this sophisticated replicator to produce all the fish matter you want from sunlight", the majority of the village will ignore me. Not because they're stupid, but because they're *people that fish*.
Over time, the replicators will be used more, and the fishing will occur less. Some of the older folks will never give up fishing. Some of the children will not learn how to fish. Eventually, the fishing will stop as one generation dies off and another raised in a new way supplants it.
The same thing happens in first world cultures, to blacksmiths, weavers, and eventually C# coders. Some have the capacity to adjust. Many don't.
Really, you need to provide the *aid* to the older generation, and the *education* to the younger and those that can adjust. The reality of most aid programs is that just the opposite occurs, which is why most aid programs are doomed to fail.
True. But I've never understood the U.S. Liberal tendency to fawn over royalty either. The way the liberal press treats a Kennedy or a Clinton, you'd think they were secretly wishing to restore the Monarchy.
Sadly, the batshit-crazy wings are in control of both parties at the moment.
It's my experience that those who use the 'parent just died' example are invariably the ones who live their lives around their 'cat barfed' calls.
I agree. I use LaTeX all the time; nothing else comes close. But a lot of what I write involves equations, sophisticated embedded postscript graphics and complicated formatting. For those documents I have yet to find a LaTeX GUI front-end that can create them any easier than can vim and a makefile. However, for simpler documents other word processing software is much easier and faster.
Beyond the needs of 99.99% might be extreme, but 98%, well, I'd agree with that.
Uh, last time I checked, that's actually how it works. If both the House and Senate were Republican-controlled, an 'overall minority(?)' Democratic President could veto every bill they sent him. Likewise, the Congress doesn't have to fund squat.
There's no new conspiracy here, just the same age-old one. You youngsters think every new drama you see you just invented. Nothing new about that either.
I'd believe it if it was a British company...
It's even easier than that. If you have a brilliant contribution to make to science, but the journals reject your letters and the scientists ignore you, well...put up your own web site and discuss it all you want. Post all about it on Facebook. If you truly have solved the P-NP problem the evidence will be irrefutable, sitting there for everyone to see, and the accolades will come pouring in.
OTOH, if people are ignoring your web site and you find yourself having to shout your genius at them in the comments section of some other web site, you might want to reconsider the firmness of your grip on reality.
I've been running the open source radeon driver on my Gentoo box for over a year now. No problems with desktop compositing, no problems with 3D graphic applications such as Blender, no problems running a 3-monitor setup. The binary driver is only necessary if gaming is your thing.
I went for AMD over nVidia solely because of the better open-source support from AMD. I'm happy to see that support is getting better all the time.
No. You, as an individual, are free to use a patented idea for your own personal use any way you see fit. However, you're not allowed to sell or distribute to anyone else anything based on that patented concept until the patent expires. On the other hand, if someone were able to copyright the act of swinging sideways you, as an individual, could be enjoined from swinging sideways. That's in the U.S. Don't know about other countries.
We all know the Internet is populated primarily by educated, thoughtful people who affect the world with their reasoned erudition, and not by those that affect the world like a hairball affects a drain.
This.
The zombie apocalypse is no further than the next great solar magnetic storm event.
Exactly. One of my favorite publishers is Dover. They re-publish a number of the old classic STEM books for just a few dollars each. About as close as you can get in the publishing world these days to the Creative Commons ideal. Thermodynamics, mechanics, ODE, electromagnetic theory, fluid dynamics, and more, most by some of the most renowned names in their fields. It's not like Calculus, Maxwell's equations, or the principles of Statics and Dynamics have been rendered obsolete by Wikipedia.
However, I am surprised by how much some of the old books I have are listed for on Amazon. $30 for the PDP-11/60 Processor handbook? Really?
One of the best uses for old computer books, though, is to whip them out and show them to the Younglings who think they've discovered something new. My dog-eared Lisp 1.5 Primer and stack of punch cards for the first Lisp program I wrote in College long ago are somewhat shocking to those who think Lambdas and functional programming is state-of-the-art computer science.
Actually, Grandma does better with a PC, with a real keyboard and mouse and a large monitor with large easy-to-read fonts. Agreed, she doesn't a tower case with dual water-cooled CrossFire GPUs like her grandson. A simple little cube thing with some USB ports, HDMI/DVI and an audio output are sufficient. Grandma's eyes aren't good enough to see a tablet screen, her hands aren't steady enough to manipulate small touchscreens, and she can't hold a tablet and a small dog/cat in her lap at the same time.
Yes, I used to have only two monitors hooked up to my system (KDE / Gentoo). I did see the issue you're describing on occasion. At least with KDE it seems the multi-monitor support has improved significantly over the last year--I rarely have issues like that anymore even on two screens (I went 3-monitor just a few months ago.) It's only a few apps now that still mis-behave at times, like evince which loves to go full-screen across all the monitors every now and then.
I'm running 5760x1200 across three monitors on an ATI Flex card using the radeon driver. No problems here. But then again, I don't game, I don't run multiple GPUs in a CrossFire setup, and I don't get near the ATI binary drivers, so it's all good.
I'm old enough to remember when Letters to the Editor were actually written on paper and mailed in with a stamp. Even did it myself a few times. Your name and address were required, and your name and city were published. (This was a small county paper that covered about 25,000 folks across a dozen small towns.) There didn't seem to be any shortage of such letters, the tone was generally polite even when the differences of opinion were stark, and the grammar was usually impeccable. About 20-25% of the letters came from the usual 'regulars'; about half of those commented on just about everything, and the other half had strong opinions on certain topics. Everyone knew who they were (sort of like local celebrities.) When you wrote a letter, it wasn't much different than standing up in a town meeting and having your voice heard. It wasn't that hard to correlate who you were with an address in the phone book, but it really wasn't a problem either.
The thing about letters is, they require thought. And time. And effort. Most folks don't mind others with differing opinions. Where they take exception is when idiots fire off spur-of-the-moment personal diatribes against them for their differing opinions. That is what online anonymity allows, and it's a bad thing when it comes to, say, newspaper comment sections. I would argue they didn't kill the commenting system, they fixed it. Newspapers would be better served with a few civil well-though-out comments than the mindless drivel anonymous commenting allows.
OTOH, slashdot isn't really 'News for Nerds', it's 'Entertainment for Nerds'. I expect entertaining mindless drivel, from the Anonymous Coward Microsoft shills defending their crumbling empire, to the Apple fanbois drooling over their latest iShiny while trying to ignore the 'BSD Inside' sticker. I understand it's hard to be civil when the basement is so cold (or hot).
Why must computer nerds always be so 'binary' these days? Back in my day we had analog, and it was OK to use varying levels of anonymity depending on the circumstances. Some web sites work better with it, others without. Nothing to see here. Get off my lawn.
Particularly when the burglar looks less like brilliant master thief Lara Croft and more like a big hairy dude with a hammer.
Xilinx.
Actually, a lot of pop music today is the *same* as the pop music of 30 years ago, because the studios just have today's current boy/girl-toy act cover the same song that was originally written 40 years ago and re-produced every decade since. Do you think the average 12-year old the music industry is targeting knows that fact?
You're one of the 1% on slashdot that actually has taken the time to stop reading SciFi comic books long enough to understand the issue. I'd love my Roomba to fix that leak under the sink, but first it has to figure out how to get out of the corner behind the sofa.
Sure, you can automate an iShinyToy factory that produces thousands of iShinyToys a day, eliminating almost every human in the place. But not one of those sophisticated machines is going to be able to reset the circuit breaker when the main fuse blows. You might not work at Apple again, but Joe's Plumbing will still be hiring for a long time.
Did you miss the part about "Cisco's biggest customers", which in TFA have names like AT&T, Sprint, and the like?
I imagine, as in most of these cases, that this is more about going where the real big money is.
In general, I want to be marketed to, with a caveat. That caveat is that I want companies who sell the things I'm interested in marketing to me. I'm not interested in the new iShiny. I don't want to hear about or see your toothpaste, your beer, or your crap toilet paper. On the other hand, I'm very interested in your new gizmo with the open-source Linux drivers. Tell me about your new oscilloscope. Tease me with new stuff for my 3-D printer. I'm constantly searching the web, and spending big, on tools and materials for my experimental aircraft hobby. I never see any pertinent ads for any of that.
The reality is, they actually don't care at all about 99% of the data they gather from you, or how accurate it is. It's useless. I can post the above interests all day long under my actual slashdot account name and it just doesn't matter. What they're mining is the 1% of what you're interested in that matches up with some advertiser who will actually pay them money. Buy toothpaste off Amazon, and now you're targeted. Follow that up with a spirited debate on waveform crest factor on your favorite google electronics group, and Proctor and Gamble will follow you around for months. That monkey you see waving its arms around is actually quite sober; it's grabbing up cash from all the advertisers who care to fling money at it. What's producing the data-mining results you're complaining about is the simple fact that you're standing on the wrong end of the monkey. That monkey ain't even looking at you.
The average code-hacking basement-dwelling conspiracy-theorist slashdot reader who is most concerned with electronic breadcrumb trails is actually of no interest whatsoever to the Marketing Department at Big Corp. It's your Grandma upstairs they're after.
Yeah, this is the real issue. Young or old, what will set you apart in any work environment is using the right tool for the job. If you need to talk to someone in the next cubicle...walk over and talk. You need the exercise. If you're setting up lunch, text. If you need details, email. If the email thread isn't working, pick up the phone and hash it out. There's also Chat, Skype, and yes, I even use a (gasp) fax machine on occasion.
What's up with all the one-trick ponies around here?
Not necessarily. Dont' forget Hanlon's Razor: never attribute to brilliant malice that which is adequately explained by abject stupidity and greed.
I have found that observing that rule has been a steadfast guide when dealing with my fellow human beings and Slashdotters alike. Rarely is it wrong, and used with precision it helps separate the basic nutters from the conspiracy kooks, the idiots from the clueless, and the noisy dolts from the truly insane.
In this case, I read in a more detailed press report (one of those things you rarely see anymore in this new age of journalism) that it was likely Assad's crazy and ruthless brother who launched this attack. Applying Hanlon's Razor, I imagine the conversations went something like this:
In Damascus:
Assad: 'WTF did you just do, moron?'
Assad's Brother: 'Used some of those weapons Dad gave us on those d**m m*f'rs.'
Assad: 'Idiot. Now we're going to lose a few pharmaceutical factories.'
In D.C.:
Analyst: 'The Syrians just gassed a bunch of their people.'
Obama: 'Idiots. Why are they goading me into a response?'
Analyst: 'No idea sir. As you know, our intelligence network is unreliable outside U.S. borders.'
U.S. Defense Contractor:
PHB 1: 'Hey, looks like the Brass will be placing an order for replacement military gear soon.'
PHB 2: 'Awesome.'
Russian Defense Contractor:
PHB 1: 'Hey, looks like the Syrians will be placing an order for replacement military gear soon.'
PHB 2: 'Awesome.'
Where in the above conversations is evil genius required?