Heh, if you're looking to run software like Mathematica and LabView on your home computer, I'm actually kind of surprised that you're willing to be happy with a $1200 Dell, let alone a $1200 Mac or a $350 Dell. I mean, if I were doing stuff at home that require Mathematica and LabView, and I had enough money to buy both of them, I'd probably be buying some sort of huge workstation, not mincing over what's the cheapest.
Or maybe you're just salty because you can't run Kazaa on PPC hardware. =D
I seem to remember the Catholic Church deciding that Copernicus's crazy idea about the Earth going around the Sun wasn't a threat to their terracentric cosmology for the same reason. The Protestants flipped out over it, the Catholics just said, "Meh, it's just a mathematical model that makes the calculations easier."
Granted, that opinion is really quite true and if you wanted to you could form a model where everything orbits Pluto, but that doesn't change that the model eventually becomes reality in the public's mind.
Perhaps if science were more popular/emphasized more at school, the problem might alleviate
The problem isn't that science isn't being taught. A lot of scientific facts are taught, and a nod is given to the scientific method, even.
What isn't being taught is reason and skepticism. And the way science is taught - as a stream of facts for the students to swallow unquestioningly - only encourages that lack of skepticism. After all, it's not a very big jump from being spoon-fed cute lab demonstrations by a middle aged adult who probably couldn't use the words non sequitir in a sentence, even after using the dictionary, to being spoon-fed heaping piles of balderdash sprinkled with a few large words by a middle aged adult in a white labcoat on T.V.
Still, I do find it absolutely astounding that people who worry about their kids using things like cocaine and mushrooms, and who know that deadly nightshade is not a safe thing to eat, can simultaneously believe that a product is 100% safe simply because it's made of "all natural ingredients."
I'd *BANG* offer *BANG* an *BANG* answer *BANG* but *BANG* I'm *BANG* too *BANG* busy *BANG* slamming *BANG* my *BANG* head *BANG* against *BANG* the *BANG* wall *BANG* to *BANG* tell *BANG* you *BANG* how *BANG* to *BANG* use *BANG* Google *BANG* or *BANG* Apple's *BANG* website.
I think that without Mathematica many of my mathematics courses wouldn't have given me nearly the command of the subject that they did.
When I'm learning linear algebra, I want to do operations on vectors and marices, not large arrays of numbers. The mechanics are important to know, and we did learn those, but once you get past the basics, every moment you spend computing a matrix multiply or dot product or what have you is a moment you're spending not learning the material.
Same for numerical mathematics. Would you rather spend a day working out how to improve an algorithm by changing a Mathematica function and seeing how it changes the output, or a week doing the same thing because you have to waste most of your time grinding out $bignum iterations of J.Random.Numerical.Method?
By the time you get to college, mathematics is not about arithmetic anymore, and complaining that math students' education is being stunted by using tools to grind the numbers is essentially the same thing as saying astronomy students' educations are being stunted because they aren't building their own telescopes anymore.
I just came into posession of two teal Indigo2 boxen last week, and I gotta admit that if you're the kind of person who can have some nostalgic fun playing with a C64, an SGI box is an amazing thing to own. I lost a few hours this weekend just toying around with the demos that came with the OS.
It's also pretty surprising how responsive the thing is - about the only thing I've found so far that can make one of these babies start thrashing is a newer version of Oracle. If I can just sort out this little Holy War I've been waging with IRIX 6.2's DHCP client (and its networking set-up in general), the workstation could very well end up being a computer that I use for real work.
One popular reason for banning AOL on company computers is because (at least a few years ago), the AOL client could seriously hose a computer. At the very least, it would toy with your network settings, and I've heard rumors that it could even damage Windows's bootup/shutdown sequences.
This was the stated reason for the AOL ban at the last place I was that had one, and if that really is the only reason, then this browser might be able to fly if it can escape the AOL client stigma.
I figured this uniqueness imperative was why iPods scratch so easily. Every iPod is like a snowflake, and it starts developing its own unique "character" the first time you allow it to be in contact with other matter.
I'm going to assume that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this phrase, and it's not just that you consider this a good way to spend your Saturday night.
Site is slashdotted, so I'm not sure what he's talking about, but here's my ramble. ..
The closest thing I can think of to TiVO for the Internet is something that lets you save content so you can view it when it's no longer available (which is what TiVO does for TV, really). This can be your own personal Wayback Machine, or just saving pages for later when you have no internet connection.
Either way, isn't this exactly what tools like wget and Plucker do?
I think the pickiness of Mac users has a lot to do with the environment. I use both Mac OS X and Linux ab out equally often. On the Mac, I find that I get incredibly annoyed with bad user interfaces, whereas I barely even notice it in Linux.
It's really not about Mac users. It's that on the Mac there's so much uniformity in how applications look and behave (admittedly much more so on OS 9 than OS X) that your brain gets into a rut and really expects everything to work that way. Suddenly going from this to a Unixy app is like having the orientation of the ground you're standing on shift without warning - it's not going to be an entirely pleasant experience.
Compare this to a straight Unix environment, using all sorts of X apps. Every single app (more or less) behaves a little differently, uses slightly different widgets, uses different keyboard commands, and all that. It's like being on a boat - when the surface you're standing on tilts to the side, it's no problem because it's constantly swaying back and forth, and you expect it.
This is probably the core of why I have a Linux install separate from OS X. When I'm booted into Linux, I love old stand-by apps like the GIMP and OO.org. But an hour later I might be booted into OS X and running a Fink install on them and find them to be the most baneful travesties imaginable.
There's no way that can be good for the USA. Historically, countries that attempt to limit their citizens' access to information or try to control what they can think have generally fallen behind the rest of the world in every respect. What happened to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire is a shining example.
If the neo-cons are really successful in implementing all the policy on their agenda, I'm sure that future historians look back on turn-of-the-millenium America as an empire in its death throes.
That's pretty normal. The company I work for basically sells equipment to customers at cost. We make all our profits on the support. IBM's been doing it for years. Best Buy makes most their money on large electronics on the protection plans, not the product's markup (which is often zero).
Here in the US we pay 35 cents to 65 cents with 60 cents being the norm for an individual 12 ounce can of coke out of a machine.
If you mean Euro cents, yeah, that's about what I'm paying around here. If not, I think maybe you're living in the wrong decade or a drastically different local economy (I live in a city).
I imagine a lot of big iron is sold as a complete package, including software.
Assuming that's the case, trying to separate a software review from a hardware review would be a bit like separating a review of Apple computers from a review of their OS.
In the case of vaccines that use similar pathogens or mimic a pathogen, don't they do it by containing receptors that are the same as (or analogous to) the ones on the pathogen the vaccine is being made for?
(just curious)
Re:reducing viral load is a far cry from a cure fo
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 1
Dropping the viral load count dosn't mean much if it only works once and or dosn't ever wipe it out.
I imagine that for many infected patients it could mean remaining healthy (and alive) for maybe another 5 years. That would sure mean a lot to me.
Re:Wait, a vaccine?
on
HIV Vaccine
·
· Score: 5, Informative
It's considered a vaccine when you're inoculating the patient with live or dead specimens of the pathogen with the goal of getting the patient's own immune system to handle the disease on its own.
In this particular case it's being used for therapy rather than trying to give someone immunity to a disease, but it's still a vaccine.
Slashdot Mirror
Heh, if you're looking to run software like Mathematica and LabView on your home computer, I'm actually kind of surprised that you're willing to be happy with a $1200 Dell, let alone a $1200 Mac or a $350 Dell. I mean, if I were doing stuff at home that require Mathematica and LabView, and I had enough money to buy both of them, I'd probably be buying some sort of huge workstation, not mincing over what's the cheapest.
Or maybe you're just salty because you can't run Kazaa on PPC hardware. =D
Am I the only one that thinks this kind of comparison is stupid?
1) No, Dell doesn't. Dell sells PCs.
2) There's more difference between a PC and a Mac than the monitor, amount of RAM, and price tag.
Just because the PC market is commoditized doesn't mean the entire computer market is commoditized.
I seem to remember the Catholic Church deciding that Copernicus's crazy idea about the Earth going around the Sun wasn't a threat to their terracentric cosmology for the same reason. The Protestants flipped out over it, the Catholics just said, "Meh, it's just a mathematical model that makes the calculations easier."
Granted, that opinion is really quite true and if you wanted to you could form a model where everything orbits Pluto, but that doesn't change that the model eventually becomes reality in the public's mind.
Perhaps if science were more popular/emphasized more at school, the problem might alleviate
The problem isn't that science isn't being taught. A lot of scientific facts are taught, and a nod is given to the scientific method, even.
What isn't being taught is reason and skepticism. And the way science is taught - as a stream of facts for the students to swallow unquestioningly - only encourages that lack of skepticism. After all, it's not a very big jump from being spoon-fed cute lab demonstrations by a middle aged adult who probably couldn't use the words non sequitir in a sentence, even after using the dictionary, to being spoon-fed heaping piles of balderdash sprinkled with a few large words by a middle aged adult in a white labcoat on T.V.
Still, I do find it absolutely astounding that people who worry about their kids using things like cocaine and mushrooms, and who know that deadly nightshade is not a safe thing to eat, can simultaneously believe that a product is 100% safe simply because it's made of "all natural ingredients."
>GET TEA
>GET NO TEA
I'd *BANG* offer *BANG* an *BANG* answer *BANG* but *BANG* I'm *BANG* too *BANG* busy *BANG* slamming *BANG* my *BANG* head *BANG* against *BANG* the *BANG* wall *BANG* to *BANG* tell *BANG* you *BANG* how *BANG* to *BANG* use *BANG* Google *BANG* or *BANG* Apple's *BANG* website.
I think that without Mathematica many of my mathematics courses wouldn't have given me nearly the command of the subject that they did.
When I'm learning linear algebra, I want to do operations on vectors and marices, not large arrays of numbers. The mechanics are important to know, and we did learn those, but once you get past the basics, every moment you spend computing a matrix multiply or dot product or what have you is a moment you're spending not learning the material.
Same for numerical mathematics. Would you rather spend a day working out how to improve an algorithm by changing a Mathematica function and seeing how it changes the output, or a week doing the same thing because you have to waste most of your time grinding out $bignum iterations of J.Random.Numerical.Method?
By the time you get to college, mathematics is not about arithmetic anymore, and complaining that math students' education is being stunted by using tools to grind the numbers is essentially the same thing as saying astronomy students' educations are being stunted because they aren't building their own telescopes anymore.
Mostly because it only has an R4k/150 CPU, and because I've heard that 6.5 drops support for the Cosmo board.
I just came into posession of two teal Indigo2 boxen last week, and I gotta admit that if you're the kind of person who can have some nostalgic fun playing with a C64, an SGI box is an amazing thing to own. I lost a few hours this weekend just toying around with the demos that came with the OS.
It's also pretty surprising how responsive the thing is - about the only thing I've found so far that can make one of these babies start thrashing is a newer version of Oracle. If I can just sort out this little Holy War I've been waging with IRIX 6.2's DHCP client (and its networking set-up in general), the workstation could very well end up being a computer that I use for real work.
One popular reason for banning AOL on company computers is because (at least a few years ago), the AOL client could seriously hose a computer. At the very least, it would toy with your network settings, and I've heard rumors that it could even damage Windows's bootup/shutdown sequences.
This was the stated reason for the AOL ban at the last place I was that had one, and if that really is the only reason, then this browser might be able to fly if it can escape the AOL client stigma.
(emphasis on the stinking)
I think this is really all I have to say about that.
I quit using the dock because it involved taking the case off. Sticking with the iSkin Exo, which has a cutout for the firewire adapter.
The screen cover on it broke, but I have replaced it with a trimmed-down WriteRight cover for my PalmPilot, which works just as well.
if push comes to shove, it's fairly easy to polish an iPod back to new with an incredibly fine polishing material (I use toothpaste) and a soft cloth.
Meh. . .
I'll gladly pay twice as much to register my vehicle in return for paying half as much in property taxes.
I figured this uniqueness imperative was why iPods scratch so easily. Every iPod is like a snowflake, and it starts developing its own unique "character" the first time you allow it to be in contact with other matter.
I don't know what Minnesota's illegal immigrant problem is
Mostly it's people from Wiconsin crossing the river in makeshift rafts in search of lower taxes.
after my first vasectomy
I'm going to assume that there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for this phrase, and it's not just that you consider this a good way to spend your Saturday night.
Site is slashdotted, so I'm not sure what he's talking about, but here's my ramble. . .
The closest thing I can think of to TiVO for the Internet is something that lets you save content so you can view it when it's no longer available (which is what TiVO does for TV, really). This can be your own personal Wayback Machine, or just saving pages for later when you have no internet connection.
Either way, isn't this exactly what tools like wget and Plucker do?
I think the pickiness of Mac users has a lot to do with the environment. I use both Mac OS X and Linux ab out equally often. On the Mac, I find that I get incredibly annoyed with bad user interfaces, whereas I barely even notice it in Linux.
It's really not about Mac users. It's that on the Mac there's so much uniformity in how applications look and behave (admittedly much more so on OS 9 than OS X) that your brain gets into a rut and really expects everything to work that way. Suddenly going from this to a Unixy app is like having the orientation of the ground you're standing on shift without warning - it's not going to be an entirely pleasant experience.
Compare this to a straight Unix environment, using all sorts of X apps. Every single app (more or less) behaves a little differently, uses slightly different widgets, uses different keyboard commands, and all that. It's like being on a boat - when the surface you're standing on tilts to the side, it's no problem because it's constantly swaying back and forth, and you expect it.
This is probably the core of why I have a Linux install separate from OS X. When I'm booted into Linux, I love old stand-by apps like the GIMP and OO.org. But an hour later I might be booted into OS X and running a Fink install on them and find them to be the most baneful travesties imaginable.
There's no way that can be good for the USA. Historically, countries that attempt to limit their citizens' access to information or try to control what they can think have generally fallen behind the rest of the world in every respect. What happened to Europe after the fall of the Roman Empire is a shining example.
If the neo-cons are really successful in implementing all the policy on their agenda, I'm sure that future historians look back on turn-of-the-millenium America as an empire in its death throes.
That's pretty normal. The company I work for basically sells equipment to customers at cost. We make all our profits on the support. IBM's been doing it for years. Best Buy makes most their money on large electronics on the protection plans, not the product's markup (which is often zero).
Kind of reminds me of a benchmark I saw where they had a PII-300 running Quake 3 at about twice the framerate of a PIII-1ghz.
Here in the US we pay 35 cents to 65 cents with 60 cents being the norm for an individual 12 ounce can of coke out of a machine.
If you mean Euro cents, yeah, that's about what I'm paying around here. If not, I think maybe you're living in the wrong decade or a drastically different local economy (I live in a city).
I imagine a lot of big iron is sold as a complete package, including software.
Assuming that's the case, trying to separate a software review from a hardware review would be a bit like separating a review of Apple computers from a review of their OS.
In the case of vaccines that use similar pathogens or mimic a pathogen, don't they do it by containing receptors that are the same as (or analogous to) the ones on the pathogen the vaccine is being made for?
(just curious)
Dropping the viral load count dosn't mean much if it only works once and or dosn't ever wipe it out.
I imagine that for many infected patients it could mean remaining healthy (and alive) for maybe another 5 years. That would sure mean a lot to me.
It's considered a vaccine when you're inoculating the patient with live or dead specimens of the pathogen with the goal of getting the patient's own immune system to handle the disease on its own.
In this particular case it's being used for therapy rather than trying to give someone immunity to a disease, but it's still a vaccine.