On the topic of the post rather than the article,
on
Two Jobs and Retire Early?
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· Score: 5, Insightful
I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this (although admittedly most of it was spent in the company of other drunken academics.)
It seems to me that for a well educated, technically skilled, first world people, there are basically three optimal strategies one can choose in finding work:
1 - Find a job that you love, so that working itself makes you happy, where happiness may include the feeling that you've accomplished something worthwhile, even if the day to day work isn't pleasant. (eg. the physicist or aid worker options)
2 - Find a job that requires minimum effort and time and allows you to spend most of your time doing things that make you happy. (the writer who's also a security guard option)
3 - Find a job that sucks but allows you to make a lot of money, then retire early and spend the rest of your life doing things that make you happy. (the investment banker turned surfer option.)
I'd argue that one is best served by pursuing any of these three strategies with intensity. Compromises are sure to sink you: taking a job that you only mostly hate in order to make enough money to retire a few years earlier buys you nothing; finding a job that requires just enough effort to leave you feeling tired at the end of the day but doesn't either give you enough money to retire early or a feeling of satisfaction puts you in the same miserable boat as most other American white collar workers.
To that end, if you choose to run with option #3, you're better off stacking on as many jobs as you can handle without physical breakdown. The off hours you sacrifice will be low quality anyway.
The downside, of course, is that option #3 involves banking your healthiest, most active years on the promise of free time in the future. If your idea of a good time involves seeing a lot of theater and learning how to paint, and if you aren't obviously a candidate for early health problems, and if you believe the economy will continue to value the medium in which you've banked your savings, then it may well be a safe bet. On the other hand, if your idea of a good time involved climbing mountains, going to protests, and fucking, you might be better off choosing an alternative strategy.
My own policy has been to go after #1. So far, I've no complaints. But, it sure helps that what I happen to enjoy also pays enough to live on.
Thank you for a concise, coherent description. You've done a far better job at explaining things than the cited article, the authors' abstracts and slides, and everything else google has been able to dig up. (Which I suspect does not bode well for the adoption of EXPO by working scientists.)
Certainly having access to a language-independent, formalized mechanism for searching through publications would be useful. Full text searches fill some of that need, but given the various ways in which even standard techniques and apparatus can be described, searching publications is still a complicated task, even in one's own sub-discipline. I generally end up permuting combinations of synonyms until I've run out of ideas, which makes the whole process a lot harder than it needs to be.
But, I do suspect this will suffer from the same problems as any organizational system built upon pre-determined categories: the categories themselves will evolve in time.
What happens when it is discovered that what had been described in the literature as a single species is actually made up of several distinct species? Are we stuck with a human steward writing out new definitions and adding links and explanations to allow people to find old data? (For that matter, who has the authority to make that sort of decision, and how do you convince them to spend time on this task?)
What happens to the papers on a topic which are published before it receives a formalized language? Who's tasked with going back and filing "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4800 Mc/s" under the appropriate "Cosmic Microwave Background / ground based experiments/etc " categories?
I wonder if a reader-based system (eg. tagging) could achieve the same goals? One could imagine allowing everyone who browses a preprint server to categorize papers however they like, then trying to extract meaningful correlations and links from that data. It's not clear how you motivate people to include enough detail to make such a system useful, but it has some appealing aspects.
If it's just a markup language, most professional scientists are probably savvy enough to use it themselves (they use LaTeX for god's sake).
Perhaps. But, it's a pretty big leap from describing something in such a way that your peers can understand it to describing something in such a way that a computer engine can do something useful with it.
I can speak English reasonably well, and (when drunk or otherwise unoccupied by more interesting discussions) I can even carry on arguments about the language itself. But if you asked me to describe the way I use language in format that would be useful to a professional linguist, you'd be out of luck.
Even going from chalkboard math to computer math can be challenging, at least for those of us non-mathematicians who tend to be sloppy about all sorts of assumptions.
Going from chalkboard descriptions of experiments to computer descriptions of experiments sounds unbelievably complicated, except in the trivial case where you're just performing well defined analysis on well defined databases and someone else has already done the hard part of building an analysis framework.
It's almost as dumb as a browser named links, or a programming language named C.
I don't disagree with you; however, if EXPO becomes popular, it probably won't remain hard to find for long.
As far as I can tell, there just isn't much information out there about it. Even using authors' names and lots of keywords, I can't find much of anything except a single pdf of conference slides (which are totally useless without the accompanying audio.)
So, as a Linux user, I run Linux as the host, and Windows XP & 98 as the guests.
That, it seems to me, is key: if possible, make the host OS the one you are most comforable or happy using, and the one where you're likely to do the most diverse set of random, general purpose computing tasks. If you love windows and resent having to use linux, pick a windows host. If you love linux, pick a linux host.
As a linux nut who both dislikes and is almost completely inept at using the windows interface, the choice was obvious for me: linux host running vmware with a windows client for the few occasions that I can't escape windows. (Sharing CAD files with collaborators, in my case.) That means I spend most of my time in the OS I prefer, and I get to depend on my favorite OS for security, hardware, and networking tasks - which is a great benefit.
One further note: the VMware site lists a hand full of very specific approved linux distributions. But, it's total popycock. I've run it without a hiccup on unsupported distros. It runs like a dream in slackware. (Although on slack you do have to touch a couple of the more eccentric redhat style init directories in order to keep the installer happy - a google search will provide full instructions.)
My guess is that you're probably going to end up re-installing both OSs in order to get sensible partitions, unless some of the linux laptop vendors offer a pre-installed dual boot system and you're not very picky.
Given that, assuming you really need to have a dual boot windows, it doesn't matter what you buy. So, go with a windows pre-install if you're willing to do some hardware compatibility research ahead of time and want an easy oem discount on windows. Go with a linux pre-install if you either want to support pro-linux companies or you want to avoid having to pay much attention to hardware details.
On the other hand, if you don't use windows very much, it might be worth considering running vmware with a windows guest OS. It's a lot nicer than having to reboot every time you're forced to run windows. And of course you can use all your favorite linux backup tools and file transfer tools without a hickup. And, if you're cheap or resent paying money to microsoft, that way you can run the same windows virtual machine with a single license on both you desktop and laptop (or rather, divergent sibling virtual machines).
The UK might be different, but I'm pretty sure if I don't give express or implied permission to the photographer then when they publish it they'll either have to blur my face or just do it out of decency. I see that all the time.
IANAL, but I've heard that in the UK, there's no codified right to publicity. A photo taken in a public space can be used for anything.
In the US, laws vary from state to state. Generally one can claim to own their likeness, and while it's entirely legal to photograph them (in a public space) there can be restrictions on the uses to which one can put images of a recognizable person without their permission.
In California (the only state with which I'm vaguely familiar), restricted uses are limited to advertising and solicitation. So, as far as I know, if you take a photo of Michael Jackson on a public street, he'd have a tough time preventing you from including it in a book of collected photos, or in a newspaper article with a legitimate caption. (eg. a caption that doesn't say, "Michael Jackson proudly endorses this newspaper.") But, if you used the image out of context in the poster advertising the book, you might conceivably be in trouble. On the other hand, if you were to take an image of some random, unknown dude on the subway, he'd have a tougher time claiming damages, unless you tried to use the image in an advert to sell the shirt he happened to be wearing at the time.
On the other hand, obtaining a signed release form is never a bad idea, especially if one wants to sell images internationally, so I expect many professional photographers do it.
Laws regarding video, and in particular, audio recordings, can be much more severe.
And if they didn't design it for typing, why bother including a keyboard at all?
Probably because entering text any other way is infuriating at best, and there's always a need to enter some text.
Even if one only ever uses it as a web browser, it will still be necesisary to give it URLs by hand. Just trying to pick out "slashdot.org" with a schrollwheel letter chooser would be enough to drive me to violence.
Having spent much too much time trying to enter strings of text into test equipment with and without little, badly-shaped, hard to use querty keyboards, I've learned to love them. If you ask me, a keyboard of some kind is a must, even on a device where one only needs to enter a few dozen characters a year.
(That's not to say I'm defending their layout choice. As a compromise between PDA and laptop, this device fails to achieve the most basic requirements of either. Perhaps, once they've gone out of business and sold off their inventory to a tech salvage shop for $10 each, I'll buy a few. Could be fun to play with.)
I'm a big fan of ardour; as a software mixing console, it's hard to beat.
But, if you just want to grab raw audio and dump it to file, there may be simpler (and more robust) alternatives.
My own favorite is ecasound. It's pretty light on resources and easily handles any real time recording task. And, it can be run entirely from the command line (and thus from the scripting language of your choice) and has a console client, both of which are convenient if you want to leave it running on a dedicated machine without having to be physically present. (I suppose you could try running ardour through a vnc.)
Ardour doesn't crash much these days, but compared to ecasound or less featurefull alternatives, it's a serious resource hog and a pain to set up if you're just recording raw data.
Provide an open database for public disclosure. This database would be a repository for prior art claims. So what you would do is, if you had a good idea, you'd drop it into the database and it would be kept there. Then when a patent came up, it would be readily searchable and if your idea was relevant and prior to their invention, it'd prevent them from getting the patent.
That's a great idea.
Our goal, after all, isn't to patent things, but to keep others from patenting them. As far as I know, under most patent systems one need only demonstrate prior art in order to keep something from being patented. (Or, at the very least, to make it impossible to enforce a patent that was granted after improper research.) An existing patent is a form of prior art, but not the only one, nor the most inexpensive one.
If there were a well established, go-to repository for public disclosure of open, potentially patentable ideas, that could be a great benefit. One would have to let the lawyers figure out how to make it qualify as prior art in as many places as possible, but it sure sounds like a much more useful place to spend our resources than on trying to build an open database of unpatentable ideas using the patent system itself.
Especially the Portland initiative of the OSDL which was just created for this task and which should know better do not even try to tackle the first top inhibitor of a desktop Linux adoption (http://www.osdl.org/dtl/DTL_Survey_Report_Nov2005.pdf [osdl.org]), not even after I've told them.
Okay, you've posted this link three times, and its still not at all clear to me what you're talking about.
In the report to which you link, the first on the list of "top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption" is "Application support" and discusses the need for several specific proprietary software packages such as Photoshop and AutoCad.
How, exactly, do you expect a standards body to fix this problem?
I think part of the problem is that each of these distribution techniques has its own advantages.
Yup. Very well said.
One of the things I like best about my distro of choice (slackware) is that its package manager doesn't try to keep track track of dependencies. In my book, that's a very good thing. I've never met a package manager that can deal with dependencies reliably, and have wasted days trying to repair the screwups that happen when package managers get it wrong.
But, that's not to say people who prefer dependency tracking package managers are stupid or that their systems are "low quality." They simply want something different from a distro than me. Lucky for both of us, it's easy enough to accommodate everyone.
I don't know where this comes from, I majored in biochemistry and chemical engineering at school, and my graduating class in ChemE was nearly half women (45% I'd, say) and in biochemistry it was more than 50% (7 of 13). Mind you even good odds did me no good.
It depends on the specific major, and we've made some significant progress - but a lot of the physical sciences are still overwhelmingly male, particularly as one climbs the academic ladder.
According to the APS report, "Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005," in that year women earned 22% of the bachelor and 18% of the PhD degrees in physics, and made up a total of 10% of faculty, with disporportunate representation on the faculty of institutions that do not grant graduate degrees. Astronomy does significantly better, but women still make up far less than 50% of graduate students and faculty. (http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/gendertrends .html )
That's certainly borne out by my own anecdotal experience at a student in large physics departments at research universities. From a hand full of experiences in other departments, I get a sense that both chemistry and engineering tend to be less skewed, which is certainly a good thing.
The only thing that makes firefox usable, in my opion, is Mozex. It allows you to handle text areas, links to non-html URLs, and lots of other tasks using the external applications of your choosing.
The official version is way of out date, since firefox keeps on changing the way extensions work... but there's an updated version here:
Why one should need an extension to force a browser to do what should have been built in from the start is another matter.
I can only imagine the mozilla people sat around one say and someone said, "Let's see . . . we can either write our own crappy text editor from scratch and *force* every user to use it. Or, we can give people the option of using any of hundreds of exisiting editors with decades of development history behind them." And someone else said, "You know, I've always wanted to write a text editor. But since there are so many good ones out there, no one would ever use mine unless we forced them to do so. Let's go with the first option."
Not just DSL, but it should be more of a 'roll your own' thing for a machine like this. The Linux kernel 2.2 [kernel.org] is still be actively maintained, and would be well-suited to lower end hardware like this, especially customized to support only the included hardware.
I'd certainly agree that rolling one's one distro for small hardware is a great idea; however, this case, one needn't even go to that extreme. Their specs - 512 MHz clock, 128 MB ram, 512 MB drive - aren't all that shabby. You could easily run the latest 2.6 kernel on that hardware with negligible overhead.
Obviously it would be in their best interest to skip all the unnecessary stuff in the kernel and not carry around any modules they don't absolutely need - but since the hardware is all well defined, that isn't hard to do.
The real issue may be that the most newbie-friendly applications also tend to be the biggest resource hogs.
Putting together a fully usable linux system that will run nicely on that hardware is trivial. Hell, I've got my own $35 laptop with far more timid specs running a very recent 2.4 kernel and loaded with applications to cover just about any common computer task one could name.
Putting together a linux system that you can hand to a child with no computer experience and expect them to do something productive with it is a much more difficult task. (As much as I'd like the children of the world to grow up loving command line tools, console applications, and text config files, it's going to be a hard sell, judging by the way even my computer-savvy, geek colleagues tend to react when I suggest software to them.)
On the other hand, if you're willing to hire someone full time for a year or two to work on the project, and you don't have to accommodate user hardware, it may not be impossible. There are an awful lot of lightweight gui-based applications out there just waiting to be stitched together into a coherent framework and accompanied by newbie-friendly documentation.
I just hope the author got a decent kickback from Adobe. At least that way *someone* would be getting something of value from this meaningless piece of drivel.
A point by point summary the article, for those who want to save a minute that might otherwise be spent reading the whole thing:
---------------------
Grandiose title, largely unrelated to the text.
"University instructors" and "teachers" say students can't draw today, and the reason is because they use computers.
Drawing with a computer is easy, and doing so makes one lazy.
A professor of architecture who hosted a conference on the topic says, "I see an increasing passivity on the part of students." (But we're not going to give you enough context to guess at what the hell his actual point might have been.)
"Teachers say" drawing with computer is easy. Not using a computer gives one the qualities of a saint.
Another professor of architecture says "it" takes a long time, and adds some meaningless spiritual gobbledegook. (What "it" is, or why on earth we should care that he finds drawing a spiritual experience, or indeed why he would bring up the subject when he's meant to be discussing the decline in his student's artistic abilities, are left as exercises for the reader.)
BLATANT, TOTALLY ABSURD, PARAGRAPH-LONG ADVERT FOR ADOBE SOFTWARE THROWN INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE ARTICLE FOR NO REASON.
Drawing is good, says the director of an art school.
Computers are good too, says the director of a computer-art school.
Some drawings sell for a lot of money.
An art auctioneer says that many people buy drawings.
Drawings are cheap compared to paintings and sculpture. (Err... didn't this set out to be an article about computers?)
It doesn't cost much money to draw on paper.
An artist says, it doesn't cost much money to draw on paper.
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I sure am glad I read that. My world view will never be the same.
I've a strong sentimental streak for artifacts myself, but in this case I've got to disagree.
For $1000, you can buy several cheap laptops *and* an electronic encyclopedia and carry one around in a backpack.
I grew up with paper encyclopedias, but always found them almost completely useless. Full text search makes any reference an order of magnitude more useful. Being able to access it from anywhere adds even more value.
If you ask me, an electronic copy of a reference is worth far more than the paper copy was ever worth. (Bringing an encyclopedia up from worthless to worth-pocket-change. Why on earth they were able to convince people to pay thousands of dollars for eternally outdated, so-brief-it's-usually-useless, often wrong and always incomplete information in the first place is a mystery. I'd happy trade an encyclopedia for its weight in specific, in-depth, reference material on almost any subject.)
From the UI side, however, I think that while OK
boxes and Yes/No boxes are great, I think that
OK/Cancel and Yes/No/Cancel boxes are heavily
overused... If you want to ask a question where
Yes/No isn't the answer, you should probably roll
your own so that the buttons can be *descriptive*
Yup.
My favorite absurd construction is this:
------------------ Are you sure you want to cancel this process?
>A PDF converter in the context >of the article means taking a PDF >and turning it into a document.
Where does the author make any reference to turning PDFs into documents?
There is exactly one mention of PDFs in the article, and this is it, in context:
Like all Linux desktops, Ubuntu has limitations. It lacks applications such as Photoshop, Framemaker, Pagemaker, Visio, Access, Quickbooks, a PDF converter, legal DVD players and most importantly income tax preparation software. Without those applications ported directly to Linux, Ubuntu remains a mid-level desktop.
I see nothing from the context that suggests the author doesn't mean, "makings pdfs from text documents" or "converting arbitrary graphics into PDFs" or "converting PDFs into bitmap images." All three of which are, I'd argue, much easier to accomplish in linux than in windows, even if you allow "windows" to include hundreds of dollars worth of add-on Adobe software. (And, although basing such conclusions on anecdote can be dangerous, those three cases cover the only things I've ever wanted to do with PDFs outside of reading them. My suspicion is that most people would say the same.)
>Also, your saying that tax software is >something someone uses one a year is >rather short sited.
On the contrary, not recognizing that you are a special case and that the vast majority of people who use "tax software" on their computers are not CPAs is short sighted.
>I'm a CPA and as such I use tax >software everyday.So, you say that >my profession isn't worthy of using >Linux?
That's exactly what I'm saying. CPAs are inherently evil people and we shouldn't do anything to support them. If my favorite distribution began including software meant for CPA's, I'd switch immediately. If there were suites of CPA-specific software for linux, I'd jump ship and run to the BSD's immediately.
For the dense, the above paragraph was supposed to be humor.
I've got nothing against CPAs. I'd love to see every CPA in the world switch over to linux. But, most people are not CPAs. It is absurd to say that tax software is the single most important desktop application which one should consider when choosing a platform for a home desktop.
For the vast majority of people who aren't CPAs, their needs are more than met by online tax prep materials. When deciding on a platform, the most important question probably shouldn't be, "will I have to switch platforms if I decide to become a CPA?"
I use CAD software almost every day. For me, the absence of robust software packages that can duplicate the features and file formats of solidworks and autocad are a big, big problem. At work, I'm stuck running windows in VMWare for the foreseeable future. But it would be just as absurd to say that the linux desktop lacks many things, "most importantly professional cad packages." I'm a special case. The vast majority of desktop computer users in the world will never run a cad package on their machines, so it's a non-issue when it comes to linux adoption on the desktop.
>If I want to view a DVD from a Linux computer, for example, when I travel to Europe from the US what choices do I have?
Not sure I understand that. Are you referring to region specific encodings, or legal restrictions?
>Ever read Plato? >Familair with the concept of a pretense of knowledge.
Nope. But I am familiar with a number of other bits of specialized knowledge, to which I would be happy to make reference if you think it would lend this discussion a more academic air.
>When you consider more tax software >companies are making their software >available as web packages, which OS >you are using becomes moot.
Yup.
Even if that weren't the case, judging a computer system by whether or not you can perform a task that one needs to perform roughly one hour per year is just silly. The author mentions a dozen application that are used daily, followed by the line, "and most importantly income tax preparation software." Most importantly? In what bizarro-universe is a home pc's most important feature tax prep software?
Even if there weren't several very robust online tax prep services, and if paper forms and human tax accountants weren't an option, it's hard to believe there are many potential linux users who don't have a friend or colleague who would lend them a windows machine once a year in order to do taxes. (Whether you're willing to give your SSN and banking info to a machine administered by someone other than you is another matter, I suppose.)
In passing, it's worth noting that of the other "missing" applications, only two that are genuine categories of software rather than specific vendor packages - PDF converters and legal DVD players - really have no place on the list.
There are plenty of ways of generating PDFs on linux. Having spent a fair amount of time generating PDFs from both platforms in recent years, I claim it's far easier to make arbitrary material into a high quality PDF using an unmodified linux install than it is in windows, even after paying hundreds of dollars to Adobe.
What's more, while there are no *legal* dvd players and there are a hand full of important codecs that are *legally* restricted in the US, it is trivial to install illegal software to satisfy one's every multimedia need. If linux growth were restricted only to those of us who claim it is ethically defensible to obtain an illicit copy of media playing software which is distributed for free to users of one OS but cannot be purchased at any price by users of another OS, in order to play our own legally purchased media on our own hardware, the linux community would never notice the difference.
Re:Loved the show, not happy about this.
on
Futurama Returns
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· Score: 1
Nothing livens up the weekend like a rough and tumble pointless Trek flame war, so here goes.
>DS9 wasn't nearly as good >(or better IMO) than TNG?
Errr... Yeah. That statement sounds about right to me. DS9 wasn't nearly as good as TNG. And Voyager wasn't nearly as good as DS9. If you ask me, those three series are perhaps the best example of the parent's point one can find. (Enterprise doesn't continue the trend, landing instead at roughly the same level as DS9: competent, but little more.)
Now, if you were to swap TNG -> TOS and DS9 -> TNG, you've got something we can all agree on.
But, in each case we're talking about a whole new crew, new writers, new actors, new budgets, and so on. It's a somewhat different case than bringing a whole team back to continue a series.
In general, it's hard to see a trend. I disagree with the parent post that Red Dwarf declined significantly at the end. On the other hand, Star Trek TOS team sure bombed their resurrected third season.
No it's not. You have to reach into Photoshop with 'javascript' in order to get any use of it at all. With imagemagick the whole toolset is a collection of standalone executables, which you can write scripts for in any imaginable scripting language.
It's a significant difference.
Yup.
There's no comparison between the ease of use one gets by being able to call software from within a script rather than trying to run scripts from within a software suite.
I'm always amazed at the amount of time the developers of gui-driven applications put into creating barely passable, complicated scripting languages. Every cad program seems to come with some arcane list of buggy, quirky script commands. For the vast majority of tasks, it ends up taking much longer to become familiar with their scripting language than to simply do things by hand. On those rare occasions when automation really is useful, I've so far always found it easier to generate some intermediate file format using a real language and then import it into the gui afterward.
I use imagemagick a few times a year. Each and every time I more or less start from scratch. But within five minutes (the first two spent reading man pages) I can cobble together something that will do exactly what I want to any group of files. And, I can add filesystem manipulation, all the math functions one could dream of, and arbitrarily complicated string processing. It would take me twenty times as long just to get the basics of the photoshop scripting syntax.
There's no internal scripting language on earth as powerful as "every language you can think of, including the ones you already know." (Well, with the arguable exception of emacs-lisp, if we want to stray dangerously close to a religious debate.)
I've seen somewhat smaller-scale structures made using a dense foam sprayed onto inflatable bladders. They're kind of neat looking, but aren't obviously more durable or cheaper than a traditional wood frame building.
Switching to concrete and covering the thing with sod sounds like a great idea, assuming one is able to put together something that will survive weathering, seismic activity, and so on.
Slashdot Mirror
I've spent a fair amount of time thinking about this (although admittedly most of it was spent in the company of other drunken academics.)
It seems to me that for a well educated, technically skilled, first world people, there are basically three optimal strategies one can choose in finding work:
1 - Find a job that you love, so that working itself makes you happy, where happiness may include the feeling that you've accomplished something worthwhile, even if the day to day work isn't pleasant. (eg. the physicist or aid worker options)
2 - Find a job that requires minimum effort and time and allows you to spend most of your time doing things that make you happy. (the writer who's also a security guard option)
3 - Find a job that sucks but allows you to make a lot of money, then retire early and spend the rest of your life doing things that make you happy. (the investment banker turned surfer option.)
I'd argue that one is best served by pursuing any of these three strategies with intensity. Compromises are sure to sink you: taking a job that you only mostly hate in order to make enough money to retire a few years earlier buys you nothing; finding a job that requires just enough effort to leave you feeling tired at the end of the day but doesn't either give you enough money to retire early or a feeling of satisfaction puts you in the same miserable boat as most other American white collar workers.
To that end, if you choose to run with option #3, you're better off stacking on as many jobs as you can handle without physical breakdown. The off hours you sacrifice will be low quality anyway.
The downside, of course, is that option #3 involves banking your healthiest, most active years on the promise of free time in the future. If your idea of a good time involves seeing a lot of theater and learning how to paint, and if you aren't obviously a candidate for early health problems, and if you believe the economy will continue to value the medium in which you've banked your savings, then it may well be a safe bet. On the other hand, if your idea of a good time involved climbing mountains, going to protests, and fucking, you might be better off choosing an alternative strategy.
My own policy has been to go after #1. So far, I've no complaints. But, it sure helps that what I happen to enjoy also pays enough to live on.
Thank you for a concise, coherent description. You've done a far better job at explaining things than the cited article, the authors' abstracts and slides, and everything else google has been able to dig up. (Which I suspect does not bode well for the adoption of EXPO by working scientists.)
/etc " categories?
Certainly having access to a language-independent, formalized mechanism for searching through publications would be useful. Full text searches fill some of that need, but given the various ways in which even standard techniques and apparatus can be described, searching publications is still a complicated task, even in one's own sub-discipline. I generally end up permuting combinations of synonyms until I've run out of ideas, which makes the whole process a lot harder than it needs to be.
But, I do suspect this will suffer from the same problems as any organizational system built upon pre-determined categories: the categories themselves will evolve in time.
What happens when it is discovered that what had been described in the literature as a single species is actually made up of several distinct species? Are we stuck with a human steward writing out new definitions and adding links and explanations to allow people to find old data? (For that matter, who has the authority to make that sort of decision, and how do you convince them to spend time on this task?)
What happens to the papers on a topic which are published before it receives a formalized language? Who's tasked with going back and filing "A Measurement of Excess Antenna Temperature at 4800 Mc/s" under the appropriate "Cosmic Microwave Background / ground based experiments
I wonder if a reader-based system (eg. tagging) could achieve the same goals? One could imagine allowing everyone who browses a preprint server to categorize papers however they like, then trying to extract meaningful correlations and links from that data. It's not clear how you motivate people to include enough detail to make such a system useful, but it has some appealing aspects.
Perhaps. But, it's a pretty big leap from describing something in such a way that your peers can understand it to describing something in such a way that a computer engine can do something useful with it.
I can speak English reasonably well, and (when drunk or otherwise unoccupied by more interesting discussions) I can even carry on arguments about the language itself. But if you asked me to describe the way I use language in format that would be useful to a professional linguist, you'd be out of luck.
Even going from chalkboard math to computer math can be challenging, at least for those of us non-mathematicians who tend to be sloppy about all sorts of assumptions.
Going from chalkboard descriptions of experiments to computer descriptions of experiments sounds unbelievably complicated, except in the trivial case where you're just performing well defined analysis on well defined databases and someone else has already done the hard part of building an analysis framework.
It's almost as dumb as a browser named links, or a programming language named C.
I don't disagree with you; however, if EXPO becomes popular, it probably won't remain hard to find for long.
As far as I can tell, there just isn't much information out there about it. Even using authors' names and lots of keywords, I can't find much of anything except a single pdf of conference slides (which are totally useless without the accompanying audio.)
That, it seems to me, is key: if possible, make the host OS the one you are most comforable or happy using, and the one where you're likely to do the most diverse set of random, general purpose computing tasks. If you love windows and resent having to use linux, pick a windows host. If you love linux, pick a linux host.
As a linux nut who both dislikes and is almost completely inept at using the windows interface, the choice was obvious for me: linux host running vmware with a windows client for the few occasions that I can't escape windows. (Sharing CAD files with collaborators, in my case.) That means I spend most of my time in the OS I prefer, and I get to depend on my favorite OS for security, hardware, and networking tasks - which is a great benefit.
One further note: the VMware site lists a hand full of very specific approved linux distributions. But, it's total popycock. I've run it without a hiccup on unsupported distros. It runs like a dream in slackware. (Although on slack you do have to touch a couple of the more eccentric redhat style init directories in order to keep the installer happy - a google search will provide full instructions.)
My guess is that you're probably going to end up re-installing both OSs in order to get sensible partitions, unless some of the linux laptop vendors offer a pre-installed dual boot system and you're not very picky.
Given that, assuming you really need to have a dual boot windows, it doesn't matter what you buy. So, go with a windows pre-install if you're willing to do some hardware compatibility research ahead of time and want an easy oem discount on windows. Go with a linux pre-install if you either want to support pro-linux companies or you want to avoid having to pay much attention to hardware details.
On the other hand, if you don't use windows very much, it might be worth considering running vmware with a windows guest OS. It's a lot nicer than having to reboot every time you're forced to run windows. And of course you can use all your favorite linux backup tools and file transfer tools without a hickup. And, if you're cheap or resent paying money to microsoft, that way you can run the same windows virtual machine with a single license on both you desktop and laptop (or rather, divergent sibling virtual machines).
IANAL, but I've heard that in the UK, there's no codified right to publicity. A photo taken in a public space can be used for anything.
In the US, laws vary from state to state. Generally one can claim to own their likeness, and while it's entirely legal to photograph them (in a public space) there can be restrictions on the uses to which one can put images of a recognizable person without their permission.
In California (the only state with which I'm vaguely familiar), restricted uses are limited to advertising and solicitation. So, as far as I know, if you take a photo of Michael Jackson on a public street, he'd have a tough time preventing you from including it in a book of collected photos, or in a newspaper article with a legitimate caption. (eg. a caption that doesn't say, "Michael Jackson proudly endorses this newspaper.") But, if you used the image out of context in the poster advertising the book, you might conceivably be in trouble. On the other hand, if you were to take an image of some random, unknown dude on the subway, he'd have a tougher time claiming damages, unless you tried to use the image in an advert to sell the shirt he happened to be wearing at the time.
On the other hand, obtaining a signed release form is never a bad idea, especially if one wants to sell images internationally, so I expect many professional photographers do it.
Laws regarding video, and in particular, audio recordings, can be much more severe.
UK/US/AUS photographers rights cards:
http://www.sirimo.co.uk/ukpr.php
Probably because entering text any other way is infuriating at best, and there's always a need to enter some text.
Even if one only ever uses it as a web browser, it will still be necesisary to give it URLs by hand. Just trying to pick out "slashdot.org" with a schrollwheel letter chooser would be enough to drive me to violence.
Having spent much too much time trying to enter strings of text into test equipment with and without little, badly-shaped, hard to use querty keyboards, I've learned to love them. If you ask me, a keyboard of some kind is a must, even on a device where one only needs to enter a few dozen characters a year.
(That's not to say I'm defending their layout choice. As a compromise between PDA and laptop, this device fails to achieve the most basic requirements of either. Perhaps, once they've gone out of business and sold off their inventory to a tech salvage shop for $10 each, I'll buy a few. Could be fun to play with.)
I'm a big fan of ardour; as a software mixing console, it's hard to beat.
But, if you just want to grab raw audio and dump it to file, there may be simpler (and more robust) alternatives.
My own favorite is ecasound. It's pretty light on resources and easily handles any real time recording task. And, it can be run entirely from the command line (and thus from the scripting language of your choice) and has a console client, both of which are convenient if you want to leave it running on a dedicated machine without having to be physically present. (I suppose you could try running ardour through a vnc.)
Ardour doesn't crash much these days, but compared to ecasound or less featurefull alternatives, it's a serious resource hog and a pain to set up if you're just recording raw data.
That's a great idea.
Our goal, after all, isn't to patent things, but to keep others from patenting them. As far as I know, under most patent systems one need only demonstrate prior art in order to keep something from being patented. (Or, at the very least, to make it impossible to enforce a patent that was granted after improper research.) An existing patent is a form of prior art, but not the only one, nor the most inexpensive one.
If there were a well established, go-to repository for public disclosure of open, potentially patentable ideas, that could be a great benefit. One would have to let the lawyers figure out how to make it qualify as prior art in as many places as possible, but it sure sounds like a much more useful place to spend our resources than on trying to build an open database of unpatentable ideas using the patent system itself.
Okay, you've posted this link three times, and its still not at all clear to me what you're talking about.
In the report to which you link, the first on the list of "top inhibitors of Linux desktop adoption" is "Application support" and discusses the need for several specific proprietary software packages such as Photoshop and AutoCad.
How, exactly, do you expect a standards body to fix this problem?
Yup. Very well said.
One of the things I like best about my distro of choice (slackware) is that its package manager doesn't try to keep track track of dependencies. In my book, that's a very good thing. I've never met a package manager that can deal with dependencies reliably, and have wasted days trying to repair the screwups that happen when package managers get it wrong.
But, that's not to say people who prefer dependency tracking package managers are stupid or that their systems are "low quality." They simply want something different from a distro than me. Lucky for both of us, it's easy enough to accommodate everyone.
It depends on the specific major, and we've made some significant progress - but a lot of the physical sciences are still overwhelmingly male, particularly as one climbs the academic ladder.
According to the APS report, "Women in Physics and Astronomy, 2005," in that year women earned 22% of the bachelor and 18% of the PhD degrees in physics, and made up a total of 10% of faculty, with disporportunate representation on the faculty of institutions that do not grant graduate degrees. Astronomy does significantly better, but women still make up far less than 50% of graduate students and faculty.
(http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/gendertrend
That's certainly borne out by my own anecdotal experience at a student in large physics departments at research universities. From a hand full of experiences in other departments, I get a sense that both chemistry and engineering tend to be less skewed, which is certainly a good thing.
The only thing that makes firefox usable, in my opion, is Mozex. It allows you to handle text areas, links to non-html URLs, and lots of other tasks using the external applications of your choosing.
The official version is way of out date, since firefox keeps on changing the way extensions work... but there's an updated version here:
http://www.gatsby.ucl.ac.uk/~iam23/code/mozex/
Why one should need an extension to force a browser to do what should have been built in from the start is another matter.
I can only imagine the mozilla people sat around one say and someone said, "Let's see . . . we can either write our own crappy text editor from scratch and *force* every user to use it. Or, we can give people the option of using any of hundreds of exisiting editors with decades of development history behind them." And someone else said, "You know, I've always wanted to write a text editor. But since there are so many good ones out there, no one would ever use mine unless we forced them to do so. Let's go with the first option."
I'd certainly agree that rolling one's one distro for small hardware is a great idea; however, this case, one needn't even go to that extreme. Their specs - 512 MHz clock, 128 MB ram, 512 MB drive - aren't all that shabby. You could easily run the latest 2.6 kernel on that hardware with negligible overhead.
Obviously it would be in their best interest to skip all the unnecessary stuff in the kernel and not carry around any modules they don't absolutely need - but since the hardware is all well defined, that isn't hard to do.
The real issue may be that the most newbie-friendly applications also tend to be the biggest resource hogs.
Putting together a fully usable linux system that will run nicely on that hardware is trivial. Hell, I've got my own $35 laptop with far more timid specs running a very recent 2.4 kernel and loaded with applications to cover just about any common computer task one could name.
Putting together a linux system that you can hand to a child with no computer experience and expect them to do something productive with it is a much more difficult task. (As much as I'd like the children of the world to grow up loving command line tools, console applications, and text config files, it's going to be a hard sell, judging by the way even my computer-savvy, geek colleagues tend to react when I suggest software to them.)
On the other hand, if you're willing to hire someone full time for a year or two to work on the project, and you don't have to accommodate user hardware, it may not be impossible. There are an awful lot of lightweight gui-based applications out there just waiting to be stitched together into a coherent framework and accompanied by newbie-friendly documentation.
This is news?
I just hope the author got a decent kickback from Adobe. At least that way *someone* would be getting something of value from this meaningless piece of drivel.
A point by point summary the article, for those who want to save a minute that might otherwise be spent reading the whole thing:
---------------------
Grandiose title, largely unrelated to the text.
"University instructors" and "teachers" say students can't draw today, and the reason is because they use computers.
Drawing with a computer is easy, and doing so makes one lazy.
A professor of architecture who hosted a conference on the topic says, "I see an increasing passivity on the part of students." (But we're not going to give you enough context to guess at what the hell his actual point might have been.)
"Teachers say" drawing with computer is easy. Not using a computer gives one the qualities of a saint.
Another professor of architecture says "it" takes a long time, and adds some meaningless spiritual gobbledegook. (What "it" is, or why on earth we should care that he finds drawing a spiritual experience, or indeed why he would bring up the subject when he's meant to be discussing the decline in his student's artistic abilities, are left as exercises for the reader.)
BLATANT, TOTALLY ABSURD, PARAGRAPH-LONG ADVERT FOR ADOBE SOFTWARE THROWN INTO THE MIDDLE OF THE ARTICLE FOR NO REASON.
Drawing is good, says the director of an art school.
Computers are good too, says the director of a computer-art school.
Some drawings sell for a lot of money.
An art auctioneer says that many people buy drawings.
Drawings are cheap compared to paintings and sculpture. (Err... didn't this set out to be an article about computers?)
It doesn't cost much money to draw on paper.
An artist says, it doesn't cost much money to draw on paper.
----------------------
I sure am glad I read that. My world view will never be the same.
I've a strong sentimental streak for artifacts myself, but in this case I've got to disagree.
For $1000, you can buy several cheap laptops *and* an electronic encyclopedia and carry one around in a backpack.
I grew up with paper encyclopedias, but always found them almost completely useless. Full text search makes any reference an order of magnitude more useful. Being able to access it from anywhere adds even more value.
If you ask me, an electronic copy of a reference is worth far more than the paper copy was ever worth. (Bringing an encyclopedia up from worthless to worth-pocket-change. Why on earth they were able to convince people to pay thousands of dollars for eternally outdated, so-brief-it's-usually-useless, often wrong and always incomplete information in the first place is a mystery. I'd happy trade an encyclopedia for its weight in specific, in-depth, reference material on almost any subject.)
Yup.
My favorite absurd construction is this:
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Are you sure you want to cancel this process?
[okay] [cancel]
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>of the article means taking a PDF
>and turning it into a document.
Where does the author make any reference to turning PDFs into documents?
There is exactly one mention of PDFs in the article, and this is it, in context:
I see nothing from the context that suggests the author doesn't mean, "makings pdfs from text documents" or "converting arbitrary graphics into PDFs" or "converting PDFs into bitmap images." All three of which are, I'd argue, much easier to accomplish in linux than in windows, even if you allow "windows" to include hundreds of dollars worth of add-on Adobe software. (And, although basing such conclusions on anecdote can be dangerous, those three cases cover the only things I've ever wanted to do with PDFs outside of reading them. My suspicion is that most people would say the same.)
>Also, your saying that tax software is
>something someone uses one a year is
>rather short sited.
On the contrary, not recognizing that you are a special case and that the vast majority of people who use "tax software" on their computers are not CPAs is short sighted.
>I'm a CPA and as such I use tax
>software everyday.So, you say that
>my profession isn't worthy of using
>Linux?
That's exactly what I'm saying. CPAs are inherently evil people and we shouldn't do anything to support them. If my favorite distribution began including software meant for CPA's, I'd switch immediately. If there were suites of CPA-specific software for linux, I'd jump ship and run to the BSD's immediately.
For the dense, the above paragraph was supposed to be humor.
I've got nothing against CPAs. I'd love to see every CPA in the world switch over to linux. But, most people are not CPAs. It is absurd to say that tax software is the single most important desktop application which one should consider when choosing a platform for a home desktop.
For the vast majority of people who aren't CPAs, their needs are more than met by online tax prep materials. When deciding on a platform, the most important question probably shouldn't be, "will I have to switch platforms if I decide to become a CPA?"
I use CAD software almost every day. For me, the absence of robust software packages that can duplicate the features and file formats of solidworks and autocad are a big, big problem. At work, I'm stuck running windows in VMWare for the foreseeable future. But it would be just as absurd to say that the linux desktop lacks many things, "most importantly professional cad packages." I'm a special case. The vast majority of desktop computer users in the world will never run a cad package on their machines, so it's a non-issue when it comes to linux adoption on the desktop.
>If I want to view a DVD from a Linux computer, for example, when I travel to Europe from the US what choices do I have?
Not sure I understand that. Are you referring to region specific encodings, or legal restrictions?
>Ever read Plato?
>Familair with the concept of a pretense of knowledge.
Nope. But I am familiar with a number of other bits of specialized knowledge, to which I would be happy to make reference if you think it would lend this discussion a more academic air.
>When you consider more tax software
>companies are making their software
>available as web packages, which OS
>you are using becomes moot.
Yup.
Even if that weren't the case, judging a computer system by whether or not you can perform a task that one needs to perform roughly one hour per year is just silly. The author mentions a dozen application that are used daily, followed by the line, "and most importantly income tax preparation software." Most importantly? In what bizarro-universe is a home pc's most important feature tax prep software?
Even if there weren't several very robust online tax prep services, and if paper forms and human tax accountants weren't an option, it's hard to believe there are many potential linux users who don't have a friend or colleague who would lend them a windows machine once a year in order to do taxes. (Whether you're willing to give your SSN and banking info to a machine administered by someone other than you is another matter, I suppose.)
In passing, it's worth noting that of the other "missing" applications, only two that are genuine categories of software rather than specific vendor packages - PDF converters and legal DVD players - really have no place on the list.
There are plenty of ways of generating PDFs on linux. Having spent a fair amount of time generating PDFs from both platforms in recent years, I claim it's far easier to make arbitrary material into a high quality PDF using an unmodified linux install than it is in windows, even after paying hundreds of dollars to Adobe.
What's more, while there are no *legal* dvd players and there are a hand full of important codecs that are *legally* restricted in the US, it is trivial to install illegal software to satisfy one's every multimedia need. If linux growth were restricted only to those of us who claim it is ethically defensible to obtain an illicit copy of media playing software which is distributed for free to users of one OS but cannot be purchased at any price by users of another OS, in order to play our own legally purchased media on our own hardware, the linux community would never notice the difference.
Nothing livens up the weekend like a rough and tumble pointless Trek flame war, so here goes.
>DS9 wasn't nearly as good
>(or better IMO) than TNG?
Errr... Yeah. That statement sounds about right to me. DS9 wasn't nearly as good as TNG. And Voyager wasn't nearly as good as DS9. If you ask me, those three series are perhaps the best example of the parent's point one can find. (Enterprise doesn't continue the trend, landing instead at roughly the same level as DS9: competent, but little more.)
Now, if you were to swap TNG -> TOS and DS9 -> TNG, you've got something we can all agree on.
But, in each case we're talking about a whole new crew, new writers, new actors, new budgets, and so on. It's a somewhat different case than bringing a whole team back to continue a series.
In general, it's hard to see a trend. I disagree with the parent post that Red Dwarf declined significantly at the end. On the other hand, Star Trek TOS team sure bombed their resurrected third season.
Yup.
There's no comparison between the ease of use one gets by being able to call software from within a script rather than trying to run scripts from within a software suite.
I'm always amazed at the amount of time the developers of gui-driven applications put into creating barely passable, complicated scripting languages. Every cad program seems to come with some arcane list of buggy, quirky script commands. For the vast majority of tasks, it ends up taking much longer to become familiar with their scripting language than to simply do things by hand. On those rare occasions when automation really is useful, I've so far always found it easier to generate some intermediate file format using a real language and then import it into the gui afterward.
I use imagemagick a few times a year. Each and every time I more or less start from scratch. But within five minutes (the first two spent reading man pages) I can cobble together something that will do exactly what I want to any group of files. And, I can add filesystem manipulation, all the math functions one could dream of, and arbitrarily complicated string processing. It would take me twenty times as long just to get the basics of the photoshop scripting syntax.
There's no internal scripting language on earth as powerful as "every language you can think of, including the ones you already know." (Well, with the arguable exception of emacs-lisp, if we want to stray dangerously close to a religious debate.)
Now that's really interesting.
I've seen somewhat smaller-scale structures made using a dense foam sprayed onto inflatable bladders. They're kind of neat looking, but aren't obviously more durable or cheaper than a traditional wood frame building.
Switching to concrete and covering the thing with sod sounds like a great idea, assuming one is able to put together something that will survive weathering, seismic activity, and so on.
Damnit.
Slashdot is adding whitespace to my post whenever I choose "code" formatting. Nicely done, guys.
Here it is as "plain text."
the above should say:
SEARCHURL="http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q="
Whoops. Added a bogus space in there somehow. To fix the above,
= en&q="
Replace this:
SEARCHURL="http://www.google.com/sear ch?hl=en&q="
with this:
SEARCHURL="http://www.google.com/search?hl
Sorry.