The summary is wrong, the Fedora website does mention it.
Fedora Core 4 Available!
Fedora Core 4 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core is available for x86-64, i386, and ppc/ppc64. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version 4, so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this release on fedora-list. - Source
That wasn't the paper, that was an article about the paper. The article is here.
I think the correlation the author tried to present had two variables that may be related but don't necessarily relate one for one.
Well it doesn't really matter what you think, because this guy actually researched it. His research is more important than your uninformed opinion. Not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying you don't know, so you cannot dismiss it.
They were breaking the law. Data cannot be given to other countries without adequate data protection laws. See Wikipedia.
Now, this is normally overlooked because it would be quite inconvenient to stop transferring information to America, but it is still against the law.
You know, you should never believe what a company says. There is a free trading standards hotline to ring. It is worth talking to them. They have your interests in mind, and they know (and uphold) the law.
I think joking about what happens if they die or not, as in the summary, is quite horrible.
The girl was only 17 and the bloke 20. That's pretty young. It'd be terrible if they died. People are allowed to joke around and have a laugh, surely? You don't always have to be serious. Sometimes everyone is stupid. If they weren't, they wouldn't have much fun. So to laugh at them for being stupid, I think is wrong.
It was bad judgment on them, but I really don't think we should laugh about this.
Grah, I can't believe the guy in the summary said: "If they don't survive they must be Future Darwin Award winners," as if he doesn't care if they live or not.
I nearly bought a (university text) book on Topology, but I cancelled it at the last minute when I found I did not have enough money for it, so I don't have any well formed opinions about it. It seems interesting though - I'll make sure I read some of it sometimes. Presently I've only read things explaining what it is, not how you do it.
I'm not too bothered about Transfinite Set Theory being a bit removed from things. I understand the opinion though. Anything which could change my life away from Computer Science to Mathematics must have some impact! (The theorem which got me was the proof that for any set A, the powerset, P(A), has more elements, even for infinite sets A)
When you have done your major, do you think you will keep with mathematics or do something else? (Like computer science, etc)
Maybe it would be worthwhile to write another article at some point talking about the various other parts of Prime Numbers that you have mentioned (and other things) in a more general way. However, I have exams at the moment and a few others I want to write at some point (One about why Pi comes up in some strange places, and one about the topic which made me love mathematics - Cantor's work. Both will focus on proofs).
I wouldn't say I am that good, but I want to do mathematics at university for sure. What was your favourite topic in mathematics, out of interest?
Yeah, nothing is quite as fun when you have to do it =(
I've made those changes. I couldn't find the "counting numbers" bit. Hmm. The divisors bit was mainly in the "What" section I see - I must have forgotten to change those when I changed the rest.
Anyway, I've credited you as pilkul on my maths page, http://jax.hopto.org/maths/. Is that what you would like to be known as?
I wrote this for people who don't know mathematics, so I do not feel I should go into more complicated topics. The sieve of Erathosthenes would be do-able, but I don't really think there is much of interest to prove in it. Mersenne and Fermat numbers both get a bit complicated when they get interesting, so I will not include those either. They are interesting topics though, I agree.
I don't think I could explain the proof of the Prime Number Theorem, and I do not have enough knowledge of the Riemann Hypothesis to really talk about it. I don't know of anything interesting to prove about Goldbach's Conjecture, and I don't feel there is much to be gained from mentioning the problem has not been solved. This is more an introduction to proof than an introduction to prime numbers.
Yes, I understand my divisibility definition lacks rigor. I had the definition you mention on the 1st page after the introduction originally, but when I showed this to my sister she did not understand it well (although she went on to understand the first three proofs), so I removed it to stop people getting scared. I thought I'd corrected all "divider" to "divisors" - someone else mentioned this (I wasn't very sure, but when my spellcheck [mistakenly] told me 'divisors' wasn't a word, I believed it).
Yeah you are right about Euclid. I will correct that.
I meant "The counting numbers" in the English sense. Since this is not aimed for people who know maths, I shall not use the term "natural numbers". I will correct that mistake also.
Yes, I love Proofs from the Book. It is great! One of the best books I ever bought. Is "Book of Numbers" the one which has a list of interesting numbers? If so, it does not interest me so much.
Thank you for your comments. It is nice to get feedback! I plan to write a few more of these since this got quite a good response (out side of Slashdot, but I was trying my luck really posting it here). I have exams soon though so I won't be doing it yet.
Not really anything to do with this specifically, but this story does have something to do with primes so I will bring it up. I wrote something about prime numbers which might interest a few Slashdot readers.
Even if you believe that, and I don't think you do, the stuff this guy did was very relevant to the real world: He worked on Shock Waves (that is, pressure waves), and partial differential equations, among other things (Including computing stuff. Some of the other stuff he has done is a bit abstract, though).
Partial Differential Equations are used in Physics for basically everything (as you mentioned). They are completely relevant to everything. Differential Equations are basically things which describe rates of change. The "partial " bit just says there are other variables involved, pretty much.
Some mathematics seems irrelevant, but it is actually very relevant to the real world. For example, Tensors.
Mathematics is by far the hardest subject humans have ever looked at, and as such, very few understand much of it. Lay persons not understanding does not make mathematics irrelevant. Few people understand how computers work, but computers certainly are not irrelevant.
I first learn Perl with the aim of creating dynamics webpages. I learnt from the tutorial Picking Up Perl - this is great and taught my most I needed to know with regard to the language - but it didn't teach me how to use it for websites.
I picked up from code lying about how to read and write files, get post/get data, and so forth, and slowly built up into quite a good Perl programmer (I suppose. Not amazing, but quite fluent). This wasn't easy though and was slow. Why? I never got taught, all in one place, how to do that. I think this is what this book is trying to do - but with a much wider range than just CGI programs (although it doesn't seem to neglect it, either).
I tried to write my own tutorial for using Perl in webpages to try and help. I'm not going to link to it here though, because it is quite terrible (I was 14 when I wrote it).
After learning Perl, and being able to use it, there is always using the standard librarys. For this, PerlDoc has been so helpful to me.
I think most Slashdotters will be pleased (or at least would be, if they used IE) with the new Spellcheck feature on the Google Toolbar. That's a pretty cool feature.
The ability to search PDF's seems like it could be useful if it is actually searching inside the PDF. I haven't actually seen another Windows based tool do that, so for me this could make Google Desktop more than the "toy" it is (for me) at the moment (It doesn't do anything a structured file system cannot).
So good improvements. I can't see what is so controversial about the toolbar though.
There is a lot of talk about Firefox, and everyone gets very excited about it, but Mozilla standard is still very good. Personally, under GNU/Linux, I prefer it to Firefox (Under Windows I prefer Firefox, however).
My sister uses GNU/Linux (Mandrake, with KDE) on her computer (No Windows) and prefers it to her old Windows ME OS. Mozilla was part of the reason - it is easy to use, helpful, securer and just makes sense. I'm not saying Firefox isn't any of these, but on Linux, I think it looks a little "Out of place", and Mozilla does not. My sister also preferred Mozilla to both Konqueror and Firefox.
Anyway, just wanted to point out that Mozilla itself exists for more than just feeding Firefox.
"Candela essentially measures the same things as watts."
But watts are not a base unit. A watt is the same "Joules per second", and Joules is also not a base unit, but is defined as a Newton Metre. But a Newton isn't a base unit, it is defined as a Kilogram Metre per second per second. So:
Newton = kg.m.s^-2 Joule = Nm = kg.m.s^-2.m = kg.m^2.s^-2 So a watt is in-fact a kg.m^2.s^-3 , or "Kilogram metre squared per second per second per second" - hence changed the kilogram will change the watt, despite them seeming unrelated!
A mole isn't the same as mass at all. It is more to do with things on an atomic level. It's really used in chemistry - I've personally never used it outside of a chemistry exam (or coursework). It is sort of just a number, but it actually isn't.
Kelvin is a fundamental base unit too. Momentum is defined as "Newton Seconds", and so (remembering the definition of a Newton) kg.m.s^-1. Kelvin's measures temperature, which is a measure of kinetic energy, so I can see where you are coming from. You're just wrong.
Ampere is too. Helpfully, from it you can define other helpful things like volts. A volt, for your interest, is defined as kg m^2 s^-3 A^-1 , or "Kilogram metre squared per second per second per second per amp". And so yet another thing this change would affect.
Just in case people care, here are the 7 base units:
Metre for Length Kilogram (what this article is about) for Mass Second for time Ampere for current Kelvin for temperature Mole for amount Candela for "Luminous intensity"... or something.
All the others are built up and defined from these, so these must be well defined. Change what exactly a Kg is changed more than just mass - it changes everything dependant upon it. Hence, these things must be got right.
The definition of second changes every now and then though, and I think the metre has changed a few times, too. I wrote a bit about the second here, in my AS-Level Physics coursework, if anyone want s a simplifed read.
The code is in C (and so C++ and related languages).
C doesn't have "NULL" as such, but NULL is generally defined to have the value 0. Since no memory location has the value of 0, it makes sense that if you have a variable which stores a memory location (a pointer), you give it the value 0 - so it is pointing to the memory location 0. When dealing with pointers, however, we generally use "NULL", not "0", despite them having the same values.
So, if ( ptr == NULL )
is basically saying "If the number stored in ptr is 0".
PHP treats NULL very differently, which is probably where your confusion comes from.
NULL is defined to be 0. Also, false is defined to be 0 (and true is defined to be 1, normally, but really it is "Not 0"). Hence they are really all the same thing, but just used in different situations - they are actually interchangeable.
It doesn't show off the power, but remember the KDE has a set of "Edutainment" programs of varying quality.
I've personally used some of these for school, and they are quite good. For example, "Logo" is replaced with KTurtle, and there are a few maths programs (KPlot for graphs and Kig for geometry, among others). There are quite a few language tools too. There is an impressive chemistry program which lists the periodic table and information about each element, too.
So KDE includes a great base. More schools should use it (especially when combined with KOffice)
"National targets range from 8% reductions for the European Union and some others to 7% for the US, 6% for Japan, 0% for Russia, and permitted increases of 8% for Australia and 10% for Iceland."
Slashdot Mirror
The summary is wrong, the Fedora website does mention it.
Fedora Core 4 Available!
Fedora Core 4 is now available from Red Hat and at distinguished mirror sites near you, and is also available in the torrent. Fedora Core is available for x86-64, i386, and ppc/ppc64. Please file bugs via Bugzilla, Product Fedora Core, Version 4, so that they are noticed and appropriately classified. Discuss this release on fedora-list. - Source
That wasn't the paper, that was an article about the paper. The article is here.
I think the correlation the author tried to present had two variables that may be related but don't necessarily relate one for one.
Well it doesn't really matter what you think, because this guy actually researched it. His research is more important than your uninformed opinion. Not saying you're wrong, but I'm saying you don't know, so you cannot dismiss it.
They were breaking the law. Data cannot be given to other countries without adequate data protection laws. See Wikipedia.
Now, this is normally overlooked because it would be quite inconvenient to stop transferring information to America, but it is still against the law.
You know, you should never believe what a company says. There is a free trading standards hotline to ring. It is worth talking to them. They have your interests in mind, and they know (and uphold) the law.
Yes it's quite a silly statement, I agree.
MyIE for instances lets IE have tabs. Whats wrong with this for tabs?
There are people there who want to add it, and say they will do a trial when they get the chance. I assume they have very busy jobs though!
And yes it takes considerable time and very considerable resources.
No. Volunteers wouldn't help.
I think joking about what happens if they die or not, as in the summary, is quite horrible.
The girl was only 17 and the bloke 20. That's pretty young. It'd be terrible if they died. People are allowed to joke around and have a laugh, surely? You don't always have to be serious. Sometimes everyone is stupid. If they weren't, they wouldn't have much fun. So to laugh at them for being stupid, I think is wrong.
It was bad judgment on them, but I really don't think we should laugh about this.
Grah, I can't believe the guy in the summary said: "If they don't survive they must be Future Darwin Award winners," as if he doesn't care if they live or not.
People like him make me ashamed to be British.
Thank you. Its been nice talking to you =)
I nearly bought a (university text) book on Topology, but I cancelled it at the last minute when I found I did not have enough money for it, so I don't have any well formed opinions about it. It seems interesting though - I'll make sure I read some of it sometimes. Presently I've only read things explaining what it is, not how you do it.
I'm not too bothered about Transfinite Set Theory being a bit removed from things. I understand the opinion though. Anything which could change my life away from Computer Science to Mathematics must have some impact! (The theorem which got me was the proof that for any set A, the powerset, P(A), has more elements, even for infinite sets A)
When you have done your major, do you think you will keep with mathematics or do something else? (Like computer science, etc)
Maybe it would be worthwhile to write another article at some point talking about the various other parts of Prime Numbers that you have mentioned (and other things) in a more general way. However, I have exams at the moment and a few others I want to write at some point (One about why Pi comes up in some strange places, and one about the topic which made me love mathematics - Cantor's work. Both will focus on proofs).
I wouldn't say I am that good, but I want to do mathematics at university for sure. What was your favourite topic in mathematics, out of interest?
Yeah, nothing is quite as fun when you have to do it =(
I've made those changes. I couldn't find the "counting numbers" bit. Hmm. The divisors bit was mainly in the "What" section I see - I must have forgotten to change those when I changed the rest.
Anyway, I've credited you as pilkul on my maths page, http://jax.hopto.org/maths/. Is that what you would like to be known as?
Thank you again for taking the time to read this.
Hey, thank you for the comments.
I wrote this for people who don't know mathematics, so I do not feel I should go into more complicated topics. The sieve of Erathosthenes would be do-able, but I don't really think there is much of interest to prove in it. Mersenne and Fermat numbers both get a bit complicated when they get interesting, so I will not include those either. They are interesting topics though, I agree.
I don't think I could explain the proof of the Prime Number Theorem, and I do not have enough knowledge of the Riemann Hypothesis to really talk about it. I don't know of anything interesting to prove about Goldbach's Conjecture, and I don't feel there is much to be gained from mentioning the problem has not been solved. This is more an introduction to proof than an introduction to prime numbers.
Yes, I understand my divisibility definition lacks rigor. I had the definition you mention on the 1st page after the introduction originally, but when I showed this to my sister she did not understand it well (although she went on to understand the first three proofs), so I removed it to stop people getting scared. I thought I'd corrected all "divider" to "divisors" - someone else mentioned this (I wasn't very sure, but when my spellcheck [mistakenly] told me 'divisors' wasn't a word, I believed it).
Yeah you are right about Euclid. I will correct that.
I meant "The counting numbers" in the English sense. Since this is not aimed for people who know maths, I shall not use the term "natural numbers". I will correct that mistake also.
Yes, I love Proofs from the Book. It is great! One of the best books I ever bought. Is "Book of Numbers" the one which has a list of interesting numbers? If so, it does not interest me so much.
Thank you for your comments. It is nice to get feedback! I plan to write a few more of these since this got quite a good response (out side of Slashdot, but I was trying my luck really posting it here). I have exams soon though so I won't be doing it yet.
-Jax (Age 16, UK, btw)
Not really anything to do with this specifically, but this story does have something to do with primes so I will bring it up. I wrote something about prime numbers which might interest a few Slashdot readers.
Prime Numbers
Good Post! =D
Even if you believe that, and I don't think you do, the stuff this guy did was very relevant to the real world: He worked on Shock Waves (that is, pressure waves), and partial differential equations, among other things (Including computing stuff. Some of the other stuff he has done is a bit abstract, though).
Partial Differential Equations are used in Physics for basically everything (as you mentioned). They are completely relevant to everything. Differential Equations are basically things which describe rates of change. The "partial " bit just says there are other variables involved, pretty much.
Some mathematics seems irrelevant, but it is actually very relevant to the real world. For example, Tensors.
Mathematics is by far the hardest subject humans have ever looked at, and as such, very few understand much of it. Lay persons not understanding does not make mathematics irrelevant. Few people understand how computers work, but computers certainly are not irrelevant.
I first learn Perl with the aim of creating dynamics webpages. I learnt from the tutorial Picking Up Perl - this is great and taught my most I needed to know with regard to the language - but it didn't teach me how to use it for websites.
I picked up from code lying about how to read and write files, get post/get data, and so forth, and slowly built up into quite a good Perl programmer (I suppose. Not amazing, but quite fluent). This wasn't easy though and was slow. Why? I never got taught, all in one place, how to do that. I think this is what this book is trying to do - but with a much wider range than just CGI programs (although it doesn't seem to neglect it, either).
I tried to write my own tutorial for using Perl in webpages to try and help. I'm not going to link to it here though, because it is quite terrible (I was 14 when I wrote it).
After learning Perl, and being able to use it, there is always using the standard librarys. For this, PerlDoc has been so helpful to me.
You may notice the article has no details.
I did a Google News Search and found this one which is much better.
Also, the guys own website.
Hope this helps.
I think most Slashdotters will be pleased (or at least would be, if they used IE) with the new Spellcheck feature on the Google Toolbar. That's a pretty cool feature.
The ability to search PDF's seems like it could be useful if it is actually searching inside the PDF. I haven't actually seen another Windows based tool do that, so for me this could make Google Desktop more than the "toy" it is (for me) at the moment (It doesn't do anything a structured file system cannot).
So good improvements. I can't see what is so controversial about the toolbar though.
There is a lot of talk about Firefox, and everyone gets very excited about it, but Mozilla standard is still very good. Personally, under GNU/Linux, I prefer it to Firefox (Under Windows I prefer Firefox, however).
My sister uses GNU/Linux (Mandrake, with KDE) on her computer (No Windows) and prefers it to her old Windows ME OS. Mozilla was part of the reason - it is easy to use, helpful, securer and just makes sense. I'm not saying Firefox isn't any of these, but on Linux, I think it looks a little "Out of place", and Mozilla does not. My sister also preferred Mozilla to both Konqueror and Firefox.
Anyway, just wanted to point out that Mozilla itself exists for more than just feeding Firefox.
It is well known there are 7 base units.
"Candela essentially measures the same things as watts."
But watts are not a base unit. A watt is the same "Joules per second", and Joules is also not a base unit, but is defined as a Newton Metre. But a Newton isn't a base unit, it is defined as a Kilogram Metre per second per second. So:
Newton = kg.m.s^-2
Joule = Nm = kg.m.s^-2.m = kg.m^2.s^-2
So a watt is in-fact a kg.m^2.s^-3 , or "Kilogram metre squared per second per second per second" - hence changed the kilogram will change the watt, despite them seeming unrelated!
A mole isn't the same as mass at all. It is more to do with things on an atomic level. It's really used in chemistry - I've personally never used it outside of a chemistry exam (or coursework). It is sort of just a number, but it actually isn't.
Kelvin is a fundamental base unit too. Momentum is defined as "Newton Seconds", and so (remembering the definition of a Newton) kg.m.s^-1. Kelvin's measures temperature, which is a measure of kinetic energy, so I can see where you are coming from. You're just wrong.
Ampere is too. Helpfully, from it you can define other helpful things like volts. A volt, for your interest, is defined as kg m^2 s^-3 A^-1 , or "Kilogram metre squared per second per second per second per amp". And so yet another thing this change would affect.
It's all very interesting.
Just in case people care, here are the 7 base units:
... or something.
Metre for Length
Kilogram (what this article is about) for Mass
Second for time
Ampere for current
Kelvin for temperature
Mole for amount
Candela for "Luminous intensity"
All the others are built up and defined from these, so these must be well defined. Change what exactly a Kg is changed more than just mass - it changes everything dependant upon it. Hence, these things must be got right.
The definition of second changes every now and then though, and I think the metre has changed a few times, too. I wrote a bit about the second here, in my AS-Level Physics coursework, if anyone want s a simplifed read.
(Wiki)
I don't see how this topics is maths, by the way.
The code is in C (and so C++ and related languages).
C doesn't have "NULL" as such, but NULL is generally defined to have the value 0. Since no memory location has the value of 0, it makes sense that if you have a variable which stores a memory location (a pointer), you give it the value 0 - so it is pointing to the memory location 0. When dealing with pointers, however, we generally use "NULL", not "0", despite them having the same values.
So,
if ( ptr == NULL )
is basically saying "If the number stored in ptr is 0".
PHP treats NULL very differently, which is probably where your confusion comes from.
NULL is defined to be 0. Also, false is defined to be 0 (and true is defined to be 1, normally, but really it is "Not 0"). Hence they are really all the same thing, but just used in different situations - they are actually interchangeable.
Hope that helps.
It doesn't show off the power, but remember the KDE has a set of "Edutainment" programs of varying quality.
I've personally used some of these for school, and they are quite good. For example, "Logo" is replaced with KTurtle, and there are a few maths programs (KPlot for graphs and Kig for geometry, among others). There are quite a few language tools too. There is an impressive chemistry program which lists the periodic table and information about each element, too.
So KDE includes a great base. More schools should use it (especially when combined with KOffice)
I agree, they have a perfect right to do this. It is interesting news, however.
A valid and working code is returned if the version is set to xp.
So it doesn't even really stop you.
The best post of the topic. I wish I had mod points.
Well, I'm adding you to my friends list in any case.
Parent required modding up!
Wikipedia Link of interest
Interesting to note this:
"National targets range from 8% reductions for the European Union and some others to 7% for the US, 6% for Japan, 0% for Russia, and permitted increases of 8% for Australia and 10% for Iceland."