Just to put my experience out there... I fish commercially in Alaska during the summer. Globalstar has been such a frustration we changed the logo on our phone to read GlobalSHIT. A 3 minute conversation with loved ones you haven't seen for over a month can be shittier than not talking to them at all.
I take that back, 3 minutes with a conversation cut short is infinitely better than not talking at all, but it's probably one of the most frustrating things I've had to deal with in my life.
I fish commercially in Alaska during the summer. If you think being away from your email is heaven, then you haven't experienced the hell that is the high seas. You might have seen Deadliest Catch, but nothing can really explain the weeks of 1 or 2 hours of sleep a night (some days you won't even get that), the constant balancing act of having your sea vessel tossing and turning in 20 foot surf (you can't rest. Standing, sitting, eating, getting knocked to your feet, during every activity 24/7 your body's muscles are working HARD to keep balance.) Getting to shower once a week if you're lucky. Life at sea is hard.
After a couple of months of this, every letter, every morsel of home is heaven. Last summer I was able to reach a WiFi point one single day much to my surprise. I managed to connect to AIM and get about a dozen messaged back and forth from my girlfriend before I got disconnected. THAT, my friend, is what heaven is on the high seas.
Okay, I'm not a religious person. I don't go to church. I'm an atheist. But I'd say that jewish hat, the arabic head dresses, and religion in general, has a lot to do with culture. In modern times, science can explain most things. Government and church are seperate. But these are fairly new-fangled inventions. For most of mankind's history this was not the case. Science, religion, government, food health codes, holidays, even things like the calendar, were all rolled into one. And for a really long time this combined culture/religion/government did a pretty damn good job of keeping people alive. We have alternatives now, but there is still lots and lots value in thousands or even millions of years of culture.
Wearing a joker hat for kicks is completely different. Don't toss out the religious system that's kept mankind going without just a little thought and respect.
I just wanted to write about a counter-point. Ragnarok has lots of private servers, and it still has quite the player base. It also allows server operators to tweak the server settings so that players get to pick server settings that most suit their taste. Note: I play WoW, used to play Ragnarok, and have friends who still play it.
The clear answer to your dilemma is that the task should have fallen on someone else. Who is going to be using these things? If it's you, maybe you are best to stick with legacy HP scopes until you figure out what it is that you want.
Have you never had a situation where something is being bought, and you aren't the one who is paying? I know, situations like that occur rarely. What if my company is paying for my cell phone, and is willing to pay for all the bells and whistles. I only have a phone that can make calls because I'm cheap. Should I pass on getting a phone that I can email from and, for example, ssh into company servers from?
Now, Oscilloscopes are fucking awesome, but I don't have money for one. If I was getting one provided for me and the bill is being picked up by someone else, do you suggest I get a legacy HP scope or maybe ask more knowledgeable people which oscilloscopes to buy?
I'm a past stoner. I still toke up every once in a while.
When people think of twitch gaming, they usually think of frantic gaming. Top players know that this isn't the case. A noob CounterStrike player shoots wildly. If cross hairs aren't over an enemy, why shoot? The noob ends up just missing and missing because whenever his cross hairs happen to cross an enemy, his gun is in between shots.
Top players know that it is better to wait a split second for the enemy to float across the cross hairs before pulling the trigger. For truly great gaming performance, the player must be in a "zen" like state, not a frantic twitch state.
Toking up can help a player reach this zen state, become immersed in the game, and oblivious to outside distractions. Of course non-potheads would probably be "ZOMG So high!" but for someone who smokes daily getting high is a calming state.
The problem with Crysis is that it looks like shit running at medium or lower graphic settings. I mean, it looks uglier than Half-Life 2 does on the same computer. People who play on medium or lower wouldn't understand what the fuss around Crysis was about. For the record, it's very pretty on high settings, but not the best FPS out there. Half-Life 2 was still much better.
I definitely agree with you, when tutoring trig students the first thing I do is have them reproduce the unit circle and the trig values for multiples of 30 and 45 degrees. Trig exams force students to learn this by asking things like, what is the sine of 60 degrees? sqrt(3)/2 is the correct answer, but generally not one that most calculators can spit out.
However, eventually when most calculators are able to spit out an answer like sqrt(3)/2, students may no longer need to know their 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles. That is fine, we can instead focus on how to use trig to find lengths of a triangles sides and move to more advanced trig topics.
Calculators on tests have made tests easier, but this is a good thing. Can you imagine having to figure out sines and cosines by hand anymore? What calculators do is make it easier to get to more advanced topics. Knowing how to add 1234+2345 in my head is just no longer a necessary skill. I rather students practice the properties of math, and write things out on paper anyway. (#1 problem with algebra and calculus students, they try to do too much math in their head) Calculators are not going away any time soon, and anything that encourages the entire population to do more math is a good thing in my book.
Secondly, while historians may not need to know trig, it is imperative that as a nation we raise our mathematical abilities. Great math and science students generally did not learn everything at school. Having a parent that can help out with some algebra homework (or even better understands the value of math) will make it much MUCH more likely that the child will grow up with an appreciation of mathematics. If we as a human race want to push the maths and sciences as far as we can, then we much raise the math and science ability of the entire population.
Just so everyone knows where my loyalties lie, I am a mathematics major, I am a math tutor, and hopefully eventually you'll see me teaching mathematics at a University near you!
"What you know about that? I know all about that."
on
I Will Derive
·
· Score: 1
The featured vid isn't that great. I agree it shouldn't have gotten it's own front page story. The vid I linked isn't that great, but I got more laughs out of it than "I will derive"
For the record, I have gone out and protested on the streets. I have called and faxed my representatives to the government. I talk to anyone who will listen about politics and our over-reaction to 9/11. I was against the war in Iraq from the very beginning. I've even seriously considered destroying the traffic cameras the government has put up at many intersections here in California since 9/11. (I seriously believe that if caught I would be branded a terrorist for such an action, and who knows what'll happen to my life at that point?)
I mean, I don't know what other form of non-violent protest I can take! I would even consider violent protests, but it would be a waste of my life without a critical mass of other citizens to join. A lot of us on Slashdot do more that just rant on Slashdot, what else would you have us do???
My own anecdote working for Microsoft. It's become one huge game of CYA. I mean, that's all it is anymore. Management makes a bad decision and gives lower level management shitty jobs that set the lower level up for failure. Instead of telling higher level management that their decision sucks, lower level spends much of the day trying to make sure their head's not on the chopping block. Lower level might even have a meeting about how to CYA when in a meeting with upper level management. Upper level management doesn't find out that things are falling apart until it's too late, then they spend their times trying to figure out how to CYA when reporting to even higher level management. Hell, they might even have a meeting about it. Compound this by the many, many levels of management (I had no idea how many levels of bosses it was until I got to Balmer) and you have a dysfunctional company that's too big for it's own good because everyone is worried that they're the cog in the system that could be the first to get replaced.
If we give the benefit of the doubt to ZapMediaPod (and I'm not saying we should) then Apple's behavior you described is exactly like Microsoft's behavior. Apple used their MP3 player monopoly to squeeze a another company out of the online music business.
The story to me here is, if it takes 9 years to get a patent approved, what does that say about our nation's entire patent system? (Answer: It's fucked up!)
I had one of those 32MB flash Rios the day it came out. Two things:
The thing was light as hell. No motor, no tape, most of the weight was from the AA batteries. Because it was so light, it seemed flimsy compared to CD players or Walkmans.
When I first carried the thing around, people thought it was a pager. When I told them it played music, they thought it was an AM/FM radio. We aught to thank Apple for spending the time (and money) educating everyone about MP3s!!!
I've heard these sweeping statements before, can anyone point out a reasonably accessible proof that overcomes basic statistical counterarguments? Basic common sense here - I can infer some interesting characteristics about gravity by splashing paint on my wall and studying the results from across the room, but I don't really have enough data to overcome a host of other contributing factors...
The article probably simplified to an extreme. (Did the article even show any calculations?)
I haven't taken enough physics classes to answer, but one thing I have learned over and over again is that "basic common sense" is many times flat out wrong.
on 03-05-08 01:30 PM (#22655468)
So, lets see... If i smoke a joint in some states i go to jail. If i bilk millions of people out of tens of millions of dollars i get.... probation, and a fine.
This is so bs, asswipe(s) should be thrown in jail. Sounds like someone's back got scratched.
I strongly disagree. The solution is to not send stoners to jail. Nonviolent criminals should not be sent to prison. The US has more people behind bars than any other country in the world, including China. We also lead the world in prisoners per capita; over 1% of our population is behind bars.
Might I remind you, that Slashdot is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." As a mathematician, I definitely fall into the "Nerds" category. While this might not be "Stuff that Matters," a proof of something like the Reimann Hypothesis is way above the heads of an everyday person. However, I would be outraged if Slashdot somehow failed to run the story on the front page.
I just saw an episode of Modern Marvels about the highway system. They showed a cool clip of some MIT students who made a traffic simulation. Projected on the wall was line outlines of a highway system and thousands of rectangles representing cars moving along. From the looks of it, it looks like a computer was simulating how those thousand cars would react to the cars around it, with some randomness thrown in of course. The thing looked like it could've been SimRoadEngineer on steroids.
With two lanes in each direction, they showed in the simulation how a single car going 30 MPH in the "slow" lane could cause a miles long traffic jam involving thousands of cars.
As an side thought, following a car with just enough room to break *is* tailgating. Staying back a couple of seconds definitely smooths the flow of traffic. Maybe just as importantly, acting predictably greatly reduces traffic accidents. I have a few friends with more sporty cars that like to tail people. Yeah, they're paying attention, and they can slow down quick, but it still causes traffic.
Dispite the many claims, I really doubt that photoshop is seriously hindering Linux adoption. I mean, really, what percentage of users out there are photographic professionals?
Okay look. So you don't like PhotoShop. That's fine. There is really no application out there that is 100% responsible for preventing everyone from switching to Linux. There are probably hundreds of business-critical commercial and in-house applications that a company must have. Each application might be responsible for a fraction of a % of that resistance to Linux. (I'm guessing PhotoShop may even be > 1%)
These are applications that a company must have before even considering a switch. There is no single application. If you want to see Linux obtain a greater marketshare, then one of the ways to do that is to get these applications to run on Linux, one at a time.
Finally, I fit happily in to the categories above. I've never used photoshop, GIMP does pretty much what I need in an easy, simple manner. I have never needed CMYK seperation. And FINALLY, I have a proper window manager which supports sloppy focus and focus-does-not-raise, and you know what? GIMP's interface actually works really, really, really well. Oh, and by the way, see point 2.
There are some of us who ARE professionals. (See point #2) This is a geek site, we are free to discuss one of the most popular software programs in our field. We use the damn program everyday. We would be the FIRST to know if there was a better program out there.
I don't normally feed the trolls, but this one got a +5 Insightful???
Slashdot Mirror
Just to put my experience out there... I fish commercially in Alaska during the summer. Globalstar has been such a frustration we changed the logo on our phone to read GlobalSHIT. A 3 minute conversation with loved ones you haven't seen for over a month can be shittier than not talking to them at all.
I take that back, 3 minutes with a conversation cut short is infinitely better than not talking at all, but it's probably one of the most frustrating things I've had to deal with in my life.
I fish commercially in Alaska during the summer. If you think being away from your email is heaven, then you haven't experienced the hell that is the high seas. You might have seen Deadliest Catch, but nothing can really explain the weeks of 1 or 2 hours of sleep a night (some days you won't even get that), the constant balancing act of having your sea vessel tossing and turning in 20 foot surf (you can't rest. Standing, sitting, eating, getting knocked to your feet, during every activity 24/7 your body's muscles are working HARD to keep balance.) Getting to shower once a week if you're lucky. Life at sea is hard. After a couple of months of this, every letter, every morsel of home is heaven. Last summer I was able to reach a WiFi point one single day much to my surprise. I managed to connect to AIM and get about a dozen messaged back and forth from my girlfriend before I got disconnected. THAT, my friend, is what heaven is on the high seas.
Okay, I'm not a religious person. I don't go to church. I'm an atheist. But I'd say that jewish hat, the arabic head dresses, and religion in general, has a lot to do with culture. In modern times, science can explain most things. Government and church are seperate. But these are fairly new-fangled inventions. For most of mankind's history this was not the case. Science, religion, government, food health codes, holidays, even things like the calendar, were all rolled into one. And for a really long time this combined culture/religion/government did a pretty damn good job of keeping people alive. We have alternatives now, but there is still lots and lots value in thousands or even millions of years of culture.
Wearing a joker hat for kicks is completely different. Don't toss out the religious system that's kept mankind going without just a little thought and respect.
Of course, this is the very last post to meet my comment threshhold. -.-
I just wanted to write about a counter-point. Ragnarok has lots of private servers, and it still has quite the player base. It also allows server operators to tweak the server settings so that players get to pick server settings that most suit their taste. Note: I play WoW, used to play Ragnarok, and have friends who still play it.
Have you never had a situation where something is being bought, and you aren't the one who is paying? I know, situations like that occur rarely. What if my company is paying for my cell phone, and is willing to pay for all the bells and whistles. I only have a phone that can make calls because I'm cheap. Should I pass on getting a phone that I can email from and, for example, ssh into company servers from?
Now, Oscilloscopes are fucking awesome, but I don't have money for one. If I was getting one provided for me and the bill is being picked up by someone else, do you suggest I get a legacy HP scope or maybe ask more knowledgeable people which oscilloscopes to buy?
I'm sure Blizz has another MMO in the works. Can you give any details? Is there any hope for World of Starcraft? (Plsplsplspls!!!!)
As an experienced pothead, the parent comment should be marked (Score:5, Informative) not (Score:5, Funny)!
I'm a past stoner. I still toke up every once in a while.
When people think of twitch gaming, they usually think of frantic gaming. Top players know that this isn't the case. A noob CounterStrike player shoots wildly. If cross hairs aren't over an enemy, why shoot? The noob ends up just missing and missing because whenever his cross hairs happen to cross an enemy, his gun is in between shots.
Top players know that it is better to wait a split second for the enemy to float across the cross hairs before pulling the trigger. For truly great gaming performance, the player must be in a "zen" like state, not a frantic twitch state.
Toking up can help a player reach this zen state, become immersed in the game, and oblivious to outside distractions. Of course non-potheads would probably be "ZOMG So high!" but for someone who smokes daily getting high is a calming state.
The problem with Crysis is that it looks like shit running at medium or lower graphic settings. I mean, it looks uglier than Half-Life 2 does on the same computer. People who play on medium or lower wouldn't understand what the fuss around Crysis was about. For the record, it's very pretty on high settings, but not the best FPS out there. Half-Life 2 was still much better.
I definitely agree with you, when tutoring trig students the first thing I do is have them reproduce the unit circle and the trig values for multiples of 30 and 45 degrees. Trig exams force students to learn this by asking things like, what is the sine of 60 degrees? sqrt(3)/2 is the correct answer, but generally not one that most calculators can spit out.
However, eventually when most calculators are able to spit out an answer like sqrt(3)/2, students may no longer need to know their 30-60-90 and 45-45-90 triangles. That is fine, we can instead focus on how to use trig to find lengths of a triangles sides and move to more advanced trig topics.
Calculators on tests have made tests easier, but this is a good thing. Can you imagine having to figure out sines and cosines by hand anymore? What calculators do is make it easier to get to more advanced topics. Knowing how to add 1234+2345 in my head is just no longer a necessary skill. I rather students practice the properties of math, and write things out on paper anyway. (#1 problem with algebra and calculus students, they try to do too much math in their head) Calculators are not going away any time soon, and anything that encourages the entire population to do more math is a good thing in my book.
Secondly, while historians may not need to know trig, it is imperative that as a nation we raise our mathematical abilities. Great math and science students generally did not learn everything at school. Having a parent that can help out with some algebra homework (or even better understands the value of math) will make it much MUCH more likely that the child will grow up with an appreciation of mathematics. If we as a human race want to push the maths and sciences as far as we can, then we much raise the math and science ability of the entire population.
Just so everyone knows where my loyalties lie, I am a mathematics major, I am a math tutor, and hopefully eventually you'll see me teaching mathematics at a University near you!
For those of you that listen to hiphop & rap: What you know about math?
The featured vid isn't that great. I agree it shouldn't have gotten it's own front page story. The vid I linked isn't that great, but I got more laughs out of it than "I will derive"
You, my friend, are not poor. And the poor folk are the ones that need education the most.
For the record, I have gone out and protested on the streets. I have called and faxed my representatives to the government. I talk to anyone who will listen about politics and our over-reaction to 9/11. I was against the war in Iraq from the very beginning. I've even seriously considered destroying the traffic cameras the government has put up at many intersections here in California since 9/11. (I seriously believe that if caught I would be branded a terrorist for such an action, and who knows what'll happen to my life at that point?)
I mean, I don't know what other form of non-violent protest I can take! I would even consider violent protests, but it would be a waste of my life without a critical mass of other citizens to join. A lot of us on Slashdot do more that just rant on Slashdot, what else would you have us do???
unfortunately, many college students don't even realize there was ever any other way.
My own anecdote working for Microsoft. It's become one huge game of CYA. I mean, that's all it is anymore. Management makes a bad decision and gives lower level management shitty jobs that set the lower level up for failure. Instead of telling higher level management that their decision sucks, lower level spends much of the day trying to make sure their head's not on the chopping block. Lower level might even have a meeting about how to CYA when in a meeting with upper level management. Upper level management doesn't find out that things are falling apart until it's too late, then they spend their times trying to figure out how to CYA when reporting to even higher level management. Hell, they might even have a meeting about it. Compound this by the many, many levels of management (I had no idea how many levels of bosses it was until I got to Balmer) and you have a dysfunctional company that's too big for it's own good because everyone is worried that they're the cog in the system that could be the first to get replaced.
If we give the benefit of the doubt to ZapMediaPod (and I'm not saying we should) then Apple's behavior you described is exactly like Microsoft's behavior. Apple used their MP3 player monopoly to squeeze a another company out of the online music business.
The story to me here is, if it takes 9 years to get a patent approved, what does that say about our nation's entire patent system? (Answer: It's fucked up!)
The article probably simplified to an extreme. (Did the article even show any calculations?)
I haven't taken enough physics classes to answer, but one thing I have learned over and over again is that "basic common sense" is many times flat out wrong.
I strongly disagree. The solution is to not send stoners to jail. Nonviolent criminals should not be sent to prison. The US has more people behind bars than any other country in the world, including China. We also lead the world in prisoners per capita; over 1% of our population is behind bars.
Might I remind you, that Slashdot is "News for Nerds. Stuff that Matters." As a mathematician, I definitely fall into the "Nerds" category. While this might not be "Stuff that Matters," a proof of something like the Reimann Hypothesis is way above the heads of an everyday person. However, I would be outraged if Slashdot somehow failed to run the story on the front page.
I just saw an episode of Modern Marvels about the highway system. They showed a cool clip of some MIT students who made a traffic simulation. Projected on the wall was line outlines of a highway system and thousands of rectangles representing cars moving along. From the looks of it, it looks like a computer was simulating how those thousand cars would react to the cars around it, with some randomness thrown in of course. The thing looked like it could've been SimRoadEngineer on steroids.
With two lanes in each direction, they showed in the simulation how a single car going 30 MPH in the "slow" lane could cause a miles long traffic jam involving thousands of cars.
As an side thought, following a car with just enough room to break *is* tailgating. Staying back a couple of seconds definitely smooths the flow of traffic. Maybe just as importantly, acting predictably greatly reduces traffic accidents. I have a few friends with more sporty cars that like to tail people. Yeah, they're paying attention, and they can slow down quick, but it still causes traffic.
Okay look. So you don't like PhotoShop. That's fine. There is really no application out there that is 100% responsible for preventing everyone from switching to Linux. There are probably hundreds of business-critical commercial and in-house applications that a company must have. Each application might be responsible for a fraction of a % of that resistance to Linux. (I'm guessing PhotoShop may even be > 1%)
These are applications that a company must have before even considering a switch. There is no single application. If you want to see Linux obtain a greater marketshare, then one of the ways to do that is to get these applications to run on Linux, one at a time.
There are some of us who ARE professionals. (See point #2) This is a geek site, we are free to discuss one of the most popular software programs in our field. We use the damn program everyday. We would be the FIRST to know if there was a better program out there.
I don't normally feed the trolls, but this one got a +5 Insightful???
Don't get me wrong. Not that I don't agree with you...
Sp no evidence is evidence? Wha???