Again, I'm not going to speak for anyone but myself and my personal experience... [end disclaimer]
but Jobs himself pronounced it Jobs. NeXT employees pronounced it Jobs. (My uncle was pretty high up if I'm not mistaken, and his employees pronounced it Jobs as well.) I don't think that you would be apt to mispronounce the boss' name:)
/* I've heard it both ways. Anyone know for sure how one pronouces "Jobs"? */
My uncle used to work for NeXT computer, and as a result I'd get a lot of discounted NeXT cubes and stations and parts.
One cube that I bought had a.snd clip of Jobs talking (overlaid on Handel's "Messiah" -- slightly funny).
He pronounced it "Jobs" -- that is to say as most North Americans would pronounce the word as seeing it.
If I'm not mistaken the NeXTmail voice attachment program, LipService, had a little intro ditty by Jobs. Again, pronounced "Jobs" as in the sentence "I got fired from three jobs":)
At the risk of touching an inflammatory topic, the answer is NO because the key here is a voluntary belief mechanism. You choose to believe something because the argument given turns the "credible" flag on. Certain "Software" -- ie, different styles of logical/illogical methodology -- will change the sensitivity of that flag.
By "brain explosion" i mean drooling, twitching, spastic lack of cohesion, followed by overheating and some leakage.
Which can be mistaken for religion, except it's involuntary;)
Basically the gist of your post was "the human brain has more concurrency than control, but there has to be control somewhere."
the point being: we *know* there's a lot of concurrency in this massively parallel computer called the brain, but where's the control? A computer of *any* kind without control is runaway, and that makes no sense considering we have survived without too many brain explosions over the years.
Rudy Rucker once calculated that even IF the neuron was a purely digital phenomenon (on/off) then we'd have 2^(3 billion) states of mind which comes out to somewhere around a gigaplex states of mind. Of course, some of these are physiological and undesirable, e.g, racing heart and no breathing, and there are bound to be more because the brain works on interference patterns as well.
Memory uses a combination of compression and hashing. We remember generalities (I saw a tree there), and hash it into our description of the scene with a pointer to a description of what a tree is. When we retreive the memory (I saw a tree there), we also uncompress the description of the details (Trees are green and brown) and uncompress any subdescription (Pine trees are pine green, and triangular), leading (after many cycles) to the conclusion memory (I saw a pine green and brown, triangular, tree there).
I'm not saying the *brain* is a NAND gate. The neurons are electrochemical NAND gates inasmuch as they are all alike -- and yet they perform different purposes (at different times in different combinations) -- all neurons are the same composition (different shapes, sometimes, and glial cells don't count), so how can the same gate be a different gate (fundamentally, in structure?) Conway proved that any logic gate can be emulated by a combination of NAND gates (don't ask me how; my math is nowhere near the level of Conway) and hitherto, most neural net programming has been using NAND gates to improve consistencey and reliability. If one NAND gate goes down (and let's face it, age, beer, and head trauma takes down much more than one) -- another NAND gate can fulfill its role, whereas if we were using OR, XOR, AND, NOT gates then we'd have spares only from that pool of specific gates.
This having been said, this is how the *neurons* work, and because different *combinations* of NAND gates can yield other gates, then it's quite possible that you might have a lot of OR gates (or whatever), whereas I might have a lot of AND gates, and somehow that might make you think visually and myself aurally...
As for using 100% of our resources; that's really funny. In parallel tasking, the name of the game is redundancy, and the human brain is the perfect example of asymettric processing. Maxing out a beowulf cluster (bearing in mind this is *symmetric* mind you) is great for throughput but terrible for reliability -- what happens when one processor is gone? you start thrashing to disk like mad. This problem is slightly eased in an asymmetric processing cluster like the Brain -- some nodes are only there for backup purposes, or to create the ambient internal interference neccesary for NAND gates to become another type of gate.
That sounds reasonable. I drew a connection between first-level memory storage and simultaneous tasking (just like one could draw a connection between load averages using a processor with more cache). Muscle memory would tend to be a "hard-wired" register.
This having been said, is there any study showing how many tasks one can simultaneously perform? I posit that you can perform all you like, but what will happen if you forget about them? (let's not get into long-term storage like writing stuff down) -- I'd say that as mental efficiency approaches, the limiting factor will still be 7 + or - 2.
AFAIK, and according to a fairly recent Discover Magazine article, the human brain DOES have math coprocessors -- multiple ones in fact. (Again, according to the article...) the human brain has a set of cells which function roughly as a number line, with a span of integer values from -5 to 5. This is inborn. An area of the brain handles basic concepts as "more" and "less." Also inborn. An area of the brain handles sophisticated mathematical tasks which are worked through (by which I mean subtraction, addition, etc -- this is sophisticated using the NAND gates which are neurons). Another area handles mathematical concepts which are memorized (e.g., multiplication tables). An example operation of multiplying 144 by 144 would call upon the memorized-portion coprocessor to realize that 144 is 12*12, and then the work-it-out-portion processor would calculate 12^4.
Then there's the whole part of the brain that thinks in geometric terms. Does it do a graphical representation of algebraic equations? I'm not qualfiied to answer. For more, read Rudy Rucker, "Mind Tools" and judge for yourself. The fact that I passed applied linear algebra by representing concepts such as orthogonal projections in a geometric view convinces at least me that geometric thinking is math coprocessing at its most fine-grained.
Damage to one portion of the brain, but not others, can lead to quirks in solving mathematical problems... very odd ones.
This was already estimated by biological psychologists as between 5 and 9, with the average falling at (you guessed it) seven. Hence the famous psychological paper entitled "The Magic Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two."
Of course this relates to conscious tasks. Presumably the brain is conducting hundreds of tasks relatin to hormonal and electrochemical feedback from the endocrine and nervous systems respectively. Think of it like this:
Kernel-land human brain can take a load average of hundreds. User-land human brain can handle a load average of 5-9 without page faulting.
Re:When was Gnome's first stable release?
on
Pair of KDE Stories
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· Score: 1
I'm actually a big fan of (the option to) double click. I understand it's not for everyone, but it requires infinitesimal effort, prohibits accidental openings of files, and easily differentiates between DnD and open. What i'd also like to see in KDE is perhaps some sort of NetInfo-type database. NetInfo is, IMO, a Windows registry done Right (and first), I loved it since NeXT and I love it still. Combined with the existing application framework for handling MIME-types in KDE, we can get a decent interface for registering file types to be opened (as opposed to WordPerfect asking to tamper with magic numers, etc). It's something which may turn me to Mac OS X (both Mac and NeXT were very good about automatically associating files) for desktop purposes.
You can actually dynamically load a new TCP/IP stack if you want. Most applications ask you to use Microsoft TCP/IP stack, and ask you to reboot after making changes because the Win32 API is so brain-dead that no one is sure what changes do what to what. So long as you're fairly confident about the reliability and ability to stay within its memory space, you can plug and chug a new stack (i'd reccomend you do it in kernel land, instead of userland, the hooks ARE there, or use psxss)
This partnership seems nice on the exterior, but what about Motorola's Coldfire line of 68xxx processors for embedded work? That's a big money maker, especially in *Motorola* cellular phones and other embedded processors. I can see the motivation perhaps in the realm of interoperability with Bigger Computers (tm) but AFAIK the Coldfire runs on a lot less power than the PowerPC for comparable performance (remember, these are embedded apps)...
I actually work for a group at my school which does something similar to that. Only partially dynamic pages with a perl/mod_perl backend to it. Our loads are phenomenally low (of course we're not getting Slashdot level load at all!) I invite Rob et al to take a look, i suggested using the Slash code but we did this one pretty much in a homegrown fashion.
http://www.sin.wm.edu click the "guest" button, no login or password
If I'm not mistaken, Bayesian statistical theory is behind robust regression techniques. Unfortunately, at least in my 300 level Econometrics class, it's "go linear or die" presumably because with a 3OLS algorithm and/or robust regression techniques, an otherwise consistent and unbiased estimator can be ruined by the distributive effects of measurement error.
Can Bayesian methods (my familiarity with Bayesian *anything* stops at set theory) be used for OLS linear regressions?
1. Any group with money will skew test results of their product in their favor through the most subtle of coercion ("Oh, you want to do a Microsoft test, here's a brand new Pentium III... Oh I'm sorry, I only have one of *those* for Windows, but you can use this Pentium I for Linux").
2. Any group with enough rabid fervor (*cough*stallman*cough*) will skew test results of their product through dogged trial and error ("GNU/Linux/TCP/IP/Kitchen Sink Didn't do well in this test! Must be a plot from those evil closed source Kapitalists! Let's recompile the kernel -O3, and test it again!")
3. Any group with enough of a desire can skew test results of their product by twisting statistics. Remember almost all statistics are filtered through Confidence Intervals, for the purpose of hypothesis testing. It could be that one group is using a 90% confidence interval, while another is using a 99% confidence interval. The problem of this is the eternal problem of the statistician: balancing Type I and Type II errors; one is about including more than you should, and one is about excluding what should rightfully be there. Each error comes at the expense of the other. Be careful when you read those statistics!
4. Linux has problems. So does any O/S. Personally I don't get too worked up about it (I use FreeBSD myself:P ). There's a difference betwen FUD and criticism. Some sites which give FUD are misbranded as criticism by/. Most sites which give criticism are misbranded as FUD by/. At the kernel of all FUD is a weak point of the enemy product. It may not be a fatal flaw, but it is a *weak point*, so their FUD should be treated as advice -- and one their FUD-laden comments are countered by software improvements, they'll have nothing to FUD about.
Example: "Linux is hard to install." Pure FUD. Caldera lets you play *Tetris* while it's installing, for (insert deity here)'s sake! But it is a weak point, because after, say, a Windows install, a series of "Wizards" pop up to configure basic services to some semblance of a default. Perhaps after a Linux install, if there is an Apache package, an httpd Wizard pops up (in ncurses -- how cute) and asks you if you want this or that.
The point is, *any* O/S can get better. And even at FUD -- (F)ear, (U)ncertainty, and (D)oubt -- addresses *fears* among the public. You can only sow the seeds of fear if there is a receptive heart. Joe WinUser might percieve a Linux configuration to be harder because linuxconf doesn't have the same help menus (for instance). While you or I may personally disagree, Joe WinUser is the public, and if the O/S is to be friendly to the public, the programmers have to address their fears.
and on page 4, Lucas mentions that the "There are always two, a master and an apprentice" applies to the *bad* jedi, because if there were more they'd kill each other. Fascinating.
He says that Linux is only good for "Small apps and spreadsheets.
Coincidentally, this is what Linux is worst at -- not that the apps are bad but that is where it is weakest, and does not pay homage to open source server successes, like Apache.
The industry pundits look at Linux apps and are disappointed.
They leave Linux without checking the rest or waiting for desk apps to mature.
He says that Linux is only good for "Small apps and spreadsheets.
Coincidentally, this is what Linux is worst at -- not that the apps are bad but that is where it is weakest, and does not pay homage to open source server successes, like Apache.
The industry pundits look at Linux apps and are disappointed.
They leave Linux without checking the rest or waiting for desk apps to mature.
He says that Linux is only good for "Small apps and spreadsheets.
Coincidentally, this is what Linux is worst at -- not that the apps are bad but that is where it is weakest, and does not pay homage to open source server successes, like Apache.
The industry pundits look at Linux apps and are disappointed.
They leave Linux without checking the rest or waiting for desk apps to mature.
The reason why Linux is preferred on x86 and PowerPC is because it is a vastly better O/S in terms of quality than Windows and Mac OS 8.x. However, when compared with a robust and extant UNIX like Mac OS X (aka NeXTStep aka OPENSTEP aka Rhapsody), the native functionality is going to be better.
According to an ad from this site, you can buy an UltraSparc workstation for $2,495. That's fairly affordable if you aren't a student and are looking for a high-powered computer. But almost nobody is going to buy a brand spanking new UltraSparc II to put Linux on it, when Solaris does the job much better. (watch me get a flood of contradictions)
I have the feeling the same is going to happen with Mac OS X and the G4.
Sometimes we have to be willing to pay for quality products. Roads are free, and we get traffic jams. Downloading the Linux kernel is free, and bandwidth drops when a new kernel is released.
We all seem to forget that we have the source code already available to us... albeit in x86 assembly. That's right, use the Microsoft executable DEBUG.EXE on any binary with the (U)nassemble command, you get a dump of all of the neato-bandito asm instructions which make the system work.
Sure, it's huge, but so is 35 million lines of C++. And from what I hear, most of those 35 million lines become nop instructions anyway =).
Moreover, Microsoft can't sue you -- assembly instructions are self-evident in the machine code, and any parser to translate asm-to-C (not that any work worth a damn) would make drastically different code in appearance, although similar in functionality.
Personally, I'd like to run the Windows instructions through gnu as to see what would happen -- but oh wait, I've got better things to do with my time:)
For the record, this is probably going to be the first post I ever make that drops below 1.
Hopefully it shouldn't be any new information for me to say that it's a fine line between including all points of view and succumbing to the line noise that mass voices can create.
However, I subscribe to the belief that the truth doesn't neccessarily have to be phrased in eloquent, multisyllabic aphorisms. The truth is ugly, people, and often the messengers of the truth are despised for their frank talk. We don't want to hear some things. We don't want to hear that some people are stronger, better, faster, smarter than others -- unless, of course, it applies to you :) .
What I fear this moderation alignment will do is remove many people like MEEPT!! -- who, despite his or her incoherency at times, told the truth in ways that irritated people because it was the truth about them.
It's a sad day when I find myself defending MEEPT!!, but there's something to be said about an inherent anti-bluntness bias in slashdot...
Let's take an example. Recently I read a post w/respect to Linux in a Dilbert article. Some killjoy posted his or her frustration about how Dilbert was mocking "The cause" and how Scott Adams was "like a weapons dealer", appeasing both the management and (in his/her words) "us peons".
A couple posts were put in response to it, more or less politely telling the poster to lighten up, that he had a lot of bitterness locked up, etc. All of them were moderated down, because the posters had the audacity to draw a correlation between the tone of a post and probable experiences in the personal or work life of this poster. The truth was ugly, but it's something we can all recognize in a grade school sandbox: the bitter poster had a stunted sense of fun and felt trampled on, and was ruining someone else's fun. I don't particularly believe that everyone's posts have equal merit -- neither does Rob, if we have moderation to begin with --, but I find it grimly amusing that it's easier to bitch about the decline of Slashdot as if it were the fall of the Roman Empire, than it is to take the truth that someone's social skills cast a bias on their statements and add a pompous air to Slashdot.
On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog, unless you talk a lot about bones.
There gradually is a PC -- Politically Correct, not Personal Computer or Program Counter -- mobocracy when it comes to approval of posts and the like. This leads to a spiraling affect, the articles which please hoi polloi tend to go up in score, and the ugly truths, the insightful posts that no one wants to hear, the laments that only become appreciated after their time are covered by the posturing of killjoys. What kind of moderation is this that only the virulently PC posts, the posts that kiss the ass of our ego, the posts that pat us all on the back because nobody makes mistakes, can get a high score, and the posts that tell people to suck it up and face the facts objectively get shot down? Moderation? Try Extremism.
Other examples include the recent slew of articles about the so-called "Future of Open Source." -- I happen to like these articles very much, but something doesn't seem right. Open Source is all about putting your code where your mouth is; you don't talk, you don't spew, you do. Why the sudden overload of articles on Open Source when there's no need to promote it? There is no need to promote it, people. The sheer fact that Open Source hinges on volunteerism means that no matter how hostile the climate, it's still going to be done. But if someone were to point out that the majority of these so-called essays on the future of open source were made because it's "cool" to be associated with open source, they would be shot down.
"Oh no! Someone dared accuse us of jumping on the bandwagon! Someone spotted us trying to steal a little credit we never had before in our lives! No matter, Open Source is my credo, (as long as it's convenient,) and I'm an individual, just like everyone else!"
The irony of the above paragraph is that a good deal of/.'ers don't understand sarcasm is a very profound way of debugging the ideological operating system.
Here I sit in the face of the mobocracy with the brazenness to call them animals, twisting real ideals into pop culture. How dare I stand up for materialism, and moderation (of behavior, not posts), and the fact that the same criticism told you when you were five still applies if you haven't changed? At least you have to respect me for trying...
Allowing mass moderation is going to galvanize/. and alienate the silent majority of truly moderate individuals, that make decisions based on facts and utility, not dogma and ideology. "Slashdot: Propaganda for Nerds. Stuff that Enlightens."
Slashdot Mirror
My copy of Win2000 Beta 3 Workstation, Server and Advanced Server all appear to have an NT Kernel.
:P
:P
That's going to be one hell of a change.
BTW, the login screen for Win2K says "Built on NT Technology."
New Technology Technology, eh?
Again, I'm not going to speak for anyone but myself and my personal experience ...
:)
[end disclaimer]
but Jobs himself pronounced it Jobs. NeXT employees pronounced it Jobs. (My uncle was pretty high up if I'm not mistaken, and his employees pronounced it Jobs as well.) I don't think that you would be apt to mispronounce the boss' name
/* I've heard it both ways. Anyone know for sure how one pronouces "Jobs"? */
.snd clip of Jobs talking (overlaid on Handel's "Messiah" -- slightly funny).
:)
My uncle used to work for NeXT computer, and as a result I'd get a lot of discounted NeXT cubes and stations and parts.
One cube that I bought had a
He pronounced it "Jobs" -- that is to say as most North Americans would pronounce the word as seeing it.
If I'm not mistaken the NeXTmail voice attachment program, LipService, had a little intro ditty by Jobs. Again, pronounced "Jobs" as in the sentence "I got fired from three jobs"
At the risk of touching an inflammatory topic, the answer is NO because the key here is a voluntary belief mechanism. You choose to believe something because the argument given turns the "credible" flag on. Certain "Software" -- ie, different styles of logical/illogical methodology -- will change the sensitivity of that flag.
;)
By "brain explosion" i mean drooling, twitching, spastic lack of cohesion, followed by overheating and some leakage.
Which can be mistaken for religion, except it's involuntary
Basically the gist of your post was "the human brain has more concurrency than control, but there has to be control somewhere."
the point being: we *know* there's a lot of concurrency in this massively parallel computer called the brain, but where's the control? A computer of *any* kind without control is runaway, and that makes no sense considering we have survived without too many brain explosions over the years.
Rudy Rucker once calculated that even IF the neuron was a purely digital phenomenon (on/off) then we'd have 2^(3 billion) states of mind which comes out to somewhere around a gigaplex states of mind. Of course, some of these are physiological and undesirable, e.g, racing heart and no breathing, and there are bound to be more because the brain works on interference patterns as well.
Memory uses a combination of compression and hashing. We remember generalities (I saw a tree there), and hash it into our description of the scene with a pointer to a description of what a tree is. When we retreive the memory (I saw a tree there), we also uncompress the description of the details (Trees are green and brown) and uncompress any subdescription (Pine trees are pine green, and triangular), leading (after many cycles) to the conclusion memory (I saw a pine green and brown, triangular, tree there).
I'm not saying the *brain* is a NAND gate. The neurons are electrochemical NAND gates inasmuch as they are all alike -- and yet they perform different purposes (at different times in different combinations) -- all neurons are the same composition (different shapes, sometimes, and glial cells don't count), so how can the same gate be a different gate (fundamentally, in structure?) Conway proved that any logic gate can be emulated by a combination of NAND gates (don't ask me how; my math is nowhere near the level of Conway) and hitherto, most neural net programming has been using NAND gates to improve consistencey and reliability. If one NAND gate goes down (and let's face it, age, beer, and head trauma takes down much more than one) -- another NAND gate can fulfill its role, whereas if we were using OR, XOR, AND, NOT gates then we'd have spares only from that pool of specific gates.
This having been said, this is how the *neurons* work, and because different *combinations* of NAND gates can yield other gates, then it's quite possible that you might have a lot of OR gates (or whatever), whereas I might have a lot of AND gates, and somehow that might make you think visually and myself aurally...
As for using 100% of our resources; that's really funny. In parallel tasking, the name of the game is redundancy, and the human brain is the perfect example of asymettric processing. Maxing out a beowulf cluster (bearing in mind this is *symmetric* mind you) is great for throughput but terrible for reliability -- what happens when one processor is gone? you start thrashing to disk like mad. This problem is slightly eased in an asymmetric processing cluster like the Brain -- some nodes are only there for backup purposes, or to create the ambient internal interference neccesary for NAND gates to become another type of gate.
That sounds reasonable. I drew a connection between first-level memory storage and simultaneous tasking (just like one could draw a connection between load averages using a processor with more cache). Muscle memory would tend to be a "hard-wired" register.
This having been said, is there any study showing how many tasks one can simultaneously perform? I posit that you can perform all you like, but what will happen if you forget about them? (let's not get into long-term storage like writing stuff down) -- I'd say that as mental efficiency approaches, the limiting factor will still be 7 + or - 2.
AFAIK, and according to a fairly recent Discover Magazine article, the human brain DOES have math coprocessors -- multiple ones in fact. (Again, according to the article ...) the human brain has a set of cells which function roughly as a number line, with a span of integer values from -5 to 5. This is inborn. An area of the brain handles basic concepts as "more" and "less." Also inborn. An area of the brain handles sophisticated mathematical tasks which are worked through (by which I mean subtraction, addition, etc -- this is sophisticated using the NAND gates which are neurons). Another area handles mathematical concepts which are memorized (e.g., multiplication tables). An example operation of multiplying 144 by 144 would call upon the memorized-portion coprocessor to realize that 144 is 12*12, and then the work-it-out-portion processor would calculate 12^4.
Then there's the whole part of the brain that thinks in geometric terms. Does it do a graphical representation of algebraic equations? I'm not qualfiied to answer. For more, read Rudy Rucker, "Mind Tools" and judge for yourself. The fact that I passed applied linear algebra by representing concepts such as orthogonal projections in a geometric view convinces at least me that geometric thinking is math coprocessing at its most fine-grained.
Damage to one portion of the brain, but not others, can lead to quirks in solving mathematical problems... very odd ones.
This was already estimated by biological psychologists as between 5 and 9, with the average falling at (you guessed it) seven. Hence the famous psychological paper entitled "The Magic Number Seven, Plus Or Minus Two."
Of course this relates to conscious tasks. Presumably the brain is conducting hundreds of tasks relatin to hormonal and electrochemical feedback from the endocrine and nervous systems respectively. Think of it like this:
Kernel-land human brain can take a load average of hundreds. User-land human brain can handle a load average of 5-9 without page faulting.
I'm actually a big fan of (the option to) double click. I understand it's not for everyone, but it requires infinitesimal effort, prohibits accidental openings of files, and easily differentiates between DnD and open.
What i'd also like to see in KDE is perhaps some sort of NetInfo-type database. NetInfo is, IMO, a Windows registry done Right (and first), I loved it since NeXT and I love it still. Combined with the existing application framework for handling MIME-types in KDE, we can get a decent interface for registering file types to be opened (as opposed to WordPerfect asking to tamper with magic numers, etc). It's something which may turn me to Mac OS X (both Mac and NeXT were very good about automatically associating files) for desktop purposes.
You can actually dynamically load a new TCP/IP stack if you want. Most applications ask you to use Microsoft TCP/IP stack, and ask you to reboot after making changes because the Win32 API is so brain-dead that no one is sure what changes do what to what. So long as you're fairly confident about the reliability and ability to stay within its memory space, you can plug and chug a new stack (i'd reccomend you do it in kernel land, instead of userland, the hooks ARE there, or use psxss)
This partnership seems nice on the exterior, but what about Motorola's Coldfire line of 68xxx processors for embedded work? That's a big money maker, especially in *Motorola* cellular phones and other embedded processors. I can see the motivation perhaps in the realm of interoperability with Bigger Computers (tm) but AFAIK the Coldfire runs on a lot less power than the PowerPC for comparable performance (remember, these are embedded apps)...
I actually work for a group at my school which does something similar to that. Only partially dynamic pages with a perl/mod_perl backend to it. Our loads are phenomenally low (of course we're not getting Slashdot level load at all!)
I invite Rob et al to take a look, i suggested using the Slash code but we did this one pretty much in a homegrown fashion.
http://www.sin.wm.edu
click the "guest" button, no login or password
See, even the mighty Linux can be brought down :)
;P)
(but then again, so can freeBSD, my OS of choice, or so I've been told
rob, have you considered using a multithreaded server like Xitami? That might improve performance somewhat.
AFAIK IRIX is System V.
I run a FreeBSD system and I have been very satisfied with the performance, btw.
If I'm not mistaken, Bayesian statistical theory is behind robust regression techniques. Unfortunately, at least in my 300 level Econometrics class, it's "go linear or die" presumably because with a 3OLS algorithm and/or robust regression techniques, an otherwise consistent and unbiased estimator can be ruined by the distributive effects of measurement error.
Can Bayesian methods (my familiarity with Bayesian *anything* stops at set theory) be used for OLS linear regressions?
Lets' face facts:
:P ). There's a difference betwen FUD and criticism. Some sites which give FUD are misbranded as criticism by /. Most sites which give criticism are misbranded as FUD by /. At the kernel of all FUD is a weak point of the enemy product. It may not be a fatal flaw, but it is a *weak point*, so their FUD should be treated as advice -- and one their FUD-laden comments are countered by software improvements, they'll have nothing to FUD about.
1. Any group with money will skew test results of their product in their favor through the most subtle of coercion ("Oh, you want to do a Microsoft test, here's a brand new Pentium III... Oh I'm sorry, I only have one of *those* for Windows, but you can use this Pentium I for Linux").
2. Any group with enough rabid fervor (*cough*stallman*cough*) will skew test results of their product through dogged trial and error ("GNU/Linux/TCP/IP/Kitchen Sink Didn't do well in this test! Must be a plot from those evil closed source Kapitalists! Let's recompile the kernel -O3, and test it again!")
3. Any group with enough of a desire can skew test results of their product by twisting statistics. Remember almost all statistics are filtered through Confidence Intervals, for the purpose of hypothesis testing. It could be that one group is using a 90% confidence interval, while another is using a 99% confidence interval. The problem of this is the eternal problem of the statistician: balancing Type I and Type II errors; one is about including more than you should, and one is about excluding what should rightfully be there. Each error comes at the expense of the other. Be careful when you read those statistics!
4. Linux has problems. So does any O/S. Personally I don't get too worked up about it (I use FreeBSD myself
Example: "Linux is hard to install." Pure FUD. Caldera lets you play *Tetris* while it's installing, for (insert deity here)'s sake! But it is a weak point, because after, say, a Windows install, a series of "Wizards" pop up to configure basic services to some semblance of a default. Perhaps after a Linux install, if there is an Apache package, an httpd Wizard pops up (in ncurses -- how cute) and asks you if you want this or that.
The point is, *any* O/S can get better. And even at FUD -- (F)ear, (U)ncertainty, and (D)oubt -- addresses *fears* among the public. You can only sow the seeds of fear if there is a receptive heart. Joe WinUser might percieve a Linux configuration to be harder because linuxconf doesn't have the same help menus (for instance). While you or I may personally disagree, Joe WinUser is the public, and if the O/S is to be friendly to the public, the programmers have to address their fears.
and on page 4, Lucas mentions that the "There are always two, a master and an apprentice" applies to the *bad* jedi, because if there were more they'd kill each other. Fascinating.
Gates is not stupid.
Gates is not stupid.
Gates is not stupid.
The reason why Linux is preferred on x86 and PowerPC is because it is a vastly better O/S in terms of quality than Windows and Mac OS 8.x. However, when compared with a robust and extant UNIX like Mac OS X (aka NeXTStep aka OPENSTEP aka Rhapsody), the native functionality is going to be better.
According to an ad from this site, you can buy an UltraSparc workstation for $2,495. That's fairly affordable if you aren't a student and are looking for a high-powered computer. But almost nobody is going to buy a brand spanking new UltraSparc II to put Linux on it, when Solaris does the job much better. (watch me get a flood of contradictions)
I have the feeling the same is going to happen with Mac OS X and the G4.
Sometimes we have to be willing to pay for quality products. Roads are free, and we get traffic jams. Downloading the Linux kernel is free, and bandwidth drops when a new kernel is released.
We all seem to forget that we have the source code already available to us ... albeit in x86 assembly. That's right, use the Microsoft executable DEBUG.EXE on any binary with the (U)nassemble command, you get a dump of all of the neato-bandito asm instructions which make the system work.
:)
Sure, it's huge, but so is 35 million lines of C++. And from what I hear, most of those 35 million lines become nop instructions anyway =).
Moreover, Microsoft can't sue you -- assembly instructions are self-evident in the machine code, and any parser to translate asm-to-C (not that any work worth a damn) would make drastically different code in appearance, although similar in functionality.
Personally, I'd like to run the Windows instructions through gnu as to see what would happen -- but oh wait, I've got better things to do with my time
For the record, this is probably going to be the first post I ever make that drops below 1.
:) .
/.'ers don't understand sarcasm is a very profound way of debugging the ideological operating system.
...
/. and alienate the silent majority of truly moderate individuals, that make decisions based on facts and utility, not dogma and ideology. "Slashdot: Propaganda for Nerds. Stuff that Enlightens."
Hopefully it shouldn't be any new information for me to say that it's a fine line between including all points of view and succumbing to the line noise that mass voices can create.
However, I subscribe to the belief that the truth doesn't neccessarily have to be phrased in eloquent, multisyllabic aphorisms. The truth is ugly, people, and often the messengers of the truth are despised for their frank talk. We don't want to hear some things. We don't want to hear that some people are stronger, better, faster, smarter than others -- unless, of course, it applies to you
What I fear this moderation alignment will do is remove many people like MEEPT!! -- who, despite his or her incoherency at times, told the truth in ways that irritated people because it was the truth about them.
It's a sad day when I find myself defending MEEPT!!, but there's something to be said about an inherent anti-bluntness bias in slashdot...
Let's take an example. Recently I read a post w/respect to Linux in a Dilbert article. Some killjoy posted his or her frustration about how Dilbert was mocking "The cause" and how Scott Adams was "like a weapons dealer", appeasing both the management and (in his/her words) "us peons".
A couple posts were put in response to it, more or less politely telling the poster to lighten up, that he had a lot of bitterness locked up, etc. All of them were moderated down, because the posters had the audacity to draw a correlation between the tone of a post and probable experiences in the personal or work life of this poster. The truth was ugly, but it's something we can all recognize in a grade school sandbox: the bitter poster had a stunted sense of fun and felt trampled on, and was ruining someone else's fun. I don't particularly believe that everyone's posts have equal merit -- neither does Rob, if we have moderation to begin with --, but I find it grimly amusing that it's easier to bitch about the decline of Slashdot as if it were the fall of the Roman Empire, than it is to take the truth that someone's social skills cast a bias on their statements and add a pompous air to Slashdot.
On the Internet, no one knows if you're a dog, unless you talk a lot about bones.
There gradually is a PC -- Politically Correct, not Personal Computer or Program Counter -- mobocracy when it comes to approval of posts and the like. This leads to a spiraling affect, the articles which please hoi polloi tend to go up in score, and the ugly truths, the insightful posts that no one wants to hear, the laments that only become appreciated after their time are covered by the posturing of killjoys. What kind of moderation is this that only the virulently PC posts, the posts that kiss the ass of our ego, the posts that pat us all on the back because nobody makes mistakes, can get a high score, and the posts that tell people to suck it up and face the facts objectively get shot down? Moderation? Try Extremism.
Other examples include the recent slew of articles about the so-called "Future of Open Source." -- I happen to like these articles very much, but something doesn't seem right. Open Source is all about putting your code where your mouth is; you don't talk, you don't spew, you do. Why the sudden overload of articles on Open Source when there's no need to promote it? There is no need to promote it, people. The sheer fact that Open Source hinges on volunteerism means that no matter how hostile the climate, it's still going to be done. But if someone were to point out that the majority of these so-called essays on the future of open source were made because it's "cool" to be associated with open source, they would be shot down.
"Oh no! Someone dared accuse us of jumping on the bandwagon! Someone spotted us trying to steal a little credit we never had before in our lives! No matter, Open Source is my credo, (as long as it's convenient,) and I'm an individual, just like everyone else!"
The irony of the above paragraph is that a good deal of
Here I sit in the face of the mobocracy with the brazenness to call them animals, twisting real ideals into pop culture. How dare I stand up for materialism, and moderation (of behavior, not posts), and the fact that the same criticism told you when you were five still applies if you haven't changed? At least you have to respect me for trying
Allowing mass moderation is going to galvanize
-- my $0.05. Keep the change.