That's because the LZO algorithm only attempts compression on data with runs of the same repeating data, and data that would match multiple instances of a sliding dictionary. Data that doesn't satisfy these conditions within a given block are not compressed.
He discovered that high IQ does not correlate with success. In fact, his "termites" (children with exceptionally high IQ) were statistically identical to children of more ordinary IQ levels in terms of financial success and position in life. If we choose to believe that intelligent people will be statistically more successful that unintelligent people, then IQ does not correlate with intelligence.
More recent research indicates that intelligence is comprised of various qualities, only one of which is measured by IQ. For instance, IQ does not capture divergent thinking - the ability to be creative. A genius tends to have high levels of both convergent and divergent thinking. Einstein for instance required a lot of creativity in order to imagine a universe where the space-time continuum itself bends as a result of gravitational influences. Purely convergent thinking is insufficient to make these conclusions.
The retina of the eye contains two types of light sensitive cells: cones and rods. The cones are responsible for the eye's ability to distinguish colour and function well in good lighting conditions. The cones are further broken down into three types of cones, each sensitive to one of the three primary colours. The rods are responsible for providing vision when the ambient lighting is low. There is only one type of rod. As a result, when observing in very low light conditions, the eye can only see in black and white.
The rods are located near the outer edges of the retina. This is why very distant stars that are barely visible appear brighter if you use your peripheral vision to view them by looking off to the side.
Your example is actually an instance of the second form of energy transfer using the far field. Photons are the carrier particles for electromagnetic radiation.
There are two ways to transfer energy wirelessly. Either you couple the receiver to the transmitter using the near field (inductive coupling), or you obtain the energy from the radiated energy in the far field (electromagnetic radiation).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer
That's just it though, isn't it? What rule was the user ignoring that caused him/her to break the TV? Were they wearing the strap? Apparently, yes, because the strap malfunctioned.
IANAL, but the analogy is flawed. The car company may in fact be liable if the seatbelts malfunction. In this case, Nintendo is being sued because the safety strap malfunctioned.
Not that I disagree with you; I have no sympathy for people who destroyed their television by pelting a Wiimote at it.
Actually, believe it or not, Ubuntu and CentOS both come with vi by default. Vim needs to be installed either by apt-get or yum. On CentOS, the package is called vim-enhanced. On Ubuntu, you have to apt-get vim.
I believe they're referring to availability. In this case, planned downtime shouldn't affect availability since service can be proactively transferred to a backup system with zero impact to the user. Wikipedia has good article here.
Or they could buy the CD from a store and rip the MP3 digitally. Avoiding DRM encumbered media is the simplest solution.
If you insist on recording the analog signal, one of the easiest things you can do is select "stereo mix" as the recording source. Then play your DRM encumbered file, and record it using your favourite sound recording software. Quality is usually pretty good, as long as no other programs access the audio device at the same time.
Not quite. The German school boy is asserting that GIVEN that the asteroid hits one of the satellites, the probability of the asteroid hitting the earth subsequent to this event is 1 in 450.
If we consider it this way, the probability of the asteroid hitting the earth is still the number predicted by the NASA scientists because the probability of the asteroid hitting one of the satellites is very close to zero and has very little effect to the original prediction.
I agree that immediate access to information is dangerous in the hands of idiots - or at the very least, very annoying. However, the fact that the current generation has immediate access to information doesn't change the fact that memorizing and understanding are two different things altogether.
You might be able to lookup the value of e on the Internet. You might be able to immediately lookup what the derivative is for a given function. But, regardless of what generation you belong to, knowing the value of e, or knowing that the derivative of x^2 is 2x doesn't change the fact that that doesn't necessarily imply that you know calculus.
However, if you search for the derivative of x^2 on Google and end up on Wikipedia or MathWorks and start reading about what differentiation is, then you will learn how to calculate the derivative of a function. The fact you used a search engine to find that information is irrelevant.
I do not believe that people who lookup facts on the Internet are smart. All intelligent people whom I have had the honor to meet understand what they talk about and don't need access to a computer when I talk to them. Are you impressed when someone can recite some random trivia to you? Do you ever phone them up and ask them for help with something? Probably not - you're smarter than that. But then, why do you consider them smart in the first place?
You seem to prove a rather different point from the one set out at the onset of this discussion. Google is simply a search engine and it allows the user to find information. "Crazy Bob's Information Hut" is a specific web site which may or may not be the result of a Google search. But good and reliable sources of information might also be part of a Google search. Consider Google scholar. While I was writing my thesis, I regularly used Google scholar to find papers relating to my topic. Once I found the papers that seemed relevant, I went out and got those papers - at my university library if no electronic copy could be found. As you can see, it is possible to start with Google search and then narrow your search as you progress.
More than likely, all the students that you peer reviewed started their research with Google. The more intelligent among them however, went the extra mile and found good sources when they wrote their papers. This is not new. Intelligent people will always write good papers by doing the research that is necessary. In our generation however, we have access to more sophisticated tools than previous generations for finding information. We have Google search and the Internet as well as online libraries. The previous generation had references, the Dewey Decimal System and card catalogs.
I am glad though, that your university fails students that don't do in-depth research. I would be quite surprised otherwise.
Re:The best tools stay out of the way...
on
Goodbye Cruel Word
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· Score: 5, Informative
You're missing the point of using LaTeX. While it is true that LaTeX makes it very easy to add equations to a dissertation, the biggest problem with using Word is that you're constantly dealing with the formatting of your document rather than actually writing the content of your document.
When you use LaTeX, you are pretty much giving the software complete control over layout and typesetting. You just tell LaTeX that you want an image / figure at a given location and the software decides the best location. The greatest thing about the LaTeX is how well cross-referencing works. You never have to worry about what index you assigned to a figure or an equation. You just reference it with a label and the LaTeX compiler automatically rebuilds your table of contents, list of figures and what not.
Finally, most universities provide a LaTeX class file which you simply include in your LaTeX file. This will (usually) setup your dissertation with the necessary margins and formatting that is required by your faculty. If you use Word, then you will have endless headaches if you need to change your margins, because all of a sudden, your images are no longer attached to the paragraphs they belong to. If you insert an equation earlier on in your document, your reference numbers will get out of order. And if you're writing your dissertation in a sane way, then you will likely have separate files for each chapter (something totally unnecessary with LaTeX - just have separate.tex files for each chapter and include them in your main.tex file). So if you want to make formatting changes, you will have to apply those changes separately to each chapter, every single time a formatting change is required.
Anyway, before I wrote my MASc thesis, I had started doing it in Word because I had never used LaTeX and I was apprehensive about learning it. In retrospect, I am extremely happy that I ended up writing my thesis in LaTeX. Because.tex files are plain text, I committed the files to an SVN repository which allowed me access to my dissertation from any computer with an SVN client. And, once everything was setup in LaTeX, making changes to the document was easy. I never had to worry about formatting; I just focused on the content and didn't worry about how it looked. At the end of the day, it looked great and formatting required zero effort on my part because including the faculty class file was a simple process.
Begging the question is a logical fallacy in which the proof of a hypothesis is shown by assuming the hypothesis to be true. It seems the use of the statement "to beg the question" is changing meaning because so many people misunderstand the statement. A little off topic - sorry about that.
Everything you say is true, however, the GP is also correct. The x86 chips have a RISC architecture below the CISC "interface". CISC instructions are mapped to a lower level microcode. It has been this way at least since the Pentium processors. MMX opcode for instance is an extension to the CISC instruction set which maps directly to Intel's RISC microcode.
From your point of view, the fact that there is an underlying RISC architecture is irrelevant since you were talking about the compiler preparing code for the processor which is transparent to Intel's RISC microcode. Nevertheless, the advantages of having a RISC architecture from the hardware design point of view are also realized by Intel's approach. It's effectively an abstraction, similar to a virtual machine.
The only problem being that photons aren't the only type of particle that can be entangled. Electrons may be entangled - and they certainly do not travel at the speed of light.
The easiest way to think of the "truly random" nature of a particle's property is by grasping the idea that a particle's properties are a superposition of possibilities that only collapses after one of the properties have been measured. Like a photon's polarization as mentioned in a previous post. If you know that a photon has been polarized up-down and measure the polarization at 45 degrees, there's a 50% probability that it is polarized in that direction. This is why if you put 3 polarization filters with the orientations: (-, \, |) in front of a lens, it will still pick up some light whereas if you put polarization filters with the orientations: (-, |), no light will pass through.
Quantum mechanics is hard for people to understand because the effects we observe at the quantum level are fundamentally different from our experience with the macroscopic world. Consider a photon's polarization. If you polarize that photon up-down, then with 100% probability, the photon is polarized up-down. If you attempt to measure the photon's polarization left-right, you will discover that with a 0% probability, it has that polarization. So far so good right? If, however, you measure the polarization of the photon at 45 degrees, you now have a 50% probability that is polarized in that direction and 50% probability that is polarized at -45 degrees.
Now, extend this to entangled photons. You entangle two photons that are polarized up-down. You separate the photons by some distance. If you measure the polarization up-down, with 100% probability, you will discover that the polarization is up-down. No information transfered, nothing learned. Why? You already knew that the probability was 100% of being up down. Now, let's say that you measure the polarization at 45 degrees. With 50% probability, the polarization will be at 45 degrees instead of -45 degrees. Again, no information transfered. All you know now is that both particles have the same polarization. If someone else was holding on to the other entangled photon, they cannot know that the photon has "resolved" itself to a particular polarization value after the first photon has been measured. If someone told them the polarization of the first photon, then they could predict the value of the photon that they currently have, but that first requires someone to tell them (at the speed of light) what the polarization of their photon is. Again, no information transfered.
So what is entanglement useful for then? It could be used as a powerful method of sharing a secret. Suppose I give you a cloud of entangled photons. If I don't know anything about the photons, then their polarizations will be completely random. I could then say that each time I resolve a photon's polarization, I will send you a message that I have read the value of the photon. So, I read the polarization of one photon causing its field distribution to collapse to the value I have measured. I then send you a message saying I have read the first value. At this point, you read the value of the corresponding entangled photon. You know that we have the same values, and so we have our first bit of the secret key. If we repeat this process for each entangled photon, we would end up with a random secret key that we both share that has never been sent across the transmission medium.
And as a perfect example of this, take a look at MediaCoder http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/ which is a GUI front end to mencoder. The thing works well, but has a substantial learning curve - might as well learn the mencoder command.
I don't believe the author was searching for a solution to his problem. He was merely stating that for his sister, figuring out how to get her flash installed was difficult.
Slashdot Mirror
That's because the LZO algorithm only attempts compression on data with runs of the same repeating data, and data that would match multiple instances of a sliding dictionary. Data that doesn't satisfy these conditions within a given block are not compressed.
IQ correlates well with convergent thinking; not intelligence as a whole. Have a look at Lewis Terman's results of his extensive research into IQ testing. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Terman#Thoughts_and_Research_on_Gifted_Children
He discovered that high IQ does not correlate with success. In fact, his "termites" (children with exceptionally high IQ) were statistically identical to children of more ordinary IQ levels in terms of financial success and position in life. If we choose to believe that intelligent people will be statistically more successful that unintelligent people, then IQ does not correlate with intelligence.
More recent research indicates that intelligence is comprised of various qualities, only one of which is measured by IQ. For instance, IQ does not capture divergent thinking - the ability to be creative. A genius tends to have high levels of both convergent and divergent thinking. Einstein for instance required a lot of creativity in order to imagine a universe where the space-time continuum itself bends as a result of gravitational influences. Purely convergent thinking is insufficient to make these conclusions.
The retina of the eye contains two types of light sensitive cells: cones and rods. The cones are responsible for the eye's ability to distinguish colour and function well in good lighting conditions. The cones are further broken down into three types of cones, each sensitive to one of the three primary colours. The rods are responsible for providing vision when the ambient lighting is low. There is only one type of rod. As a result, when observing in very low light conditions, the eye can only see in black and white.
The rods are located near the outer edges of the retina. This is why very distant stars that are barely visible appear brighter if you use your peripheral vision to view them by looking off to the side.
Your example is actually an instance of the second form of energy transfer using the far field. Photons are the carrier particles for electromagnetic radiation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photon
Can a device like the ones we are discussing actually "pull" more power from the source if present ?
Yes, the process uses inductive coupling and works just like a transformer. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inductive_coupling
There are two ways to transfer energy wirelessly. Either you couple the receiver to the transmitter using the near field (inductive coupling), or you obtain the energy from the radiated energy in the far field (electromagnetic radiation). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wireless_energy_transfer
Indeed. They are quite annoying. You can't even skip them.
That's just it though, isn't it? What rule was the user ignoring that caused him/her to break the TV? Were they wearing the strap? Apparently, yes, because the strap malfunctioned.
IANAL, but the analogy is flawed. The car company may in fact be liable if the seatbelts malfunction. In this case, Nintendo is being sued because the safety strap malfunctioned.
Not that I disagree with you; I have no sympathy for people who destroyed their television by pelting a Wiimote at it.
Actually, believe it or not, Ubuntu and CentOS both come with vi by default. Vim needs to be installed either by apt-get or yum. On CentOS, the package is called vim-enhanced. On Ubuntu, you have to apt-get vim.
I believe they're referring to availability. In this case, planned downtime shouldn't affect availability since service can be proactively transferred to a backup system with zero impact to the user. Wikipedia has good article here.
Like a virtual machine save state. Either you install the OS from scratch, or you load the VM save state. Either looks identical to the running apps.
Or they could buy the CD from a store and rip the MP3 digitally. Avoiding DRM encumbered media is the simplest solution.
If you insist on recording the analog signal, one of the easiest things you can do is select "stereo mix" as the recording source. Then play your DRM encumbered file, and record it using your favourite sound recording software. Quality is usually pretty good, as long as no other programs access the audio device at the same time.
Not quite. The German school boy is asserting that GIVEN that the asteroid hits one of the satellites, the probability of the asteroid hitting the earth subsequent to this event is 1 in 450.
If we consider it this way, the probability of the asteroid hitting the earth is still the number predicted by the NASA scientists because the probability of the asteroid hitting one of the satellites is very close to zero and has very little effect to the original prediction.
I agree that immediate access to information is dangerous in the hands of idiots - or at the very least, very annoying. However, the fact that the current generation has immediate access to information doesn't change the fact that memorizing and understanding are two different things altogether.
You might be able to lookup the value of e on the Internet. You might be able to immediately lookup what the derivative is for a given function. But, regardless of what generation you belong to, knowing the value of e, or knowing that the derivative of x^2 is 2x doesn't change the fact that that doesn't necessarily imply that you know calculus.
However, if you search for the derivative of x^2 on Google and end up on Wikipedia or MathWorks and start reading about what differentiation is, then you will learn how to calculate the derivative of a function. The fact you used a search engine to find that information is irrelevant.
I do not believe that people who lookup facts on the Internet are smart. All intelligent people whom I have had the honor to meet understand what they talk about and don't need access to a computer when I talk to them. Are you impressed when someone can recite some random trivia to you? Do you ever phone them up and ask them for help with something? Probably not - you're smarter than that. But then, why do you consider them smart in the first place?
You seem to prove a rather different point from the one set out at the onset of this discussion. Google is simply a search engine and it allows the user to find information. "Crazy Bob's Information Hut" is a specific web site which may or may not be the result of a Google search. But good and reliable sources of information might also be part of a Google search. Consider Google scholar. While I was writing my thesis, I regularly used Google scholar to find papers relating to my topic. Once I found the papers that seemed relevant, I went out and got those papers - at my university library if no electronic copy could be found. As you can see, it is possible to start with Google search and then narrow your search as you progress.
More than likely, all the students that you peer reviewed started their research with Google. The more intelligent among them however, went the extra mile and found good sources when they wrote their papers. This is not new. Intelligent people will always write good papers by doing the research that is necessary. In our generation however, we have access to more sophisticated tools than previous generations for finding information. We have Google search and the Internet as well as online libraries. The previous generation had references, the Dewey Decimal System and card catalogs.
I am glad though, that your university fails students that don't do in-depth research. I would be quite surprised otherwise.
You're missing the point of using LaTeX. While it is true that LaTeX makes it very easy to add equations to a dissertation, the biggest problem with using Word is that you're constantly dealing with the formatting of your document rather than actually writing the content of your document. When you use LaTeX, you are pretty much giving the software complete control over layout and typesetting. You just tell LaTeX that you want an image / figure at a given location and the software decides the best location. The greatest thing about the LaTeX is how well cross-referencing works. You never have to worry about what index you assigned to a figure or an equation. You just reference it with a label and the LaTeX compiler automatically rebuilds your table of contents, list of figures and what not. Finally, most universities provide a LaTeX class file which you simply include in your LaTeX file. This will (usually) setup your dissertation with the necessary margins and formatting that is required by your faculty. If you use Word, then you will have endless headaches if you need to change your margins, because all of a sudden, your images are no longer attached to the paragraphs they belong to. If you insert an equation earlier on in your document, your reference numbers will get out of order. And if you're writing your dissertation in a sane way, then you will likely have separate files for each chapter (something totally unnecessary with LaTeX - just have separate .tex files for each chapter and include them in your main .tex file). So if you want to make formatting changes, you will have to apply those changes separately to each chapter, every single time a formatting change is required.
Anyway, before I wrote my MASc thesis, I had started doing it in Word because I had never used LaTeX and I was apprehensive about learning it. In retrospect, I am extremely happy that I ended up writing my thesis in LaTeX. Because .tex files are plain text, I committed the files to an SVN repository which allowed me access to my dissertation from any computer with an SVN client. And, once everything was setup in LaTeX, making changes to the document was easy. I never had to worry about formatting; I just focused on the content and didn't worry about how it looked. At the end of the day, it looked great and formatting required zero effort on my part because including the faculty class file was a simple process.
Begging the question is a logical fallacy in which the proof of a hypothesis is shown by assuming the hypothesis to be true. It seems the use of the statement "to beg the question" is changing meaning because so many people misunderstand the statement. A little off topic - sorry about that.
Everything you say is true, however, the GP is also correct. The x86 chips have a RISC architecture below the CISC "interface". CISC instructions are mapped to a lower level microcode. It has been this way at least since the Pentium processors. MMX opcode for instance is an extension to the CISC instruction set which maps directly to Intel's RISC microcode. From your point of view, the fact that there is an underlying RISC architecture is irrelevant since you were talking about the compiler preparing code for the processor which is transparent to Intel's RISC microcode. Nevertheless, the advantages of having a RISC architecture from the hardware design point of view are also realized by Intel's approach. It's effectively an abstraction, similar to a virtual machine.
The name you are looking for is "prisoner's dilemma".
The only problem being that photons aren't the only type of particle that can be entangled. Electrons may be entangled - and they certainly do not travel at the speed of light. The easiest way to think of the "truly random" nature of a particle's property is by grasping the idea that a particle's properties are a superposition of possibilities that only collapses after one of the properties have been measured. Like a photon's polarization as mentioned in a previous post. If you know that a photon has been polarized up-down and measure the polarization at 45 degrees, there's a 50% probability that it is polarized in that direction. This is why if you put 3 polarization filters with the orientations: (-, \, |) in front of a lens, it will still pick up some light whereas if you put polarization filters with the orientations: (-, |), no light will pass through.
Quantum mechanics is hard for people to understand because the effects we observe at the quantum level are fundamentally different from our experience with the macroscopic world. Consider a photon's polarization. If you polarize that photon up-down, then with 100% probability, the photon is polarized up-down. If you attempt to measure the photon's polarization left-right, you will discover that with a 0% probability, it has that polarization. So far so good right? If, however, you measure the polarization of the photon at 45 degrees, you now have a 50% probability that is polarized in that direction and 50% probability that is polarized at -45 degrees.
Now, extend this to entangled photons. You entangle two photons that are polarized up-down. You separate the photons by some distance. If you measure the polarization up-down, with 100% probability, you will discover that the polarization is up-down. No information transfered, nothing learned. Why? You already knew that the probability was 100% of being up down. Now, let's say that you measure the polarization at 45 degrees. With 50% probability, the polarization will be at 45 degrees instead of -45 degrees. Again, no information transfered. All you know now is that both particles have the same polarization. If someone else was holding on to the other entangled photon, they cannot know that the photon has "resolved" itself to a particular polarization value after the first photon has been measured. If someone told them the polarization of the first photon, then they could predict the value of the photon that they currently have, but that first requires someone to tell them (at the speed of light) what the polarization of their photon is. Again, no information transfered.
So what is entanglement useful for then? It could be used as a powerful method of sharing a secret. Suppose I give you a cloud of entangled photons. If I don't know anything about the photons, then their polarizations will be completely random. I could then say that each time I resolve a photon's polarization, I will send you a message that I have read the value of the photon. So, I read the polarization of one photon causing its field distribution to collapse to the value I have measured. I then send you a message saying I have read the first value. At this point, you read the value of the corresponding entangled photon. You know that we have the same values, and so we have our first bit of the secret key. If we repeat this process for each entangled photon, we would end up with a random secret key that we both share that has never been sent across the transmission medium.
And as a perfect example of this, take a look at MediaCoder http://mediacoder.sourceforge.net/ which is a GUI front end to mencoder. The thing works well, but has a substantial learning curve - might as well learn the mencoder command.
mod parent up.
Does it surprise anybody that grad students are treated this way? Its a norm. http://www.phdcomics.com/ - funny because it's true.
I don't believe the author was searching for a solution to his problem. He was merely stating that for his sister, figuring out how to get her flash installed was difficult.