My only choice to even be allowed to APPLY for a Masters was first to go back and do about 4-5 years of Continuing Education.
Find different schools or a different approach to applying. If there's not a mechanism for accepting your experience in lieu of "how do compilers work 101" then they're probably not that great a school. If they are good schools, but you're hearing that from them admissions office, you might also try approaching some faculty directly and talking to them a few times (over time) about going to grad school. Faculty can often pretty much grant anyone they want admission. You still have to go through the admissions process, but they pull your app out and accept it on the word of the faculty member who will be embarrassed if you suck.
A technical career was most certainly *not* a mistake for me. I'm doing fine, and most of the people I know with PhDs in physics are doing alright, too. Financially it's been pretty useful, and also as far as independence at work. The only real downside of the PhD is that it decreases mobility -- you can move around but it takes a lot longer, especially if you want something entertaining, but there are plenty of high paying jobs that are more engineering oriented.
I decided to bike to work years ago, rather than drive, because it seemed exhorbitantly expensive compared to the benefit. It turned out to leave me with plenty of disposable income, so I had pretty good savings when I started grad school. I was getting the same money as the other grad students, but managed to have a more comfortable lifestyle by sharing an apartment and not owning a car. Neither was a hardship-- it was more cost effective to rent a car once a month or so if I wanted to go on a long trip. I don't think I mentioned that this was in a place with fairly hostile weather, where it wasn't unusual to ride home in temperatures below minus 20 F. Put on a couple layers of clothes and it's actually warmer than getting in the car and waiting for it to warm up. There were also way too many times to count that I stopped on my bike to push other peoples' cars out of deep snow. The bike you can just lift and carry for a few feet.
I also never felt like it was any sort of hardship, no matter what the weather, then or now. Like I said earlier, it's a matter of attitude. If you think sitting in your car in traffic is stylin', then by all means, waste your time and money on it. Life is all about trades and decisions, including financial ones. Plenty of people with high incomes manage to still not afford their lifestyles because they imagine they should have more than they can afford, and I know plenty of people with low incomes who live within their means (by making various trades) and are quite comfortable.
. You talk about living a less expensive lifestyle, commuting to work in the rain on a bicycle or moped, etc. Ok, sounds great, so why bother with the expensive college education to have such a low standard of living? Why not just get a job working as a tradesman?
Sometimes it lets you increase your standard of living in other areas, or some people may not even see it as a low standard of living. I have an advanced degree and get paid pretty well, even for the expensive area where I live. I bike to work in the heat, rain, thunderstorms, at night, etc. I prefer it over driving (I own a fine car). I'd much rather be outside moving than sitting in the car.
It's as much a question of attitude as anything else, but it also leaves me with more disposable income than my peers (I also don't have to pay for things like health clubs-- it seems silly to exercise indoors in Southern CA unless the smog is really bad, which it usually isn't anymore, especially morning or evening.) As a grad student I shared an apartment (mostly with pleasant people) and was carless, and as a result could spend a lot more money making myself comfortable in other ways (e.g. good food).
Re:GoDaddy exploits any lack of technical knowledg
on
Pre-Selling Domain Names?
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I use SnapNames for this-- you only pay if you get the domain name, and you can have a standing order forever. They actually snagged me a name that I had been wanting and had been dormant for a while. I now have all my domains set up to get grabbed by SnapNames in the unlikely event that I manage to overlook all the expiration warnings and things. SnapNames uses a bunch of different registrars (I suspect depending on the responsiveness of their site at the instant the domain goes up for grabs).
When SnapNames did get me a name, they registered it through BlueHill (who I hadn't heard of). A while later I decided to consolidate all my domains in one place, and BlueHill was actually the most responsive with the transfer request.
I had also made the mistake of registering some domains through Yahoo a long time ago-- a major pain to transfer the.org name away from them, because they and Melbourne both pointed at each other as being responsible for providing the Auth code for the transfer. Melbourne was easy to get ahold of by email and phone, and tried to be helpful. Yahoo is a pain to get ahold of, but eventually it got transferred. Definitely avoid resellers (which yahoo is) and go directly with a primary registrar. Resellers just add a complication layer.
Right now all my domains are with Godaddy (except for one with Netsol that I'll probably move away soon), but if they get difficult, BlueHill was responsive enough that I would try them.
There are plenty of common rules for integration, including various substitutions, many of which amount to educated guesses that a computer can make as well as a human.
I'm sure there are plenty of integrals that mathematica and maple can't handle. Go check out a copy of Gradshteyn and Ryzhik and try running a few through.
Put the filter at a 45 degree angle to the LOS and make it reflective in the IR and transmissive in the visible. The camera lens is then invisible to the sensor system because the IR is directed off to the side.
Not all OSS is high quality, far from it. And last but not least, not all of it is maintained on a decently regular basis.
I'm a relative newcomer to OSS, but I think that neither of these statements is a real problem with OSS.
first: Not all OSS is high quality.
That's certainly true, but not all closed source software is high quality either. A lot of fairly specialized stuff that's closed source is junk, too. (actually some pretty major stuff is junk, too, but I'll use a relatively specialized example) A friend of mine has had to wrestle a lot with electrophysiology software (to drive data acq hardware and analyze data) and a lot of the proprietary stuff is expensive and kludgy, and often you can't tell if the calculations it claims to be doing are grounded in reality. There are some open source alternatives, and although they may not have some of the features you want from the closed stuff, you can add the ones you need and know how they actually do the work . In science that you're publishing it's critical to know that the software isn't doing something wrong behind your back. OSS makes it easier to check and fix problems with the data acq and analysis software.
I've also had problems with closed source data acq software environments that force upgrades too frequently, and in such a way that if you want to make minor changes to something, or run it on a slightly later OS, you have to upgrade the whole thing (sometimes taking a lot of time and money), rather than be able to just upgrade the pieces of it that you want to use.
As for stuff that's not maintained: That's also a problem in the closed source world, and it's worse. If you have closed source legacy software that gets dropped you're SOL if you ever need to change anything (like maybe buy a new machine to run it on, because the old one died, but the program only runs under windows 3.1). You basically have to replace the whole thing.
For open source stuff that's not maintained it just goes dormant. I recently decided to start playing around with a subset of the open directory (dmoz.org), and rather than try to roll all my own software, spent a fair amount of time looking for stuff that I could start from. There are a fair number of closed source packages for manipulating the data, and a few open source ones, too. Possibly the best one I found was an open source perl module that hadn't been maintained in about 4 years (Catalog at Senga.org). It installed easily and pretty much ran out of the box (despite being designed for a much earlier version of mySQL). There were some things that needed fixing (e.g. compliance with the current dmoz acknowledgement statement) and it was relatively easy to do myself. I also can customize it to do whatever I need much more easily than trying to wrestle APIs on someone elses closed source package, and put the updated version back up for others to use and expand on.
My first thought from the parent post (the part you quoted) wasn't numerical solvers (approximators if you like), but programs like Maple and Mathematica, which can symbolically produce the same solutions that one normally associates with pencil and paper calculus. There have even been pocket calculators capable of some of this since at least the late 80s.
No floating point involved at all unless you want it to plug in some values at the end and pop out a number.
It sounds like you missed the Alan Sokal affair a few years back.
He basically pulled together a bunch of philosophical jargon, made some stuff up relating it to quantum mechanics, loaded it with red flags for anybody with a minimal knowledge of physics and had no trouble getting it published in the journal Social Text. He even wrote a book critical of philosophers misusing physics, and did it in french because he thought the worst culprits were francophone. You can read all about it here: Sokal affair
Of course, there are also scientists who could use a little refresher in math, too. One of my favorite papers is some psychiatrists who were inadvertantly testing the equivalence principle in a study on clozapine and weight gain. It was reported that clozapine causes weight gain, and they proposed that it might also cause an increase in body mass index (BMI). BMI is defined as: m/h^2, where m is weight in kilograms and h is height in meters. If you read the paper they weren't suggesting that clozapine affects your height. Abstract available here:
Clozapine and Body Mass Change.
The amazing thing is that the reviewers didn't at least make them change the first two lines of the abstract.
Would a Kroger executive talk enthusiastically about your new "partnership" with them
But it would make a great story in the Onion...
"Kroger DEO David Dillon said that he was 'very pleased to have the opportunity to supply toothpaste and other oral hygiene products to Quarters, who is widely known for is impeccable white teeth and fresh breath.'"
Nope. Dealers tried this already and it's been through the courts. If they require you to use their services in order to remain under warrantee they have to provide the service as part of the purchase price.
And there's a long established aftermarket for maintaining cars once the warrantee runs out, probably with more than enough clout to keep automakers from compelling you to go to the dealer for service for the life of the car.
if you have two detectors a large distance apart, you effectively increase the aperture size to that large.
you get the angular resolution of the aperture that size, but you don't get the sensitivity unless you have the collecting area of the larger aperture. You also can't image very well unless you have enough propellant (or apertures) to fill in the uv plane.
What, exactly, do they need the publisher for? It's certainly not to publish.
For marketing, but most bands don't really get much marketing from their record label anyway, and then get dropped, often without the rights to their own music.
Getting CDs made is pretty easy, but it's a big capital expense-- a friend of mine (who's made a lot of CDs) once had one all set and then the band broke up, leaving her with ~800 CDs and no band to promote with them. I like CD Baby, but the CafePress idea that someone suggested isn't bad either-- CDs on demand (though they probably won't last as long as pressed CDs).
Skates (along with helmet, pads, etc.) can pretty much disappear into a backback or gym bag, especially low-cut 5 wheel speed skates, which are faster anyway. If it's a problem you just change before you get to the building and walk the last block or so.
I work at a fairly large company and there have always been at least a few execs who bike to work. But this is SoCal, where a newspaper column I read several years ago pointed out that you could be sitting in ratty cutoffs and a tank top at a sidewalk cafe and have someone walk up and ask if that's your Ferrari that's illegally parked (and have it likely be the case).
Well, for people like me at 42 degrees North latitude, late fall / all winter / early spring have two distinct problems: It's pitch black during the morning and evening commutes It's cold outside, with snow on the ground I'm sorry, but when my body starts to freeze to a block of solid ice while cycling, it's time to put the bike away.
I live in SoCal now, but spent 6 years cycling to work year round in Minneapolis, and a year in Boston before that.
It's really not so bad biking in the cold (I still do it on vacation sometimes)-- you warm up faster on the bike than you do in a car that needs time for the heater to warm up. It's actually better in colder places, because dry snow and ice aren't as messy to ride in. When it's really cold (below 0 F) you just don't leave any exposed skin and it's alright.
There are also some really nice lights available these days-- 15-20 W is enough to see by up to ~25 mph, and if you're willing to spend some bucks there are the metal halide lights that can light up the road for a whole group of riders. Illuminite and Scotchlite are also not bad as supplemental reflectors-- they do wear out eventually, but they last a fairly long time and help your visibility.
If you just decide that it's normal to bike to work year round it's easy. It's generally more effort for me to drive to work (and not forget stuff that I'm supposed to bring) than it is to bike.
Yeah, I finally got a link to a non-/.ed article at CNN, and the parent of those 13 really ought to be starting campaigns now to displace the school board members and the DA, or even recall elections if there's a mechanism for them. That would get attention fast.
If the district can afford to hand out that many iBooks it's got to be fairly affluent, and if the parents have a clue and care, they'll apply financial and employment pressure in the right place against their elected officials who are threatening to damage their kids lives over something pretty lame.
I'd assume they'd WANT me to know the admin password if it was taped to the back of the laptop.
Exactly. It's not like they made any effort to secure the passwords.
Whoever set up the machines doesn't know anything about how to admin macs. There's no real need for them to even write down the admin passwords for the individual machines at all, because if you have possession of the mac and a set of OS X install CD's it's pretty easy to reset the admin password.
issuing a kid free computer hardware as part of their education, telling them not to screw it up (and not to risk infecting the network that that their fellow students and staff rely upon)
They were iBooks, presumably running OS X (the link is slashdotted). Good luck getting an infection that screws up the network. If they were running 9 then the risk is even lower.
I work in a mixed facilty (PCs, macs, linux, suns) with thousands of people and computers. Most users can pick their own. When there's a new PC virus they announce it on the facility-wide PA system. The mac users then just sit and chuckle.
I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order
Yeah, you deserved a star for the day. It's depressing that teachers would suspend someone for something like that. So much for actually encouraging thought in schools...
Way back when I was in high school we had a computer lab with 4 Apple ][s and they had some BASIC programming classes. There were ~4 of us between the 2 sessions of class who had Apples at home and knew more about them than the teacher. He was very cool about it, and it didn't make him uncomfortable at all. Instead, if he got hung up on something he'd even ask one of us during the middle of his class (e.g. what's the poke to click the speaker).
Later they set me up with a summer job doing some programming for the district (which turned out to be amazingly trivial-- it took me about a day, and then a couple days to clean up formatting). It was in the main district computer office, and one day the first week the sysadmin sat me down and asked if I knew how GPAs were calculated, so I told him. Then he said "well that's more than I knew". Then he proceeded to say something to the effect of "We know you could probably hack some grades, please don't". I hadn't even thought about it, and didn't need to, but I thought that was pretty funny.
I've had vonage for a while, and most of the time it sounds way better than my landline (which I still have with minimum service, since cells don't work near my house).
The only time it's been choppy is when I used 4 way calling (I call family member who has 3-way, and then we each add another person) and two people try to talk at once. It's not as bad on 3-way, but I think that's because there are fewer times when both other people are trying to talk at once.
I went through a search for hosting several months ago and ended up going with hub.org in part because they didn't have a lot of hype.
What they do have is reasonably priced hosting where you can tell exactly what you're getting. There are several different setup options, and a continually updated list of all the software installed (down to the details of the perl modules), including version numbers. That was very appealing, given some of my experience wrestling with bunches of packages that aren't all updated at the same rates.
You also get unlimited domains, email addresses etc, and are charged by storage and bandwidth. As far as I can tell, the whole thing is run on open source software. Like the hosts in the parent post, you have to do a little work, because they don't do the whole pre-canned site/site builder thing.
I've only needed support a few times, and it's been pretty quick-- usually I send an email late in the evening and things are taken care of by morning (I have what used to be the lowest end package, and there are higher packages with quicker support).
They aren't the absolute cheapest, but I was about to sign up for one of those that someone had recommended, and then I got to the TOS, which were very long, and basically said "you can't actually do anything that would lead to using as much storage and bandwidth as we advertise". Hub doesn't offer as much storage, but they'll often install software on request in their layer, so it doesn't count againt your storage.
I only have a couple of sites, and they're relatively simple so far, but I've been pretty happy with the service.
You can't be on 10 teams, you can't report to 10 managers.
Unfortunately the OP could be reporting to 10 managers (or more). In a matrix organization (I work in one) you have a "line" manager, who owns you, and project managers who have money and hire you to do work. When the project is done, they "go out of business" and your line manager helps make sure there's more work in the pipeline. If I work on 2 projects, I have at least 3 bosses-- one line, and two project. If I worked on 10 projects I'd have 11 bosses.
In management classes they often teach that 10 (or even fewer, 5-7) is the maximum number of direct reports that even a good manager can handle effectively. And management is about getting other people to do the work.
If you're working on 10 projects at a time it means you may be reporting to multiple people (even if you're doing multiple projects for a couple different people), they may all want different reporting formats, they'll want to be meeting with you to get status of things, etc. The overhead of dealing with your customers can eat more a 40 hour work week before you've actually produced a single thing. You need to offload some of the work to other people (and then maybe manage them to make sure the work gets done).
All that said, I use a combination of simple things that work for me. - each project (or major element of a project) gets its own folder/directory. I leave these on sort by date. - every time I change a file (I don't write software-- I do system engineering for space things, and sometimes tech development)) I give it a new filename that includes the date (sort by date makes this redundant, but when sending files out it makes it clear to people which is most recent) - each project gets its own mailbox directory, with a filter to a general box, and specific filters for key people to put them into their own named boxes (people I report to get their own mailbox) - If I'm actually responsible for a lot of organization, I give a project a single excel notebook with a lot of sheets. Each meeting that happens regularly gets its own sheet for notes, there's a sheet for project requirements, sheet for contact information, sheet for schedule, sheets for trades, etc. excel isn't perfect, but it's flexible enough that it works. - I keep track of action items and things like that with electronic stickies (on my mac), and group them by project. Anal people freak when they see my desktop, but it works for me. My paper desktop is similar (but being phased out), and I can always find things quickly. - any request/issue/anything that I can resolve right when I see it (unless it's clearly worthy of ignoring) I respond to and pop it off the stack. One less thing to think about.
My company has actually been gradually developing some simple but useful (and useful primarily because they're so simple) web based tools for things like status reporting and action item tracking. It's not universal, but many project people have someone (the same someone) set up a web page that lets various people put in their status (and sends them email reminders), and then it emails it out.
first- the guy whose front wheel gets tagged is the one who goes down. Rule #1 in a pack is protect your front wheel. In years of close quarters road and track riding I've seen a few noobs go down when someone tagged their rear wheel, but it's rare. Skilled riders can often stay up after having someone hit their front wheel (it's not hard, but if you overreact you go down), but it's probably more common among trackies than roadies. I don't think I've ever seen someone go down from a rear wheel tag that didn't also take out the guy whose front wheel made contact. Deliberate crashing of people happens, but those guys race together every day and what goes around does come around, so it's not generally a well advised activity.
second- there are other races beside le Tour, and other countries, and other places people get tested. Most testing is done by national agencies, often in affiliation with WADA (which has it's own problems). Because pro cycling is international, testing is largely handled by the UCI (and includes out of competition testing). Athletes who win a lot get tested a lot. During the biggest Tour drug scandal it was the french police driving things as much as the sports agencies-- they were raiding rooms in the middle of the night.
At US national championships in track cycling last week, it looked like USADA was testing all the gold medalists plus others at random.
Yes, there is still drug use in cycling (and baseball, football, and the top level of nearly any sport), but there are also clean athletes at the top levels.
Yeah, I'll second that cycling is pretty heavily tested, though testing for EPO is still iffy, and they have an upper limit on hematocrit instead. US track cycling nationals were last week in here LA and there was a whole lot of testing going on there.
What's maybe more interesting is that I read recently (in the LA times maybe?) that softball, which is being dropped from the olympics, is one of the few sports that didn't have any positive drug tests in Athens.
Slashdot Mirror
My only choice to even be allowed to APPLY for a Masters was first to go back and do about 4-5 years of Continuing Education.
Find different schools or a different approach to applying. If there's not a mechanism for accepting your experience in lieu of "how do compilers work 101" then they're probably not that great a school. If they are good schools, but you're hearing that from them admissions office, you might also try approaching some faculty directly and talking to them a few times (over time) about going to grad school. Faculty can often pretty much grant anyone they want admission. You still have to go through the admissions process, but they pull your app out and accept it on the word of the faculty member who will be embarrassed if you suck.
Physics produces in the neighborhood of 1200-1500/year. It's on the decline lately.
m l
you can see some statistics (including production vs time) here: http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/emptrends.ht
Chemistry probably produces more, and Biology/Biochem even more than that.
A technical career was most certainly *not* a mistake for me. I'm doing fine, and most of the people I know with PhDs in physics are doing alright, too. Financially it's been pretty useful, and also as far as independence at work. The only real downside of the PhD is that it decreases mobility -- you can move around but it takes a lot longer, especially if you want something entertaining, but there are plenty of high paying jobs that are more engineering oriented.
I decided to bike to work years ago, rather than drive, because it seemed exhorbitantly expensive compared to the benefit. It turned out to leave me with plenty of disposable income, so I had pretty good savings when I started grad school. I was getting the same money as the other grad students, but managed to have a more comfortable lifestyle by sharing an apartment and not owning a car. Neither was a hardship-- it was more cost effective to rent a car once a month or so if I wanted to go on a long trip. I don't think I mentioned that this was in a place with fairly hostile weather, where it wasn't unusual to ride home in temperatures below minus 20 F. Put on a couple layers of clothes and it's actually warmer than getting in the car and waiting for it to warm up. There were also way too many times to count that I stopped on my bike to push other peoples' cars out of deep snow. The bike you can just lift and carry for a few feet.
I also never felt like it was any sort of hardship, no matter what the weather, then or now. Like I said earlier, it's a matter of attitude. If you think sitting in your car in traffic is stylin', then by all means, waste your time and money on it. Life is all about trades and decisions, including financial ones. Plenty of people with high incomes manage to still not afford their lifestyles because they imagine they should have more than they can afford, and I know plenty of people with low incomes who live within their means (by making various trades) and are quite comfortable.
. You talk about living a less expensive lifestyle, commuting to work in the rain on a bicycle or moped, etc. Ok, sounds great, so why bother with the expensive college education to have such a low standard of living? Why not just get a job working as a tradesman?
Sometimes it lets you increase your standard of living in other areas, or some people may not even see it as a low standard of living. I have an advanced degree and get paid pretty well, even for the expensive area where I live. I bike to work in the heat, rain, thunderstorms, at night, etc. I prefer it over driving (I own a fine car). I'd much rather be outside moving than sitting in the car.
It's as much a question of attitude as anything else, but it also leaves me with more disposable income than my peers (I also don't have to pay for things like health clubs-- it seems silly to exercise indoors in Southern CA unless the smog is really bad, which it usually isn't anymore, especially morning or evening.) As a grad student I shared an apartment (mostly with pleasant people) and was carless, and as a result could spend a lot more money making myself comfortable in other ways (e.g. good food).
I use SnapNames for this-- you only pay if you get the domain name, and you can have a standing order forever. They actually snagged me a name that I had been wanting and had been dormant for a while. I now have all my domains set up to get grabbed by SnapNames in the unlikely event that I manage to overlook all the expiration warnings and things. SnapNames uses a bunch of different registrars (I suspect depending on the responsiveness of their site at the instant the domain goes up for grabs).
.org name away from them, because they and Melbourne both pointed at each other as being responsible for providing the Auth code for the transfer. Melbourne was easy to get ahold of by email and phone, and tried to be helpful. Yahoo is a pain to get ahold of, but eventually it got transferred. Definitely avoid resellers (which yahoo is) and go directly with a primary registrar. Resellers just add a complication layer.
When SnapNames did get me a name, they registered it through BlueHill (who I hadn't heard of). A while later I decided to consolidate all my domains in one place, and BlueHill was actually the most responsive with the transfer request.
I had also made the mistake of registering some domains through Yahoo a long time ago-- a major pain to transfer the
Right now all my domains are with Godaddy (except for one with Netsol that I'll probably move away soon), but if they get difficult, BlueHill was responsive enough that I would try them.
There are plenty of common rules for integration, including various substitutions, many of which amount to educated guesses that a computer can make as well as a human.
I'm sure there are plenty of integrals that mathematica and maple can't handle. Go check out a copy of Gradshteyn and Ryzhik and try running a few through.
Put the filter at a 45 degree angle to the LOS and make it reflective in the IR and transmissive in the visible. The camera lens is then invisible to the sensor system because the IR is directed off to the side.
Not all OSS is high quality, far from it. And last but not least, not all of it is maintained on a decently regular basis.
I'm a relative newcomer to OSS, but I think that neither of these statements is a real problem with OSS.
first: Not all OSS is high quality.
That's certainly true, but not all closed source software is high quality either. A lot of fairly specialized stuff that's closed source is junk, too. (actually some pretty major stuff is junk, too, but I'll use a relatively specialized example) A friend of mine has had to wrestle a lot with electrophysiology software (to drive data acq hardware and analyze data) and a lot of the proprietary stuff is expensive and kludgy, and often you can't tell if the calculations it claims to be doing are grounded in reality. There are some open source alternatives, and although they may not have some of the features you want from the closed stuff, you can add the ones you need and know how they actually do the work . In science that you're publishing it's critical to know that the software isn't doing something wrong behind your back. OSS makes it easier to check and fix problems with the data acq and analysis software.
I've also had problems with closed source data acq software environments that force upgrades too frequently, and in such a way that if you want to make minor changes to something, or run it on a slightly later OS, you have to upgrade the whole thing (sometimes taking a lot of time and money), rather than be able to just upgrade the pieces of it that you want to use.
As for stuff that's not maintained: That's also a problem in the closed source world, and it's worse. If you have closed source legacy software that gets dropped you're SOL if you ever need to change anything (like maybe buy a new machine to run it on, because the old one died, but the program only runs under windows 3.1). You basically have to replace the whole thing.
For open source stuff that's not maintained it just goes dormant. I recently decided to start playing around with a subset of the open directory (dmoz.org), and rather than try to roll all my own software, spent a fair amount of time looking for stuff that I could start from. There are a fair number of closed source packages for manipulating the data, and a few open source ones, too. Possibly the best one I found was an open source perl module that hadn't been maintained in about 4 years (Catalog at Senga.org). It installed easily and pretty much ran out of the box (despite being designed for a much earlier version of mySQL). There were some things that needed fixing (e.g. compliance with the current dmoz acknowledgement statement) and it was relatively easy to do myself. I also can customize it to do whatever I need much more easily than trying to wrestle APIs on someone elses closed source package, and put the updated version back up for others to use and expand on.
My first thought from the parent post (the part you quoted) wasn't numerical solvers (approximators if you like), but programs like Maple and Mathematica, which can symbolically produce the same solutions that one normally associates with pencil and paper calculus. There have even been pocket calculators capable of some of this since at least the late 80s.
No floating point involved at all unless you want it to plug in some values at the end and pop out a number.
It sounds like you missed the Alan Sokal affair a few years back.
He basically pulled together a bunch of philosophical jargon, made some stuff up relating it to quantum mechanics, loaded it with red flags for anybody with a minimal knowledge of physics and had no trouble getting it published in the journal Social Text. He even wrote a book critical of philosophers misusing physics, and did it in french because he thought the worst culprits were francophone. You can read all about it here: Sokal affair
Of course, there are also scientists who could use a little refresher in math, too. One of my favorite papers is some psychiatrists who were inadvertantly testing the equivalence principle in a study on clozapine and weight gain. It was reported that clozapine causes weight gain, and they proposed that it might also cause an increase in body mass index (BMI). BMI is defined as: m/h^2, where m is weight in kilograms and h is height in meters. If you read the paper they weren't suggesting that clozapine affects your height. Abstract available here: Clozapine and Body Mass Change.
The amazing thing is that the reviewers didn't at least make them change the first two lines of the abstract.
Would a Kroger executive talk enthusiastically about your new "partnership" with them
But it would make a great story in the Onion...
"Kroger DEO David Dillon said that he was 'very pleased to have the opportunity to supply toothpaste and other oral hygiene products to Quarters, who is widely known for is impeccable white teeth and fresh breath.'"
Nope. Dealers tried this already and it's been through the courts. If they require you to use their services in order to remain under warrantee they have to provide the service as part of the purchase price.
And there's a long established aftermarket for maintaining cars once the warrantee runs out, probably with more than enough clout to keep automakers from compelling you to go to the dealer for service for the life of the car.
if you have two detectors a large distance apart, you effectively increase the aperture size to that large.
you get the angular resolution of the aperture that size, but you don't get the sensitivity unless you have the collecting area of the larger aperture. You also can't image very well unless you have enough propellant (or apertures) to fill in the uv plane.
What, exactly, do they need the publisher for? It's certainly not to publish.
For marketing, but most bands don't really get much marketing from their record label anyway, and then get dropped, often without the rights to their own music.
Getting CDs made is pretty easy, but it's a big capital expense-- a friend of mine (who's made a lot of CDs) once had one all set and then the band broke up, leaving her with ~800 CDs and no band to promote with them. I like CD Baby, but the CafePress idea that someone suggested isn't bad either-- CDs on demand (though they probably won't last as long as pressed CDs).
Skates (along with helmet, pads, etc.) can pretty much disappear into a backback or gym bag, especially low-cut 5 wheel speed skates, which are faster anyway. If it's a problem you just change before you get to the building and walk the last block or so.
I work at a fairly large company and there have always been at least a few execs who bike to work. But this is SoCal, where a newspaper column I read several years ago pointed out that you could be sitting in ratty cutoffs and a tank top at a sidewalk cafe and have someone walk up and ask if that's your Ferrari that's illegally parked (and have it likely be the case).
Well, for people like me at 42 degrees North latitude, late fall / all winter / early spring have two distinct problems:
It's pitch black during the morning and evening commutes
It's cold outside, with snow on the ground
I'm sorry, but when my body starts to freeze to a block of solid ice while cycling, it's time to put the bike away.
I live in SoCal now, but spent 6 years cycling to work year round in Minneapolis, and a year in Boston before that.
It's really not so bad biking in the cold (I still do it on vacation sometimes)-- you warm up faster on the bike than you do in a car that needs time for the heater to warm up. It's actually better in colder places, because dry snow and ice aren't as messy to ride in. When it's really cold (below 0 F) you just don't leave any exposed skin and it's alright.
There are also some really nice lights available these days-- 15-20 W is enough to see by up to ~25 mph, and if you're willing to spend some bucks there are the metal halide lights that can light up the road for a whole group of riders. Illuminite and Scotchlite are also not bad as supplemental reflectors-- they do wear out eventually, but they last a fairly long time and help your visibility.
If you just decide that it's normal to bike to work year round it's easy. It's generally more effort for me to drive to work (and not forget stuff that I'm supposed to bring) than it is to bike.
Yeah, I finally got a link to a non-/.ed article at CNN, and the parent of those 13 really ought to be starting campaigns now to displace the school board members and the DA, or even recall elections if there's a mechanism for them. That would get attention fast.
If the district can afford to hand out that many iBooks it's got to be fairly affluent, and if the parents have a clue and care, they'll apply financial and employment pressure in the right place against their elected officials who are threatening to damage their kids lives over something pretty lame.
I'd assume they'd WANT me to know the admin password if it was taped to the back of the laptop.
Exactly. It's not like they made any effort to secure the passwords.
Whoever set up the machines doesn't know anything about how to admin macs. There's no real need for them to even write down the admin passwords for the individual machines at all, because if you have possession of the mac and a set of OS X install CD's it's pretty easy to reset the admin password.
issuing a kid free computer hardware as part of their education, telling them not to screw it up (and not to risk infecting the network that that their fellow students and staff rely upon)
They were iBooks, presumably running OS X (the link is slashdotted). Good luck getting an infection that screws up the network. If they were running 9 then the risk is even lower.
I work in a mixed facilty (PCs, macs, linux, suns) with thousands of people and computers. Most users can pick their own. When there's a new PC virus they announce it on the facility-wide PA system. The mac users then just sit and chuckle.
Way overreaction on the part of the admins.
I can see that I deserved *something* for disobeying a direct order
Yeah, you deserved a star for the day. It's depressing that teachers would suspend someone for something like that. So much for actually encouraging thought in schools...
Way back when I was in high school we had a computer lab with 4 Apple ][s and they had some BASIC programming classes. There were ~4 of us between the 2 sessions of class who had Apples at home and knew more about them than the teacher. He was very cool about it, and it didn't make him uncomfortable at all. Instead, if he got hung up on something he'd even ask one of us during the middle of his class (e.g. what's the poke to click the speaker).
Later they set me up with a summer job doing some programming for the district (which turned out to be amazingly trivial-- it took me about a day, and then a couple days to clean up formatting). It was in the main district computer office, and one day the first week the sysadmin sat me down and asked if I knew how GPAs were calculated, so I told him. Then he said "well that's more than I knew". Then he proceeded to say something to the effect of "We know you could probably hack some grades, please don't". I hadn't even thought about it, and didn't need to, but I thought that was pretty funny.
I guess things have changed.
I've had vonage for a while, and most of the time it sounds way better than my landline (which I still have with minimum service, since cells don't work near my house).
The only time it's been choppy is when I used 4 way calling (I call family member who has 3-way, and then we each add another person) and two people try to talk at once. It's not as bad on 3-way, but I think that's because there are fewer times when both other people are trying to talk at once.
I went through a search for hosting several months ago and ended up going with hub.org in part because they didn't have a lot of hype.
What they do have is reasonably priced hosting where you can tell exactly what you're getting. There are several different setup options, and a continually updated list of all the software installed (down to the details of the perl modules), including version numbers. That was very appealing, given some of my experience wrestling with bunches of packages that aren't all updated at the same rates.
You also get unlimited domains, email addresses etc, and are charged by storage and bandwidth. As far as I can tell, the whole thing is run on open source software. Like the hosts in the parent post, you have to do a little work, because they don't do the whole pre-canned site/site builder thing.
I've only needed support a few times, and it's been pretty quick-- usually I send an email late in the evening and things are taken care of by morning (I have what used to be the lowest end package, and there are higher packages with quicker support).
They aren't the absolute cheapest, but I was about to sign up for one of those that someone had recommended, and then I got to the TOS, which were very long, and basically said "you can't actually do anything that would lead to using as much storage and bandwidth as we advertise". Hub doesn't offer as much storage, but they'll often install software on request in their layer, so it doesn't count againt your storage.
I only have a couple of sites, and they're relatively simple so far, but I've been pretty happy with the service.
You can't be on 10 teams, you can't report to 10 managers.
Unfortunately the OP could be reporting to 10 managers (or more). In a matrix organization (I work in one) you have a "line" manager, who owns you, and project managers who have money and hire you to do work. When the project is done, they "go out of business" and your line manager helps make sure there's more work in the pipeline. If I work on 2 projects, I have at least 3 bosses-- one line, and two project. If I worked on 10 projects I'd have 11 bosses.
In management classes they often teach that 10 (or even fewer, 5-7) is the maximum number of direct reports that even a good manager can handle effectively. And management is about getting other people to do the work.
If you're working on 10 projects at a time it means you may be reporting to multiple people (even if you're doing multiple projects for a couple different people), they may all want different reporting formats, they'll want to be meeting with you to get status of things, etc. The overhead of dealing with your customers can eat more a 40 hour work week before you've actually produced a single thing. You need to offload some of the work to other people (and then maybe manage them to make sure the work gets done).
All that said, I use a combination of simple things that work for me.
- each project (or major element of a project) gets its own folder/directory. I leave these on sort by date.
- every time I change a file (I don't write software-- I do system engineering for space things, and sometimes tech development)) I give it a new filename that includes the date (sort by date makes this redundant, but when sending files out it makes it clear to people which is most recent)
- each project gets its own mailbox directory, with a filter to a general box, and specific filters for key people to put them into their own named boxes (people I report to get their own mailbox)
- If I'm actually responsible for a lot of organization, I give a project a single excel notebook with a lot of sheets. Each meeting that happens regularly gets its own sheet for notes, there's a sheet for project requirements, sheet for contact information, sheet for schedule, sheets for trades, etc. excel isn't perfect, but it's flexible enough that it works.
- I keep track of action items and things like that with electronic stickies (on my mac), and group them by project. Anal people freak when they see my desktop, but it works for me. My paper desktop is similar (but being phased out), and I can always find things quickly.
- any request/issue/anything that I can resolve right when I see it (unless it's clearly worthy of ignoring) I respond to and pop it off the stack. One less thing to think about.
My company has actually been gradually developing some simple but useful (and useful primarily because they're so simple) web based tools for things like status reporting and action item tracking. It's not universal, but many project people have someone (the same someone) set up a web page that lets various people put in their status (and sends them email reminders), and then it emails it out.
bs all around
first- the guy whose front wheel gets tagged is the one who goes down. Rule #1 in a pack is protect your front wheel. In years of close quarters road and track riding I've seen a few noobs go down when someone tagged their rear wheel, but it's rare. Skilled riders can often stay up after having someone hit their front wheel (it's not hard, but if you overreact you go down), but it's probably more common among trackies than roadies. I don't think I've ever seen someone go down from a rear wheel tag that didn't also take out the guy whose front wheel made contact. Deliberate crashing of people happens, but those guys race together every day and what goes around does come around, so it's not generally a well advised activity.
second- there are other races beside le Tour, and other countries, and other places people get tested. Most testing is done by national agencies, often in affiliation with WADA (which has it's own problems). Because pro cycling is international, testing is largely handled by the UCI (and includes out of competition testing). Athletes who win a lot get tested a lot. During the biggest Tour drug scandal it was the french police driving things as much as the sports agencies-- they were raiding rooms in the middle of the night.
At US national championships in track cycling last week, it looked like USADA was testing all the gold medalists plus others at random.
Yes, there is still drug use in cycling (and baseball, football, and the top level of nearly any sport), but there are also clean athletes at the top levels.
Yeah, I'll second that cycling is pretty heavily tested, though testing for EPO is still iffy, and they have an upper limit on hematocrit instead. US track cycling nationals were last week in here LA and there was a whole lot of testing going on there.
What's maybe more interesting is that I read recently (in the LA times maybe?) that softball, which is being dropped from the olympics, is one of the few sports that didn't have any positive drug tests in Athens.