So the kilogram based on an H2O standard would not change (much) depending on the current atmospheric pressure.
You're just the kind of guy employee that is so highly wanted at an institute for standards!;) Of course you are right, variations are small, but if the goal of the project is to get an ultra-precise definition of the KG, these variations are huge. Not to mention the fact that the water needs to have a precisely defined purity, content of gas(es), etc. etc..
Didn't know that! Well, be it Asus or Xandros, I find that they did a very good job here! Out of the EEE box, everything "just works". I never had so little problems with video and sound formats as on the EEE. If they only could sign a deal with Apple to get quicktime working flawlessly as well;)
Wow, did slashdot find a new "vi vs. emacs" argument? Damn, now I have to find an unfounded opinion on this "labels vs. folders" thing to make sure I'm in the next time we start this discussion.
Actually, since I started using e-mail in about 1995, I keep all mails in the main inbox and search either by ctrl-W in pine or with a grep on the mbox:p This works as long as you switch mail providers every now and then and don't take along the 10.000 e-mails from your previous account to your new account.
disregarding the issue if infoworld editors are getting paid in some way for writing positive articles, I just checked the site to see if maybe I would be prejudiced about infoworld's quality.
Guess what, browsing to infoworld.com opens a page with *just one single huge dell ad*, and a link "skip this ad". Sorry, I do not take any site seriously that has to resort to those tactics. I even stopped going to the Onion when they started that, and that site wasn't serious to begin with;)
The layout of the infoworld.com site seems to be inspired by that of english tabloid thesun.co.uk, a huge amount of "information" and useless links, combined with an absence of a clear structure.
I can't say if maybe the articles are of good quality, because it's hard to keep interest in a site that looks like that.
I also often find that the people who are sticking close behind while driving are not speeding or in a hurry, as they don't pass when I make way, instead they are just using the one in front to keep their car sort of in line while doing something else. I'd rather have some idiot speeding but concentrating behind me.
I understand your point, really, you lose that part of editor functionality. But you also gain the added insight in your code that you can see very quickly and with 100% confidence at what level of indentation a piece of code is.
Therefore, in practice, I have found the indentation issue not to be a problem. In my eyes, python's main issue are the messages at program crashes. They are uninformative, and sometimes even missing. That and several other factors seem to indicate some remaining immaturity of the code parser, but for the rest, python really is a fast and effective way to program in OO. I see it as a kind of perl for OO problems. (I know that perl has OO, but it's never as integrated as in python). There are many things that can be solved with perl, and there many things you shouldn't even try with perl. Same goes for python.
Maybe we should protest only in the properly marked official protest spaces?
Good thing the US is already training their citizens to think this way by inventing the "free speech zones". If someone in, say, the 80s would have told us this would happen, would anyone have believed it?
True for master thesis work, but for introductory courses that doesn't really hold up. You have to start with the simple stuff, no way to avoid that. Students that try to avoid doing the simple work will just shoot them self in the foot at a later stage, maybe too late to recover the damage. Happened at my Pharmacy faculty, where teams of two could work together at least up onto the 5th year, after which they had to do final exams individually. The couples where one weak student had relied on the better one all those five years would be in deep shit.
Depending on the local geography and city spread, creating a decent laptop-friendly train network might be a solution. I live in Germany and they are currently building a wi-fi network on the high speed train tracks. I don't use it yet because I find it a bit too expensive and I don't mind being off-line for a while. I do use their power plugs (one for every two seats) and manage to do quite a bit of work on the train. During rush hour, you will see A LOT of people using their laptops, writing letters, doing excel stuff, or just watching a movie. And you actually arrive at work / home again in a relaxed shape. At the moment, for every place where I have to go alone, the train is actually just as expensive as the cost of gas when going by car.
I understand that the US has a bit different network of cities and more spread housing (suburbs. etc), so switching might be problematic, but I think that the harsh reality of oil and energy prices will catch up with this and it a better public transport system will be necessary.
Sorry, non-native speaker here, but what is a DM? answer.com suggests: Dungeon Master, Doctor of Medicine, Dangermouse, Depeche Mode, Dennis Miller, and several others. Which one is it?
It already happens: I quite often see the self-signed certificate warning when big companies (Deutsche Post, for example), have been restructuring their website and something that was on deutschepost.de went to post.de, for example. I even wrote them about it, but of course no answer or change. In the end, people don't really read the warning anyway:/
gmx not, web.de does, just search for web.de and "abzockerei";) I have personal experience with this stuff, web.de is really trying to earn money in very unethical ways.
Just one of the many examples, I guess about a hundred people on this page alone:http://www.teltarif.de/forum/x-internet/2145-1.html BTW, just ignoring the Mahnung is the best solution there. They will not bring it to court, as there will be evidence enough that the trap people in pressing the wron button, which happens to end up in electronically ordering a contract and accepting the AGB.
I read the gmail.de site, and don't really think that his all-in-one solution is very convenient, but well, who am I to judge. As far as I know you normally don't send a copy of your pass to get an e-mail account, didn't have to do that to get my DSL, to register a domain name, nor to get an account at online stores in Germany. For mobile phones you need to give the number, and when registering at a bank. But maybe I missed out on something here.
I figure you didn't pay much attention to the "meaningless statistics class" either. There is a realistic chance on a measurement with an outcome far from the center of the gauss curve of your data. There are simple algorithms to remove the measurements that are too far off. Or you want to do several thousand measurements during your chemistry lab;)
I ment: "after which they start to bill you". Though "ill" is sort of fitting. web.de works a bit like the RIAA, they try to get money from you, wave around with their contract clause, and just hope no-one lets it go to their attorney, because in fact they have no real grounds to stand on.
While I'm glad for the guy getting his justice done, I'm not sure if there's any winner here. I know many people who use gmail in Germany, but a lot of them are not Germans. Most likely google, using gmail.com or googlemail.com will not get a big userbase anyway, just because of not being originally german. Popular free e-mail accounts here are the german-based gmx.de and the german-based web.de, who are real ripoffs by uninvitedly switching your account to the "Gold" account, after which they start to ill you. Despite them being such assholes, they remain popular, just because people are used to it since the early days of free e-mail.
Google could have gotten additional users out here if they would have gmail.de, how many more users compared to googlemail.de we will never know. But the biggest downside is the brand confusion: googlemail, gmail, what is what? The german owner of gmail.de will also not be helped much by this, because there will be two kinds of people: the ones that have never heard of gmail.de and live a happy live never finding out. And the ones that know that gmail is a google product and don't want to confuse others, or don't want to risk having their mail at a small provider
Interesting point: To register at gmail.de you have to send a copy of your identity pass, I kid you not. And if I understand correctly, only e-mails within gmail.de users are allowed. crazy
I guess so, because in Germany it is very easy to find mobile phones without a camera still. I just bought a 20 euro prepaid one from nokia. They even sell the e-ink motorola mobile phone out here, but I must say that is unfortunately crappy, especially since writing an SMS is hell, or going through any kind of menu structure by ticking in codes that resemble advanced vi;)
I am a bit sad, though, that they do put in a radio in mine, instead of something more useful like bluetooth. I guess radios are dead cheap.
If an instructor gives assignments that can't be possibly done thoroughly until its deadline, they shouldn't complain to students using Wikipedia. Actually I know that in linguistics they often don't complain when the main goal the of essay assignment is to create a correct style the essay, not so much a correct content.
It depends on the type of research, if it's a chemistry assignment and the library has access to many online journals, it won't be a problem to get all sources in a day. If it's an assignment on the eating habits of the citizens of Middle-Egypt in the 16th century, it will take at least several weeks to obtain two obscure books that actually fit the subject.
and the burden for making whole systems has shifted more to the customer.
Yes, exactly. In science, this is a problem, because even though most scientist are at least proficient in programming (albeit not always adhering to clean coding practices), there are few that know MPI or have the time or will to learn it. In fact, I'm a bit worried. MPI is improving in a much slower rate than compute nodes are getting multicore.
This means that even though the optimal application from Linpack will keep showing increased performence for newer multicore systems, the actual speed of use for most scientists will not grow along with it. What we need are a lot of people working on a way to hide the message passing and load balancing mechanisms etc. for programmers. There doesn't seem to be a lot of focus on it at the moment, most likely because intel can still market their multicore processors without problems.
Really, who came up with the idea to ask an editor, and not a datacenter architect, to build this? Why did he get carte blanche to spend 400.000, no questions asked? Recently there was an article on slashdot that datacenter architects are in high demand, but this strikes me as being ridiculous.
Ok, I believe you that you are happy, it sounds good until now. But what if macrovision gets taken over? And the database "accidentally" renewed without backup?
I can't see how you are already working on your PhD and still making these sorts of questions
I can.
To all the "do your own work" flamers out here: More often than not, PhD projects are based on vague ideas or old projects that were left lying around by the professor because it is too risky to put an expensive PostDoc on it. What your PhD is all about is filtering out the bad ideas from your Prof and do your best to get something consistent that you can write up in a solid thesis. Really, even if you come with your own ideas to apply for a PhD, by the time that your work as a PhD starts you will find out that instead of working on your idea, you're first supposed to end some work that has been left by the previous PhD. You get my point.
Then, consider that any PhD subject can be approached from many different ways, and to work out a single approach will take at least a year. My PhD was on computational modeling of biomolecules, and trust me, by just reading the literature you still won't get an idea of the kind of problems an experimentalist faces. Talking to people that have been around longer is really smart, and helps not waste your time on irrelevant details.
Besides, just imagine that the poster ends up working in your firm as a contractor, being a fresh fancy PhD from Tufts and all. Would you like someone who tries to figure out everything by his own, or asks around at the workers in the field first to see what the issues are.
What I've noticed about being a scientist, is that in many cases the ability to ask questions is the most valuable skill you can have. If you know how to ask the correct question you are already halfway to the answer. Besides, what is a scientist that doesn't ask questions good for?
Heh, when I started my PhD 5 years ago I had a compaq alpha for a desktop PC with tru64, and I was all but pleased. Maybe it was a fast machine for memory-intensive work, but I just needed a fast CPU for MD and of course being able to do desktop work (mastering the "Common Desktop Environment" in the mean time, yay) Listening to an MP3 at work was out of the question, Tru64's "Multimedia" capabilities were somewhat limited to playing a CD or UA soundfiles. Apparently there are Lame binaries even for tru64, but I can't imagine that I didn't try it:)
Incidentally I am also a lot better at what I do now then I ever was at physics as well.
I can imagine what you mean here! A very helpful answer. I recently realized that helping someone out with their tech problem gives me a lot more personal satisfaction than inventing ad-hoc simulation tricks of which I can hardly persuade myself that they make physical sense, but still can be published. And since most of my waking life is spent at work, I sure as hell should do the work I enjoy most:)
Slashdot Mirror
So the kilogram based on an H2O standard would not change (much) depending on the current atmospheric pressure.
You're just the kind of guy employee that is so highly wanted at an institute for standards! ;) Of course you are right, variations are small, but if the goal of the project is to get an ultra-precise definition of the KG, these variations are huge. Not to mention the fact that the water needs to have a precisely defined purity, content of gas(es), etc. etc..
so the kg will change depending on the current atmospheric pressure?
Didn't know that! Well, be it Asus or Xandros, I find that they did a very good job here! Out of the EEE box, everything "just works". I never had so little problems with video and sound formats as on the EEE. If they only could sign a deal with Apple to get quicktime working flawlessly as well ;)
Actually, since I started using e-mail in about 1995, I keep all mails in the main inbox and search either by ctrl-W in pine or with a grep on the mbox :p This works as long as you switch mail providers every now and then and don't take along the 10.000 e-mails from your previous account to your new account.
Guess what, browsing to infoworld.com opens a page with *just one single huge dell ad*, and a link "skip this ad". Sorry, I do not take any site seriously that has to resort to those tactics. I even stopped going to the Onion when they started that, and that site wasn't serious to begin with ;)
The layout of the infoworld.com site seems to be inspired by that of english tabloid thesun.co.uk, a huge amount of "information" and useless links, combined with an absence of a clear structure.
I can't say if maybe the articles are of good quality, because it's hard to keep interest in a site that looks like that.
I also often find that the people who are sticking close behind while driving are not speeding or in a hurry, as they don't pass when I make way, instead they are just using the one in front to keep their car sort of in line while doing something else. I'd rather have some idiot speeding but concentrating behind me.
Strangely enough the reply box is as narrow as your text BTW. Not that it's bad, it parses perfectly readable on my 1st generation eee ;)
Therefore, in practice, I have found the indentation issue not to be a problem. In my eyes, python's main issue are the messages at program crashes. They are uninformative, and sometimes even missing. That and several other factors seem to indicate some remaining immaturity of the code parser, but for the rest, python really is a fast and effective way to program in OO. I see it as a kind of perl for OO problems. (I know that perl has OO, but it's never as integrated as in python). There are many things that can be solved with perl, and there many things you shouldn't even try with perl. Same goes for python.
Good thing the US is already training their citizens to think this way by inventing the "free speech zones". If someone in, say, the 80s would have told us this would happen, would anyone have believed it?
True for master thesis work, but for introductory courses that doesn't really hold up. You have to start with the simple stuff, no way to avoid that. Students that try to avoid doing the simple work will just shoot them self in the foot at a later stage, maybe too late to recover the damage. Happened at my Pharmacy faculty, where teams of two could work together at least up onto the 5th year, after which they had to do final exams individually. The couples where one weak student had relied on the better one all those five years would be in deep shit.
Ah, but what is worse then? Wasting time playing Role Playing Games or playing WoW? :p IMHO, either way, he has a problem ;)
I understand that the US has a bit different network of cities and more spread housing (suburbs. etc), so switching might be problematic, but I think that the harsh reality of oil and energy prices will catch up with this and it a better public transport system will be necessary.
Sorry, non-native speaker here, but what is a DM? answer.com suggests: Dungeon Master, Doctor of Medicine, Dangermouse, Depeche Mode, Dennis Miller, and several others. Which one is it?
It already happens: I quite often see the self-signed certificate warning when big companies (Deutsche Post, for example), have been restructuring their website and something that was on deutschepost.de went to post.de, for example. I even wrote them about it, but of course no answer or change. In the end, people don't really read the warning anyway :/
Just one of the many examples, I guess about a hundred people on this page alone:http://www.teltarif.de/forum/x-internet/2145-1.html BTW, just ignoring the Mahnung is the best solution there. They will not bring it to court, as there will be evidence enough that the trap people in pressing the wron button, which happens to end up in electronically ordering a contract and accepting the AGB.
I read the gmail.de site, and don't really think that his all-in-one solution is very convenient, but well, who am I to judge. As far as I know you normally don't send a copy of your pass to get an e-mail account, didn't have to do that to get my DSL, to register a domain name, nor to get an account at online stores in Germany. For mobile phones you need to give the number, and when registering at a bank. But maybe I missed out on something here.
I figure you didn't pay much attention to the "meaningless statistics class" either. There is a realistic chance on a measurement with an outcome far from the center of the gauss curve of your data. There are simple algorithms to remove the measurements that are too far off. Or you want to do several thousand measurements during your chemistry lab ;)
I ment: "after which they start to bill you". Though "ill" is sort of fitting. web.de works a bit like the RIAA, they try to get money from you, wave around with their contract clause, and just hope no-one lets it go to their attorney, because in fact they have no real grounds to stand on.
Google could have gotten additional users out here if they would have gmail.de, how many more users compared to googlemail.de we will never know. But the biggest downside is the brand confusion: googlemail, gmail, what is what? The german owner of gmail.de will also not be helped much by this, because there will be two kinds of people: the ones that have never heard of gmail.de and live a happy live never finding out. And the ones that know that gmail is a google product and don't want to confuse others, or don't want to risk having their mail at a small provider
Interesting point: To register at gmail.de you have to send a copy of your identity pass, I kid you not. And if I understand correctly, only e-mails within gmail.de users are allowed. crazy
I am a bit sad, though, that they do put in a radio in mine, instead of something more useful like bluetooth. I guess radios are dead cheap.
It depends on the type of research, if it's a chemistry assignment and the library has access to many online journals, it won't be a problem to get all sources in a day. If it's an assignment on the eating habits of the citizens of Middle-Egypt in the 16th century, it will take at least several weeks to obtain two obscure books that actually fit the subject.
Yes, exactly. In science, this is a problem, because even though most scientist are at least proficient in programming (albeit not always adhering to clean coding practices), there are few that know MPI or have the time or will to learn it. In fact, I'm a bit worried. MPI is improving in a much slower rate than compute nodes are getting multicore.
This means that even though the optimal application from Linpack will keep showing increased performence for newer multicore systems, the actual speed of use for most scientists will not grow along with it. What we need are a lot of people working on a way to hide the message passing and load balancing mechanisms etc. for programmers. There doesn't seem to be a lot of focus on it at the moment, most likely because intel can still market their multicore processors without problems.
Really, who came up with the idea to ask an editor, and not a datacenter architect, to build this? Why did he get carte blanche to spend 400.000, no questions asked? Recently there was an article on slashdot that datacenter architects are in high demand, but this strikes me as being ridiculous.
Ok, I believe you that you are happy, it sounds good until now. But what if macrovision gets taken over? And the database "accidentally" renewed without backup?
I can.
To all the "do your own work" flamers out here: More often than not, PhD projects are based on vague ideas or old projects that were left lying around by the professor because it is too risky to put an expensive PostDoc on it. What your PhD is all about is filtering out the bad ideas from your Prof and do your best to get something consistent that you can write up in a solid thesis. Really, even if you come with your own ideas to apply for a PhD, by the time that your work as a PhD starts you will find out that instead of working on your idea, you're first supposed to end some work that has been left by the previous PhD. You get my point.
Then, consider that any PhD subject can be approached from many different ways, and to work out a single approach will take at least a year. My PhD was on computational modeling of biomolecules, and trust me, by just reading the literature you still won't get an idea of the kind of problems an experimentalist faces. Talking to people that have been around longer is really smart, and helps not waste your time on irrelevant details.
Besides, just imagine that the poster ends up working in your firm as a contractor, being a fresh fancy PhD from Tufts and all. Would you like someone who tries to figure out everything by his own, or asks around at the workers in the field first to see what the issues are.
What I've noticed about being a scientist, is that in many cases the ability to ask questions is the most valuable skill you can have. If you know how to ask the correct question you are already halfway to the answer. Besides, what is a scientist that doesn't ask questions good for?
Incidentally I am also a lot better at what I do now then I ever was at physics as well. :)
I can imagine what you mean here! A very helpful answer. I recently realized that helping someone out with their tech problem gives me a lot more personal satisfaction than inventing ad-hoc simulation tricks of which I can hardly persuade myself that they make physical sense, but still can be published. And since most of my waking life is spent at work, I sure as hell should do the work I enjoy most