I am all in favor of this, as it allows people outside scientific communities to join in with a low barrier (that is, if you happen to be a math wizard). But is, and if so, how is he going to ensure that the right people will be mentioned as co-authors in the paper?
Commenting on the German system: Not really sure what you mean with state-sponsored, but at least it's very well regulated by the state, and a license nowadays will set you back about 1000 euro, also depending on your talent, quick learners would need less lessons. Training under daylight and in dark conditions is obligatory, as is a course in first aid! There is now a point system: You lose points on major traffic violations (not on incorrect parking or speeding 20 kmh too fast), where in the worst case you need to redo the exam to regain your license. Or, if you are just a few points behind, you can follow sessions on responsible driving etc.
All in all it's serious business, and you see that it works. The autobahn really is amazing, many responsible drivers, which makes it possible to speed. The lack of speed enforcement in most areas probably makes for more safer driving altogether, as you pay more attention to traffic around you than to your speedometer.
As a comparison, let me mention Holland, where speed enforcement is ridiculous: first of all passing the car before you takes a lot of time, as you can go only 125 kmh, and the guy in front of you travels 119 kmh or so. This means that for a lot of time, the car that passes is in the dead angle of the other guy's mirrors. Secondly, you end up being completely tensed on constantly checking your speed.
My direct experience in northern Europe, is that it's pretty ok to work at the university or as a teacher. You will not be able to drive the newest BMWs or some expensive flat, but you'll be able to lead a pretty comfortable life (and have some quality of life as well*). It's a bit worse in southern Europe, but that sort of scales with the average salary I suppose. Most difficult part is to get steady positions as a university scientist, that difference with a "real job" falls away in an unsteady economy where everybody has problems.
Other difference is that, no matter how good you are, you will always get the standard pay. This used to bother me, as it doesn't give much incentive to improve, but I changed my mind, also because the current crisis shows that the quality of your work and your payment is absolutely uncorrelated everywhere you look. I'd rather have pleasure from my moderately paid job than have to accept that the director of my company screwed up totally, annihilated several thousands of jobs, including mine, and still gets away with a several million euro bonus.
News flash big business: if you spend 10x as long, and 10x as much money as anyone else in that industry would on creating a product, it is not society's responsibility to compensate you. You deserve to lose money, and probably deserve to go out of business over the project.
Actually, checking the news recently it seems that the opposite is true. If you manage to fuck up just big enough, you can ask for a government bailout and get it. All this with the reasoning that otherwise, jobs will be lost. I wonder how long those "saved" jobs will last, considering that the company was apparently stupid enough to not foresee the current financial situation. The interesting thing is, if you as a company have been thinking forward, and are now doing well, and could well create many more jobs because your product/service is sound, you won't get a penny. we're lost.
A music video is a promotional video: it's a commercial to get you to buy music from the artist. Making it non-free is shooting yourself in the foot. Current state of things, since a couple of days: youtube removes the sound of many songs due to "MVG copyrights" or whatever. The best thing of this is that it stimulates people to use other channels to get their media, not channels as regulated as youtube.
'On February 9, 2007, Timbaland commented on the issue as follows in an MTV interview:"It makes me laugh. The part I don't understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don't know him from a can of paint. I'm 15 years deep. That's how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, 'You can't be serious.'"'
Yes, I remember the days when it was called a "promotional video". But it is just that. Who buys just the music video, except some 13 year-olds. The product is the artist and his music, the video is a bloody advertisement for it.... Having people pay for advertisement might sound genius, but it will end up in less people seeing your advertisement.
Or you spend a tenth of that and buy a netbook. The machine is smaller, which makes case and screen inherently more stable. If it has SSD you have no problems with your data, and it doesn't have a fragile dvd drive. I dropped my eee from the table several times, without any problems, not even small cracks in the case. Colleague dropped his from two stories high, that did kill the screen, machine itself was probably still intact. You might find some cool tests involving dropping and cars done with the first eee on youtube.
Washing machines also don't have shells, though still using a functional computer, and you get things done with it: washing your laundry. On a Windows system that has no advanced shell, I still get things done, like making powerpoint presentations. On a system with a high-quality shell, like linux, I can basically automate anything a computer can do. That is a lot. Not good for doing your laundry, though.
The judgment indeed leaves for wiggleroom. They did not ban e-voting per se, instead they required the collecting and the counting of the voting to be transparent to the population, in accordance to the constitution. Interesting question is, how e-voting can have transparent counting, open source code for the machine comes to mind.
I see that as a good thing, netbooks end up being quite thick, just look at the new Classmate, and that's not very good for ergonomics. At least my dell mini has a bit of a tilt, lowering the angle my hands have to make when typing, but an ultra-flat keyboard like in this construction could be even better. I do expect some difference between reality, and what is now presented as a render and estimated price. Still, the idea is so cool, I'd buy it if it manages to stay below 500 euro.
I was there when there was free webspace and free urls by "big names" around 95. I forgot the names(!), but I do remember how I had to fight pop-ups that were introduced along the way, or urls that were impossible to use after a year, because they were not your property. I lost several webpages in cyberspace there.
So I have now my own, paid, virtual server for my url, pages, my e-mail that are not mailing lists, etc. That is still not the holy grail, though: my virtual server provider, one of the bigger ones in europe, managed to get my server down last month for about 24 hours. At least I could speak someone on the telephone about it who could confirm it, but they were not likely to speed it up, or pay me back for the lost service. (even though it could be fast, just load the virtual images on another batch of machines, and reroute the internal ip traffic).
Hmm, we will see this soon enough. Due to netbooks there are now a large amount of users with extensive SSD usage, many read-writes. There is no swap, and cache of the browser should be turned of by default, but I already noticed that if my RAM gets full, the eee would write to my harddisk at a high rate.
In practice, if the write operations on the SSD would slowly descrease below a useful level, I would just swap the current SSD disk in my Dell mini, by that time the price, performance and storage would be so much better that I'd probably it anyway.
Ok, had it twice today. Since it is at work, I have no root account to switch to. In practice, NFS hangs and all PCs are unresponsive for the next 5 minutes. Which is crazy, often it is even because of an NFS disk that was not actively being used. Thanks for your solutions to when it happens, but my reasoning is, it shouldn't even happen in the first place. There is no reason that xorg should stop responding just because an application using it is going bezerk.
I'm a 3G (HSDPA(UMTS) customer in Germany. There has been a run on 3G lately, largely due to O2/Tchibo offering prepaid 3G sticks with 10GB/month for 25 eur.
This popularity has severe consequences! While the first few months were still ok, having about 70 kB/s on average, I'm currently glad if I get 10. At unholy hours in the night it can get to above 200 kB/s, so it's very likely an overload of their capacity that is holding everyone back.
I couldn't care less if I had 3G or 4G if there is only be a capacity to give me 1/100th of the maximum bandwith. I don't use internet underway as much anyway, so if O2* will not promise to resolve this with priority, I'll have to get back to DSL for my internet connection. Hopes are not high, it's more likely to get worse: as far as I understood they cut down some roaming contracts which effectively decreased the available bandwith again.
If anyone has some good suggestions on how to put some pressure to the providers, I'm all open for it.
* Competition seems to have the same problems with their 3G networks.
Katrina, for example. Still wondering if help wouldn't have been more efficient and fast if the people there were rich, influential. Top Gear went there a year after and it still looked like a war zone. Not as if the US doesn't have any money, there's apparently enough to bail out some high-salaried bankers, it's just that the investments are disproportionate to the poor.
well, but your macbook was way more expensive. To me, anything more expensive than 400 EUR and heavier than 1 kg is not a netbook anymore. That is what will keep me from buying a netbook tablet for a while, heavy and expensive.
My number one reason to choose a real netbook. 2 pounds is the maximum weight. I can put it on a small bag and don't even notice I'm carrying it around. Every now and then I have the thinkpad from work, it's like a punishment to carry it, even just small distances + you need an additional bag that you can forget or have stolen.
Indeed. Running Ubuntu now, every now and then I get the update list, but it's not like I'll select only part of the updates. Not sure if that is even practically possible. So also there, you either decide not to update (or do it manually for everything, but then you might as well switch to gentoo, as far as the amount of work is concerned), or to automatically update everything.
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I am all in favor of this, as it allows people outside scientific communities to join in with a low barrier (that is, if you happen to be a math wizard). But is, and if so, how is he going to ensure that the right people will be mentioned as co-authors in the paper?
All in all it's serious business, and you see that it works. The autobahn really is amazing, many responsible drivers, which makes it possible to speed. The lack of speed enforcement in most areas probably makes for more safer driving altogether, as you pay more attention to traffic around you than to your speedometer.
As a comparison, let me mention Holland, where speed enforcement is ridiculous: first of all passing the car before you takes a lot of time, as you can go only 125 kmh, and the guy in front of you travels 119 kmh or so. This means that for a lot of time, the car that passes is in the dead angle of the other guy's mirrors. Secondly, you end up being completely tensed on constantly checking your speed.
Other difference is that, no matter how good you are, you will always get the standard pay. This used to bother me, as it doesn't give much incentive to improve, but I changed my mind, also because the current crisis shows that the quality of your work and your payment is absolutely uncorrelated everywhere you look. I'd rather have pleasure from my moderately paid job than have to accept that the director of my company screwed up totally, annihilated several thousands of jobs, including mine, and still gets away with a several million euro bonus.
* For the US, this does not count during tenure :p
News flash big business: if you spend 10x as long, and 10x as much money as anyone else in that industry would on creating a product, it is not society's responsibility to compensate you. You deserve to lose money, and probably deserve to go out of business over the project.
Actually, checking the news recently it seems that the opposite is true. If you manage to fuck up just big enough, you can ask for a government bailout and get it. All this with the reasoning that otherwise, jobs will be lost. I wonder how long those "saved" jobs will last, considering that the company was apparently stupid enough to not foresee the current financial situation. The interesting thing is, if you as a company have been thinking forward, and are now doing well, and could well create many more jobs because your product/service is sound, you won't get a penny. we're lost.
well sorry, but that's what you get for reading backslashdot...
A music video is a promotional video: it's a commercial to get you to buy music from the artist. Making it non-free is shooting yourself in the foot. Current state of things, since a couple of days: youtube removes the sound of many songs due to "MVG copyrights" or whatever. The best thing of this is that it stimulates people to use other channels to get their media, not channels as regulated as youtube.
'On February 9, 2007, Timbaland commented on the issue as follows in an MTV interview:"It makes me laugh. The part I don't understand, the dude is trying to act like I went to his house and took it from his computer. I don't know him from a can of paint. I'm 15 years deep. That's how you attack a king? You attack moi? Come on, man. You got to come correct. You the laughing stock. People are like, 'You can't be serious.'"'
yeah man, let's start straight away!!!!
oh, before we start, did you already see that picture of the kitten with the funny face? Let me look it up for you!
Yes, I remember the days when it was called a "promotional video". But it is just that. Who buys just the music video, except some 13 year-olds. The product is the artist and his music, the video is a bloody advertisement for it.... Having people pay for advertisement might sound genius, but it will end up in less people seeing your advertisement.
Or you spend a tenth of that and buy a netbook. The machine is smaller, which makes case and screen inherently more stable. If it has SSD you have no problems with your data, and it doesn't have a fragile dvd drive. I dropped my eee from the table several times, without any problems, not even small cracks in the case. Colleague dropped his from two stories high, that did kill the screen, machine itself was probably still intact. You might find some cool tests involving dropping and cars done with the first eee on youtube.
I find disabling flash in linux to be one of the easier tasks. Just try to update it once, and it will stop working forever :(
Washing machines also don't have shells, though still using a functional computer, and you get things done with it: washing your laundry. On a Windows system that has no advanced shell, I still get things done, like making powerpoint presentations. On a system with a high-quality shell, like linux, I can basically automate anything a computer can do. That is a lot. Not good for doing your laundry, though.
a bit unrelated, but wth: when installing raised floors, take care of what they were made of, whiskers from the metal could wreck your hardware.
The judgment indeed leaves for wiggleroom. They did not ban e-voting per se, instead they required the collecting and the counting of the voting to be transparent to the population, in accordance to the constitution. Interesting question is, how e-voting can have transparent counting, open source code for the machine comes to mind.
I see that as a good thing, netbooks end up being quite thick, just look at the new Classmate, and that's not very good for ergonomics. At least my dell mini has a bit of a tilt, lowering the angle my hands have to make when typing, but an ultra-flat keyboard like in this construction could be even better. I do expect some difference between reality, and what is now presented as a render and estimated price. Still, the idea is so cool, I'd buy it if it manages to stay below 500 euro.
So I have now my own, paid, virtual server for my url, pages, my e-mail that are not mailing lists, etc. That is still not the holy grail, though: my virtual server provider, one of the bigger ones in europe, managed to get my server down last month for about 24 hours. At least I could speak someone on the telephone about it who could confirm it, but they were not likely to speed it up, or pay me back for the lost service. (even though it could be fast, just load the virtual images on another batch of machines, and reroute the internal ip traffic).
additionally: what is the lifetime of these smaller chips? Or the percentage of faulty cpus.
Hmm, we will see this soon enough. Due to netbooks there are now a large amount of users with extensive SSD usage, many read-writes. There is no swap, and cache of the browser should be turned of by default, but I already noticed that if my RAM gets full, the eee would write to my harddisk at a high rate.
In practice, if the write operations on the SSD would slowly descrease below a useful level, I would just swap the current SSD disk in my Dell mini, by that time the price, performance and storage would be so much better that I'd probably it anyway.
Ok, had it twice today. Since it is at work, I have no root account to switch to. In practice, NFS hangs and all PCs are unresponsive for the next 5 minutes. Which is crazy, often it is even because of an NFS disk that was not actively being used. Thanks for your solutions to when it happens, but my reasoning is, it shouldn't even happen in the first place. There is no reason that xorg should stop responding just because an application using it is going bezerk.
Hmm, being part of the EU makes Hungary pretty western in my book, but YMMV.
I'm a 3G (HSDPA(UMTS) customer in Germany. There has been a run on 3G lately, largely due to O2/Tchibo offering prepaid 3G sticks with 10GB/month for 25 eur. This popularity has severe consequences! While the first few months were still ok, having about 70 kB/s on average, I'm currently glad if I get 10. At unholy hours in the night it can get to above 200 kB/s, so it's very likely an overload of their capacity that is holding everyone back. I couldn't care less if I had 3G or 4G if there is only be a capacity to give me 1/100th of the maximum bandwith. I don't use internet underway as much anyway, so if O2* will not promise to resolve this with priority, I'll have to get back to DSL for my internet connection. Hopes are not high, it's more likely to get worse: as far as I understood they cut down some roaming contracts which effectively decreased the available bandwith again. If anyone has some good suggestions on how to put some pressure to the providers, I'm all open for it. * Competition seems to have the same problems with their 3G networks.
Katrina, for example. Still wondering if help wouldn't have been more efficient and fast if the people there were rich, influential. Top Gear went there a year after and it still looked like a war zone. Not as if the US doesn't have any money, there's apparently enough to bail out some high-salaried bankers, it's just that the investments are disproportionate to the poor.
well, but your macbook was way more expensive. To me, anything more expensive than 400 EUR and heavier than 1 kg is not a netbook anymore. That is what will keep me from buying a netbook tablet for a while, heavy and expensive.
My number one reason to choose a real netbook. 2 pounds is the maximum weight. I can put it on a small bag and don't even notice I'm carrying it around. Every now and then I have the thinkpad from work, it's like a punishment to carry it, even just small distances + you need an additional bag that you can forget or have stolen.
Indeed. Running Ubuntu now, every now and then I get the update list, but it's not like I'll select only part of the updates. Not sure if that is even practically possible. So also there, you either decide not to update (or do it manually for everything, but then you might as well switch to gentoo, as far as the amount of work is concerned), or to automatically update everything.