Absolutely! I drink a LOT of coffee (black, strong, no sugar), and I also love IPAs, the higher the IBU the better. In fact, I don't really notice the bitterness anymore, I notice the flavour of both coffee and beer. It's sort of like how one notices the flavour of spicy food after adjusting to the heat of the spice (which I have done and love).
For years, CRA, the Canadian equivalent to the IRS, has been including Web Authentication Codes (WACs) with the annual notice of assessment, that is, their summary of your personal income tax submission, snail mailed to your address of record some weeks after you submit your personal tax return.
Your WAC changes every year. Without it, you cannot access your account in CRA's online systems.
And it isn't enough: You also need your SIN and the amount recorded on a particular line of your return (or notice, I cannot remember which).
Now here is where my memory gets hazy: Once you register for online access, I think they might send a one-time code to your address, which is required to activate your account.
The only way to subvert this system is to tamper with postal delivery, which means fraudsters must take specific, intentional action and break multiple federal laws (postal acts, the income tax act, etc.). There ain't no easy to guess stuff in the Canadian system. The bar is sufficiently high, the risks to fraudsters very high, i.e., hard time.
There is an implication that Dijkstra was wrong about the goto - the implication being based on how conservatively it is used.
Perhaps it is wiser to conclude that the goto is used so conservatively because Dijkstra was right and that programmers have, in general, taken his wisdom to heart and avoided the goto except for those instances where, properly documented, it is the best tool for the job.
(By prophylactic prediction I mean the sort of warning or planning that completely forestalls the danger predicted, through awareness, preparation, etc. Kind of like the Y2K non-event.)
Really? You've been sending him checks for your share of this mass education, have you?
While a professor and occasional host of science programs, his job is no more to explain things to the masses than mine, or yours.
Hey, I'm not saying the practices that make people vulnerable are wise - just that they exist and that unless positive steps are taken to test and, where necessary, fix, systems will be vulnerable. After all, we are seeing reports of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild, so we know there are affected systems out there. If we've done our jobs right, they won't be ours - but we cannot just hope that we've done our jobs right - and we do need to advise management that a) we're aware of the issue, b) we did our jobs right, and c) we're double checking, just to be safe.
Folks, for what it's worth, here is a management briefing I wrote this morning. Please feel free to re-use, but please do give proper attribution. Please do comment and correct as appropriate.
Summary: Briefing for management on activities to minimize impacts of the "shellshock" computer vulnerability.
Status: Testing underway. Our initial scans and appraisals are that our public-facing systems are likely not subject to shellshock. NOTE: The situation is fluid, due to the nature of the vulnerability. Personnel are also reaching out to hosting providers to assess the status of intervening systems.
What is it? A vulnerability in a command interpreter found on the vast majority of Linux and UNIX systems, including web servers, development machines, routers, firewalls, etc. The vulnerability could allow an anonymous attacker to execute arbitrary commands remotely, and to obtain the results of these commands via their browser. The security community has nicknamed the vulnerability "shellshock" since it affects computer command interpreters known as shells.
How does it work? Command interpreters, or "shells", are the computer components that allow users to type and execute computer commands. Anytime a user works in a terminal window, they are using a command interpreter - think of the DOS command prompt. Some GUI applications, especially administrative applications, are in fact just graphical interfaces to command interpreters. The most common command interpreter on Linux and UNIX is known as the "bash shell". Within the last several days, security researchers discovered that a serious vulnerability has been present in the vast majority of instances of bash for the last twenty years. This vulnerability allows an attacker with access to a bash shell to execute arbitrary commands. Because many web servers use system command interpreters to fulfill user requests, attackers need not have physical access to a system: The ability to issue web requests, using their browser or commonly-available command line tools, may be enough.
How bad could it be? Very, very bad. The vulnerability may exist on the vast majority of Linux and UNIX systems shipped over the last 20 years, including web servers, development machines, routers, firewalls, other network appliances, printers, Mac OSX computers, Android phones, and possibly iPhones (note: It has yet to be established that smartphones are affected, but given that Android and iOS are variants of Linus and UNIX, respectively, it would be premature to exclude them). Furthermore, many such systems have web-based administrative interfaces: While many of these machines do not provide a "web server" in the sense of a server providing content of interest to the casual or "normal" user, many do provide web-based interfaces for diagnotics and administration. Any such system that provides dynamic content using system utilities may be vulnerable.
What is the primary risk? There are two, data loss and system modification. By allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary commands, the shellshock vulnerability may allow the attacker to both obtain data from a system and to make changes to system configuration. There is also a third risk, that of using affected systems to launch attacks against other systems, so-called "reflector" attacks: The arbitrary command specified by the attacker could be to direct a network utility against a third machine.
How easy is it to detect the vulnerability? Surprising easily: A single command executed using ubiquitous system tools will reveal whether any particular web device or web server is vulnerable.
What are we doing? Technical personnel are using these commands to test all web servers and other devices we manage and are working with hosting providers to ensure that all devices upon which we depend have been tested. When devices are determined to be vulnerable, a determination is made whether they should be left alone (e.g., if t
This was on HN a few days ago; my comment there was the same: In the case of LastPass, the headline is misleading and a little fearmongery.
There were two issues with LastPass and NEITHER affected its storage of persistent passwords, that is, neither affected the feature the vast majority of us use passwords managers for!
One concerned a targeted attack against one-time passwords (OTP), the other concerned bookmarklets, which are used by less than 1% of the user base, according to LastPass. Personally I didn't know either feature existed until I read the LastPass blog entry about these two vulnerabilities.
A truer headline would have been Vulnerabilities found in less-frequently used features of LastPass; persistent site password storage unaffected".
I don't use iTunes or iBooks or any other Apple media apps. I've only had my Air for a few months, and I do love it so, but....
If Mavericks is free, why does the App Store need a credit card in order for me to download it?
I do not plan on purchasing anything through iTunes. Never say never, sure, but I don't. Ever.
Guess I can't have Mavericks.
Even though it's free.
Kudos, Apple, you've given me my first reason to feel less than happy about a hardware purchase I reveled in.
(Originally posted in wrong discussion, mea culpa; since then, I've discovered one can bootstrap iTunes/AppStore integration without a CC, but it requires attempting to download a free app and entering tombstone info - still too much for a free OS update, IMHO, but better in a kludgey, hackish way.)
In addition to the excellent comments previously made, consider investigating the Center for Open Science, specifically their information for developers, and the associated Open Science Framework (note: will display only if cookies are enabled; I've no idea what value they provide in this context and will be contacting them about that).
They may not have anything that can help you. Or they might. Or you might be able to help them. Or not. YMMV, etc.
main power-use for me would be occasional command line stuff to automate things... cron jobs... should work similar on OS-X
In general, yes, all the command line goodness is there. However! The OSX version of many utility functions has obviously suffered from lack of care and feeding. For example, grep under Linux will quite happily deal with pathnames with embedded dashes and spaces; OSX grep interprets these as additional, unrecognized switches. Sigh.
what about the incomplete keyboard on the Macs... page down, home, etc....
I was concerned about this as well, but it turned out to be a non-issue: fn-arrow, command-arrow, etc., provide these functions. It took a little while to learn, but not as long as I expected.
Case point 4. Desktop computing, while not dead, is not what it was just a few years ago. Does Ubuntu's trying to compete in mobile markets, while still maintaining desktop support mean that they are lost or that they are trying to stay current?
Far from dead! The working world is still largely/mostly/all desktop! Sure, we have mobile and BYOD, but for the moment these are side-stories. Case 4 is becoming correct for home users but you'd need a Case 5 to be complete: "Case 5, Ubuntu has had sporadic and isolated success in the working world". Your Case 4 would then be more on-point .
I switched from WIndows to Ubuntu years ago after evaluating many distro communities and distro directions. At the time, Ubuntu appeared to have a good vision, and good balance between "it just works" (my computer is vital to my professional life and MUST work with minimal effort) and "power users will be at home" (my first jobs were on UNIX systems decades ago, this was very important to me).
From a technical perspective, Ubuntu was just a little ways ahead of others, IMHO.
From a community perspective, it was miles ahead! Fewer trolls, easy to participate, easy to grow, good tools and sites for the community. Most other distro sites and fora were, well, slapdash, poorly conceived, for the cognocenti, and full of the usual Linux aggressive bullshit ("well, just do cmd-alt-bang-fork-shift-nano-vim, you stupid goof, it's obvious!").
That made the switch easy, and I recommended Ubuntu many times and used it for years.
Then Shuttleworth slowly became less benevolent, community tools became harder to use, information that had been easily available began to disappear, and the distro itself became muddled. There was just no way to be a comfortable power user anymore, at least not without major effort.
And if I'm going to spend major effort, why use a system I don't like? So I started switching.
I tried Mint, I tried pure Debian, I made mistakes and learned a lot. Great. But.
I enjoy being able to configure as desired and be a power user occasionally, but I don't want to have to be one all the frikkin' time. And Mint and Debian required way too much hand-holding. Eventually, because too many things didn't just work, I went back to Ubuntu. But it was nasty and ugly and difficult to use and didn't support my 4 year old laptop as well as it used to and just wasn't fun.
I caved. I bought a Mac a few weeks ago, a 13" Air. Wow. What a beast! It's fun to use, easy to use, I can get work done without pain. LibreOffice on this thing screams!
Sure, I don't power use much anymore, but you know what? That fun is gone. Life is too short to spend so much time tweaking config files, and too short to use ugly, obtuse, opaque systems like Unity. I never thought I'd ever say this, but I love OSX.
All the philosophical and principled reasons for using Linux have largely been abandoned by Ubuntu, other distros are way behind, and if I'm going to use a commercial OS - which Ubuntu clearly wants to be - I might as well use a nice one that works well on insane kick-ass hardware. I'll be on OSX on this Air for years. Goodbye Ubuntu.
The Guide is sprinkled liberally with editorial license, and, if sprinkled with pepper and Altarian rhino snot, can be used as a survival bar, indefinitely. There are also side helpings of sarcasm, off the wall humour, black humour, mauve humour, and the humour of a hyperintelligent yet bilious shade of blue.
Whatever h2g2.com is, it isn't the guide, lacks license, and, much like this post, lacks humour of any description, and wouldn't sustain you if served on toast.
We're a family of casual gamers. We don't game a lot, and when we do they tend to be games many can play together (Rock Band, Glee, etc.). We also play more traditional head-to-head games, but all gaming comes in spurts, days/weeks where we do it a lot followed by months where we don't. The Wii worked for us.
But that was then.
Since then, we've slowly gotten tired of more and more remotes, more and more devices, and we've slowly discovered more and more on-line distractions. Hey, we just finally signed up for Netflix a few weeks ago, partly because we didn't have a decent device for it - we don't enjoy being our own tech support anymore. What changed is that we got Apple TV to make it easier to show pictures to friends, and Apple TV is a bit of a gateway device....
Which brings us to the Wii U. I want something more than the Wii, something more than Apple TV, and I want fewer remotes and few devices in my living room. Recent announcements of the Wii U having universal remote capabilities and integrated media streaming capabilities made me very excited!
But guess what? The lack of DVD and Blue Ray capabilities is a deal-breaker.
My living room is cluttered. The tech is good enough that one device can do it all. So I ain't buying a device that doesn't. If I add one device (a U) I want to remove two (the old Wii and my DVD player).
People are calling the Wii U the first eighth generation console. Nope. It's the last seventh. Or the only 7.5. To be next-gen, you have to raise the bar, and the Wii U doesn't: it has some cool features, but it doesn't come close to being truly new, a true replacement for what we have, a new way of doing anything.
You want to get "the casual gamer", the folks like us and many like us? You give us one device that does all of the above, and more, without being intrusive, without binding us to you (like Apple does - hey, we've already got iTunes, like Google wants to, etc.). I'd buy that. And if you can throw in something really mind blowing, many more would buy it.
But the U is just "meh" enough for me to wait to see what's next.
The gentleman's name is Thierry, not Theirry. Bad enough to get it wrong in the article, but in the headline?
It matters not that others have misspelled his name. Is that our standard for quality? Fourth-graders pointing at each other saying "well that's how BEEB did it!"?
I have to agree with all of that: If you are working in the field, studying in the field, then you absolutely must master the math to get ahead, to understand the details and find the exceptions, and to make contributions.
But that's not the question I took the OP to be asking. If the OP had asked "What maths must I learn to advance the state of the art in GR?" I would have agreed with others who posted a standard undergraduate-followed-by-graduate program of study (because you ain't advancin' anythin' with undergrad calc and algebra, unless you are a physics/math major and your undergrad includes advanced PDs, complex analysis, advanced stats, and advanced analytic geometry).
I took the question as "What do I need to understand to be able to get more out of the more advanced physics articles found here on/. and other interesting places?" - hence my agreement that you don't need math, Jack.
In fact, I would go so far as to assert that for most of us, trying to understand some of the more esoteric stuff outside our fields, math only gets in the way: A quantitative and precise understanding of most of today's hard science requires considerable specialized mathematics, and unless already has quite some specialized mathematics in one's own field, one will be unable to jump easily to and get anything out of the specialized mathematics of another field.
So this leaves the curious seeking high-quality, qualitative, non-mathematical articles and explanations.
(With the caveat that at some relatively simple math is a really good idea, since it can so encapsulate the physics. E=mc**2 is beautiful in its simplicity, beautiful in the equivalence it expresses.** As is the Lorentz transformation when applied to the relationship between t and c.)
(** Re the post commenting how muddy things get when you set c==1 in E=mc**2: I disagree completely. The physical point is that E=m; mathematically, E is proportional, of course, but the physics is that they are the same thing - that was radically new. That's the first beautiful point of the statement. The second, far more subtly beautifully point, is that the constant required to make the proportion an equality is the speed of light squared. OMG ponies! Why on earth should that be? Investigating that leads to some really interesting physics.
+1 on this and all related posts: Relativity is about physics, about beautiful physics, and is not about math.
There are bits of relativity for which Einstein had to go math-shopping: He knew what the physics must look like, he needed to know if the mathematicians had any tools that matched what he wanted to express (they did, Lorentz transformations being one of the most important).
Note: I have a physics degree, which means I have studied more math than anything else. The math is important to express the physics precisely, important to get useful answers to specific questions. But the physics come first. (There's the old trope of the physics prof saying "set C to 1 so you can see the physics happening.)
Read about and try to reproduce Einstein's thought experiments. Start with the one about travelling at the speed of light, and what you would see as you approached C (hint: if you travel at C, photons can only reach you from in front, from along your axis of travel). Think about the "falling in an elevator" experiment. These get you a long way to the principle of equivalence, the principle of relativity, etc.
Only once you have some idea of the physics should you attempt to tackle the math - and by that time, you'll be starting to get a good idea of what the math might look like.
Do not attempt to learn the math first and thereby get to the physics. There lies madness.
I just had a cookie. I like cookies. Especially Farmers Market oatmeal raisin cookies, homemade ginger crinkles, and those butter cookies that only Mom makes right.
So you're saying that there was an error in the original paragraph by Kolivas, correct?
Which means we're in violent agreement so far.
That leaves the question of the use of the word "sic". Correct?
The word "sic" is used when quoting to indicate that the error in the quote was in the original and is not a transcription error. Refer to this reference, e.g.
Was it pedantic? Sure!/. thrives on pedantry. Was it correct? Absolutely.
Slashdot Mirror
Absolutely! I drink a LOT of coffee (black, strong, no sugar), and I also love IPAs, the higher the IBU the better. In fact, I don't really notice the bitterness anymore, I notice the flavour of both coffee and beer. It's sort of like how one notices the flavour of spicy food after adjusting to the heat of the spice (which I have done and love).
For years, CRA, the Canadian equivalent to the IRS, has been including Web Authentication Codes (WACs) with the annual notice of assessment, that is, their summary of your personal income tax submission, snail mailed to your address of record some weeks after you submit your personal tax return.
Your WAC changes every year. Without it, you cannot access your account in CRA's online systems.
And it isn't enough: You also need your SIN and the amount recorded on a particular line of your return (or notice, I cannot remember which).
Now here is where my memory gets hazy: Once you register for online access, I think they might send a one-time code to your address, which is required to activate your account.
The only way to subvert this system is to tamper with postal delivery, which means fraudsters must take specific, intentional action and break multiple federal laws (postal acts, the income tax act, etc.). There ain't no easy to guess stuff in the Canadian system. The bar is sufficiently high, the risks to fraudsters very high, i.e., hard time.
There is an implication that Dijkstra was wrong about the goto - the implication being based on how conservatively it is used.
Perhaps it is wiser to conclude that the goto is used so conservatively because Dijkstra was right and that programmers have, in general, taken his wisdom to heart and avoided the goto except for those instances where, properly documented, it is the best tool for the job.
(By prophylactic prediction I mean the sort of warning or planning that completely forestalls the danger predicted, through awareness, preparation, etc. Kind of like the Y2K non-event.)
Tyson's job is to explain things to the masses.
Really? You've been sending him checks for your share of this mass education, have you? While a professor and occasional host of science programs, his job is no more to explain things to the masses than mine, or yours.
Hey, I'm not saying the practices that make people vulnerable are wise - just that they exist and that unless positive steps are taken to test and, where necessary, fix, systems will be vulnerable. After all, we are seeing reports of the vulnerability being exploited in the wild, so we know there are affected systems out there. If we've done our jobs right, they won't be ours - but we cannot just hope that we've done our jobs right - and we do need to advise management that a) we're aware of the issue, b) we did our jobs right, and c) we're double checking, just to be safe.
Folks, for what it's worth, here is a management briefing I wrote this morning. Please feel free to re-use, but please do give proper attribution. Please do comment and correct as appropriate.
Summary: Briefing for management on activities to minimize impacts of the "shellshock" computer vulnerability.
Status: Testing underway. Our initial scans and appraisals are that our public-facing systems are likely not subject to shellshock. NOTE: The situation is fluid, due to the nature of the vulnerability. Personnel are also reaching out to hosting providers to assess the status of intervening systems.
What is it? A vulnerability in a command interpreter found on the vast majority of Linux and UNIX systems, including web servers, development machines, routers, firewalls, etc. The vulnerability could allow an anonymous attacker to execute arbitrary commands remotely, and to obtain the results of these commands via their browser. The security community has nicknamed the vulnerability "shellshock" since it affects computer command interpreters known as shells.
How does it work? Command interpreters, or "shells", are the computer components that allow users to type and execute computer commands. Anytime a user works in a terminal window, they are using a command interpreter - think of the DOS command prompt. Some GUI applications, especially administrative applications, are in fact just graphical interfaces to command interpreters. The most common command interpreter on Linux and UNIX is known as the "bash shell". Within the last several days, security researchers discovered that a serious vulnerability has been present in the vast majority of instances of bash for the last twenty years. This vulnerability allows an attacker with access to a bash shell to execute arbitrary commands. Because many web servers use system command interpreters to fulfill user requests, attackers need not have physical access to a system: The ability to issue web requests, using their browser or commonly-available command line tools, may be enough.
How bad could it be? Very, very bad. The vulnerability may exist on the vast majority of Linux and UNIX systems shipped over the last 20 years, including web servers, development machines, routers, firewalls, other network appliances, printers, Mac OSX computers, Android phones, and possibly iPhones (note: It has yet to be established that smartphones are affected, but given that Android and iOS are variants of Linus and UNIX, respectively, it would be premature to exclude them). Furthermore, many such systems have web-based administrative interfaces: While many of these machines do not provide a "web server" in the sense of a server providing content of interest to the casual or "normal" user, many do provide web-based interfaces for diagnotics and administration. Any such system that provides dynamic content using system utilities may be vulnerable.
What is the primary risk? There are two, data loss and system modification. By allowing an attacker to execute arbitrary commands, the shellshock vulnerability may allow the attacker to both obtain data from a system and to make changes to system configuration. There is also a third risk, that of using affected systems to launch attacks against other systems, so-called "reflector" attacks: The arbitrary command specified by the attacker could be to direct a network utility against a third machine.
How easy is it to detect the vulnerability? Surprising easily: A single command executed using ubiquitous system tools will reveal whether any particular web device or web server is vulnerable.
What are we doing? Technical personnel are using these commands to test all web servers and other devices we manage and are working with hosting providers to ensure that all devices upon which we depend have been tested. When devices are determined to be vulnerable, a determination is made whether they should be left alone (e.g., if t
This was on HN a few days ago; my comment there was the same: In the case of LastPass, the headline is misleading and a little fearmongery.
There were two issues with LastPass and NEITHER affected its storage of persistent passwords, that is, neither affected the feature the vast majority of us use passwords managers for!
One concerned a targeted attack against one-time passwords (OTP), the other concerned bookmarklets, which are used by less than 1% of the user base, according to LastPass. Personally I didn't know either feature existed until I read the LastPass blog entry about these two vulnerabilities.
A truer headline would have been Vulnerabilities found in less-frequently used features of LastPass; persistent site password storage unaffected".
Yeah, /. needs both an edit function and a +1.
Thank you, Mr. Canadian Judge
Just a little nit: Her title is Madam Justice Fenlon, so your expression of gratitude needs a tweak. :->
We have a c.2003 52" Viera and love it.
The brightness is not an issue: it's on the North wall of the living room, facing a large window, and if it is "too sunny", I close the drapes. Done.
The viewing angle is amazing. Sunday night suppers are often prepared standing at the counter "just this side" of the family room, watching football.
I've stayed away from L[CE]D TVs because plasma just seemed like a better solution.
And now they will go the way of Betamax.
Silly consumers, believing hype and myth, buying poorer tech, and not saving a whole lot doing it....
Oops, posted on wrong thread. Mea culpa.
Off topic indeed.
I do not plan on purchasing anything through iTunes. Never say never, sure, but I don't. Ever.
Guess I can't have Mavericks.
Even though it's free.
Kudos, Apple, you've given me my first reason to feel less than happy about a hardware purchase I reveled in.
(Originally posted in wrong discussion, mea culpa; since then, I've discovered one can bootstrap iTunes/AppStore integration without a CC, but it requires attempting to download a free app and entering tombstone info - still too much for a free OS update, IMHO, but better in a kludgey, hackish way.)
I don't use iTunes or iBooks or any other Apple media apps. I've only had my Air for a few months, and I do love it so, but....
If Mavericks is free, why does the App Store need a credit card in order for me to download it?
I do not plan on purchasing anything through iTunes. Never say never, sure, but I don't. Ever.
Guess I can't have Mavericks.
Even though it's free.
Kudos, Apple, you've given me my first reason to feel less than happy about a hardware purchase I reveled in.
In addition to the excellent comments previously made, consider investigating the Center for Open Science, specifically their information for developers, and the associated Open Science Framework (note: will display only if cookies are enabled; I've no idea what value they provide in this context and will be contacting them about that).
They may not have anything that can help you. Or they might. Or you might be able to help them. Or not. YMMV, etc.
Worth taking a peek, anyway.
main power-use for me would be occasional command line stuff to automate things... cron jobs... should work similar on OS-X
In general, yes, all the command line goodness is there. However! The OSX version of many utility functions has obviously suffered from lack of care and feeding. For example, grep under Linux will quite happily deal with pathnames with embedded dashes and spaces; OSX grep interprets these as additional, unrecognized switches. Sigh.
what about the incomplete keyboard on the Macs... page down, home, etc....
I was concerned about this as well, but it turned out to be a non-issue: fn-arrow, command-arrow, etc., provide these functions. It took a little while to learn, but not as long as I expected.
Case point 4. Desktop computing, while not dead, is not what it was just a few years ago. Does Ubuntu's trying to compete in mobile markets, while still maintaining desktop support mean that they are lost or that they are trying to stay current?
Far from dead! The working world is still largely/mostly/all desktop! Sure, we have mobile and BYOD, but for the moment these are side-stories. Case 4 is becoming correct for home users but you'd need a Case 5 to be complete: "Case 5, Ubuntu has had sporadic and isolated success in the working world". Your Case 4 would then be more on-point .
I switched from WIndows to Ubuntu years ago after evaluating many distro communities and distro directions. At the time, Ubuntu appeared to have a good vision, and good balance between "it just works" (my computer is vital to my professional life and MUST work with minimal effort) and "power users will be at home" (my first jobs were on UNIX systems decades ago, this was very important to me).
From a technical perspective, Ubuntu was just a little ways ahead of others, IMHO.
From a community perspective, it was miles ahead! Fewer trolls, easy to participate, easy to grow, good tools and sites for the community. Most other distro sites and fora were, well, slapdash, poorly conceived, for the cognocenti, and full of the usual Linux aggressive bullshit ("well, just do cmd-alt-bang-fork-shift-nano-vim, you stupid goof, it's obvious!").
That made the switch easy, and I recommended Ubuntu many times and used it for years.
Then Shuttleworth slowly became less benevolent, community tools became harder to use, information that had been easily available began to disappear, and the distro itself became muddled. There was just no way to be a comfortable power user anymore, at least not without major effort.
And if I'm going to spend major effort, why use a system I don't like? So I started switching.
I tried Mint, I tried pure Debian, I made mistakes and learned a lot. Great. But.
I enjoy being able to configure as desired and be a power user occasionally, but I don't want to have to be one all the frikkin' time. And Mint and Debian required way too much hand-holding. Eventually, because too many things didn't just work, I went back to Ubuntu. But it was nasty and ugly and difficult to use and didn't support my 4 year old laptop as well as it used to and just wasn't fun.
I caved. I bought a Mac a few weeks ago, a 13" Air. Wow. What a beast! It's fun to use, easy to use, I can get work done without pain. LibreOffice on this thing screams!
Sure, I don't power use much anymore, but you know what? That fun is gone. Life is too short to spend so much time tweaking config files, and too short to use ugly, obtuse, opaque systems like Unity. I never thought I'd ever say this, but I love OSX.
All the philosophical and principled reasons for using Linux have largely been abandoned by Ubuntu, other distros are way behind, and if I'm going to use a commercial OS - which Ubuntu clearly wants to be - I might as well use a nice one that works well on insane kick-ass hardware. I'll be on OSX on this Air for years. Goodbye Ubuntu.
The Guide is sprinkled liberally with editorial license, and, if sprinkled with pepper and Altarian rhino snot, can be used as a survival bar, indefinitely. There are also side helpings of sarcasm, off the wall humour, black humour, mauve humour, and the humour of a hyperintelligent yet bilious shade of blue.
Whatever h2g2.com is, it isn't the guide, lacks license, and, much like this post, lacks humour of any description, and wouldn't sustain you if served on toast.
We're a family of casual gamers. We don't game a lot, and when we do they tend to be games many can play together (Rock Band, Glee, etc.). We also play more traditional head-to-head games, but all gaming comes in spurts, days/weeks where we do it a lot followed by months where we don't. The Wii worked for us.
But that was then.
Since then, we've slowly gotten tired of more and more remotes, more and more devices, and we've slowly discovered more and more on-line distractions. Hey, we just finally signed up for Netflix a few weeks ago, partly because we didn't have a decent device for it - we don't enjoy being our own tech support anymore. What changed is that we got Apple TV to make it easier to show pictures to friends, and Apple TV is a bit of a gateway device....
Which brings us to the Wii U. I want something more than the Wii, something more than Apple TV, and I want fewer remotes and few devices in my living room. Recent announcements of the Wii U having universal remote capabilities and integrated media streaming capabilities made me very excited!
But guess what? The lack of DVD and Blue Ray capabilities is a deal-breaker.
My living room is cluttered. The tech is good enough that one device can do it all. So I ain't buying a device that doesn't. If I add one device (a U) I want to remove two (the old Wii and my DVD player).
People are calling the Wii U the first eighth generation console. Nope. It's the last seventh. Or the only 7.5. To be next-gen, you have to raise the bar, and the Wii U doesn't: it has some cool features, but it doesn't come close to being truly new, a true replacement for what we have, a new way of doing anything.
Universal remote? Been there, done that.
Touch screen? Ditto. Game transfer? Yup. Networking? Social? DVD? Streaming? Motion control? Yup, yup, yup, yup.
You want to get "the casual gamer", the folks like us and many like us? You give us one device that does all of the above, and more, without being intrusive, without binding us to you (like Apple does - hey, we've already got iTunes, like Google wants to, etc.). I'd buy that. And if you can throw in something really mind blowing, many more would buy it.
But the U is just "meh" enough for me to wait to see what's next.
I'm probably not the only one.
The gentleman's name is Thierry, not Theirry. Bad enough to get it wrong in the article, but in the headline?
It matters not that others have misspelled his name. Is that our standard for quality? Fourth-graders pointing at each other saying "well that's how BEEB did it!"?
Oi.
I have to agree with all of that: If you are working in the field, studying in the field, then you absolutely must master the math to get ahead, to understand the details and find the exceptions, and to make contributions.
But that's not the question I took the OP to be asking. If the OP had asked "What maths must I learn to advance the state of the art in GR?" I would have agreed with others who posted a standard undergraduate-followed-by-graduate program of study (because you ain't advancin' anythin' with undergrad calc and algebra, unless you are a physics/math major and your undergrad includes advanced PDs, complex analysis, advanced stats, and advanced analytic geometry).
I took the question as "What do I need to understand to be able to get more out of the more advanced physics articles found here on /. and other interesting places?" - hence my agreement that you don't need math, Jack.
In fact, I would go so far as to assert that for most of us, trying to understand some of the more esoteric stuff outside our fields, math only gets in the way: A quantitative and precise understanding of most of today's hard science requires considerable specialized mathematics, and unless already has quite some specialized mathematics in one's own field, one will be unable to jump easily to and get anything out of the specialized mathematics of another field.
So this leaves the curious seeking high-quality, qualitative, non-mathematical articles and explanations.
(With the caveat that at some relatively simple math is a really good idea, since it can so encapsulate the physics. E=mc**2 is beautiful in its simplicity, beautiful in the equivalence it expresses.** As is the Lorentz transformation when applied to the relationship between t and c.)
(** Re the post commenting how muddy things get when you set c==1 in E=mc**2: I disagree completely. The physical point is that E=m; mathematically, E is proportional, of course, but the physics is that they are the same thing - that was radically new. That's the first beautiful point of the statement. The second, far more subtly beautifully point, is that the constant required to make the proportion an equality is the speed of light squared. OMG ponies! Why on earth should that be? Investigating that leads to some really interesting physics.
+1 on this and all related posts: Relativity is about physics, about beautiful physics, and is not about math.
There are bits of relativity for which Einstein had to go math-shopping: He knew what the physics must look like, he needed to know if the mathematicians had any tools that matched what he wanted to express (they did, Lorentz transformations being one of the most important).
Note: I have a physics degree, which means I have studied more math than anything else. The math is important to express the physics precisely, important to get useful answers to specific questions. But the physics come first. (There's the old trope of the physics prof saying "set C to 1 so you can see the physics happening.)
Read about and try to reproduce Einstein's thought experiments. Start with the one about travelling at the speed of light, and what you would see as you approached C (hint: if you travel at C, photons can only reach you from in front, from along your axis of travel). Think about the "falling in an elevator" experiment. These get you a long way to the principle of equivalence, the principle of relativity, etc.
Only once you have some idea of the physics should you attempt to tackle the math - and by that time, you'll be starting to get a good idea of what the math might look like.
Do not attempt to learn the math first and thereby get to the physics. There lies madness.
But dude, that's on-topic.
Oh, man. We need to recover this thread, ASAP.
I just had a cookie. I like cookies. Especially Farmers Market oatmeal raisin cookies, homemade ginger crinkles, and those butter cookies that only Mom makes right.
Do you like cookies?
I do.
So you're saying that there was an error in the original paragraph by Kolivas, correct?
Which means we're in violent agreement so far.
That leaves the question of the use of the word "sic". Correct?
The word "sic" is used when quoting to indicate that the error in the quote was in the original and is not a transcription error. Refer to this reference, e.g.
Was it pedantic? Sure! /. thrives on pedantry. Was it correct? Absolutely.