"Look, the bottom line is that Apple users like Apple. So what?"
It happens to be relevant to the discussion, in this case why they have such dramatically increased loyalty to what amounts to an inferior system on an inferior network.
I think that the answer is exactly what I said. iPhone users like the iPhone more than they dislike AT&T.
If the inferior system you're referring to is the iPhone I don't think that's a fair assessment. Certainly it's a different system, but for the vast majority of iPhone users I argue that it's a superior system. Most users don't care about the closed nature of the platform and appreciate that they have about 250k apps available, compared to the 40k or so Droid apps. Just because other phones are arguable better for a power user doesn't mean that they're better for the average user.
There is no arbitrary starting point for a decade. The current decade could be 9 yrs + 7 months old, or it could be 2 years + 1 day old or it could be three seconds old.
The modern convention is that decades start in years ending with a 0. Yes, there are douchebags who will say "nu-uh, there was no year 0, so the decade doesn't end until the 0 year is over!!oneone!11! I burn you with my wiked smatzzz!" but people probably do equally douchey things like saying "If you're from Phoenix, does that make you a Phoenician?".
They fail to see that the whole damn system is arbitrary and that nobody is any more or less correct than any other person when choosing a starting point for his decade.
Except that NumPy will use LAPACK and BLAS for it's linear algebra making it far more efficient. Try a QR decomposition on a matrix of any significant size in VB, then do the same decomposition using LAPACK and you'll see a huge difference. As for numerical analysis being about writing efficient algorithms, sure, that's true, but why would you want to rewrite those algorithms when highly optimized versions come by default?
Disclaimer: Yes, I'm sure you could get VB to use LAPACK and BLAS but python will do it by default.
What concerns me most is that you said that you haven't ever read a complete research paper. How can you be sure that your idea is new and worth publishing if you haven't done the requisite literature reviews? You really need to do your homework before you submit anything to a journal. Most journals will select referees for papers based on that paper's references. If you reference some papers by Dr. Smith and he is still alive, there's a good chance that Dr. Smith will be asked to referee. If you don't have reasonable references, your submission may be rejected out of hand.
Academic publication can be a very slow process. Don't be surprised if it takes a year for your paper to be officially accepted, and another six months before it shows up in print. DO NOT submit your paper to more than one journal. If you don't hear back, don't assume that you've been rejected. Contact the journal and find out what's going on before you send your submission elsewhere. The last thing you want is for more than one journal to accept your paper.
Yes. In addition to a PS3, X360, and Wii there's also the iPhone and iPad that can be bricked via forced updates.
I've had an iPhone for quite some time and I don't ever remember a forced update. I always get a message informing me that an update is available and asking if I want to install it.
Yes, I was off by several orders of magnitude, I stand corrected. I wasn't paying attention.
Thanks for the catch. And thanks for not repping me down. I guess my public humiliation is punishment enough.:)
TFA is dead wrong. While DNA evidence can prove that a person didn't commit a crime, a false positive is still possible. If we collect DNA from everyone in the country as suggested, the odds of a false positive will increase accordingly. With the odds of a false positive are about 1:1 Billion (Google it if you don't believe this number), that means that about 300 people in the United States alone will match your DNA fingerprint. And that's just the ones who are currently alive.
When does hacking become an act of war?
on
Iran Hacks US Spy Sites
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
At some point (I think we're already there) our computer infrastructure becomes so important to a nation that a cyber attack could be construed as an act of war. I wonder how long it will be before we see a physical military response to a cyber attack. We've already seen evidence that China attacked Google's corporate infrastructure a few months ago. Is this really all that dissimilar than Chinese agents coming to the US and physically breaking into Google's buildings? To relate things to the article, if it could be shown that Iran was indeed attacking CIA sites, would the US be justified in bombing Iranian intelligence facilities? Just some food for thought.
I read a book some time ago in which most people were 'iconerate' as opposed to being fully literate. It meant that they could recognize specific icons and symbols and understand them, but that user interfaces has become so sophisticated that understanding beyond that wasn't needed.
While this isn't exactly the idea you've described, there is more than a passing similarity. Users fly through messages and menus quickly because they know what to expect. They remember that blue thing with the W on it starts word, and the green one with the X starts excel. The problem with using this kind of system with error messages is that unless you're using it to capture very common errors, the users will never get to the point where they can immediately associate the icon with a specific problem. And if the users see the error often enough to achieve that level of understanding then they probably know how to deal with it themselves. Which, come to think of it, may not be bad if they could come to associate an icon with specific recovery steps. but it's not going to help you with the complex issues which is where the helpdesk really needs it.
The puppy error idea may work in the short term, but soon I think that the novelty will wear off and they'll all blur into "some cartooish icon" in the user's mind.
It looks like most of the replies to this post talk about Python's large standard library (I think every one of them has used the phrase "batteries included") but quoting directly from the review:
This book discusses the Python language and excludes the Python standard and non-standard libraries. The latter are discussed in other places including Lutz's own Programming Python which stands at its third edition at the time of writing of this article. I find this division necessary because of size considerations and, in fact, this division did not exist in the first edition of the book!
This book attempts to introduce ONLY the core language so your comparison to K&R is dead on accurate. The author choose not to include the batteries in order to keep the book from getting too big, and he STILL took over 1000 pages. There's something wrong here.
You're right, it's not a panacea but under the current system, a case like this one could bankrupt an entire district. Under a private system it would destroy just the one school.
The problems that you list all exist now with public schools, and probably wouldn't be any worse under a private system. The upside, however could be huge. The defunct school's property could be bought and it's teachers (minus the offending staff) hired immediately by a competing school with very little disruption to the current student body. The problem here was the administration, not the educators, so one can assume that they would roll right into the next school year as if nothing had happened.
This is another great argument for privatizing the school system. If this was a privately run school, there would be no taxpayer involvement. The students could sue the offending school into oblivion and not worry about destroying local education (or their own property values) for years to come. Of course that would mean that the school wasn't an agent of the government which would kill the fourth amendment charges, but it also (probably) removes some protections that school officials have as a result of being government agents.
Being a dependency of openoffice.org-core only means that it must be installed if openoffice.org-core is also installed. That does not prevent it from being installed without openoffice.org-core.
Dependency is not a symmetric relation.
Google translates that at 100,000 webPAGES for me. Not webSITES. If the proper translation is websites, then the study is a little more credible. But not much.
I don't speak or read German, so I'm relying on the Google translation and a little intuition here, so please bear with me.
They mention testing for the Open Symbol font as the indicator for an OpenOffice install. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most Linux boxes come with Open Symbol installed? I know Debian does. How can they know that OpenOffice installed the font? I have a laptop on which I have never installed OpenOffice, but I do have XMing and it's font package. Guess what... my system has Open Symbol.
Take that along with the fact that they admit an error of +/-10% in the Microsoft numbers and it's clear that this study is seriously flawed.
Even if the font they're checking for could only have come from an OpenOffice install, the best they can say is that 21% of the computers had OpenOffice installed on them at one point. There is absolutely no guarantee that it wasn't removed but left the fonts behind.
I also couldn't find any information about the website they used to collect data. They could have a HUGE sampling bias here. What if, for example, the web site promotes open source software? Or is a resource for programmers and developers? Those users are far more likely to have OpenOffice installed than the average user.
PhD, MS, MA, BS, BA, AS and AA all do have legal statuses. They are given by educational institutions accredited by the US Department of Education, or some equivalent body outside of the US.
The Department of Education does not accredit schools. It publishes a list of accreditation agencies, but there is no requirement for an educational institutions to be accredited by any of these agencies, and in some states non-accredited institutions can still award degrees -- see "diploma mill".
You're picking nits. Allow me to amend my previous statement to be "PhD, MS, MA, BS, BA, AS and AA from accredited institutions all do have legal statuses." Institutions which grant these accredited degrees must meet the requirements of the Higher Education Act of 1965 and therefore, by definition, have a legal status. If you truly believe your own argument then "Engineer" has no legal standing because many job titles containing the word "Engineer" don't require a PE. We both understand what is meant by "Engineer" and "PhD" in the context of this discussion, and it's not a sanitation engineer or a degree from a diploma mill.
A PhD has no more legal status than an MS or BS or even an AA degree.
PhD, MS, MA, BS, BA, AS and AA all do have legal statuses. They are given by educational institutions accredited by the US Department of Education, or some equivalent body outside of the US. While a PhD has no more legal status, it certainly carries more weight than other degrees.
Having said that, I do no agree with the assertion that some certification is required in order to have a profession as opposed to a job. That's just silly.
The teacher owns the material, it is they who develops it and in no way has to do with the schools.
If the teacher does own the rights to a lesson plan, I see no problem with him selling his work in whatever forum he wishes.
But I'm curious about why you think that a teacher actually owns the rights to work he gets paid by his employer to do. Unless it is specifically spelled out in a contract, programmer has no rights to code he writes as part of his job, a reporter has no rights to articles he writes for his paper and a musician has no right to music he composes or performs. Why would a teacher be any different? I doubt that any teacher has an ownership clause in his contract.
Unless he keeps work he intends to sell for profit completely separate from work paid for by an employer, he will forfeit all rights. Even if he does manage to develop these lesson plans completely on his own time, if he refines them as a result of classroom use he's back in trouble.
Without knowing more about the nature of the polls, it is just plain silly to make the claim that because the distribution is not random, there must be fraud. For a wonderful example, look at the distribution of move ratings by viewers. Assuming that you're using a 1-5 scale, you'll see is that there are far more 1's and 5's than anything else and very few 2's. If a person likes something they are more likely to give a 5 than a 4 and if they didn't they're more likely to give a 1 than a 2.
If you want to see for yourself, go download the dataset used for the Netflix prize and check the distribution. Or, pick a random movie from IMDB and look at the distribution. You'll see that the number of votes for a rating of 1 is far more than those for 2 or 3. The proper way to do this analysis is to compare the distribution against the expected distribution, not to compare it against a uniform distribution. If I saw a uniform distribution of movie ratings, I'd cry foul.
So what? If you fulfill the requirements for a minor along the way to a major then shouldn't you be awarded that minor? You did all the same work that anyone else would have done. Should I have been stripped of my BS Math when I got my MS Math just because the requirements for the former were included in the requirements for the latter?
My school did something similar to what you describe and I always thought it was a silly policy.
I'm not sure why you think Blizzard averages only one major update every two years. They have had four major patches just this year, adding three new instances (dungeons for the uninitiated), weather, cross server PVP, overhauls to several character classes and too many fixes and minor additions to list.
Blizzard is currently up to version 1.12. That's twelve significant updates since launch. Those patches included around ten new instances and many other end game additions.
Slashdot Mirror
"Look, the bottom line is that Apple users like Apple. So what?"
It happens to be relevant to the discussion, in this case why they have such dramatically increased loyalty to what amounts to an inferior system on an inferior network.
I think that the answer is exactly what I said. iPhone users like the iPhone more than they dislike AT&T.
If the inferior system you're referring to is the iPhone I don't think that's a fair assessment. Certainly it's a different system, but for the vast majority of iPhone users I argue that it's a superior system. Most users don't care about the closed nature of the platform and appreciate that they have about 250k apps available, compared to the 40k or so Droid apps. Just because other phones are arguable better for a power user doesn't mean that they're better for the average user.
Look, the bottom line is that Apple users like Apple. So what? If you don't like Apple, don't use it's products. End of story. Why the trolling?
So basically D&D, but in your own basement instead of your friends?
There is no arbitrary starting point for a decade. The current decade could be 9 yrs + 7 months old, or it could be 2 years + 1 day old or it could be three seconds old.
The modern convention is that decades start in years ending with a 0. Yes, there are douchebags who will say "nu-uh, there was no year 0, so the decade doesn't end until the 0 year is over!!oneone!11! I burn you with my wiked smatzzz!" but people probably do equally douchey things like saying "If you're from Phoenix, does that make you a Phoenician?".
They fail to see that the whole damn system is arbitrary and that nobody is any more or less correct than any other person when choosing a starting point for his decade.
Except that NumPy will use LAPACK and BLAS for it's linear algebra making it far more efficient. Try a QR decomposition on a matrix of any significant size in VB, then do the same decomposition using LAPACK and you'll see a huge difference. As for numerical analysis being about writing efficient algorithms, sure, that's true, but why would you want to rewrite those algorithms when highly optimized versions come by default?
Disclaimer: Yes, I'm sure you could get VB to use LAPACK and BLAS but python will do it by default.
What concerns me most is that you said that you haven't ever read a complete research paper. How can you be sure that your idea is new and worth publishing if you haven't done the requisite literature reviews? You really need to do your homework before you submit anything to a journal. Most journals will select referees for papers based on that paper's references. If you reference some papers by Dr. Smith and he is still alive, there's a good chance that Dr. Smith will be asked to referee. If you don't have reasonable references, your submission may be rejected out of hand.
Academic publication can be a very slow process. Don't be surprised if it takes a year for your paper to be officially accepted, and another six months before it shows up in print. DO NOT submit your paper to more than one journal. If you don't hear back, don't assume that you've been rejected. Contact the journal and find out what's going on before you send your submission elsewhere. The last thing you want is for more than one journal to accept your paper.
Yes. In addition to a PS3, X360, and Wii there's also the iPhone and iPad that can be bricked via forced updates.
I've had an iPhone for quite some time and I don't ever remember a forced update. I always get a message informing me that an update is available and asking if I want to install it.
Yes, I was off by several orders of magnitude, I stand corrected. I wasn't paying attention. Thanks for the catch. And thanks for not repping me down. I guess my public humiliation is punishment enough. :)
TFA is dead wrong. While DNA evidence can prove that a person didn't commit a crime, a false positive is still possible. If we collect DNA from everyone in the country as suggested, the odds of a false positive will increase accordingly. With the odds of a false positive are about 1:1 Billion (Google it if you don't believe this number), that means that about 300 people in the United States alone will match your DNA fingerprint. And that's just the ones who are currently alive.
At some point (I think we're already there) our computer infrastructure becomes so important to a nation that a cyber attack could be construed as an act of war. I wonder how long it will be before we see a physical military response to a cyber attack. We've already seen evidence that China attacked Google's corporate infrastructure a few months ago. Is this really all that dissimilar than Chinese agents coming to the US and physically breaking into Google's buildings? To relate things to the article, if it could be shown that Iran was indeed attacking CIA sites, would the US be justified in bombing Iranian intelligence facilities? Just some food for thought.
So let me make sure I have this right...
Valve developed Portal, a fantastic game with an enthusiastic fan base who would love to see a sequel.
Steam, which is owned by Valve has just announced that Valve will in fact be releasing said sequel.
The release date for the amazing new game is April 1st.
Just sayin...
I read a book some time ago in which most people were 'iconerate' as opposed to being fully literate. It meant that they could recognize specific icons and symbols and understand them, but that user interfaces has become so sophisticated that understanding beyond that wasn't needed.
While this isn't exactly the idea you've described, there is more than a passing similarity. Users fly through messages and menus quickly because they know what to expect. They remember that blue thing with the W on it starts word, and the green one with the X starts excel. The problem with using this kind of system with error messages is that unless you're using it to capture very common errors, the users will never get to the point where they can immediately associate the icon with a specific problem. And if the users see the error often enough to achieve that level of understanding then they probably know how to deal with it themselves. Which, come to think of it, may not be bad if they could come to associate an icon with specific recovery steps. but it's not going to help you with the complex issues which is where the helpdesk really needs it.
The puppy error idea may work in the short term, but soon I think that the novelty will wear off and they'll all blur into "some cartooish icon" in the user's mind.
It looks like most of the replies to this post talk about Python's large standard library (I think every one of them has used the phrase "batteries included") but quoting directly from the review:
This book discusses the Python language and excludes the Python standard and non-standard libraries. The latter are discussed in other places including Lutz's own Programming Python which stands at its third edition at the time of writing of this article. I find this division necessary because of size considerations and, in fact, this division did not exist in the first edition of the book!
This book attempts to introduce ONLY the core language so your comparison to K&R is dead on accurate. The author choose not to include the batteries in order to keep the book from getting too big, and he STILL took over 1000 pages. There's something wrong here.
You're right, it's not a panacea but under the current system, a case like this one could bankrupt an entire district. Under a private system it would destroy just the one school.
The problems that you list all exist now with public schools, and probably wouldn't be any worse under a private system. The upside, however could be huge. The defunct school's property could be bought and it's teachers (minus the offending staff) hired immediately by a competing school with very little disruption to the current student body. The problem here was the administration, not the educators, so one can assume that they would roll right into the next school year as if nothing had happened.
This is another great argument for privatizing the school system. If this was a privately run school, there would be no taxpayer involvement. The students could sue the offending school into oblivion and not worry about destroying local education (or their own property values) for years to come. Of course that would mean that the school wasn't an agent of the government which would kill the fourth amendment charges, but it also (probably) removes some protections that school officials have as a result of being government agents.
Being a dependency of openoffice.org-core only means that it must be installed if openoffice.org-core is also installed. That does not prevent it from being installed without openoffice.org-core. Dependency is not a symmetric relation.
Google translates that at 100,000 webPAGES for me. Not webSITES. If the proper translation is websites, then the study is a little more credible. But not much.
They mention testing for the Open Symbol font as the indicator for an OpenOffice install. Correct me if I'm wrong, but don't most Linux boxes come with Open Symbol installed? I know Debian does. How can they know that OpenOffice installed the font? I have a laptop on which I have never installed OpenOffice, but I do have XMing and it's font package. Guess what... my system has Open Symbol.
Take that along with the fact that they admit an error of +/-10% in the Microsoft numbers and it's clear that this study is seriously flawed.
Even if the font they're checking for could only have come from an OpenOffice install, the best they can say is that 21% of the computers had OpenOffice installed on them at one point. There is absolutely no guarantee that it wasn't removed but left the fonts behind.
I also couldn't find any information about the website they used to collect data. They could have a HUGE sampling bias here. What if, for example, the web site promotes open source software? Or is a resource for programmers and developers? Those users are far more likely to have OpenOffice installed than the average user.
Take this study with a grain of salt.
The Department of Education does not accredit schools. It publishes a list of accreditation agencies, but there is no requirement for an educational institutions to be accredited by any of these agencies, and in some states non-accredited institutions can still award degrees -- see "diploma mill".
You're picking nits. Allow me to amend my previous statement to be "PhD, MS, MA, BS, BA, AS and AA from accredited institutions all do have legal statuses." Institutions which grant these accredited degrees must meet the requirements of the Higher Education Act of 1965 and therefore, by definition, have a legal status. If you truly believe your own argument then "Engineer" has no legal standing because many job titles containing the word "Engineer" don't require a PE. We both understand what is meant by "Engineer" and "PhD" in the context of this discussion, and it's not a sanitation engineer or a degree from a diploma mill.
A PhD has no more legal status than an MS or BS or even an AA degree.
PhD, MS, MA, BS, BA, AS and AA all do have legal statuses. They are given by educational institutions accredited by the US Department of Education, or some equivalent body outside of the US. While a PhD has no more legal status, it certainly carries more weight than other degrees.
Having said that, I do no agree with the assertion that some certification is required in order to have a profession as opposed to a job. That's just silly.
The teacher owns the material, it is they who develops it and in no way has to do with the schools.
If the teacher does own the rights to a lesson plan, I see no problem with him selling his work in whatever forum he wishes.
But I'm curious about why you think that a teacher actually owns the rights to work he gets paid by his employer to do. Unless it is specifically spelled out in a contract, programmer has no rights to code he writes as part of his job, a reporter has no rights to articles he writes for his paper and a musician has no right to music he composes or performs. Why would a teacher be any different? I doubt that any teacher has an ownership clause in his contract.
Unless he keeps work he intends to sell for profit completely separate from work paid for by an employer, he will forfeit all rights. Even if he does manage to develop these lesson plans completely on his own time, if he refines them as a result of classroom use he's back in trouble.
By "is not random" in the first sentence I meant "is not uniform". Sorry for the typo.
Without knowing more about the nature of the polls, it is just plain silly to make the claim that because the distribution is not random, there must be fraud. For a wonderful example, look at the distribution of move ratings by viewers. Assuming that you're using a 1-5 scale, you'll see is that there are far more 1's and 5's than anything else and very few 2's. If a person likes something they are more likely to give a 5 than a 4 and if they didn't they're more likely to give a 1 than a 2. If you want to see for yourself, go download the dataset used for the Netflix prize and check the distribution. Or, pick a random movie from IMDB and look at the distribution. You'll see that the number of votes for a rating of 1 is far more than those for 2 or 3. The proper way to do this analysis is to compare the distribution against the expected distribution, not to compare it against a uniform distribution. If I saw a uniform distribution of movie ratings, I'd cry foul.
So what? If you fulfill the requirements for a minor along the way to a major then shouldn't you be awarded that minor? You did all the same work that anyone else would have done. Should I have been stripped of my BS Math when I got my MS Math just because the requirements for the former were included in the requirements for the latter? My school did something similar to what you describe and I always thought it was a silly policy.
I'm not sure why you think Blizzard averages only one major update every two years. They have had four major patches just this year, adding three new instances (dungeons for the uninitiated), weather, cross server PVP, overhauls to several character classes and too many fixes and minor additions to list.
Blizzard is currently up to version 1.12. That's twelve significant updates since launch. Those patches included around ten new instances and many other end game additions.