If you hit Ctrl+Alt+F# (F1, F2, etc) you can get into a command line... You can hit Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back to the GUI. Probably more important that they know that one, if they accidentally zap themselves to the command line.
cliche (oops, forgot my accent aigeu again...) Cliché has an acute accent. And I agree that it should be spelt à la, which makes sense to people who know french, as oppose to ala which makes no sense to anyone. At the very least, it should be spelt "a la".
The bus leaves at an angle of theta relative to the plane perpendicular to gravity, i.e. 0 means it leaves of completely flat. For maximum effect, let theta be 35.26 degrees.
Where did 35 degrees come from? On even ground, the maximum range of a projectile is 45 degrees.
Actually, I thought this was a pretty good way of teaching physics. It only takes high school physics to show that it is theoretically possible as long as you ignore air resistance.
Nit-picking your solution:
y = v0*sin(theta)*t - g*t^2 Should be y = v0*sin(theta)*t - (1/2) * g*t^2
Some people really do believe a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap in a freeway
Here's a question? What is the minimum speed you need to clear a 50-foot gap?
Answer:
Launch at 45 degrees. i.e. vx = vy
vx * t = 15.24 m
t is the time in seconds to travel 50 feet.
vy - g * (t/2) = 0. At t/2 seconds, it reaches the apex. vy(t/2) = 0
Solving... v = 27 miles per hour.
So yes, this is one person who believes a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap.
Obviously you won't maintain the speed without a landing ramp, but that wasn't part of the requirements...
I think intelligence involves going outside the bounds of the program. Consider how Kasparov attributed non-chess related conditions to his loss.
IBM's total control of the site and the playing conditions underscored the vulnerability of the human player. I was the only player in this competition influenced by any sort of negative or hostile atmosphere. I think IBM's unwillingness to cooperate or give printouts of the computer's thought processes harmed that atmosphere. (As of today, I still have not received the complete printouts that I requested.) There were also many minor incidents, starting with the fact that the venue was created for the convenience of the machine -- with all these air-conditioning systems and dozens of people serving the machine -- not the human player.
I don't want anybody to look at this as an excuse. It's my fault. I accepted the conditions.
So if there's one thing that humans can do better than computers, it's making excuses. Seriously, that takes creativity and intuition.
Most large companies are run by clueless bozos who will be happy to outsource your job to the lowest bidder, and really don't care much about your job satisfaction
This particular comic argues directly against the thesis of this slashdot article though. The pointy-haired boss trying to advocate FOSS to the technically minded employees. If it wasn't for the extreme viewpoint of the boss wanting to change everything all at once, the roles should be reversed between Dilbert and the boss. Of course, then it wouldn't be funny. Actually, on second though, it's not even funny in the first place. Trade publications would advertise closed source proprietary software, not FOSS.
But the comic illustrates the corporate culture's resistance to change though, and how even if the employees would benefit from the change to FOSS, they still fear the change.
The web page he is referring to obviously has not read The Origin of Species.
"Darwin's theory is over-simplified."
I read the Origin of Species, and there is absolutely nothing over-simplified in there. It's a classic straw man argument. "Darwin says the strongest survive, but if that was true, we'd all be elephants."
Nothing will replace email for me unless it is searchable. When you're trying to dig up details that are buried under a year of facebook junk, or long since deleted from your cell, it's nice to not have to resort to asking for them again.
I'll admit that sometimes it's useful to have 2 firefox windows open, say one for work, one for other stuff, or to compare or copy and paste. But this guy had 8 open! I dislike this because the Alt-Tab window in Windows does not show the program name until you select it, making it very inefficient for switching quickly. The order of the programs on the task bar is not related to the order they are in the Alt-Tab screen. Also, if you have your task bar on auto-hide to keep it from eating up your screen space, you can't simply glance at it, like you can with your firefox tabs. Also your firefox tabs adjust their size dynamically to use the most of the available space.
For me, the reason I prefer tabs so much is that you can open all new links in background tabs with middle clicks. This allows you to continue reading the current page and lets you know when the new link has completely downloaded at a glance. But more fundamentally, it keeps your workspace organized. It's easier to control-tab, to move one tab to the right, and control-shift-tab to move one tab to the left, than it is to slowly alt-tab to the correct window. Also, by using tabs, you only need one Alt-Tab to switch to another application.
With relevance to the gimp, I notice that I spend an unnecessary amount of time ensuring the various windows and dialogs are not blocking each other, or being blocked by another program's window. It's a pain to alt-tab between 4 or 5 Wilbur icons, having to read the title at each step. In Linux, I make sure to run the gimp on its own desktop. In windows, I'm forced to minimize everything but the gimp.
The common theme among instances vs. tabs, gimp interface, multiple desktops vs. single desktop can be summed up in one word: hierarchy. Linux desktops environments like KDE and Gnome get this right. Keep your email client, and all email related stuff in one desktop, web browsing in another desktop, the gimp in yet another. Keep your various work related applications in their own desktop. Switch between them with Control-F1 (through Control-F8).
Each desktop's Alt-Tab will be local, greatly reducing clutter. In Windows, when you get to have that many programs running, it takes all day to alt-tab between them, and you're pretty much forced to close some. The gimp adds to this problem by introducing multiple windows when there should be only one. They are on the right track with having "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo" all in one docked and tabbed dialog.
From wikipedia: The number of windows used by GIMP's interface can cause desktop clutter. This is not only because the GIMP uses a (controlled) single document interface, but also because it uses multiple windows for its tools, color palette, etc. (unlike many competing graphics programs, which use a multiple document interface or an SDI with integrated toolbars).
That would be number 1, on my list of Gimp usability suggestions.
Having said all this, once you get to find all the useful features, and creating shortcuts to them, man is it ever fast!
I watched the video, and the only thing that stuck in my mind, is that I think you're not qualified to study usability if you have to Alt-Tab through a bunch of firefox instances because you haven't discovered tabs yet.
why would Gödel's Theorem imply that such a simulation take into account its own contributions
Because its contributions will need to be simulated to be taken into account, resulting in the need for a meta-simulator.
If you enjoy pondering things like this, I strongly recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I loved that book, and although I might not be applying its concepts entirely correctly here, what I took out of the book that's relevant to this was the following:
The simulation is not system. No matter how accurate math is, it does not represent the real world, and should not be mistaken for that.
You can not objectively analyse an entire system if you're part of that system. e.g. You can not prove to yourself that you are sane.
So, do they have enough compute power to simulate the flap of every butterfly's wings now? And does it include the heat it produces from its cooling systems in its climate models?
(I know it's a joke but...) It's impossible. To incorporate its own heat generated into its own simulation would violate Gödel's first incompleteness theorem: "Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete."
The computer must be completely removed from the system to be accurate. It must be run from an another dimension, but you still run into the same problem when you go to take the measurements.
Matlab had a programming contest back in 2004 about Gerrymandering.
you are given the task of preparing for an upcoming election in the state of Rectanglia. As the director of redistricting, your job is to divide the state into N districts of equal population. Therefore, given a matrix A in which each element corresponds to the population in a given square mile, return a matrix B that indicates which voting district each square mile belongs in.
The best algorithms consisted of snaking, trimming, growing and refining.
But the path to mastering most programming languages has been strewn with obstacles, since students needed to figure out not only the underlying logic but also master a brand new syntax, observe strict rules about semicolons and bracket use, and figure out what was causing error messages even as they learned the program."
I just completed the Chinese test and none of the parts *require* vector math. They are much simpler to solve if you stick with simple 2 dimensional triangles, or finding an appropriate 3D orthographic set of lines.
.. but I just really believe that "too" much choice sucks.
Very true. This is a very informative Google TechTalk called The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less [warning 1 hour] that describes this issue. It's not intuitive, but is logical. It is very hard for people to make a choice, so hard, that often people will avoid making a decision when doing nothing is actually more costly than making a bad choice. This talk is back up by results of some interesting experiments.
Slashdot Mirror
The most PIMP?
Cracks me up every time I watch it.
All the episodes
Mendelson says that when he's pressing 1,000, "I can feel my bones flexing."
I always thought that bones would snap before they'd flex very far, even under a constant load.
P.S. I use Gentoo.
Where did 35 degrees come from? On even ground, the maximum range of a projectile is 45 degrees.
Nit-picking your solution:
y = v0*sin(theta)*t - g*t^2
Should be y = v0*sin(theta)*t - (1/2) * g*t^2
Here's a question? What is the minimum speed you need to clear a 50-foot gap?
Answer:
Launch at 45 degrees. i.e. vx = vy
vx * t = 15.24 m
t is the time in seconds to travel 50 feet.
vy - g * (t/2) = 0. At t/2 seconds, it reaches the apex. vy(t/2) = 0
Solving... v = 27 miles per hour.
So yes, this is one person who believes a bus traveling 70 mph can clear a 50-foot gap.
Obviously you won't maintain the speed without a landing ramp, but that wasn't part of the requirements...
I think intelligence involves going outside the bounds of the program. Consider how Kasparov attributed non-chess related conditions to his loss.
IBM's total control of the site and the playing conditions underscored the vulnerability of the human player. I was the only player in this competition influenced by any sort of negative or hostile atmosphere. I think IBM's unwillingness to cooperate or give printouts of the computer's thought processes harmed that atmosphere. (As of today, I still have not received the complete printouts that I requested.) There were also many minor incidents, starting with the fact that the venue was created for the convenience of the machine -- with all these air-conditioning systems and dozens of people serving the machine -- not the human player.
I don't want anybody to look at this as an excuse. It's my fault. I accepted the conditions.
So if there's one thing that humans can do better than computers, it's making excuses. Seriously, that takes creativity and intuition.
This particular comic argues directly against the thesis of this slashdot article though. The pointy-haired boss trying to advocate FOSS to the technically minded employees. If it wasn't for the extreme viewpoint of the boss wanting to change everything all at once, the roles should be reversed between Dilbert and the boss. Of course, then it wouldn't be funny. Actually, on second though, it's not even funny in the first place. Trade publications would advertise closed source proprietary software, not FOSS.
But the comic illustrates the corporate culture's resistance to change though, and how even if the employees would benefit from the change to FOSS, they still fear the change.
The sexist thing in the world is a woman that is smarter than you are. (listen to Nerd Porn Auteur)
Nothing will replace email for me unless it is searchable. When you're trying to dig up details that are buried under a year of facebook junk, or long since deleted from your cell, it's nice to not have to resort to asking for them again.
I'll admit that sometimes it's useful to have 2 firefox windows open, say one for work, one for other stuff, or to compare or copy and paste. But this guy had 8 open! I dislike this because the Alt-Tab window in Windows does not show the program name until you select it, making it very inefficient for switching quickly. The order of the programs on the task bar is not related to the order they are in the Alt-Tab screen. Also, if you have your task bar on auto-hide to keep it from eating up your screen space, you can't simply glance at it, like you can with your firefox tabs. Also your firefox tabs adjust their size dynamically to use the most of the available space.
For me, the reason I prefer tabs so much is that you can open all new links in background tabs with middle clicks. This allows you to continue reading the current page and lets you know when the new link has completely downloaded at a glance. But more fundamentally, it keeps your workspace organized. It's easier to control-tab, to move one tab to the right, and control-shift-tab to move one tab to the left, than it is to slowly alt-tab to the correct window. Also, by using tabs, you only need one Alt-Tab to switch to another application.
With relevance to the gimp, I notice that I spend an unnecessary amount of time ensuring the various windows and dialogs are not blocking each other, or being blocked by another program's window. It's a pain to alt-tab between 4 or 5 Wilbur icons, having to read the title at each step. In Linux, I make sure to run the gimp on its own desktop. In windows, I'm forced to minimize everything but the gimp.
The common theme among instances vs. tabs, gimp interface, multiple desktops vs. single desktop can be summed up in one word: hierarchy. Linux desktops environments like KDE and Gnome get this right. Keep your email client, and all email related stuff in one desktop, web browsing in another desktop, the gimp in yet another. Keep your various work related applications in their own desktop. Switch between them with Control-F1 (through Control-F8).
Each desktop's Alt-Tab will be local, greatly reducing clutter. In Windows, when you get to have that many programs running, it takes all day to alt-tab between them, and you're pretty much forced to close some. The gimp adds to this problem by introducing multiple windows when there should be only one. They are on the right track with having "Layers, Channels, Paths, Undo" all in one docked and tabbed dialog.
From wikipedia:
The number of windows used by GIMP's interface can cause desktop clutter. This is not only because the GIMP uses a (controlled) single document interface, but also because it uses multiple windows for its tools, color palette, etc. (unlike many competing graphics programs, which use a multiple document interface or an SDI with integrated toolbars).
That would be number 1, on my list of Gimp usability suggestions.
Having said all this, once you get to find all the useful features, and creating shortcuts to them, man is it ever fast!
I watched the video, and the only thing that stuck in my mind, is that I think you're not qualified to study usability if you have to Alt-Tab through a bunch of firefox instances because you haven't discovered tabs yet.
If you enjoy pondering things like this, I strongly recommend Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. I loved that book, and although I might not be applying its concepts entirely correctly here, what I took out of the book that's relevant to this was the following:
(I know it's a joke but...) It's impossible. To incorporate its own heat generated into its own simulation would violate Gödel's first incompleteness theorem:
"Any effectively generated theory capable of expressing elementary arithmetic cannot be both consistent and complete."
The computer must be completely removed from the system to be accurate. It must be run from an another dimension, but you still run into the same problem when you go to take the measurements.
The best algorithms consisted of snaking, trimming, growing and refining.
First you get the sugar, then you get the power, then you get the women.
I just completed the Chinese test and none of the parts *require* vector math. They are much simpler to solve if you stick with simple 2 dimensional triangles, or finding an appropriate 3D orthographic set of lines.
Very true. This is a very informative Google TechTalk called The Paradox of Choice - Why More Is Less [warning 1 hour] that describes this issue. It's not intuitive, but is logical. It is very hard for people to make a choice, so hard, that often people will avoid making a decision when doing nothing is actually more costly than making a bad choice. This talk is back up by results of some interesting experiments.