I also place emphasis on anything that is open source and easy to implement since it will allow me to bypass the convoluted purchase approval process.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you want good support and easy implementation, you have to look for normal paid-for solutions. Besides, open source is not synonym for free. This is especially true with specialized software or something you want good support for. Open source just means you get the code aswell, so you can implement your own additions (without use of plugins) or change it.
Your point may be valid. But what would really help your validity is mentioning some proprietary products that beat R and WEKA at their own game. Sure, I've used Matlab and it can't be beat in some respects and is heavily supported. But to suggest that just because it effortlessly interfaces with Excel spreadsheets when the person could get by with a simple export in Excel to run their R script on the resulting files? Not worth the cash, in my opinion. I don't go out and buy every piece of software to evaluate it, though. I'm aware of Matlab and Mathematica and have used them quite a bit... but I still prefer R and WEKA. So, CmdrPony, go ahead and list all the proprietary point-and-click-omg-it-just-works software for our friend here. We're all waiting.
But unless you get an product from a company that is spending money to develop it, you never get good software and good support.
Say, friendo, have you ever heard of Linux? Eclipse? Audacity? PostGRES? VLC?
No one can make both because everything in this world costs money, and developers have to live too. Open source and free software model works well for the likes of Google and Firefox because the developments get paid by money made with advertising. Statistical analysis software, and other specialized software is a different matter.
Can you tell me what advertising model is employed to funnel money through Firefox into Google? I mean, Google makes a competing product called Chrome -- the rendering engines are even different! What in the world are you free basing?
R is my personal favorite but you're going to have to get down and dirty with some high level programming (scripting). Check out the data import package (you would probably export your spreadsheets to flat txt files and import although the functionality is ever increasing). There's no user interface in this suggestion... what there is, however, is a massive collection of packages for statistical analysis. Very well maintained, constantly updated and ever expanding.
These (probably) require an intermediate data transformation step but are open source and extensively supported. Any examples of what you wanted to do? Simple stuff like standard deviation or complex stuff like principle component analysis (PCA)? I guess if it was just simple stuff, that'd be built into Excel, right? Maybe your problems are simple enough to just need a good macro writer to tackle? Whatever happens, good luck!
As I noted in my submission yesterday, this stems from their anger at Chinese fur farms that often have tanuki. At first it seems like this directed at Mario and Nintendo however I think they're merely using the popularity of Mario to get this message out about the cruelty of Chinese fur farms.
Your trade is for a government which grants a lot of freedoms, and a government which curtails some of your freedoms (but generally leaving you alone) in a world where all the services run perfectly.
Let's say you got lucky and you agree with the Communist Party. Okay, so that's "generally leaving you alone"? Or is it completely prohibiting you from ever being exposed to any information -- no matter how true or false or unverified -- that could give you a second thought about your party line?
Let me be the first to say that the second such a scenario affects anyone of my countrymen, I am no longer being left alone. Censorship for the sole interests of a political regime is unacceptable.
Here's a "rumor" for you: The United States government will readily murder non-citizens for oil. Is it true? Who cares? I just said it! Try saying anything like that about the Chinese government while you're on their little telecom service and enjoy your slow decline as you are forced to view the world through their custom-made-ever-shifting looking glass.
I can't "give" you passion. I'm not Martin Luther King Jr. and this isn't about Human Rights. Passion comes from within and if it's not there, I can't trigger you to release it.
If all it required for passion was to saunter up to a counter and say "One passion, please" then we'd all be theoretical physicists musing over our all night analysis of LHC data whilst having tea with Stephen Hawking right now.
Sorry to be so crass about it but all I can do is tell you what got the ball rolling inside of me to make computers do exactly what I bid them to and how that makes me feel at the end of the day. To tell you to go home and read Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug and then implement a Hidden Markov Model that learns on Bach Chorales in LISP is unlikely to do you any good. Me, on the other hand, that shit turned me from a hay bailing idiot farmhand into a programmer.
I'm not a beekeeper but my aunt had a couple hive boxes that she kept year round. One had a hive that stayed around but the other had a problem of dying off or swarming and moving away (despite the fact that we treated each box exactly the same and packed them with hay bails just before winter). Once she captured a hive with a nuc and successfully moved it into the failing hive box but it didn't last long. This minimalist design appears to solve the warmth issue (by keeping it on the inside of your home) but what happens when your swarm moves or your queen dies and there's no brood to create a new hive? Is there a method to repopulating these things?
Also, does anyone know if bees select their hives based on locality to fields and nectar sources? From my aunt's experiences, bees seem to be fickle creatures and will readily leave due to inattentive keepers. I imagine a lot of these things would just end up empty.
One more concern is that the small aperture on the outside might be subject to blockage by freezing rain, ice or snow and in the picture it looks like it would be hard to remedy that.
Says So Right in the Summary
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Ask The Yes Men
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· Score: 2
Has there been any retaliation for your pranks/hijinks?
Surely you must appreciate the research and hard work that goes into the field of prankology and I was wondering if you could share with us each of your favorite pranks throughout history that are well documented and evidenced. Crop circles? Andy Kaufman? What?
Do You Draw a Line at Who You Prank?
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Ask The Yes Men
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· Score: 4, Interesting
I don't know who your targets often are but one of your recent results from the Yes Lab and Black Flood was to fool people into thinking that The Hobbit was being filmed in the Tar Sands in Canada. This apparently raised awareness of the Tar Sands but also there were complaints that you were no longer limited to fooling corporations and that this prank tricked activists as well. So I must ask, is there a line that you won't cross on who you will prank and who you absolutely will not prank? Is anyone a potential target for these shenanigans? Is no one safe? Children? Impoverished people? Cancer patients? Related follow up, have you personally ever felt bad about someone or some group (perhaps an innocent bystander) that fell into being duped by your antics?
There will be plenty of soundbites and choreographed photo-ops to go around. Candidates will read speeches from TelePrompters, and staffers will mail out policy statements calculated to inspire political fealty to one candidate or another — finding unscripted answers from most of the candidates is going to be tough. Slashdot interviews, by contrast, give you the chance to do something that interviews in more conventional media usually don't: the chance to ask the questions you'd actually like to have answered, and to see the whole answer as provided.
Oh they won't have teleprompters for a Slashdot interview? So what? Every single candidate or person working for a candidate are going to do the following:
Assess Slashdot's core demographic (young white males with liberal leanings).
Go to their "cheat sheets" and select the well tailored response to each topic at the appropriate slot of the political scale to garner the maximum number of votes from said demographic.
Read questions, refuse those that cannot be filled with square peg or easily deflected.
Spend a tiny amount of time reframing each question as the first part of the response until it is a seamless transition to the copy/paste of their advisers' maximized stock spiel or merely deflect it (hey, this isn't a debate you just have to bob and weave out of one round).
This isn't my first rodeo. Seriously, watch a candidate's speech in BFE one-horse-town North Texas one day and then their speech in yuppie concrete jungle Manhattan the next day. They will skirt issues and spew half truths that are almost (but not quite, it's an art) in direct conflict with their message at another locality. How do you maximize votes? Why settle for those localized maxima with the same speech in two different demographics when a massive overhaul will win you the campaign? Why do you think they have teams of speech writers? If you campaigned on one consistent platform through the country, you're dead in the water. The only way to win is to lie by omission or worse.
Oh and if you think that a webmaster of a politician is going to be allowed to answer questions in regard to that politician's campaign, you can forget it. A person with a STEM background interfacing in a Q&A for someone's campaign?! Are you daft? No no no no, nobody is going to allow that. The phrase "talking points" was made for a reason. Can you imagine that conversation? "Hey, I know I designed your website for your campaign, now I'm going on a news site to represent your campaign to potentially anybody -- I mean if I really fuck up this could be on Colbert or something. Wish me luck!"
I'm the whiny bitch. And I'm whiny because I've seen all this before.
That's fine, you're free to rip apart a new language and you can bitch all you want at me or someone who's been in this field for longer than a decade. But when a new guy shows up eager to learn and in so many words you tell him to GTFO for selecting a new language that you haven't personally canonized as worthy that's where I'm going to set my foot down. He could be looking to program Visual Basic and your response would still be worse than gently guiding him toward a more fruitful endeavor.
I'm not aware of many communities that thrive on ostracizing new members (well, maybe Scientology).
Many of us have. It happens over and over and over. Computers should be a means to an end, but instead we keep making them a means to a means to a means to a means (recursion anyone?). Progress is fine, but what ends up happening in the computer industry is that we never are satisfied with the solutions we already have. People keep feeling the need to reinvent the wheel and few people work together, use existing solutions or think of the long term.
I think you're missing the importance of competing technologies and solutions. If I'm one of the suso-approved software languages, what motivation do I have to improve on multithreading? I'm already approved by the standards board as being one of the ten golden languages. It's important for languages like C++ to be threatened by Java and have Java in turn be threatened by Ruby. Why? So they continually work towards supporting what the community wants and needs. Without this who gets to determine whether we sacrifice performance for ease of maintenance? Or that the language should behave more like a functional language than an object oriented language? This is much like a market with languages competing for developers. And that's good and results in a healthy toolbox for you and I. Don't rip apart Dart unless you have some legitimate technical beef with it. So far you haven't offered anything like that. Right now it is largely unknown what its strengths and weaknesses are. You attack it as, what? Some sort of ECMAScript clone or ripoff?
Standards and languages end up more like fashion trends instead of tools. I think we'd benefit a lot more if we just identified ten or so languages that people could learn for different tasks and then because there were only ten, more people would know them, have more code reuse and better support and we'd get more done because we wouldn't be thinking all the time how to make a better language or IDE or any of the tools that you need.
This is already done in universities. I learned Scheme, Perl, PHP, C, Matlab and Java in my undergrad days. I didn't learn Processing, Clojure, Python, R or Ruby until later. Universities basically tell students what the most common languages are as they try to prepare them for the job market. Much like literary canon you're told to execute Moby Dick/Java instead of Snow Crash/Clojure. Why? Because some people decided that Moby Dick and Java are just plain better. And that's not even starting with the proprietary languages -- some that are more used today than most of what I've listed. Would C# be in your list of ten holy languages? Would Flash/Flex?
You're being a code dictator by saying what you think would improve the net efficiency of the software community. And while that might work in the short run or in a community with constrained resources, it doesn't work so well when there are millions of developers and a very long time in front of us. Why weren't new languages halted when we had Lisp, C, Fortran and Cobol? Surely at the time, those could have been argued to provide everything we need today, right?
I love my job. A new language is a new toy. Relax and tinker in your free time. Fall back on the standard powerful
Hi. I'm a young whipper snapper who would like to learn something fresh and new with almost no user base instead of using already existing solutions that do all that I'd ever need to do and have loads of documentation and already existing user base.
Alternative response: Welcome to the exciting ever changing world of software development with more tools at your disposal than you could ever hope to learn! It's great that you're interested in this brand new language. It's probably not the best to cut your teeth on if you're new to the game so be prepared for challenges in regards to lacking documentation.
And instead of acknowledging that I was foolish to try using a brand new language and expect great support, I'm going to complain to everyone I come into contact with that they don't support this new language and if they were worth anything they would support it because its by company X or uses this new paradigm Y.
You make the submitter sound like a whiny bitch... yet all I detected in his questions were eagerness and optimism. Where did he complain? Where did demand support for this language from you? Why the hostility? You don't have to read his posts at dartlang.org you know. Christ at the end he was hoping to help build support for Dart.
Slashdot: rewards for taking an acerbic tongue to outsiders since before it was cool.
a) Is there any chance that if I self-teach Dart, I can get a job in development without a CS degree, once companies begin using the language?
Assuming you have a technical degree/bachelor of science I don't see why not. The biggest problem I see is going to be that I've never encountered a job where I didn't also need to know stuff about the back end and databases. I've always developed on all fronts of a project and I'm not sure where you would go to just do Dart development and not also some webservice or controller or MVC style design. And that's where you'll get blindsided is you probably aren't familiar with MVC design or database queries. Who knows though? I've interviewed a Mechanical Engineer and brought them on to do requirements back when we did waterfall.
b) Is it really worth installing Virtual Studio as per the dartlang docs, or should I wait for a dedicated IDE like the rumored 'Brightly'? Alternatively, are there any solid open development environments that are adding support?
c) Do you know of any books that are out or on the way that I could buy?
This language was announced in September. At some point (four or five months?) a "rough cuts" of a book will probably be available on Safari books.
What programming series do you guys recommend?
I'm partial to Pragmatic Programmer, O'Reilly and No Starch in that order. APress might be worth a mention but personally I steer clear of Packt and Wrox. I've done some reviews on this site and I think that my reviewing reflects this.
Hopefully I can learn in my spare time, and if I can't get a job in development I can at least have fun with it, and maybe make a few libraries for the Dart community!
Stay active on the dartlang.org Google group and shout out if you get stuck. Good luck and have fun!
I'm guessing you don't have any programming experience on your resume. If you really want that programming job, I'd set goals for myself to complete a project in dart on my own so that I have at least something to show a prospective employer that shows some capability and (more importantly) self-motivation.
I found it odd that the author didn't cover mask work rights in the United States. They only last 10 years in semiconductor mask works and are also reducible to mathematical equations despite being amazingly complex layouts of basic transistors and connections. I would argue these are closer to mathematical equations than Goetz's hardware circuit board example.
I'm not sure if software patents should be completely abolished, just reduced. Maybe five years? I mean, how long in the software industry until something is considered old news or common knowledge? For them to last 20 years just seems to be nothing but inhibiting of innovation to me -- and I'm a software developer! I'm one of the guys that should be benefiting from a longer term. But so far, it's only been a major pain in the ass. I'm sure Goetz could argue I'm just not "inventive" enough to hold software patents. I'd wager I'm just not up to the task of working with an army of lawyers.
I actually take serious issue with Goetz's explanation on the second page of the article about software:
Note that these terms are all consistent with a manufactured product: research, competitive analysis, functionality, specifications, operational environment, operating characteristics, interfaces, modules, engineering, implemented, debugged, tested, quality assurance, alpha and beta testing, documentation, installation, training, OEM, component, system, repackaged, maintenance, warrants, workmanship, guarantees, errors, defects, improved, enhanced, upgraded, and models.
Dude, you can make software development as complicated as goddamn rocket science. But at the end of the day some kid in a basement can also write software sans all that shit. I know where we work, we use Agile Methodologies, high communication, we work in very small teams and we depend on our developers not to be complete liabilities. Sure your control gates and extensive product assurance works too with just about any level of competence in your developers but I feel that's why software is so unreasonably expensive these days.
There are plenty of resources online that get you from nothing to your first "Hello, World!" program in a matter of minutes. The same is not true of hardware circuits -- especially if you want to manufacture them at all in a commercially viable way.
The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — has been steadily developing since 2001. It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.
So you're saying that the entirely homegrown processor was started by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU? Sounds very telling of China's position on innovation (copy/paste). I'm very excited someone is putting pressure on the nations of the world to compute like a boss but it does rub me the wrong way when the title of the article is titled with a "West vs. East" prefix. I'm not trying to get all "Rah Rah USA" here but isn't all the fabrication and chip design built on top of so much history from all around the world? Calling anything entirely "homegrown" in supercomputers or chip design seems kind of unbelievable to me. Unless China's got something radically original, I'm guessing they owe at least a little credit to so much work done in the USA, Europe the rest of Asia. I mean, it is RISC, right?
This "East vs. West" and "homegrown" stuff is kind of misleading and I find this amusing:
Lest you think this is merely serendipitous happenstance, think again: China has repeatedly stated that it wishes to sever its reliance on American/Western high-tech — and now it can add supercomputers to its rapidly growing list of (mostly reverse-engineered) successes.
And when that is deemed "too slow" where do you turn to move forward? Do you draw on your internal innovation to come up with a new design and process to defeat your opponents or do you merely go back to re-engineering your opponent's latest chip?
Very soon, perhaps by 2020, the only edge that the US will have is in the realm of research and innovation...
Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets? Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?
... and today's announcement of the Sunway supercomputer suggests that the US might not have as much of an advantage as it would hope.
Hey man, I love FUD if it kicks our politicians into dumping more of that Military Industrial Complex cash into Science and Research but... feel free to call me skeptical of your last conclusion. The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design -- unless they're on their way to reverse engineering another.
There is Always More Work to Do
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The Real Job Threat
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· Score: 5, Interesting
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
Well, the fact is that at first there were people that lost their jobs (the generation undergoing restructuring in their trade)... I thought in economics they called this restructuralization unemployment or some such term that wasn't necessarily bad unemployment. But they found work elsewhere -- all four of my grandparents were dirt farmers and I sure the hell am not. Sure, I grew up working on farms but picking rock and bailing hay are chump jobs. I herald the man that does away with that work. I think this statement is universally true: You could provide someone the means to complete all the work they want and -- given they are industrious enough -- you can come back the next day and they will be ready to pay you for more work done in new and different ways.
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job. I couldn't be more diametrically opposed to that position. Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better. I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
There will always be more work to be done and I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time. I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
Project Page and English Translation
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Copiale Cipher Decoded
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· Score: 4, Informative
Why did it take them seven years (almost exactly to this date) to come to this conclusion?
Does Muller stand by this statement on Principle Component Analysis from 2004?
In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)
I'm wagering you've studied many communications protocols -- is there any protocols that you feel was terribly designed and implemented? Any modern day elegant/simple/innovative protocols that you've admired?
What about the comments where I link to the original paper and its machine translation?
"STEP ON THE SOLAR DISK OF A SWARM OF OBSERVED corpuscle Observatory in Zacatecas (MEXICO). "
"By Jose Tree and Bonilla (Director of the Observatory of Zacatecas, Mexico).
"I have the habit at the observatory in Zacatecas, located at two thousand 502 meters above sea level, daily observation of the surface state solar drawing, via direct and projection, stains and grains, as also the protuberances of the solar chromosphere, to borrow to do the spectroscope.
To this end, I adapted the equatorial opening 0.16 m, a device projection it receives on a sheet of paper a picture of Sun 0250 m diameter, because the field of the lens does not project more than its surface 0260 m and is unclear. When the solar disk offers some interest took photographs of 0067 m in diameter, through snapshots plates Gelatin silver.
The dome of the Observatory has small windows and thick black curtains, so that does not penetrate through the lens nothing but the image of the sun His ever noticed provision allows, with precision and clarity, faculae and the smallest details of sunspots and granulations, thanks to the transparency of the atmosphere and the height to which it is located the Observatory, under a tropical sky (22 ° 46 '34 "north latitude 9).
On August 12, 1883, at 08:00 am, I began to draw spots when suddenly I perceived a small body of light that penetrated the field of the lens, drawing on paper that I used to play spots, and walk through the solar disk projecting a shadow almost circular.
He had not yet left my surprise when the same phenomenon was repeated again and this is often such that two hours could count up to 283 bodies across the solar disk.
Slowly, the clouds hampered the observation could not restart until the time of passage of the sun across the meridian and only 40 minutes, during which were counted again within another 48 bodies. The paths followed by these bodies indicate a direct displacement from west to east, more or less inclined north or south of the solar disk. In a few minutes of observation I noticed that these bodies that looked black and gloomy, a perfectly round and more or less elongated-, when projected on the solar disk offered bright images leaving the edges and across the fields of the lens.
Intervals were variable steps, both passed a body or two-no using more than one third, half a second, or a second maximum to cross disk, and a minute or two passed before there others as well spent 15 or 20 at a time, so it was difficult to count. I could fix the history of many of these bodies on the solar disk, marking its entry and outputs in the paper that I used to draw the traces, that role, as equatorial lens followed, by a system clock, the movement Sun's apparent diurnal on the sky. Figure 118 is a reduced copy the drawing I made that day the solar disc (250 mm in diameter) with trajectory of the bodies and sunspots.
Often taking pictures of the Sun, when your hard smudged and faculae remarkable, I put in a position to photograph just the rare and interesting phenomenon of these bodies pass through the solar disk.
For this reason, I replaced in the same equatorial target by another 0.16 m of equal intensity, but chemical source (suitable for photographic work), I adapted to the eyepiece and the camera. After several trials to correctly approach these bodies, I managed to take some pictures, of which I chosen what I consider more interesting to send to the journal Astronomy '. While these photographs I took an assistant counted the bodies in the 'search' the equator. The photograph was taken wet collodion 1 / 100 of a second. This rate did not give me time to filter
(Although I am not a physicist) I understand that this is talking about the concept of "time" from a frame of reference between the GPS satellites and the ground stations. However, the original paper's implementation did not measure time with GPS satellites (that would be silly). Instead, it used the satellites to obtain very precise distances and when they did this, they accounted for relativity. The time recording devices were atomic clocks at the locations of the facilities on the surface of the Earth. As the second article notes, they just said they did this and you assume they did it correctly. However, if they miscalculated relativity between the satellites and ground stations, it's going to be in the form of the distance being incorrectly measured -- not the actual time itself. And that distance (which would be slightly shorter than they calculated) should then result in an explanation of the nanosecond difference.
The question shouldn't be who can or should pay more taxes, it should be how can we reign in a government out of control when it comes to spending.
Really? Let's say for a moment that your small business was selling advertising through clicks on advertisements on the internet. Now, you figure out your taxes and charge your customers that. But somehow, Google keeps undercutting that price point. How do they do it? Oh, right "double Irish" and "dutch sandwich" tax loopholes. You don't make enough money to set up a shell office in Ireland or Netherlands to funnel sales through? Too bad, you'll forever be figuring in more taxes than Google into your price since you can't take advantage of these bullshit tax loopholes.
I agree the government is way out of control on spending. But you don't have a lick of business sense if you're disagreeing with me on what is fair for taxation in this situation. It flat out ruins your competitiveness as a small business and there's a reason we have laws that protect the competitiveness of the small guys. Just because they compete on an international level shouldn't give them the right to beat local businesses into the ground -- let alone enjoy the American infrastructure that is paid for with taxes while avoiding the same taxes!
Slashdot Mirror
I also place emphasis on anything that is open source and easy to implement since it will allow me to bypass the convoluted purchase approval process.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but if you want good support and easy implementation, you have to look for normal paid-for solutions. Besides, open source is not synonym for free. This is especially true with specialized software or something you want good support for. Open source just means you get the code aswell, so you can implement your own additions (without use of plugins) or change it.
Your point may be valid. But what would really help your validity is mentioning some proprietary products that beat R and WEKA at their own game. Sure, I've used Matlab and it can't be beat in some respects and is heavily supported. But to suggest that just because it effortlessly interfaces with Excel spreadsheets when the person could get by with a simple export in Excel to run their R script on the resulting files? Not worth the cash, in my opinion. I don't go out and buy every piece of software to evaluate it, though. I'm aware of Matlab and Mathematica and have used them quite a bit ... but I still prefer R and WEKA. So, CmdrPony, go ahead and list all the proprietary point-and-click-omg-it-just-works software for our friend here. We're all waiting.
But unless you get an product from a company that is spending money to develop it, you never get good software and good support.
Say, friendo, have you ever heard of Linux? Eclipse? Audacity? PostGRES? VLC?
No one can make both because everything in this world costs money, and developers have to live too. Open source and free software model works well for the likes of Google and Firefox because the developments get paid by money made with advertising. Statistical analysis software, and other specialized software is a different matter.
Can you tell me what advertising model is employed to funnel money through Firefox into Google? I mean, Google makes a competing product called Chrome -- the rendering engines are even different! What in the world are you free basing?
R is my personal favorite but you're going to have to get down and dirty with some high level programming (scripting). Check out the data import package (you would probably export your spreadsheets to flat txt files and import although the functionality is ever increasing). There's no user interface in this suggestion ... what there is, however, is a massive collection of packages for statistical analysis. Very well maintained, constantly updated and ever expanding.
The other suggestion has a better GUI but is really heavyweight. WEKA has helped me time and time again perform advanced statistical calculations on data sets and it's in Java so runs on just about anything. Their interface occasionally improves too, they now have an explorer that I use to prep data and remove outliers/null data (don't worry, this isn't climate data). It's well documented.
These (probably) require an intermediate data transformation step but are open source and extensively supported. Any examples of what you wanted to do? Simple stuff like standard deviation or complex stuff like principle component analysis (PCA)? I guess if it was just simple stuff, that'd be built into Excel, right? Maybe your problems are simple enough to just need a good macro writer to tackle? Whatever happens, good luck!
As I noted in my submission yesterday, this stems from their anger at Chinese fur farms that often have tanuki. At first it seems like this directed at Mario and Nintendo however I think they're merely using the popularity of Mario to get this message out about the cruelty of Chinese fur farms.
Your trade is for a government which grants a lot of freedoms, and a government which curtails some of your freedoms (but generally leaving you alone) in a world where all the services run perfectly.
Okay. I must take issue with "generally leaving you alone." This is utter and complete bullshit. When the recent news is that 39 of the largest companies in China are agreeing to begin their own censorship initiatives under guidance of the Chinese government I have to ask you one question: If you were to give any political party in America complete control of what comes in and out of our TVs, Radios, Computers, Cellphones, etc how many Americans do you think it is going to affect?
Let's say you got lucky and you agree with the Communist Party. Okay, so that's "generally leaving you alone"? Or is it completely prohibiting you from ever being exposed to any information -- no matter how true or false or unverified -- that could give you a second thought about your party line?
Let me be the first to say that the second such a scenario affects anyone of my countrymen, I am no longer being left alone. Censorship for the sole interests of a political regime is unacceptable.
Here's a "rumor" for you: The United States government will readily murder non-citizens for oil. Is it true? Who cares? I just said it! Try saying anything like that about the Chinese government while you're on their little telecom service and enjoy your slow decline as you are forced to view the world through their custom-made-ever-shifting looking glass.
I can't "give" you passion. I'm not Martin Luther King Jr. and this isn't about Human Rights. Passion comes from within and if it's not there, I can't trigger you to release it.
If all it required for passion was to saunter up to a counter and say "One passion, please" then we'd all be theoretical physicists musing over our all night analysis of LHC data whilst having tea with Stephen Hawking right now.
Sorry to be so crass about it but all I can do is tell you what got the ball rolling inside of me to make computers do exactly what I bid them to and how that makes me feel at the end of the day. To tell you to go home and read Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold-Bug and then implement a Hidden Markov Model that learns on Bach Chorales in LISP is unlikely to do you any good. Me, on the other hand, that shit turned me from a hay bailing idiot farmhand into a programmer.
I'm not a beekeeper but my aunt had a couple hive boxes that she kept year round. One had a hive that stayed around but the other had a problem of dying off or swarming and moving away (despite the fact that we treated each box exactly the same and packed them with hay bails just before winter). Once she captured a hive with a nuc and successfully moved it into the failing hive box but it didn't last long. This minimalist design appears to solve the warmth issue (by keeping it on the inside of your home) but what happens when your swarm moves or your queen dies and there's no brood to create a new hive? Is there a method to repopulating these things?
Also, does anyone know if bees select their hives based on locality to fields and nectar sources? From my aunt's experiences, bees seem to be fickle creatures and will readily leave due to inattentive keepers. I imagine a lot of these things would just end up empty.
One more concern is that the small aperture on the outside might be subject to blockage by freezing rain, ice or snow and in the picture it looks like it would be hard to remedy that.
Has there been any retaliation for your pranks/hijinks?
Considering the summary lists a court case from the Chamber of Commerce after The Yes Men held a mock conference where they claimed the Chamber of Commerce was going green, I'd guess that the answer to your question is an undoubted unsurprising "yes."
Furthermore on their site you can find news articles of companies like Peabody Energy suing them to take their company name off their fake sites.
Surely you must appreciate the research and hard work that goes into the field of prankology and I was wondering if you could share with us each of your favorite pranks throughout history that are well documented and evidenced. Crop circles? Andy Kaufman? What?
I don't know who your targets often are but one of your recent results from the Yes Lab and Black Flood was to fool people into thinking that The Hobbit was being filmed in the Tar Sands in Canada. This apparently raised awareness of the Tar Sands but also there were complaints that you were no longer limited to fooling corporations and that this prank tricked activists as well. So I must ask, is there a line that you won't cross on who you will prank and who you absolutely will not prank? Is anyone a potential target for these shenanigans? Is no one safe? Children? Impoverished people? Cancer patients? Related follow up, have you personally ever felt bad about someone or some group (perhaps an innocent bystander) that fell into being duped by your antics?
There will be plenty of soundbites and choreographed photo-ops to go around. Candidates will read speeches from TelePrompters, and staffers will mail out policy statements calculated to inspire political fealty to one candidate or another — finding unscripted answers from most of the candidates is going to be tough. Slashdot interviews, by contrast, give you the chance to do something that interviews in more conventional media usually don't: the chance to ask the questions you'd actually like to have answered, and to see the whole answer as provided.
Oh they won't have teleprompters for a Slashdot interview? So what? Every single candidate or person working for a candidate are going to do the following:
This isn't my first rodeo. Seriously, watch a candidate's speech in BFE one-horse-town North Texas one day and then their speech in yuppie concrete jungle Manhattan the next day. They will skirt issues and spew half truths that are almost (but not quite, it's an art) in direct conflict with their message at another locality. How do you maximize votes? Why settle for those localized maxima with the same speech in two different demographics when a massive overhaul will win you the campaign? Why do you think they have teams of speech writers? If you campaigned on one consistent platform through the country, you're dead in the water. The only way to win is to lie by omission or worse.
Oh and if you think that a webmaster of a politician is going to be allowed to answer questions in regard to that politician's campaign, you can forget it. A person with a STEM background interfacing in a Q&A for someone's campaign?! Are you daft? No no no no, nobody is going to allow that. The phrase "talking points" was made for a reason. Can you imagine that conversation? "Hey, I know I designed your website for your campaign, now I'm going on a news site to represent your campaign to potentially anybody -- I mean if I really fuck up this could be on Colbert or something. Wish me luck!"
I'm the whiny bitch. And I'm whiny because I've seen all this before.
That's fine, you're free to rip apart a new language and you can bitch all you want at me or someone who's been in this field for longer than a decade. But when a new guy shows up eager to learn and in so many words you tell him to GTFO for selecting a new language that you haven't personally canonized as worthy that's where I'm going to set my foot down. He could be looking to program Visual Basic and your response would still be worse than gently guiding him toward a more fruitful endeavor.
I'm not aware of many communities that thrive on ostracizing new members (well, maybe Scientology).
Many of us have. It happens over and over and over. Computers should be a means to an end, but instead we keep making them a means to a means to a means to a means (recursion anyone?). Progress is fine, but what ends up happening in the computer industry is that we never are satisfied with the solutions we already have. People keep feeling the need to reinvent the wheel and few people work together, use existing solutions or think of the long term.
I think you're missing the importance of competing technologies and solutions. If I'm one of the suso-approved software languages, what motivation do I have to improve on multithreading? I'm already approved by the standards board as being one of the ten golden languages. It's important for languages like C++ to be threatened by Java and have Java in turn be threatened by Ruby. Why? So they continually work towards supporting what the community wants and needs. Without this who gets to determine whether we sacrifice performance for ease of maintenance? Or that the language should behave more like a functional language than an object oriented language? This is much like a market with languages competing for developers. And that's good and results in a healthy toolbox for you and I. Don't rip apart Dart unless you have some legitimate technical beef with it. So far you haven't offered anything like that. Right now it is largely unknown what its strengths and weaknesses are. You attack it as, what? Some sort of ECMAScript clone or ripoff?
Standards and languages end up more like fashion trends instead of tools. I think we'd benefit a lot more if we just identified ten or so languages that people could learn for different tasks and then because there were only ten, more people would know them, have more code reuse and better support and we'd get more done because we wouldn't be thinking all the time how to make a better language or IDE or any of the tools that you need.
This is already done in universities. I learned Scheme, Perl, PHP, C, Matlab and Java in my undergrad days. I didn't learn Processing, Clojure, Python, R or Ruby until later. Universities basically tell students what the most common languages are as they try to prepare them for the job market. Much like literary canon you're told to execute Moby Dick/Java instead of Snow Crash/Clojure. Why? Because some people decided that Moby Dick and Java are just plain better. And that's not even starting with the proprietary languages -- some that are more used today than most of what I've listed. Would C# be in your list of ten holy languages? Would Flash/Flex?
You're being a code dictator by saying what you think would improve the net efficiency of the software community. And while that might work in the short run or in a community with constrained resources, it doesn't work so well when there are millions of developers and a very long time in front of us. Why weren't new languages halted when we had Lisp, C, Fortran and Cobol? Surely at the time, those could have been argued to provide everything we need today, right?
I love my job. A new language is a new toy. Relax and tinker in your free time. Fall back on the standard powerful
Hi. I'm a young whipper snapper who would like to learn something fresh and new with almost no user base instead of using already existing solutions that do all that I'd ever need to do and have loads of documentation and already existing user base.
Alternative response: Welcome to the exciting ever changing world of software development with more tools at your disposal than you could ever hope to learn! It's great that you're interested in this brand new language. It's probably not the best to cut your teeth on if you're new to the game so be prepared for challenges in regards to lacking documentation.
And instead of acknowledging that I was foolish to try using a brand new language and expect great support, I'm going to complain to everyone I come into contact with that they don't support this new language and if they were worth anything they would support it because its by company X or uses this new paradigm Y.
You make the submitter sound like a whiny bitch ... yet all I detected in his questions were eagerness and optimism. Where did he complain? Where did demand support for this language from you? Why the hostility? You don't have to read his posts at dartlang.org you know. Christ at the end he was hoping to help build support for Dart.
Slashdot: rewards for taking an acerbic tongue to outsiders since before it was cool.
a) Is there any chance that if I self-teach Dart, I can get a job in development without a CS degree, once companies begin using the language?
Assuming you have a technical degree/bachelor of science I don't see why not. The biggest problem I see is going to be that I've never encountered a job where I didn't also need to know stuff about the back end and databases. I've always developed on all fronts of a project and I'm not sure where you would go to just do Dart development and not also some webservice or controller or MVC style design. And that's where you'll get blindsided is you probably aren't familiar with MVC design or database queries. Who knows though? I've interviewed a Mechanical Engineer and brought them on to do requirements back when we did waterfall.
b) Is it really worth installing Virtual Studio as per the dartlang docs, or should I wait for a dedicated IDE like the rumored 'Brightly'? Alternatively, are there any solid open development environments that are adding support?
I'm guessing from this that your best bet is this if you're a minimalist kind of person (like me) or this if you're familiar with the behemoth Eclipse. You'll probably find yourself repeating that process after filing bugs until there is a stable release though ...
c) Do you know of any books that are out or on the way that I could buy?
This language was announced in September. At some point (four or five months?) a "rough cuts" of a book will probably be available on Safari books.
What programming series do you guys recommend?
I'm partial to Pragmatic Programmer, O'Reilly and No Starch in that order. APress might be worth a mention but personally I steer clear of Packt and Wrox. I've done some reviews on this site and I think that my reviewing reflects this.
Hopefully I can learn in my spare time, and if I can't get a job in development I can at least have fun with it, and maybe make a few libraries for the Dart community!
Stay active on the dartlang.org Google group and shout out if you get stuck. Good luck and have fun!
I'm guessing you don't have any programming experience on your resume. If you really want that programming job, I'd set goals for myself to complete a project in dart on my own so that I have at least something to show a prospective employer that shows some capability and (more importantly) self-motivation.
I'm not sure if software patents should be completely abolished, just reduced. Maybe five years? I mean, how long in the software industry until something is considered old news or common knowledge? For them to last 20 years just seems to be nothing but inhibiting of innovation to me -- and I'm a software developer! I'm one of the guys that should be benefiting from a longer term. But so far, it's only been a major pain in the ass. I'm sure Goetz could argue I'm just not "inventive" enough to hold software patents. I'd wager I'm just not up to the task of working with an army of lawyers.
I actually take serious issue with Goetz's explanation on the second page of the article about software:
Note that these terms are all consistent with a manufactured product: research, competitive analysis, functionality, specifications, operational environment, operating characteristics, interfaces, modules, engineering, implemented, debugged, tested, quality assurance, alpha and beta testing, documentation, installation, training, OEM, component, system, repackaged, maintenance, warrants, workmanship, guarantees, errors, defects, improved, enhanced, upgraded, and models.
Dude, you can make software development as complicated as goddamn rocket science. But at the end of the day some kid in a basement can also write software sans all that shit. I know where we work, we use Agile Methodologies, high communication, we work in very small teams and we depend on our developers not to be complete liabilities. Sure your control gates and extensive product assurance works too with just about any level of competence in your developers but I feel that's why software is so unreasonably expensive these days.
There are plenty of resources online that get you from nothing to your first "Hello, World!" program in a matter of minutes. The same is not true of hardware circuits -- especially if you want to manufacture them at all in a commercially viable way.
This analogy is rather flawed.
The ShenWei chips are based on the Loongson/Godson architecture, which China — as in, the country itself — has been steadily developing since 2001. It is believed that the Loongson family of processors, including the ShenWei SW-3 found in Sunway, were created by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU.
So you're saying that the entirely homegrown processor was started by reverse engineering a DEC Alpha CPU? Sounds very telling of China's position on innovation (copy/paste). I'm very excited someone is putting pressure on the nations of the world to compute like a boss but it does rub me the wrong way when the title of the article is titled with a "West vs. East" prefix. I'm not trying to get all "Rah Rah USA" here but isn't all the fabrication and chip design built on top of so much history from all around the world? Calling anything entirely "homegrown" in supercomputers or chip design seems kind of unbelievable to me. Unless China's got something radically original, I'm guessing they owe at least a little credit to so much work done in the USA, Europe the rest of Asia. I mean, it is RISC, right?
This "East vs. West" and "homegrown" stuff is kind of misleading and I find this amusing:
Lest you think this is merely serendipitous happenstance, think again: China has repeatedly stated that it wishes to sever its reliance on American/Western high-tech — and now it can add supercomputers to its rapidly growing list of (mostly reverse-engineered) successes.
And when that is deemed "too slow" where do you turn to move forward? Do you draw on your internal innovation to come up with a new design and process to defeat your opponents or do you merely go back to re-engineering your opponent's latest chip?
Very soon, perhaps by 2020, the only edge that the US will have is in the realm of research and innovation ...
Reverse engineering is innovation? Okay so when China outstrips the United States and defeats the evil Western corporations, who then will they turn to for reverse engineering targets? Also, what is driving this chip to innovate? Who are the competitors for Loongson/Godson? Nobody inside their borders, the government is funding that! That's the problem when your government pays for and decides what you're going to use. Once that's in place, you can sit back and soak up that fat federal funding. Where's the competition going to come from?
Hey man, I love FUD if it kicks our politicians into dumping more of that Military Industrial Complex cash into Science and Research but ... feel free to call me skeptical of your last conclusion. The fact is that by 2020 they're still going to be using this same reverse engineered chip design -- unless they're on their way to reverse engineering another.
Why didn't combines and massive tractors ruin agriculture jobs in the United States? I mean, they clearly replaced the work of many men and the same could be said then: "Many farm hands, in short, are losing the race against the machine." The combines got bigger and faster and more efficient and suddenly you even needed fewer operators!
... I thought in economics they called this restructuralization unemployment or some such term that wasn't necessarily bad unemployment. But they found work elsewhere -- all four of my grandparents were dirt farmers and I sure the hell am not. Sure, I grew up working on farms but picking rock and bailing hay are chump jobs. I herald the man that does away with that work. I think this statement is universally true: You could provide someone the means to complete all the work they want and -- given they are industrious enough -- you can come back the next day and they will be ready to pay you for more work done in new and different ways.
Well, the fact is that at first there were people that lost their jobs (the generation undergoing restructuring in their trade)
People have asked me if I'm afraid about open source ruining my software job. I couldn't be more diametrically opposed to that position. Open source basically makes me better at my job and ensures my future by empowering me to do my job better. I could give someone all the software they ask for one day and come back the next day only to have them asking me for more software.
There will always be more work to be done and I think there will always be more software to write for a very very very long time. I'm more worried that people have forgotten how to clean a chicken or simply grow enough vegetables and plants to survive (should we ever be thrust backwards).
This link to the New York Times might work better for the article and since submitting it I have stumbled on the research page and its English translation.
Does Muller stand by this statement on Principle Component Analysis from 2004?
In PCA and similar techniques, each of the (in this case, typically 70) different data sets have their averages subtracted (so they have a mean of zero), and then are multiplied by a number to make their average variation around that mean to be equal to one; in technical jargon, we say that each data set is normalized to zero mean and unit variance. In standard PCA, each data set is normalized over its complete data period; for key climate data sets that Mann used to create his hockey stick graph, this was the interval 1400-1980. But the computer program Mann used did not do that. Instead, it forced each data set to have zero mean for the time period 1902-1980, and to match the historical records for this interval. This is the time when the historical temperature is well known, so this procedure does guarantee the most accurate temperature scale. But it completely screws up PCA. PCA is mostly concerned with the data sets that have high variance, and the Mann normalization procedure tends to give very high variance to any data set with a hockey stick shape. (Such data sets have zero mean only over the 1902-1980 period, not over the longer 1400-1980 period.)
... in the Thunderdome? Or was it more of a Highlander thing?
I'm wagering you've studied many communications protocols -- is there any protocols that you feel was terribly designed and implemented? Any modern day elegant/simple/innovative protocols that you've admired?
What level of success does TCP/IP owe to your glorious beard?
If there was one thing you could go back and change about TCP/IP -- something that is far too entrenched to change now -- what would it be?
(Although I am not a physicist) I understand that this is talking about the concept of "time" from a frame of reference between the GPS satellites and the ground stations. However, the original paper's implementation did not measure time with GPS satellites (that would be silly). Instead, it used the satellites to obtain very precise distances and when they did this, they accounted for relativity. The time recording devices were atomic clocks at the locations of the facilities on the surface of the Earth. As the second article notes, they just said they did this and you assume they did it correctly. However, if they miscalculated relativity between the satellites and ground stations, it's going to be in the form of the distance being incorrectly measured -- not the actual time itself. And that distance (which would be slightly shorter than they calculated) should then result in an explanation of the nanosecond difference.
I run a small business.
Oh the irony.
The question shouldn't be who can or should pay more taxes, it should be how can we reign in a government out of control when it comes to spending.
Really? Let's say for a moment that your small business was selling advertising through clicks on advertisements on the internet. Now, you figure out your taxes and charge your customers that. But somehow, Google keeps undercutting that price point. How do they do it? Oh, right "double Irish" and "dutch sandwich" tax loopholes. You don't make enough money to set up a shell office in Ireland or Netherlands to funnel sales through? Too bad, you'll forever be figuring in more taxes than Google into your price since you can't take advantage of these bullshit tax loopholes.
I agree the government is way out of control on spending. But you don't have a lick of business sense if you're disagreeing with me on what is fair for taxation in this situation. It flat out ruins your competitiveness as a small business and there's a reason we have laws that protect the competitiveness of the small guys. Just because they compete on an international level shouldn't give them the right to beat local businesses into the ground -- let alone enjoy the American infrastructure that is paid for with taxes while avoiding the same taxes!