If any of my coworkers broke down and went into a savage fit of rage
You'd be ecstatic until you work out which schmuck is going to get lumbered with doing all their work while they're off recuperating, or serving their sentence. Sounds to like the start of a domino effect. Take the hint and get out of the way.
I recall in the pre-Y2K days knowing one manager (well, one who admitted to it) being somewhere more than 3 weeks behind in his email. Eventually he declared "email bankruptcy", deleted all the unread stuff and started again.
ISTM the trick is to realise that almost none of the emails a person gets are important or even relevant. Collect the ones from your boss and your boss's boss and deal with those. Pretty much anything else can be ignored. If it really is that important, they can always phone you.
You could well be right. However, from the sense of optimism in the article these are the sorts of things I would come to expect. If on the one hand they're making statements using words like "revolutionise" and "massively parallel" thn they've got to back 'em up!
Personally I'd say that it's still too early to say if QC will bear fruit - just we haven't yet seen any major benefits of DNA mapping (people still get cancer). It would just be nice to read a piece that wasn't trying for the hard sell, and was able to present a quiet, factual article without all the hype.
The article contained a little too much "future tense" for my liking. ISTR people have been talking about quantum computing, entanglement and qubits for, what?, a decade or more. Now I'm a patient man but it still seems to be couched in phrases like "we will..." "could..." "would..." "... is being researched" "... is theoretically..." . I recall back in the 60's when lasers were the wonder of the time, they got a bit of a reputation for being a solution in search of a problem - though that's obviously changed now (we've discovered the problems they can solve). So does that mean that some time in the next 50 years, we'll have quantum computers crunching massively paprallel problems, such as decrypting all our previously secure communications, manipulating all the pixels of a video feed in real-time, right off the sensor or even with an entanglement USB peripheral that takes the place of all our networking and communications systems - providing instantaneous point-to-point links between pairs of chips?
Or does it mean that none of this will come to pass? To quote the article
the average computer user probably won't have much use for a quantum computer
I'd say it's quite important to know which way our future is headed - anybody know?
and I ignore most of the rest.
I keep all my email in text files and generally just grep them when II need to call up a piece of information (such as an order date) that I have forgotten.
I can't say what the critical issues are with drupal 7, but from my experience of drupal 6 - their most critical issue was they relied on modules written by amateurs who couldn't be bothered to correct their mistakes when they came to light, making many of the modules I wanted to use useless. The degree of amateurishness was such that I spent days or weeks under the (false) impression that it must be me who didn't understand what I was doing.
On that basis, I have no intention of porting across to drupal 7 for at least 6 months - maybe longer, until the 11 known "critical" errors have been fixed and all the so-far undiscovered critical errors fixed. Once bitten.
So far as "bootless" goes, my old PDA is ready for use virtually instantaneously. It still boots - more or less, but instead of the multi-minute bloat of modern operating systems, it is capable of doing anything I need within about that much time. Now the functions of the PDA are strictly limited. Let's see what we've got: word processor, games, internet browser, email, calendar, video/MP3 players -- hang on a second! Maybe it's not really that limited after all. Give it a keyboard, mouse and a 17-inch screen and you've got a PC that would do the job very nicely.
Not only are its limitations insignificant for the average (non-power) user, but unless you do something daft like reflash the O/S, there's little in the way of screwing it up, either. Maybe instead of looking forwards to Windows Mobile 7, Android, iOS etc. we should take a step back and consider not what's possible but what we actually want?
Universities are as much about research and discoveries as they are about teaching. In fact most of the staff get their positions through their research qualifications, rather than their teaching ability (as is often painfully obvious to the students). if you go for an informal approach, there is no structure in place to enforce or even validate the quality of the staff and it will rapidly spiral downwards in both reputation and quality of graduates.
Putting aside indolence and being "scared" of technology it seems to me that the charities and community outlets should be doing this. Don't they have some sort of implied responsibility to not waste (i.e. sell off too cheaply) any donations or communal property they own or are given?
Apart from anything else, they are in the ideal position to do this - since they could scan the books at their leisure before pitting them on sale. if I gave books to a charity shop, I'd like to feel that they were getting the most benefit from my gifts - and if that entails checking their value before slapping a generic $2 price tag on each one, so be it.
Maybe commercial premises don't require password access. However that doesn' t make them secure. Only a fool would use one of those locations without securing an HTTPS connection to (say) their bank. Because, guess what? Yes - the wifi is insecure.
0.999... == 1, so 0.999...8 must equal 0.999..9.
Therefore 0.999...7 must also equal 0.999...8 and 0.999...
and 0.999...6 must also equal 0.999...7 and so on.
so with an infinite number of comparisons, 0.000...1 == 0.999...
and since you can multiply any number in the range 0 - 1 by something to get every other number, logic would indictate that all numbers have the same value PROVIDED the initial assertion was true,
This self-assembly spacecraft wouldn't actually go to the moon, it would go around it and come back. No landings, no exploration, no payload return mission. In fact all you'd get are a few more photos just like they took 40 years ago with Apollo 8.
The craft wouldn't even complete the trip - it would be going too fast on the return path from the moon to slow down and dock back with the ISS, so it would just perform a "normal" atmospheric re-entry at 25,000 MPH just like all (more or less) the other Apollo moon missions did.
It might just be worthwhile if it was a stage in a definite strategy to restart exploration, but it sounds much more like yet another make-work task for the ISS - we've got this space station, it's just up there going round, and round, and round - can't we get to use it for something useful? A question that so far has had very little in the way of positive responses.
Are there any other avenues where I can contribute to open source and improve programming skills?"
The internet is drowning in code and starving from lack of decent documentation on how to use it. if you want to transform a mediocre, existing OSS project into a world-class, standing head and shoulders above everything else in its field piece of exemplary work, then take ANY numerical library and write some examples for it, write explanations on how it works, what its limitations are (hell: even comment some of the source code itself). Write user guides, API guides, put together a FAQ or a Wiki. List the mistakes and create some workarounds.It's not sexy, but it's what we need most.
The other thing that inspecting other people's work will do (apart from really honking-off some of the more protective - read; poor - software authors) is to show you, close up and in the real world, some of the constructs and techniques that are employed. For better or worse, this will give you a lot of experience in good and bad techniques and will give you a much larger palette to choose from when you decide to endow the planet with yet another piece of OSS of your won making.
If only computers could classify "interesting technical pointers, snippets and announcements" versus "inane drivel about bodily functions or other personal activity"
if you're prepared to accept a 99% level of confidence, the answer is yes, computers can classify inane crap. The simple way to do this is to realise that something over 99% of all internet traffic is inane crap. Therefore saying "all of it" satisfies the 99% requirement (and probably includes this post, too).
29% of tweets aren't ignored. That is an incredibly good hit rate, for what is essentially a write-only, vanity medium. Imagine if that same level of response could be replicated in real life: nearly one-third of the mutterings and grumbles that we hear all the time elicited a response (apart from "Oh, do shut up!") we'd spend all day engaged in pointless and empty conversations with complete strangers.
The biggest change is just that they're keeping up to date with all the new stuff that's happening around them. I haven't seen any posts or "official" Ubuntu messages which say: If you upgrade to 10l10, you will be able to do X, Y and Z that you couldn't do before and A, B and C will be better / faster / less buggy.
On that basis, it looks like they're selling the features, not the benefits. So since they can't tell me what the benefits are I can't see a compelling reason to adopt it.
From what we *know* this planet is more Mars-like than Earth-like. So if we were going to go anywhere in the hope of either finding life or of settling, ourselves forget travelling 20 ly, just try travelling a few hundred million km to our nearest neighbour and finding life there. Once we can do that then there is a point to dreaming about going further out.
As it is, even if we set off to the Gliese 581 system today, when we finally got there we would undoubtedly find life - ourselves. As Larry Niven points out in his fiction, by the time our current technology takes to get there, someone will have invented / discovered a faster way of travelling and will therefore overtake our 21st century probe en route.
Oh there's much more to it than merely the O/S. It's all the applications and third party management tools, too. They all provide GUIs (sometimes only GUIs) as they think it makes their stuff look easy to use. In fact all it does is make it easier to sell to decision makers who don't have the background to distinguish "friendly" from repeatable.
All good admins document their work (don't they? DON'T THEY?).
With a CLI or a script that's easy: it comes down to "log in as user X, change to directory Y, run script Z with arguments A B and C - the output should look like D".
Try that when all you have is a GLUI (like a GUI, but you get stuck): open this window, select that option, drag a slider, check these boxes, click Yes, three times. The output might look a little like this blurry screen shot and the only record of a successful execution is a window that disappears as soon as the application ends.
I suppose the Linux community should be grateful that windows made the fundemental systems design error of making everything graphic. Without that basic failure, Linux might never have even got the toe-hold it has now.
People stick because there's no compelling reason to change. There are no "must have" features that would make me go to the hassle and expense of upgrading. There are (so far) no third party apps I need that will only run on Win7 and no hardware that requires it either.
The basic issue here is that all these "new" O/S's that Microsoft bring out are basically just the same old thing, possibly with a few usability tweaks and some different, more resource-hungry eye candy and some old bugs and security holes removed - to leave room for the new ones they'll introduce.
Just like you wouldn't go changing you car's engine just because Toyota or Ford or Hyundai brought out a new one, the basic lack of innovation (in both car engines and operating systems) means there's no compelling benefits to reward you for making the switch. Maybe if they had something radical, new, innovative and necessary - instead of yet another facelift on the old, backward-compatible stuff they've been stamping out for 20 years, there'd be a market. Until then I'm happy with what I have.
Since we're talking about software that is already outside the law, it's reasonable to assume that the punishments or retribution that the illegal software makers can build in to "protect" their code could also be outside the bounds of acceptability. So while "legal" DRM measures can't do much beyond saying "you're being naughty, please stop" the illegal copies of illegal software could give themselves licence to wreak havoc on the machine that's attempting to run them. Just how far they'd be prepared to go (causing the hardware to catch fire? is that practical?) could be an interesting development for the uninvolved onlooker to track.
Twitter has been a key component in Iran for organisers against their election results.
Just as soon as there is something similar in other countries, expect a LOT of people to get on twitter to organise dissent. Whoever wrote this piece has an incredibly short memory - or a numbingly parochial view of the world and the internet.
The worst judgement call of all would be to engage a company with such a contradictory name as Social Intelligence (like military intelligence - hah!). Especially if they think they can extrapolate from what people write about themselves to how they will perform in a work environment. You might as well employ palmistry and phrenology as a way of selecting low-risk candidates. They were fact-free fads in their time, too.
If only that worked in the computer / games world. ISTM reviews start at 3 stars, just for providing a cardboard box. If there's anything in it, the product automatically gets 4 stars, and if they have an advertisement in the magazine or website then 5 stars is a shoo in.
I have seen mini-reviews of products that the reviewer admitted didn't even work get a 3* rating on the basis of what the product description said (and an assurance from the supplier that the example they got "must have been a flook"). it's also obvious in many, many reviews that the reviewer has never even seen the product and is writing a piece simple from the suppliers promotional literature - who do they think they're kidding?
Slashdot Mirror
If any of my coworkers broke down and went into a savage fit of rage
You'd be ecstatic until you work out which schmuck is going to get lumbered with doing all their work while they're off recuperating, or serving their sentence. Sounds to like the start of a domino effect. Take the hint and get out of the way.
ISTM the trick is to realise that almost none of the emails a person gets are important or even relevant. Collect the ones from your boss and your boss's boss and deal with those. Pretty much anything else can be ignored. If it really is that important, they can always phone you.
Personally I'd say that it's still too early to say if QC will bear fruit - just we haven't yet seen any major benefits of DNA mapping (people still get cancer). It would just be nice to read a piece that wasn't trying for the hard sell, and was able to present a quiet, factual article without all the hype.
Or does it mean that none of this will come to pass? To quote the article
the average computer user probably won't have much use for a quantum computer
I'd say it's quite important to know which way our future is headed - anybody know?
and I ignore most of the rest. I keep all my email in text files and generally just grep them when II need to call up a piece of information (such as an order date) that I have forgotten.
On that basis, I have no intention of porting across to drupal 7 for at least 6 months - maybe longer, until the 11 known "critical" errors have been fixed and all the so-far undiscovered critical errors fixed. Once bitten.
Not only are its limitations insignificant for the average (non-power) user, but unless you do something daft like reflash the O/S, there's little in the way of screwing it up, either. Maybe instead of looking forwards to Windows Mobile 7, Android, iOS etc. we should take a step back and consider not what's possible but what we actually want?
Universities are as much about research and discoveries as they are about teaching. In fact most of the staff get their positions through their research qualifications, rather than their teaching ability (as is often painfully obvious to the students). if you go for an informal approach, there is no structure in place to enforce or even validate the quality of the staff and it will rapidly spiral downwards in both reputation and quality of graduates.
Apart from anything else, they are in the ideal position to do this - since they could scan the books at their leisure before pitting them on sale. if I gave books to a charity shop, I'd like to feel that they were getting the most benefit from my gifts - and if that entails checking their value before slapping a generic $2 price tag on each one, so be it.
Maybe commercial premises don't require password access. However that doesn' t make them secure. Only a fool would use one of those locations without securing an HTTPS connection to (say) their bank. Because, guess what? Yes - the wifi is insecure.
Therefore 0.999
and 0.999
so with an infinite number of comparisons, 0.000...1 == 0.999...
and since you can multiply any number in the range 0 - 1 by something to get every other number, logic would indictate that all numbers have the same value PROVIDED the initial assertion was true,
we should've been doing YEARS AGO.
... what exactly would be different, now?
This self-assembly spacecraft wouldn't actually go to the moon, it would go around it and come back. No landings, no exploration, no payload return mission. In fact all you'd get are a few more photos just like they took 40 years ago with Apollo 8.
The craft wouldn't even complete the trip - it would be going too fast on the return path from the moon to slow down and dock back with the ISS, so it would just perform a "normal" atmospheric re-entry at 25,000 MPH just like all (more or less) the other Apollo moon missions did.
It might just be worthwhile if it was a stage in a definite strategy to restart exploration, but it sounds much more like yet another make-work task for the ISS - we've got this space station, it's just up there going round, and round, and round - can't we get to use it for something useful? A question that so far has had very little in the way of positive responses.
Have you tried 6 stars: ****** ? that's the best password as it's so easy to remember when the website echoes it back to you.
Are there any other avenues where I can contribute to open source and improve programming skills?"
The internet is drowning in code and starving from lack of decent documentation on how to use it. if you want to transform a mediocre, existing OSS project into a world-class, standing head and shoulders above everything else in its field piece of exemplary work, then take ANY numerical library and write some examples for it, write explanations on how it works, what its limitations are (hell: even comment some of the source code itself). Write user guides, API guides, put together a FAQ or a Wiki. List the mistakes and create some workarounds.It's not sexy, but it's what we need most.
The other thing that inspecting other people's work will do (apart from really honking-off some of the more protective - read; poor - software authors) is to show you, close up and in the real world, some of the constructs and techniques that are employed. For better or worse, this will give you a lot of experience in good and bad techniques and will give you a much larger palette to choose from when you decide to endow the planet with yet another piece of OSS of your won making.
If only computers could classify "interesting technical pointers, snippets and announcements" versus "inane drivel about bodily functions or other personal activity"
if you're prepared to accept a 99% level of confidence, the answer is yes, computers can classify inane crap. The simple way to do this is to realise that something over 99% of all internet traffic is inane crap. Therefore saying "all of it" satisfies the 99% requirement (and probably includes this post, too).
29% of tweets aren't ignored. That is an incredibly good hit rate, for what is essentially a write-only, vanity medium. Imagine if that same level of response could be replicated in real life: nearly one-third of the mutterings and grumbles that we hear all the time elicited a response (apart from "Oh, do shut up!") we'd spend all day engaged in pointless and empty conversations with complete strangers.
On that basis, it looks like they're selling the features, not the benefits. So since they can't tell me what the benefits are I can't see a compelling reason to adopt it.
As it is, even if we set off to the Gliese 581 system today, when we finally got there we would undoubtedly find life - ourselves. As Larry Niven points out in his fiction, by the time our current technology takes to get there, someone will have invented / discovered a faster way of travelling and will therefore overtake our 21st century probe en route.
Oh there's much more to it than merely the O/S. It's all the applications and third party management tools, too. They all provide GUIs (sometimes only GUIs) as they think it makes their stuff look easy to use. In fact all it does is make it easier to sell to decision makers who don't have the background to distinguish "friendly" from repeatable.
With a CLI or a script that's easy: it comes down to "log in as user X, change to directory Y, run script Z with arguments A B and C - the output should look like D". Try that when all you have is a GLUI (like a GUI, but you get stuck): open this window, select that option, drag a slider, check these boxes, click Yes, three times. The output might look a little like this blurry screen shot and the only record of a successful execution is a window that disappears as soon as the application ends.
I suppose the Linux community should be grateful that windows made the fundemental systems design error of making everything graphic. Without that basic failure, Linux might never have even got the toe-hold it has now.
The basic issue here is that all these "new" O/S's that Microsoft bring out are basically just the same old thing, possibly with a few usability tweaks and some different, more resource-hungry eye candy and some old bugs and security holes removed - to leave room for the new ones they'll introduce.
Just like you wouldn't go changing you car's engine just because Toyota or Ford or Hyundai brought out a new one, the basic lack of innovation (in both car engines and operating systems) means there's no compelling benefits to reward you for making the switch. Maybe if they had something radical, new, innovative and necessary - instead of yet another facelift on the old, backward-compatible stuff they've been stamping out for 20 years, there'd be a market. Until then I'm happy with what I have.
Since we're talking about software that is already outside the law, it's reasonable to assume that the punishments or retribution that the illegal software makers can build in to "protect" their code could also be outside the bounds of acceptability. So while "legal" DRM measures can't do much beyond saying "you're being naughty, please stop" the illegal copies of illegal software could give themselves licence to wreak havoc on the machine that's attempting to run them. Just how far they'd be prepared to go (causing the hardware to catch fire? is that practical?) could be an interesting development for the uninvolved onlooker to track.
Twitter has been a key component in Iran for organisers against their election results. Just as soon as there is something similar in other countries, expect a LOT of people to get on twitter to organise dissent. Whoever wrote this piece has an incredibly short memory - or a numbingly parochial view of the world and the internet.
The worst judgement call of all would be to engage a company with such a contradictory name as Social Intelligence (like military intelligence - hah!). Especially if they think they can extrapolate from what people write about themselves to how they will perform in a work environment. You might as well employ palmistry and phrenology as a way of selecting low-risk candidates. They were fact-free fads in their time, too.
If only that worked in the computer / games world. ISTM reviews start at 3 stars, just for providing a cardboard box. If there's anything in it, the product automatically gets 4 stars, and if they have an advertisement in the magazine or website then 5 stars is a shoo in. I have seen mini-reviews of products that the reviewer admitted didn't even work get a 3* rating on the basis of what the product description said (and an assurance from the supplier that the example they got "must have been a flook"). it's also obvious in many, many reviews that the reviewer has never even seen the product and is writing a piece simple from the suppliers promotional literature - who do they think they're kidding?