Knowing how to use those tools properly is part of what a (molecular biologist|mechanical engineer|electrical engineer) does, so if you're interested in doing that, you'll want to learn. The way to learn something complex is to see it, fumble around with it, make some mistakes, figure out what caused them, take a look at the documentation, mess up again, take another look, and so on. How will you ever start that process without first getting your hands on the tool?
In my experience, it's not that biologists can't figure out how to use the tools themselves, but rather that they sometimes don't understand the advanced algorithms that go into them. Many computational biology algorithms today are really advanced with a plethora of subtleties -- phylogeny trees are built using consensus and parsimony, sequence alignment aka BLAST is heuristics based on edit distance -- and the problem is more that they're blindly used as tools, where fumbling around incorrectly will generally produce some output, instead of understanding the assumptions and limitations of the underlying algorithms.
They mention using "off-the-shelf" tools...that's a tricky one. It's a fine balance between making the process challenging vs. instructive. If you use off-the-shelf engines to slap in your own graphics and levels, it's debatable how educational the experience will be. On the other hand, if you get mired in developing an engine or coding AI logic, etc., then it's debatable how much "video games" have to do with it, versus plain ol' CS education.
If you, as an individual, drank $400 of coffee per year
Except workplaces rarely have a Starbucks barista making cappucinos. It's usually drip filter coffee. A large tin of Chock Full O' Nuts costs anywhere between $10 - $20 and would last about two months for the average person (unless you like to load the basket up all the way). Given that workplace coffee is generally shite, I'd say your total expense per person is a maximum of $60-$120. Factor in bulk discounts at a place like Costco and you're looking at something like $50 - $80 tops a year for a heavy drinker. So it isn't all that bad.
I would still fly. And those who wouldn't would push for a transcontinental high-speed train (Mag-Lev?) which would have a lower risk/reward, but just as cost effective.
I for one am waiting for the first New York - London Maglev train, or even the first Paris - Dubai Maglev train. The point is that some of us don't have a choice *but* to fly. That's why people who go an about "but flying isn't a right!" irritate the hell out of me. What am I supposed to do? Take a bloody ship?
And although rail is an excellent solution in theory, you only need to look at Eurail to see why it won't work. Gross incompatibilities between, say French and Spanish train systems mean that I have to switch over at the border. Modern systems like the Chunnel are the exception, and any solution that advocates building an entirely new, international, high-speed train system is doomed to fail at the drawing board, for political as much as economic reasons.
Buying the lowest-power CPUs?! Are you absolutely sure about that?
Actually, I meant power as in flowing electrons, not megahertz. So for example, a 95 W Athlon instead of a 125 W Opteron with comparable characteristics.
And they wonder why the school systems of the nation can't hire anyone competent.
I'd like to add that a competent sysadmin would do his best to keep costs to a bare minimum, and that includes things like buying the lowest-power CPUs that can get the job done, sticking to the job's specifications for software, cycling computers into powersave when idle, and -- in a school environment -- switching the damn things off at night, when very few people have legitimate reasons to use them.
Treating your work computers as your personal playground to install random stuff on to amuse yourself is completely unprofessional. Why do you think he didn't ask for permission? Because for whatever the reasons might be, he would probably have been unlikely to procure it.
They were his machines to configure, as a technology supervisor. It's not like he hacked into the machines in the dark of night to set things up on the sly. Sure, his configuration may have been a failure as far as the business needs of the school system were concerned, but when TFA is claiming "there may be charges filed!!"
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation. If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws. This guy set up a SETI account in his own name, for whatever joy he gets from being at the top of SETI crunch lists, and used government-paid electricity for his own purposes. Over 5,000 computers with say (conservatively) 200W PSUs, that's not an insignificant amount of electricity/dollars. If my tax dollars went into it, I'd be kinda pissed (mainly because I'd prefer donating cycles to Folding@Home, but that's another story).
A little silly? Perhaps, but judging the degree of his "ethics violation" and the subsequent consequences is the job of a judge or jury. The fact that an "ethics violation" that breaks an ethics law has been committed isn't really debatable.
Once it's a public company, it has a fiduciary responsibility to bend its users over to try and get as much money for its shareholders as it can.
Here's an interesting thing they could think of. Ask users to pay a small monthly fee to see who views their profiles. Sure, it'll drive a lot of people off the site, but Facebook is so ingrained in the lives of a certain demographic that it would feed of insecurities and fears and certainly generate a decent monthly revenue. The same insecurities and fears would ensure that a user pool never disappears, since getting off Facebook would deprive you of OMG! why is Sheila dressed like a tramp!??
I agree in principle with what you're saying about Bing vs. Goog, but I'm quite astounded by your leaps of logic. Nobody here can make a claim for either search engine being better, because as the old saying goes (approximately): "I see you anecdote, and raise you two."
The two engines gave quite similar results for such a clear unambiguous and uncommon term. This implies they are spidering with similar coverage.
Most of the results that are controversial/missed by a search engine will occur at the periphery of the web. There's one giant honkin' connected in the Web, so it's quite unsurprising that the first few dozens of results for a well-defined, common term will show up in all major search engines. Your search does NOT imply that they are spidering with similar coverage. See the paper by Broder: Broder et al
Google's results were clearly more relevant. This implies that Bing's ranking algorithm is still not as good as Google's.
Anecdotes and subjective judgments do not result in implications, unless you're Sarah Palin.
one occurs overwhelmingly in an unwanted context. Bing borks them.
This is interesting, but again, "miserable failure" can be used as an anecdote for Google "borking" too.
If you use data, it seems reasonable to me to charge a fee even if you just made "a mistake".
Agreed...but the issue is not about paying for the 0.2kb HTTP request you just made, but rather paying for an entire MB worth of data. It's not like billing per kilobyte or even per BYTE is technically infeasible, so why can't you pay for a fractional MB if that's what you use? In fact, there is absolutely no justifiable technical reason for this -- it's pure asshat accounting. This is like plugging in a desk lamp into your wall outlet for 5 minutes and ComEd charging you for an entire kWh.
You know it's asshat-ish when even AT&T has a better policy.
This means that as soon as someone proclaims "We know the rules of Economics!", someone else is going to look at those rules and either game them to their benefit, or rewrite them to better suit their own purpose.
Which means that economists will always have a profession, and more concretely, a job. Now THAT's job security (just talk to any humanities scholar going up for tenure)...
If the plan is limited, it's not "unlimited", so please stop pretending. No, any cap is a cap is not no cap is not "unlimited".
Actually, all "unlimited" plans are limited. Just multiply maximum bandwidth by days in the month to figure out your monthly cap. So the question here is if 5 GB is less than Verizon's "3G" speed multiplied by about 30 days. It would be nice if someone with Verizon could figure this out.
There's a difference between a calling a method, where the object has internal state, and a C Win32 API function call, i.e., sans objects. I absolutely guarantee that you won't see many pretty signatures in the Win32 API. I'd bet that 99% of the Win32 API function SIGNATURES won't make it through a standards-compliant compiler without Windows.h. Anyway, my comment was supposed to be funny, but on second thought, it might actually deserve that informative mod.
Don't even get me started on the dual-version ANSI and Unicode functions, although given the mess that the Win32 API is, it's probably an elegant solution.
The code in question seems to be called into scrutiny because the two areas of code bear the same name (ReadBytes) and operate similarly.
(bold mine)
Actually, if the function is just something called "ReadBytes(char *buf)" or similar, then that's a bit strange. If it was truly Microsoft-written, it would be: WINAPI DWORD ReadBytesW(LPCSTRWRAAXA szCharBufW_x, struct READBYTESINFO *srbinfArgs).
This is incredibly brave of Microsoft, given that Outlook is so ubiquitous. I can see a number of good and not-so-good reasons for doing this:
(1) They feel that Outlook is genuinely capable of withstanding competition from the likes of TBird and other competitors, and to be fair, the quality of Outlook has improved a lot.
(2) They feel that opening Outlook's specs will give them access to iPhone app-store like ingenuity from the "crowd" (throw in your favorite buzzword here). Basically, let the hackers go at it and come up with neat little means to improve Outlook usability. If more products carry a "Works with MS Outlook" sticker, that can only be good for outlook (in one line of reasoning).
(3) All the old, seasoned outlook engineers have retired or died, and they're hoping that someone can figure out the.pst specs.
I say this because the last time I apologized to a girl for kissing her, she dumped me for being such a woosy.
Moral of the story: NEVER apologize for sex.
I think it's safe to say that there's a substantial percentage of readers who are wondering: what is wrong with you? And also, kissing is not sex.
You can't tell me that nobody in charge knew this stuff would be controversial. They knew exactly what they were doing and that it would get them more publicity than they were willing to pay for
Never attribute to cleverness what can be attributed to stupidity. The Pepsi campaign was actually for Amp, a mountain dew-type energy drink, which is supposed to be "edgy", whatever that means. To me, that sounds like a bunch of douchebag marketing execs, fresh out of newly minted MBAs or marketing degrees, who genuinely, genuinely believe that putting out a sexist ad is "targeting the demographic" and not a "massive liability".
PC sales staff are clueless droids - film at 11. It's been this way since PCs hit retail sales floors. Anybody with the smarts to sell a PC with competence has the smarts to not be in retail.
Agreed, but PC sales staff can be very helpful, based on my experience. You can ask them where the Toshiba laptop you saw advertised is located, and they can expertly guide you to the correct shelf. You can ask if they have a fresh piece available instead of the display unit, and they can effectively locate one in the back for you. Based on their extensive experience, they can advise you about the best way to beat traffic on your way home.
Given this AI the built-in ability to have sex, or at least to want to impress others of the same kind. That should do the job. After all the desire to have sex (and with that procreation) is the single strongest force driving humanity forward.
There's actually a bit of insight here. The only problem is that we don't have a model for "attraction" -- hell, if we did, Slashdot would wither in its readership and die. So while it's (relatively) easy to design sex robots, without an appropriate model for attraction -- and thus things to strive for -- we'd end up with nothing more than a vast, mechanistic orgy of clanging parts, spilled lube, and wasted electricity.
This is silly. Why would a machine without a sense of purpose or drive decide to play video games or seek entertainment or do anything except just sit there? Playing games would result from the wrong motivation ("wrong" from a certain perspective, anyway) not from the lack of any motivation.
Not only that, there are other hot-button issues of great practical importance we should be debating on Slashdot:
Perhaps we need to install an emotion circuit in all household androids to improve their efficiency...but what about corporate androids??
The key to a car that runs on garbage is a light alloy body!!
Buy a name brand or assemble your own quantum computer?
For some it may be. Why do you think you know what is best for everyone?
I think the GP was referring to basic math. Assuming that Verizon ties you into a 1 year contract, which is probably the LEAST we could expect for a shiny new phone (more like 2 years), then you end up breaking losing money under the GP's scenario. With the more realistic two year contract -- and let's face it, Verizon is not going to let you walk away on a prepaid plan with the N900 -- you lose a decent chunk of money. Since I think most people, according to recent polls, LIKE money, it's probably better for them.
If you feel that Verizon CEOs are underfed, on the other hand, by all means go ahead and pay more....
The system is very simple -- you ask the recipient to flip a coin and change their answer depending on the outcome.
You might be referring to the bootstrap or any number of other resampling techniques, and I think you'll find that its often more complicated that turning your dataset into noise.
Is it ok to change "11.6%" to "16.3%" based on a "hunch"?
I'm not a statistician, this is an honest question
IAAS, and the answer is no. That goes for the GP as well -- no one is contesting estimation theory, just that the fundamental assumptions are so grossly unmet in this "study" as to render it meaningless. And as someone else already commented, it's dangerous here because it's going to dictate public policy.
If you're going to "adjust" your objective findings, based on some bizarre assumption that a certain percentage of people will lie about file sharing, then why do a survey at all if not to create mathematical/sciency-sounding smoke and mirrors?
Whenever you estimate a statistic like that, you should also indicate the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimate. Why are they not reporting the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval surrounding that estimate?
Perhaps because it's hard to come up with confidence intervals when you admit to fudging your own data by bumping the estimate up by almost five percentage points.
Slashdot Mirror
Knowing how to use those tools properly is part of what a (molecular biologist|mechanical engineer|electrical engineer) does, so if you're interested in doing that, you'll want to learn. The way to learn something complex is to see it, fumble around with it, make some mistakes, figure out what caused them, take a look at the documentation, mess up again, take another look, and so on. How will you ever start that process without first getting your hands on the tool?
In my experience, it's not that biologists can't figure out how to use the tools themselves, but rather that they sometimes don't understand the advanced algorithms that go into them. Many computational biology algorithms today are really advanced with a plethora of subtleties -- phylogeny trees are built using consensus and parsimony, sequence alignment aka BLAST is heuristics based on edit distance -- and the problem is more that they're blindly used as tools, where fumbling around incorrectly will generally produce some output, instead of understanding the assumptions and limitations of the underlying algorithms.
YMMV, as always.
They mention using "off-the-shelf" tools...that's a tricky one. It's a fine balance between making the process challenging vs. instructive. If you use off-the-shelf engines to slap in your own graphics and levels, it's debatable how educational the experience will be. On the other hand, if you get mired in developing an engine or coding AI logic, etc., then it's debatable how much "video games" have to do with it, versus plain ol' CS education.
That's awesome, I can totally help out my fellow ... what's that? I get $1M if I rock NetFlix's movie rating DB? Movie ratings here I come!
You're a little late...the Netflix contest ended quite a few months ago, with the $1M being awarded to a joint AT&T Research/Yahoo Labs team.
If you, as an individual, drank $400 of coffee per year
Except workplaces rarely have a Starbucks barista making cappucinos. It's usually drip filter coffee. A large tin of Chock Full O' Nuts costs anywhere between $10 - $20 and would last about two months for the average person (unless you like to load the basket up all the way). Given that workplace coffee is generally shite, I'd say your total expense per person is a maximum of $60-$120. Factor in bulk discounts at a place like Costco and you're looking at something like $50 - $80 tops a year for a heavy drinker. So it isn't all that bad.
I would still fly. And those who wouldn't would push for a transcontinental high-speed train (Mag-Lev?) which would have a lower risk/reward, but just as cost effective.
I for one am waiting for the first New York - London Maglev train, or even the first Paris - Dubai Maglev train. The point is that some of us don't have a choice *but* to fly. That's why people who go an about "but flying isn't a right!" irritate the hell out of me. What am I supposed to do? Take a bloody ship?
And although rail is an excellent solution in theory, you only need to look at Eurail to see why it won't work. Gross incompatibilities between, say French and Spanish train systems mean that I have to switch over at the border. Modern systems like the Chunnel are the exception, and any solution that advocates building an entirely new, international, high-speed train system is doomed to fail at the drawing board, for political as much as economic reasons.
Buying the lowest-power CPUs?! Are you absolutely sure about that?
Actually, I meant power as in flowing electrons, not megahertz. So for example, a 95 W Athlon instead of a 125 W Opteron with comparable characteristics.
And they wonder why the school systems of the nation can't hire anyone competent.
I'd like to add that a competent sysadmin would do his best to keep costs to a bare minimum, and that includes things like buying the lowest-power CPUs that can get the job done, sticking to the job's specifications for software, cycling computers into powersave when idle, and -- in a school environment -- switching the damn things off at night, when very few people have legitimate reasons to use them.
Treating your work computers as your personal playground to install random stuff on to amuse yourself is completely unprofessional. Why do you think he didn't ask for permission? Because for whatever the reasons might be, he would probably have been unlikely to procure it.
They were his machines to configure, as a technology supervisor. It's not like he hacked into the machines in the dark of night to set things up on the sly. Sure, his configuration may have been a failure as far as the business needs of the school system were concerned, but when TFA is claiming "there may be charges filed!!"
Actually, I think it falls pretty squarely under most States' ethics laws as a violation. If I set up a Bittorent tracker using government computers, then I'm using bandwidth inappropriately, which violates ethics laws. This guy set up a SETI account in his own name, for whatever joy he gets from being at the top of SETI crunch lists, and used government-paid electricity for his own purposes. Over 5,000 computers with say (conservatively) 200W PSUs, that's not an insignificant amount of electricity/dollars. If my tax dollars went into it, I'd be kinda pissed (mainly because I'd prefer donating cycles to Folding@Home, but that's another story).
A little silly? Perhaps, but judging the degree of his "ethics violation" and the subsequent consequences is the job of a judge or jury. The fact that an "ethics violation" that breaks an ethics law has been committed isn't really debatable.
Once it's a public company, it has a fiduciary responsibility to bend its users over to try and get as much money for its shareholders as it can.
Here's an interesting thing they could think of. Ask users to pay a small monthly fee to see who views their profiles. Sure, it'll drive a lot of people off the site, but Facebook is so ingrained in the lives of a certain demographic that it would feed of insecurities and fears and certainly generate a decent monthly revenue. The same insecurities and fears would ensure that a user pool never disappears, since getting off Facebook would deprive you of OMG! why is Sheila dressed like a tramp!??
The two engines gave quite similar results for such a clear unambiguous and uncommon term. This implies they are spidering with similar coverage.
Most of the results that are controversial/missed by a search engine will occur at the periphery of the web. There's one giant honkin' connected in the Web, so it's quite unsurprising that the first few dozens of results for a well-defined, common term will show up in all major search engines. Your search does NOT imply that they are spidering with similar coverage. See the paper by Broder: Broder et al
Google's results were clearly more relevant. This implies that Bing's ranking algorithm is still not as good as Google's.
Anecdotes and subjective judgments do not result in implications, unless you're Sarah Palin.
one occurs overwhelmingly in an unwanted context. Bing borks them.
This is interesting, but again, "miserable failure" can be used as an anecdote for Google "borking" too.
If you use data, it seems reasonable to me to charge a fee even if you just made "a mistake".
Agreed...but the issue is not about paying for the 0.2kb HTTP request you just made, but rather paying for an entire MB worth of data. It's not like billing per kilobyte or even per BYTE is technically infeasible, so why can't you pay for a fractional MB if that's what you use? In fact, there is absolutely no justifiable technical reason for this -- it's pure asshat accounting. This is like plugging in a desk lamp into your wall outlet for 5 minutes and ComEd charging you for an entire kWh.
You know it's asshat-ish when even AT&T has a better policy.
This means that as soon as someone proclaims "We know the rules of Economics!", someone else is going to look at those rules and either game them to their benefit, or rewrite them to better suit their own purpose.
Which means that economists will always have a profession, and more concretely, a job. Now THAT's job security (just talk to any humanities scholar going up for tenure)...
If the plan is limited, it's not "unlimited", so please stop pretending. No, any cap is a cap is not no cap is not "unlimited".
Actually, all "unlimited" plans are limited. Just multiply maximum bandwidth by days in the month to figure out your monthly cap. So the question here is if 5 GB is less than Verizon's "3G" speed multiplied by about 30 days. It would be nice if someone with Verizon could figure this out.
Except that a truly Microsoft-written ReadBytes method on the .NET Framework can be that simple, for example one int parameter http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.io.binaryreader.readbytes.aspx [microsoft.com]
There's a difference between a calling a method, where the object has internal state, and a C Win32 API function call, i.e., sans objects. I absolutely guarantee that you won't see many pretty signatures in the Win32 API. I'd bet that 99% of the Win32 API function SIGNATURES won't make it through a standards-compliant compiler without Windows.h. Anyway, my comment was supposed to be funny, but on second thought, it might actually deserve that informative mod.
Don't even get me started on the dual-version ANSI and Unicode functions, although given the mess that the Win32 API is, it's probably an elegant solution.
The code in question seems to be called into scrutiny because the two areas of code bear the same name (ReadBytes) and operate similarly.
(bold mine)
Actually, if the function is just something called "ReadBytes(char *buf)" or similar, then that's a bit strange. If it was truly Microsoft-written, it would be:
WINAPI DWORD ReadBytesW(LPCSTRWRAAXA szCharBufW_x, struct READBYTESINFO *srbinfArgs).
(1) They feel that Outlook is genuinely capable of withstanding competition from the likes of TBird and other competitors, and to be fair, the quality of Outlook has improved a lot. .pst specs.
(2) They feel that opening Outlook's specs will give them access to iPhone app-store like ingenuity from the "crowd" (throw in your favorite buzzword here). Basically, let the hackers go at it and come up with neat little means to improve Outlook usability. If more products carry a "Works with MS Outlook" sticker, that can only be good for outlook (in one line of reasoning).
(3) All the old, seasoned outlook engineers have retired or died, and they're hoping that someone can figure out the
I say this because the last time I apologized to a girl for kissing her, she dumped me for being such a woosy. Moral of the story: NEVER apologize for sex.
I think it's safe to say that there's a substantial percentage of readers who are wondering: what is wrong with you? And also, kissing is not sex.
You can't tell me that nobody in charge knew this stuff would be controversial. They knew exactly what they were doing and that it would get them more publicity than they were willing to pay for
Never attribute to cleverness what can be attributed to stupidity. The Pepsi campaign was actually for Amp, a mountain dew-type energy drink, which is supposed to be "edgy", whatever that means. To me, that sounds like a bunch of douchebag marketing execs, fresh out of newly minted MBAs or marketing degrees, who genuinely, genuinely believe that putting out a sexist ad is "targeting the demographic" and not a "massive liability".
PC sales staff are clueless droids - film at 11. It's been this way since PCs hit retail sales floors. Anybody with the smarts to sell a PC with competence has the smarts to not be in retail.
Agreed, but PC sales staff can be very helpful, based on my experience. You can ask them where the Toshiba laptop you saw advertised is located, and they can expertly guide you to the correct shelf. You can ask if they have a fresh piece available instead of the display unit, and they can effectively locate one in the back for you. Based on their extensive experience, they can advise you about the best way to beat traffic on your way home.
Given this AI the built-in ability to have sex, or at least to want to impress others of the same kind. That should do the job. After all the desire to have sex (and with that procreation) is the single strongest force driving humanity forward.
There's actually a bit of insight here. The only problem is that we don't have a model for "attraction" -- hell, if we did, Slashdot would wither in its readership and die. So while it's (relatively) easy to design sex robots, without an appropriate model for attraction -- and thus things to strive for -- we'd end up with nothing more than a vast, mechanistic orgy of clanging parts, spilled lube, and wasted electricity.
This is silly. Why would a machine without a sense of purpose or drive decide to play video games or seek entertainment or do anything except just sit there? Playing games would result from the wrong motivation ("wrong" from a certain perspective, anyway) not from the lack of any motivation.
Not only that, there are other hot-button issues of great practical importance we should be debating on Slashdot:
And I speak as an AI researcher.
For some it may be. Why do you think you know what is best for everyone?
I think the GP was referring to basic math. Assuming that Verizon ties you into a 1 year contract, which is probably the LEAST we could expect for a shiny new phone (more like 2 years), then you end up breaking losing money under the GP's scenario. With the more realistic two year contract -- and let's face it, Verizon is not going to let you walk away on a prepaid plan with the N900 -- you lose a decent chunk of money. Since I think most people, according to recent polls, LIKE money, it's probably better for them.
If you feel that Verizon CEOs are underfed, on the other hand, by all means go ahead and pay more....
The system is very simple -- you ask the recipient to flip a coin and change their answer depending on the outcome.
You might be referring to the bootstrap or any number of other resampling techniques, and I think you'll find that its often more complicated that turning your dataset into noise.
Is it ok to change "11.6%" to "16.3%" based on a "hunch"? I'm not a statistician, this is an honest question
IAAS, and the answer is no. That goes for the GP as well -- no one is contesting estimation theory, just that the fundamental assumptions are so grossly unmet in this "study" as to render it meaningless. And as someone else already commented, it's dangerous here because it's going to dictate public policy.
If you're going to "adjust" your objective findings, based on some bizarre assumption that a certain percentage of people will lie about file sharing, then why do a survey at all if not to create mathematical/sciency-sounding smoke and mirrors?
Whenever you estimate a statistic like that, you should also indicate the level of uncertainty surrounding the estimate. Why are they not reporting the upper and lower bounds of the confidence interval surrounding that estimate?
Perhaps because it's hard to come up with confidence intervals when you admit to fudging your own data by bumping the estimate up by almost five percentage points.