Secure from what? The goal is not to secure you from a bootloader virus; I doubt that was discussed for more than five minutes while this system was being designed. The goal is to secure DRM systems from you, the user, because of what happened with DVDs and deCSS, what happens with software cracking tools, etc. The goal is to turn PCs into iPads.
This is a trap, designed to rob you of the freedom you have right now, which as it so happens is the freedom that PCs were meant to provide in the first place.
Right. I would agree this crap is for security if, for example, mobo manufacture can put a jumper or something in that would by pass secure boot. This way, people who are the weak link in security, who wouldn't know what a jumper is, stay "secured" (as secure as you trust the vendor from whom you buy the hardware has not tinkered with it), while the rest of us who actually has a clue, can go on doing what we have been doing: actually owning the hardware we pay good money for.
But my question still stands - would a particle with negative mass be bound by speed-of-light restrictions? Or, alternatively, could manipulation of the Higgs field result in imaginary mass as well?
Yes it would. A particle with negative mass is just a particle that if you exert on it force to the right, it will accelerate to the left. A particle whose velocity vector and momentum vector are in the opposite direction. Besides this vectoral reversal, relativistic dynamics applies just as well to it as particle with positive mass.
Indeed, in semiconductor physics, it is perfectly acceptable mathematically to treat absent of electron on the valence band (called hole) as having a negative effective mass and negative charge. It is just more convenience and intuitive to instead consider hole as a pseudo particle with a positive mass and a positive charge. So that's what we do. The same physics is mathematically identical to that of the Fermi sea of the Dirac equation. Negative mass is not too terribly interesting in this respect, unlike the tachyon, which has imaginary mass.
There should be some punishment for misusing patent law and the ITC/courts like this. Perhaps the court should ban the plaintiffs competing product for 6-12 months when an allegation is found to be false...
How about put up X amount of money for the review period? Some fraction (half?) of what the alleged infringer expects to make in that period. You get your money back if patents are upheld, otherwise, you pay for your false allegation.
At which point Samsung will have $95M but will have to re-start their advertising campaign, essentially re-launch the product, and target a market that has just bought a bunch of competing products - among which iDevices from which Apple stands to gain a lot more through e.g. app store purchases, third party products such as docks that use licensed tech, etc..
I would love to see them use that money and make a commercial that say: "Buy Samsung, because the other guy is a complete doushbag."
A physical object that is commonly-agreed upon medium of value change. That's cash by definition.
[x] High-Value
By artificial scarcity. Quote from Warren Buffett:
"[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. [Gold] has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."-Harvard, 2008
[x] Anonymous
Right, because moving a couple hundred pounds of the stuff for any substantial purchase can easily be kept secret...
90% of the code used in the Linux driver is shared with the Windows driver, that was a claim made by one of their developers on their forums I read a year or so ago. Open sourcing the code is out of the question as all of that code isn't just from internal employees, as getting everyone who has written lines of code to agree to their code being available under a open source licence would be a huge task. Documentation would be great, there's the issue of IP though there. To be fair to Nvidia, they actively support Linux, I've used their cards for years and have never had much of an issue, in the old days, it was just a matter of shutting X11 and running their installer, it built the kernel module and you were good to go. Nowadays every distro I've used has the packages ready out of the box. I think Linus pain comes simply from running pre release kernels and expecting them to be supported before their even released! Nvidia normally provide patches in these situations anyway so I don't understand what Linus really wants them to do.
Until one day, they decided that your card is too old to support. By that point, nouveau would probably have decent support for basic 3D primitive, but by no mean optimized. For really old card that neither driver support, the user is screwed.
The other reason the Chinese are good at math is because they don't have excuses. In China you can't say "Oh, I'm just not good with numbers" and expect to be taken seriously as a person. That's just not a cop out you can use. Meanwhile every American kid who didn't study enough and forgets some algebra formulas just figures "Hey, I'm just bad at math" and then goes and does a literature degree or whatever.
Is that base on your culture stereotype? In fact, in the Chinese education system, there is an explicit method of claiming that you are not good with math and science (and vice versa): in high school, a few years before the all-important college entrance exam, the classes are segregated into "wen-ke" and "li-ke". "Wen-ke" or literary class, emphasizes literature, history, political science and has a very light role for math and science. "Li-ke", logic classes, emphasizes the opposite subjects. Students are taught equally everything upto that point. Afterward, they concentrate on their area of studies. They even receive different consideration on college applications.
Indeed, there is a debate in the Chinese blogosphere now that some people, most journalists and authors who came from a "wen-ke" background, claiming that mathematics more advanced than middle school is useless and the blogs of scientist and engineers who claim the opposite.
He ignored how studying calculus concepts like differentials and integrals at a young age (I think around junior high age) is the norm in China,
I will tell you categorically this is not true. I have Chinese textbook from 1-12 from a few years ago. trigonometry is what they go up to. Now, some older textbook from the early 80's (right after the culture revolution) did include calculus, but that was dropped in the 80's.
What I think do make the point you are trying to make largely valid is that Chinese student teaches what in the state we called Advanced Algebra by end of middle school (equivalent to 9th grade here since they have 6 years elementary school). The three years of high school essentially consists doing a LOT of exercises and prep-exam in preparation for the "gao-kao", the be-all college entrance exam. Look at China, South Korean, and Japan is you wan to see what standardized exam will turn your education system into. It is horrific.
Check out this article (in Chinese, but the picture speaks for itself): http://bbs.gdou.edu.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=73378&do=blog&id=3436
The picture showcases a girl who recently finished her gao-kao with all the prep-exam she did in high school, every single one of which she kept. I think there are some rumor that the picture is actually a fake, but many on wei-bo (Chinese twitter) are echoing that it is not an exaggeration.
I agree with your larger point that the traditional lecture style education is not good for everyone.
You may have suffered through traditional "higher education," but a new generation is learning a different way. Some of them are learning it better. We have made tremendous progress in many fields, why do we not study the process of academic instruction just as intensely as, say, nuclear physics?
We do. Some physics department, like the one from which I got my PhD, offers research in physics education as a PhD program. Student do research and gather data in classroom and apply the same statistical analysis techniques to asset the effectiveness of certain teaching techniques. Unfortunately, they usually do not get the same respect in the department as more traditional thesis topics. Usually there are a few (<5) faculties out of the whole department who actually care about physics education that they accept student in these topics. The APS is starting to recognize it as a specialty, but only treats it as a "special topic". We are getting there.
Khan Academy is good, a lot of people use those videos!
--cej102937
When I was TA-ing to pay my way through my degree, I recommend KA to many intro physics students. Then after talking to a lot of them, I find the result to be kind of mixed. Some find it helpful, other not and it somewhat surprised me that it did not correlated with grade. The worst case is that some thinks it's helpful when in fact it did not (and you can tell by asking conceptual questions that is only a twist of the problems covered in the video). Totally anecdotal. However, fellow students who actually engaged in physics educations research tents to agree that a one way dictation, abet using video, do not help student who lacks a good conceptual foundation to begin with. And this guy, who also did a PhD in physics education, also agree. I do think the world is better with those video than without though.
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
It is not inconceivable that the so-call god rewards conviction and the full exercise of the intellect that he bestowed as the ultimate virtue? The way I see it, religion, Abrahamic religions in particular, is precisely the kind of quick-and-easy way for a deity or deities use to rule out dumb and uninquisitive people . Promise people reward in the unforeseeable future and see how many people open their wallets. Not much different from your run-of-the-mill direct-marketing scheme. Probably what I would use if I were an omnipotent god.
People who believes they are right without evident lost the ability to investigate whether it is so.
The diameter of the sun is 1e9 meters. The distance to the closest star, Alpha Centauri, is about 4e16m (40 lightyears)...Let's put that in context:
Suppose the sun is the size of a grain of sand, say 1mm (1e-3mm), the distance to the nearest grain of sand is 40 kilometer. So a collision between galaxies is basically collision between empty spaces...
A friend of mine is a phd student in a lab whose PI is very fond of accepting bright local high school students for summer stint then ask his students to "supervise" them (The PI likes to travel during the summer with no teaching duties, but it's not like he would spend his valuable time to supervise bunch of high school kids anyway). A few of them stood out and got accepted into the lab for having a high ranking in the Intel competition. Being a foreign student, she asked me what the competition was about. Then she goes on a rand about how she basically had to babysit some of these morons who did not seem to have spend a single hour in basic lab safety training. Can't tell the different chemical labels if it were flying straight toward their face. At some point, she basically had to relegate them to the office with computers because otherwise she cannot get any work done.
I recently build an HTPC with a Zotac barebone with an NVIDIA ION GPU. The first player I went to was VLC, but I found that it cannot do GPU accelerated HD video. VLC has a checkbox for it in preference, but it doesn't play a 1080p H.264+flac mkv file I have and on a 720p file, CPU usage was high. After much experimenting, I find that smplayer/mplayer and Media Player Classic - Home Cinema will do GPU acceleration right out of the box. Both are free.
Side note. During my experiment, I got so frustrated with Windows 7, I installed Ubuntu 11.10. To my surprise, VDPAU pretty much just works with mplayer, especially mplayer2. I think both the nvidia (proprietary) and nouveau (open source) worked, but my memory is uncertain on this point. VLC under Linux supposedly support the competing VAAPI, which can use VDPAU as a backend, but it did not work. The only reason I eventually switch back to Windows is Netflix and its silverlight addiction, which, by the way, will also not use GPU to accelerate HD video.
We tried that and have a few people who still think like that, but now that journals outside of physics have moved away from LaTeX it's pretty much dead for us. None of our students know it when they come in, they're capable enough MS office users that they can do any of the formatting needed in office, so what does LaTeX get you? Marginally better equation editing, and a lot more work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing. And then you're asked to submit documents in office format anyway for most internal or government documents because you don't seriously think the secretarial staff have any clue what to do with a latex document.
10 years ago when I was an undergrad it was still a critical part of the experience to know how to use LaTeX. Now it's like forcing people to use IE6, there are some people still clinging to it for various reasons that are hard to change, but for everyone else office tools get the job done. Of course if your office training at the highschool level is bad you probably aren't any better off either way.
I did not know LaTeX when I started graduate school, but picked it up soon enough after realizing that it's such an amazing tool to take mathematical lecture notes. Many years later, with various macros, short-hands, packages, scripts accumulated, I find that when I need to make a document, not just the mathematical one, I immediately fire up vi and start typing \documentclass...(actually I have a two key shortcut to immediately load a pretty general template).
If a student cannot go online and find something like "The Not-So-Short Guide to LaTeX" and pick it up immediately, I'd have doubt of him/her ability to master a technical subject worthy of a dissertation.
Now, if this is a humanity department, I will probably be more sympathetic to the said students.
I believe you're over-thinking the one-dimensional attribute. It simply means they're using a straight-line chain of the molecules in question. There are no molecules in the construct branching off at any other angle, that's all.
Charge-spin separation and spin-orbital separation are specifically effect of electron collective behavior in one-dimension: that is when the motion of electron is constrained to have one degree of freedom. Think of a single-lane road in which lane change is forbidden.
The article is talking about quasiparticles, that is, collective excitations in some medium that behave as though they were individual particles. Think about a Newton's cradle (that thingy with the balls that click back and forth). When a ball hits one end of the device, a ball emerges from the other end of the device. It's as though there were some kind of particle (there's a mandatory rule that we have to give it a stupid name, so let's call it a ballon) that is transmitted through the device. Now, even though we know that there's no actual particle traveling through the device, we can make calculations as though there were, and this makes things simpler to work with.
Condensed matter physicists work with much more complicated media and their particles are quantum rather than classical, but otherwise the idea is the same. In this case, they have a medium consisting of a strontium cuprate wire, which, of course has lots of electrons in its atoms. They fire a beam at it (like the ball hitting the Newton's cradle) and this excites stuff in the wire, which they find acts like quasiparticles of a particular kind.
The exact kind of quasiparticle is one that acts like an electron, but has no charge or spin, just orbital properties. The spin and charge kinds of quasiparticle were previously discovered, and this completes the set, which is why it's news.
More specifically, "separation" refers to the prediction (and now observation) that in the collection of electrons in the 1D wire, orbital, spin, and charge information travel at different speed. This is in particular a low dimensional effect. Hence this is observed in a quantum wire.
Why not improve the gnome classic desktop from gnome 3 instead? This zombie-gnome2 effort seems like a waste of time to me.
Can you put a weather widget on the top bar on Gnome3 Classic? How about a CPU temp sensor? How about a graph that shows CPU, RAM, swap, and network usage? Maybe a sensor that shows the CPU speed for each core with the ability to change them to ondemand or performace? Can you put the taskbar on bottom bar? Can you put just a gnome foot (start button) on the bottom left like Windows and the full menu on top (Gnome-foot, Places, System)?
The last time I tried Gnome3, none of these things were possible. These were not an option on Gnome3 Classic either. I want my old Gnome2 back, not the "look" of Gnome2 stuck on top of Gnome3. I don't want "New Coke" in an "Old Coke" can.
All but the cpufreq applet part is possible with Gnome Shell Extensions and I am pretty sure there is actually an extension out there for cpufreq that I just haven't found useful yet. Now I am generally in flavor of a lightweight base and add feature via plug-in approach...Only if Gnome3's base was actually lightweight.
My Asian and Indian coworkers can't use Siri, and most have stopped trying out of frustration. It can't understand their accent, and doesn't seem to get any better over time. That is the most obvious reason why Google would want to do this.
I second this. On my android phone (Samsung Epic 4G), go to the language setting for voice-recognition. The list of supported language and ascent is long and includes both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese. FYI, there is no Indian, but there is "English (Indian)". Sure, full sentence recognition and semantic matching is not up to Siri's par in well spoken English as far as I can tell, but it works well enough for my parents, who can not really use a computer to input Chinese. Now, It is not clear to me if GV is responsible for their non-English recognition, but I wouldn't be surprised. I am also not sure if iPhone4(s) can do this, but I suspect that if it can, some of my more fanboyish friends would be jumping up and down to show me, who due to my hate of iTunes, refuses to use most hardware from Apple since iPod1.
You are right. The freezing and boiling point of water depends on temperature. But that is no longer used as the definition of C. The new official definition is with -273.15C being absolute zero and 0.01C being the triple point of water. Both of these temperature are fixed and do not depends on additional thermodynamic parameters.
It's not like Microsoft said, "hey, we invented an easy way to mount ISO's. Take THAT Linux! wait, you already have that? Oh well, our way is superior!"
It's more like Microsoft said, "Hey, we made ISO's easy to mount."
The rest of the crap comes from those who make a living trying to instigate fights between users in both camps.
More importantly, why are people arguing for the advantages of Windows over Linux when comparing desktop features? Last I check, MS's desktop competitor is OSX. We who uses Linux desktop daily knows that much of the "Linux desktop is too hard to use" is utter crap, but why is MS fanboy trying to raise this FUD? It is not like when their desktop users finally become fed up, they will switch to Linux en mass. At this point it is more likely OSX.
Where Windows is competing with Linux, on the servers, high-performance, etc, if you can't effing fire up a terminal to do simple task like this, get your hand off my expensive hardware!!!
A benefit that they are advocating is that it is religiously unobjectionable because it respect the Sabbath. So they'd want to adjust the orbit to 357, 364, or 371 days. Given Global Warming, we might want to move further away from the sun. So 371.
Slashdot Mirror
If the only thing keeping this secure
Secure from what? The goal is not to secure you from a bootloader virus; I doubt that was discussed for more than five minutes while this system was being designed. The goal is to secure DRM systems from you, the user, because of what happened with DVDs and deCSS, what happens with software cracking tools, etc. The goal is to turn PCs into iPads. This is a trap, designed to rob you of the freedom you have right now, which as it so happens is the freedom that PCs were meant to provide in the first place.
Right. I would agree this crap is for security if, for example, mobo manufacture can put a jumper or something in that would by pass secure boot. This way, people who are the weak link in security, who wouldn't know what a jumper is, stay "secured" (as secure as you trust the vendor from whom you buy the hardware has not tinkered with it), while the rest of us who actually has a clue, can go on doing what we have been doing: actually owning the hardware we pay good money for.
Interesting.
But my question still stands - would a particle with negative mass be bound by speed-of-light restrictions? Or, alternatively, could manipulation of the Higgs field result in imaginary mass as well?
Yes it would. A particle with negative mass is just a particle that if you exert on it force to the right, it will accelerate to the left. A particle whose velocity vector and momentum vector are in the opposite direction. Besides this vectoral reversal, relativistic dynamics applies just as well to it as particle with positive mass.
Indeed, in semiconductor physics, it is perfectly acceptable mathematically to treat absent of electron on the valence band (called hole) as having a negative effective mass and negative charge. It is just more convenience and intuitive to instead consider hole as a pseudo particle with a positive mass and a positive charge. So that's what we do. The same physics is mathematically identical to that of the Fermi sea of the Dirac equation. Negative mass is not too terribly interesting in this respect, unlike the tachyon, which has imaginary mass.
There should be some punishment for misusing patent law and the ITC/courts like this. Perhaps the court should ban the plaintiffs competing product for 6-12 months when an allegation is found to be false...
How about put up X amount of money for the review period? Some fraction (half?) of what the alleged infringer expects to make in that period. You get your money back if patents are upheld, otherwise, you pay for your false allegation.
At which point Samsung will have $95M but will have to re-start their advertising campaign, essentially re-launch the product, and target a market that has just bought a bunch of competing products - among which iDevices from which Apple stands to gain a lot more through e.g. app store purchases, third party products such as docks that use licensed tech, etc..
I would love to see them use that money and make a commercial that say: "Buy Samsung, because the other guy is a complete doushbag."
Gold: [x] Cashless
A physical object that is commonly-agreed upon medium of value change. That's cash by definition.
[x] High-Value
By artificial scarcity. Quote from Warren Buffett:
"[Gold] gets dug out of the ground in Africa, or someplace. Then we melt it down, dig another hole, bury it again and pay people to stand around guarding it. [Gold] has no utility. Anyone watching from Mars would be scratching their head."-Harvard, 2008
[x] Anonymous
Right, because moving a couple hundred pounds of the stuff for any substantial purchase can easily be kept secret...
90% of the code used in the Linux driver is shared with the Windows driver, that was a claim made by one of their developers on their forums I read a year or so ago. Open sourcing the code is out of the question as all of that code isn't just from internal employees, as getting everyone who has written lines of code to agree to their code being available under a open source licence would be a huge task. Documentation would be great, there's the issue of IP though there. To be fair to Nvidia, they actively support Linux, I've used their cards for years and have never had much of an issue, in the old days, it was just a matter of shutting X11 and running their installer, it built the kernel module and you were good to go. Nowadays every distro I've used has the packages ready out of the box. I think Linus pain comes simply from running pre release kernels and expecting them to be supported before their even released! Nvidia normally provide patches in these situations anyway so I don't understand what Linus really wants them to do.
Until one day, they decided that your card is too old to support. By that point, nouveau would probably have decent support for basic 3D primitive, but by no mean optimized. For really old card that neither driver support, the user is screwed.
The other reason the Chinese are good at math is because they don't have excuses. In China you can't say "Oh, I'm just not good with numbers" and expect to be taken seriously as a person. That's just not a cop out you can use. Meanwhile every American kid who didn't study enough and forgets some algebra formulas just figures "Hey, I'm just bad at math" and then goes and does a literature degree or whatever.
Is that base on your culture stereotype? In fact, in the Chinese education system, there is an explicit method of claiming that you are not good with math and science (and vice versa): in high school, a few years before the all-important college entrance exam, the classes are segregated into "wen-ke" and "li-ke". "Wen-ke" or literary class, emphasizes literature, history, political science and has a very light role for math and science. "Li-ke", logic classes, emphasizes the opposite subjects. Students are taught equally everything upto that point. Afterward, they concentrate on their area of studies. They even receive different consideration on college applications.
Indeed, there is a debate in the Chinese blogosphere now that some people, most journalists and authors who came from a "wen-ke" background, claiming that mathematics more advanced than middle school is useless and the blogs of scientist and engineers who claim the opposite.
He ignored how studying calculus concepts like differentials and integrals at a young age (I think around junior high age) is the norm in China,
I will tell you categorically this is not true. I have Chinese textbook from 1-12 from a few years ago. trigonometry is what they go up to. Now, some older textbook from the early 80's (right after the culture revolution) did include calculus, but that was dropped in the 80's.
What I think do make the point you are trying to make largely valid is that Chinese student teaches what in the state we called Advanced Algebra by end of middle school (equivalent to 9th grade here since they have 6 years elementary school). The three years of high school essentially consists doing a LOT of exercises and prep-exam in preparation for the "gao-kao", the be-all college entrance exam. Look at China, South Korean, and Japan is you wan to see what standardized exam will turn your education system into. It is horrific.
Check out this article (in Chinese, but the picture speaks for itself): http://bbs.gdou.edu.cn/home.php?mod=space&uid=73378&do=blog&id=3436 The picture showcases a girl who recently finished her gao-kao with all the prep-exam she did in high school, every single one of which she kept. I think there are some rumor that the picture is actually a fake, but many on wei-bo (Chinese twitter) are echoing that it is not an exaggeration.
You may have suffered through traditional "higher education," but a new generation is learning a different way. Some of them are learning it better. We have made tremendous progress in many fields, why do we not study the process of academic instruction just as intensely as, say, nuclear physics?
We do. Some physics department, like the one from which I got my PhD, offers research in physics education as a PhD program. Student do research and gather data in classroom and apply the same statistical analysis techniques to asset the effectiveness of certain teaching techniques. Unfortunately, they usually do not get the same respect in the department as more traditional thesis topics. Usually there are a few (<5) faculties out of the whole department who actually care about physics education that they accept student in these topics. The APS is starting to recognize it as a specialty, but only treats it as a "special topic". We are getting there.
Khan Academy is good, a lot of people use those videos!
--cej102937
When I was TA-ing to pay my way through my degree, I recommend KA to many intro physics students. Then after talking to a lot of them, I find the result to be kind of mixed. Some find it helpful, other not and it somewhat surprised me that it did not correlated with grade. The worst case is that some thinks it's helpful when in fact it did not (and you can tell by asking conceptual questions that is only a twist of the problems covered in the video). Totally anecdotal. However, fellow students who actually engaged in physics educations research tents to agree that a one way dictation, abet using video, do not help student who lacks a good conceptual foundation to begin with. And this guy, who also did a PhD in physics education, also agree. I do think the world is better with those video than without though.
Then why do we pick them out to be special and give them tax exemption? Don't answer that.
If I'm wrong, I loose nothing. If I'm right, you lose everything.
It is not inconceivable that the so-call god rewards conviction and the full exercise of the intellect that he bestowed as the ultimate virtue? The way I see it, religion, Abrahamic religions in particular, is precisely the kind of quick-and-easy way for a deity or deities use to rule out dumb and uninquisitive people . Promise people reward in the unforeseeable future and see how many people open their wallets. Not much different from your run-of-the-mill direct-marketing scheme. Probably what I would use if I were an omnipotent god. People who believes they are right without evident lost the ability to investigate whether it is so.
The diameter of the sun is 1e9 meters. The distance to the closest star, Alpha Centauri, is about 4e16m (40 lightyears)...Let's put that in context:
Suppose the sun is the size of a grain of sand, say 1mm (1e-3mm), the distance to the nearest grain of sand is 40 kilometer. So a collision between galaxies is basically collision between empty spaces...
So...it's foggy in the office?
A friend of mine is a phd student in a lab whose PI is very fond of accepting bright local high school students for summer stint then ask his students to "supervise" them (The PI likes to travel during the summer with no teaching duties, but it's not like he would spend his valuable time to supervise bunch of high school kids anyway). A few of them stood out and got accepted into the lab for having a high ranking in the Intel competition. Being a foreign student, she asked me what the competition was about. Then she goes on a rand about how she basically had to babysit some of these morons who did not seem to have spend a single hour in basic lab safety training. Can't tell the different chemical labels if it were flying straight toward their face. At some point, she basically had to relegate them to the office with computers because otherwise she cannot get any work done.
"Public transportation project found to spontaneous converge toward a centrally organized communist entity spontaneously, Liberal academia found."
Just download VLC already.
I recently build an HTPC with a Zotac barebone with an NVIDIA ION GPU. The first player I went to was VLC, but I found that it cannot do GPU accelerated HD video. VLC has a checkbox for it in preference, but it doesn't play a 1080p H.264+flac mkv file I have and on a 720p file, CPU usage was high. After much experimenting, I find that smplayer/mplayer and Media Player Classic - Home Cinema will do GPU acceleration right out of the box. Both are free.
Side note. During my experiment, I got so frustrated with Windows 7, I installed Ubuntu 11.10. To my surprise, VDPAU pretty much just works with mplayer, especially mplayer2. I think both the nvidia (proprietary) and nouveau (open source) worked, but my memory is uncertain on this point. VLC under Linux supposedly support the competing VAAPI, which can use VDPAU as a backend, but it did not work. The only reason I eventually switch back to Windows is Netflix and its silverlight addiction, which, by the way, will also not use GPU to accelerate HD video.
... is Dan Brown furiously scribbling notes for his next book.
Or Ubisoft coming up with Assassin's Creed -- the new millennium.
We tried that and have a few people who still think like that, but now that journals outside of physics have moved away from LaTeX it's pretty much dead for us. None of our students know it when they come in, they're capable enough MS office users that they can do any of the formatting needed in office, so what does LaTeX get you? Marginally better equation editing, and a lot more work fighting with the document preparation than the actual writing. And then you're asked to submit documents in office format anyway for most internal or government documents because you don't seriously think the secretarial staff have any clue what to do with a latex document.
10 years ago when I was an undergrad it was still a critical part of the experience to know how to use LaTeX. Now it's like forcing people to use IE6, there are some people still clinging to it for various reasons that are hard to change, but for everyone else office tools get the job done. Of course if your office training at the highschool level is bad you probably aren't any better off either way.
I did not know LaTeX when I started graduate school, but picked it up soon enough after realizing that it's such an amazing tool to take mathematical lecture notes. Many years later, with various macros, short-hands, packages, scripts accumulated, I find that when I need to make a document, not just the mathematical one, I immediately fire up vi and start typing \documentclass...(actually I have a two key shortcut to immediately load a pretty general template).
If a student cannot go online and find something like "The Not-So-Short Guide to LaTeX" and pick it up immediately, I'd have doubt of him/her ability to master a technical subject worthy of a dissertation.
Now, if this is a humanity department, I will probably be more sympathetic to the said students.
I believe you're over-thinking the one-dimensional attribute. It simply means they're using a straight-line chain of the molecules in question. There are no molecules in the construct branching off at any other angle, that's all.
Charge-spin separation and spin-orbital separation are specifically effect of electron collective behavior in one-dimension: that is when the motion of electron is constrained to have one degree of freedom. Think of a single-lane road in which lane change is forbidden.
The article is talking about quasiparticles, that is, collective excitations in some medium that behave as though they were individual particles. Think about a Newton's cradle (that thingy with the balls that click back and forth). When a ball hits one end of the device, a ball emerges from the other end of the device. It's as though there were some kind of particle (there's a mandatory rule that we have to give it a stupid name, so let's call it a ballon) that is transmitted through the device. Now, even though we know that there's no actual particle traveling through the device, we can make calculations as though there were, and this makes things simpler to work with.
Condensed matter physicists work with much more complicated media and their particles are quantum rather than classical, but otherwise the idea is the same. In this case, they have a medium consisting of a strontium cuprate wire, which, of course has lots of electrons in its atoms. They fire a beam at it (like the ball hitting the Newton's cradle) and this excites stuff in the wire, which they find acts like quasiparticles of a particular kind.
The exact kind of quasiparticle is one that acts like an electron, but has no charge or spin, just orbital properties. The spin and charge kinds of quasiparticle were previously discovered, and this completes the set, which is why it's news.
More specifically, "separation" refers to the prediction (and now observation) that in the collection of electrons in the 1D wire, orbital, spin, and charge information travel at different speed. This is in particular a low dimensional effect. Hence this is observed in a quantum wire.
Why not improve the gnome classic desktop from gnome 3 instead? This zombie-gnome2 effort seems like a waste of time to me.
Can you put a weather widget on the top bar on Gnome3 Classic? How about a CPU temp sensor? How about a graph that shows CPU, RAM, swap, and network usage? Maybe a sensor that shows the CPU speed for each core with the ability to change them to ondemand or performace? Can you put the taskbar on bottom bar? Can you put just a gnome foot (start button) on the bottom left like Windows and the full menu on top (Gnome-foot, Places, System)?
The last time I tried Gnome3, none of these things were possible. These were not an option on Gnome3 Classic either. I want my old Gnome2 back, not the "look" of Gnome2 stuck on top of Gnome3. I don't want "New Coke" in an "Old Coke" can.
All but the cpufreq applet part is possible with Gnome Shell Extensions and I am pretty sure there is actually an extension out there for cpufreq that I just haven't found useful yet. Now I am generally in flavor of a lightweight base and add feature via plug-in approach...Only if Gnome3's base was actually lightweight.
My Asian and Indian coworkers can't use Siri, and most have stopped trying out of frustration. It can't understand their accent, and doesn't seem to get any better over time. That is the most obvious reason why Google would want to do this.
I second this. On my android phone (Samsung Epic 4G), go to the language setting for voice-recognition. The list of supported language and ascent is long and includes both Cantonese and Mandarin Chinese. FYI, there is no Indian, but there is "English (Indian)". Sure, full sentence recognition and semantic matching is not up to Siri's par in well spoken English as far as I can tell, but it works well enough for my parents, who can not really use a computer to input Chinese. Now, It is not clear to me if GV is responsible for their non-English recognition, but I wouldn't be surprised. I am also not sure if iPhone4(s) can do this, but I suspect that if it can, some of my more fanboyish friends would be jumping up and down to show me, who due to my hate of iTunes, refuses to use most hardware from Apple since iPod1.
You are right. The freezing and boiling point of water depends on temperature. But that is no longer used as the definition of C. The new official definition is with -273.15C being absolute zero and 0.01C being the triple point of water. Both of these temperature are fixed and do not depends on additional thermodynamic parameters.
It's not like Microsoft said, "hey, we invented an easy way to mount ISO's. Take THAT Linux! wait, you already have that? Oh well, our way is superior!"
It's more like Microsoft said, "Hey, we made ISO's easy to mount."
The rest of the crap comes from those who make a living trying to instigate fights between users in both camps.
More importantly, why are people arguing for the advantages of Windows over Linux when comparing desktop features? Last I check, MS's desktop competitor is OSX. We who uses Linux desktop daily knows that much of the "Linux desktop is too hard to use" is utter crap, but why is MS fanboy trying to raise this FUD? It is not like when their desktop users finally become fed up, they will switch to Linux en mass. At this point it is more likely OSX.
Where Windows is competing with Linux, on the servers, high-performance, etc, if you can't effing fire up a terminal to do simple task like this, get your hand off my expensive hardware!!!
A benefit that they are advocating is that it is religiously unobjectionable because it respect the Sabbath. So they'd want to adjust the orbit to 357, 364, or 371 days. Given Global Warming, we might want to move further away from the sun. So 371.