The driver will probably still be the one to control the throttle (and maybe also the brake), just so that he/she can be held liable in case of an accident.
Because rebels are nowadays labeled "terrorists" and thus get no sympathy at all from the other 51% of the population that sit comfortably in their living-rooms watching the rebellion on TV.
Music is not worth owning any more, but not because it is necessarily bad. My nieces (14 and 15 years old) are so accustomed to the modern ephemeral character of music that they never follow up with any band/artist. They will stream and listen to some music that they find cool on their phones, but will not bother looking up discographies and will certainly not bother picking up the CD (the what you say?) no matter how great the find the music. And that is because they subconsciously know that in a month's time they will be bombarded by the next great thing. They don't know what ripping a CD means (much less how to do it). I'm not even sure if they have a CD player. They don't care about sound quality. They do not collect music (at their age my collection grew exponentially). Even MP3s and cloud services do not make much sense to them any more. They have MP3-players that are collecting dust, because why bother downloading (even illegally), or going through the hassle of buying the music and storing it online when they can listen to it right away (and only once or twice)? We seem to have something like MTV-on-demand with this model. But this fast consumption also means that no songs (and much less records) will ever get the chance of becoming a classic.
Is there a tablet for hobbyist developers? In the sense that one can install a compiler (e.g. GCC) and experiment with own applications? I have found stuff like this but it seems like a major hassle to get things running. Is there any hope to begin with, that the big players will relax their policies enough so that such things can be easier? I would expect a Win7 tablet to be able to do the things I want, but another post above mentions the problem with the battery life. I do not own a tablet or a smartphone, so I don't really know how things stand beyond the app-store-land, but it seems that even Python in Android is not working as one would expect. So, any suggestions?
This doesn't really mean anything. Google has long ago realized that they are big enough to try out many different things. Even if only 1% of the things they experiment with ends up being a success, it will directly translate into huge amounts of profit, that will make the whole process worthwhile. For a large company, this certainly seems a better strategy than trying only a few ideas and then betting all your money on a couple of products.
I would think that a little girl (or boy, for that matter) at say, the age of 8, does not have much realization of "being myself" and "following a role model". Actually, I would say that you won't know anything about yourself until you reach the age of at least 20, but of course that varies dramatically. The Greeks philosophized quite a lot about it and to "know yourself" was considered a significant milestone or even target in one's life. So role models do help and Disney role models in particular need to take a hike. Gender in role models should not make a difference, but I guess it is easier for someone at a very young age to identify himself/herself with someone of the same gender, but this is not a necessity.
Having said that, I must state that having fantasy is something to be encouraged at all ages. So which one is better? To fantasize being Liu Yang that set a target, trained and achieved it, or Snow-white that did nothing but look beautiful and hide in the forest?
I RTFA. I also watched the presentation where he makes a similar mention. But he does not give any examples. The only example that we have is the one for basketball. So how does this work in other fields? Just to mention that it is "used by x to understand y" is not enough!
You should all hand over your geek cards at the front desk, if you ever were in position of one.
You have a geek making a presentation about an idea on how to bring together an optimum team of items depending on their statistical profiles, and you argue about how interesting basketball/baseball is? I have never witnessed people miss the point all at once that badly ever before in my life...
Here, I will boil it down for you: 1. Gather statistical data on the items of which you want to build a new group of. 2. Do some data-mining and graphing to figure out how these items cluster. Do not predefine clusters, but let them surface themselves. 3. Depending on a free, non-mapped variable (e.g. cost) make an optimum choice of individuals from each group. Alternatively, base your choice on a given pattern that you want to match or counter-act (e.g. the opposing team). 4. Profit! 5. Gather new data and update your graphs to keep up with times.
How about starting to come up with ideas on how to apply this concept to physics, medicine, engineering and economics? Jeez...
No, the algorithms too can be quite complex, depending on the field. And nobody with a sane mind uses BASIC. Usually something will be tested using a small test-problem in Matlab or Mathematica (or even Excel for very simple stuff) that have built-in graphing capabilities and mathematical libraries to get a feeling of how everything works. If everything looks good but runs slow, the model will be re-written in Fortran or C that will do the number crunching. Usually the scientist will write a serial version of the code that will be handed over to a programmer for refactoring and parallelization. Nobody will bother with a GUI at this level, so there is no need to use anything fancy and languages like Fortran are pretty fast out of the box (just remember to loop through the columns first). The Fortran or C output-files will usually be ASCII so that the raw data can be reviewed if necessary. If some semi-automatic graphing capability is needed, gnuplot will be used via a shell script or even from within the main program. When all bugs are eliminated, and depending on the complexity of the output, unformatted files can also be used to increase speed that will later have to be parsed in post-processing in order to throw the data at programs like ParaView.
So, as you see, the toolset is actually as efficient as it can get. As far as I know, all tools that can actually take advantage of parallel machines are very efficient themselves, even if used by non-experts. Interpreted languages have their place too, however. As mentioned above, these come into play at early stages of development, when it takes longer to write the program than to run it. Matlab is a good example. Python has the advantage that it is free and also object-oriented, if that is your kind of fruit. Developing new stuff using a compiled language can be a drag, especially if they use static typing, because you will be changing the code a lot at the beginning. When you have your algorithm working, you are familiar with it and you need to run it using large data-sets (and/or many of them), then it is time to switch to something faster. The second programming pass will then not take that much time because you will (hopefully) know what you're doing by that time.
And that is why I use LaTeX for anything longer than 4 pages. You get to work with a non-obtrusive ASCII editor of your choice, plus the fact that the text looks fine at the end. You only need to worry about formatting at the very beginning of your work (when you pick your template) and at the very end (when you go through the manuscript to improve its looks).
I really don't mind clicking, this is not what is wrong with the ribbon.
The problem with the ribbon is that you have to think in order to use it. You have to take a moment and think what you want to do so that you can figure out where you have to click in order to find the appropriate tool. It is actually rather well structured if you consider that it is a hard thing to group abstract menu items and tools in a meaningful way. It will work in favor of someone with little or no previous experience, but it is a pain for a trained used.
In this particular case, thinking is bad! When I write a document, I want my mind to be with what I am writing. In the old-fashioned way you could connect functions with locations and motions that, after a while, would come to you as natural. For example, if you place the picture toolbar on the lower left corner of the window, then every time you want to edit a picture in Word, your hand will automatically move the mouse in that direction. You don't have to explicitly think about it. It is kinda like driving a car or playing a computer game. You don't actively think while stirring, it just comes in a natural way.
With the ribbon, I very often get annoyed that I have to take my mind away from what I'm doing in order to find the stupid menu buttons. And I find working with it much slower and counter-productive. Yes the old menu took up space and looked ugly, but it worked for me.
What happened to the "if it's not broken, don't fix it" motto? Did anyone complain that the menu list, that everyone knows where it is and what is there to expect, did not stand out enough? Or that it lacked any other visual property? At least with the ribbon they tried re-thinking the topic "menu" and took a shot at providing something different (whether you like it or not is another topic). What exactly were they trying to achieve with this modification? What a horrible waste of resources...
For the record, I find it a bit childish and old-fashioned in caps, but, actually, I couldn't care less.
You people can joke all you like about old languages.. I'm getting paid to use, maintain and write FORTRAN code. In the past, I have written FOSS in FORTRAN and put it in the public domain. People still download it on a weekly basis. FORTRAN has gone through 10 updates and code that was written on cardboard in the sixties can work together with OO code from last week. FORTRAN is the back-end for the NumPy and SciPy numerical libraries. Python is just a fancy way of writing FORTRAN. And, no, I'm not an old fart (yet), but I can chase you off my lawn nevertheless. Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time...
It has nothing to do with trespassing, it has to do with the guys attitude. You could argue that he had to factor his working time in the price of the pictures, so a high price is to be expected. But, the sad truth is, nobody cares how much time he invested in taking the photos. All it maters is whether you are willing to pay that price for a piece of paper with your face printed on it. And holding on to the original digital files as if they were some sort of valuable asset (dude, it is not a photo that will be on the cover of the TIME magazine, it's just somebody's graduation party) doesn't make him a professional "protecting his copyright". All it makes him is an asshole. As if anyone would be willing to buy two copies of the same picture for his price! The pictures that we bought were promptly scanned and shared with friends and none of us bothered to check whether that was technically legal or not.
Amen brother! If I had mod points, you would totally own them.
At a friends graduation, the place was swarming with photographers taking pictures right and left and giving away their business cards. When we went to pick some photos up from a photographer's shop, we found out that his prices were ludicrous. Dude, that was MY freaking face on the picture! (not a pretty one, but still) So the guy was holding on to thousands of photos from the graduation party that were partially taken without the consent of the pictured individuals and their prices were absurd. And when we told him that we also want the digital files of our photos together with the printouts (for that price), he told us that that was not possible because the digital images were under his copyright. I say screw that guy, his business and his colleagues.
Yes, he took time to be at the graduation party, and yes, his pictures were better looking that the amateurish ones (back then). But you know what? Nobody asked him to be there. And with the quality of amateur cameras and phones getting more and more awesome, his sort will become extinct and I won't be surprised (or sad).
Kudos to the engineers and their managers that realized that technical problems are not technicalities. It took two Space Shuttles and a few unmanned missions to figure it out, but I guess we are learning, and that is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
The driver will probably still be the one to control the throttle (and maybe also the brake), just so that he/she can be held liable in case of an accident.
Have you tried out ImageMagick? Still not like AutoCAD though, if that's what you have in mind. What do you want to do with sprites?
That's why we call them the blue man group.
Over here we call them the "Smurfs".
Oh, we hear him alright. And he is right.
Because rebels are nowadays labeled "terrorists" and thus get no sympathy at all from the other 51% of the population that sit comfortably in their living-rooms watching the rebellion on TV.
Music is not worth owning any more, but not because it is necessarily bad. My nieces (14 and 15 years old) are so accustomed to the modern ephemeral character of music that they never follow up with any band/artist. They will stream and listen to some music that they find cool on their phones, but will not bother looking up discographies and will certainly not bother picking up the CD (the what you say?) no matter how great the find the music. And that is because they subconsciously know that in a month's time they will be bombarded by the next great thing. They don't know what ripping a CD means (much less how to do it). I'm not even sure if they have a CD player. They don't care about sound quality. They do not collect music (at their age my collection grew exponentially). Even MP3s and cloud services do not make much sense to them any more. They have MP3-players that are collecting dust, because why bother downloading (even illegally), or going through the hassle of buying the music and storing it online when they can listen to it right away (and only once or twice)? We seem to have something like MTV-on-demand with this model. But this fast consumption also means that no songs (and much less records) will ever get the chance of becoming a classic.
Is there a tablet for hobbyist developers? In the sense that one can install a compiler (e.g. GCC) and experiment with own applications? I have found stuff like this but it seems like a major hassle to get things running. Is there any hope to begin with, that the big players will relax their policies enough so that such things can be easier? I would expect a Win7 tablet to be able to do the things I want, but another post above mentions the problem with the battery life. I do not own a tablet or a smartphone, so I don't really know how things stand beyond the app-store-land, but it seems that even Python in Android is not working as one would expect. So, any suggestions?
This doesn't really mean anything. Google has long ago realized that they are big enough to try out many different things. Even if only 1% of the things they experiment with ends up being a success, it will directly translate into huge amounts of profit, that will make the whole process worthwhile. For a large company, this certainly seems a better strategy than trying only a few ideas and then betting all your money on a couple of products.
I would think that a little girl (or boy, for that matter) at say, the age of 8, does not have much realization of "being myself" and "following a role model". Actually, I would say that you won't know anything about yourself until you reach the age of at least 20, but of course that varies dramatically. The Greeks philosophized quite a lot about it and to "know yourself" was considered a significant milestone or even target in one's life. So role models do help and Disney role models in particular need to take a hike. Gender in role models should not make a difference, but I guess it is easier for someone at a very young age to identify himself/herself with someone of the same gender, but this is not a necessity.
Having said that, I must state that having fantasy is something to be encouraged at all ages. So which one is better? To fantasize being Liu Yang that set a target, trained and achieved it, or Snow-white that did nothing but look beautiful and hide in the forest?
Wow! Very interesting!
I really admire Donald Knuth, I really do, but I did not know he was so inarticulate! Or is it just the camera that makes him so?
I RTFA. I also watched the presentation where he makes a similar mention. But he does not give any examples. The only example that we have is the one for basketball. So how does this work in other fields? Just to mention that it is "used by x to understand y" is not enough!
No, I wasn't aiming for irony. I'm just in a complete other field than biomedical research. Please, enlighten us!
You should all hand over your geek cards at the front desk, if you ever were in position of one.
You have a geek making a presentation about an idea on how to bring together an optimum team of items depending on their statistical profiles, and you argue about how interesting basketball/baseball is? I have never witnessed people miss the point all at once that badly ever before in my life...
Here, I will boil it down for you:
1. Gather statistical data on the items of which you want to build a new group of.
2. Do some data-mining and graphing to figure out how these items cluster. Do not predefine clusters, but let them surface themselves.
3. Depending on a free, non-mapped variable (e.g. cost) make an optimum choice of individuals from each group. Alternatively, base your choice on a given pattern that you want to match or counter-act (e.g. the opposing team).
4. Profit!
5. Gather new data and update your graphs to keep up with times.
How about starting to come up with ideas on how to apply this concept to physics, medicine, engineering and economics? Jeez...
Periodic boundary conditions, eh?
Been doing molecular dynamics simulations much?
No, the algorithms too can be quite complex, depending on the field. And nobody with a sane mind uses BASIC. Usually something will be tested using a small test-problem in Matlab or Mathematica (or even Excel for very simple stuff) that have built-in graphing capabilities and mathematical libraries to get a feeling of how everything works. If everything looks good but runs slow, the model will be re-written in Fortran or C that will do the number crunching. Usually the scientist will write a serial version of the code that will be handed over to a programmer for refactoring and parallelization. Nobody will bother with a GUI at this level, so there is no need to use anything fancy and languages like Fortran are pretty fast out of the box (just remember to loop through the columns first). The Fortran or C output-files will usually be ASCII so that the raw data can be reviewed if necessary. If some semi-automatic graphing capability is needed, gnuplot will be used via a shell script or even from within the main program. When all bugs are eliminated, and depending on the complexity of the output, unformatted files can also be used to increase speed that will later have to be parsed in post-processing in order to throw the data at programs like ParaView.
So, as you see, the toolset is actually as efficient as it can get. As far as I know, all tools that can actually take advantage of parallel machines are very efficient themselves, even if used by non-experts. Interpreted languages have their place too, however. As mentioned above, these come into play at early stages of development, when it takes longer to write the program than to run it. Matlab is a good example. Python has the advantage that it is free and also object-oriented, if that is your kind of fruit. Developing new stuff using a compiled language can be a drag, especially if they use static typing, because you will be changing the code a lot at the beginning. When you have your algorithm working, you are familiar with it and you need to run it using large data-sets (and/or many of them), then it is time to switch to something faster. The second programming pass will then not take that much time because you will (hopefully) know what you're doing by that time.
And that is why I use LaTeX for anything longer than 4 pages. You get to work with a non-obtrusive ASCII editor of your choice, plus the fact that the text looks fine at the end. You only need to worry about formatting at the very beginning of your work (when you pick your template) and at the very end (when you go through the manuscript to improve its looks).
I really don't mind clicking, this is not what is wrong with the ribbon.
The problem with the ribbon is that you have to think in order to use it. You have to take a moment and think what you want to do so that you can figure out where you have to click in order to find the appropriate tool. It is actually rather well structured if you consider that it is a hard thing to group abstract menu items and tools in a meaningful way. It will work in favor of someone with little or no previous experience, but it is a pain for a trained used.
In this particular case, thinking is bad! When I write a document, I want my mind to be with what I am writing. In the old-fashioned way you could connect functions with locations and motions that, after a while, would come to you as natural. For example, if you place the picture toolbar on the lower left corner of the window, then every time you want to edit a picture in Word, your hand will automatically move the mouse in that direction. You don't have to explicitly think about it. It is kinda like driving a car or playing a computer game. You don't actively think while stirring, it just comes in a natural way.
With the ribbon, I very often get annoyed that I have to take my mind away from what I'm doing in order to find the stupid menu buttons. And I find working with it much slower and counter-productive. Yes the old menu took up space and looked ugly, but it worked for me.
Seriously?
What happened to the "if it's not broken, don't fix it" motto? Did anyone complain that the menu list, that everyone knows where it is and what is there to expect, did not stand out enough? Or that it lacked any other visual property? At least with the ribbon they tried re-thinking the topic "menu" and took a shot at providing something different (whether you like it or not is another topic). What exactly were they trying to achieve with this modification? What a horrible waste of resources...
For the record, I find it a bit childish and old-fashioned in caps, but, actually, I couldn't care less.
Yes!
oh, got it, nevermind
Pardon my ignorance, but what's the difference between soft and hard scifi?
I just couldn't figure it out from your post or the people's replies to it
You people can joke all you like about old languages.. I'm getting paid to use, maintain and write FORTRAN code.
In the past, I have written FOSS in FORTRAN and put it in the public domain. People still download it on a weekly basis.
FORTRAN has gone through 10 updates and code that was written on cardboard in the sixties can work together with OO code from last week.
FORTRAN is the back-end for the NumPy and SciPy numerical libraries. Python is just a fancy way of writing FORTRAN.
And, no, I'm not an old fart (yet), but I can chase you off my lawn nevertheless.
Now go away, or I shall taunt you a second time...
It has nothing to do with trespassing, it has to do with the guys attitude. You could argue that he had to factor his working time in the price of the pictures, so a high price is to be expected. But, the sad truth is, nobody cares how much time he invested in taking the photos. All it maters is whether you are willing to pay that price for a piece of paper with your face printed on it. And holding on to the original digital files as if they were some sort of valuable asset (dude, it is not a photo that will be on the cover of the TIME magazine, it's just somebody's graduation party) doesn't make him a professional "protecting his copyright". All it makes him is an asshole. As if anyone would be willing to buy two copies of the same picture for his price! The pictures that we bought were promptly scanned and shared with friends and none of us bothered to check whether that was technically legal or not.
Amen brother! If I had mod points, you would totally own them.
At a friends graduation, the place was swarming with photographers taking pictures right and left and giving away their business cards. When we went to pick some photos up from a photographer's shop, we found out that his prices were ludicrous. Dude, that was MY freaking face on the picture! (not a pretty one, but still) So the guy was holding on to thousands of photos from the graduation party that were partially taken without the consent of the pictured individuals and their prices were absurd. And when we told him that we also want the digital files of our photos together with the printouts (for that price), he told us that that was not possible because the digital images were under his copyright. I say screw that guy, his business and his colleagues.
Yes, he took time to be at the graduation party, and yes, his pictures were better looking that the amateurish ones (back then). But you know what? Nobody asked him to be there. And with the quality of amateur cameras and phones getting more and more awesome, his sort will become extinct and I won't be surprised (or sad).
Kudos to the engineers and their managers that realized that technical problems are not technicalities. It took two Space Shuttles and a few unmanned missions to figure it out, but I guess we are learning, and that is a good thing.