Maybe applications need to find a less obtrusive way of popping up hints, because most users need them; they won't go looking.
The last time someone tried this we got Clippy. I think a whole generation of geeks needs to die away before anyone gets the nerve to try something like this again...
The traveling salesman only comes into play after you have determined the amount and the position of the nodes. The grass mowing problem actually was on how to discretize your domain.
socialism is not "left". Communism is left. If you are afraid to say it, maybe you should rethink your beliefs. Moreover, socialism just doesn't make sense anymore; it is like a capitalist system with build-in flaws.
Having said that, I also need to point out that confirmation nowadays is neither easy nor cheap. We need to, alas, cut down on duplication and in many cases we can only afford to fund those that are most likely to get it right in the first place.
I don't know about Lisp, but Fortran is one of my favorites!
I suggest you focus on Fortran 95, maybe with some features of Fortran 2003. Thus, the book by Chapman (Fortran 95/2003 for scientists and engineers) would be the one to recommend. You can also check out the comp.lang.fortran group. I also use the gfortran compiler, but the g95 compiler is also pretty good (although it looks like it's abandonware nowadays). A few years ago gfortran was not able to compile a lot of features, but I gave it a spin a few weeks ago and it seems that they are up to speed again.
I am not surprised that Fortran+database return no results. Someone that programs databases would not use Fortran, and someone that uses Fortran would never program a database, if you get my drift...:-)
I meant nothing against Fortran. I am a Fortran programmer myself. It is just that although Fortran supports direct access files, it has no intrinsic subroutines/functions for database management and back then (Fortran 77) did not support multidimensional arrays of mixed data types (character strings together with reals and integers and so on...). That is why although Fortran might have been an option back then, I find it more probable that the database programmers of that era would have used some other language (either C or Cobol) instead. Not necessarily because they were better (in my opinion, they weren't), but also because Cobol was more popular with businesses back then.
You have a point, but the difference is the time scale for recovery. As reported in the CNN article, 3 days of grounding were enough to notice a difference. If something changes in the climate it will take much longer than 3 days for things to roll back to their previous state (if ever).
And you missed the point, in which the GP was saying that the article has nothing to do with contrails, it is about a whole different phenomenon altogether.
You shall be now asked to leave the shaolin temple, and leave your geek card at the exit...
I agree with what you said, I just want to do some CNN-bashing: Those damn journalists were trying to be sensational again by saying that the air traffic affects the *climate* while it is obvious that it just affects the *weather*. If the air traffic disappears the *weather* will just roll back to its usual behavior that is dictated by the *climate*. Of course, I am only taking about the condensation wisps that are referred to in the article, not the aircraft emissions, that do have an effect on the *climate*.
But I guess the word weather is out of fashion, and climate sounds so much better... Damned journalists, I hate you guys...
You said it, as well as someone else above, and it goes like this: "Google is using its search monopoly to push Chrome"
Google does not have a monopoly in search. You can go e.g. to Bing with no consequences. Doing so will not prevent you from using any other programs, features of your hardware etc. The stuff that is online is just there. They do not need a specific search engine in order for them to be found or (nowadays) a specific browser to be viewed. You can type the address in the bar and navigate to your target directly (I know that is starting to change, but this is another story).
My point is, what Google is doing is different than, e.g. what MS was doing with Windows and IE6 and Windows Media Player. Not having Windows in the 90's meant you could not use your hardware properly (driver issues), you could not play most of the audio and video formats and you could not view a lot of websites appropriately.
Google is just exercising aggressive marketing strategies, that's all (and I don't like that either). But in this case, unlike 10 years ago, you have other options. Use them!
It requires a registered account to download the PDFs. And, to be honest, I wasn't much excited about the titles either. Are there any gems that are really worth making an account for?
Well, it was a lucky break, without the quotes. Sojourner lasted 3 months, so they set up to reach this target, and maybe even surpass it a little, which they did. As far as target setting goes (from the project managing perspective, not the engineering perspective), it was done quite by the book. From the engineering perspective, the initial estimate was that in three months time the martian dust would have covered the rovers' solar panels so that they would run out of juice, freeze up and die a little bit after that. Then, however something unexpected happened, namely a "cleaning event": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaning_event This was unexpected because the thin martian atmosphere would not (so everyone thought) be able to lift the dust from the solar panels. Thankfully it is not so...
Concerning the budget, the rovers are actually getting *cheaper* as time passes and the mission gets extended. The most expensive part of the mission is getting the rovers on Mars in the first place. Thus, the dollar/sol ratio will keep getting smaller even if the mission receives several additional extensions.
You were however totally right in this point: Nobody will risk his neck and *guarantee* a lifetime of say, 3 years. Especially not when the last mission lived only three months. So, yes, this is a political issue, which is totaly ok if you ask me (just read Richard Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster to understant what I mean). Now, after having seen how it is like on Mars the year over, the threshold has been risen to a quite harder target than before. MSL Curiosity is planned to operate for at least 1 Martian year (686 Earth days).
Well, you have to admit that an Xbox is pretty big for a marketing freebie. We are not talking about free pens and calendars here.
The chain of reasoning here could be: College freshmen buy new computers, so there is a market there > They need to choose between MS, Apple, Linux > We need to make them go with Windows, so let's throw in an Xbox there > Help spread Win7 *and* make revenue from Xbox game sales.
I don't think that this marketing campaign is targeted to the teens that play games. It is targeted to the teens that are buying a computer for college, i.e. office, work (which will also help with MS-Office sales). If it was targeted to the gaming crowd it would be the other way around: e.g. a free netbook for every Xbox sale.
Well, I am currently typing this in Firefox 3.6.3 in a WinXP laptop with 512 MB RAM and an AMD Athlon 3000+ that is however downclocked to 398 MHz (it overheats if I let it run faster. I had to tweak it after some years of abuse...). Then again, I am a really patient person.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe applications need to find a less obtrusive way of popping up hints, because most users need them; they won't go looking.
The last time someone tried this we got Clippy. I think a whole generation of geeks needs to die away before anyone gets the nerve to try something like this again...
There should be another class for athletes like him.
There is! It is called Special Olympics.
The traveling salesman only comes into play after you have determined the amount and the position of the nodes. The grass mowing problem actually was on how to discretize your domain.
So you basically suggest a Monte Carlo algorithm... Interesting...
Ahem,
socialism is not "left". Communism is left. If you are afraid to say it, maybe you should rethink your beliefs. Moreover, socialism just doesn't make sense anymore; it is like a capitalist system with build-in flaws.
Mod parent up!
Having said that, I also need to point out that confirmation nowadays is neither easy nor cheap. We need to, alas, cut down on duplication and in many cases we can only afford to fund those that are most likely to get it right in the first place.
I don't know about Lisp, but Fortran is one of my favorites!
I suggest you focus on Fortran 95, maybe with some features of Fortran 2003. Thus, the book by Chapman (Fortran 95/2003 for scientists and engineers) would be the one to recommend. You can also check out the comp.lang.fortran group. I also use the gfortran compiler, but the g95 compiler is also pretty good (although it looks like it's abandonware nowadays). A few years ago gfortran was not able to compile a lot of features, but I gave it a spin a few weeks ago and it seems that they are up to speed again.
I am not surprised that Fortran+database return no results. Someone that programs databases would not use Fortran, and someone that uses Fortran would never program a database, if you get my drift... :-)
Happy programming!
I meant nothing against Fortran. I am a Fortran programmer myself. It is just that although Fortran supports direct access files, it has no intrinsic subroutines/functions for database management and back then (Fortran 77) did not support multidimensional arrays of mixed data types (character strings together with reals and integers and so on...). That is why although Fortran might have been an option back then, I find it more probable that the database programmers of that era would have used some other language (either C or Cobol) instead. Not necessarily because they were better (in my opinion, they weren't), but also because Cobol was more popular with businesses back then.
Probably using C, COBOL or (less probably) FORTRAN...
You have a point, but the difference is the time scale for recovery. As reported in the CNN article, 3 days of grounding were enough to notice a difference. If something changes in the climate it will take much longer than 3 days for things to roll back to their previous state (if ever).
And you missed the point, in which the GP was saying that the article has nothing to do with contrails, it is about a whole different phenomenon altogether.
You shall be now asked to leave the shaolin temple, and leave your geek card at the exit...
I agree with what you said, I just want to do some CNN-bashing:
Those damn journalists were trying to be sensational again by saying that the air traffic affects the *climate* while it is obvious that it just affects the *weather*. If the air traffic disappears the *weather* will just roll back to its usual behavior that is dictated by the *climate*. Of course, I am only taking about the condensation wisps that are referred to in the article, not the aircraft emissions, that do have an effect on the *climate*.
But I guess the word weather is out of fashion, and climate sounds so much better... Damned journalists, I hate you guys...
Mod parent up!
You said it, as well as someone else above, and it goes like this: "Google is using its search monopoly to push Chrome"
Google does not have a monopoly in search. You can go e.g. to Bing with no consequences. Doing so will not prevent you from using any other programs, features of your hardware etc. The stuff that is online is just there. They do not need a specific search engine in order for them to be found or (nowadays) a specific browser to be viewed. You can type the address in the bar and navigate to your target directly (I know that is starting to change, but this is another story).
My point is, what Google is doing is different than, e.g. what MS was doing with Windows and IE6 and Windows Media Player. Not having Windows in the 90's meant you could not use your hardware properly (driver issues), you could not play most of the audio and video formats and you could not view a lot of websites appropriately.
Google is just exercising aggressive marketing strategies, that's all (and I don't like that either). But in this case, unlike 10 years ago, you have other options. Use them!
Just what was missing! An app for a cellphone that enables you to... call someone?! Wait, what?
This is in the same spirit, from VLT in Chile:
http://www.youtube.com/user/NikoBustos#p/a/u/1/wFpeM3fxJoQ
They are pretty much the same thing: well done science is a piece of art.
It requires a registered account to download the PDFs. And, to be honest, I wasn't much excited about the titles either. Are there any gems that are really worth making an account for?
Well, it was a lucky break, without the quotes. Sojourner lasted 3 months, so they set up to reach this target, and maybe even surpass it a little, which they did. As far as target setting goes (from the project managing perspective, not the engineering perspective), it was done quite by the book. From the engineering perspective, the initial estimate was that in three months time the martian dust would have covered the rovers' solar panels so that they would run out of juice, freeze up and die a little bit after that. Then, however something unexpected happened, namely a "cleaning event":
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleaning_event
This was unexpected because the thin martian atmosphere would not (so everyone thought) be able to lift the dust from the solar panels. Thankfully it is not so...
Concerning the budget, the rovers are actually getting *cheaper* as time passes and the mission gets extended. The most expensive part of the mission is getting the rovers on Mars in the first place. Thus, the dollar/sol ratio will keep getting smaller even if the mission receives several additional extensions.
You were however totally right in this point: Nobody will risk his neck and *guarantee* a lifetime of say, 3 years. Especially not when the last mission lived only three months. So, yes, this is a political issue, which is totaly ok if you ask me (just read Richard Feynman's report on the Challenger disaster to understant what I mean). Now, after having seen how it is like on Mars the year over, the threshold has been risen to a quite harder target than before. MSL Curiosity is planned to operate for at least 1 Martian year (686 Earth days).
I, for one, wish her luck!
...I'm hunting wavicles! Wehehehehehe!
Well, you have to admit that an Xbox is pretty big for a marketing freebie. We are not talking about free pens and calendars here.
The chain of reasoning here could be: College freshmen buy new computers, so there is a market there > They need to choose between MS, Apple, Linux > We need to make them go with Windows, so let's throw in an Xbox there > Help spread Win7 *and* make revenue from Xbox game sales.
I don't think that this marketing campaign is targeted to the teens that play games. It is targeted to the teens that are buying a computer for college, i.e. office, work (which will also help with MS-Office sales). If it was targeted to the gaming crowd it would be the other way around: e.g. a free netbook for every Xbox sale.
I use soccer fields you insensitive clod!
Well, I am currently typing this in Firefox 3.6.3 in a WinXP laptop with 512 MB RAM and an AMD Athlon 3000+ that is however downclocked to 398 MHz (it overheats if I let it run faster. I had to tweak it after some years of abuse...). Then again, I am a really patient person.
* Due to some economic circumstances, I found myself able to retire very comfortably at the age of 28. Nevertheless, I continued to work.
Sounds nice. Why don't you try an open source project?
So you only hang around with people that are of the same religious/political/etc opinions as you? How utterly boring, to say the least...