Well, you re right in all points. And that is why it makes it even more interesting for us to learn why the artist of the article chose the GIF format instead of the APNG format.
I would never buy something that is only stored in the cloud. If I buy it, I want to have it at home, lend it to my friends, rip it, jailbreak it, change its format, print it, resell it, make backups, feed it to my dog, set it on fire, do whatever I want with it! If you don't want me doing any of the above, you obviously don't want to sell me something, you want to provide me with a service. It is like going to the cinema. You pay 10 euros and you walk in the theater with a coke, you watch the movie, drink the coke, go home, end of story. Now, if you want to provide me with the opportunity of going to the cinema using my couch, my machine, my bandwidth and my coke, then this should not cost more than 2-3 euros. Ah, you would say, but now you can store the movie in the cloud, and watch it again! Therefore we set the price at 8 euros. Well, I don't want that because, you see, you tried again to sell me something without making me the owner of anything! I want a really cheap streaming service with no monthly fee that will let me click on a button and watch a movie, all legal, just this once, no questions asked, thank you very much.
Disclaimer: the price numbers are hypothetical and used to express relative prices. Anything that costs 10 credits in real life should in my opinion cost no more than 2 or 3 credits online. BTW, if anyone knows of a streaming service like the one described above that will work from Germany I would be quite grateful. Thanks!
You won't get any sound advice if you don't tell us the background of your students. It is the most important thing in any tutoring class. If they have no idea what an OS is, perhaps you should start there. If they know how to use Windows (and understand what an operating system is actually doing), perhaps you could start by making a comparison of the two systems. Oh, and please, do not start with the "on UNIX everything is a file" thing. This has never, ever, helped anyone at that stage. Perhaps you could make a historical review to show, e.g. that in the before time, DOS was the OS and Windows was a GUI. Then tell them that Linux is the OS and Gnome is the GUI. If they get that, then jumping from DOS to Bash will be easy. And some general advice: If possible, do not guide them through a trivial task as a tutorial to show them how "things are done". I have always found such tutorials boring and uninspiring. Instead, give them a book, a manual, an online link or whatever where they can search for stuff and an easy task to perform. Make it like a competition: "let's see who can figure it out fiiiiiirst!" kind of thing. Also, remember that it has to be something that they can accomplish by looking in the material you gave them. The exercise is not for pumping up your own ego when you come to them after two hours with an answer that they could have never found.
uh... you're kidding, right? The jar of 99.9% ethanol from Merck that we had in the lab sure let out an odor when we opened it... The question is whether that smell is *distinctive* of ethanol.
Here are a few random answers/comments: Sure you can vote the government out of office, but that will just change the persons, not the policies. Prices go up due to inflation, although the lack of competition is indeed a problem. Corporate takeovers are more or less regulated, but as you pointed out, not enough...
The GP didn't refer to remembering the oligarchy and plutocracy definitions, he referred to *understanding what they mean*. There is a subtle, but quite important difference that I am sure you with your 4.0 GPA average will understand. As for me, I am Greek, so get off my lawn.
Maybe the fact that FB has infiltrated the "internet infrastructure" will do the trick. This is definitely not the correct term but I don't know how to put it properly. What I mean is, for example, that its boomed popularity caused *other* sites to introduce FB elements in their pages (I am talking about the "like" buttons). Same for Google, which is the search engine under the hood of the "search" buttons in numerous websites. In addition, I remember once reading a vision testament by Google saying that they want their name to become synonymous to the internet. They already succeeded when it comes to searching and video streaming (although they bought YouTube and didn't develop it themselves), and they are on their way to take over fields like email and document processing. Likewise, FB has already sent MSN, IRC, ICQ and various other networking services the way of the Dodo (Skype survives, but this is because social networking and the communications branch diverged) and they accomplished to make their brand synonymous to social networking. This is Facebooks value. Now, if it will be around in ten years is hard to say, for 10 years is too long a time in such cases.
As long as the studies that the NCGA webpage refers to are scientific (I didn't read them), their results should be reliable within certainty limits. *Of course* the results would end up being used for promotion by the interested parties.
I remember once back in the day, a friend of mine called me to help her with her new computer because there was some problem with the modem. The box had been delivered a few days back and everything seemed to be working perfectly but the modem would not connect to her ISP (dial-up). I tried *everything* on both the software and the hardware side. The support guy also had no idea. Everything seemed ok on their side, too. The drivers were ok, the hardware also, we were dialing the correct number, the username/password was active. Then I set the volume of the modem real loud. And lo! The modem would whine and purr, but amongst the whines and the purrs there was something like a female voice coming out of the metal box...
Then my friend suddenly stood up, pounded her head against the wall (metaphorically speaking) and explained: the part of the town where she was living had a *really* old telephone network: if a neighbor was making a long distance call you could easily get charged for it and visa-versa. To avoid such problems she had called the telephone company and had a barrier placed that would block all numbers starting with a zero! When the modem dialed the ISP number that also started with a zero but would give her cheaper internet prices instead of normal call prices a recorded female voice would answer the call explaining that a barrier had been placed for such outgoing calls! Of course, the modem would ignore her and try to mate with her with no success...
About 11,700,000 results * burst into flames 2 results (all Slashdot) * still sobbing for her pet rabbit 3 results (two Slashdot) * sucked into the trans-dimensional vortex 2 results (all Slashdot) * shouldn't even have been any radioactive material IN a children's book 2 results (all Slashdot) * and that's how little Tiffany learned about death and accidental dismemberment 3 results (all Slashdot) * came to my home and set it on fire and then kicked my dog 2 results (all Slashdot) * never knew I was capable of that sort of pain... This was disappointing... 2 results (all Slashdot) * ordered the complete Beethoven Symphonies and the discs had nothing buy Justin Bieber on them 6 results (one Slashdot) * contained a live bobcat... c'mon only 6? About 3,780,000 results * would not buy again
Ahem...
The Carnot cycle is theoretically the most efficient for converting Q to W. So, "basic thermodynamics" has nothing to do with what you explain, which may or may not be correct; it is not my point to prove you wrong. Other than that, you didn't actually refer to what the GP was saying. Does really 1 gallon of diesel contain 5% more energy than a gallon of gasoline?
society does not progress; it simply changes. We gain some things but lose others.
And THAT is why documentation is so important. I agree fully with you, but I would like to add that if know-how is well documented, then we can always fall back to it in case of emergency or if we take a wrong turn. GPS is a nice example: very few people know how to navigate using the stars, but GPS enables anyone to steer a boat. However, the old method is still there, in the books.
Wow, OK, I rest my case. I was totally unfamiliar with that product. The quad-core at $2500 is too expensive in my opinion and it is the only one you can find in a store (at least where I live). That is why I said what I said. After browsing the Apple website (after I read your reply) I saw that there is also an 8-core and the 12-core that you mentioned. Then, yes, if I had 5 grand to invest, I would go with the 12-core beast as well. However, I would skip the 8-core and I would still go with a beige box for anything smaller than that. Thanks though for the info!
Our Macs do a more than satisfactory job at analyzing large amounts of scientific data.
Seriously? Number crunching with macs? Why pay for the fancy plastic while you can invest the money to get a processor with a better FLOPS capability and more memory? I bought a box for number crunching some months ago and I paid 500 Euros, including screen!. I spent the money only on two parts: CPU and RAM. Good luck getting the same performance/cost ratio on a Mac...
You should be ashamed of yourself. I, for one, strongly protest against burning brazil nuts. So what if they are mentally challenged (as I think is the correct term) and come from an underdeveloped country. They are people too, and therefore burning them to fry eggs and bacon is just cruel.
Boring a very, very long tunnel alone does not strike me as that hard (the summary already states that there are water ducts longer than this tunnel). But making it a tunnel for people to go through means that there have to be vertical ventilation shafts at regular intervals along its length, fire-fighting measures and, i suppose, escape routes. Especially the vertical shafts must have been also hard to manufacture since the tunnel is under the Alps, which is not the most comfortable place to make a vertical hole at. Here is a nice picture : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Nrla_scheme.png
How dare you convert the scientific units of the article to a lowly everyday unit that results to a very low number! I'll stay with my astounding seventy-three million Pascals, thank you very much!
The cocoons need to be intact in order for silk of any kind to be produced. The silk moths are not supposed to open their cocoons in the first place. Usually the silkworm pupae are killed while still inside the intact cocoon by heating them.
Geometry was clearly the tool of scientists as the time...
You nailed it just there... Even relatively modern works, such as those of Gibbs on thermodynamics, much derivation and calculation is based on geometry.
Hmm... Maybe I *want* a tailor-made vacuum cleaner. Because I think that the vacuum cleaners that are in the store, aimed at covering the average or most popular demands, are not exactly right for me. On the other hand it is way too expensive for me now to order a custom-made vacuum cleaner. I don't think I would be that bad if someone came to me with a nice solution to one of my problems (this carpet really stinks).
Jokes aside, the vacuum cleaner example may be too trivial for this case, but I don't think it is that dark a future. The problems will begin if the data start being used as means for discriminating between citizens. It is thus a good thing that all they are interested in is obtaining our money (in a legal way).
Slashdot Mirror
Well, you re right in all points. And that is why it makes it even more interesting for us to learn why the artist of the article chose the GIF format instead of the APNG format.
I would never buy something that is only stored in the cloud. If I buy it, I want to have it at home, lend it to my friends, rip it, jailbreak it, change its format, print it, resell it, make backups, feed it to my dog, set it on fire, do whatever I want with it! If you don't want me doing any of the above, you obviously don't want to sell me something, you want to provide me with a service. It is like going to the cinema. You pay 10 euros and you walk in the theater with a coke, you watch the movie, drink the coke, go home, end of story. Now, if you want to provide me with the opportunity of going to the cinema using my couch, my machine, my bandwidth and my coke, then this should not cost more than 2-3 euros. Ah, you would say, but now you can store the movie in the cloud, and watch it again! Therefore we set the price at 8 euros. Well, I don't want that because, you see, you tried again to sell me something without making me the owner of anything! I want a really cheap streaming service with no monthly fee that will let me click on a button and watch a movie, all legal, just this once, no questions asked, thank you very much.
Disclaimer: the price numbers are hypothetical and used to express relative prices. Anything that costs 10 credits in real life should in my opinion cost no more than 2 or 3 credits online. BTW, if anyone knows of a streaming service like the one described above that will work from Germany I would be quite grateful. Thanks!
Hello World!
Bill, is that you?
You won't get any sound advice if you don't tell us the background of your students. It is the most important thing in any tutoring class. If they have no idea what an OS is, perhaps you should start there. If they know how to use Windows (and understand what an operating system is actually doing), perhaps you could start by making a comparison of the two systems. Oh, and please, do not start with the "on UNIX everything is a file" thing. This has never, ever, helped anyone at that stage. Perhaps you could make a historical review to show, e.g. that in the before time, DOS was the OS and Windows was a GUI. Then tell them that Linux is the OS and Gnome is the GUI. If they get that, then jumping from DOS to Bash will be easy. And some general advice: If possible, do not guide them through a trivial task as a tutorial to show them how "things are done". I have always found such tutorials boring and uninspiring. Instead, give them a book, a manual, an online link or whatever where they can search for stuff and an easy task to perform. Make it like a competition: "let's see who can figure it out fiiiiiirst!" kind of thing. Also, remember that it has to be something that they can accomplish by looking in the material you gave them. The exercise is not for pumping up your own ego when you come to them after two hours with an answer that they could have never found.
uh... you're kidding, right?
The jar of 99.9% ethanol from Merck that we had in the lab sure let out an odor when we opened it... The question is whether that smell is *distinctive* of ethanol.
Here are a few random answers/comments: Sure you can vote the government out of office, but that will just change the persons, not the policies. Prices go up due to inflation, although the lack of competition is indeed a problem. Corporate takeovers are more or less regulated, but as you pointed out, not enough...
The GP didn't refer to remembering the oligarchy and plutocracy definitions, he referred to *understanding what they mean*. There is a subtle, but quite important difference that I am sure you with your 4.0 GPA average will understand. As for me, I am Greek, so get off my lawn.
Maybe the fact that FB has infiltrated the "internet infrastructure" will do the trick. This is definitely not the correct term but I don't know how to put it properly. What I mean is, for example, that its boomed popularity caused *other* sites to introduce FB elements in their pages (I am talking about the "like" buttons). Same for Google, which is the search engine under the hood of the "search" buttons in numerous websites. In addition, I remember once reading a vision testament by Google saying that they want their name to become synonymous to the internet. They already succeeded when it comes to searching and video streaming (although they bought YouTube and didn't develop it themselves), and they are on their way to take over fields like email and document processing. Likewise, FB has already sent MSN, IRC, ICQ and various other networking services the way of the Dodo (Skype survives, but this is because social networking and the communications branch diverged) and they accomplished to make their brand synonymous to social networking. This is Facebooks value. Now, if it will be around in ten years is hard to say, for 10 years is too long a time in such cases.
So what?
As long as the studies that the NCGA webpage refers to are scientific (I didn't read them), their results should be reliable within certainty limits. *Of course* the results would end up being used for promotion by the interested parties.
I remember once back in the day, a friend of mine called me to help her with her new computer because there was some problem with the modem. The box had been delivered a few days back and everything seemed to be working perfectly but the modem would not connect to her ISP (dial-up). I tried *everything* on both the software and the hardware side. The support guy also had no idea. Everything seemed ok on their side, too. The drivers were ok, the hardware also, we were dialing the correct number, the username/password was active. Then I set the volume of the modem real loud. And lo! The modem would whine and purr, but amongst the whines and the purrs there was something like a female voice coming out of the metal box...
Then my friend suddenly stood up, pounded her head against the wall (metaphorically speaking) and explained: the part of the town where she was living had a *really* old telephone network: if a neighbor was making a long distance call you could easily get charged for it and visa-versa. To avoid such problems she had called the telephone company and had a barrier placed that would block all numbers starting with a zero! When the modem dialed the ISP number that also started with a zero but would give her cheaper internet prices instead of normal call prices a recorded female voice would answer the call explaining that a barrier had been placed for such outgoing calls! Of course, the modem would ignore her and try to mate with her with no success...
About 11,700,000 results * burst into flames
2 results (all Slashdot) * still sobbing for her pet rabbit
3 results (two Slashdot) * sucked into the trans-dimensional vortex
2 results (all Slashdot) * shouldn't even have been any radioactive material IN a children's book
2 results (all Slashdot) * and that's how little Tiffany learned about death and accidental dismemberment
3 results (all Slashdot) * came to my home and set it on fire and then kicked my dog
2 results (all Slashdot) * never knew I was capable of that sort of pain... This was disappointing...
2 results (all Slashdot) * ordered the complete Beethoven Symphonies and the discs had nothing buy Justin Bieber on them
6 results (one Slashdot) * contained a live bobcat... c'mon only 6?
About 3,780,000 results * would not buy again
Ahem... The Carnot cycle is theoretically the most efficient for converting Q to W. So, "basic thermodynamics" has nothing to do with what you explain, which may or may not be correct; it is not my point to prove you wrong. Other than that, you didn't actually refer to what the GP was saying. Does really 1 gallon of diesel contain 5% more energy than a gallon of gasoline?
society does not progress; it simply changes. We gain some things but lose others.
And THAT is why documentation is so important. I agree fully with you, but I would like to add that if know-how is well documented, then we can always fall back to it in case of emergency or if we take a wrong turn. GPS is a nice example: very few people know how to navigate using the stars, but GPS enables anyone to steer a boat. However, the old method is still there, in the books.
Wow, OK, I rest my case. I was totally unfamiliar with that product. The quad-core at $2500 is too expensive in my opinion and it is the only one you can find in a store (at least where I live). That is why I said what I said. After browsing the Apple website (after I read your reply) I saw that there is also an 8-core and the 12-core that you mentioned. Then, yes, if I had 5 grand to invest, I would go with the 12-core beast as well. However, I would skip the 8-core and I would still go with a beige box for anything smaller than that. Thanks though for the info!
Our Macs do a more than satisfactory job at analyzing large amounts of scientific data.
Seriously? Number crunching with macs? Why pay for the fancy plastic while you can invest the money to get a processor with a better FLOPS capability and more memory? I bought a box for number crunching some months ago and I paid 500 Euros, including screen!. I spent the money only on two parts: CPU and RAM. Good luck getting the same performance/cost ratio on a Mac...
You should be ashamed of yourself. I, for one, strongly protest against burning brazil nuts. So what if they are mentally challenged (as I think is the correct term) and come from an underdeveloped country. They are people too, and therefore burning them to fry eggs and bacon is just cruel.
Boring a very, very long tunnel alone does not strike me as that hard (the summary already states that there are water ducts longer than this tunnel). But making it a tunnel for people to go through means that there have to be vertical ventilation shafts at regular intervals along its length, fire-fighting measures and, i suppose, escape routes. Especially the vertical shafts must have been also hard to manufacture since the tunnel is under the Alps, which is not the most comfortable place to make a vertical hole at. Here is a nice picture : http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Nrla_scheme.png
http://www.google.com/search?q=73000000+Pa+in+atm&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a jeez... You give us Europeans a bad name...
How dare you convert the scientific units of the article to a lowly everyday unit that results to a very low number! I'll stay with my astounding seventy-three million Pascals, thank you very much!
The "rare" in rare earths does not mean "scarce". Just start digging them out elsewhere.
The cocoons need to be intact in order for silk of any kind to be produced. The silk moths are not supposed to open their cocoons in the first place. Usually the silkworm pupae are killed while still inside the intact cocoon by heating them.
You forgot Greece in 1967: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greek_military_junta_of_1967%E2%80%931974#American_influence_in_Greece
Geometry was clearly the tool of scientists as the time...
You nailed it just there... Even relatively modern works, such as those of Gibbs on thermodynamics, much derivation and calculation is based on geometry.
Hmm... Maybe I *want* a tailor-made vacuum cleaner. Because I think that the vacuum cleaners that are in the store, aimed at covering the average or most popular demands, are not exactly right for me. On the other hand it is way too expensive for me now to order a custom-made vacuum cleaner. I don't think I would be that bad if someone came to me with a nice solution to one of my problems (this carpet really stinks). Jokes aside, the vacuum cleaner example may be too trivial for this case, but I don't think it is that dark a future. The problems will begin if the data start being used as means for discriminating between citizens. It is thus a good thing that all they are interested in is obtaining our money (in a legal way).