A centimeter is not a different unit from a meter. It is simply a shorthand for "one hundredth of a meter". The reason you are asked to normalize (usually in scientific literature), is to facilitate comparisons of different values. You should also note that this normalization process is MUCH easier than in English units, since it involves only modifying the exponent (or moving the decimal point).
Switching to a different measurement system is stupid if you don't actually intend to use it. What good is using meters when you still sell 4x8 ft plywood? Measurement system conversion must necessarily imply converting not just the units, but the physical object sizes as well. Sell 1x2 m plywood, 5 mm bolts, and 5 mm drill bits. Halfway conversion is simply an incovenience, since you end up with ugly fractional measurements which give an unjustifiably bad name to the metric system.
If someone were to write a good enough implementation of everything, everyone would eventually own a copy. Because software lasts forever, there would be no need to buy any more.
The book goes to great lengths to explain why "trash" programs are not a solution. They can only work in the shell. Programs do not just call "rm" in the shell when they want to delete a file, they use the unlink() system call, which will have no knowledge whatsoever of your trashcan.
Any programmer should have been cringing with shame for his kind reading that book. I could point out that almost all the things mentioned in the book are still that way today. I could point out that instability and inanity of Microsoft Windows is not an excuse. I could reply to the book point by point, trying to create a discussion on how to fix the mentioned problems. But I can't. Slashdot does not really care. Linux hackers' attitude toward users is well known. So I guess I'll just have to shut up, fire up my editor and try to fix it myself. All of it. After all, who else is ever going to try?:(
Look at those black spots in the ocean! Wouldn't it be great to put some floating islands there and plant lots and lots of trees. And bring up cold water from the deeper layers so that plankton could start growing and feed the fish and the whales. Impossible? Oh well; it was a nice dream.
/// \todo Remember to sue everyone in about 20 years (bgates)
If you put todo comments in your code, use some parsable syntax or you'll never find them again. Especially after 20 years when all the original programmers might be dead.
> It may sound like sexual prejudice, but it seems > that men's much-debated ability to navigate > slightly better than women applies in virtual > environments as well as the real world.
Just remember that common situation of the man gripping the steering wheel in frustration, staring straight ahead and trying to figure out exactly where he might be. Meanwhile his wife is looking at him with an expression of pity and scorn, after having reminded him for the tenth time to stop and ask for directions. Yeah. Men really do find things faster... When they listen to their wives.
First of all, get a cup of coffee. Not only will it make you feel better, but also, if somebody asks why you are so nervous, you can say "it's the caffeine, man". Second, find your computer. The boss will probably take care of that. You will probably then be assigned a couple of bugs to fix, just to get familiar with the software. Now remember, every program must be "compiled" first. Ask a coworker how to "compile" the program. This is a normal question since every company does it differently. Pay attention. Now that you can "compile", you have taken care of at least a third of your day. Remember, real programmers "compile" a lot. The next tip is to find the source code (ask the coworker; no programmer will start such a search on his own) and open a couple of files. Reading them will make you look busy and eventually teach you how programs are made. The next thing to do is learn to "debug". Debugging means telling the computer to do the program one line at a time and seeing what happens. To learn to "debug", watch your coworkers for a while; it is something they do a lot. You know they are "debugging" when you see the source code with a funny colored line moving through it. (Note: if your job involves "Unix" and "gdb", you are in bigger trouble and will need to get a graphical debugger first from freshmeat.net). When you know how to "compile", read the code, and "debug", you will find that at least a three quarters of your day can be taken up by those activities. When asked about your progress say something like "oh, it might be done today, or maybe next week.". Now I know you are thinking about the remaining quarter of your day; but do not worry. Those hours are usually taken up by "meetings" and will involve little effort on your part. To cut down your day even more, come in late. All real programmers do. The real programmers also stay up until midnight, but nobody will notice if you leave before then.
Somewhere down the line, we are going to run into a situation where we have a completely new life form, engineered by humans, that is competing with existing species.
You mean like the time when that new life form called "humans" started competing with existing species, wiping out the neanderthals, the mammoths, the bison, the spotted owl, the gorilla, the... I wonder if nature had any business upsetting the "order of nature"
In order to show that a relationship is truly biological it needs to hold across all human cultures, otherwise there exists at least some significant societal (nuture) influence.
Not necessarily, there are some biological differences between different racial groups (which is why we have different races in the first place). A biological influence may be restricted to humans of asian descent, for instance, which will exclude all cultures created by people of other races. Furthermore, cultural influence may go both ways, either enhancing or inhibiting the effect; just because it is not visible, does not mean it is not there.
Ok, I think you're generalizing here. Patai describes the beliefs and culture of particular kinds of arabs and applies it to the entire region. Muslim beliefs aren't that homogeneous across the mideast and africa, let alone all the various subcultures.
If you do not generalize, you can not think. The only way of acquiring knowledge is by generalizing from specific data and creating higher-level concepts. When we create stereotypes for people of a specific race, or gender, or occupation, we do so by generalizing on the information available to us. Some of this information may be incorrect, some of it may be correct, and the validity of the stereotype depends on that. So when you meet a woman and think "she's a female, and is probably bad at math", you are simply changing your expectation levels based on previous experience of meeting women who were bad at math (God knows I've met a lot of those, and only three who were not). People who complain about stereotypes should instead complain about their causes. Black people should complain about the stupid and ignorant black people who hang out on the steets selling drugs, terrorizing their 'hood, and generally caring about nothing but living through yet another miserable day. It is they who create the impression that all black people are "animal scum" or worse, and the intelligent and successful members of the race suffer for it. (The 'hood culture, incidentally, is that of poverty, not of race. Poor white people hang out there too, but there always seems to be more poor blacks than poor whites for some reason)
Hah. Here's a question - would someone who wears a bikini out in the sun gain increased sexuality and therefore wear few clothes more? Or would someone who already had increased sexuality be more inclined to wear fewer clothes (assuming that wearing a bikini is all about that person's sexuality)?
Look at the nudist clubs. They wear nothing at all for reasons that have nothing to do with sex.
The basic idea is that a woman who wears sexually attractive clothes most or all of the time (we can just say bikini, that may be easier) is hurting herself in the long run, regardless of whether she wants to just have sex or not.
This argument comes from a typically socialist attitude that people should be protected from themselves. If she is hurting herself in the long run (with which I would disagree, since by learning the male reaction to such clothes she would gain valuable experience on how to [or how not to] get what she wants), it is nobody's business but hers. Every person must own his life if he is to have a life in the first place. If you insist on living his life for him, you deprive him of his most valuable posession, of existance.
Well, by making herself sexually attractive all the time, this becomes the woman's main appeal. In the eyes of many men and even women, she is first and foremost a sexy thing, secondly a person with feelings and intelligence.
This will only happen if she truly lacks any other distinguishing qualities and talents. Nobody gets turned down on a job interview for looking go
There are always ways programs are not perfect. For instance, the program above does not take in to account that stdout may not be available -- if that happens (it does, trust me), the program will either not give the intended result or it will die altogether (depending on the system it's built/run on).
The intended result is the output of "Hello world!" to stdout. If stdout is not available, printf will return an error code (which is ignored here) and the program will exit normally (it should have used return(0), by the way), which is correct behaviour; after all, if you don't give it a stdout, it can't pring "Hello World!" on it, can it?
All he said was that sun exposure may be linked with sexual drive and that obesity lowers charisma.
No, this is not what he said at all. First, he wasn't saying that there was a link between sun exposure and sexual drive - he stated that the relationship was cause-and-effect. There's an absolutely enormous difference between the two, but I don't think I need to point that out.
Most of us do not make the distinction when speaking plainly. When I say "linked" I imply that there may be a casual relationship. I am not explicitly stating the latter because of my low level of certainty. However, whenever I see a correlation, I usually consider it prudent to investigate the relationship further.
The former was a valid speculation based on statistical evidence
You lost me here. What statistical evidence? His supporting evidence to show that thin people are unhappy but ambitious was a slide of a sad-faced Kate Moss. What the hell does that prove? The scientific method is spinning in its grave.
First, my statement was related to sun exposure, not obesity. The slide was obviously meant to underscore a point, not serve as proof (most of us can tell one from the other, you know). But as for the evidence, there have been statistical surveys of sexual drive and such (forgive me for not remembering the reference), which show that sun exposure really is associated with greater sexual drive. Such a study can not prove whether it is a cause or just a coincidence, but that goes for pretty much all "studies" in the so-called "human sciences", where even the unlikeliest coincidences end up on TV as major breakthroughs in understanding. The most you can expect is a reasonably high level of confidence in your results, and that is exactly what Watson had.
Watson was in essence stating his opinion on the matter, and passing it off as scientific research.
What do you think scientific research is all about? It is about having an opinion (which is usually called a 'hypothesis') and systematically going about trying to prove it. Depending on your success, your opinion may be elevated to the status of a 'theory', or be dismissed as nonsense. Science is not like religion where you have to believe everything you hear. You must never believe a scientific conclusion; you can only accept it if you see the reason why it must be true. This applies equally to the statement "fat people are not as attractive as thin people" and to "acceptance of quantum theory must be accompanied by the rejection of local reality".
He was trying to contrast these pictures with pictures of Muslim women to show sexual drive. I'm surprised if you can't see why this would be offensive.
No, I can't see. In fact, I consider it rather amusing. You see, the arabs consider their women to be sexual aggressors. They implicitly believe that if a man and a woman were left alone in a room, they would inevitably have sex. [See 'The Arab Mind' by Raphael Patai, an arab, for more interesting facts on the arabic world.] This is a reason for the head-to-toe robes and general segregation by gender (there are other reasons too, of course).
Back to the point: it is pretty obvious that an arab woman wearing her robes all the time would receive much less sun exposure than a western bikini-clad woman on the beach. It would have been a valid example to support his sun-exposure correlation, if it weren't for the fact that there simply is no correlation in this case.
If scantily clad pictures were demeaning to women, bikinis would not have been all that popular. Nobody is forcing women to dress sexy; they dress sexy because they want to, and to suggest otherwise is indeed sexist.
Your logic here is flawed and doesn't have much, if anything, to do with the Watson talk. You're assuming that women, in general, would never do something that's demeaning and so therefore an
Read the book "The Society of the Mind" by Eric L. Harry, ASIN#: 0060176946. A really great story of a neurotic computer who just incidentally happens to control a horde of killer robots (or does it?) and a bunch of nuclear devices that are the only way to stop an asteroid hurling toward the Earth...
All he said was that sun exposure may be linked with sexual drive and that obesity lowers charisma. The former was a valid speculation based on statistical evidence, the latter is obvious to anyone even though nobody wants to admit it openly. And so what if he showed some pictures of scantily clad women to illustrate his point? If scantily clad pictures were demeaning to women, bikinis would not have been all that popular. Nobody is forcing women to dress sexy; they dress sexy because they want to, and to suggest otherwise is indeed sexist.
I keep wondering why the metafont engine is used only by TeX and nobody else. In my opinion it is a much more elegant system than truetype. Is there some reason why it has not caught on?
> Mainframes can handle enormous amounts of data > without having to break it up for a cluster
How do they do that? Your Linux application can keep crunching data too, without breaking it up; except that it would take longer.
> or without being bogged down with I/O like most > client-server type solutions.
You get bogged down if your application does too much chit-chat. If you design your protocol to minimize that, your I/O will be negligible. The mainframe has nothing to do with it - it's the programmer.
> Mainframes are great when you need to handle > databases with tons of information in it - and > you need to consistantly dig through it. Most > machines cannot handle it, and will buckle.
Bullshit. Again, this is not the mainframe, it is the database engine that runs on it. If you implement the engine correctly, it will run on a PC Linux box just fine too.
> Mainframes almost never buckle, unless you are > testing new stuff on them (naughty newbie - > that's what a test LPAR is for) or you do funky > things to them.
Same is true of Linux. I have never had a kernel crash unless I was playing with some bleeding-edge code that wasn't supposed to be used by sane people.
In other words: the PC Linux box is just as good as the mainframe is your Linux software is just as good as the software you run on the mainframe.
As you suck cold water from the bottom of the ocean, surface water will start sinking down to replace it. At first it will be replaced by the coldest water (that's a little warmer) around it. Think of pouring some hot water into a cup of cold water; it takes a lot to make a difference, and it will be a LONG LONG time before we can suck the entire Pacific ocean through a straw.
Slashdot Mirror
A centimeter is not a different unit from a meter. It is simply a shorthand for "one hundredth of a meter". The reason you are asked to normalize (usually in scientific literature), is to facilitate comparisons of different values. You should also note that this normalization process is MUCH easier than in English units, since it involves only modifying the exponent (or moving the decimal point).
Switching to a different measurement system is stupid if you don't actually intend to use it. What good is using meters when you still sell 4x8 ft plywood? Measurement system conversion must necessarily imply converting not just the units, but the physical object sizes as well. Sell 1x2 m plywood, 5 mm bolts, and 5 mm drill bits. Halfway conversion is simply an incovenience, since you end up with ugly fractional measurements which give an unjustifiably bad name to the metric system.
If someone were to write a good enough implementation of everything, everyone would eventually own a copy. Because software lasts forever, there would be no need to buy any more.
It is not useless. It is what the Army calls a "controlled pair". First you play only MP3, then you back your actions with some serious firepower.
The book goes to great lengths to explain why "trash" programs are not a solution. They can only work in the shell. Programs do not just call "rm" in the shell when they want to delete a file, they use the unlink() system call, which will have no knowledge whatsoever of your trashcan.
Any programmer should have been cringing with shame for his kind reading that book. I could point out that almost all the things mentioned in the book are still that way today. I could point out that instability and inanity of Microsoft Windows is not an excuse. I could reply to the book point by point, trying to create a discussion on how to fix the mentioned problems. But I can't. Slashdot does not really care. Linux hackers' attitude toward users is well known. So I guess I'll just have to shut up, fire up my editor and try to fix it myself. All of it. After all, who else is ever going to try? :(
And somewhere in a lab deep within the MIT complex, a lone scientist named Gordon Freeman just found a crowbar...
Look at those black spots in the ocean! Wouldn't it be great to put some floating islands there and plant lots and lots of trees. And bring up cold water from the deeper layers so that plankton could start growing and feed the fish and the whales. Impossible? Oh well; it was a nice dream.
Must not forget the excellent idea of the ransom license.
/// \todo Remember to sue everyone in about 20 years (bgates)
If you put todo comments in your code, use some
parsable syntax or you'll never find them again.
Especially after 20 years when all the original
programmers might be dead.
> It may sound like sexual prejudice, but it seems
> that men's much-debated ability to navigate
> slightly better than women applies in virtual
> environments as well as the real world.
Just remember that common situation of the man gripping the steering wheel in frustration, staring straight ahead and trying to figure out exactly where he might be. Meanwhile his wife is looking at him with an expression of pity and scorn, after having reminded him for the tenth time to stop and ask for directions. Yeah. Men really do find things faster... When they listen to their wives.
First of all, get a cup of coffee. Not only will it make you feel better, but also, if somebody asks why you are so nervous, you can say "it's the caffeine, man". Second, find your computer. The boss will probably take care of that. You will probably then be assigned a couple of bugs to fix, just to get familiar with the software. Now remember, every program must be "compiled" first. Ask a coworker how to "compile" the program. This is a normal question since every company does it differently. Pay attention. Now that you can "compile", you have taken care of at least a third of your day. Remember, real programmers "compile" a lot. The next tip is to find the source code (ask the coworker; no programmer will start such a search on his own) and open a couple of files. Reading them will make you look busy and eventually teach you how programs are made. The next thing to do is learn to "debug". Debugging means telling the computer to do the program one line at a time and seeing what happens. To learn to "debug", watch your coworkers for a while; it is something they do a lot. You know they are "debugging" when you see the source code with a funny colored line moving through it. (Note: if your job involves "Unix" and "gdb", you are in bigger trouble and will need to get a graphical debugger first from freshmeat.net). When you know how to "compile", read the code, and "debug", you will find that at least a three quarters of your day can be taken up by those activities. When asked about your progress say something like "oh, it might be done today, or maybe next week.". Now I know you are thinking about the remaining quarter of your day; but do not worry. Those hours are usually taken up by "meetings" and will involve little effort on your part. To cut down your day even more, come in late. All real programmers do. The real programmers also stay up until midnight, but nobody will notice if you leave before then.
Somewhere down the line, we are going to run into a situation where we have a completely new life form, engineered by humans, that is competing with existing species.
... I wonder if nature had any business upsetting the "order of nature"
You mean like the time when that new life form called "humans" started competing with existing species, wiping out the neanderthals, the mammoths, the bison, the spotted owl, the gorilla, the
even your minimal working model is 40 thousand miles long and costs a Dr Evil sum. :)
You mean "one mieeelion dollars?"
And any developer who sets the default volume to 0 on his installed sound package should not be allowed to write any kind of software at all.
Not necessarily, there are some biological differences between different racial groups (which is why we have different races in the first place). A biological influence may be restricted to humans of asian descent, for instance, which will exclude all cultures created by people of other races. Furthermore, cultural influence may go both ways, either enhancing or inhibiting the effect; just because it is not visible, does not mean it is not there.
If you do not generalize, you can not think. The only way of acquiring knowledge is by generalizing from specific data and creating higher-level concepts. When we create stereotypes for people of a specific race, or gender, or occupation, we do so by generalizing on the information available to us. Some of this information may be incorrect, some of it may be correct, and the validity of the stereotype depends on that. So when you meet a woman and think "she's a female, and is probably bad at math", you are simply changing your expectation levels based on previous experience of meeting women who were bad at math (God knows I've met a lot of those, and only three who were not). People who complain about stereotypes should instead complain about their causes. Black people should complain about the stupid and ignorant black people who hang out on the steets selling drugs, terrorizing their 'hood, and generally caring about nothing but living through yet another miserable day. It is they who create the impression that all black people are "animal scum" or worse, and the intelligent and successful members of the race suffer for it. (The 'hood culture, incidentally, is that of poverty, not of race. Poor white people hang out there too, but there always seems to be more poor blacks than poor whites for some reason)
Look at the nudist clubs. They wear nothing at all for reasons that have nothing to do with sex.
This argument comes from a typically socialist attitude that people should be protected from themselves. If she is hurting herself in the long run (with which I would disagree, since by learning the male reaction to such clothes she would gain valuable experience on how to [or how not to] get what she wants), it is nobody's business but hers. Every person must own his life if he is to have a life in the first place. If you insist on living his life for him, you deprive him of his most valuable posession, of existance.
This will only happen if she truly lacks any other distinguishing qualities and talents. Nobody gets turned down on a job interview for looking go
The intended result is the output of "Hello world!" to stdout. If stdout is not available, printf will return an error code (which is ignored here) and the program will exit normally (it should have used return(0), by the way), which is correct behaviour; after all, if you don't give it a stdout, it can't pring "Hello World!" on it, can it?
Most of us do not make the distinction when speaking plainly. When I say "linked" I imply that there may be a casual relationship. I am not explicitly stating the latter because of my low level of certainty. However, whenever I see a correlation, I usually consider it prudent to investigate the relationship further.
First, my statement was related to sun exposure, not obesity. The slide was obviously meant to underscore a point, not serve as proof (most of us can tell one from the other, you know). But as for the evidence, there have been statistical surveys of sexual drive and such (forgive me for not remembering the reference), which show that sun exposure really is associated with greater sexual drive. Such a study can not prove whether it is a cause or just a coincidence, but that goes for pretty much all "studies" in the so-called "human sciences", where even the unlikeliest coincidences end up on TV as major breakthroughs in understanding. The most you can expect is a reasonably high level of confidence in your results, and that is exactly what Watson had.
What do you think scientific research is all about? It is about having an opinion (which is usually called a 'hypothesis') and systematically going about trying to prove it. Depending on your success, your opinion may be elevated to the status of a 'theory', or be dismissed as nonsense. Science is not like religion where you have to believe everything you hear. You must never believe a scientific conclusion; you can only accept it if you see the reason why it must be true. This applies equally to the statement "fat people are not as attractive as thin people" and to "acceptance of quantum theory must be accompanied by the rejection of local reality".
No, I can't see. In fact, I consider it rather amusing. You see, the arabs consider their women to be sexual aggressors. They implicitly believe that if a man and a woman were left alone in a room, they would inevitably have sex. [See 'The Arab Mind' by Raphael Patai, an arab, for more interesting facts on the arabic world.] This is a reason for the head-to-toe robes and general segregation by gender (there are other reasons too, of course).
Back to the point: it is pretty obvious that an arab woman wearing her robes all the time would receive much less sun exposure than a western bikini-clad woman on the beach. It would have been a valid example to support his sun-exposure correlation, if it weren't for the fact that there simply is no correlation in this case.
Read the book "The Society of the Mind" by Eric L. Harry, ASIN#: 0060176946. A really great story of a neurotic computer who just incidentally happens to control a horde of killer robots (or does it?) and a bunch of nuclear devices that are the only way to stop an asteroid hurling toward the Earth...
All he said was that sun exposure may be linked with sexual drive and that obesity lowers charisma. The former was a valid speculation based on statistical evidence, the latter is obvious to anyone even though nobody wants to admit it openly. And so what if he showed some pictures of scantily clad women to illustrate his point? If scantily clad pictures were demeaning to women, bikinis would not have been all that popular. Nobody is forcing women to dress sexy; they dress sexy because they want to, and to suggest otherwise is indeed sexist.
I keep wondering why the metafont engine is used only by TeX and nobody else. In my opinion it is a much more elegant system than truetype. Is there some reason why it has not caught on?
> Mainframes can handle enormous amounts of data
> without having to break it up for a cluster
How do they do that? Your Linux application can keep crunching data too, without breaking it up; except that it would take longer.
> or without being bogged down with I/O like most
> client-server type solutions.
You get bogged down if your application does too much chit-chat. If you design your protocol to minimize that, your I/O will be negligible. The mainframe has nothing to do with it - it's the programmer.
> Mainframes are great when you need to handle
> databases with tons of information in it - and
> you need to consistantly dig through it. Most
> machines cannot handle it, and will buckle.
Bullshit. Again, this is not the mainframe, it is the database engine that runs on it. If you implement the engine correctly, it will run on a PC Linux box just fine too.
> Mainframes almost never buckle, unless you are
> testing new stuff on them (naughty newbie -
> that's what a test LPAR is for) or you do funky
> things to them.
Same is true of Linux. I have never had a kernel crash unless I was playing with some bleeding-edge code that wasn't supposed to be used by sane people.
In other words: the PC Linux box is just as good as the mainframe is your Linux software is just as good as the software you run on the mainframe.
You think 30 kBps is slow?!? My modem is a screamer at 4 kBps and is nearly immune to the Slashdot effect.
As you suck cold water from the bottom of the ocean, surface water will start sinking down to replace it. At first it will be replaced by the coldest water (that's a little warmer) around it. Think of pouring some hot water into a cup of cold water; it takes a lot to make a difference, and it will be a LONG LONG time before we can suck the entire Pacific ocean through a straw.