I've been around for a while, reading though not posting often. For some of us your resignation ranks up there with Jobs' (but more unexpected and, one hopes, not for similar reasons). All the best in whatever you do. You must be in your mid-late thirties, and have an entire life ahead of you!
It's cross platform because it runs on 99% of all desktops
What MS didn't see coming was that many people are accessing the web without desktops (or laptops). On mobile devices, Microsoft has a negligible marketshare and there's no Silverlight for iOS or Android (I don't even know whether there's Silverlight for Windows Phone 7!)
2: Color LCD mode: Which is worse than the cheapest LCD on the market. Colors are weak and viewing angles are terrible.
But the brightness can be set at minimum, and I'm the only one viewing the thing most of the time. It's not a family entertainment system. It's good for reading, surfing the net, and some other things.
But it is true, you need to see it before you buy it. And that is hard to do.
I own an Adam too. The Pixel Qi is quite usable outdoors, though not as high-contrast as old-fashioned paper (or, probably, e-ink). It's a light-gray rather than white background, and dark-gray rather than black text. But I've used it outdoors for up to half an hour and it's very comfortable.
Indoors, the backlight is required but I leave it permanently at the lowest setting (and I wish there was a still lower setting). It is much better than any LCD I've used.
As for the glossiness, that's why they ship a matte screen protector. Presumably it's not default because some people don't like matte.
For me, the Pixel Qi is the unique selling point of the Adam. (The hackability is the other big plus -- if you don't like their ROM, flash your own -- but it's not unique.)
I have Arial installed, and "allow pages to choose their own fonts" checked. It shows slashdot in DejaVu Sans for me, which is my default sans-serif font (firefox on linux, and also chrome on linux). Some sites force Arial on me, but apparently not Firefox...
Thanks for the link. However, I'm not sure you read beyond the title. On page 2, Knuth foresees two types of reactions based on reading the title alone, and yours sounds the first type. In fact Knuth does not disagree with Dijkstra, and he quotes Dijkstra to show that Dijkstra was not dogmatic about GOTO either. Knuth's purpose is to explore where GOTO has a place and where it is better to eliminate it.
Linux "just works" unless you have unsupported hardware. Same as Apple -- except that a lot more hardware is supported under Linux, these days. There's a reason Apple doesn't allow third-party boxes to run OS X.
Actually, KDE 4 does that too, and it took me a while to realise it: for a long time I thought I was accidentally double-tapping the touchpad (double-clicking the titlebar also maximises). Extremely annoying. I disabled it as soon as I figured out what was happening. But I notice Windows users prefer to work with maximised and minimised windows.
KDE4 also half-maximises on dragging to a left or right screen edge, but that's not so bad because one is unlikely to do it accidentally (the mouse cursor needs to be at the screen edge, which means the window will be half off the screen). So I've left that enabled.
Rather than hope the VLC developers will read this, you could, you know, e-mail vlc-devel@videolan.org? You don't need to register to do that, and it is what the story asks you to do.
When did you last use KDE4? I've been running KDE 4.2 since a little before its release, and all the applications I need work including a pretty good network-manager plasmoid; and I find kwin4 *way* superior to compiz-fusion. The effects are well thought out and actually useful. (And yes, it has a cube, but that's just eyecandy.) Before January I was running gnome+compiz-fusion, for pretty much the reasons you say.
I have to second anonymous's surprise. Every mathematician I know uses LaTeX, not just for documents, but also for presentations. Some physicists use powerpoint or keynote, but always with a LaTeX plug-in for math. MS Office's math support is a joke. Do you actually write mathematical documents?
Here's the opposite kind of story. I bought a USB-to-serial adapter, which "just worked" in linux, but required a driver for Windows XP, which I installed. Some time later, when I plugged in the device into a different USB port, XP asked me for the driver disk again. I had mislaid the disk, but on a hunch, I unplugged it and plugged it into the port I originally used, and it worked. So XP requires a separate driver installation for each USB port? (All the ports worked with Linux, and the other ports worked with other devices on XP, so it didn't seem to be a hardware problem).
I've only used relatively simple formulas but they worked fine in the two-way transfer. What does not work is Endnote. Right now I make changes in recording mode and my collaborators insert them: no hitches whatever so far.
When using more complicated math, I use LaTeX... I haven't had to co-author anything very mathematical with Word users.
Indeed, I taught a course based on SICM last year. As a mechanics textbook it is superb -- it clarifies many issues that are ambiguous or wrong in other books, and it gives a very nice treatment of nonlinear dynamics and phase-space structure. Its treatment of canonical transformations and canonical perturbation theory is the best I have seen. For those brought up on Goldstein, it is a godsend. Thank you, Sussman and Wisdom.
Now the caveats. For programming, it uses Scheme (like SICP) -- but, unlike SICP, the programs and libraries they require work only on MIT's dialect of Scheme. If you are a Scheme guru, I imagine you can teach a brilliant course on it. The advantage of Scheme over Fortran/C/other non-lisp languages is that you can combine symbolic manipulation and numerical work: you can derive Lagrange's or Hamilton's equations with your program, pretty-print them and then solve them numerically. The disadvantage is that you need to learn Scheme, and the farther you go the more non-intuitive it gets (since they never teach it formally, and claim their students at MIT pick it up on their own). In fact some programs as printed have bugs, fixed in the errata, and I really can't see the error. So after a while the programming part just became a glorified graphing system, useful to do phase space plots of a driven pendulum.
The book's approach to computer work is completely different from what most physicists think of as "numerical methods" (and they never actually explain how to solve a differential equation numerically: they use canned routines from their libraries for that.) Nevertheless it is a very interesting approach and I'd recommend checking it out. It may have something in common with how physicists use Mathematica, Maple etc, and will teach you more about programming than those tools will.
Purely from the physics point of view, as I said, the book is outstanding. It is available for free here so it costs you nothing to take a look.
The anon parent is absolutely right. LastMinute, Tesco et al probably have a duty to their shareholders to stop any sort of misuse of their trademark.
It's not all that easy to lose a trademark -- Google is still in place, as is Xerox -- but the risk is there and it has happened, cf. the other examples above. In this case, if Google treats a search for "Tesco" as a search for "supermarket", and Tesco doesn't protest, Tesco is probably implicitly agreeing that their name is a generic name for a supermarket: at least, a competitor could argue in that way.
That's not the point. The point is the phone book calls them plumbers; it doesn't list them under a brand name (like whatever the equivalent is for Tesco's in plumbing.) Tesco would have no case if a Google search for "supermarkets" threw up ads for non-Tesco supermarkets. What they object to is a customer searching for "Tesco" and being advertised something else. Whether their objection is valid is a matter of debate but there's no analogy with the phone book.
If I've read correctly, the bug only occurs when old kernels (without this newest little patch) are compiled with the brand new GCC 4.3.
You read wrongly, or more likely did not read at all. And nor did the moderators. The bug exists no matter what compiler was used to compile the kernel.
Many replies in one, here; and a day late so I guess nobody will read it.
If a gene exists in 1/50 people and you sample 1000, the odds that you wouldn't find it is pretty remote.
But you'd only care if you see the disease. That's the point you and other geneticists above are missing. Otherwise you'd never know whether the gene is linked with a disease in its variant form, or is harmless.
For the story to be convincing, in your sample population, you need to show that one person has the disease AND that person has the qq version AND nobody else has the qq version AND about one in 50 people have the qp version. This, also, is why you don't just go directly for the guy who has Lou Gehrig's disease: you need to compare with lots of "normal" people.
Slashdot Mirror
I've been around for a while, reading though not posting often. For some of us your resignation ranks up there with Jobs' (but more unexpected and, one hopes, not for similar reasons). All the best in whatever you do. You must be in your mid-late thirties, and have an entire life ahead of you!
It's cross platform because it runs on 99% of all desktops
What MS didn't see coming was that many people are accessing the web without desktops (or laptops). On mobile devices, Microsoft has a negligible marketshare and there's no Silverlight for iOS or Android (I don't even know whether there's Silverlight for Windows Phone 7!)
Adam handles video fine. In transflective mode it's black and white, but the speed is not affected.
2: Color LCD mode: Which is worse than the cheapest LCD on the market. Colors are weak and viewing angles are terrible.
But the brightness can be set at minimum, and I'm the only one viewing the thing most of the time. It's not a family entertainment system. It's good for reading, surfing the net, and some other things.
But it is true, you need to see it before you buy it. And that is hard to do.
I own an Adam too. The Pixel Qi is quite usable outdoors, though not as high-contrast as old-fashioned paper (or, probably, e-ink). It's a light-gray rather than white background, and dark-gray rather than black text. But I've used it outdoors for up to half an hour and it's very comfortable.
Indoors, the backlight is required but I leave it permanently at the lowest setting (and I wish there was a still lower setting). It is much better than any LCD I've used.
As for the glossiness, that's why they ship a matte screen protector. Presumably it's not default because some people don't like matte.
For me, the Pixel Qi is the unique selling point of the Adam. (The hackability is the other big plus -- if you don't like their ROM, flash your own -- but it's not unique.)
Read the FAQ (bottom of the project page). This isn't meant to be a package manager
I have Arial installed, and "allow pages to choose their own fonts" checked. It shows slashdot in DejaVu Sans for me, which is my default sans-serif font (firefox on linux, and also chrome on linux). Some sites force Arial on me, but apparently not Firefox...
Thanks for the link. However, I'm not sure you read beyond the title. On page 2, Knuth foresees two types of reactions based on reading the title alone, and yours sounds the first type. In fact Knuth does not disagree with Dijkstra, and he quotes Dijkstra to show that Dijkstra was not dogmatic about GOTO either. Knuth's purpose is to explore where GOTO has a place and where it is better to eliminate it.
Linux "just works" unless you have unsupported hardware. Same as Apple -- except that a lot more hardware is supported under Linux, these days. There's a reason Apple doesn't allow third-party boxes to run OS X.
Dragging a window to the top maximizes.
Actually, KDE 4 does that too, and it took me a while to realise it: for a long time I thought I was accidentally double-tapping the touchpad (double-clicking the titlebar also maximises). Extremely annoying. I disabled it as soon as I figured out what was happening. But I notice Windows users prefer to work with maximised and minimised windows.
KDE4 also half-maximises on dragging to a left or right screen edge, but that's not so bad because one is unlikely to do it accidentally (the mouse cursor needs to be at the screen edge, which means the window will be half off the screen). So I've left that enabled.
Rather than hope the VLC developers will read this, you could, you know, e-mail vlc-devel@videolan.org? You don't need to register to do that, and it is what the story asks you to do.
Once upon a time, Slashdot editors did read what they posted. I guess both 3706 and 6544 remember.
When did you last use KDE4? I've been running KDE 4.2 since a little before its release, and all the applications I need work including a pretty good network-manager plasmoid; and I find kwin4 *way* superior to compiz-fusion. The effects are well thought out and actually useful. (And yes, it has a cube, but that's just eyecandy.) Before January I was running gnome+compiz-fusion, for pretty much the reasons you say.
I have to second anonymous's surprise. Every mathematician I know uses LaTeX, not just for documents, but also for presentations. Some physicists use powerpoint or keynote, but always with a LaTeX plug-in for math. MS Office's math support is a joke. Do you actually write mathematical documents?
Here's the opposite kind of story. I bought a USB-to-serial adapter, which "just worked" in linux, but required a driver for Windows XP, which I installed. Some time later, when I plugged in the device into a different USB port, XP asked me for the driver disk again. I had mislaid the disk, but on a hunch, I unplugged it and plugged it into the port I originally used, and it worked. So XP requires a separate driver installation for each USB port? (All the ports worked with Linux, and the other ports worked with other devices on XP, so it didn't seem to be a hardware problem).
Two possible reasons: many academic publishers accept only Word; and many proprietary programs (like Endnote) work only with Word.
I've only used relatively simple formulas but they worked fine in the two-way transfer. What does not work is Endnote. Right now I make changes in recording mode and my collaborators insert them: no hitches whatever so far.
When using more complicated math, I use LaTeX... I haven't had to co-author anything very mathematical with Word users.
The "one company" that the parent was referring to was MS, not W3C. Read the grandparent for context.
Just because Fox interviews a NASA analyst doesn't mean NASA developed the thing. The video clearly says it's the air force that's developing this.
Indeed, I taught a course based on SICM last year. As a mechanics textbook it is superb -- it clarifies many issues that are ambiguous or wrong in other books, and it gives a very nice treatment of nonlinear dynamics and phase-space structure. Its treatment of canonical transformations and canonical perturbation theory is the best I have seen. For those brought up on Goldstein, it is a godsend. Thank you, Sussman and Wisdom.
Now the caveats. For programming, it uses Scheme (like SICP) -- but, unlike SICP, the programs and libraries they require work only on MIT's dialect of Scheme. If you are a Scheme guru, I imagine you can teach a brilliant course on it. The advantage of Scheme over Fortran/C/other non-lisp languages is that you can combine symbolic manipulation and numerical work: you can derive Lagrange's or Hamilton's equations with your program, pretty-print them and then solve them numerically. The disadvantage is that you need to learn Scheme, and the farther you go the more non-intuitive it gets (since they never teach it formally, and claim their students at MIT pick it up on their own). In fact some programs as printed have bugs, fixed in the errata, and I really can't see the error. So after a while the programming part just became a glorified graphing system, useful to do phase space plots of a driven pendulum.
The book's approach to computer work is completely different from what most physicists think of as "numerical methods" (and they never actually explain how to solve a differential equation numerically: they use canned routines from their libraries for that.) Nevertheless it is a very interesting approach and I'd recommend checking it out. It may have something in common with how physicists use Mathematica, Maple etc, and will teach you more about programming than those tools will.
Purely from the physics point of view, as I said, the book is outstanding. It is available for free here so it costs you nothing to take a look.
The anon parent is absolutely right. LastMinute, Tesco et al probably have a duty to their shareholders to stop any sort of misuse of their trademark.
It's not all that easy to lose a trademark -- Google is still in place, as is Xerox -- but the risk is there and it has happened, cf. the other examples above. In this case, if Google treats a search for "Tesco" as a search for "supermarket", and Tesco doesn't protest, Tesco is probably implicitly agreeing that their name is a generic name for a supermarket: at least, a competitor could argue in that way.
That's not the point. The point is the phone book calls them plumbers; it doesn't list them under a brand name (like whatever the equivalent is for Tesco's in plumbing.) Tesco would have no case if a Google search for "supermarkets" threw up ads for non-Tesco supermarkets. What they object to is a customer searching for "Tesco" and being advertised something else. Whether their objection is valid is a matter of debate but there's no analogy with the phone book.
Indeed, Slashdot is becoming a disgrace. They could have waited another day: the article becomes freely available on March 20.
If I've read correctly, the bug only occurs when old kernels (without this newest little patch) are compiled with the brand new GCC 4.3.
You read wrongly, or more likely did not read at all. And nor did the moderators. The bug exists no matter what compiler was used to compile the kernel.
Many replies in one, here; and a day late so I guess nobody will read it.
If a gene exists in 1/50 people and you sample 1000, the odds that you wouldn't find it is pretty remote.
But you'd only care if you see the disease. That's the point you and other geneticists above are missing. Otherwise you'd never know whether the gene is linked with a disease in its variant form, or is harmless.
For the story to be convincing, in your sample population, you need to show that one person has the disease AND that person has the qq version AND nobody else has the qq version AND about one in 50 people have the qp version. This, also, is why you don't just go directly for the guy who has Lou Gehrig's disease: you need to compare with lots of "normal" people.