I don’t really agree with that I’ve been using the full gamut of Computer Algebra Systems (CAS) ranging from Macysma to Mathematica to HP Prime for years, and I find text-only entry to be very comfortable. Mathematica even has photoshop-style palettes if you wish to choose familiar notations.

Don’t confuse mathematics with mathematics notation. The latter is totally arbitrary and can easily be replaced, most obviously by the various prefix notations common in CASes ( Integrate[x^2,x,a,b] , for example).

The future of education is human teachers teaching human kids.

Please stop using prospective educational uses to justify technolust. There’s no harm in wanting better gadgets, but there is harm in fixing things that aren’t broken.

The best thinkers in history were educated by people. I see absolutely no reason to replace competent, compassionate humans with impersonal and inflexible machines.

This reminds me of a time when an online translation tool mistranslated ‘condone’ as ‘condemn’.

Based on my limited understanding, proving P = NP would not necessarily and automatically provide a manner of constructing reductions. It might. But there are proofs in computation theory that demonstrate limit complexities but do not provide the algorithms that might implement them, nor do they (currently, visibly) provide any indication of how that algorithm may be arrived at.

Besides, proving P = NP would have a vast number of consequences that would echo across mathematics and the more fundamental sciences. To harp upon the security implications is as short-sighted as fretting that all-out thermonuclear war would negatively affect the postal delivery service.

I wish I could mod you up.

Not only that... as I understand it, the underlying technology was a breakthrough for the time. It was one of the first cluster-based web systems. Those things are a dime a dozen nowadays but much of the foundation work derived from those early experiences.

Because in the late nineties it was rather impressive, and the layout appealed to my WIRED-intoxicated, angsty-cypherpunk teen self.

In at least an infinite subset of the infinite number of universes it straddles, yes - but most likely not this one.

I have to agree. They’re just adding clutter and backporting annoying eye-candy. OS X used to be a dependable, solid OS that was a pleasure to work with. Now they’re curtailing users’ ability to run stuff, abstracting the filesystem, adding eye-candy that causes clutter, and reducing computers to some kind of network appliance cum social experience. Apple’s design has always been noted for it’s minimalism. How is it that their software development is headed in the opposite direction? It’s becoming clunky.

Yes, Leopard (on G5) and Snow Leopard (on Intel) have been their high-water marks so far. I fear they’re going gaga over social networking and consumer electronics.

OS X 10.8 “Hello Kitty"

Finally a slashdot article that doesn’t go *WHOOSH* over my head.

I’m a heavy numerical user and I prefer using elegant-looking NUMBERS compared to cluttered EXCEL. Then I feed everything into Risk Engine (a Mac app) for Montecarlo analysis.

Perfectly enviable workflow with essentially no tradeoffs, and largely invisible as far as those whom I exchange worksheets with are concerned. (They send and receive standard .xls files, how they get processed my end is my business.)

I have a desktop, a server, a NAS, an audio streamer connected to my stereo, a pair of AppleTVs, and a pair of Ethernet-sporting flat-panel LCDs all wired with 1000baseT ethernet.

However, wherever possible, I’ve also configured the same devices to use WiFi if for some reason the cable comes out, so that, for example, the video stream does not fail if somebody trips over the AppleTV’s ethernet connection and yanks it out of the jack.

Then there’s the incriminated iPhone4, an iPad2 and a MacBookAir exclusively on WiFi.

Granted.

The greatest disappointment of all? That they somehow engineered a desire for it into me.

I for one was hugely disappointed that Apple’s latest iPhone refresh (iPhone 4S) did not address 5GHz WiFi connectivity. The iPhone 4 has supported 802.11n since it was released last year, but, unlike the iPad, it does not support the 5GHz band, constraining use to the already oversubscribed 2.4 GHz band.

The end-result is silly: for example, I’m running a 5GHz 802.11n network for all my devices at home, but I’m broadcasting an extra 2.4GHz signal for the sole benefit of my iPhone 4. I hoped Apple would address this obvious shortcoming but obviously they didn’t. Sad.